My Oxford Year: A Novel

The story of the Oxford scholar poor,

Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,

Who, tired of knocking at preferment’s door,

One summer morn forsook

His friends, and went to learn the gypsy-lore,

And roam’d the world with that wild brotherhood,

And came, as most men deemed, to little good,

But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar-Gypsy,” 1853

Hours later, while I’m distracting myself in the gift shop by perusing awful—truly, awful—“Get Better Soon” greeting cards, my phone buzzes. It’s a text.

From Connor.

As I read it, confusion quickly eclipses my surprise.

Congrats! Holy shit!

What is he talking about? For a crazy moment, I think that he must know about Jamie and me, about my decision to stay. Obviously, I’m a sleep-deprived idiot. I text back:

Hi! But . . . ?

He replies with a link to a CNN web page. I click on it.

I only read the headline before striding out the double sliding doors and into the parking lot, pressing call.

Gavin picks up on the first ring. “There you are!” he says. As if I’m a kid who wandered away from him at a department store instead of someone who didn’t answer her phone once—once—because she was deciding whether or not to kill her boyfriend.

“Hillerson’s out!”

“Yeah, I saw,” I say.

He’s barely listening to me. “It was the debate, his numbers tanked! We just won all five primaries!” I’d totally forgotten about the primaries. Is today Tuesday? I look up at the cloudy sky for a clue as to what time it is. “God, I wish I could see his smug bullshit face right now. Anyway, we’re officially in full-on general-election mode. Things are moving quickly, kid, and we’re gonna need you to come home. I know it’s early, but you had a good run. And I remember that I spent my Trinity Term just drinking.” He laughs. I don’t. “Look, I know it’s not exactly sticking to the plan, but plans are subject to change without notice.” I can tell my silence is unfamiliar to him and for the first time I sense discomfort in his voice. “Okay?”

I wasn’t going to do this now. I wanted to wait until I’d had some sleep, until I could be articulate and diplomatic, because, frankly, I’m a verbally incontinent mess at the moment.

But now, like Hillerson, my hand has been forced.

Here we go.

“No.”

Gavin’s silent. He’s never heard that word come out of my mouth before. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m not coming home.”

“Let’s not make this a thing, Ella. You don’t want me to find an interim deputy political director, because, I gotta be honest, I don’t think that’s gonna be good for you—”

“No, I mean I’m not coming home. Period. Now or in June.”

More silence. Then he says, “What’s this about, Ella? It can’t be another job. There’s no better opportunity—”

“No, I wouldn’t do that to you. Or Janet. I’m so grateful to you both . . .” I can’t finish. I choke up. It turns out, the act of making a choice, of choosing a path, doesn’t mean the other path disappears. It just means that it will forever run parallel to the one you’re on. It means you have to live with knowing what you gave up. Which isn’t a bad thing; if anything, it only serves to strengthen my resolve.

But I would have killed this job. I would have been a superstar. I know it.

Gavin knows it, too, because, after a lengthy pause, he tries to save me from myself. “Ella, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna give you a day to think it over before I start looking for someone else.”

“I don’t need a day.”

“Yesterday, we promoted you. Today, you quit. Did you get spooked? Doesn’t this opportunity mean anything to you?”

Resenting the hell out of his guilt-tripping takes a backseat to my encroaching realization that actually, no, it doesn’t. It occurs to me that I never told anyone I’d been promoted. When Gavin and Janet gave me the news, I went back to the company of my friends, my boyfriend, and his parents, who gave me a ring, and I never had the urge, not once, at any point in the evening, to tell anyone. It was irrelevant before I decided it was irrelevant. “You would think,” I answer.

“You’re too smart for this!” Gavin says, impassioned. “You’re not one of those girls.”

I bristle. “What girls would those be?”

He pauses. His tone rhetorical, he asks, “Is this about a boy?”

My anger comes hot and quick. What an awful, reductive thing to say. I take a breath. “No. This is about a girl. This is about a girl choosing her life.”

“Oh, really? Choosing her life over making history? Over helping get a fellow woman elected president? Those are your priorities?”

He might as well have punched me in the stomach. “Gavin—”

Suddenly another voice takes over the line. “Ella?” Then she whispers, away from the receiver, “Take a walk.”

Still reeling from Gavin’s assault, hearing her voice makes my eyes swim. “I’m so sorry—” I begin.

“Don’t apologize,” she says fiercely. “You hear me?”

I don’t think I can stand any longer. I drop to my knees on the asphalt, frigid air sawing in and out of my lungs, clouding in front of my face. “It’s just . . . things changed. I changed,” I gasp.

“Ella, Ella, stop. It’s your choices at the end of the day that make you who you are. Be that. I admire that.” She’s silent for a moment, letting her words sink in. I struggle to breathe. “I have to go.”

“Thank you.”

“My door is always open. Okay? That’s a promise.”

