“Queens’ College,” she said with a lift of her chin. “Mathematics and physics.”
Warnie let out a sigh of amazement. “Mathematics and physics?”
Jack stared at his mother with her sweet smile and her warm brown eyes, with her thin nose and wondered, for the first time, what she must have looked like or acted like when she was his age.
This was astonishing.
Jack never wanted to grow up; his father made it all seem so dreary. But right then, for a moment, he imagined his mother young and in college, and she gave him hope that getting older might be exciting in its own way.
“But you told me that you were a writer,” Jack said.
“A person doesn’t have to be only one thing in the world. You can be more.”
“I can’t.” Jack let out a laugh, and Warnie did too.
“Well, I was,” she said.
“Tell me what you wrote,” said Jack.
“I liked to write stories. Before your father and I were married, we wrote letters back and forth to each other, and I let him read my work. And this, my boys, is how I fell in love with him, because he took my writing seriously and he took me seriously. He was so kind about my stories.”
“Father was kind?” Warnie asked in one breath.
Mother laughed. Jack adored his mother’s laughter and he wished he’d been the cause of it. “Very kind,” she said. “Your father would write back to me and tell me how wonderful my stories were. He encouraged me to send them off. And I did. I published a piece in the Home Journal. It was called . . .” She leaned forward and used her storytelling voice, the beautiful voice of myths and tales, and said, “It was called ‘The Princess Rosetta.’”
Jack set down his pencil and said sternly, “I want to read it.”
She laughed freely. “It’s gone. I don’t know what has happened to it in the flurry of the moves and your arrivals and . . . But your father read it long ago. I know you see him as a harsh father who can’t understand you, Jacksie, but he’s a kind man whose attention to what mattered allowed me to fall in love with him.”
Jack stared at his mother. The idea of falling in love with anything but nature and stories was as foreign a concept as the planets’ movements.
They all rode in companionable silence until they reached Castlerock, its beaches, and lazy afternoons.
Finally, on a cloudy and windy summer afternoon, Jack, Warnie, and Mother climbed the hill toward Dunluce Castle. When Jack looked up and spied the castle high on an emerald hill, his breath caught.
Time paused. Everything stood still and quiet, and Jack’s heart reached high above him to the ruin of stone and to crumbling towers that once pierced the clouds.
Longing, which he’d only felt in small doses before, now washed in with the sea’s waves, crashing with wild silver spray on the rocks. The castle spread wide with turrets at the corners, its walls without roofs, jagged as if it had grown from the coast. A stone bridge spanned a wide expanse where, if one imagined, both dragons and ogres lived in the furrows of the cliff and would grab for the kingdom at the first chance. Only the bravest of the brave could keep them from conquering. The sea was carved with the troughs and peaks of the waves crashing at the shoreline. Two gulls swooped on the wind. In the rocks below, tidal pools reflected the cloudy sky, and all around the brothers came the pungent and clean smell of salt.
“Warnie,” Jack said. “Look.”
Warnie did look, and together they imagined what knights and kings battled, what princesses needed saving, and what quests lay ahead for the royal kingdom of this castle.
*
“Megs!” George calls out to his sister in the middle of her story so that she almost drops her notebook.
“What? Are you okay?” She drops her hand onto his forehead.
Why did adults always touch his forehead as if it told them everything they needed to know?
“Is that . . .” Did George dare hope? “Is that castle in Ireland . . . Is it Cair Paravel? Is it real?”
His sister takes a deep breath and pulls him closer with one arm. “Dunluce Castle is real. But is it the castle in Mr. Lewis’s book? I don’t know.”
“His mother . . . It’s so desperately sad. Did she live?”
“I’m not yet done with the story, George.”
“I’m not sure I want to know. I want Jack’s mother to live. Does she?”
“Okay, I’ll quit now if you want.” Megs grins in the way George loves. Her whole face gives away that she will do whatever he wants, but she already knows what he wants.
George sits straight up, his heart beating with the imaginings of a young Jack Lewis and his brother. He needs to know what happened, even if what happened is awful. “Megs . . .” He exhales and snuggles closer. “All stories have the dark and scary part,” he says. “Maybe that’s where we are now. The dark part before the good part.”
“Well,” she says, “maybe this is a good place to stop for now. The beach trip to Castlerock and Dunluce Castle is full of beauty and love.” She closes her notebook.
George puts his hand on hers. “Keep going. I want to know.”
*
Jack’s prayers might have worked, or so he thought, because for weeks after that surgery, his mother recovered in her room. Then one March afternoon, when Warnie had come home for a weekend, Jack and Warnie sat by her side in the quiet bedroom.
“Mother,” Warnie said, “if we pray hard enough, God will heal you. And we have been praying so hard.”
Mother rested on her pillows, her face so pale and her lips so thin that Jack tried not to look too closely; he just wanted to hear her voice. “God doesn’t always answer our prayers the way we want,” she told her sons. “There are things we can’t know about His great plan.”
Jack walked to the end of the bed and lifted his chin in defiance and said, “If His plan isn’t to heal you, then He isn’t real.”
“Oh, my sons, I have something for you.” She struggled to sit up, then she leaned over and picked up two Bibles from her bedside table. “There is one for each of you to treasure for all of your life.”
Jack and Warnie took the thick Bibles from her hand, felt their smooth leather bindings and silky pages.
“Thank you, Mother,” Jack and Warnie said at the same time, but Jack all at once felt that they weren’t talking to their actual mother, because how could this ill woman in the bed be her? Their mother did not stay in bed; she taught them Latin and Greek. She played outside with them. She took them to beaches and castles and mountains.
She did not lie in bed and give them Bibles as a consolation prize.
Mother gazed at her sons. With tears in her eyes, she took their hands. “Oh, boys, we must ask ourselves . . . We must . . .” She paused and closed her eyes. “What have we done for God?” The boys stood stock-still and held her hand until their father shooed them out of the room. Neither of them had an answer.
Only days later, on August 23, his father’s birthday, Jack awoke in the night with a gnawing toothache. As usual, he was worried about Mother, but now there was something new to fret about: his own pain, throbbing in his mouth along with a fever that burned behind his eyelids and at the back of his neck.