Disclaimer: Peter Pan belongs to JM Barrie. Thus, not mine.
Wendy stares out the window at night, sometimes, and imagines her daughter flying back into her arms, Jane's small face flushed with stories and bright brown eyes shining with something like homesickness and adventure and excitement and, maybe, just maybe, the start of maturity. It's been three weeks since Janie left, and, good heavens, but they have been the longest three weeks of Wendy's life. She finds herself, more and more often, climbing up to Jane's nursery (my old nursery, she thinks, staring at the familiar ceiling painted with puffy white clouds and the two empty beds in the corner, relics from the days when the room housed three children, not just one little girl, not just nobody at all) and sitting in the window seat for hours at a time and watching the sky for a flying pirate ship aglow with pixie dust, or perhaps a lost shadow or two.
Mother, she thinks wryly as she snaps out of her daze, tears her eyes away from the starry sky, walks slowly downstairs and starts making dinner, aware that her husband will be home soon, Did you feel this way when we were gone?
Jane is nine, Wendy reminds herself, nine and far too young for such adventures. Too young to duel pirates, or war with Indians, or… or perhaps not. Perhaps the point is that Jane is still young, younger than Wendy was when she first flew off to the second star to the right and straight on to morn. Young enough to dream and believe in dreams. I was twelve, Wendy recalls, twelve and on the brink of being a lady. Even so, it was hard enough for me to come home. I always was a dreamer.
Jane is nine, and not on the brink of anything at all. She's still girlish and childish and sweet-ish and sassy-ish and, well, nine. Neverland will hold so many adventures for such a girl, more adventures than Wendy feels comfortable with. What ifs echo through her aging head topped with silvering hair, and she smiles (almost too tightly to really be called a smile) to remember how she never once thought of what ifs when she was the one in Neverland, not until the very end of that adventure.
The worst one is What if she doesn't come home? What if she chooses Peter?
Wendy doesn't let herself think that one.
The second worst one is What if she brings Peter back with her?
Not that Peter will ever leave Neverland permanently, of course. Peter is Neverland, and Neverland is Peter. But if (when, she corrects herself sternly, when) he brings her daughter home, and then flies off again without so much as a backwards glance… it will break everyone's heart: Jane's, losing the boy who will undeniably be her first love; Peter's, flying away from the life he will always be denied; and Wendy's, losing… well, she's not sure anymore what she'll lose when she watches Peter Pan fly away trailing a cloud of pixie dust behind him, but she knows that it will hurt.
She clutches the needle in her hand a bit tighter as she patches up one of Jane's dresses. The child ripped it falling out of a tree, of all things.
She will have a wonderful time in Neverland. And then she will come home. And that will be that.
That is the way the world works, isn't it? Little girls tire of being little forever, and so they grow up. Some of them rush too much into the growing up, but that's not healthy either, no more healthy than clinging to perpetual childhood. There's a time and a place for everything. That's the way life is.
Wendy can only hope that Janie knows that.
She's still a dreamer, years later, as she sits in that same seat, staring up at that same sky, searching for the second start to the right and her Lost Girl.