Becoming Mrs. Lewis(120)
In what seemed an additional miracle, or maybe just a relief that felt miraculous, Bill had ceased in his threats to take the boys to America. While I’d recovered, while I’d slept, Jack had written Bill the most scathing letter of his life, explaining to him that he would not return the boys, who were both frightened of him. Whose happiness would you foster by forcing them back to you now? Jack asked. Douglas also wrote to Bill, telling him of his need to stay in what was now his home. We didn’t prod Douglas or write the letter for him—this was of his own accord, my precious son whom Jack called “an absolute charmer full of just the right amount of mischief.” Whether it was Jack’s letter or Douglas’s appeal or my own dying pleas, I would never know.
Life again held promise. I touched Jack’s hand. “They gave me my death sentence and now I’ve grown bone. And you’ve lost bone. You’re in pain and in need of a brace, and I’m relieved of so much pain.” I stood shakily from the wheelchair, using a cane to bear my weight. “You shouldn’t have done that . . . you shouldn’t . . .” I gasped on the words. “I’m just now coming to understand what the doctor told us today. I’m getting stronger and you’re getting weaker. Or at least your bones are. Why did you do this?”
“I didn’t do anything, Joy. God granted my request, if that is what happened at all.” He smiled through the pain and then stood straight. “And look at that, I finally figured out the bloody straps.” He patted his waist where the brace held fast. “Now look at the youthful figure this gives me.”
Our laughter entwined and filled the room, and also seemed to fill the world.
We grabbed our individual canes. I wanted to be outside, to touch the greenest leaves of summer, to taste a tomato off the vine, to feel the sun run down my face like honey. I wanted every sensual experience in the world. I wanted to run my hands across Jack’s body, to dip my fingers into the cold pond, to inhale the summer air, to roll in the grass. Some were possible and some soon would be: I was alive! And in remission.
“Jack.” We took a few hobbling steps together down the hallway and through the front door to emerge into the sunshine.
“Yes, love?”
“Can’t you see? Honestly, can’t you see? It’s a miracle.”
“Miracles, my love, never break nature’s laws.”
“Jack! I’m growing bone. You are losing. You are my . . . substitution.”
“Let’s not get into the land of fancy.” He stopped in midstep. “But I thank God every minute I remember.”
“Thank him for your pain?”
“Yes, and for your relief.” He stopped and kissed me deeply. “The love I have for you has built a bridge to my true self, Joy. The self I only momentarily touched before you. If this pain is part of the bargain, so be it.”
“Why did it take us so long to see this? To know?”
His answer was merely a kiss. Sometimes that is the best answer, I thought, and I kissed him in return.
We walked slowly, every step a triumph, as I’d once been told I would never walk again and that my grave would be my resting place by now. I stopped before the garden and released Jack’s hand to touch his face. “The very fact that I’m standing here and the cancer has been arrested feels like a miracle that you orchestrated.”
“Love always chooses for another’s highest good, but I don’t know if I chose this. I only know that I would have, and maybe God has done the same.”
“I will choose you every time, Jack. Even with this cancer. Even with this suffering. Even with all that came before, I would choose you and this one evening in a garden, our bodies leaning against each other.”
Jack drew me as close as he could with calipers and braces, with canes in the way and pain deep within our bones.
Silence, the sublime sort, hovered for a long while until I asked, “Did you write this morning on the new book?”
“I did, but I was also counting the minutes until you awoke. I couldn’t focus knowing you were waiting. It’s difficult to focus on the Psalms when love like this is sleeping downstairs.”
He kissed me with the passion I’d dreamt of for many years. I tasted his pipe tobacco and his humanness and soft mouth. I wanted every inch of the man I loved so dearly.
I didn’t know if others understood his deep love for me. I’d wondered and then let it go—it didn’t matter anymore what Tollers or the Inklings or the Sayers believed. Maybe Jack had admitted his love or maybe he hadn’t, but all that mattered was that I grasped the truth. He loved me when I was brash. He loved me in my weakest state. He loved me after I stopped trying so hard to make him love me. He loved me when I was outwardly unworthy. I thought of Aslan and his words in Prince Caspian, “You doubt your value. Don’t run from who you are.”
I looked over the Kilns property washed in twilight, the golden light of another day’s end, another day Jack and I had together. “It’s time to fix this place up a bit.”
“Oh, Mrs. Lewis, I wondered how long it was going to be before you said so.”
“I mean, honestly, could you possibly still want your blackout curtains and crumbling walls and yellow paint?”
“I could.”
I laughed.
“Remember all those years ago in the pub the night before you left for Edinburgh?” he asked. “It was on your first visit when we talked of what it meant to show our real faces, when you told me of your decision to always show me your face without veil. That was love, Joy; it’s what we’re doing now.” His brown eyes seemed fathomless, their depths holding the answers. “Although it was your mind I loved first, it is not what I’ve loved best. The heart of you is the heart of me now, and I want to know it fully.”