ABC Amber LIT Converter (20 page)

“You okay in there?” Peter called from the bedroom. “You’re not bleeding to death or anything, are you?”

“I’m fine,” Rhonda said. “The soap stings, that’s all.”

Think, Rhonda, think.

If her shoes were here, then that meant Ernie was. Or had been at some point.

“Oh my God,” she mumbled as the reality of the situation finally hit her.

She patted Peter’s keys in her pocket—the keys she’d found in the cemetery, which was only a ten-minute walk from here. And Aggie’s house was abandoned. He could easily keep a little girl in a place like this. The closest neighbors were Clem and Justine, and a quarter mile of thick woods separated them.

“Are you gonna help me move this thing, or what?” Peter called.

“Coming,” Rhonda shouted.

What next? She had to get help. Her cell phone was in the car. She’d get to it quickly, make the call, then come back in and stall for time. Ernie could be here, right here, somewhere in the house.

She went down the hall and opened the door to Peter’s old room. Checked the closet. Under the bed. Only dust bunnies. Had she seriously expected to find Ernie that easily?

“What are you doing?” Peter called.

“Looking for a Band-Aid! I think there’s one in my car.” She moved to Daniel and Aggie’s old room, throwing open the closet door. Nothing. Cardboard boxes and abandoned clothing.

“Rhonda, what’s going on?” Peter called from behind the dresser in the doorway down the hall.

“I’m just gonna run to my car,” she told him. She heard the scrape of a chair. Then a shuffle and slide.

Shit. Peter was scrambling over the top of the dresser.

She ran to the stairs and bounded down them, two at a time.

“Rhonda, slow down. Talk to me. Are you hurt?” He was after her now.

She got to the bottom of the stairs, tripped on the toy bear there. Hadn’t the rabbit given Ernie a white stuffed animal? A bear, right? No. It was a bunny. Of course it was a bunny. Rhonda picked up the plush animal. Tiny rounded ears. Big brown nose. Definitely a bear.

Peter was nearly at the bottom of the stairs, coming slowly, steadily.

“Why’s the garage padlocked, Peter?”

“I have no idea.”

“What’s in it?”

“I don’t know, Rhonda—tools, coffins—the same shit that’s always been in there.”

She backed her way to the front door and put her hand on the knob and turned. She raced outside, Peter right behind. She got to the garage, pounded on the locked door. “Hello?” she called. “Can you hear me?”

“What do you think you’re doing, Ronnie?” Peter asked.

“Unlock the door, Peter!”

“I can’t. I don’t have the key.”

She reached into the front pocket of her jeans, pulled the key ring with the rabbit’s foot out, and tossed the keys in his direction. They landed on the front porch with a dull clank. He doubled back and picked them up.

“Where did you get these?” he asked. He looked horrified, as if she’d thrown a severed hand at him.

“Open the door to the garage,” she demanded, trying to keep her voice calm and level.

“I told you, Ronnie, I don’t have a key. Never had one. My mother must have put that lock on years ago.” He was talking slowly and calmly, as if to an unhinged person. He jogged down the porch steps and came toward her. She saw the old shovel leaning against the garage and picked it up, as Aggie had done to Daniel years before.

“Jesus, Ronnie! Put the shovel down.” He raised his hands in surrender but took another step toward her.

“Come any closer and I aim for your head,” she told him.

“I mean it, Peter.” Her hands were shaking. She backed up and slowly made her way to her car. Peter followed, making sure to keep just out of shovel range.

“You can’t leave here like this,” he said.

“Watch me,” she said, throwing the shovel at him. He dove and it missed him by an inch. She got in her car and locked the doors. He came forward, tried the door handle, pounded on her window while she fumbled with the keys in the ignition.

“Wait!” he yelled. She threw the car into reverse and Peter lost
his balance, falling in the driveway. She peeled out onto the road. Checked her rearview mirror to see Peter running after her. She floored it.

“Fuck!” she screamed, pounding the steering wheel. “Fucking think!” She could go to her parents, but what would they do? The police. She had to call the police. She grabbed her cell phone, but dialed the Find Ernie hotline instead of 911. Pat picked up.

“Find Ernie hotline. Do you have a tip for us?”

