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“i thought i could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process. it needs not a map, but a history.”
—a grief observed, c.s. lewis
❆
Peter is quieter than he used to be. Different. They’re all different, Helen’s children, and have been since that summer they went away, since the next—since three months after the war began when the reality of it all had sunk in and they realized their father wasn’t coming home soon, and might never come home at all. There is a years-long stillness about them by now that Helen has never quite understood.
But even then, there is a deeper change wrought in her elder son. He’s sadder, she thinks. Turned inwards. Even standing next to her, he feels so very far away. It is a difference and a distance that does not shift, not even when Richard comes home and their family is meant to be whole again.
He surrenders the role of the head of house with surprising grace, her eldest, though it’s impossible to miss how the others turn to Peter, always Peter, whenever they need something, no matter how small. And Peter is always there waiting. Richard has noticed it, Helen knows, and doesn’t quite know what to do with the son he came home to find a man before his time, the others who look to him like a rock or a sun or the way they used to with Richard.
She thinks they ought to be proud, raising such a kind and caring son. A leader, that one, people tell her. A protector.
Look after the others, she told him that morning in the station, and he has. He is. Probably he always will. She should be glad of that.
Mostly, Helen watches him and feels sad.
❆
It worsens that one October, from one term to the next. She’s never understood why, for nothing much had happened she can think of that might have caused it. He didn’t seem upset at all after being denied enlistment months before—asthma was the grounds for it, something they’d nearly forgotten he had. The country air’d done him good, she’d thought, but lately the rasp was back on smoky days, and so Peter was not to go to war.
She’d thought he might have been bitter about that, once. But by then it seemed like all the simmering anger, one that kept erupting from him for a year or more, the kind that made people shake their heads and whisper of all the terrible things war does to boys before they’re even men, had somehow sloughed off his shoulders like snow in a thaw. His steps were lighter than she’d heard in years when he came home that day and told the other children while Helen stood listening in the shadowed hall, the same quiet gladness in her eldest’s tone rising warmly in her chest. He wasn’t going to war. The mud of the trenches would not swallow him the way they had her father, her uncles; had nearly taken Richard before they spat him out, half-chewed.
Perhaps things would be all right after all.
But then he went away to university and came back between terms a different man, older and wearier than she’s ever seen. Now he sits a little ways apart from his brother and sisters and oft-visiting cousin while they talk with heads bent close together, prone to standing abruptly at she knows not what and walking unsteadily away to his room. Helen’s never close enough to hear what causes it, and she’s spent enough time trying to find her way back into the closed-off circle that is her children to know they wouldn’t tell her if she asked.
It's not easy, studying medicine, she knows, and especially in a war. She’s never certain why Peter chose it—he didn’t show much interest for it, before, but perhaps that’s the best she can hope for out of the ways war changes children, and hers in particular. She might’ve thought that to be the cause of his newfound sorrow, his silence, his oft-shaking hands, might not have studied it and him so closely, might never have learned the truth—that is, if it wasn’t for the candles.
❆
She doesn’t notice it at first—he’s so quiet about it, in that newly private way of his—but eventually, Helen glances at her brood on their way to the door after service and realizes Peter isn’t among them. When she turns to look for him, Edmund shifts in a way that might nearly be on purpose, but can’t quite block his brother, now behind him, from view.
What Helen sees then and after is this: Each time they attend Mass, which is now more than they did before Richard’s discharge, but less than before the war, Peter crosses to the side altar and lights a votive candle there, watching it catch and flicker for just a moment before following the rest of them to the door. He never says anything, never seems to pray, never stops to meet her eye. Afterward, Lucy takes his hand, and Susan touches his elbow, and Edmund stands in such a way that shields the rest of them from view, and Helen does not say anything, because what is there to say?
She thinks they’re for Richard at first, truth be told, but then Richard comes home, alive and well and here to stay, and Peter still lights a candle. She thinks it’s for the war, but then the war ends. People celebrate in the streets. The country begins to rebuild.
And Peter?
Peter comes home between terms and lights a candle every week. He smiles more, very slowly, but it seems an effort, somehow. A front. Helen knows such things well enough herself. Sometimes they’re real, she thinks, most often thanks to Lucy, but they’re sadder than they once were. He’s sadder. Not quite in the same way he used to be, when he seemed to move through his days as though everything pained him, when she caught him once sitting on the edge of his bed in the dark, head between his knees and hands fisted in his hair, but still—the quiet, the stillness, the way he jerks ‘round sometimes on the street as though he’s seen someone, a ghost; a flash of dark hair in a crowd. Still he visits the altar as steadily as the women now turned widows, lighting candles for the husbands who will never return from the war.
He never offers an explanation, and she doesn’t ask—not here, not yet—but over time, Helen sees things. She begins to understand.
❆
She learns the story in pieces, in another language, through a cracked-open door.
The year after that painfully quiet October, Lucy pulls Peter aside on Christmas to give him his gift in private. Helen thinks nothing of it at first, long used to the strange ways of her children by now. Nor has she given a thought to the pieces her youngest has been painting of late, among them a watercolor portrait of a dark-haired man at sea Lucy’s been hunching over for months. That is, not until she finds it tucked under Peter’s pillow on New Year’s while all the children, even Susan, are out helping Lucy build a fort in the snow.
She stands there holding it for a moment, noticing the way the edges have already begun to fray from touch. Outside, she hears Lucy shout something, and Peter’s answering laugh. She hasn’t heard him sound so happy in years.
As her children tumble about in the snow, Helen places the painting back where she found it and slips away out the door, leaving the bed unmade and seemingly undisturbed.
She doesn’t ask what it means, that portrait. Who it is. Peter never says. But she doesn’t forget it, either.
❆
Time passes. Things change. So do people. Every year they come back to her, Helen’s children, though half of them aren’t children anymore, and Lucy and Edmund are hardly so. Sometimes, Helen thinks they haven’t been children for longer than they were, the four of them, but somehow it doesn’t matter so much when the days grow shorter and colder and they all crowd back into their home in Finchley, filling the half-empty house with laughter and light she’s been missing all year.
Christmas isn’t the only time they’ll visit her, of course, but it is the time when she knows for certain they’ll all be there, and she loves it for that more than for all the gifts in the world.
All this is to say that it’s Christmas Eve again, and so it’s not at all surprising when evening comes and Peter knocks softly on her door, both their coats in hand, the same as he does every year.
He’s stopped attending Mass on his own, she knows. He spends his Sundays during school taking the train down to visit Professor Kirke, to talk or to study, Helen’s never certain. She’s held her peace on the matter because she understands in that way mothers do that some part of him would break as surely as her own heart if she forced him to go. When he comes round to visit, he stays home with Susan on Sundays and reads quietly in the den, and Helen does not ask if either of them will come to church with her. But every year on Christmas Eve, though Helen’s never asked and Peter’s never answered, he dons his coat and takes her to services. This year is no different.
At least, not at first.
The walk is dark and chilly, but Peter is a pillar of warmth at her side. The service is well worn in its familiarity, but Helen likes it that way. She knows every song and verse by heart. It lasts exactly as long as she knows it will, and as it ends, when she turns aside briefly to exchange passing greetings with Mrs. Bennet from two houses down, she knows without even looking that Peter has made his way to the rack of candles.
But here is where things change, because for just a moment or two, Peter lingers before the army of tiny flames, and Helen finds herself crossing the space between them to stand quietly at his side. For a few heartbeats, they watch the candles flicker.
And though later she will never know for certain what makes her say it, Helen asks, very gently, “Who is it for?”
Peter does not answer for long enough that she thinks he won’t, that she oughtn’t have asked, that there is something truly terrible he’s not telling her. She looks up at him, at the candlelight limning his profile, at the trembling set of his jaw.
He does not look at her when he lets out a long and ragged breath and all but whispers, “His name was Caspian.”
And Helen begins to understand.
❆
She’s heard the name before, of course, in hushed tones and laughter, in warmth and in sadness both, from all her children—except Peter. The way he says it now is almost shocking in its rawness, like skin peeled back, like pressing on a bruise. A wound.
Whoever this Caspian is, Helen is the last to know. The last to understand.
She’s used to that, though, is the thing.
❆
“We met when I was in school,” Peter tells her quietly, sitting beside her on the church steps. “During the war.”
In the glow streaming from the windows behind them, she watches his hands make a series of aborted gestures, as though to grasp something, or curl into fists, or sink his nails into the meat of his palm. He abandons each, haltingly, halfway through. He won’t look at her. Maybe he cannot.
Impulsively, Helen reaches out and grasps one of his hands instead, the way she’s seen Lucy do for years, only just now wondering if perhaps it was meant to stop her brother doing something as much as it was for comfort.
Peter startles lightly, stares down at her palm in his—but he does not pull away.
Helen thinks he might be shaking. She also thinks it’s not from the cold.
“And where is Caspian now?” she asks, though some part of her wonders if she shouldn’t. But Helen has spent years of her life not questioning things—her husband’s decision to enlist; her children’s behavior; how it is she came to feel shut out of half her own life. Perhaps it was inevitable she would want answers for something—for anything—eventually.
She can hear more than see how Peter swallows roughly before answering, “Gone.”
“Gone?” she repeats carefully. Does he mean—
“Dead.”
The word is delivered flat and short and brittle, as cold as the stone of the steps beneath them, but before he turns his face fully away from her, she glimpses the glittering shard of pain in his eyes and nearly reels from the breadth of it.
Peter continues, gazing off down the road, then down at their hands upon his knee, “He— a while ago. It doesn’t matter.”
But it does.
Helen doesn’t say anything just then. Neither does Peter. He keeps staring down at their hands, at hers folded over his, as though he’s expecting her to pull away. Helen doesn’t know why she would. What could make her. She knows what he’s afraid of, though, for how could she not?
She looks at her son, bent and grieving and afraid in the shadow of the church where she raised him, and she hears the well of tenderness in his voice, sees the softening around his eyes when he says this Caspian’s name, and she knows. Of course she knows. She’s his mother.
Perhaps she always has known, in some secret part of her heart—down where she could keep from looking too closely at it if she tried. But that’s not important now, and maybe it never was, because Helen Pevensie looks at her child, the first piece of her heart carved out of her chest, and she wants nothing more than to hold him like she did when he was small and scared and skittish, quick to bruise and even quicker to cry. He might still be all of those things, but by now he’s learned to be them where Helen cannot see.
Until here, that is. Until now.
“What was he like?”
Peter looks sharply up at her, and she manages something of a smile, nudges her knee against his.
“Tell me.”
Peter laughs, then, though it’s a strangled sound, made more of breath and pain than any real mirth. He says, “Kind.” Swallows. Draws in a throttled sort of breath, and grips her hand like a lifeline. “Curious. Clever as anything. Certainly smarter than me. You…you would’ve liked him, I think. He was an awful lot like Susan, if she were more stubborn, I suppose. Well, less subtle about it.”
“Like you, then,” she replies, partly because she hopes it will make him laugh, partly because the two of them are like halves of the same person, she’s always thought, as though Peter left behind his shape in her womb until Susan came along to fill it.
He falls quiet, then, his breath stuttering, his hand spasming. When she looks at him, she sees his eyes are tightly closed, as if the memory, the pain, is a physical thing standing before him, and he can ward it off by simply not looking at it.
“No,” Peter says softly at last. “No, he’s— he wasn’t like me at all. Not really. People said so, but…he was better.”
He breathes in sharply, and then out slower, as though he is trying to steady himself. Helen wonders if it’s working. She wonders if he would be grateful if he knew she cannot tell.
