Becoming Mrs. Lewis(62)
“You must get to the doctor, Warnie,” I told him, “before that settles deeper into your chest.”
“I will,” he said. “I have dialed Doc Harvard and made an appointment.”
It was in that moment that the honk of a taxi startled us all. Jack and I stood.
“I must go,” I said. “Back to London and to the docks and then . . .”
“We will miss you, Joy.” He nodded, his spirit closed to me. I couldn’t discern—was he sad or frustrated? Angry? “Please write to us.”
“I’m going to miss you both terribly.”
Warnie came to me and also hugged me. “Joy, we aren’t going anywhere. When you return, we will be here.”
Tears gathered in my chest and then found their way to my eyes, falling before I could catch them. “I don’t know how I’ll find a way to return, but if I can, I will.”
They nodded at me in agreement and I turned away, walked out the painted-green door of the Kilns and into the taxi waiting outside.
I’d offered my heart, and now I would pay the price—I always did.
PART III
AMERICA
January 1953–November 1953
“Courage, dear heart,” said Aslan.
THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER, C. S. LEWIS
CHAPTER 28
Saying I must not love him any more;
But now at last I learn to disobey
“SONNET OF MISUNDERSTANDINGS,” JOY DAVIDMAN
January 9, 1953
The farmhouse shimmered, ice and snow covering it like a veil. I stood on the front porch like one entering a prison. I had willfully submitted myself to the sentence and would find the willpower to face the disarray. Claim my part in it. I would take care of my children and write furiously and completely. I would be brave.
I entered the house, and an odd stillness surrounded me, a waiting silence like that right before a battle begins. The children were in school. The hallway overflowed with shoes and coats, schoolbooks and mittens, in organized piles or hung on hooks. Family life, one I’d always wanted and needed, seemed a mirage. Renee had taken my place, and yet this was my place. My heart was at the Kilns and my body was here, and nothing at all in the world made any sense.
Bill strode down the stairs and, not having heard me enter, was surprised to see me standing in the hallway in my coat and hat, my suitcase and trunk at my feet. He wore pressed blue jeans and a black sweater I’d never seen, but his grimace was familiar.
“Joy,” he said flatly. “You’re back.”
And I hated him. That suddenly and that completely. All resolve and all promises to be the nicest girl washed away as finally as if a flood had come through the front hallway and swept me away. “That’s right, Bill, I’m back. Back to your little love nest.”
It was vitriol. It was the sin I’d placed before God more times than any other: my anger and my acidic tongue. But it was the truth, and my spirits had been rubbed raw and open. This was the blood of it all.
He bounded down the last few steps and grasped my shoulders, his face contorted with rage. “Don’t you come in here and ruin the peace and love that Renee and I have built.”
“Renee and you?” My voice rose to a high screech of pain. “You are a horrid person, Bill Gresham. You’re a sociopath, and she has no idea who you are and what you’re capable of. You’ve seduced her so that you can have the life you’ve always wanted, one of adoration while you write your pitiful stories alone in your room.”
In an instant, like a snake’s strike, his hands closed around my throat. I stood perfectly still, my eyes a challenge. If he was to choke me to death in the foyer of my own house, it was a better ending than to live with him. His fingers pressed into the flesh above my collarbone, anger an electric current flowing through his hands. Despair buried me, black as any grave.
“You are disgusting,” he said and flung me from him as spittle flew from his lips. I rocked back, my head banging into the wall behind me.
I steadied myself to find my footing before stepping toward him. “You don’t frighten me. What a cheating, lying man you are. I’m not one bit fooled.”
“You know nothing,” he said. “If I ever loved you, and I doubt I did, it wasn’t even close to the way I love Renee.”
A small mewling sound came from the top of the stairs, and I looked for my cat; instead I saw Renee standing with a basket of laundry in her arms, tears falling freely down her pretty face.
“Stop.” She dropped the basket, and a full burst of clothes fell down the stairs: socks and underwear, children’s shirts and pants. “Both of you stop it! Not here. Not now.”
I picked up one of my suitcases and pushed past Bill to climb the stairs, kicking laundry clear of me with each step. I couldn’t even look at the room Bill and I had once shared. I stormed instead into the bedroom I’d once split with Renee. Her personal belongings cluttered the room. Her hairbrush sat faceup on the dresser, long strands of black hair caught in the bristles; her perfumes and makeup organized in a straight line; her clothes folded neatly on the bench at the end of the bed. Her bed was made and her pillows fluffed and sitting upright.
I grabbed her belongings, one by one, slowly and deliberately throwing them into the hall. Her clothes. Her makeup. Her shoes and finally her pillow. Only then, when the room had once more become itself save her cloying perfume, did I slam the door and fall onto the single bed, the one I had lain on only months before, confiding in my cousin my husband’s cruelty and betrayal.