I wake on Christmas Day feeling like I’ve barely slept. In the middle of the night, a terrifying fear swamped me. What if George didn’t make it to Christmas morning? What if, for George, it stayed winter and never Christmas? I found my way to George’s bedside, to the upright chair where I’ve been half-asleep ever since.
In dawn’s light, with the streaky pinks and reds striping the horizon and lighting George’s room, I know my fears are ridiculous. And also that George, even if he didn’t wake on Christmas morning, wouldn’t find himself in the icy wasteland of the White Witch.
I stretch and crank my neck, which is stuck to the right with a pain that shoots down my shoulder. George breathes in and out softly. The covers are up to his chin, and one arm has flopped out to reveal his flannel Christmas pajamas with lambs in Santa hats. I hear a rustling sound and look to see Dad standing in the doorway.
He’s already dressed and shaved clean, his face gleaming in the morning sun. He puts a finger over his lips for silence and nods for me to follow him to the kitchen.
We stand there, waiting on the kettle, fatigue like a heaviness in my head and shoulders. “Happy Christmas, Dad,” I say quietly. He slips his arm around me and pulls me close.
“Happy Christmas, my little one.”
He hasn’t called me that in so long that I feel myself a child who needs comforting. He lets me go, and I turn to see the fir tree with the silver tinsel and the presents piled underneath. They are wrapped in red and green. Some white with tinsel bows. Only a few, but enough to make me smile. Across the mantle of the fireplace are four stockings, once knitted by Grandma Devonshire. Somehow my parents, just as they do every year, have managed to hide the presents, then sneak them under the tree without me hearing a thing.
Dad’s voice comes wrapped in a cough. “When I read your notebook last night . . . What do any of these tales have to do with what George wants to know?”
I take a breath and step back while the kettle heats up and Mum and George sleep on.
“To people like Mr. Lewis, life isn’t a math equation. Everything he says seems to have layers and layers of meaning. George wanted me to ask just one question: Where did Narnia come from? All I was trying to do was answer him. But meanwhile, it changed me, Dad.” I pause.
“Megs, you’re doing everything you can, I know that . . .”
“George is going to die,” I say, shocking myself by saying it aloud. “I can’t do anything to save him. But I can tell him the stories that Mr. Lewis told me. If Mr. Lewis’s answer to a question is another story, who am I to argue?”
As if someone has startled him, Dad drops his tea, hot brown water flowing over the table, the teacup rattling to the wooden floors. He sets his face into his hands and begins to sob. His shoulders shake. His pants are soaked with tea unnoticed. His voice breaks the air. “I don’t want to lose him. I can’t fix it. I can’t work hard enough or pay enough . . .”
I place my arms around my dad and pull him close. “I know. I know,” I say as a knock startles us both and we look to the front door, confused.
“Santa?” Dad askes with a funny grin. He wipes the tears from his face, blows his nose with a loud snort into his handkerchief.
“Maybe?” I say and walk to the door in my nightgown, a flannel gown with flowers around the sleeve cuffs.
I regret this ensemble as I open the door to see Padraig standing there in a long black coat, his curls freckled with snow beneath a bright cherry-colored Santa hat. His cheeks are red and I am filled with delight. Pure delight, though simultaneously I wish I were dressed in my Christmas best with a hint of red lipstick.
“Padraig!” I grab my coat from the hook and slip it on before I step outside and close the door. “Why are you here?”
“Do you mean Happy Christmas?” he asks with a sly grin. Then I see in his hand a piece of paper rolled like a scroll with a red ribbon wrapped around it.
“Do you mean Nollaig Shona Dhuit?” I ask.
He laughs. “Yes, I do.” He pauses, looks behind him and then back to me. “Beautiful Megs, I don’t want to bother you or your family, but I wanted to bring this to you before I go back to Ireland today with my father.” He nods toward the car idling in front of the house. “He’s waiting.”
I glance toward the blue Wyvern and I feel the heat of a blush rising. “Oh splendid. An Oxford professor seeing me in my jammies. Jolly brilliant.”
Padraig almost laughs. “He let me come out of the way to give this to you.” He hands me the paper. “I told him all about you. About George. He’s happy to be here.”
From behind the Wyvern’s windshield, Professor Cavender, wearing a blue hat and red scarf, waves at me. I wave back timidly and look to Padraig.
“What is it?” I ask.
“It’s a story . . . or a poem . . . I’m not sure what it is. I wrote it last night. For you and for George.”
“Why did you come here? Why not mail it?” I wonder why I am ruining this moment with all the questions even as I ask them.
“I’m here . . . for you. Are you a dolt, Megs?”
“I don’t think so.” I almost smile at the same words he’d used in the snowbank when he’d kissed me.
He lowers his voice and steps so close to me I can feel the heat from beneath his coat. “I’m here because I’m rightly in love with you. That is why. And I want to be here for you. You don’t have to love me back. It doesn’t have to work that way, but it would sure be nice if you did.”
