Maybe my dream of Oxford, the planning, the career building, the Rhodes, everything that went into getting me there was really about: just getting there. Maybe the City of Dreaming Spires—the foundational lifeblood of education in the Western world—wasn’t itself the dream, but the entry point to something I could have never imagined, never seen until now.
Love. Family. Connection.
A life.
And the freedom to decide, on my own terms, what I want to do, what I’m going to do with my calling.
For the first time in a decade, I don’t have an immediate plan.
Well. Except for one.
I go back into the hospital, stopping by the commissary to buy a round of coffee for my fellows in purgatory. Reentering the waiting room, I see Cecelia and Antonia sitting side by side, talking. William’s next to his wife, nominally reading, but mostly just teeming with ineffectual worry.
I hand out coffee and then plop down across from all of them. “William,” I say. He looks up from his magazine. “We have some business to discuss.” He nods once, as Cecelia and Antonia look at me warily. “When Jamie comes out of this, when he feels better, I don’t care if it’s in the middle of term, I’m taking him traveling. We’re going to travel until we feel like stopping. You’re not going to make him feel bad about this. In return, I promise that I won’t let him be reckless.”
Antonia perks up, her face radiant with hope. “Dear girl! Are you staying?”
“Sorry, yeah. I’m staying.” Should have led with that.
Antonia gasps, leaps out of her chair, and throws her arms around me. Over her shoulder I continue to stare at William, waiting for a response. Finally, after an eternity, he says, “Your terms are acceptable,” and goes back to his magazine.
“Really?” I can’t keep the surprise out of my voice as I pull away from Antonia. “Because I mean it. We’re going to go and keep going. Jamie’s shown that he cares about his health and we’ll do whatever needs to be done, but—”
“First rule of business,” William murmurs, flipping a page. “When they say yes, stop talking.”
The barest hint of a smile crosses his face, but before I can return it, Dr. Corrigan walks into the room and we all flock to her like imprinted ducklings.
I can’t read her expression.
I have a horrible, sinking, high-seas feeling in my stomach. What if he’s gone? What if I made all these life plans for us and there’s no more us?
Honestly? I wouldn’t change a thing. I look around and realize that there is so much more us than I ever realized.
A peace settles over me, causing me to meet the doctor’s gaze with strength.
Luckily, she smiles. “It’s time to wake Jamie up.”
IT TAKES A few hours to bring him out of the anesthesia. So while Jamie is being un-anesthetized, we four do our best to get completely anesthetized with my half-consumed bottle of birthday Scotch from Charlie, which we happily drink out of Dixie Cups in the hospital lobby.
When we’re finally allowed to enter Jamie’s room, I take the lead, coming around the corner and finding myself halted by the beautiful sight before me. Jamie’s sitting up, the head of the bed elevated. He looks absolutely wrecked. “Rode hard and put away wet,” as my father would have said. But when he sees me, I’m rewarded with a big, loving, living smile. He reaches his hand out. It’s only a few inches off the bed, but it’s enough. More than enough.
I cautiously walk down the aisle, approaching his bedside.
Seeing his eyes open, alert, blue, twinkling, and wanting weakens me. My chest blows open and a gust of love rushes through it.
I thought the hardest thing I’d have to do was leave him in June.
But the hardest thing is staying. The hardest thing is living with dying. Loving with dying. The hardest thing is love, with no expiration date, no qualifiers, no safety net. Love that demands acceptance of all the things I cannot change. Love that doesn’t follow a plan.
I take his hand gently and kiss it. He tries to speak, but his voice is raw from intubation and sleep. Nothing comes out but a small, endearing squeak. I resist the urge to jump on him. Probably not medically sound. So I whisper, “I love you.”
I watch him smile. Then, by sheer force of will, he slowly pulls me close to him, bringing my ear to his mouth. He takes a shaky breath, mustering all his strength, and I close my eyes, ready to hear those words repeated back to me.
Instead, he whispers, “It’s a good thing I don’t love you, Ella from Ohio.”
Epilogue
And, while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.
Charles (Tennyson) Turner, “Letty’s Globe,” 1860
I’ll always remember Jamie this way:
Standing in a raging waterfall. We’d hiked up a canyon not far from the Amalfi coast. After a bracing dip in jewel-toned pools, I went to warm myself on the sun-drenched rocks. Jamie refused to get out. He dove in and out of the water like a dolphin, at one point even making the sound to accompany it. He was a boy again. Exploring, playing, having the time of his life. He was healthier, not nearly as thin as he was right after the pneumonia (hard to be when you’re living on pasta, wine, and gelato). I watched him for what felt like an hour as he called out to me, “Watch this, Ella!” and then did some physical feat that would have been impossible months earlier.
The waterfall was a distance away, but that didn’t stop him. He climbed up on the rocky base and stood directly under the pounding water. He cried out in primal tones, so alive. He would not let the waterfall defeat him. If it pushed him down he would fight his way back up. At times he’d stand tall, as if he’d found a place of balance between himself and the rushing water. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. His face would go in and out of focus, now in front of the waterfall, now behind, slipping between the curtain, back and forth, back and forth between the vale, and every time my heart would stutter.
That day, that image, the waterfall as a curtain between life and the after, became my metaphor.
When Jamie woke up in that Glasgow hospital, life as he knew it had changed. He happily accepted the news that the trial might have bought him some time. But when I told him I had decided to stay?
He balked.
We fought.
He banished me from his room for a whole day. I overheard him telling Antonia that he felt guilty that I was giving up my dream for him, what if I regretted it, what if I grew to resent him for it, what if—until finally Antonia had drawled, “She’s clever, she’ll always be clever, she can do anything she wants with her life, so, impossible though it seems, have the grace to consider, gorgeous boy, that her decision might not have been entirely about you.”
That is why I love her.
Six weeks later, after journeying back to Oxford and physical therapy and countless tests and gallons of Smithy’s frozen broth, we seized our moment, our window of health, and slipped, like thieves in the night, out into the world. Into its cities and villages, its mountains and valleys, its waterfalls.
Today, as I sip my coffee, a kiss lands whisper-soft on my shoulder.
Oh, good.
Jamie’s awake.
His kisses continue up my neck and I offer my cup to him, never taking my eyes off the morning light on the rolling vineyards. He takes the coffee and sits next to me on the veranda. Absently twirling the ring around my finger, I calculate distances in my head. We have a full day of driving ahead of us. We’re aiming to be in Switzerland by nightfall. Of course, we’ll stop and do some tastings on the way. There’s also a house in Annecy where Tennyson once stayed, which Jamie wants to check out. Maybe we’ll grab lunch there. I’ve grown addicted to saucissons aux pommes and have to make sure I get at least one more helping before we leave the Rhône Valley.
Jamie tips his face up to the morning sun.
I came to Oxford looking for a Once-in-a-Lifetime Experience. I chose to experience a lifetime.
I know that one day he will lose to the waterfall, slip behind its turbulent curtain forever, lost to me like something out of a fairy tale. But in our story, there’s no villain, no witch, no fairy godmother, no moral imperative or cautionary conclusion. No happily-ever-after.
It just is. It’s life.
The water keeps flowing as we come and go.
We were never forever, Jamie and I. Nothing is in this life. But if you love someone, and are loved by someone, you might find forever after.
Whatever and wherever that is.
Afterword
To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited