Chapter 21
Christmas is painful.
Three months weren't nearly enough to truly lessen the pain of their loss and on Christmas, it is all brought back with fresh intensity again. There is just something about those special days in the yearly calendar that makes the thoughts turn towards loved ones, especially those who're absent, and never is this truer than on Christmas Day.
The hollowness left by the gaps in their midst is nothing new, but this gap feels different. In 1914, they were missing Jem and Jerry, and in 1915 Walter and Carl had left, too, but then, they believed them to be temporary gaps. In some ways, they were aware that such expectations could never be trusted, because in those first days of war, they also expected Jem and Jerry to be home by Christmas, but the war taking longer was easier to imagine than one of theirs never coming back.
They knew about the dangers, of course. They just never really thought they'd come true. With matters like these, no-one ever does.
Now though, one of the gaps torn in their middle is permanent, eternal, never to be filled again, and it hurts more than is conceivable.
Thus, while they do gather on Christmas as every year, there is nothing festive about this otherwise so festive time. Instead, they're quiet, subdued, as they contemplate the past two and a half years and the price they already had to pay for them. What no-one dares ask out loud is how many more years they will have to give, and how high the cost will be in the end.
With the twins home from Kingsport and Rilla and Shirley home from Charlottetown, Ingleside is fuller than it has been since summer, but while normally, their return reliably makes the house louder and livelier, this time, it remains as quiet as before. The hush that settled on Ingleside in September continues to lie heavily upon the house, not unlike the thick blanket of snow does, and it weighs down everyone living inside.
When they move through the house, they all do so quietly, almost on tiptoes, and when they speak, they do it in hushed tones, nearly in whispers. Most of the time, they don't speak much anyway, however, because words fail them, now that they have lost the one among them to whom words always came easiest.
Somehow, Walter's loss also exacerbates the absence of Jem, their fearless leader who is spending his third Christmas apart from them, with no-one able to say when, or if, he will be with them again. The gap his absence cuts isn't filled with nearly as much pain as caused by the loss of Walter, but it's made up of fear and uncertainty, and those left behind can't even begin to fill the breach.
Four of them can't be enough when they used to be six and now are only five anymore.
The days before Christmas, therefore, pass quietly and Christmas Day is quiet, too. They attend church in the morning, listening to a heartfelt, thoughtful sermon by Reverend Meredith, and praying for the lost ones and those who can't be home. Silently, Rilla adds her own prayer, for a little boy with a dent in his lip, wherever he may be, and asks God to watch over him, because whatever the sins of the parents are, he is but an innocent and has no-one else to look out for him.
In the evening, the Merediths are over for dinner, and no-one tries to be cheerful. They're friendly and respectful, all of them pensive as they think of those not among them, even little Bruce. The atmosphere, therefore, is quiet and almost gentle, and while it doesn't lessen the pain, it makes the day bearable, at least.
Still, when they go to bed on Christmas Day, they're all thankful that it is behind them. There will be other Christmases and they will be painful, but now, they know they can face them and come out on the other side. It's not a realisation that leaves them feeling glad, for gladness left them on a day in September, but it leaves them with a feeling of relief to have faced what they dreaded and to have put it behind them.
They do sincerely wish to put it behind them, so in an effort not to prolong the day any further, everyone retires to bed early. The twins, Rilla notices, both go to Nan's bedroom, knowing they can lean on each other during the night ahead. For her own part, Rilla nods at Shirley in passing, for they have mostly come to understand each other without many words in the preceding weeks, before she withdraws to her little attic bedroom.
The room is cool, cooler than the living room that was warmed by a merry fire, but Susan gave her a hot water bottle and some thick woollen socks to take with her and to ward off the chill. Neither hot water nor wool can achieve much against the chill in their hearts, but they help against the cold of an icy winter pressing against the windows from the outside. While the storms of the preceding days have settled, they left them with a heavy blanket of snow and as Rilla briefly glances out of the window in her room, the snow glistens white and mysterious in the moonlight.
It's a beguiling sight, and Rilla thinks that it is just a sight like this that once would have compelled Walter to write a poem, about the magic of snow on a silent winter night. She hopes that the moon shone down on him kindly in his last night on this earth, the night he wrote his last letter to her.
