Hello dear readers and an official, belated Happy New Year!
This chapter closes what I have often referred to as the 'Act One' of this story. But of course, an end is only another form of a beginning…
A special thank you to the lovely reviewers of my recent Halloween and Christmas-themed community challenge one-shots, and thanks to all for your continued interest and support. I hope this and all the stories on the site bring you engagement, entertainment, enjoyment and a little much-needed escapism this year x
Love
MrsVonTrapp x
Chapter Seventeen
'Of identity beyond the grave'
David sprinted as fast as he dared down into Rainbow Valley, another improbable name for a local landmark now likely ruined for him forever. He had persuaded his father and Tessa to stay up at the house, in the event that his hunch was wrong and Anne eventually returned, and if he was right, then at least he could remain with her and better direct them to assist if she needed help.
Help. He had tried to help her, yesterday, and had become unstuck at every turn. And yet he would profess a desire to become a healer whilst evidently having no clue how to actually heal. Perhaps this was the universe telling him to take a job in a lab somewhere, far away from real human suffering.
From… her suffering.
He pushed on, an unlikely echo of his steps all those weeks ago, cutting through the maple grove, now a shadowy expanse of midnight-dark canopy above and tangled growth below, remembering too well the time he had Keats in his head and gripped by an ennui that had led him on his original path of no return, to find a dryad under his tree, half dream and, perhaps, half wish fulfillment.
Predestined, as Anne would have it.
He burst through into the clearing, ghostly in the pale moonlight in every sense, to the lone and lonely oak he had long claimed for his own and that now would forever be associated with her.
She wasn't here.
He pulled up short, breathing heavily both through fear and exertion. Jesus Christ Almighty, she wasn't here. He'd been so certain he would find her that he took precious moments just processing the realisation, the bewildering panic rising in his chest, seizing him by the throat. If she wasn't here, then she could be anywhere and he had failed yet again.
He stumbled over to the tree, large hands gripping it as if he might shake some answers out of it, circling to see the old initials that had so intrigued her, wishing he could just hear her voice again, teasing out his moniker, her lovely face smiling up at him in the sun.
He kicked something at the base of the tree, almost crushing it beneath his big feet, leaning over to examine a large clump of fresh-plucked plants, almost an improbable posy, resting there as if a calling card. Not flowers, though… the fragrant, needle-like leaves, familiar to him from the walled garden at Ingleside but largely ignored, becoming an unlikely talisman. He bent over the offering, inhaled.
Rosemary.
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance… *
He choked on the scent of them, coughed, cried out her name.
"Anne!"
"ANNE!"
She wasn't here now, but she had been. He turned, seeking any movement, shouted out again into the void.
Where the Hell was she?
He would have seen or heard her if she had doubled back, so it only meant that she had continued forward.
Looking forward, not back.
He took a shuddering gasp. Forward was the Glen Pond. He himself had told her about it, the very day he had met her.
The rosemary in one hand and the torch in the other, he raced on, the shimmering eye of the water coming into view, but everything was eerily silent and still, and so damned dark. He took a moment, flashing the torch across the expanse, heart pounding in fear. Everything in him urged that she wasn't here, either, to push on, to keep climbing… up the long hill, through more woods and arriving in sight of the Old Manse, once the ancestral home, or so it had seemed, of many generations of Merediths.
There was more light here, thankfully; a dull halo reaching out from the road to his left, coupled with the dim night lights of the old Presbyterian and Methodist churches, and straddling them the even older graveyard, ancient tombstones once the sight of ill-conceived Halloween frolics with Megan, Max and Maddie and even, so his father had divulged, with he, his mother and Uncle Mike. But now all was unnervingly still, and he searched the surrounds in despair, until… until…
A light, zig-zagging its way through the markers in the old cemetery.
"Anne!"
His heart almost broke through his ribcage as he burst towards her, eyes trained on that pale beacon so as to not lose sight of her. She did not stop, but instead stumbled about the uneven, overrun paths, swinging the torch wildly, sobbing quietly to herself, her free hand trailing a messy bouquet of flowers and what looked like more rosemary. She did not acknowledge him until he lay a hand on her arm, almost sagging bodily in relief.
"Thank God, Anne!" he could barely gasp the words. "What are you doing here?"
"I can't find them!" she wailed, still moving haphazardly. "David, help me find them!"
"Anne, damn it, slow down! I've been combing the whole of the bloody Valley for you! We were scared to death for you! What the hell is going on?"
