Sometimes in the middle of winter’s dark afternoon I would find him in the chair that usually sat next to his bed, but he’d have scooted it to the window. There he stood upon it with his nose pressed to the glass, his breath fogging the pane. It was then that I remembered that his world, although stuck with ours, was his own altogether. Whatever was in his mind—matters of adventure, sorrow, or comfort, I could never fully know. Whatever he saw out the window, or whatever he wanted to see out the window, was his alone.
At seventeen years old, I left for Oxford after earning a scholarship for my understanding of the theory of relativity from Albert Einstein, a teacher who had visited Oxford three times. I could grasp his formulas just as clearly as day. Einstein’s equations changed the world, and I wanted to be a part of that new world, where numbers and equations unraveled mysteries.
But stories? Those were for George. Books kept him occupied, and I do believe alive, during the long convalescence between each worsening bout. Stories and fairy tales allowed him to be another person, another child, another being. He could leave his bed and soar above the stars, or roar like a lion, or fall fast into a river and swim like a fish. Mum allowed him the luxury, but Dad turned away from the fairy tales.
I loved Dad with a fierce love, but I loved George more. Maybe when we know we will lose someone, we love fiercer and wilder. Of course there will always be loss, but with George the end lingered in every room, in every breath, in every holiday.
That December night at our cottage, before I give George Mr. Lewis’s second story, darkness falls in a quick way—one minute a golden light resting against the window, then the black of a moonless and cloudy night.
I return to George’s room while Mum and Dad talk about business, the ledgers of the market. George sits awake, reading again, the same book with four children riding on a lion’s back under a bough of leaves. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Instead of sitting in the chair, I scoot him over and slide in next to him on the soft bed.
“Mum is going to come in and make me say my prayers and go to sleep,” he says. “So hurry.”
“There’s no hurrying these stories,” I say with a grin and open the notebook. I change my voice, add more singsong. “Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago.” I pause and look sideways at him.
“And not very far away,” he says and we both laugh.
*
George listens as his sister resumes reading the pages in her black notebook. Megs is so beautiful, and he knows the light in her eyes is her love for him. It makes him feel that no matter what happens, he will be okay, and so will she.
“Now,” she says, “it is 1908, and we are still in Little Lea in Belfast. Jack is almost ten years old and Warnie is twelve.”
His sister loves her facts, but again his mind spins toward the story like he’s been transported to Ireland, a place he’s never visited except in stories and photographs. He sees a young boy on his knees next to a bed in a room with a wide window framing a murky night.
Please, God, save my mother. Save her now. Make her well. I cannot live without her.
Jack was on his knees on the cold hard wood, his knees aching. He squeezed his eyes shut so tight that he felt his eyebrows slide down as he uttered the prayer again and again.
The aroma of ethers—a smell that bit the back of his throat—seeped into his room. Jack was missing his brother more than ever, feeling more alone than ever. He was praying because downstairs, on the beautiful wooden kitchen table where Mother usually kneaded dough or sat with a book or cut a loaf of bread, she lay unconscious, having surgery.
Unimaginable.
Too much to understand.
They called it cancer.
Jack’s room was thin with cold, all the firewood burning in the kitchen for Mother, for the nurses who wore their swan-like caps, for the doctors with their serious expressions and terrifying metal tools and scalpels.
Warnie had been away at school when Mother’s headaches began. Soon the bustling house had become hushed, and people in white uniforms flew in and out of its doors. Their grandfather was moved to a nursing home because his daughter-in-law couldn’t care for him as she had.
If Grandfather had been right, then God would hear Jack’s prayers and save his mother.
Jack used all of his mind and heart to imagine her, with the kind smile and moon face he’d inherited from her, healed, taking him on holiday to the beach or Dunluce Castle. Traveling with him to London to see again the great lions in Trafalgar Square. Quizzing him on his Latin or reading him a story.
Alive. It was the only thing that mattered or made sense.
Sick was the only word he understood for what was happening. But Jack had been sick, a lot actually, and he was fine and alive. Surely Mother would be also.
The world felt like it was tilting or sinking.
Silence rushed against Jack’s ears like a sea crashing on rocks, and he stood from his knees and crawled into bed, sitting up against the oak headboard to wait for good news. He pulled the wool blanket to his chin and stared out the window. His heart hammered in his chest, and he imagined his mother alive and well and holding him.
Perhaps his imagination, combined with his prayers, would keep her alive. If she were alive in his mind, she would be alive in the world. This seemed to be true as far he could tell.
Jack might be able to create a world like Boxen with his brother, but he could not create a world without his mother in it.
His imagination took him to the jagged edges of his trip to Castlerock two years ago, when Mother had taken Warnie and him to Dunluce Castle.
The train had sped, heading north to the tip of Ireland, and rocked them to near sleep as the countryside and its towns flew by: chimneys with rising smoke, church steeples pointing above the roofs, sheep with tangled muddy wool, and farmers who stood behind the wooden fences and raised a greeting of one hand to the train.
Jack and Warnie had sat next to each other in their stiff traveling clothes while Mother sat across from them in a pale blue dress with lace around her collar, a deeper blue bonnet tied beneath her chin with a ribbon. Her dark hair hung in ringlets that nearly touched her shoulders. She tapped the train’s tray, where Jack and Warnie’s lesson papers on Greek were spread. “Let us finish before we arrive in Castlerock,” she said.
Jack looked away from the countryside. “But, Mother, it’s summertime. Enough of lessons.”
She shook her head with a stern but kind smile. Jack and Warnie each took their worksheet with the vocabulary words and began to translate and fill in the blank spaces. Jack actually enjoyed Latin and Greek, but he loved staring out to the wild Irish countryside and finding more Boxen stories in his imagination.
“Why must we do schoolwork and not you?” Jack asked Mother. It was an absurd question, and he knew it even as the words came from his lips.
“Oh, I had plenty of schooling. When you’re old like me you won’t have to do lessons unless you’re enthralled with a subject.” She paused and seemed to be elsewhere for a moment before returning her attention to her sons. “Just as you love to read now, so do I. I never want to stop learning.”
This was the first Jack had heard of such a thing. His mother in school?
Warnie lifted his gaze from the words scribbled across his page in tight script. “Where did you go to school?”