She is never far parted from this letter, though she knows it by heart, and as her thoughts turn to her brother, she reaches for it almost instinctively. Despite her care, the pages are beginning to look worn, his writing becoming faint along the creases where the letter was folded and re-folded too often to count. Now, Rilla unfolds it again, very carefully, as reads Walter's last letter once more, her lips silently forming the words as she does.
She reads his letter whenever she feels herself faltering or doubting. Walter's words gave her the strength to look forward, to set her sights on a goal and work to achieve it, and when that goal seems too hard to achieve, she falls back on his words to drive her forward again.
And you will tell your children of the Idea we fought and died for – teach them it must be lived for as well as died for, else the price paid for it will have been given for nought. This will be part of your work, Rilla.
Somewhere out there is her son, and somehow, she will find him. She doesn't yet know how to, or how long it will take, or what she has to do to achieve it, but one day, she will hold her son in her arms again, because in his last letter, Walter said so.
She clings to that thought. She has to.
Carefully folding the letter again, Rilla places it on her bedstand. In the light of a small lamp, she undresses and puts on her warm flannel nightclothes, before slipping under the covers, woollen socks on her feet and hot water bottle cradled to her stomach. Thanks to Susan's care, she isn't cold, but sleep won't come easily anyway. It never does, these days, and ever since she arrived at Ingleside, it has proved more elusive still.
She does, eventually, fall asleep, but it's not long before she jerks awake again, ripped from sleep by the nightmares she's come to expect. They're familiar to her, those nightmares, but nevertheless, she never gets used to them. Whenever she wakes from them, she's still frozen with shock and fear for a few moments, before reality sets in and she realises that she's safe.
Now, as always, it takes several seconds to even her breathing and calm her beating heart while she lies in the darkness of her room. She is alone and it's quiet around her, that peculiar silence of a sleeping house covered in a heavy layer of snow.
Her hot water bottle is still lukewarm, so she can't have been asleep for very long. However, experience tells her that she won't be able to go back to sleep right away, so she crawls out from under the blankets anyway, braving the chill that has spread through the room as night proceeded.
Wrapping a shawl around her shoulders, she walks quietly to the door. She doesn't want to wake up anyone else, but she feels some cookies and a glass of milk might help her settle down again, so she tiptoes down the stairs, cautious to avoid the steps that creak. The downstairs of the house lies dark, quiet and cool in front of her, most of the lingering heat from the fire having dissipated by now.
Quietly, Rilla continues her way towards the kitchen, but stops when she sees a ghostly figure standing in the doorway to the living room. For the fraction of a second, she thinks it really is a ghost, pale and dressed in white, but then she recognises her mother and chides herself for her own foolishness.
Of course, ghosts don't exist.
"Can't sleep either?" asks her mother with a wan little smile.
Rilla shakes her head. "I thought some milk and cookies might help." She pointes vaguely in direction of the kitchen.
"A sensible idea," commends her mother and, before Rilla knows what's happening, walks over to the kitchen herself.
Truth to be told, Rilla wasn't looking for company when she came downstairs, and she certainly wasn't looking to be alone with either of her parents. With everything unresolved standing between them, their connection remains fraught, and three months of absence didn't change that.
However, having expressed her desire for milk and cookies, she sees no way to turn around and leave now, without it being obvious that she's trying to avoid her mother. Fraught as matters might be, she's not looking to hurt her mother either, especially after Susan hinted earlier how she suffered in the weeks after Walter's death. Thus, not wanting to add to that, Rilla decides to follow, passing through the door that her mother holds open for her.
Inside the kitchen and with the door closed behind them, there's no immediate danger of waking anyone else, so where they whispered beforehand, they can now speak more freely, at least as far as the sound of their voices is concerned. Words, alas, don't come easier than they did before, so as Rilla fetches a jar of cookies from the pantry and Anne pours each of them a glass of milk, neither of them speaks.
The milk, like the house, is cold, but the cookies are just the right level of crumbly. They remind Rilla of her childhood, of a time when she would have given anything to share confidentialities with her mother over cookies and milk, just the two of them.
How times have changed, indeed.
"How are you enjoying Queen's?" her mother asks suddenly, interrupting Rilla's musings.
It seems as safe a subject as any, and it reminds Rilla of that evening in summer when it was her mother's support that swayed her father into allowing her to leave. She wonders, as she has done countless of times since, whether it was deliberate and what her mother could have meant by it.
"It's fine," she replies cautiously. "I'm studying a lot. It's interesting."
It's not, of course, actually very interesting. She is studying hard, that's no lie, but she didn't suddenly turn into an academically inclined person just because she's now attending Queen's. With the help of Shirley and Miss Oliver, she's keeping up with the workload, but she's not more interested in most subjects than she was before.
Looking at her mother and remembering what Susan said about her being confined to bed for weeks in autumn, she feels compelled to add, "That's why I haven't had time to come home on the weekends. I aim to graduate in one year instead of two, so I'm spending all my time studying and learning."
The look of surprise crossing her mother's face at this information stings, Rilla can't deny, but it doesn't come unexpected either. For her, of all the Ingleside children, to try and finish Queen's in a year instead of the customary two, would surprise anyone, she reasons.
"There's no need for you to rush your time there," her mother tells her, seemingly choosing her words with care. "We told your siblings to enjoy their time at Queen's and not to spend it just studying. We could afford to send them for two years, thankfully, and we can still, so the same is true for you. You don't have to rush to graduate in summer."
If only she knew!
Well aware that she can't share her true plans with her mother, Rilla just shrugs. "I already lost two years by not going when I was eligible to." It's not a good lie, especially considering that she never showed any interest in Queen's before this summer, but somehow, she doesn't think her mother will call her out on it.
Predictably, she doesn't, instead querying, "Which subjects are you enjoying the most?"
It's a more curious question than it ought to have been, and probably, most students would have answered it easily, but it leaves Rilla utterly stumped. To her, Queen's has been a means to an end from the beginning and she never once stopped to consider whether there was anything about it she enjoyed.
"Um…" she stalls as she tries to gather her wits. "I'm doing quite well at the Classics, actually. I haven't inherited your way with words to easily excel in English, or father's talent for the sciences, but I'm doing my best. Shirley is helping me and there's a teacher, Miss Oliver, who agreed to tutor me as well."
"How kind of her!" exclaims her mother, and Rilla can only nod, because there's no denying that Miss Oliver is incredibly kind to do what she does.
Most days after normal lessons are over, Rilla goes straight to the teacher's office, where Miss Oliver helps her go over that day's material again and explains everything that Rilla struggles with. Covering the material of two years in one, Rilla also takes more courses than the average student, so her time is well and truly taken up with her studies. That, at least, wasn't a lie, though she must admit that she probably wouldn't have come home for the weekends even if her workload had been lighter.
"My nemesis was always geometry," her mother relays with a self-deprecating little smile. "Try as I might, I never could make sense of it."
"Geometry is alright," Rilla replies, shrugging. "Anything that gives me rules to learn and apply is mostly fine."
She will never be a great scholar, she knows, and she certainly won't ever be a writer, but with a clear goal to work towards, she's become a diligent student. What she lacks in brilliance, she has to make up for in tenacity, so she does better in subjects that reward hard work over natural talent. If it can be learned by heart, she can master it through sheer stubbornness, so translating a text into Latin will always be a more achievable task for her than writing a clever, well-constructed essay or, God forbid, a poem or story in English.
"It's good to know that geometry didn't defeat everyone in the family," her mother states. It's meant to be a light-hearted comment, Rilla understands, and she sees her mother trying to raise a smile to go alongside it, but while her attempts are valiant, the smile never reaches her eyes. None of her smiles do, these days.
It reminds Rilla, once more, of what Susan said about her mother being laid up in pain and shock for weeks after news of Walter's death reached Ingleside. Even the following letter from his commanding officer, assuring them that he died quickly and painlessly, didn't do much to change that and, according to Susan, it was only after a trip to Avonlea at the beginning of the month that her mother returned to normal life, or what is deemed as such.
She doesn't know why Susan told her about it, but hearing it, Rilla couldn't help feel wretched, and she can't help it now either. She knows her father told Shirley they shouldn't come home, and she truly was too busy studying even on weekends for trips back to the Glen, but rational as those arguments are, they're not enough to counter the emotions brought forth by what Susan told her.
If one of them had been home, would it have been easier for their mother? If one child had remained close to her, would the loss of another have been just a little easier to bear?