“Pat, it’s Rhonda. I need to talk to Warren.”

“He’s not here.”

“Where is he?” Rhonda’s voice was frantic.

“I don’t know, Rhonda. I haven’t seen him all day. Or last night for that matter. He might be at home with Jim.”

Rhonda turned left, toward town. Pat and Jim’s house was on the way to the Mini Mart. She’d stop by there first and find Warren.

“Pat, listen to me. I think Peter has Ernie at his mother’s house. Out on Lake Street. I think she’s in the garage.”

“What?Are you sure?”

“I saw her shoes, Pat. I’m going to hang up and call Crowley right now. Peter knows I know. He may move her. Or worse.”

It’s all come crashing down. The rabbit suit is unpacked from its secret hiding place in a box at the back of a closet no one would ever think to look in. A faux fur pelt. Enormous ears, pink inside. Oh, the secrets those ears have heard! The heady secrets of little girls, whispered in soft, sugary breaths.

One last time, the rabbit suit will be worn. One last time, Peter Rabbit will come to life.

AUGUST 10, 1993

THEY HAD DONEthe play the past two nights and tonight’s performance would be the last and greatest. Rhonda floated across the stage, saying her lines as if in a dream she hoped she would never wake up from.

“Do you know,” Rhonda, as the now elderly Wendy, said as she sat in the rocking chair by the window, peering out into the night, “I sometimes wonder if I ever did really fly.”

Over the past weeks, she had sensed change was coming. She sensed it each time she heard Peter speak, calling out directions, throwing them their lines. It was there in the way his voice was starting to crack when he let out his crow through the woods. She heard change in the tilt and tremble, the slight squeak of his call; felt its powerful presence looming like a monster under the trapdoor, waiting to ruin everything in the final act.

In the last days leading up to the play, they addressed each
other in character all day long, losing track of their old selves as easily as Peter Pan lost his shadow.

But shadows, as Rhonda showed Peter on stage, can be sewn back. And after tonight, Rhonda wondered, would they put their old selves back on? Would it really be that simple?

“And I wonder,” Rhonda as Wendy said, “if I would now remember the way.”

The final scene in their version of the play, the one Peter wrote, had Wendy as an old woman (Rhonda wore a gray wig and drew wrinkles on her heavily powdered face) trying to remember just where it was Peter Pan lived and what it had been like there. Finally, after a great struggle, after trying to remember if Peter sang or crowed, if he had really taught them to fly, if he was even real at all, Rhonda, as Wendy, had a flash—a line that came to her, and it was the last line of the play. She stood up slowly from her chair, hobbled over to the window with her cane, pulled back the curtain, and remembered out loud, “Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.”

Rhonda, there on the stage that night, had a sudden vision of herself as an adult, saying that line quietly on some far-off night as she stared up at the sky, like it might help bring her back. Back to Peter, to that summer. To Lizzy, her once upon a time twin. To her character Wendy who she was afraid of becoming, because Wendy forgets, little by little, and Rhonda did not want to forget, not one tiny piece. Not the way Peter looked in his green outfit they’d sewn felt leaves to. The way he smelled green all summer, like trees and roots, like growing things. She didn’t want to forget Lizzy, who truly became Captain Hook, running through the woods with a bent wire coat hanger sticking out of her sleeve, a real felt pirate’s hat on her head, cocked sideways. The way Lizzy got to die at the end of the play, tossed to the crocodile, who gobbled her up as she screamed.

She did not want to forget the toothy crocodile, played by
Tock Clark, who had been their worst enemy forever and then suddenly wasn’t anymore. Tock Clark whom they all had hated, Peter most of all, until something changed, as big things always do when you’re young, but as an adult, you can never remember just what it was. All you can do is pull back the curtain, thinking you half-remember the way back.Second star to the right, and straight on till morning . And there, through the window, at the edge of the horizon, is the crocodile’s smile, Peter’s crow, and his adamant line—I shall never grow up!—called out in a voice cracking with change.

“Second star to the right, and straight on till morning,” Rhonda said there in her Wendy nightgown, and she also heard herself say it in some alternate universe, where she was a grown woman trying to find her way back.