After another harsh swallow, Peter manages, even lower than before, “He was better than I’ll ever be, I think. And you know, I thought I hated him for it, at the start. But I didn’t.” He laughs, shaky and wet and fragile, and something aches deep in Helen’s chest. “I didn’t hate him. It wasn’t that. Because I—”
He pulls his fingers away from hers, drops his head into his hands and lets out something that isn’t a laugh or a sob or any noise Helen knows how to call by any name except pain.
“Well,” Peter says into his palms, after six unsteady heartbeats, “it doesn’t matter anyway.”
It’s the first lie he’s told tonight.
Barely above a whisper, he adds, “I wish you might’ve met him. I think— I think he’d’ve liked you, too.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that.
In the end, she doesn’t say anything at all. She just holds him, wrapping her arms around his hunched-up shoulders and drawing his head down to rest on one of her own.
The thing about Peter these days is he does not cry loudly nor noticeably nor, usually, where anyone can see. If not for the tears she feels soaking into the collar of her coat, Helen would not know her son is weeping at all.
But he is, and she does, and so she holds him there on the icy church steps in that dark and silent night, pressing kisses into his hair like she did when he was small. They stay like that until their hands and feet and faces are numb; until neither of them can stand the cold any longer.
And then they go home.
❆
“I’m sorry,” she musters the bravery to say when they’re halfway back, walking slowly to mind the slick spots on the pavement well-masked in the dark.
Peter is silent for a long moment at her elbow, saying nothing as he helps her around a dirtied mound of snow. When she tries to look at him, he’s nothing but another shadow in the night, standing like some tall and straight sentry against the chill. Like this, he looks more a general or a lord or some other great and proud man than her quiet, grieving son.
At last, he says, “It’s all right.”
It isn’t. They both know this.
But sometimes, Helen has learned, a lie is the best you can manage in the face of the enormous cruelty of the truth, and so she wraps her hands a little tighter around his offered arm and does the kindest thing she can tonight: she lets it pass.
They don’t speak the rest of the way home.
❆
The house is dark and quiet when they enter, though from outside she could make out warm light still beaming from Susan’s window. Probably the other two are in there with her, sprawled out on her floor, doing whatever it is they do when Helen isn’t near enough to listen. Probably, when he sheds his coat and shoes, Peter will join them, shutting the door tight behind him. And Helen will not.
Something of that knowledge lodges in her throat, standing there in the darkened entry hall, so that she finds herself turning back towards her eldest, stretching out a searching hand in the dark.
“Merry Christmas, darling,” she whispers.
His fingers, now ungloved but still chilled from the wind, find her outstretched hand, wrap around it.
Once upon a time, those hands were small enough she could hold both of them in one of hers and envelop them completely. Once upon a time, he didn’t know grief or loss or the senseless cruelty of the world.
Once upon a time, he was happy, her son. He still is, sometimes, in fits and starts and glimpses—but it’s not the same. It never will be. What can?
Peter gives her hand a gentle squeeze, the way she’s seen him do for Lucy a hundred times. A thousand. She thinks she catches a flash of his smile in the moonlight, fleeting and sadder than it would have been, once, but still here. He’s still here. Always.
“Merry Christmas, Mum,” he tells her.
And then he’s gone.
❆
Here is something Peter will never know: the first Mass of the new year, Helen lights her own candle by the altar. Standing before the rack of tiny flickering lights, of a dozen strangers’ prayers, Helen offers her own, just then. She prays for the parts of her son’s life she’ll never get to know, for one thing. For his safety, for another. For his happiness most of all.
And in truth, she prays more than a little bit for this Caspian and the wound he left in her son. She prays he’s in a kinder place than this war-torn and still-mending world, and, to her own faint surprise, that they will see one another in the next.
Here is something Helen does not yet know: she will see him, too. And Peter was right. She will like him. But that is not to be—not now. Not yet. For now, Helen lights a candle and walks out into the bitter January morning, into the winter of 1949, and turns towards home, where her family waits.
And if she lights a candle every service after, well, no one asks her why.