“He’s written to us.”
“Let me see.”
“I don’t think you should read it, Joy. You just need to know that he’s demanding that if . . . if something happens to you, he wants the boys back with him. He laid some terrible accusations at your feet. But don’t trouble yourself; I’ve written back to him in the sternest way possible. He will not and cannot have the boys return to America.”
“Let me read it,” I said. “Now.”
He didn’t argue, but rose and left the room. His footsteps echoed up the stairs to his office and then back down again. When he returned he handed the letter to me.
Dear Jack,
it began . . .
There were condolences about my prognosis and a reference to the fact that Bill’s only spirituality was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and then the dagger:
Let me tell you my side of the story.
I read on with an invisible hand around my throat.
He told Jack that when I’d left five years ago, I’d been “disturbed.” He claimed my mind had been a mess and my heart set on Jack. He wrote that I’d never made very much of my writing career and that he’d supported me in the Presbyterian Life articles so that I could feel good about myself. He claimed I left my boys too long （he was right）， and that when I’d returned I’d been both angry and hostile. And there was more. His bitterness was so palpable it thrummed off the page and into my body, an electric current.
Bill ended with this.
There is nothing more my sons need than their dad.
I closed my eyes and then dropped the pages to the floor, and Jack allowed them to scatter like trash. “No.”
“We won’t let him, Joy. We will not allow it.”
Grief began to heave within me, then made way for anger. My eyes flew open and I attempted to sit, for a moment forgetting that I was bedbound. The traction pulleys clanged against each other in protest, and a knife-pain sliced down my left thigh. But anger won and I slammed my fist into the mattress.
“His accusations, Jack. What a woman that must be for all of those things to be true. A horrible woman. One I wouldn’t want to even know, much less be.”
“It’s Bill’s way of telling a story he needs to believe.” Jack’s voice low and quiet, a balm.
“And nothing of his affair with my cousin? His anger or his rages or his alcoholism and breakdowns? His suicide threats that kept us captive? He doesn’t say why I might have been angry when I returned home? Only that I was bitter and what else . . . violent? What a farce.”
Jack rested his hand on my arm. “Joy.”
I took in a long breath.
“Please get me a pad of paper and a pen. I must write back.”
“I already wrote to him.”
“Then I’ll add to it, Jack. I can’t let him leave this as a legacy, these pages of lies.” Tears flooded my eyes, and I wiped furiously at them. “I’m tired of crying. Of hurting. I want only love now. Only love. It should be all that remains.”
“That is what we have.” He kissed me again and reached for the poetry book. I closed my eyes, let the hostile fury ride its wave, and listened to Jack quote Wordsworth. “‘I wandered lonely as a cloud . . .’”
Inside my mind I heard Bill, but when I opened my eyes to Jack, I knew that whatever Bill believed or whatever he’d written did not and could not affect the love that breathed between Jack and me.
I understood for the first time the apostle Paul’s words, “Death, where is your sting?”
CHAPTER 55
Beyond the foaming world; here is the chart
Of the last journey, past the last desire
（LAST SONNET, LAST LINE）
“SONNET XLIV,” JOY DAVIDMAN
June 1957
“Your cancer has been arrested.”
These words fell so casually from the mouth of the doctor in the white coat and tortoiseshell spectacles that I thought I might have misheard him.
I sat in my wheelchair with Jack standing at my side and stared at the drops of dried blood on the doctor’s sleeve, his stethoscope hanging from his neck like a dead snake, as the words sank into my consciousness with soft mercy.
“Arrested?” Jack and I asked simultaneously.
The man nodded, his brows knit together in confusion. “Not healed. But the disease has been arrested. Your bones are solid as a rock, at least for now.” He paused and fiddled with his stethoscope. “We don’t understand. If you’d like to call it a miracle you could. But it is not what we expected. You, Mrs. Lewis, are growing new bone. Your body is depositing calcium into your bone, strengthening it. Honestly, when we sent you home we didn’t have any other plan but to keep you comfortable. Death was imminent.”