We Seven

A Narnia & Mirror, Mirror Fanfiction

Part 16

Susan never acknowledged she ever forgot Narnia, nor did she immediately begin acting as if the little chessman had brought her back from a kind of selective amnesia.

She simply – having handed the tiny gold horse-head to Jo – began to chatter brightly about all the things which it'd reminded her of, all that it recalled to her – Lilygloves the chief mole, her horse (the one she'd left behind her hunting the white stag), and how at first Reepicheep the mouse and Alexis had not particularly liked one another, and wasn't it funny, since Alexis had liked the aforementioned Lilygloves so much, and a mole and a mouse were not so very different, but they had not had Talking Mice their first time, so perhaps it took getting used to – until gradually she sounded, not like somebody merrily recollecting a game she used to play in childhood, but like a grown woman wistfully talking of things which had all really happened when she was just a bit younger than she was presently.

It had not escaped Jo's notice, either, she'd called Nicholas Alexis.

Susan did not fall to weeping and apologising, to wondering aloud in great sobbing laments how she could have forgotten, though her eyes did indeed shine bright with tears that fell silently down her cheeks when she blinked them free.

No, it was more as if she had been asleep and spying the chessman in the dust had roused her.

That morning, when she got up and fixed Jo's breakfast and opened the shop, she had not believed Narnia was real, and – when she came back to Jo from cleaning up the broken glass – she did.

And yet she'd not spent even the short stride to the backroom in any kind of active philosophical contemplation, had not spared any thought whatever to the existence or nonexistence of other worlds...

Jo did not grudge her the prerogative of a belief which could turn itself on and off like a switch from some deep place inside. How could she? When she had after all her waiting finally, finally gotten back her long-lost sister? The sister who was friend to her as well as to Narnia. For Susan was – as they continued to reminisce together – what she had been before their last trip to Narnia; before she began to close herself off and started to go wrong, before America, before they gave up on each other and she became chummy with that snobby Anne Featherstone, before she let her bitterness and disappointment overtake her.

If Susan had wounded her, particularly where Nicholas was involved, Jo forgave and forgot with her whole heart as she gazed at the beaming face of her sister crouching by her wheelchair, going on about the time Lucy had wandered into an overgrown thicket nearby the Lantern Waste and got burrs in her hair.

By the time they got her out of this thicket again, Royce had twisted his ankle and, subsequently, they'd all been late to take their tea with Mr. Tumnus that afternoon.

Jo turned the chessman over in her hand and asked whether Susan recalled the time Tumnus had tried to bake a new spice cake, some recipe he'd gotten from the beavers, and it had come out black as cinders.

"Oh, yes!" laughed Susan merrily, pausing to catch her breath. She put a hand to her heart. "And there were wood splinters in it! I don't think poor Mr. Tumnus or Mrs. Beaver realised wood-shavings are not an applesauce substitute for humans."

"Ed actually tried to eat it after you said it was good to spare Tumnus's feelings!" hooted Jo, smacking the left arm-rest of her wheelchair, giddy with mirth. "He didn't see you'd spit out it into your hanky first!"

"Edmund will eat – I mean would..." Susan's bright smile dimmed some. "Would eat anything as long as it wasn't covered in confectionery sugar." Then, in a small voice, "Jo, do you think there's only one heaven?"

"Whatddya mean?"

"I mean, do you think, they're all – our siblings and Cousin Eustace and Miss Plummer and the professor and Nicholas – in the same heaven as Caspian?" This was the first and last time Susan – even after becoming herself again so suddenly – would ever mention him. "It would be too awful if they were someplace else and never got to see one another, don't you think?"

"I dunno," Jo admitted. "But I don't see why not. That's the point of Heaven, isn't it? Being with all your old friends again?"

"B-but – here, in our world – priests don't speak of any animals going to Heaven. And Lilygloves and the beavers had as good a right to heavenly peace as any people we knew in Narnia." Susan seemed perturbed by this; her bottom lip stuck out, giving her an almost childish, sulky appearance.

"Look, I don't think Heaven is segregated, okay? Really."

