King of Shadows: a Firefly Story

After the unsuccessful bone marrow transplant, we knew science and the gods had abandoned us. We could count our remaining time as a family in days, not years. So throughout those nine months in Kathleen’s hospital room, we read. We read to keep Victoria’s spirits afloat. We read to distract us from the inevitable. We read because we didn’t know what else to do.

On a spring afternoon, while browsing at a local bookstore, I saw a book entitled King of Shadows by Susan Cooper. Victoria and I had enjoyed some of the author’s previous works, and the story sounded promising.

The protagonist, a boy named Nat Field, had been struck by misfortune and lives with his aunt. He gets recruited to become a member of an American acting company that travels to England to rehearse at the reconstructed Globe Theatre. One night, Nat falls asleep and wakes up in 1599 London. He soon finds himself acting in the original Globe Theatre with William Shakespeare himself as his costar.

No wonder, then, that King of Shadows, about a kid roughly Victoria’s age, with Shakespeare as a prominent character, would catch my eye. I bought it, and we resolved to make this one of our future stories.

One night in June 2001, it was time. I pulled out our new copy of King of Shadows and started reading the story of a boy in Shakespeare’s time … some other time, some other place, far, far away from Kathleen’s hospital room. 

For any parent reading a book for the first time, each new revelation surprises you, just as it does your child. Part of the fun often comes from discovering the plot twists together. As I read this book aloud, we became engrossed in our distraction, unaware of where the story was heading – until the reasons why Nat lived with his aunt slowly became clear to me.

My reading slowed to a crawl, a sense of dread invading my mind. Nat, we were discovering together, had become an orphan because his mother had died of cancer. And his father, stricken with grief, had committed suicide.

I paused, starting to sweat.

I flipped to the description on the inside jacket flap. The warning was now obvious. “Nat Field’s short life has been shadowed by loss and horror,” it read. I never thought to investigate that horror, to explore that loss, before I purchased the book or even started reading aloud. Now it was too late.

I looked up at Victoria as she lay in her mother’s arms on the hospital bed. 

“Victoria, this … this is just … a story,” I stumbled. “It’s true that your mother is going to die and it breaks my heart. I can feel it breaking sometimes. But I’m not going anywhere. I’m not killing myself. I love you! You make my life worth living.” I smiled, tears in my eyes, hands shaking, mouth dry.

Victoria was lost in thought. I didn’t know whether I should read on or ungracefully change the topic. Kathleen hugged Victoria closer to her, smiled her normal smile and said, “So what happens next?” I read on. Because words felt better than silence. Because the worst, at least in King of Shadows, had passed.

As I continued, we came to the part of the story when Shakespeare gives Nat a sonnet, saying, “I give it to you to remind you that love does not vanish with death.” Later, Nat asks Shakespeare to read that sonnet to him.

It was Sonnet #116.

Of course. Of course it would be that one. It had been there when Kathleen and I fell in love. It had been there on our wedding day. It had been there just moments after Victoria was born. And now, here it was again.

“I know that sonnet!” Victoria exclaimed.

“So do I,” Kathleen beamed.

I read on.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds,” I started.

“Admit impediments,” Victoria chimed in gleefully.

“Love is not love,” Kathleen said, making it a trio.

“Which alters when its alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove, oh no, it is an ever fixed mark,” we recited in unison. I started to cry. We all started to cry. Through the tears, we finished reciting Sonnet #116. 

“See, Victoria, love does not vanish with death,” I explained. “‘But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.’ We are at the edge of doom. But our love, the love that the three of us share, will last because it is an ever fixed mark and will be in our hearts forever.” The three of us sat and cried separately together, each staring into our own personal, inescapable doom.

As we were about to leave the hospital that evening, Kathleen called me to the side of her bed. She pulled off the ring I had given her in celebration of Victoria’s birth. It held an emerald-shaped Aquamarine stone (Victoria’s birthstone) with three small diamonds on each side.

As Kathleen handed me the ring, she said, “When you get home tonight, I want you to put this ring in a box along with my gold chain necklace. Then have Victoria call me.”

When we arrived home, Victoria was exhausted, less from the late hour than from the revelations in that night’s reading and our emotional recitation. I put the ring and necklace in a small box and told Victoria that her mother wanted to talk to her. I called Kathleen and handed the phone to Victoria, summoning my sharpest face-reading skills. Listening to her mother’s message, Victoria didn’t say a word. With tears welling in her eyes she simply extended and opened her right hand, palm up. I gently placed the small box in her palm and waited.

She slowly opened the box. Her eyes widened when she saw the ring, not because of its value, but because she had seen it on her mother’s right ring finger every day of her life.

She strung the gold chain through the opening, placed it around her neck and softly said, “I know. I love you, Mommy.” After she hung up, I asked Victoria what her mother had said. 

“She told me, ‘As long as you wear this ring, I will be close to your heart.’”

Kathleen died the next day.