Retiring to Neverland

All men grow old, but some are lucky enough to grow young again. Those were the men that Wendy liked to visit most. The men who had spent the majority of their adult lives laboring away at one mundane task after another and then, once they were too old to see much more than blurry outlines or to hold their pee for more than twenty minutes, they started to pull innocuous little pranks on the other residents of the nursing home. And Peter was the ringleader among the puckish pensioners.

Once, in the dining room, Peter assembled a catapult out of his dinnerware and started to fling his food across the table. It started with the peas, which happened to fly the farthest. It hit Selvester Slightly right on the tip of his nose, and Slightly, always quick to jump to the wrong conclusion, assumed the assault of the peas was a personal attack and hurled a whole forkful of meatloaf back towards Peter, who dodged with the nimbleness of youth that seemed quite unfit for his age. Peter laughed his rough, cackling laugh and launched a spoonful of cream corn that landed with a splat only halfway across the table, right in front of Mr. Nibs. It was the wildest food fight Wendy had ever seen, even topping her days as a counselor for a cooking camp. Of course, she had only been working at Neverland Retirement for a week and a half at that point. The seasoned nursing home attendants knew there were still rouge peas hiding under furniture from the last food fight, and the one before that.

But food fights were nothing. The real danger came around when Peter convinced the other residents to partake in cane-fighting. The first time Wendy stumbled upon a cane fight, she was awe-struck. There stood Peter, teetering haphazardly on his legs while he waved his long metal cane in the air, right at the face of Sam Smiegel. And poor Smee, already too unstable for a cane, attempted to lift his walker for the duel. He staggered backward, knocking into a portrait in the hall of an old sailing ship, but he caught his balance and stumbled forward with such force that he might have plummeted down face-first, had not his walker struck hard against the length of Peter’s cane. The clang of aluminum rang out through the hall, soon followed by Wendy’s loud shouts and the clammer of other attendants, all coming to break up the fight. Only, the two men didn’t seem angry as they were separated, the jolly old fools.

“Why do you cause such a ruckus all the time, Peter?” Wendy asked him later that day as she cut a tennis ball to be fitted onto the end of his cane, a precaution made in a vain attempt to dissuade fighting.

“A little play keeps the spirit young. That’s why I’ll never grow old,” Peter told her with a wink. “Don’t you want to stay young forever, Wendy?”

Truth be told, Wendy always had a fear of growing up. She lived a good life, a proper life. She had a beautiful three-bedroom home like she had dreamed of when she was a little girl, though she hadn’t dreamed of the 30-year mortgage at a 7.884 percent interest rate. She had married a charming, dependable man that she had met in college, although she hadn’t realized how much effort was required for a happily ever after, and many days passed when she questioned whether ending the marriage would amount to more happiness. And she had a child, a beautiful little girl named Jane, who had gone off to college last year and seemed to be much too busy in her studies to spare a moment to call home, even once a week. And of course, Wendy had a job. She had gotten her first job bagging groceries when she was sixteen, and she’d been working ever since, and yet she still had another decade to go before she could retire. And what then? How long would she have to be free before she ended up as a patient in a home just like this?

And yet, the patients here in Neverland seemed more youthful than she had been in a long time. Perhaps there was something to Peter’s words after all.

Soon, Wendy started favoring Peter. She took on as many shifts in his wing as possible and struck up conversations with him. He was a fascinating man, and the stories he told her of his past seemed to be just as imaginative and wild.

Peter was a Ferryman. He would load up his boat with people from all walks of life and charter them across international waters. Sometimes, he would ferry goods, other times, the boats themselves, with no passengers. When Wendy asked him if it was a lonely career, he laughed and promised her he befriended all the mermaids along the way, and that their alluring songs of the sea and wind would keep him company as he traveled where no other men dared go. And oh the places he would see! Peter loved nothing more than talking about his marvelous life to Wendy. He taught her about the tides and the currents, which were strange notions to a city girl such as herself. He filled her mind with the wonder of exotic islands, native tribes, and merciless pirates that roamed the seas. Peter even taught Wendy all about celestial navigation, in case she ever found herself in need of following the stars to navigate home.

In return for his stories, Peter asked Wendy to share many of her own. So Wendy told Peter about her life in the city, her family, her childhood, and the trials of raising a daughter. Peter listened to it all with childlike fascination, but what he loved most of all were Wendy’s classic bedtime stories that reminded him of the tales his own mother would tell him, once upon a time. Peter could listen to Wendy’s stories for hours, and soon he spread the word to all the other residents of Neverland and Wendy received quite a name for herself as the long lost mother of all the residents because of those bedtime stories.

Wendy didn’t mind one bit. She rather enjoyed retelling the tales she once told her daughter, who was now too old to appreciate them. It was good to know that enthusiasm that was lost with age came again towards the end of life. And yet, the end-of-life part was quite another story.

For Wendy, the idea of Neverland as a perfect place shattered as soon as the first resident fell victim to the merciless hand of death. She wept and wept and questioned whether she could continue her employment at Neverland. It was no longer the magical, perfect place that filled her fascination. Wendy began to worry and fret about one day losing all of the residents, especially Peter.

