Once Upon a Wardrobe(17)

“Mother!” he cried out.

Jack’s bedroom door flew open, but it was Father in the doorway. This was as startling as if a talking beast had appeared. His father, always leaning toward sadness as it was, sat on the edge of Jack’s bed. He smelled like sweat and fear. “Jacksie, your mother is very sick.”

Jack sat up. “So am I. Send her to me!”

“It’s not the same, Jacksie. It’s serious. I need you to be a man now. Don’t cry out. Don’t make this harder on all of us.”

The tenor of his father’s voice was different, a bit like someone had taken out a vital part of his soul and put it away.

Jack flopped onto his pillow and held back the tears, his fever burning, his tooth throbbing, and he thought about his mother and how she could not be too sick, because the world and everything in it depended on her.

But she was leaving them even as Jack was wishing for her to come help him, her soul rising from her ravaged body.

The Lewis family’s world unraveled with the words of their father in the morning. “Your mother has gone to heaven to be with God.” Warnie and Jack huddled close together as their father uttered this impossible statement. “She is gone. Now come see her and say good-bye.”

See her? Jack recoiled. “No. Do not make me.” His lips quivered as he tried to control the grief. If he started crying, he might not stop.

Father bent down, his hands on his knees as he directed his youngest son. “You must see her and say good-bye.”

Warnie squared his shoulders as if to protect his little brother, as if to protect himself. “No!”

“Now.” Albert pointed at the door, and the brothers had no choice but to obey.

Later, hours later, when friends and family had gathered at Little Lea and the drawing room was overflowing with people who spoke in whispers, as if death warranted secrets, Jack escaped to the kitchen to find the comfort of Lizzie. As he scanned the room for her, his gaze fell on the calendar hanging on the plaster wall, a calendar that had been the outline of their days, now full of weeks and years without their mother. Jack read the quote for August 23, 1908: a line from King Lear: “Men must endure their going hence.”

Jack stared at that line, one he knew from his Shakespeare lessons, a phrase that was as true as anything he’d ever read.

He wept for his lost mother.

*

Megs closes her notebook and George shakes his head, wipes at the tears in his eyes. “Poor, poor Jack! Can you imagine, Megs? Can you even imagine?”

“No, George, I can’t. When Mr. Lewis told me this part, I cried right there in front of him in his common room, snotty tears on his cotton handkerchief.”

He reaches for his sister’s hand. “It’s okay, Megs. It’s part of the story. There’s lots of parts to a story.”

Even as he feels Megs watching him, George closes his own eyes. He’s so tired, and he wants to see all that she showed him, to think about Mr. Lewis losing something so beloved and then later creating something so marvelous.

George wants to consider it all.

He longs to climb inside the wardrobe and watch the story come together just as it happened. He doesn’t want to change the author’s life; he wants to watch it turn into something new, something with snow, a white witch, and a lion that calls to George even in his sleep, its roar far off and deep, both comforting and terrifying.





Seven

To See with Other Eyes




Oxford in the dead of winter has its own beauty. The pinnacles and stone towers glitter, and the wind blows wild and without warning. I’ve decided to walk to the Kilns this afternoon. It’s a gorgeous path of sidewalks winding only two and a half miles through Oxfordshire. If an old man with a walking stick can do it, so can I.

When I reach the Magdalen Bridge over the Cherwell, where the river splits into two and where the Thames is then called Isis, I gaze down to the flowing water. There are no punters on this cold afternoon, and the banks of the river sparkle with ice. Birch and alder trees are bare and thin and seem taller without their leaves to fluff them up. To my left, standing staunch and proud, is the stone edifice of Magdalen College. The tawny-colored wooden gates with ironworks are shut. The architecture of this college on High Street makes me almost believe the building was built during the medieval times and a dragon once turned the corner flapping its wings and roaring fire.

This is how George has influenced me. I am starting to see stories where I hadn’t seen them before. I’ve obviously been thinking too much of Mr. Lewis’s lion book.

Something in me wants to burst through the Magdalen gates and run to the tip-top of its tower, just as the boys’ choir does every first of May, and gaze out over all of Oxford while shouting my indignation at death, at sickness, and at the sheer indecency that women students aren’t admitted into Magdalen College.

Instead, I walk slowly past the gates and over the bridge so I can climb the hilly terrain toward the Kilns. I think of George while I walk, my hands warm in my red mittens and shoved deep into the pockets of my wool coat, my head bowed to the wind as it threatens to rip off my blue knit cap that Mum knit for me last winter.

I imagine George warm in bed and what he’d give to trade with me for a red nose and runny eyes as he trudges toward the author’s house.

If I could gift George one thing in his life, other than a new heart that pumped blood to all the right places, it would be this: to give him answers to his questions about his beloved Narnia. Mr. Lewis and Warnie—whom I discovered they also call “the Major” because of all his time in the army—will tell me another story today over tea. I will listen, but I also promise myself that I will ask for one fact beyond the story, one solid thing I can take home to George, like the biscuit tin with moss that Warnie gave Jack.