Rilla doesn't know, and she knows she won't ask it. Perhaps, nothing could have lessened the pain, this most horrible of pains brought on by the loss of a child. She remembers their brief, painful conversation in summer, when her mother told her that losing Joy caused her the greatest pain in her life, and understands the loss of Walter only matches that pain.
Nothing hurts like the loss of a child.
Rilla, too, lost a son.
She knows it's not comparable, of course, because her mother raised and nurtured Walter for two decades, whereas she held her son for only minutes. Walter is also unmistakeably gone, whereas her own son is still alive somewhere, or at least she can hope that she is, for he was born healthy and there's no reason for him not to be fine. She can still harbour hope, therefore, to one day hold him again, whereas her mother will never again embrace Walter.
She knows how much it hurts her to be parted from her own son. She doesn't even want to begin to imagine what her mother must feel like.
It's not the same, she knows, and yet, in a way, both she and her mother lost a son. It's not the same, yet it strikes something within Rilla and forges a fragile connection to her mother that wasn't there before, created by a pain that is not shared, but somehow, still mutual.
It doesn't erase what was, and it won't make things easy going forward, but looking at her mother now, Rilla isn't, for the first time in months, overcome by feelings of resentment and betrayal and doubt. Instead, despite everything that happened and all the questions that remain unanswered, she feels for her mother, a woman who lost two children and yet still tries to smile to comfort one of the children who remain.
"Wait here, please," Rilla asks, getting to her feet.
She can feel her mother's eyes on her back as she hurries from the kitchen. Her behaviour, she knows, must be confusing, but instinct made her decision for her, and now that the decision is made, it wants following through.
Quietly, Rilla makes her way upstairs, taking care to avoid the creaking steps and to open the door to her room without any noise. Inside, it is dark except for the light of the moon, but Rilla knows her way around the room blindly. Within moments, she's walking back downstairs, quickly but quietly, because the others in the house deserve sleep and she wants none of them present for this either.
Re-entering the kitchen, she finds her mother where she left her, sitting at the kitchen table, two half-drunk glasses of milk and a mostly full jar of cookies in front of her.
"Rilla…?" she asks, a look of confusion on her face.
Rilla doesn't answer. Instead, very carefully, she places the letter on the table. Walter's final letter.
Of course, her mother recognises the handwriting immediately. She gasps quietly and raises a hand to her chest. "Is this…?"
"He wrote it on the night before…" Rilla swallows, "before."
The letter wasn't intended for their mother, at least not directly so. It was addressed to Rilla and, in some way, also to Una Meredith. She will make a copy for Una, Rilla resolves, and a copy for herself, but it feels only right to give the letter itself to her mother now, after she herself had it to comfort her for nearly three months.
It is, she thinks, why she held on to the letter. She considered giving it to Una, who has lost more than the world will ever know, but something made her hold back. She thought it was selfishness, initially, but now she realises that she held on to the letter for this very moment, for this very purpose.
There is no pain like the loss of a child.
"I want you to have it," she tells her mother, her voice hoarse. "I know every word anyway. The words have brought me… comfort and… resolve, I think. It's… he's there, in that letter. You'll see that he is. Even then, he knew what to say."
There's a moment of silence as they look at each other, mother and daughter, and for the first time in too long, Rilla thinks she understands her mother and, perhaps, her mother her.
There's no pain like the loss of a child.
Slowly, her mother reaches out, her fingers touching the letter gingerly, almost warily. But when she looks up and smiles, the smile reaches her eyes.
To Anonymous:
You know what's funny? "Sweet and sorrowful" are among the last attributes I arrive at when thinking of canon Rilla. Sweet, she might be at times, but when has Rilla ever been sorrowful? That's Una all the way, but it's not Rilla. Canon gives her a lot more nuances than that, so why not allow her to have them? Why reduce her to being a damsel-in-distress who eternally relies on others to save her? In canon, among other things, she's resourceful, she's a good planner, she's hands-on, and she reliably rises to the occasion, even when she has to surpass herself. All those are good attributes to have, and they mean she's far more than a passive player in her own story who needs help to accomplish anything. Like everyone, she needs support at times, but to have her stand by uselessly while her cleverer siblings shine by solving all her problems wouldn't make for a good story, I think.
