The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [110]
Oxford, in summer, was not as Rose had expected. The City of Dreaming Spires, where she imagined students rushing to class clad in robes, professors discussing earnestly the teleology of Plato’s Republic, yards of ale, and serene campuses bedecked with gargoyles and stern English gardens, was busy and well-touristed and more modern than she had hoped. Through the film of jet lag, she found the motion exhausting, overwhelming, and it made her understand, for the first time, the wisdom in a quiet cup of tea or a mid-morning pint.
When she arrived, she threw herself into Jonathan’s arms, the stress of the flight, the absent months, her own heartbeat, collapsing in a pile of sticks when she saw him. Her body, confused by the lack of sleep, by the bright sun when there should be darkness (and where was the rain? wasn’t it supposed to always be raining in England?), moved on its own.
They took the train to Oxford, her eyes bouncing from Jonathan to the blur of pastoral land out the window. At home, she had watched the suburbs grow farther and farther from the city, the gap between their tiny tracts and the wide fields of Barney growing less and less, and something in her lurched and prayed at the green space she saw here, the stone houses left free from progress, the simplicity of a flock of sheep.
How like a winter hath my absence been from thee! Rose thought as she felt the warmth of his body beside hers, his warm, dry palm in her cold one. They arrived at his rooms, fell into bed, and rediscovered each other. After, she lay with her head on his chest, allowing herself to feel small, feminine, protected, the splay of her hand on his beating heart. She dozed, he woke her with gentle reminders of the dangers of sleeping through her first day, she dozed again.
They went to dinner embarrassingly early, Rose still dizzy from exhaustion and newness. Jonathan led her into a pub, its beamed ceilings so low she had to bend when she crossed from one room to another, the staircase to the second floor more like a crawl space than a passage. “The oldest pub in England!” Jonathan announced, or maybe it was the oldest pub in Oxford. It was not fair to test her comprehension at that moment. He ordered a couple of pints at the bar, and they climbed upstairs. They sat down across a table, battered and scarred, burned dark between the scrapes, and held hands. She had not forgotten what he looked like, but seeing him in person, she realized what she had lost in memory was the intensity, the precise deep of his eyes, the geometric angle at which his perpetual cowlick rose, the burn of his skin on hers.
“I’m so glad to have you here,” he said. “You don’t know how I’ve missed you.”
Her smile matched his, a quiet blush in her cheeks. “I’ve missed you more,” she said. “Going through all this without you has been so hard.”
“How is your mom?” he asked, his brows pulling together.
“She was better, but the radiation has made her so tired. She just seems miserable.”
Jonathan exhaled. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’d think by now they’d be able to come up with a better solution than poison.” She looked up at him, smiled. “You’re a scientist. You fix it.”
He lifted their hands and slipped his fingers through hers so they pressed palm to palm. “You know full well that’s not my area. But I can assure you they’re working on it.”
“Not in time for her,” Rose said.
In time for us?
“How’s she feeling, you know, mentally?”
“She rests a lot, and we read to her, and that’s what she needs most of all. If Bean and Cordy . . .” She stopped herself.
“Bean and Cordy what?”
“Well, I was going to say if Bean and Cordy would help more, but that’s not fair. They’ve actually been tremendously helpful, both of them. Surprisingly.”
“Mmm.”
“I’m still with her more, but they’re working. So I guess I understand.” Rose felt a stab of guilt at