It made Susan's heart lighter to think so – to believe her sister had the right of it.

There was a change in the sisters – both of them – and Ash noticed it when he came into the shop a few days after Jo's accident with the wheelchair and Susan's recovery of the chess knight.

He was meant to pick up a clock – a gaudy wall-clock framed with wooden cherubim and rimmed in plated gold – he could not really afford, for a grandmother he did not really have.

It seemed a gentler way of making a loan, as well as a way of being certain they did not think they should ever pay him the money back, though he was sure Susan – grateful as she was – saw straight to the truth; she was like that.

She did. And she was.

In truth, Susan rather lamented she had not been friends with Ash long ago herself. She'd seen only his outer appearance – he was not beautiful, and he had seemed a dreadful flirt. The latter trait would not have been so harshly judged if he had been a good-looking boy.

But Jo hadn't seen him as pathetic, borderline sleazy, but as lonely. She'd seen him with a friend's eye. And that friendship had not failed either of them yet.

Anyway, Ash noticed Susan – as she wrapped the clock in swaths of tissue-paper and hummed – was merrier, and Jo – when she wheeled herself, with some difficulty, for her 'bump' against the curio cabinet had certainly not helped her condition, leaving her looking weak and rather bruised – onto the shop floor to say hello – radiated an almost preternatural happiness in response to her sister's evident joy.

He asked – as Susan carefully placed the wrapped clock into a brown paper bag with glued-on wicker handles and passed it to him over the counter – what was going on with them.

If anything, he had expected sorrow here. He'd heard about Jo's accident, and imagined they'd be tense and perhaps more in need of his generosity than before. Instead, they seemed so glad, they might have been rich in their sisterly glee; no one who looked as they did could be in sorry straits.

But the girls only side-eyed one another and giggled like small children.

"Girl talk," Jo said apologetically to Ash's bemused look.

"It's nothing, honestly," said Susan, glowing. "We've just been reminiscing between ourselves, you know."

He did not know, yet he smiled as if he did, the Pevensie sisters' happiness leaving him with a lighter heart and a skip to his step as he exited the shop.

Susan and Jo had nearly two whole splendid years consisting almost entirely of 'do you remembers?'

It was as if a window in their world had been opened into the old treasure chamber in Narnia; they held their past in their minds the way they had held things in their hands in the light of Edmund's torch during their second and last trip to Narnia.

But, in this case, there was no need to save the battery, so they might go on and on; they might rehash old jokes and labour over their little treasures, so vivid in their minds, until midnight and later, when they finally – always reluctantly – left one another to go to sleep. Susan upstairs, and Jo on her sofa-bed below. Still, more than once in the night, pragmatic Susan, knowing she was making herself tired unnecessarily, would nonetheless tiptoe back downstairs and begin all over again, because just one thing had come into her mind, and she couldn't wait until the morning to ask whether Jo remembered it also.

Some of their days were marred with sadness; Jo still had her mood swings and some damaged part of Susan felt she should cry over Narnia rather than rejoice in its memory. After all, these were the memories of their dead siblings and friends, too.

But these bad days were increasingly infrequent and their happiness usually overcame them.

Jo never took up drawing or playing the piano – though Susan did everything she could think of to encourage her – again, even when she got enough strength back in her right hand to hold a spoon correctly and the nurse stopped coming, but she began to find some new interests. She threw darts with her left hand; she pecked with the fingers of that same hand at the keys of a typewriter someone brought into the shop and invented silly stories to make Susan laugh. She'd leave the drafts where she knew her sister would find them. Shakespeare she was not, Edith Nesbit she was probably not, Hemingway she was definitely not, but naturally good-humoured and capable of telling a funny tale well enough she certainly was.

They could have picnics in the park now without Jo looking enviously at the children setting up the wickets for game of cricket.

The sisters' daily lives were small and revolved almost entirely around one another (Aunt Alberta thought too much so, only Susan told her to mind her own business and whether by her own inclination or else Uncle Harold finally growing a spine after the death of his son and putting his foot down, she did), but they were full lives all the same, no less important than anybody else's.