Also, where did you get the idea that she was "brilliantest smartest girl in the world" or that she will become "a brilliant lawyer"? No-one ever said so. In fact, she herself stresses that she's decidedly not brilliant and never will be. Personally, I refuse to believe that someone has to be brilliant by nature to accomplish anything. (In fact, most lawyers I know are perfectly normal people.) Hard work goes a long way and Rilla is capable of working hard. If she means to succeed at college, she absolutely has to put in the work, precisely because it won't come easily to her, which I find to be by far the more interesting narrative. It's true, she isn't naturally ambitious and she isn't as clever as her sisters, but she's faced with a challenge to master and she decided to rise to it. That, I think, is one of the very traits that make Rilla into what she is in canon, and it's one of the traits that will be important for her in this story, too.
And while we're speaking of canon... where in canon does it ever say that Faith is "highly ambitious" or even just academically inclined? Fanfics tend to portray her as such, but neither RV nor RoI do. If we're talking canon characterisation, we ought to do so for all characters, don't you think?
To Joanna:
Your review touches upon something very important, and that's how our experiences shape us. In some ways, we become the people we are because of all the paths not taken, for if we had just chosen one different path, we would inevitably be changed in some way. That's not to say outside influence can turn someone into an entirely different person, but different experiences bring different character traits to the surface, so depending on what someone lived through, these experiences will cause them to act in a certain way.
For Rilla, I think it's important to consider the path she took to get here. Is she more subdued, more serious, less flighty than she was in canon? Absolutely, because everything else would be unrealistic. As you point out, she saw a lot of injustice and she had a lot of injustice happen to her. Put plainly, she had to navigate more than one deeply traumatising experience, so there's just no way this doesn't shape and influence her. After everything that happened to her, if she was still the same sweet, silly girl she was at the beginning of RoI, that would be ridiculous. Even in canon, the war years change her quite a bit, though for some reason, a lot of people don't really give her credit for the way she matures during the course of the book, instead picturing her forever as the pre-war girl whose life has never been touched by anything bad.
Similarly, motivations are also important when considering decisions and behaviour. As you point out, this Rilla is driven by different motivations than canon Rilla was. She has a son and she wants to get him back - that's so far removed as the situation was for canon Rilla that it shouldn't be any wonder that they don't always act in the same way. Their motives and goals are different, so they make different decisions based on different priorities. They're still the same person with the same core traits, but these manifest differently.
All of which is to say that your review voiced very many of my own thoughts that went into writing this story and portraying this character, which I'm very pleased about =). This Rilla developed differently from canon Rilla because their stories are different, even though they still share many core strengths and weaknesses. For this Rilla, the path she's taken now leads her into a new direction, and while I agree it's not one that canon Rilla ever would have entertained, I feel and hope that in this story, it makes sense.
As for how to become a lawyer back then, I believe it wasn't as well-regulated as it's today, so there might have been different paths. Clara Brett Martin got a BA in mathematics before going on to law school, which included articling at a law firm. Upon graduating, she was called to the bar and received a LL.B. I felt it was a safe course for Rilla to model her own path on, though that's not to say that there weren't other, more practically-minded ways to become a lawyer back then.
I must admit I don't know much about the sons of LMM, so it was very interesting to read how they might have influenced her portrayal of her characters. The theory of her lost second son influencing her writing of Shirley is a bittersweet and beautiful one. Thanks for sharing it with me and thanks also for pointing me in direction of 'Conviction', which I hope to check out presently =).
To Anne Shirley Blythe:
Thank you for your review! And you're welcome for Shirley ;). He's really rising to the occasion by quietly supporting Rilla without demanding explanations, isn't he? I see Shirley as a character who sees and understands a lot, and then tries to help others as best as he can, in an nonintrusive and careful way. Anything more blunt might have made Rilla balk, but this is a kind of support she can accept, so Shirley is really the perfect person to be at her side right now.
Following the path set out in front of her, it will take Rilla eight years to take a lawyer, but you know what they say about the best laid plans. It's the plan now for her to study law and get her son back that way, but that doesn't mean it will actually end up playing out that way, so those eight years might not come true at all.
Anne and Gilbert really are the sticking points of this story, it seems ;). Alas, nothing is ever set in stone, and I hope this chapter succeeds in showing some progress in the relationship of Anne and Rilla. Certainly, I'd love to hear your opinion on it!