"Where are they?" she turned around again in desperation.
"Who are you talking about? Jesus, Anne, it's four in the morning by now!"
"Them!" she wept brokenly. "Anne and Gilbert and… Joy."
Oh, God…
He felt his whole being collapse at her words. God damn, not again!
"Anne, you know it's David with you, right, sweetheart?" he attempted to place a reassuring arm around her. "Why don't we just come away back to Ingleside and –"
"Of course I know you're David! I'm not crazy, you know!"
"Anne, no one said you were!"
"Didn't they?" she threw off his arm, turning on him with a scathing look, all blazing eyes and bedraggled hair. "Just let me do this one thing, David, and then I'll gladly go back!"
"Anne, you haven't been well today…" he pleaded. "Please listen to me!"
"I've done more than enough listening, you damned Judas!"
He quailed, stopping in his tracks.
"Anne…" he swallowed painfully, computing a terrible realization. "Wh-what did you overhear?"
She turned back to him with a frightening composure, looking deeply into his eyes, her own blistering with his betrayal.
"Everything."
Although bone-tired, something earlier that evening made Anne fight sleep, instead hugging her sore stomach and creeping her way out of the bedroom and along the upper floor of Ingleside, pausing at the quaint window on the landing with a broad, deep seat ** before moving to crouch in the long shadows above the stairs, watching as her mother, having wished her goodnight, joined Rob and David down in the lounge. She was silent and surreptitious as a cat, having had too many years as a girl practicing her clandestine surveillance.
She was utterly depleted in body and mind from the afternoon, both physically exhausted and heartsore over events that had overtaken her. She couldn't keep anything at bay, most especially that haunting old reality, those sharp stabs of pain, of a birth revisited, and the aching aftermath of a single day, dawn to dusk, encompassing both such joy – and her actual Joy – and utter devastation.
And now… another sort of reality.
Her mother was regrettably upset, and exacting in her questions to David, and it was disconcerting to see genial, easygoing Rob in lawyer mode alongside her. But Anne's trust in David was absolute. He had promised her he wouldn't discuss the revelations from today. The relief on his face back at the hospital when she had dismissed her own truth as an emotionally laden fiction had hurt almost as much as the trauma of reliving the birth and devastating passing of Joy.
But she had seen, all too well, that he just wasn't there, yet. That he was not yet ready to unpack that encounter in the bedroom of the House of Dreams… that he couldn't believe what he was still compelled to implicitly deny. That she couldn't ask him to be more than he was, at the moment.
So she had to make a decision… to accept this and fall back into how things had been, hugging their precious secret to herself again. That she would accept her own role as being emotional and overwrought, in order to make the peace. That she would deny herself in order not to lose him. That she would enact any number of deep breathing exercises to keep her so-called anxiety at bay and placate her mother.
And then…
She watched and heard a terrible play enacted, where the supposed hero fell at the very first hurdle…
Her mother dredging up their old family grief in the most shocking way…
Anne had been protected from the worst of the stories about her father over the years, but nothing had saved her from years of internet deep dives into the stories about bad-boy genius Alex Ford, the enfant terrible of the Toronto theatre scene, the popular but capricious adapter and director of The Life-book of Captain Jim and its Gemini-award winning accompanying documentary on the creation of the play and retrospective on Captain Jim and his fellow former seafarers. There was an entire shelf back in her father's old office still dedicated to the multiple Dora Awards the adaptation had generated, including Best Play, he as Best Director and one for her mother as Best Actress… there had been the new forward her father had written for the reissue of the Life-book… there had obviously been publicity over the saving of the old captain's beloved lighthouse…
… but there had also been the stories of the drink… the drugs… the women…
Anne had heard all this before, but never what her mother was now saying… of delusions. Of psychotic breaks. Of mental illness. Of the drink and the drugs and the women perhaps masking an even deeper problem… bone-deep, blood-deep, gene-deep, with the possibility of passing, so her tortured mother was brokenly suggesting, from her father to her.
Anne had stuffed her fist into her mouth so she wouldn't shout out in pain and protest. Her father had not been mentally unbalanced, and neither was she.
That hardly mattered now, of course, for there was David, willfully, recklessly spilling secrets in the guise of love and care and what was best for her. Not what happened up in that bedroom at the House of Dreams, where he on the other side of that kiss had been equally culpable, but certainly everything else. More than enough to have her mother openly sobbing.