During this season of joy, Susan found no cause for unhappiness in this springtime of the mind. She had her sister, who had become her other half – like her own twin, her own mirror image, herself but different ….opposite... herself in reverse, tomboyish where she was girly and messy where she was neat – especially in the absence of anyone else to love.

Since they had lost the others, she had – too late, some would say – lost her former social ambitions to be very grown up and very important and very much around the right sort of persons.

It wasn't as if, even when she was grateful to him, she could love Uncle Harold. She couldn't make herself love Ashley Sion either, though she liked and respected him more than she'd ever dreamed she might.

It was only Jo she loved.

For Jo's part it was slightly more complicated. The only living person she loved was probably indeed Susan. But – perhaps because of Nicholas's influence – she had, in adulthood at least, always been more philosophical than her sister.

An invalid also learns to live in their own head more than unhampered, healthy people do.

When Susan left her alone for the night, until ever she crept back down again, Jo had a thousand conversations in her mind with the dead. And they visited her in dreams, supplying their own side of these imaginary talks, while Susan's dreams were darker, briefer, largely unpeopled (by the dead or the living) and less often remembered come the morning.

This blank dreaming likely had a great deal to do with Susan being tired from running the shop and looking after her sister; she did a great deal on a daily basis.

But this strong love sprung up between the sisters after the curio cabinet incident was unselfish.

Susan knew Jo's return affection was not as exclusive that she gave her, and did not – at any rate – require it should be. There was no need, either, to point it out.

Sometimes, it was even the source of a bittersweet smile.

On one occasion, Susan was closing up the shop, flipping the sign over and dusting the counter with furniture polish and locking away little baubles which had been brought down for closer inspection earlier in the day, while Jo dozed – having a bit of a nap – on her backroom sofa.

Susan's work done, she peeked in to find Jo had on a very strange expression in her sleep. A very pleased one. She murmured Nicholas's name and rolled over, her satisfied look unchanged. Susan coyly asked her about it when she woke later, saying she'd seemed very happy indeed, and Jo – blushing – said she'd dreamed she had feeling in – and the use of – her legs again. She didn't elaborate, and Susan didn't tease her though there was a twinkle in her blue eyes that suggested part of her wanted to, just a little bit.

"Oh, let her have her dreams," murmured Susan to herself, brushing out her long black hair upstairs in the bare flat that night and glancing out the window to the street below. "It's better if one of us still remembers how it feels to care for other people, to have other sorts of pleasure."

It was better if one of them still remembered what it felt like back when the world was bigger than only themselves.

The second year living at the antique shop produced the greyest, dullest winter in Susan's memory. Unless there had been grey skies and temperatures too cold for the relief of snowfall when she was a literal infant and Helen had sat by her cradle with a scarlet-faced Jo in her lap fussy with croup, and this was only a guess, then not once in Susan's nearly twenty-three years of life had there been a winter as banal as this.

It was still bright and warm in their hearts, and if they had been in good spirits on the particular day Susan happened to be looking out at the grey sky, then it wouldn't have mattered so much.

Only Jo was in a mood – she had a cold headache, and her nose was cherry-red (this was, perhaps, what made Susan speculate about the babyhood croup, though she supposed it was more likely to have been something less interesting, like an ear infection).

"Phooey!" Susan sighed in lament. "I'd take blistering heat or a blizzard willingly just now, wouldn't you? This endless grey light is like...nothing..."

Jo just shrugged and said she was going to sleep for a while.

"All right." Susan was disappointed. She'd been hoping for the distraction of a good jaw about Narnia. It was more pleasant than ever to recall dewy slopes and warm summer days by the sea at Cair Paravel when the weather was so bland and ugly, when life – such as it was – outside the shop might as well have been lost in the fog.

With the way the eerily still yet biting wind was barely driving the leaves from one side of the pavement to the other, she would have been glad to hear stray cats making love on the roof, even.

It would mean something was alive out there.

But, of course, she wouldn't have bothered wasting her thoughts on hypothetical promiscuous cats if she'd only known.

That was, if she'd known Jo wouldn't be waking up and joining her for breakfast come the following morning.

