“I didn’t know….I swear to God,” the man mumbled. “Mary and Mary Clark…” Gregory kept stammering.
The police had been to his house twice to talk to him, they’d come with a warrant once and searched the place, trashing the inside, or so the Huxburries, who lived next door to him, had said. They couldn’t find anything, and there was no proof that Gregory was the culprit, only the fact that Preston had been found so close to the Hawthorne house, that Gregory Hawthorne had gone to the hospital with a stomach ache that same night that Preston had been poisoned, that they’d found he’d been poisoned with traces of the same chemical… But Claire, as the grieving mother, only could know so much, and still the police did nothing, because a stomachache, they said, was not enough in the way of proof.
“I want you to go,” Matthew said, calmly but forcefully through clenched teeth, and the man still stood there. He looked shriveled, as if a giant monster had taken his entire body in its fist and crushed him.
“I’m so sorry. And he was such a nice boy,” Mr. Hawthorne groveled, looking at Claire, he reached out, taking a step toward her. Matthew moved in, grabbed Gregory Hawthorne’s arm and pushed him back.
“Get out of here!” he cried. “Didn’t you hear me, I said get out!” he was shouting and though no one else could see it, Claire could tell, because she knew her husband, that he was ten, maybe twelve seconds from crying. “I said get out!” Matthew yelled, and though the get-together had stopped, though this solemn gathering had already fallen to its knees, it seemed to break and shatter like glass as Matthew, the father, lost his cool.
“Hey,” Terrell said to Gregory, “I think it’s time you get going.”
“I don’t think they want you here,” Kyle elaborated, and Gregory Hawthorne stumbled back.
“I just wanted to say,” he went on, looking at Claire like a little boy who is truly sorry for something. “I mean, I just wanted you to know, just you, as his mother, that…” He took two more steps toward Claire and she wondered, even with all these people here, should she be afraid?
“Get out!” Matthew cried, and lunged at the man; he had him on the floor in three seconds, holding him down. He swung once, swung twice and Claire couldn’t tell if her husband had hit him, but one of the women cried out and Terrell and Kyle ran toward Matthew, picking him up and setting him right. Another one of his friends stood Gregory Hawthorne up, looked him over and grabbed his arm, half dragging, half walking him through the front door and tossing him into the yard.
“I’m sorry,” Matthew apologized to the entire gathering, which had stopped to watch. “I’m sorry,” he said, sauntering away toward their bedroom. One of his friends looked to Claire and she followed her husband—she knew it was her job even in all this to follow him. That’s what adults do, that’s what the wife of a grieving husband is for, to follow, to sacrifice, to not break down even when all she wants is to fall to her knees.
As she turned toward the stairs to their bedroom, she passed the window in the foyer. Claire looked out of it for a second, half expecting to see her son’s shiny red bike. Instead Gregory Hawthorne was standing there, about to walk away. He shook his head, he turned around, but not before their eyes met and Claire wasn’t sure if it was pity she felt for him.
PRestoN
Preston did not remember going to sleep and he did not recall waking up the next day, but after a certain amount of time (as if time were another thing here) he opened his eyes and found that he was in bed. He heard the other kids playing down below, and when he glanced out his window he saw them tumbling off the Ferris wheel, nearly crashing to their deaths before picking themselves up and flying away.
Just after he awoke, as if on cue, a knock sounded on his door and Preston answered it. He didn’t call out, like he would have at home when his mother knocked and then barged right in, usually with a laundry hamper full of clothes. Preston could see that the leader and his Lost Boys had a certain respect for a person’s space. He opened the door, rubbing his eyes, to find the boy called Peter. He looked exactly the same as he had the night before in his green shorts and T-shirt; his scraggly hair appeared to have leaves in it and that impish grin was plastered across his rugged, though delicate, face.
“Hi,” he said. “I wanted to see how you were doing. I was wondering if you were ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“For the tour. Usually kids come all together and I give them the tour, or one of the Lost Boys does it, or a couple of them, or I get the fairies to do it, but you came on your own and so you get a private tour.”
“I’m different?” Preston asked and all of a sudden he felt sad as he remembered once more. “I can’t go back there? Home, I can’t go back?”
“You can’t go back,” the leader reiterated as they walked along the wide branch of the tree Preston’s room sat on. The sounds of TV shows, some Preston recognized, or video games with their “pow, pow, peeeew, peeeew,” filtered through the doors.
“I remember people, Peyton, Eva,” Preston started recalling the memories that had come flooding in last night. “I remember what the house looked like and the trees. There were always a lot of trees.”
“Trees are good, there are a lot of trees here,” the boy replied.
“I used to hide in them,” Preston elaborated. “Where are we exactly?”
“We’re Here,” the boy said simply, scratching his head. “They call it Neverland because it’s a place where children never grow up. I mean, that was the simple way to describe it when she woke up and they ran with it.”
“I know Neverland,” Preston stopped, remembering further back, to a television and a cartoon of a little boy on a windowsill. “Are you him, are you the. . .you said your name was Peter… are you the Peter?”
“That’s what they started calling me, Peter Pan,” the boy said as if he didn’t know what to do with that kind of question. “This place has been here forever, well before the stories, and one of them came back and she told everyone else about it and some man wrote a play and they were all telling stories and writing books and making movies and now the boys who come Here think they know everything. And it’s good, it’s good that she told them because now no one is afraid, they think they’ve been Here before, they think they know it. But I guess to give it a name misses the point and it’s just Here and you’ll be Here for a while until you’re somewhere else. But then again I like calling it Neverland. . .I don’t make up my mind easily. But this isn’t the end. You can’t spend all the time in the universe running around a Ferris wheel and hunting Indians.” The boy’s words came out of him in a single breath and it was as if his mind were going a mile a minute.
“There are Indians?” Preston asked as they reached the edge of the branch.
“There are,” Peter answered. “Now, what do you remember of Before?”
“I remember trees,” Preston replied. “And Mr. Hawthorne gave me cookies.”
“He did,” Peter said as if he knew.
“Then I felt really, really sick, and I went to sleep in the trees and woke up Here.”
“I know,” Peter went on, hands behind his back as if he were thinking long and hard about something.
“So it was Mr. Hawthorne’s fault and he poisoned me,” Preston reasoned, speaking as the words came. “He must have done this to me, but he was so nice.”
“You shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Peter interrupted. “It’s okay,” he then said. “It’s okay,” he looked at him as Preston felt tears coming and Peter wiped them before they reached the middle of his cheeks. “We’re all going to take care of