“Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?”
~Sylvia Plath
Susan waited a week before going into Edmund’s room. A week, to try to bear the weight of giving others hope by the beauty on her face, born from her heart. A week, because the weight was too heavy to try to bear more.
Peter’s room had been hard. Edmund’s—she hadn’t entered it since he started college, uninterested in the books and papers she knew would litter the room. She stood in the doorway and looked around. He’d changed it. And it hurt that she hadn’t been there for those changes. Edmund had always—and now would never—read his deepest and best discoveries to his siblings. There was a depth to him most people half-feared, a depth of thought and gravity and justice. But Edmund had a gentleness her friends had never expected from the grave, wise youth, gentle with the broken. And he of the four had been the most gentle with Susan. The most to give her what her namesake once had been.
Perhaps it was because he’d also betrayed, a part of her whispered. He’d heard and heeded the call of something other than a Lion’s voice. And he knew the brokenness that came with listening to the whisper and learning to be deaf, deaf to the roar, the deep, low voice of Aslan.
Susan shuddered, as Edmund once had at Aslan’s name. Her memories of Aslan she still avoided; that loss was one she could not now relive. She stepped quickly into Edmund’s room and shut the door, cutting off the hardest memories.
It was, as ever, drowning in paper and books. But not stacks of paper; Edmund had taken to pasting paper on the wall. The ones around his bed and desk were in neat, painstaking lines; the ones above the bookshelves and by the closest door were slightly crooked, as if done in a hurry.
Dear Edmund. It was a momentary reaction, but the thought hurt; she hadn’t said that to him in years; not in that tone. And he loved her and would have noticed.
She knew he loved words, and everywhere he kept what they said in front of him. She walked to his bed and reached to touch the one he’d kept close by while sleeping; it had two quotes on it.
“Measure your life by loss and not by gain,
Not by the wine drunk but by the wine poured forth.
For love’s strength is found in love’s sacrifice,
And he who suffers most has most to give.”
~Streams in the Desert, entry on October 11th
“Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering on the sacrificial altar of your faith,
I am glad and rejoice with you all. Paul”
Right below them was a Bible; Susan had heard her father quote that verse from Paul before, mainly before going to a war where he’d lost his leg. I am glad, he’d emphasized; why did Edmund have to remind her of that? Why, she thought, turning to Aslan, did the strong have to be sacrificed, why did God’s children have to give up what they wanted? There had been nothing wrong with her life; nothing wrong with dances and parties and friends; if there had, her parents would have never let her live it!
They didn’t know you were forsworn, that little voice said. That you had sworn to follow a Lion—how they would have worried at that—and that everything you loved you took because He wouldn’t give you what you wanted most.
Oh, how persistent that voice was getting. She looked around the traitor’s room; had he heard a small voice when he betrayed his family? If he had, maybe he’d deliberately made it louder later, by writing down all the things he would live by, and their cost, to drown out the other voice that whispered.
And it had made Edmund gentle, Susan thought, tears filling her eyes, not quite spilling over. Edmund had always been a king. She blinked the water back.
Beneath the two quotes, Lucy’s calligraphy was by a small piece of parchment.
“Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen.”
On the same paper he’d written with his bold, printed letters,
“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, God’s special possession,
that you may declare the praises of him
who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Peter.”
He’d underlined royal. She touched it, touching the ink long dried, wondering what it meant to him. Had he—possibly—found what Aslan promised, found Him in this world? Edmund had always been the one to see connections between truths and the way they interwove; had he found the truth of Aslan here in England?
Was she ready to find it herself? She closed her eyes, brushing away the tears. She wasn’t sure she was. Not only had she betrayed him, seeking a life without Him, but she wasn’t ready to give her life back to Him again.
Because she wasn’t sure she had a life to give.
She wasn’t sure she could take the breaking that would happen if she saw His face, the breaking inside her, because she remembered His beauty and majesty broke her.
She got up and left the king’s room for the queen’s.
For Lucy’s.
For the little sister who had loved life, loved Aslan, loved her family, and who had tried unsuccessfully to hide her hurt every time Susan left. Her last memories of Lucy was Lucy struggling to smile, to give Susan joy when Susan gave pain.
Until that last wonder-born smile on a white, white face—
Susan stopped, her hand on the knob. She couldn’t do this. Not her last sibling, not the youngest, not the one whose name meant light. She couldn’t lose them all. She couldn’t walk in there and make it final that Lucy wouldn’t be back there, like Edmund would never touch those papers again, like Peter wouldn’t rest on his bed under Aslan’s eyes again. She slowly collapsed against the door, sitting against it, her arms wrapped around herself. She couldn’t go in.
