Becoming Mrs. Lewis(115)
It was the January doctor’s announcement that almost destroyed us.
“Months to live,” he told us. “Months at best.”
Together we took the news inside, let it churn our hearts to pulp. “If I could have made you love me all those years ago,” I said, “we’d have had more time.”
“Free will,” he said and kissed me. “It’s the only thing that might make love worth having.”
I nodded in fear. “We cannot look at what horror has happened to us, but at how we will turn to God in it. If I only identify with the three-dimensional world I once believed in, I will despair. But we know better, Jack. We know there is more.”
Jack’s face, the ruddiness now white and sallow as if I’d drained him of his life as well, drew close to mine. “I want more of life here with you.” His voice carried a tremor, and for one split second I thought I knew what he must have sounded like when he was a small boy and his mother was dying in the back bedroom of Little Lea. “I want more of you,” he said.
“As do I want more of you.”
During those months in the hospital Jack was at my bedside as much as possible. For three-day weekends he never left me but to sleep at the Kilns. During the times I believed I’d heal we relished our moments together; he sometimes sneaked sherry into the hospital. We recited poetry and read together. We talked of the future, whether it was a day or a month or more. We kissed and we held each other and felt great expectation of what might be. During the worst moments we prayed, feverishly we prayed.
“It’s hopeless,” I told him on a February afternoon when they removed the cast and found that the bones were not healing. “We must stop living in denial.”
Crochet needles wrapped in gray yarn sat on my lap, abandoned mittens for Davy.
“It is not hopeless,” he said with surety. “It is uncertain, and this is the cross God always gives us in life, uncertainty. But it is not hopeless.”
“Jack, all I’ve ever wanted was to bring you happiness. And here I am bringing you pain. It would have been best if you’d never met me at all.”
“Not met you at all?” He stood and paced the hospital room and then turned to me with fire on his face. “My life would have been but dry dust compared to having you in my world. With whom could I have ever been this close? Till We Have Faces would not exist. My biography would be but half what it is. My heart would still be hibernating, too troubled to feel.” He came to my side and kissed my face, first one cheek, then the other, and then my lips. “Whatever we face together is better than never knowing you at all.”
“There is so much to live for now. So much,” I said and closed my eyes, shook off the dread.
“It does seem fate designs a great need and then frustrates it.”
I smiled at him. “Now tell me how the boys are doing. Give me news from outside this cellblock of a room.”
“I’ve restored the old falling-down guesthouse for them,” he said with a grand smile. “Now they have a place all their own to play and hide. And guess what they found in there.”
“Dead animals?” I asked.
“Your ham! On a top shelf. There it was. I used the guesthouse for storage during the rations.”
I laughed so heartily that Jack wiped tears from my eyes. “I remember sending that to you.”
“They ate it,” Jack said with his own laughter. “They took it right back to the house, and Mrs. Miller opened that tin and it was still good.” Then he grew serious. “I cleaned that little house because I think they need to get away as best they can.”
“Or you need to be away from them.” I kissed his hand, which held mine. “It must be a burden, Jack. I am so sorry.”
“It’s not a burden, Joy. I love them. But they do bloody well fight.” He paused. “I don’t believe Warnie and I ever brawled like that. Douglas often takes off into the woods leaving a roaring Davy behind; I found him one midnight skating on the pond under a full moon.”
“They have been knitted together so differently.”
“Yes. And that clashes. But also they worry. They worry about you. And they don’t know what to do with those emotions.”
“It breaks my heart in more places than my moth-eaten leg. If only we could promise them answered prayers.” Immense weariness settled on me again, as it often did without warning. “Read to me, please. It takes away the pain.” I closed my eyes. “Anything at all, Jack.”
It was Shakespeare he chose that day, and I dozed, slipping in and out of the cadence of his words. It was only when I opened my eyes to see why he’d stopped that I realized he hadn’t been reading at all, but quoting from memory.
Whenever I believed I could not love him more, I did.
CHAPTER 53
Could you listen to your devoted lover?
Listen just a while, it will soon be over
“ACROSTIC IN HENDECASYLLABICS,” JOY DAVIDMAN
It was a Thursday, March 21, the spring equinox, the time I’d told Jack at our first meeting was a signal of new beginnings. He’d believed new beginnings were heralded by autumn. But it looked like I was right, for this was our wedding day. A real one.
My hospital room, now so familiar I could see it with my eyes closed, was cluttered with books and papers, with my typewriter and notepads. Newspapers and even a Scrabble game were scattered on the rolling table across from my bed, yet it would become a sacred cathedral in the next moments.