Summary: She had the heart and character of a queen. How far would Aslan go to bring her back, to remake the one He loved into a queen again?
“The anguish of a heart deceived and desolate”
~Lucy Maud Montgomery, “Each in His Own Tongue”
“If death is not a daily reality then Christ’s triumph over death is neither daily nor real. Worship and proclamation and even faith itself take on a dream-like, unreal air, and Jesus is reduced to something like a long-term insurance policy, filed and forgotten—whereas he can be our necessary ally, an immediate, continuing friend, the holy destroyer of death and the devil, my own beautiful savior.”
~Walter Wangerin, Mourning into Dancing (p. 29-30)
They partied like they were immortal, like death couldn’t touch them. It was something that happened before their time, in the War to end all wars; it scarred their fathers and their mothers and left their grandmothers weeping, but it wouldn’t touch them, with their heels and nylons and lipstick, with their smiles and jokes at death and life. Life was theirs, and death couldn’t touch them.
Until it did. Sara wore black for a while, and she didn’t smile at death anymore. She dropped out from their set eventually, at odds with the way the rest embraced life and laughed at death. But that was Sara; Susan had lived for almost forty years and was still a young girl (no, she wasn’t that old, the other years hadn’t happened. It was all a game. That’s all it was. It wasn’t another life). Susan was the queen of this set, its most stunning beauty and its ruler. Susan was untouchable by death.
Till a train accident happened. (A train accident. They’d fought wars, giants, fled the heart of Calormen with a mere shipload of soldiers, and a single accident had taken them. All of them.
No, wait, none of that had happened. Except for the accident. But it couldn’t be real, either.) Till a call from Aunt Alberta—crying. Aunt Alberta never cried. But Aunt Alberta had never lost a son, either. Suddenly Susan was crying too, bent over, the phone on the floor.
A train accident, her aunt had stammered through choking sobs. Helen, your father, Eustace. Eustace was with them. They’re gone, all of them! Nearly a hundred dead, all of them.
James had bent over her, calling for Mary, the most level-headed of their set. The way Mary had asked what was wrong—Susan couldn’t forget it. The gentle touch to her shoulder, kneeling so her perfectly made-up eyes were level with Susan’s, and the tone that promised to deal with it, because their set could overcome the world.
But not the next one.
When Susan had told her, trying (so hard) to be clear, Mary’s fingers had withdrawn from her shoulder, a reflexive drawing away. Because death didn’t touch them, it didn’t matter; it was a joke.
(Sara had never laughed at it again. And this, this was why. Death wasn’t funny when it stole your breath and shattered your heart, when it took.)
Days later, Susan couldn’t care less that Mary had drawn back. But that promise, the promise in her tone, in her question, to have that promise cheated hurt.
But Mary had still gone with her to the morgue, she and their friend Ellen, and Clive had driven them, Clive who had just said, “I’m sorry,” and it didn’t hurt the way the others’ sympathy had, and Susan remembered death had taken his wife, Joy, with cancer.
Susan had gone in alone. (Alone. Words shouldn’t hurt this much.) She’d told the examiner at the desk who she had come for, and he’d been so briskly efficient. He’d had the mercy not to make small talk.
Her parents’ carriage car had burned, and only their personal effects survived—their rings, Dad’s metal leg from the war, the clasps to her mother’s purse—but that was enough. The clasps shut together gently, the same gentleness that always radiated from their mother—had. Had always radiated. God, why was it “had”?
Peter and Edmund—their faces were unmarred. Peter’s face was resolute, strong—so utterly unafraid. (She remembered when they’d stood on a mountain, watching giants stalk forward, shaking the earth with their feet and shaking clubs in their hands, and he had worn that same look. But—the giants only threatened death, they never dealt it out. A train could do what giants couldn’t…she was mixing England and Narnia now, but he still looked like a king…)
“Peter,” she called, touching his forehead. She expected him to answer, till she touched him; he felt stiffer than a wooden puppet. She jerked her hand away, clenching her fingers; this was real. He was dead.
She heard someone clear his throat, and she looked up. (Her hand was still clenched. This couldn’t, couldn’t be real. Narnia was more real than this.) The examiner was looking at her, patience plastered on his face and body language. He was waiting? Oh, she was there to identify them. Identify the bodies of her family, because her family wasn’t alive any longer.
“My brother,” she said. Her voice was shaking. Her older brother. She turned—she didn’t want to see if her fingers had left marks—to look at her younger brother.
Edmund’s dark hair was laying over his forehead, but she didn’t brush it away. She couldn’t touch him, couldn’t know like she knew with Peter that he was dead, because dead meant gone. And if he could never answer her again, never look at her with his eyes and face and mind listening with the gravity of a judge and the wisdom of a king, then she didn’t want to know it, didn’t want to know that death was real.
“Also your brother?” Brisk, kind, clinical voice, the white coat visible from the corner of her eye.
“Yes.” Yes, from the time he’d been born, to the horrid days at school, through ruling a kingdom—through changing from a witch’s puppet to Aslan’s own, through seeing redemption made real. Her brother. Death had taken her brother.
“This is the last.” The white coat vanished till she turned towards it; the examiner was already at the next cold table, one that didn’t have a sheet over the body. (Almost a hundred dead; perhaps they had run out.) It was Lucy.
It shouldn’t be. Lucy was living; Lucy was laughter and joy (“She’s so incredibly odd, Susan. Is she really your sister?”). Lucy was young. Lucy couldn’t be dead.
Even though Lucy never laughed at death. Lucy fought it, a diamond bottle in her fingers, love in her voice and hands that went to the wounded. She’d fought it in England, too, visiting soldiers who lost everything and sharing her laughter with them till they felt like living again.
Lucy should be laughing. This silence was wrong when she was here, the silence of death. The silence that couldn’t be broken but couldn’t be quiet, because memories haunted life when life itself was gone.
But it shouldn’t have mattered, because Susan could see Lucy, and Lucy wasn’t moving.
Lucy’s arm bent at an odd angle, and her bloody fingers lay on the table; her face was whiter than Jadis’s had been.
But she was smiling. Not her laughing, living smile, but still a smile of wonder. The smile that only lit her face when she’d seen Aslan.
Susan broke, hand over her mouth, eyes closing to shut it out, shut out her brothers and sister lying on the tables, but the silence wouldn’t go away, it drowned out the words the examiner said as he took her arm and led her back to her friends. And Clive stopped the others from speaking till they dropped her off at her flat.
“Call us,” he’d told her, tone serious. “Even if it’s just to say ‘I called,’ call us at least once a day. Every morning.”
She’d nodded and shut the door, and then wished and wished they’d stayed, because she couldn’t keep the images from playing over and over again.
Peter’s wooden stance, resolute face, Edmund’s closed eyes that couldn’t see her, and Lucy’s—Lucy’s smile.
Susan had to wonder, had Lucy seen Him? Was there a lion in the middle of the train wreck, golden light falling on twisted metal and blood, stooping to touch his dear one with his nose as she breathed her last?
If he was there, then why hadn’t He stopped it?
OOOOO
In her room a Lion watched her with golden eyes.
There is no other way to make you a queen for your beauty of heart as well as your beauty of body, my child. His tears dropped to the floor as hers did. They are with me now, and I with them.
But the Lion grieved with the one who was left behind.
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