Once Upon a Wardrobe(62)

“Do you mean Happy Christmas?” he asks with a sly grin. Then I see in his hand a piece of paper rolled like a scroll with a red ribbon wrapped around it.

“Do you mean Nollaig Shona Dhuit?” I ask.

He laughs. “Yes, I do.” He pauses, looks behind him and then back to me. “Beautiful Megs, I don’t want to bother you or your family, but I wanted to bring this to you before I go back to Ireland today with my father.” He nods toward the car idling in front of the house. “He’s waiting.”

I glance toward the blue Wyvern and I feel the heat of a blush rising. “Oh splendid. An Oxford professor seeing me in my jammies. Jolly brilliant.”

Padraig almost laughs. “He let me come out of the way to give this to you.” He hands me the paper. “I told him all about you. About George. He’s happy to be here.”

From behind the Wyvern’s windshield, Professor Cavender, wearing a blue hat and red scarf, waves at me. I wave back timidly and look to Padraig.

“What is it?” I ask.

“It’s a story . . . or a poem . . . I’m not sure what it is. I wrote it last night. For you and for George.”

“Why did you come here? Why not mail it?” I wonder why I am ruining this moment with all the questions even as I ask them.

“I’m here . . . for you. Are you a dolt, Megs?”

“I don’t think so.” I almost smile at the same words he’d used in the snowbank when he’d kissed me.

He lowers his voice and steps so close to me I can feel the heat from beneath his coat. “I’m here because I’m rightly in love with you. That is why. And I want to be here for you. You don’t have to love me back. It doesn’t have to work that way, but it would sure be nice if you did.”

There I stand in my pajamas and love enters my world like lightning from a blue sky, surprising, unexpected, and completely meant to knock me over. I can’t say the words in return, not yet, although I know I will. Someday, and soon.

Instead, I take the paper and open it. I read as Padraig watches me.

Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago and not very far away, a little boy entered the world in a small stone cottage in the English countryside. Some babies are born closer to the end of their story than others, and this little boy was one of those.

For a short while the boy named George remembered where he came from, and then the memory faded, almost disappeared into the bright light of this loud world with all its talking adults and worries and sickness and words. But when the boy read a certain kind of story, or heard a very particular type of tale, he had the nudge of a memory, a thrilling kind of prescient joy, an echo or reminder of something more, of somewhere very important, of somewhere where it all began.

That feeling returned with every book he picked up and with every story he begged his sister, Megs, to tell him.

And Narnia was his favorite of all. The young boy wanted to know how the author found this story of a lion and a witch and a wardrobe, a tale that carried him to new adventures.

He asked Megs to find out for him; he asked her to discover how Narnia had roared into this world.



I look up to Padraig and I don’t even try to hide my tears. He takes off his leather gloves and holds my face in his hands. “You will write the rest of this story. And hopefully I’ll be in it.”

And with that, he kisses me. Right on my front stoop on Christmas Day, smack in front of his father and the sky and the unseen stars above us. And I kiss him in return with a promise that can’t be yet voiced, but one as sure as a blood oath.

Dad opens the door.

“Dad,” I say and take Padraig’s hand in mine, unashamed of the kiss he interrupted. “This is my friend Padraig Cavender.”

“The boy who carried you to Dunluce?” Dad asks, straightening his cardigan and squinting into the morning sun.

“Yes, sir,” Padraig says without flinching.

We both wait and then Dad smiles. “Thank you; you are a good man.”

“It was one of the best days of my life, sir,” Padraig says. “And now I must be off. My father is waiting, and there is a ferry to catch.”

“Happy Christmas,” my dad says.

“And to you.” Padraig tips his hat and then he leaves.

I watch him as he saunters to the car, opens the passenger door, and looks back to me. I wave with the rolled-up paper and hope he can feel everything I feel, because it is the only Christmas gift I have for him.

Dad does me a great favor and doesn’t say a word about the kiss that still has me feeling untethered and grounded both. We wander back to George’s room. On the way, I hide the paper in a drawer in the kitchen hutch.

“Happy Christmas,” Dad and I call out as we reach George’s sunlit room, where Mum is waiting.

“Happy Christmas,” he says, and he’s smiling, so pure, so bright. Then he holds up my notebook, which I’d left at his bedside table, and I see the list I’d made in the pub. “What’s this?” he asks.

“Oh.” I reach his side and kiss his cheek. “I was . . . I was trying to make a list to show where I thought each thing in the story came from . . . and . . .”

“Like a math diagram?”

I feel stupid. I should never have tried it.

“How did that work out?” he asks with a teasing voice.