Page 89 of Losing Wendy

My breath catches as I’m transported to that moment. The moment when I knew the man was dead at my hands, when his spirit cried out at me.

“You don’t want that, John. Trust me when I say you don’t want that.”

“Don’t tell me what I want,” he snaps. It’s the first time he’s ever raised his voice at me since we were children.

Just then, Nettle and Benjamin barge in, both cramming themselves through the doorway like they’ve been racing to the bathroom. Confusion swarms their faces as they glance back and forth between me and my brother. The tension in the room must be palpable because Nettle murmurs an apology about not knowing anyone was in here and scurries out, dragging Benjamin with him.

John clears his throat.

I pick at the hairs at the base of my skull, sighing as I try not to take his outburst personally. “John, to take another person’s life…”

“You did it when it needed to be done.”

“Taking a life to save another’s isn’t what you’re talking about.”

“Is it not? What if I need it to save mine?”

John’s blinking away tears now, and for a moment, it strikes through the leather barrier covering my soul. I throw my arms around my brother, pulling him closer, sorry for the pain I let him drown in without my help.

“Don’t let him eat at you from the inside,” I whisper. “I miss them too, but we’re never going to see him again. Fantasizing about revenge, it’s only going to leave you wanting. Empty. Do you understand me?” I ask, pulling away and gazing into my brother’s face. For a moment, I’m shocked when I have to look up at him, not down. It’s silly, because John has been taller than me for several years now, but in this moment, I’d felt like we were still children, John coming to me crying after he’d scraped his knee.

But John hasn’t scraped his knee.

I can see it in the way he looks down at me with pity. Like, though the care I have for him has touched him, he thinks there’s something I’m missing. Something that could set both of us free.

I’m starting to wonder if my parents aren’t the only family members that I lost to the captain that night.

CHAPTER 33

Ihardly sleep that night.

I hardly sleep for several nights.

The man is there, the man who took Thomas’s life, and every time I close my eyes, he’s waiting for me behind my darkened lids. He’s sneaking in the shadows, slipping his hands around Thomas’s neck, digging his fingernails into the boy’s flesh. Fashioning the Reaper’s fox into Freckles’s cheek. And then I’m there, clawing at the man, begging him to tell me why. The man only laughs, and then he rips away the picture of Thomas I keep folded up in my pocket, shredding it to pieces with yellowed claws that turn into talons. He’s taking the talons to Peter’s wings, carving gash marks in his flesh in the shape of a smile. It bleeds and bleeds and bleeds, and the sand laps it up as if it’s parched from only ever consuming the salty waves, the water that’s too heavy and thick ever to quench thirst.

Somehow, the blood always ends up staining my hands.

I’m tortured every night until the visions slip into the daytime.

I wake, though is it truly waking if I never fall asleep? If I wake to bleeding palms from where I’ve tried to scrape the man’s death off of them? From where I’ve tried to pry my own fingers from the blade.

John worries about me. So does Michael, who often wakes in the night sobbing as he tries and fails to shake me awake from the awful dreamscapes that haunt me.

I haven’t brought up the nightmares to Peter yet, but he watches me carefully, his eyes often darting to my hands, which are never quite able to scar.

One night I wake to wrestling Michael to the floor. He’s scratching my face, John screaming at me as I press my hands into Michael’s throat, trying to strangle the stranger before he can sneak up behind Thomas. Before I have to watch the boy die again.

Shock and shame overwhelm me when I come to my senses and realize what I’ve done. Michael scrambles away from me, his body writhing this way and that, like he doesn’t know what to do with his limbs in space. Doesn’t know the difference between the ground and the ceiling. The difference between my damaging touch upon his throat and the collarless neckline of his shirt, into which he now claws his fingers, trying to rip it away. Like he thinks it might choke him as well.

I loose a scream, covering my mouth with my hand lest the sharp sound harm Michael further. He covers his ears, wailing, until John drags me by my armpits out of the room and into the hall.

“Wait for me here,” he says calmly, though there’s a hint of panic in his voice. I catch the downward twitch of pity on his face as he looks over me. Then he returns to our brother, where he’ll surely wrap him up tightly in his arms until Michael knows he’s safe again, until he stops clawing at his neck, at invisible hands that no longer choke him.

I sob, my tears staining my palms. My palms that I hate. I hate them for driving the knife into that man’s back. For placing themselves on Michael’s innocent skin, for strangling the air out of my sweet, innocent brother.

Regret and shame and self-loathing beat at my insides, threatening to tear me apart, and though I try to keep my voice down as to not upset Michael further, the sobs puncture my throat in pulsing staccato, the panicked labor of a war drum.

A hand finds its way to my shoulder, and when I look up to find John, I find Victor instead. His long, dark eyelashes frame eyes black as soot, but there’s understanding in them. Ink curving into letters meant to be read.

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