She sat there through the night, cold, chilled, and crying. Each hour the clock in the hall startled her, waking her back to the darkness and loss she knew she’d chosen. And outside her sister’s room she mourned, with her heart and her mind, the life she’d lived that ended in death.
When dawn came she was watching for it, begging for it, wanting nothing else but her night to be over. And it came, hours and hours after she asked for it, and at first it was cold. The light was grey, as it always is before the sun came up, and she got to her feet stiffly, her body aching. She went to the kitchen, hesitating at the cabinet; she knew each cup inside. Impulsively she reached for Lucy’s, needing any reminder of light right then. She made tea, walked to the window, drew up the shade, and watched the sunrise.
Watched as the world became golden, while the kitchen remained dark. When the sun came all the way up and she could no longer watch it, she turned away. She left the shade up, set her cup in the sink, and went back to Lucy’s room.
She had to do this. She could do nothing else while this hung over her heart. She wished she’d brought more tea; maybe it would have helped, she thought as she opened the door. She could have pretended she was finally coming to Lucy’s room for tea, as she had so often asked.
Oh, Lucy. Even on the threshold, Susan started crying.
Lucy’s room was Aslan.
Everywhere. Illuminated with golden light (Lucy loved open windows and her room faced the dawn), there were paintings Lucy had made of Him, hung everywhere; dictations of the High King in Peter’s script that praised the Lion were placed in places of honor; and songs of Narnia in Edmund’s print were framed and hung beside the Lions.
And all the things Susan had placed in the back of her closet, things she’d intended to throw out—one day—had been rescued and brought here. A painting of a dryad they’d found that looked Narnian. Lucy had added a lion beside the dancing form, watching over it. A shawl with a Narnian design covered the wall like a tapestry, the backdrop for Lucy’s favorite painting. Susan had always been good at finding Narnian things, even in England. She had forgotten. She brushed her fingers on the shawl; it was still soft as the swallow Ekrin’s feathers. Lucy had loved it when Susan had found it; she was radiant with joy. She’d thanked Susan and told her what a gift Aslan had sent them!
The shawl blurred as Susan cried harder. Lucy, who had seen every event in life as Aslan’s gift; had she even seen coming back to England that way, eventually?
For there were Christian crosses beside the Lions, Edmund’s print had Bible words as well as songs, and Peter had a proclamation that dedicated his life to The Christ. England and Narnia mixed in Lucy’s room, new since Susan left, and Susan wept for all that she missed; that she missed Lucy’s coming home. For if Edmund was the scholar, Lucy knew Aslan by heart. And Susan could no longer doubt He found His Dear One, whatever world He sent her too.
But she crumbled, stumbling against the wall, knocking papers over, weeping with loss. Because she saw Him everywhere now, and in the face of Lucy’s love, the love that saw so clearly, Susan could not deny what she’d betrayed.
The one who loved her. Even when He sent her away, she could not have said He didn’t love her.
Only later, when the years had seemed so hard, and Narnia completely gone, had she said His love was not enough.
She had loved Him too. She had wept during another long, dark vigil, wept with Lucy by her side, tears cold on her cheeks through the long night near a table made of stone, at the thought He was slain, gone, that His golden light would never touch her heart or light Lucy’s face again. That her brothers were alone. That He’d left them.
And dawn had flooded her world with light, and His return had made it golden, and they had played, played a game of tag, because the world had joy and life and beauty again.
And Lucy’s room brought His love flooding back, the eyes that saw souls, the forgiveness when she’d listened to fears in Caspian’s reign, the way He had always listened during the Golden Age, the way He had never turned away when she was weak. The way He was there, every single time, even when He didn’t answer with His own, golden voice.
A resurrection. Oh, Aslan, she needed a resurrection. She needed the life that only came when she saw Him.
One of Edmund’s scripts lay before her knees as it had fallen with her; she blinked blurry eyes to pick it up away from the water falling on it.
“I am the resurrection and the life. John”
Oh, Aslan…
Come find me now.
Stumbling, she went back to the living room, back to the Bible her father read from, and took it to Lucy’s room. And in the light of the dawn, she finally sought the Lion, as He willed to be sought, in her world. And she found Him, again and again, in the cross where He died for traitors, in the promise that He was forgiveness, in the words that said he pierced soul and spirit, and in the promise that He was the life, and that life was the light of man.
She found Him, and she loved Him, and the Lion who was also a Lamb, and also a Man, laughed and cried with her that night.
His love is victorious. Over death, over pain. Over us. We are His, and He has claimed us, and there is no escape from that patient, enduring love. He will make us live again.