Neverland Read Free

sleep in the middle seat, curled impossibly around the baby’s carrier while Governor gave us a few hours of silence. The twins would be asleep in the very back of the wagon, having made beds for themselves out of the sleeping bag Daddy kept back there.
    I sat up front, the naviguesser for the evening, poring over the map of the Georgia coastline.
    “Snug,” he’d say, and that was my nickname from earliest memory, although only my father and mother would use it; Missy and Nonie dared not say it, because their nicknames, Mutt and Jeff, seemed a hundred times worse to them. I was too old for that nickname—I had been too old for it for a good while—my name is Beau. But sometimes when I felt the coldness of the world, I didn’t mind it. “Snug,” his voice weary and kind, “see the lights down there? That’s the bridge.”
    I would peer over my map, crinkling it up and tossing it on the floor. In the dark, the peninsula was beautiful, and it was like driving around and seeing Christmas lights: Yellow and dim-blue lights studded the bridge over the bay, which my grammy Weenie called the “tiara.”
    It dipped into a flat end of Gull Island, but low hills rose up beyond, specked with more flickering, wavering lights, as if the place were held hostage by lightning bugs.
    “Nighttime’s a wonderful thing,” Daddy would say as we drove down the hill to the tiara bridge, “it makes things prettier than they are.”
    And, waking perhaps even the dead, I would turn around and shout, “Hey-ey!” to my mother, my sisters, and now my baby brother, too. “We’re almost here!”

5
    Gull Island was as small as my thumb from the bridge, and only two hundred people ever occupied the peninsula at any one time. It was too marshy
for much in the way of development, and it would be too expensive to fix up. (At that time its reputation was at an all-time low, no one to speak of ever went there for vacations, and even the people who lived there year-round tended to head for other beaches down the coast by August.)
    Arrival to Gull Island meant crossing through the West Island—the bad part of the peninsula. Stories abounded about pirate treasures sunken in the marshes, which glowed with firefly light and will-o’-the-wisp and smelled like rotten peaches and baby vomit; the Gullahs had a graveyard they kept decorated with colorful flowers, and Nonie had started a tradition in my family that, when we passed the graves, we had to hold our breath or a ghost would get us.
    “Leonora Burton Jackson, you stop that right this instant or your face’ll freeze that way,” Mama said.
    I looked from the front seat to the back to see Nonie turning blue.
    She let out what could only have been a honk when she finally could no longer hold her breath. She glared at me. “A plague on both your houses,” she hissed. In seventh grade she’d fallen in love with Shakespeare and was fond of quoting and misquoting her favorite lines.
    Missy, the less avid reader of the two, chimed in, “Bloody bones on the first step.”
    “Stop that,” Daddy interrupted, “right now.”
    “We can’t have him wetting the bed again.” Missy couldn’t resist this stab at my machismo.
    Okay, I confess. I was the kid who wet the bed, and although the damp sheets had ended when I was eight, my sisters still used it as leverage, particularly when it came to blackmail, and would probably continue to do so until I turned ninety. The root of the bed-wetting, according to a friend of my mother’s who was up on such things, was my hatred of my mother, which I can tell you did not go over well in the Jackson household. But the true reason was simpler: My sisters would take great pleasure in telling me horror stories, and lying in bed at night, I would be too scared with
nightmares to set foot on the floor of my dark bedroom. So the natural thing to do was to just relieve myself in my jammies and then sleep around the spot—a habit from which I broke myself by