ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 172: Strangled

When I saw Peter Pan on television, when I was a young girl, I wanted to fly away with Peter to Neverland.

My big family — father, mother, four brothers, two sisters — overwhelmed me and embarrassed me. They were in my life, in my space, but they weren’t real to me. I wanted to go away with Peter. He and Neverland were more real than my home, my family.

Is it any wonder that this little girl never really grew up, either? That she met her Peter Pan who took her with him to Neverland? Where she kept house for him, fixed him bits of food, listened to his stories, stayed by his side? Where time didn’t exist. Where no one else really existed. Where even she and he didn’t exist.

Ernie and I played out Peter Pan, and we played out the children’s story The Secret Garden, too. Why else would Ernie have taken me to a walled garden of roses and given me a brass key and waited for that first kiss?

He wanted me to believe in him. He wanted us to create magic together. Because you know exactly how to feed my ego, I think I could accomplish great things with you with me, he wrote me in his Letter of Proposal.

On the outside looking in, it looked as if our rose garden was thriving. No one knew, not even Ernie and me, how entangled we were. How strangled we were.