When Susan went to wake Jo, she found her hot to the touch and unresponsive. She moaned without opening her eyes and seemed wholly unaware of her sister's anxious exclamations over her. Her cold had got into her chest and – unbeknown to Susan, who'd patiently let her sleep in two hours later than was typical for her, thinking she must be tired – turned to pneumonia. The nurse who used to come had said, once, that in her condition – being wheelchair-bound as she was – Jo might be more susceptible to upper-respiratory problems than a healthy, active person, but Susan hadn't truly imagined such a minor cold as her sister had had last night could...

Well, the important thing was not to fret over what might have been done earlier, but to get her to hospital now, and she did so as quickly as she was able.

At first, Susan was hopeful.

She didn't believe she was in any actual danger of losing Jo. It was absurd to think someone who'd survived being crushed under a luggage rack and the grief from the death of the five persons in the world she loved best would, or even could, be defeated by a rising fever and hacking cough.

She tried not to think about how hot Jo's skin was, or how – when the doctors got her temperature down and brought her back to a kind of semi-consciousness – they still shook their heads and polished their spectacles and hesitated to give any kind of positive reassurance she was recovering.

Jo stayed overnight and the nurse on duty was kind enough not to make Susan take a black cab back to the shop, giving her a chair and pillow so she could remain at her sister's bedside.

When she took her hand, Jo squeezed her fingers but otherwise showed little sign of life beyond her rasping wheezes and slowly rising and falling chest.

The next morning, her breathing was even more laboured and the doctors told Susan the pneumonia was complicated by a secondary infection they weren't sure they could do much for.

"Jo," she whispered, when the doctor left and they were alone together in the room again. "Can you hear me? Jo, come on, you've got to fight. This is nothing. I need you to fight. Come on."

Jo moaned and struggled for yet another raspy breath.

Susan's own chest constricted. It struck her then. Maybe it wasn't fair to brazenly dismiss what was clearly an ordeal – the last in a long string of many – for Jo as 'nothing'. She had been suffering a long, long time. Two years in a wheelchair with little hope of ever walking again. An accident which took away all the people she'd been close to, including her husband. And she had lost Narnia, too; she had not gotten to go back after their second adventure, either. Now she was so ill she could barely breathe. Susan wanted her to survive, but she wasn't sure if it was kind to demand such an outcome.

She needed her, true, but she'd had her for two years. Perhaps that was all Jo had left to give her, all the miracle she could reasonably ask for.

It might be time to stand on her own two feet, to use everything which had been taught her by the people and places she loved, even if they weren't around anymore.

It was one thing to act like a Narnian when you lived in Narnia – when you were a queen of Narnia – but another, far nobler action to manage to act like one when you weren't going back, when there was – to the world at large – no Narnia.

Lucy had managed it with grace, right to the end; she had not.

She might have walked out of Narnia calm on the outside, through the door and to the station like the others, but inside she'd been kicking and screaming like a child, lamenting its unfairness. Susan realised she'd never mourned Narnia, nor all that went with it, because she'd never really let it go. Denying is not the same as releasing. Having something pried from your fingers and sulking in a corner about it is not the same as relinquishing it willingly.

That was why she'd never searched for Aslan in this world – she was still angry with him for denying her the other.

Susan couldn't change the past; she couldn't make herself behave differently and give up Narnia with the grace befitting a queen.

But she could let Jo go now, if she felt she needed to leave.

"Jo, sweetheart?"

A low moan told her she'd heard.

She took her sister's hand again. "I want you to fight and stay, more than anything – you know I do – but I also understand if it's too much. If coming back to this..." Her voice broke, a few tears escaping her eyes and running down her white cheeks. "I've had you for two years, and I'll take as many more as you've got left to give, gladly, but if you want to go to the others now, I'll understand. It's all right. I'll be all right. I promise."

With great effort, Jo turned her head on the pillow and opened her eyes a slit, looking briefly – gratefully – at Susan.

As they began to close again, she understood. "Give them my love," she choked, the tears flowing free now, "when you get there, dear – wherever it is you're going." The base of her thumb stroked circles on the back of Jo's clammy left hand. "Tell them I'll follow, when I'm meant to – if I can."

