Once Upon a Wardrobe(26)

Mum looks over my shoulder. “You sketched that?” She sets down her kitchen towel and sits down on the other side of George, puts one arm around him.

“You didn’t know he can draw so well either?” I ask, and I wonder why we haven’t noticed. Have there not been colored pencils and art notebooks in our house? No, there haven’t been.

“Sometimes he draws little doodles on things,” Mum said. “But this . . .” She looks to her son. “These are so beautiful. Did you copy this from somewhere?”

“From my head,” he says with a shrug. “When Megs is telling me the stories, I see pictures in my head. I can see it all and then I just draw it.”

“Your imagination,” I say. “It’s extraordinary.”

“It is?”

Mum touches the notebook. “Yes, it is. It’s exactly what Megs said.”

We are all silent as we realize that even though we’ve hovered over George for all these years, we haven’t noticed this talent of his. Not because he hid it from us but because perhaps we paid mind to the wrong things.

I realize George’s imagination is taking him places while I ramble on about stories and facts about Mr. Lewis. George takes something of this world and travels to another, as if the story world and the real world run right alongside each other. Or maybe they are inside each other. I warm with this new knowledge, with the idea of these worlds all running next to each other. Einstein found one, Mr. Lewis another, and my brother yet another.

For a breath or two, I wonder about this magical world we live in. It’s a mystery we can never understand. For a moment, a small and breath-holding moment, I know it to be true: there is more, something more I can’t see, a vivid truth that can’t be described by logic or words alone, a truth that delights the heart.

And then my feeling—or was it a knowing?—is gone. I am back in the winter light, and I realize that maybe this was what Mr. Lewis was talking about with his biscuit tin and with Squirrel Nutkin and with nature. I suspect he understands that joy, that sudden longing or knowing that comes and is gone so quickly.

I want it back.

I want it back as badly as Edmund wanted more Turkish delight.

*

Later that morning, after I’ve worked through a few equations and after George takes his morning nap, Mum and Dad go for a long walk in the crisp snow-covered town, leaving us alone. We sit on big fat pillows in the living room facing a fire that snaps and sparks like stars rising up the chimney.

“What do you want for Christmas?” I ask George. “Tell me.”

George wiggles his toes near the fire and lies back, stares up to the ceiling. “I want to go to Ireland.”

“No, silly. I meant, what do you want me to get you? To bring you?”

George sits up. “You already bring me everything I want. I have the art book, pencils, and stories from Mr. Lewis. There’s nothing else I need. I want to go somewhere. I want to have my own adventure. Everyone in the books has adventures, and I want my own.” He is so matter-of-fact that I know this isn’t the first time he’s thought of it.

“Well, that’s why they’re in a book, because we don’t have a magic wardrobe.”

“That’s nonsense.” He crosses his legs and his cheeks flush red with energy. “I want my own adventure. I want to go to Ireland. I want to see it.”

I play along. “Okay, what do you want to see in Ireland?”

“I want to see Dunluce Castle, where Jack’s mum took him on holiday before she died. I want to see the wild sea and the ruins. I want to . . . feel it.” George lifts his face as if the bursts of Irish air swell and rise around our tiny cottage in the middle of the English countryside.

“How shall we do that?” I am beginning to feel like this is a terrible and wonderful idea, to take my brother somewhere other than his imagination, to take him from the bed and the cottage and Worcester.

To take him from safety.

He shakes his head as if I have no idea about anything at all. “How are we to do that? Most likely the same way other people go to Ireland.”

“I don’t think it’s safe for you,” I say. “Not now.”

“In Mr. Lewis’s books, would Peter or Susan say it’s not safe?”

I stare at my brother. He’s arguing with me about children in a book. “George,” I say, “Peter and Susan are made-up people.”

“They’re more than that, and you know it.”

George stands and walks to a large oak hutch that stands against the far wall. On its shelves are piles of plates and rows of teacups and glasses, linen napkins and bowls and serving platters. George opens one of its drawers and pulls out a paper map. He brings it back and unfolds it on the floor in front of us both.

“I wish we had an atlas,” he says.

“Now that I can try to find you,” I tell him as he spreads the ragged map flat.

A spark flies from the fireplace and hits the edge of the paper, sizzles. “Here we are.” On the map, he points to Worcester in the West Midlands, our borders wiggly with lines that separate us from Birmingham and Hereford. “And there you are when you’re not with me.” He points at Oxford, just south and east of our town. He runs his finger down the map lines, and I realize he’s done this while I’m away from him; he maps my way from home to university and back.