This is my first Anne of Green Gables story and the first one that I have written in many years. I am still a bit rusty but hope to develop one of the stories I am writing into something more polished. Initially, I was a fan of the original TV series with Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie when I was a child, but over the course of this year after my teenage son was researching literature Victorian and Edwardian era for his IB course, I started reading the L.M. Montgomery books. I briefly remember reading the Anne of Green Gables book as a child, but never read any of the others (I was more of a Hobbit fan growing up). However, House of Dreams is probably my favourite as an adult. I understand a little of pregnancy loss from my life and empathised greatly with Anne and Gilbert. I am working on a few ideas, and I am experimenting on different storylines.

Dedicated to the memory of Jonathan Crombie, who will forever be our Gilbert.

Glen St. Mary, November, 1892.

The silence was deafening as Marilla made her way back to the spare room. She needed some time to grief herself, for her lost grandchild but mostly for the pain that Anne and Gilbert were breathing in. The baby had been conceived in the first few weeks of their marriage and the couple were both shocked and excited that it had happened so quickly. Gilbert was overjoyed, at last he…he hoped for a red-headed girl just like his beautiful Anne. They were originally planning to name their first baby girl after their deceased friend Ruby, but during the week before Joyce's birth, Anne introduced the name after a particularly vivid dream. Gilbert was the one who called her "Joy".

Oh, Joy! His sweet curly-haired daughter, with her mother's green eyes and her father's pouted lips. Anne often described them as resembling a twisted bow-tie, a comparison Gilbert happily laughed at knowing how his wife liked to induce reactions from him.

At her daughter's birth, Anne cradled Joyce, kissing her, and covering her in the warmth of the white woollen blanket sent to her by Gilbert's mother as if her love alone could bring this precious baby back to life. The murmurs which came from the baby were slight and reminded Gilbert of a wounded bird he once tried to save as a small child.

He couldn't save Joy either.

In the following weeks, the tears seemed to flow fast and furious, but Anne tried to control them, at least around Gilbert. In turn, Gilbert drowned the sound of his pain with a stern cough every morning as he shaved. Memories of the previous months haunted his mind, especially the good-natured arguing about names the couple enjoyed with Gilbert frequently shutting down any suggestion of Tennyson related names, especially for boys.

"Perceval Blythe…NO, NO, NO," he protested. "It sounds like an incurable disease, Anne-girl," he scoffed under his breath.

Anne loved to tease him, and as her belly grew, the couple settled into a nightly ritual of Gilbert massaging her feet and cradling her belly before he went to sleep. They talked to the baby, shared with her the story of how they met with Gilbert whispering, "Please have red hair," when he thought Anne was fast sleep. She usually wasn't but she had a grin planted on her face as she nestled into the comfort of Gilbert's firm but loving arms, as she too drifted off to the beautiful dreams of their future.

Now those days permeated in the silence of the building tension and bitterness between the pair who were soulmates through and through. Gilbert by his very nature was a patient man, but Anne's coldness to his touch pierced his heart like a ragged edged knife. He remembered many years in their past when she rejected his touch and how the ache in his heart lingered through every look he gave Anne at Redmond, in order to demonstrate how much love he held for her, and only her.

'I am her husband, but she treats me like a stranger,' he thought. Gilbert longed to feel Anne's naked body as he held her delicate and petite frame in his large arms, swearing that he would love and protect her for the rest of his life. He had thought of himself as the luckiest man on the island.

Now he felt cursed.

Cursed with the destruction of death and the ripple of a devastating loss that he feared they wouldn't ever recover from. Even letters from Avonlea failed to comfort him and truth be told, he felt humiliated at the sympathy resonating in well-meaning sentiments from loved ones and old peers. Charlie Sloane, once his fierce rival for Anne's adolescent attention, suggested that there were many needy children at orphanages like Anne had come from, and while gone was the animosity from their youth, Gilbert felt like Charlie was rubbing it in. Charlie had first resumed their friendship with Gilbert during medical school, expressing his shock at being a settled man with a foreign buxom-breasted wife, whose name even Charlie couldn't pronounce and who cooked the best apple pie this side of Alberta. Gilbert's childhood best friend, Moody Spurgeon MacPherson had been the minister at Glen St John for two years, some 30 miles from their home, and frequently stopped by on his way to the major train station to visit his widowed mother in Avonlea. It pained Gilbert that his own parents barely wrote after the tragedy and their inability to write Joyce's name in their sympathy card felt that she was perhaps not even real. The only letter that meant anything of significance was from Miss Stacey, now head of the education board near Halifax. She regaled in the news of her two favourite former pupils' marriage and in their loss, and didn't attempt to repeat some piteous explanation at why such a loved baby could be torn from their sacred arms. Even Rachel Lynde who often boasted enough about her eight healthy deliveries, sent notes of love every week for two months - encouraging the couple to love each other and accept that sometimes the good are always tested with the most devastating of experiences. Time will heal, she wrote and all life is random.

Sometimes there is no rhyme or reason. It just happens.

In retrospect, Gilbert dreamt of going back into the past when Anne and he would disappear for hours rambling in the green lustre of Avonlea; it was his safe haven from the impossible demands of his sickly father, John, who blamed his infatuation with Anne on his decision to not farm. Gilbert knew, at least in part, he was right. Had Anne never came to Avonlea, he most likely would never have had the courage or the motivation to accomplish his dreams. No doubt, had Anne at any time objected to Gilbert's desire to be a doctor, he would have packed it in and become a farmer like his father wanted.

Anne was his dream.

