Page 5 of Losing Wendy

It’s not that I don’t hurt, don’t ache. It’s not that her words don’t reflect a wound I’ve refused to speak aloud my entire life.

It’s that as long as she’s here, weeping over me, I cannot bring myself to feel it. When she’s gone, leaving me alone with my thoughts—that’s when I’ll absorb her words. That’s when the truth of them will sting. If I know myself at all, I’ll probably find myself bitter toward her for voicing those words on my behalf, for finding them before I could. For daring to hurt alongside me when this is my pain, my torment.

But for now, it’s as if my mother’s grief takes up the whole room, overshadowing mine, drowning me in the numbness of analyzing my own pain like it’s a modern painting hanging in an exhibit. If I were to reach out, I wouldn’t feel the colors, just the texture of the swirls and divots.

Her words fold over my ears in waves of crimped parchment. One miserable fate to another.

It’s not fair for me to blame my mother for my curse. As much as she indicts herself, if it weren’t for her, oblivion would have claimed me long ago.

I was five years of age when the plague swept through thecoastal city of Jolpa, where we live. No one knows for sure where the plague came from. Most think it crept in under the cover of the salty mist that so often obscures the harbors, leaching into the lungs of the hardened sailors, who then carried it over the soaked piers. Onto the cobblestone streets. Passed it onto the lips of their wives with the press of a homecoming kiss.

Others say it crawled up from the sewers on the backs of rats who made their nests in the rafters of the fisheries, chewed holes in the gill nets, and poisoned the fish with their grimy teeth. Still others, those skeptical of magic, say it came from the faerie dust imported from the West, poisoning our lungs as we burned it to light our street lamps.

Regardless of its origins, Mama and I both fell ill. Papa sent John away to the summer home in Kelton with a nurse, lest he catch the illness too.

Mama recovered with time.

I did not.

From the way my mother tells the story, I was so close to Death, I told her I felt him planting a kiss on my forehead, though there was no one else in the room with us.

I was so far gone, the physicians recommended I be given an opiate that would alleviate the pain of the cysts forming in my lungs.

My mother was distraught. Torn between yearning for her child to be free of agony and knowing the opium would certainly kill me.

But that night, as she held the vial of opium in her hand, a voice whispered to her from the shadows.

“I could save her,” it said. “I could take away her pain.”

My mother had been warned by her mother and all mothers before her not to speak to the shadows, especially not those who lurked close to children or the stench of death. But my mother was addled with grief and forgot the warnings, just as all mothers before her would have done had their child’s chest been rattling with the Reaper’s bell toll.

“Anything,” she’d said.

“Anything?” the shadows had whispered back. “I doubt that very much. A tender lady like you—I doubt you’ve ever allowed your skin to be kissed by the sun, your feet to develop calluses from frolicking bare in the earth. Anything seems quite far-fetched.”

“Please,” my mother had begged. “Anything to save her.”

And anything it had been. The way Mama tells it, the shadows had pounced from the wall like a cat, then melded into the shape of a woman.

The woman had bent over me, pinching her hands against my nose, covering my mouth until shadows filled my lungs, causing my chest to rise, my eyes to cloud over with darkness.

And then I had taken a breath.

But not before Mama had made a bargain.

One she’d thought would be simple to keep.

“My Prince of Never, my Shadow Keeper, needs companionship,” the shadowed woman had said. “I fear what he might become if allowed to continue on as he is. If I heal her, you may keep her until her twentieth birthday. But from the moment this child begins her third decade, she will belong to him.”

My mother had hesitated then, knowing well the atrocities of which mortal men were capable. Who knew what an immortal such as the Shadow Keeper might do to her daughter once she was of age? She had heard of the Prince of Never, the shattered remnant of an ancient fae who kidnapped children from their beds at night, stealing them away with promises of adventure. It was a modern folktale, meant to keep children from sneaking out of their beds and bothering their parents in the middle of the night, but as with all folktales, it was seeded in truth.

“What if she were to marry before then?” my mother had asked. “Surely you wouldn’t take a woman away from her husband.”

The shadow woman had laughed, amused that my mother assumed she would care about such frivolous human concerns as matrimony. My mother had known it was unlikely to succeed, knew she was grasping at the wind, but to her surprise, the shadow woman had conceded.

“Very well, then. Find the girl a husband before the turn of her third decade, and the vow tying her to my Shadow Keeper will become void.”

My mother hadn’t hesitated before grasping at the shadow’s hand and forming the bargain, the stains of which stretch the length of her forearm to this day.

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