“You really mustn’t be so reckless with that cane fighting, Peter.” Wendy chided the next time she caught him in the halls.

“It helps me practice my balance, Wendy,” Peter said with a laugh, then he went right back to swinging his cane around again.

“Oh Peter, stand back from the balcony you could fall,” Wendy fussed one evening when she caught him leaning over the edge to shout to Mrs. Bell on the ground below.

“Don’t worry, Wendy. I know how to fly,” Peter winked playfully.

“Oh Peter, do eat healthier, won’t you? Sneaking sweets isn’t good for your heart,” Wendy urged when she caught him in the kitchen.

“Oh Wendy, stop worrying about death. I’ve battled him before, you know. And I chopped off his hand.” Peter swung the kitchen knife about him as if he were sword fighting, but Wendy kept scolding him with her hands on her hips.

Peter laughed and joked and teased Wendy for her constant fuss, but over the months, his teasing waned and his laughter grew more hollow as worry ate its way through his joy like a parasitic worm.

Peter’s practical jokes became less frequent while his visits with the doctor happened more often than ever before. He spent less time playing games with the other residents, and more time walking around the lake and staring at the lily pads in deep contemplation. Wendy caught him standing by an old juniper tree one afternoon when the hot sun was beating down on his wrinkled skin for so long without him moving that tidepools of sweat formed on his flesh.

“What are you doing, Peter?” Wendy asked, her tone apprehensive. She had sensed the shift in her favorite resident and she feared that death, one-handed as it may be, was coming for him once again.

“Watching my shadow,” Peter said. He didn’t look at Wendy. His head was bowed towards the ground where his shadow stretched out long and far along the grass before him, almost touching the edge of the lake.

“And what is it doing?” Wendy asked.

“Trying to get away from me,” said Peter. He crouched low, his old knees cracking with his descent. Wendy held her breath, thinking he might topple over, but he managed to stabilize himself by resting his hand in the grass where the shadow of his shoes started, “It likes to run away at night, but it always has to come back in the morning. It thinks it can exist without me, but it can’t.”

Wendy stood out there with Peter until the sun set fully and his shadow faded into the darkness. As they returned inside and Wendy readied a bath for Peter, she asked him where he thought his shadow traveled to while he was sleeping.

“To my childhood home in London,” Peter said matter-of-factly. “To play with the new generation of kids there. Kids who never have to grow up. My shadow hates getting old, you know. Being old isn’t much fun for a shadow, they like to jump and play and dance. I’m not much good at that anymore.”

Wendy assured him that she thought he must still be a fine dancer, which made Peter smile, but not twenty minutes later he found he wasn’t even nimble enough to get out of the bathtub without assistance.

That night Peter dreamed of all the places his shadow may go in the dark and the way it would be able to stretch and twirl and dance across the land if it wasn’t tied to his old and feeble body. Then he dreamt he was his shadow and he could twirl and dance across the land. When he woke up, his body felt heavier than ever before and there was a fog around his mind and lead in his chest. He lay there in his bed, listening to the tic-toc of the analog clock on the wall and cursing the inevitability of time itself. It felt like it was chasing him, a predator in hot pursuit. The tic-toc, tic-toc lingered in his mind long after he woke up and left the room.

Peter lost interest in cane-fights. He lost interest in pulling pranks on the other residents or starting food fights in the cafeteria. He even lost interest in telling stories about his life. The tales seemed to belong to some other man a lifetime ago, to a man who never thought he would grow old. A man who could always beat death in a fight. But some battles cannot be won.

Wendy hated seeing Peter in such a state. Part of her wanted to take an extended vacation from Neverland. Quitting early didn’t seem like a bad option either. The retirement home simple would not be the same without Peter. And yet, without his jokes and laughter and games, it was as if he was already gone. And Wendy wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye to her old friend. So she tried to find her lost boy the only way she knew how, with her stories.

She told him a tale about a boy named Peter, a boy who was fueled by such a strong spirit of youth tht he never grew up. This was a boy who could fly far above th seas. A boy who navigated by the stars and who knew, if he followed the second start to the right, he would find Neverland. Wendy talked of pirates. Of sword fights. Of the joys and trials of youth. And as she spoke, Peter listened. His deep creased frown became a smile again, and his laughter, recently hollowed, reverberated with life and joy once more.

“Thank you, Wendy,” Peter said when she finished, her tale extending beyond the center’s shift change, his voice crackled with emotion and his eyes twinkles, as if sprinkled by pixie dust. “Thank you for the stories.”

“You’re very welcome, Peter,” Wendy smiled. She helped him into his bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. “Now you dream of your adventures and in the morning, I want you to tell me all your stories.”

Wendy slipped out of his room and clocked out from her shift at Neverland retirement center. By the time she left, the sun was down to the smallest sliver in the sky and the shadows were morphing into the nighttime. A cool breeze swept by Wendy and made her shiver. She rubbed the goosebumps on her arm and turned in the direction the wind blew. There, just beyond her vision, Peter’s shadow twirled and danced in the evening breeze.