Rhonda spoke the last line and the crowd was up on its feet, applauding. Hooting, whistling, screaming, “Bravo!” Rhonda looked out into the rows of chairs set up in the clearing. Every one of them had been filled. There, in the front row, were her parents, and Daniel and Aggie. Next to them was Laura Lee Clark in a sequined gown. Some of the men her father worked with were there, and all of the parents of the lost boys, pirates, and Indians. There were children too young or too shy to have been given roles. Tinker Bell’s parents recorded the entire play with a video camera.

Rhonda was joined on stage by the entire cast, and, arms around each other, they took their final bow.

THE PROCESSION THROUGHthe woods to Rhonda’s house was noisy and chaotic. The pirates and lost boys were sword fighting. Tock was snapping imaginary crocodile jaws at everyone. Laura Lee was telling a story about Sandy Duncan.

The two picnic tables in Rhonda’s yard were covered in dishes
everyone had brought. There were four different pasta salads, a frightening-looking Jell-O mold, a cake shaped like a pirate ship complete with mast and sails, shish kebabs, burgers, and hotdogs, chips and dip, a tray of Swedish meatballs being kept warm by a can of Sterno, pigs in a blanket, coolers full of beer and soda, and two bowls of punch with fruit floating in it.

Daniel was sword fighting with Peter and Lizzy. Peter, still in character, looked very serious and fought hard against his father, like he was out for blood with his wooden sword.

Tinker Bell was riding high on her father’s shoulders. “I’ll make you a copy of the video,” her dad promised Justine, who smiled, said, “That would be lovely,” and heaped more Swedish meatballs on his plate.

As the evening progressed, the punch flowed freely. Daniel and Clem had dragged the stereo from the living room, then cranked up Van Morrison. People started dancing. Clem danced with Rhonda. Daniel and Laura Lee swung each other drunkenly through the crowd. Justine stood by the food table, tapping her foot in time with the music. Aggie danced by herself, going in circles around a tiki torch, eyes closed, arms stretched out toward the sky. At one point, when Rhonda passed in front of her on her way to get more cake, Aggie said, “Rhonda, you were marvelous! It’s such a sad ending, though, don’t you think?”

Rhonda shrugged.

“I mean, Peter and Wendy don’t get to be together. She grows old. He doesn’t. He gets to live out eternity in Neverland with that little fairy. And Wendy has nothing.”

“But it was what she wanted,” Rhonda said, her voice sounding squeaky and defensive. “To go home, I mean.”

Aggie looked up over Rhonda’s shoulders.

Peter was calling to Rhonda from across the table and Rhonda excused herself from Aggie, forgetting all about the cake she’d meant to get.

Peter passed out cups of rum punch to Rhonda, Tock, and Lizzy, urging them to drink up. Clem went and spoke to Aggie, who laughed, closed her eyes, and kept dancing, spilling punch but seeming not to notice or care. When Clem returned to the food table, Justine snapped at him, words Rhonda couldn’t hear, and he hung his head like a beaten dog. Justine turned and marched into the house, slamming the door. Clem, who rarely drank, poured himself a cup of punch and downed it in two gulps. Aggie opened her eyes again and beckoned him over with seductive waves of her fingers. Clem stood his ground and poured himself another cup of punch.

“Dance with me,” Aggie called.

He shook his head.

“Suit yourself,” she said, and began to dance alone, her arms circling slowly at first, then fast like a windmill. She came forward and bumped against the picnic table, losing her balance. She put down her arm to steady herself, and her hand went right into the tray of Swedish meatballs.

“Shit!” she screamed, waving her burned hand wildly through the air. The meatballs had fallen off their metal stand and knocked over the Sterno. The paper tablecloth caught fire. A pile of napkins and paper plates went up in flames.

Aggie laughed. “Someone call 911,” she cackled. Around her, people began batting at the fire with paper plates and dumping cups of punch on it. There was much staggering and laughter as pineapple and maraschino cherries flew through the air, landing on the flaming table like little meteorites. Clem dashed to get the hose at the side of the house, but it was in tangles and wouldn’t reach the table. He began the slow process of unknotting it, cursing the whole time, yelling, “Stay back!”