Jo squeezed the hand that stroked hers, more tightly than before, then slowly let her grasp slacken.

Susan squeezed the loose, tan fingers one last time, just to be sure, but she knew.

She knew Jo'd gone.

Jo found herself in strange surroundings – she was standing in grassy country, no wheelchair needed, underneath a blue sky, and she was wearing an elegant dress, one indescribably soft and comfortable and without any of the restraints of fashionable dresses in the world she'd just left – in absolutely no pain.

Apart from the grass and sky, and some very nice fruit trees that gave off a scent like all her ideas of Heaven and made her mouth water, there appeared to be only a strange door attached to nothing else, no wall or building.

It could be walked around easily, and she did so – with springy glee at being able to use her legs after two years' inactivity – several times.

At some point, she got the brilliant idea to put her eye to a chink in the door, feeling a strange, colder air coming through the wooden slates (they were spacious, like on the door of a barn or a stable, not like the front door of a house), and pulled her eye away with an icicle formed on her lashes. She broke it off, shuddering as she blinked and watched it melt in the warm air until it was just a harmless droplet rolling down her index finger.

What she'd seen – though it cannot be said whether she understood it, knew it for a dead Narnia – was terrible and sad.

Next, she tried to find someone in her immediate vicinity to explain the marvel of the stable door, and she asked a small gaggle of dwarfs who she'd thought – despite their unfriendly, morbid expressions and blackened eyes – were feasting, since they had scattered goblets and other things about them, only they were not very pleasant to her.

That was when she saw a man with his back to her. He was as wonderfully dressed as herself and had a regal bearing and a golden crown on his head. She was uncharacteristically shy of him. He was clearly very handsome, even from behind, and she didn't believe she could bear it if this lovely king was going to be as rude to her as the dwarfs had been.

Jo began to smooth the front of her dress although it was already perfectly in place and unwrinkled before clearing her throat to get this king's attention, when he turned suddenly and she saw his face and recognised him.

"Nicholas!" she cried, and rushed into his arms, which were open for her in an instant. "You waited for me," she gasped into his shoulder. "I thought – I hoped – you would!"

She had rather the advantage over him. He did not know how long he had been there, for time was not as it was in England, and he'd barely registered anything about the railway accident apart from a dim memory of a train coming too fast and worrying about Jo's safety being on it.

He did not know – since he had not gone with the rest – he was dead.

He'd only known he did not like to go on without her. Perhaps some part of him suspected the truth, however – because somehow it never struck him as possible he'd be sent back to her at the end of the adventures if he went with the others.

The only thing he knew that she did not was about the death of Narnia.

He looked at her as they broke apart. "Your hair is long!" She had curls down past her shoulders.

Jo laughed. "This is how it was before I cut it at Professor Kirke's house, just before my first time in Narnia when we met." Susan had been so distraught over her chopping off those curls! "You look different, too. Healthier."

"Yes." Taking her hand – her right hand, with its strength fully restored – he threaded his fingers through hers. He bent forward and kissed her. "Come," he murmured; "let's go catch up with the others."

"But where've they gone? Where are we going?" Jo's voice rose, a little reedy.

"Somewhere new," Nicholas guessed, for that was as far as his understanding could – at present – take him. "You will come with me, won't you?"

"Yes," she said, gazing into his face and nodding.

Susan Pevensie's last living sibling – the one who'd survived the crash that took the others – died on a Friday in late 1951. The sky that had been so dreadfully grey earlier turned a more reassuring blue when Susan looked out the hospital room's window after Jo'd gone.

The world seemed wider now, no longer shrouded in fog, though she'd take her time inching out into it. She didn't intend to lose herself again, and she needed time to grieve.

She was sad – and rather lonely, as she suspected she would be for a while yet – but she wasn't angry, wasn't bitter.

Some people are never queens in other worlds, are never given the chance to learn the lessons which will define their character forever after; some people never have any sisters or brothers or cousins or mentors or mothers or fathers, or anyone else, to love.

Susan was simply glad she was not one of them.