“That’s a plan,” I say, and she’s gone.

I let the cold seep into my knees for a minute. I clock my breathing, wait for it to settle. I look at the bare branches above me, the gray mist of a sky, the cars, the Dacias and Minis and Vauxhalls, which I realize seem more familiar to me now than their American counterparts.

I lift the phone up, stare at the screen for a moment.

And then turn it off.

It occurs to me now, in this blisteringly cold hospital car park on the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland, that being called upon to do something because you’re good at it is not the same thing as having a calling. My calling is education, not politics. Politics was my father’s calling.

I feel like I’m waking up from one of those dreams, the revelatory kind, where you carry with you into waking the sense that all secrets were revealed and all mysteries were solved, and everything feels different . . . but what the hell was it about? You struggle to remember the context, you chase the clues left behind, you hold on to the threads of the revelation hoping they’ll lead you back to the source, and when you finally give up and let it go . . . it finds you.

Maybe my dream of Oxford, the planning, the career building, the Rhodes, everything that went into getting me there was really about: just getting there. Maybe the City of Dreaming Spires—the foundational lifeblood of education in the Western world—wasn’t itself the dream, but the entry point to something I could have never imagined, never seen until now.

Love. Family. Connection.

A life.

And the freedom to decide, on my own terms, what I want to do, what I’m going to do with my calling.

For the first time in a decade, I don’t have an immediate plan.

Well. Except for one.

I go back into the hospital, stopping by the commissary to buy a round of coffee for my fellows in purgatory. Reentering the waiting room, I see Cecelia and Antonia sitting side by side, talking. William’s next to his wife, nominally reading, but mostly just teeming with ineffectual worry.

I hand out coffee and then plop down across from all of them. “William,” I say. He looks up from his magazine. “We have some business to discuss.” He nods once, as Cecelia and Antonia look at me warily. “When Jamie comes out of this, when he feels better, I don’t care if it’s in the middle of term, I’m taking him traveling. We’re going to travel until we feel like stopping. You’re not going to make him feel bad about this. In return, I promise that I won’t let him be reckless.”

Antonia perks up, her face radiant with hope. “Dear girl! Are you staying?”

“Sorry, yeah. I’m staying.” Should have led with that.

Antonia gasps, leaps out of her chair, and throws her arms around me. Over her shoulder I continue to stare at William, waiting for a response. Finally, after an eternity, he says, “Your terms are acceptable,” and goes back to his magazine.

“Really?” I can’t keep the surprise out of my voice as I pull away from Antonia. “Because I mean it. We’re going to go and keep going. Jamie’s shown that he cares about his health and we’ll do whatever needs to be done, but—”

“First rule of business,” William murmurs, flipping a page. “When they say yes, stop talking.”

The barest hint of a smile crosses his face, but before I can return it, Dr. Corrigan walks into the room and we all flock to her like imprinted ducklings.

I can’t read her expression.

I have a horrible, sinking, high-seas feeling in my stomach. What if he’s gone? What if I made all these life plans for us and there’s no more us?

Honestly? I wouldn’t change a thing. I look around and realize that there is so much more us than I ever realized.

A peace settles over me, causing me to meet the doctor’s gaze with strength.

Luckily, she smiles. “It’s time to wake Jamie up.”

IT TAKES A few hours to bring him out of the anesthesia. So while Jamie is being un-anesthetized, we four do our best to get completely anesthetized with my half-consumed bottle of birthday Scotch from Charlie, which we happily drink out of Dixie Cups in the hospital lobby.

When we’re finally allowed to enter Jamie’s room, I take the lead, coming around the corner and finding myself halted by the beautiful sight before me. Jamie’s sitting up, the head of the bed elevated. He looks absolutely wrecked. “Rode hard and put away wet,” as my father would have said. But when he sees me, I’m rewarded with a big, loving, living smile. He reaches his hand out. It’s only a few inches off the bed, but it’s enough. More than enough.

I cautiously walk down the aisle, approaching his bedside.

Seeing his eyes open, alert, blue, twinkling, and wanting weakens me. My chest blows open and a gust of love rushes through it.

I thought the hardest thing I’d have to do was leave him in June.

But the hardest thing is staying. The hardest thing is living with dying. Loving with dying. The hardest thing is love, with no expiration date, no qualifiers, no safety net. Love that demands acceptance of all the things I cannot change. Love that doesn’t follow a plan.

I take his hand gently and kiss it. He tries to speak, but his voice is raw from intubation and sleep. Nothing comes out but a small, endearing squeak. I resist the urge to jump on him. Probably not medically sound. So I whisper, “I love you.”

I watch him smile. Then, by sheer force of will, he slowly pulls me close to him, bringing my ear to his mouth. He takes a shaky breath, mustering all his strength, and I close my eyes, ready to hear those words repeated back to me.

Instead, he whispers, “It’s a good thing I don’t love you, Ella from Ohio.”