Epilogue

Spring, 1982

She wore every one of her fifty-five years well, her face just marked by the faint lines of age, and the dark hair hardly brushing against her shoulders only tinged by streaks of gray. Her eyes were bright and awake, and those lines on her face around her eyes and mouth, they were not only age, but many from the smiles and laughter that still consumed her now and then.

Brigitta was not smiling now, though, standing in this graveyard. Until today, she stood in this place twice a year, once to mark her father's death, and once for Sabina's...Once for her mother. No matter how greatly she had chafed under that thought when a young girl, that Sabina would be her mother, Brigitta had finally understood the difficulty of the task her mother had taken on in marrying into the von Trapp family, seeing how her mother cared for her when she had begun to flounder under the burden of her curiosity. And she had been a wonderful mother, a wonderful wife for her father, and a beloved grandmother for her own children. Sabina had died at an early age, though, just a few years after her father's own death, as though in losing him, she had lost herself as well. Brigitta was not sure if she had wept any less for her than for her father.

This was neither the fourth of April nor the twenty-sixth of November, though, but the nineteenth of March. The journey was not a terribly long one for her, a few hours along one of the country's interstates more or less, yet she came only those two dates every year. While Sabina had still lived, Brigitta had come on her own once every year, the fourth of April. It seemed improper to be there at any other time, as if by visiting at another moment, she interrupted the quiet meditations of her parents, hidden away in their own secret space.

This day was unlike any other day that she had been in this place; its twin was a year before, in another place, another continent, just standing in the cemetery behind the abbey. The sky had been as gray as this one, threatening to wet the grass around her just as well as the one above her now. Salzburg was a place she no longer knew, almost as though she had not been there since she was a child. The short journey to that city at the very beginning of her adulthood she hardly remembered, and whenever she thought back to it, all she knew was the pain. Any other times she had returned were spent visiting with the little family who remained, the few friends who still merited that title. She always refused to think about that part of the past.

But she was older, now, and everything that had created that ache was so much further from her mind and waking moments. Sometimes, it felt as though it belonged to another life that was not hers, but something that she had read in a novel when she was younger, or something she had created in one of her own. Despite what she had studied in her college years, Brigitta had gone on to be a novelist, writing in the days while her husband and older children were out of the house, and in those years when her youngest children had been at school. Thinking back to those days in Salzburg was like a history that she knew was her own, regardless of feeling it in her own memory.

No one else knew of it, what had sparked that ache; she made certain of that. Why destroy her father and mother's happiness, the love their family had felt? No, there had been no reason. What would knowledge create for them all? Only pain, and they had gone through enough of that for a lifetime. If they had put the question to her, perhaps she might have answered in earnest, but the thought had never crossed the minds of any of her siblings, and especially not the youngest; Christopher, Eric, and Lana, the last born six or seventh months after they had returned from that horrible visit, had no knowledge of Austria, no memories of her, and no care for what had happened in that place so many years before their time. Their happiness was untouched by all of it.

Brigitta had never returned to that place, save for this day the year before, on the nineteenth of March, 1981. On several trips, she had stood in Salzburg, trying to remember the paths of her childhood...but the abbey cemetery, no. It had taken more courage than she had possessed in those moments, harder nerves than ran in herself. It would still be there the next time, she had always told herself; after perhaps thirty-five years from the moment it was set upright in the soil, the stone was there, the inscription weathering the rain, storms, and snows of the Austrian climate, but every word still visible.

The stone had been rough beneath her fingers, feeling every bit the age it had attained, and the letters had emerged clearly on the paper over which she scraped her charcoal. Holding that page in this moment, it was as dry and cold as that day. How silly she must appear to any person who might walk by, she thought vaguely, a grown woman just standing in a graveyard, clutching a blackened piece of paper in one hand, and a few dark, flat stones in her other, stones as cold as the paper. Even her daughter must think something strange of her.

Any of her children would have come with her had she asked, Brigitta knew, but somehow, it was better that she stood in this place with Rachel, her second daughter. Somehow, her spirit seemed to have come out in Rachel. An intelligent young woman just in her early thirties, Rachel's eyes were a bright blue, her hair a light shade tinted by red that she wore longer than the woman she resembled, her own touching her shoulders, occasionally brushing over to the top of her back. But her soul seemed directly drawn from Maria's.

Brigitta rarely even thought that name, and she had never spoken it in all those days since she had seen the stone for the first time in Salzburg, but whenever she truly considered her daughter, it was impossible to sever that connection. Though the faith that had been in Maria was not in Rachel—the girl had been born in the 1950s, and in her college years ?xt=urn:btih:e1af5f59f021775254627ec1d9a861695dc20b0e&dn=Aladdin+%282019%29+%5BBLURay%5D+%5B1080p%5D+English&tr=udp%3A%2F% %3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F% .com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F% .com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F% .tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F% .com%3A6969had discovered a swath of new ideas that widened her mind and world even as it saddened her parents and grandparents—but the same love of music and song filled her.

