Once Upon a Wardrobe(15)

Unimaginable.

Too much to understand.

They called it cancer.

Jack’s room was thin with cold, all the firewood burning in the kitchen for Mother, for the nurses who wore their swan-like caps, for the doctors with their serious expressions and terrifying metal tools and scalpels.

Warnie had been away at school when Mother’s headaches began. Soon the bustling house had become hushed, and people in white uniforms flew in and out of its doors. Their grandfather was moved to a nursing home because his daughter-in-law couldn’t care for him as she had.

If Grandfather had been right, then God would hear Jack’s prayers and save his mother.

Jack used all of his mind and heart to imagine her, with the kind smile and moon face he’d inherited from her, healed, taking him on holiday to the beach or Dunluce Castle. Traveling with him to London to see again the great lions in Trafalgar Square. Quizzing him on his Latin or reading him a story.

Alive. It was the only thing that mattered or made sense.

Sick was the only word he understood for what was happening. But Jack had been sick, a lot actually, and he was fine and alive. Surely Mother would be also.

The world felt like it was tilting or sinking.

Silence rushed against Jack’s ears like a sea crashing on rocks, and he stood from his knees and crawled into bed, sitting up against the oak headboard to wait for good news. He pulled the wool blanket to his chin and stared out the window. His heart hammered in his chest, and he imagined his mother alive and well and holding him.

Perhaps his imagination, combined with his prayers, would keep her alive. If she were alive in his mind, she would be alive in the world. This seemed to be true as far he could tell.

Jack might be able to create a world like Boxen with his brother, but he could not create a world without his mother in it.

His imagination took him to the jagged edges of his trip to Castlerock two years ago, when Mother had taken Warnie and him to Dunluce Castle.

The train had sped, heading north to the tip of Ireland, and rocked them to near sleep as the countryside and its towns flew by: chimneys with rising smoke, church steeples pointing above the roofs, sheep with tangled muddy wool, and farmers who stood behind the wooden fences and raised a greeting of one hand to the train.

Jack and Warnie had sat next to each other in their stiff traveling clothes while Mother sat across from them in a pale blue dress with lace around her collar, a deeper blue bonnet tied beneath her chin with a ribbon. Her dark hair hung in ringlets that nearly touched her shoulders. She tapped the train’s tray, where Jack and Warnie’s lesson papers on Greek were spread. “Let us finish before we arrive in Castlerock,” she said.

Jack looked away from the countryside. “But, Mother, it’s summertime. Enough of lessons.”

She shook her head with a stern but kind smile. Jack and Warnie each took their worksheet with the vocabulary words and began to translate and fill in the blank spaces. Jack actually enjoyed Latin and Greek, but he loved staring out to the wild Irish countryside and finding more Boxen stories in his imagination.

“Why must we do schoolwork and not you?” Jack asked Mother. It was an absurd question, and he knew it even as the words came from his lips.

“Oh, I had plenty of schooling. When you’re old like me you won’t have to do lessons unless you’re enthralled with a subject.” She paused and seemed to be elsewhere for a moment before returning her attention to her sons. “Just as you love to read now, so do I. I never want to stop learning.”

This was the first Jack had heard of such a thing. His mother in school?

Warnie lifted his gaze from the words scribbled across his page in tight script. “Where did you go to school?”

“Queens’ College,” she said with a lift of her chin. “Mathematics and physics.”

Warnie let out a sigh of amazement. “Mathematics and physics?”

Jack stared at his mother with her sweet smile and her warm brown eyes, with her thin nose and wondered, for the first time, what she must have looked like or acted like when she was his age.

This was astonishing.

Jack never wanted to grow up; his father made it all seem so dreary. But right then, for a moment, he imagined his mother young and in college, and she gave him hope that getting older might be exciting in its own way.

“But you told me that you were a writer,” Jack said.

“A person doesn’t have to be only one thing in the world. You can be more.”

“I can’t.” Jack let out a laugh, and Warnie did too.

“Well, I was,” she said.

“Tell me what you wrote,” said Jack.

“I liked to write stories. Before your father and I were married, we wrote letters back and forth to each other, and I let him read my work. And this, my boys, is how I fell in love with him, because he took my writing seriously and he took me seriously. He was so kind about my stories.”

“Father was kind?” Warnie asked in one breath.

Mother laughed. Jack adored his mother’s laughter and he wished he’d been the cause of it. “Very kind,” she said. “Your father would write back to me and tell me how wonderful my stories were. He encouraged me to send them off. And I did. I published a piece in the Home Journal. It was called . . .” She leaned forward and used her storytelling voice, the beautiful voice of myths and tales, and said, “It was called ‘The Princess Rosetta.’”