For years the guilt plagued Gilbert, only comforted by his mother's insistence that he needed to follow his path, even if that path was out of Avonlea. He wished he could change so much about his initial meeting with his Anne Girl and their long road to friendship. After Anne's determination to never forgive him, something she kept her word at for five very long and arduous years, Gilbert swore that he would earn Anne's trust and respect if it was the last thing he did. After all they had suffered through to come together, If he lost her trust now, he would lose everything that made their love so eternal.

But that was then and his present looked vastly different than his romantic dreams as a 13 year old.

As a man and his role as the local doctor, his maturity was a stability that so many relied on. The meticulous nature of his dedication to his patient care made Gilbert a much-admired member of the Four Winds Harbour community. However, the downside was the time it took him away from Anne, his adored bride, who he sacrificed so much to give her the comfortable life she deserved. The hours were long as a doctor; the influx of births in the fall after losing Joyce almost crippled his spirit but the softness of his soul always ensured that the mothers in his care were safe from harm. Each night returning home filled Gilbert with dread and anxiety as he felt he had to measure up to Anne's expectations of him as a stellar and indestructible force.

'What kind of mood would Anne be in?,' he repeated to himself as he reached the steps to his front door. Would she even acknowledge my existence?'

Each night Gilbert would arrive home and ask their housekeeper Susan Baker about her day, knowing full well that she knew that was code for how Anne was. Her face filled with the pain of a difficult day, with Anne's refusal for food or the panic she felt when she would leave the house for hours without telling Susan where she ventured off to. But Anne made Susan swear to not tell Gilbert or she would make sure her position was short lived. It frightened Anne that she could even think of being so vindictive, wicked and mean-spirited, but she couldn't bare Gilbert knowing what she did during the day. It was the only secret she had ever kept from him. She loved him dearly but the look of disappointment she felt every evening as they prepared for bed entered her body like a gush of wind, and the gap between them and who they once were as a couple only seemed to grow with each passing day.

It was a Saturday night and for a change, Gilbert was able to return home before sundown. He brought Anne white mayflowers that were growing in the Caster's garden; the couple had welcomed their 8th healthy child and gladly allowed the young doctor to take his plentiful share for his wife. As he entered the door of their proclaimed House of Dreams, he smiled with the face of a lover meeting his sweetheart in the moonlight as he spotted Anne in the backyard terrace.

The look on Susan's face as he reached the back door was unmistakable. He immediately looked down at the wooden floor and his dusty black leather shoes, too afraid to look Susan in the eye with the hopelessness of despair coursing through his body. Susan, a kindly old maid, understood having watched the young couple interact before their loss. The wail of Anne's grief at the moment Joy left the earth and Gilbert's subsequent collapse next to Anne as she pushed him away from their daughter, still consumed her thoughts. It was the last real sound she heard from Anne.

"It was not a good day, Doctor," she reported in a sombre tone. "She has been in the garden since noon and won't eat a spread of my fine food," Susan added with her head slightly bowed.

"I see," replied Gilbert with a grimaced expression and a faint sigh, as the mayflowers crumbled into pieces in his sturdy hands.

It had been almost five months since Joyce's birth and death, and he had not had a complete conversation with Anne since that horrible night. When he would ask her how her day was, she would tell him in an automated tone, "Fine."

But Gilbert knew she was far from fine, and he feared things would never be fine between them again.

Anne would accept his kisses on the cheek each morning and evening, but she would not volunteer any affection, forcing Gilbert to perceive her distance as blame for Joyce's death. He didn't need the blame, he felt the guilt every day, in every healthy newborn he brought into the world, or from the children he saw roaming on the main street in the Glen. He imagined what Joy would be like growing up alongside such children. Images of her thick, curly brown hair, treasured by her mother and with her father's gorgeous features, replayed in his mind. She would've been a child of beauty and innocence, utterly adored by her parents. Now she was forever in some pine wooden box, never to be lulled to sleep by her father or to hear the fairytales her mother was so fond of in her youth.

The Blythe garden was Anne's oasis. Gilbert had planted mayflower seeds from Avonlea when they moved in, and by the time Joyce was born, both mayflowers and violet lilies grew in abundance. One unusually humid night a month after their loss, he came home to find the mayflowers buds, which had grown healthy during the early summer, suddenly gone. "They were rotten," Anne insisted as she looked through Gilbert with a bitterness which made him quiver.

Gilbert didn't believe her.

Mayflowers represented their love story of their friendship, to their estrangement in college and finally their engagement. Anne was his mayflower and the violent removal of the seeds, meant there was little hope for their future happiness.

No happiness and no Joy.

During her pregnancy, Captain Jim had carved a seat especially for Anne out of mahogany wood, a seat where she and Gilbert would huddle together as they shared their dreams for their future family. In the months after their loss, every evening no matter the weather, Gilbert would join Anne in the garden, sitting next to her, sometimes touching her hand if she didn't push it away, but they would not speak. The only comfort he felt was hearing Anne breathe the same night air as he; the only real connection they had to each other in this new reality. Gilbert guessed that there was a silent understanding among the begrieved that sometimes there are no words to heal the darkness of the world, but the strong and dependable doctor knew that he would not let Anne face it alone.

But aloneness was all he felt this night as tears built up and trickled down his face, which he quickly wiped away, not willing to look vulnerable and weak to the only person that mattered. He pledged, if only to himself, that he would fight for the life with Anne that he so desperately fought for years to secure. Gilbert only nightly prayer was that tomorrow would be the day that Anne forgives him, much like the wishes he had as a boy in Avonlea trying to win her heart after that unfortunate slate incident. As Gilbert looked at the now chilly night sky, he promised himself that he would make it all better one day. If there was a star for him to wish on, he didn't see it but hoped that it would help him find his way back to his Anne-girl and the warmness of the hearth they no longer enjoyed, even on a winter's night.

One day, he told himself, tomorrows would be theirs once more.