But of course not as much as I love George.
Home is our Devonshire house, a stone cottage surrounded by the hand-hewn fences of aged alder. Between the low wooden gate and the front door, a wild garden of rambling purple fumitory and thick moonwort fern rests hidden beneath snow. The window boxes Dad once made Mum for her birthday hang from the two side windows, sad and empty in the winter barrenness.
Last autumn, as the earth moved toward rest, Mum worked in the garden with a fervor I hadn’t seen in years, and I believe I know why: she can’t keep George alive, but she can keep the flowers and vegetables growing under her care.
Today when I arrive at the house, where I’d lived all my life until I departed for Oxford, the chimney smoke curls upward from a cap at the far-right end of the cottage. I walk carefully along the stone pathway that is covered with snow and glinting with swords of sunlight. I hesitate before placing my hand on the knob of our blue-painted front door.
No matter how I feel, I must appear cheerful for George.
I open the door, and a rush of heat flows toward me with a fireplace scent so reminiscent of my early childhood that my knees almost buckle.
But I can’t fold.
I must be strong.
I shut the front door, slip off my jacket and mittens, set them on the bench, and kick off my wellies. I move slowly through the house I know as well as anything in my life. I can walk through it quick as lightning with my eyes fast shut and never hit an edge of counter, a kitchen table, or Dad’s large leather chair. In a single minute and blindfolded, I could find my bedroom and crawl beneath its worn-thin sheets with a warm water bottle and be ten years old again.
I reach the stone-walled kitchen to find it empty. The kettle sits on the blue countertop next to an empty teacup. On the small dark wooden table, a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers is facedown, the spine of it cracked. Mum is halfway through a Lord Peter Wimsey story. I like thinking about how the author also went to Somerville, how her book connects us through my mum.
I take two rights to George’s bedroom. He has the room with the largest windows so he can see outside when the weakness of his heart keeps him from rising. At times he loses his breath so desperately that his lips turn a strange shade of blue. This window is his door to the world.
When I reach his room, I see that his bed holds only squashed pillows and rumpled covers.
My heartbeat thunders inside my ears. Has there been a rush to hospital and no one had time to tell me? It has happened before.
Mum’s voice brings her to the doorway. She hugs me as tight as a vise. “You’re home!”
“Where’s George?”
I point to his empty bed. Mum’s gaze leaves mine to scan the room. She startles, calls out his name. I do the same. He doesn’t answer. Together we rush through the small house, which takes no more time than it does to call his name thrice more.
Mum flings open the front door and pokes her head out. “I see only your footprints in the snow,” she says, and I hear relief in her words.
I rush back to George’s room and look under his bed. Then I notice the wardrobe door is slightly ajar.
“Mum, look!” I call out as I yank open the door. There’s George, his knees drawn up to his chest, his blue eyes looking straight at us.
“Megs!” He scurries out. I hug him as tightly as I can without fearing I will break the little bones in his chest and shoulders.
“Georgie Porgie.”
I lift him and he throws his arms around my neck. He carries the aroma of the rose sachets in the closet and I breathe it in. Slight and frail, he clings to me. And I to him. I place him gently in bed, and he holds to my neck until I laugh and kiss his cheek. I draw the covers to his chin while Mum watches with a look of pure relief.
I sit on the edge of George’s bed and it slants toward me. “I received your letter. It was so beautiful the way you told me the story about Dad and the sheep he chased through the garden. When did you learn to write so well?”
George grins, and that hair of his is so blond it appears like cotton. Twilight rests against the windows as if it wants to join us in the bedroom, and I flick on his bedside light.
“George,” I say quietly, “why were you hiding in there?”
“I’m not hiding, I’m dreaming,” he says, looking out the window as if he can see something we can’t. “Imagining.”
Mum looks at me and nods her head for me to follow her to the kitchen.
“I’ll be right back.” I kiss George on his cheek, and he closes his eyes.
Mum sets the kettle to the stove’s fire and watches it in silence for a few heartbeats, until she turns to me with tears in her eyes. “It’s because of that book that he goes and hides in the wardrobe. He reads that story over and over. He wants to read nothing else. Not even his favorites, Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin. Now it’s all about Narnia and the lion and the four children who are living apart from their parents during the war. It’s about magic and witches and talking animals. It’s all he wants to talk about.”
“Have you read it?”
“No, I haven’t yet. Aunt Dottie dropped it off days ago. It’s a new book for children by that author who teaches at your university.”
“C. S. Lewis, yes,” I say. “One of his other books, The Screwtape Letters, was all the chatter. There’re more books to come from him, I’ve heard.”
“Well, he best hurry. I doubt your brother will be . . .” Tears gather in her eyes, and she brushes them away with the back of her hand.
“Mum, don’t say such things. Please.”
“It’s true.”
“You don’t know that.”
The teakettle screams, and Mum pours boiling water into the cup over the tea leaves nestled in the silver strainer and watches the steam rise. “Go on now. Take your cuppa and visit with your brother.”
She pulls her worn gray sweater tighter around her and buttons it near the neck as if she’s holding herself together with the Shetland wool of her father’s old farm lambs. I kiss her red cheek and she takes a linen handkerchief and wipes her eyes, then blows her nose into it with a resonating sound. We both laugh.
“Go on now,” she says.
His room is warm. During the day it’s the sunniest part of the house—intolerable for a few weeks every summer and favored in winter. It’s shaped like a perfect square （and I know a perfect square） with plaster walls painted an ivory color. The single bed is handmade by our Grandfather Devonshire, fashioned of oak with four posters squiring up like the tower at Magdalen. The hand-hewn oak floors are covered with a sheep’s-wool rug, fluffy in the places not often trod and flattened where our feet walk again and again. The blanket on his bed is striped, alternating blue and green, pulled high over the crisp white linen sheets that Mum irons smooth. The wardrobe across from the bed and between the windows, once belonging to Mum’s sister, Dottie, has the trees and birds of a forest glade carved into its wooden doors. I think how each of these things is a part of our family, each made or passed down through a Devonshire or MacAllister line that reaches us now.
George’s face is placid, and he rests on his pillow lightly, as if he hasn’t enough weight to dent the down feathers inside. His eyes are closed, and I watch him sleep. His easy breaths go in and out.