There I stand in my pajamas and love enters my world like lightning from a blue sky, surprising, unexpected, and completely meant to knock me over. I can’t say the words in return, not yet, although I know I will. Someday, and soon.
Instead, I take the paper and open it. I read as Padraig watches me.
Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago and not very far away, a little boy entered the world in a small stone cottage in the English countryside. Some babies are born closer to the end of their story than others, and this little boy was one of those.
For a short while the boy named George remembered where he came from, and then the memory faded, almost disappeared into the bright light of this loud world with all its talking adults and worries and sickness and words. But when the boy read a certain kind of story, or heard a very particular type of tale, he had the nudge of a memory, a thrilling kind of prescient joy, an echo or reminder of something more, of somewhere very important, of somewhere where it all began.
That feeling returned with every book he picked up and with every story he begged his sister, Megs, to tell him.
And Narnia was his favorite of all. The young boy wanted to know how the author found this story of a lion and a witch and a wardrobe, a tale that carried him to new adventures.
He asked Megs to find out for him; he asked her to discover how Narnia had roared into this world.
I look up to Padraig and I don’t even try to hide my tears. He takes off his leather gloves and holds my face in his hands. “You will write the rest of this story. And hopefully I’ll be in it.”
And with that, he kisses me. Right on my front stoop on Christmas Day, smack in front of his father and the sky and the unseen stars above us. And I kiss him in return with a promise that can’t be yet voiced, but one as sure as a blood oath.
Dad opens the door.
“Dad,” I say and take Padraig’s hand in mine, unashamed of the kiss he interrupted. “This is my friend Padraig Cavender.”
“The boy who carried you to Dunluce?” Dad asks, straightening his cardigan and squinting into the morning sun.
“Yes, sir,” Padraig says without flinching.
We both wait and then Dad smiles. “Thank you; you are a good man.”
“It was one of the best days of my life, sir,” Padraig says. “And now I must be off. My father is waiting, and there is a ferry to catch.”
“Happy Christmas,” my dad says.
“And to you.” Padraig tips his hat and then he leaves.
I watch him as he saunters to the car, opens the passenger door, and looks back to me. I wave with the rolled-up paper and hope he can feel everything I feel, because it is the only Christmas gift I have for him.
Dad does me a great favor and doesn’t say a word about the kiss that still has me feeling untethered and grounded both. We wander back to George’s room. On the way, I hide the paper in a drawer in the kitchen hutch.
“Happy Christmas,” Dad and I call out as we reach George’s sunlit room, where Mum is waiting.
“Happy Christmas,” he says, and he’s smiling, so pure, so bright. Then he holds up my notebook, which I’d left at his bedside table, and I see the list I’d made in the pub. “What’s this?” he asks.
“Oh.” I reach his side and kiss his cheek. “I was . . . I was trying to make a list to show where I thought each thing in the story came from . . . and . . .”
“Like a math diagram?”
I feel stupid. I should never have tried it.
“How did that work out?” he asks with a teasing voice.
“It didn’t, really,” I say. Our gazes meet and we laugh.
Dad perches on the end of the bed, picking up George’s sketchbook.
“These drawings are jolly marvelous.” Dad flips through the pages, and Mum and I walk behind him, peering over his shoulder to watch the sketches go by. Each page is a scene from Mr. Lewis’s life, and each page has a colored lion in the background: fierce, tender, curious, or protective. George has captured all of them in the expressions and stance of his lion.
“George,” Dad says, “it looks like you think the lion followed the author around for all of his life.”
George nods. “I think the lion follows all of us around. We just have to look for him.”
I scoot George over, wrapping my arm around his shoulder as I sit on the bed. “Well, how do we see him?” I ask.
George looks at me, then at Mum and Dad. He opens his hand and then rests his palm over his heart, leaving it there on his chest as his only answer.
After that, we’re all silent for a time.
“Dad,” George finally speaks, “I heard you in the kitchen. Please don’t be so hard on Megs. She did as I asked. There is no real answer. I never thought there was.”
“I maintain that there is an answer,” I say. “Or many answers.”
“And what are they?” Mum asks, either skeptical or curious, I can’t tell.
George looks to me and nods. He now trusts me to answer, and I want to keep every ounce of that trust.
“Maybe . . . maybe Narnia also began when Mr. Lewis sat quietly and paid attention to his heart’s voice. Maybe we are each and every one of us born with our own stories, and we must decide how to tell those stories with our own life, or in a book.” I stop and clear my mind, my heart, and my eyes. “Or . . . could it be that all our stories come from one larger story? Maybe Narnia also began before Mr. Lewis was even born in Belfast, Ireland. Maybe . . . Mr. Lewis’s tale already existed in the bright light where every story, legend, and myth is born.”
“Yes, Megs,” George says so quietly that Mum leans closer. George’s eyes alight not on any of us but on the wardrobe across the room. “Yes. The bright lamppost light where all stories begin and end.”