Rachel was not standing beside her, but she had driven, and now waited by their car, nearby but still out of earshot unless Brigitta shouted. True, she had offered to come along, but Brigitta had asked her to remain behind. For this moment, she needed to be here with just her mother and father, and Maria, as near as she could be. Glancing to the gray clouds swirling above, she could already seen the rain ready to break free. However much her daughter was willing to endure her caprices, Rachel would believe something strange if she stood in the rain, just staring down at a grave marker and holding tight to a smudged paper and small stones. They all meant little to nothing to her, or maybe it seemed so because of how large they loomed in Brigitta's mind. Rachel had loved them both, but as grandparents—the only way that she could. Loving them as a child loved a parent was impossible, and of course she never knew Fräulein Maria.

Bending down, Brigitta just laid her paper out on the edge of the tombstone's flat surface that surrounded the headstone, the ring of stone rising a couple inches above the grass that filled the emptiness between the stones. Row after row stretched on in every direction, the realm of the dead where one day, they would all rest, finding companionship with those they had once loved. Still loved. Rolling the stones between her fingers, she placed one on each corner, sliding them to the very edges. Crouching there, she looked back to the inscription carved in the rock.

"She forgave us, Father," Brigitta whispered, tracing her finger over the words engraved on the stone before her. Georg Ritter von Trapp, Sabina Angeline von Trapp. The years that dated their deaths were too near one another, and for Lana, their deaths when she was just coming into adulthood had been almost too much. But perhaps it had been better that way for the two of them, as though fate had chosen not to force her mother to endure the years of loneliness that a life as a widow meant. In spite of that, and how well she had loved her mother, Brigitta could not think about Sabina at this moment, even here. "I know she did. For everything." Would have even been right to ask her to leave the abbey and the life she had chosen? Brigitta didn't know, and she doubted that she could even form that question in prayer, as though it was a question God himself meant to remain unanswered.

And would Maria have wished for them to know what had befallen her? No, Brigitta couldn't believe she would have wished that upon anyone. Whatever she did, whatever happened to her—their beloved Fräulein Maria—there was no pain for any of them but the ache of memory, the longing to see her again. It was not the desperate misery of death and loss, rather the unhappiness of absence. And there was no reason any of her siblings should know of their governess's fate unless they came to this place sometime soon, for why would they ask her of what had come to Maria otherwise? All of them still loved and remembered her, but they rarely spoke of her, like she was a ghost in their memories, who had melted into the wind. Where ignorance is bliss...

A first drop of water fell out of that hazy sky, splattering on the black-gray stone in front of her. "Mom!" Rachel called, and Brigitta looked back. Her daughter's pale hair was almost beginning to rise with the humidity that she suddenly felt, and she looked up. The clouds had thickened, and another few drops of rain slapped the grass beside her. As much as she just wished she could stay here beside her parents, beside the three of them, she had to leave. Rising slowly, and shaking a few folds from her skirt, Brigitta turned away from that stone, swallowing hard as she did. But she wasn't really leaving them, was she? She would be back again soon, on the fourth of April, again on twenty-sixth of November.

And the next nineteenth of March, to begin her yearly visits anew.

On her glasses, a droplet of rain spread out, and Brigitta took a few steps slowly, then quickened her pace, not wanting to be caught in the rain. Soon, she thought, the possibilities consuming her as she opened the passenger door of the car and ducked inside. Don't worry. I'll be back very soon.

The page was already wet, the dark stone beneath gleaming through the transparent fibers. Where charcoal covered the page that had been creamy white, the water smeared the words that had made their impression until it appeared identical to the first rubbing taken of that stone in Salzburg: illegible, incomprehensible, a mystery that would never be uncovered. On the stones weighing the paper down, the droplets gathered, growing into puddles that clung to the surface for a few moments before breaking apart and sliding down each side to either soak the page further or coat the tombstone. Though the white spaces between the charcoal marks mixed together, now gray, the words that Max Detweiler had commissioned were still visible to the empty field like they were in the empty graveyard of Nonnberg Abbey, as if the places were somehow together for this time, just for a moment.

In loving memory of Maria Rainer, Beloved of God and friend of man
Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.

A/N: And that's that! I get the impression that this story has made some people quite sad, as I remember from the first time I posted it; personally, I enjoyed writing it very much. The Sound of Music lends itself to some toothachingly sweet fanfictions, so I think it's good to really change that dynamic, for there to be unhappiness and loss whilst attempting to stay in character. We don't always get the happily ever after we know we want, but we might find a different one when we're not really looking for it. And that doesn't mean it's better or worse...it's just different.