Gratitude flooded me with warmth and chatter.
“Remember in Phantastes, each little flower had its own fairy?” I asked Jack as Davy and Douglas crested the hill to see Oxfordshire. My breath caught in the back of my throat, the hellish exhaustion pulling me down when I wanted to be up. I leaned over, balancing my hands on my knees, and then picked a round-faced daisy. I stood and handed it to Jack. “My favorite was the daisy fairy. The way MacDonald described it as a fat child, a cherub.”
“The ash tree in that book frightened me,” he said and pointed to an ash only four feet away, its bark corrugated and emulating small rivers. “For years I looked out my window to see if one was coming for me with its bloody knobbed and twisted hand.”
“The things we remember about stories,” I replied with a laugh. “If you had to choose only one, flower or tree, which would you keep in the world?”
“Trees,” he said. “The ones that hold steady.”
“Agreed,” I said. “I think about those snake roots below the ground, reaching and reaching and never seeing the light.”
“Just like all humans,” he said with such a grin. “A hidden life.”
“We all have one, don’t we? But with friends maybe we can show a little bit of it, let it see the light, even though the trees don’t have a choice at all.”
“Not with all friends. But with someone like you, Joy, that’s possible. It’s only in friendships like this that I’ve ever been able to discuss the deeper questions—probe at the hidden life.”
With someone like me. I took those words and I placed them on the altar of my memory. Then I bent over to take another breath.
“Are you okay?” Jack asked.
“Just a bit tired, I suppose.” I stood to face him. “Well, more than that, actually. I went to see the doctors in London.”
“And?” He glanced at my boys and then back to me, concern in his eyes.
“First I saw the dentist, who told me that the last London dentist—the one I thought had given me such a fantastic deal—had botched the job. Six more teeth needed to be pulled. Then I saw the doctors, eight of them, Jack. What a fiasco. Who needs eight doctors? The poking and the prodding and the needles and the X-rays, all to tell me what they’d always told me—my thyroid is low again.”
“Can they help?” he asked, concern as softness in his voice.
“They increased my medicine,” I said. “I had the radium collar when I was a child, and they were quite concerned about that, telling me they don’t use it anymore as it causes burns and cancers and all kind of horrific problems. I told them it was too late to be worrying about all of that nonsense. All we can do is go from here.”
“Sounds awful.” He leaned on his walking stick, both hands wrapped around its top. “Perhaps the medicine will help?”
“Yes, I think it will. But there was a bright spot in that long day,” I said. “I whiled away an hour talking to Dr. Greene, Graham Greene’s brother. I told him I had just read The End of the Affair, and we were off and running about the literary London world and its gossip. Our chatter took my mind off illness. We gabbed about Dostoyevsky until they stuck me with another needle and brought in another doctor to stare at me like a specimen.”
He shook his head, his jowls moving too. “Dostoyevsky at the doctor. Only you.”
What I didn’t mention to Jack was the actual hell of pulling all those teeth. I’d had so many removed and with such violent pain that only codeine had eased it. I didn’t dare talk about it for reliving it. Nor did I tell him of the lump in my breast, which they once again dismissed as nothing but a cyst.
“You stay here a moment, rest.” Jack took a few steps toward the boys and glanced over his shoulder, lifted his walking stick to me. “I’ll catch up to them. You push yourself far too much.”
“All right then, go on,” I said.
I watched Jack with my boys on the top of Shotover. They’d lugged a folded kite to the top of the hill, and now they unfurled it. Bright stripes of red and blue shuddered in the wind, not taking flight but landing on the ground crooked and hard. Davy ran to it, picked it lovingly off the ground, and brushed it off to hold in his hand.
“I’ll run,” he shouted into the wind to Douglas. “You keep it up.”
Davy ran forward, lifting his ten-year-old hands into the air with an offering of kite to wind.
Jack trotted alongside him to lift the kite until the fabric caught the wind and flapped like a bird, a slapping sound in the sky.