While her mother cried and Rob comforted and David appeared to be attacking his hair by the roots, Anne herself grew suddenly and curiously calm.
She inched back down the hall, silently opened and closed doors, quickly scanning bedrooms she had once had an intimate knowledge of, and finally came to find what she needed.
Captain Jim had had his own light, and now so did she.
Anne now began to stalk away from David, with a self-righteous head toss, as the coldness of his unwilling answers earlier that night washed over him like the mist stealing up from the gulf during winter. In that dread moment he knew their enchanted summer had ended, in every possible respect.
"Anne… I'm sorry. More than you will ever know! Maybe if you just come back with me to Ingleside we can all sit down and talk about –"
" - I'm done with talking, David! Most of all with you!"
"Anne, your mother is worried out of her mind!"
"Great choice of words! And meanwhile you think I've lost mine!"
"Well, yes, Anne, running away in the dead of night through the Valley to the damned cemetery is exactly the way to disprove that point!"
"I came tonight because I knew none of you would let me come in the morning!" she shrilled.
"Why the Hell would you be wanting to come at all? Leave the dead be, Anne, for Christ's sake!"
"Oh, the irony!" she laughed bitterly.
"Please say that's not a reference to your precious Anne and Gilbert!"
"Actually, I'm thinking more immediate than that! I would have loved to put some roses on their graves just now but what a pity I couldn't find any!"
He paled in the pale light, hazel eyes sparking with pain and frustration.
"That is a low blow, Anne," he hissed.
"Any lower than needing an exorcist?" she spat.
White to the lips, he wrenched his phone from his pocket.
"I'm calling Dad and your Mom," he informed icily.
"Oh that's great, David! Just sell me out to them again!"
"Anne, you're sick. I care for you and would take your part in anything, but I've also got to follow my conscience on this!"
She brandished her broken bouquet to the heavens.
"Sounding like Dr Gilbert Blythe more and more every day!"
He spoke into his phone hurriedly, as she watched on, a live wire of emotion and disappointment. When he ended the conversation, his eyes turned back to hers, begging their own forgiveness.
"Anne, please…" he held out his large, beloved Blythe hand, still holding fast to his torch and his own clump of bedraggled offerings in the other.
"Where. Are. They?" she asked stubbornly once again through gritted teeth, tears streaming.
"Anne, if I knew I would tell you. I'd go to their graves with you myself! But I'm pretty sure they're not here. It's the Methodist graveyard for a start, and the family were Presbyterian…"
She looked at him, uncomprehendingly.
"And anyway, no one's been buried here or in the newer cemetery out the front for, God, eighty years or more!"
"They're… not here?" her body slumped to his words.
"If they're anywhere," he gabbled, desperate to give her something, "I think they'd be buried up at the new lawn cemetery, between here and Lowbridge," he sighed. "That's what everyone uses now, probably since the 1950's. They may have… that is, they may have… had Joy interred with them there."
She took precious moments to process this, before collapsing to the ground in exhausted agony, loudly crying wrenching tears.
"Anne… oh, God, Anne…" he seized her in his arms, holding tightly. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry for all of this! Anne, please don't cry! It breaks me! I love you!"
She looked up through a veil of tears into his anguished face.
"You… love me?"
"Yes!"
"Here? Now?"
"Yes!"
She stared into his eyes for several beats.
"But not enough to believe me."
Her words sounded as a death knell, backgrounded by a car on the lone road behind them they could hear approaching, at speed.
"Here comes the cavalry," she shrugged out of his arms, standing slowly, rubbing her tearstained cheeks with her hand after having thrown down her posy in disgust.
"Anne…" he stood by her helplessly. "This will all be better in the morning. When… everyone… has a clearer head. I promise you!"
"You promised other things too, David…" she protested sadly. "You sang them to me."
"Pardon?" his eyes searched hers, brows angling in confusion.
"Let me be the place that you hide…" she repeated, as a reedy, otherworldly quiver.
His intake of breath was sharp, but he set his jaw stubbornly, warding off his own frayed emotions. And then there was no time for anything else, with Tessa calling out for them from the church carpark, and their respective parents yet again rushing towards them.
Anne said nothing on the short ride back to Ingleside, excepting her quiet, defeated apologies for worrying everyone so. She took the stairs back up to bed without a backward glance, leaving Tessa with tears and questions that David was again forced to answer.
Tessa and his dad remained awake and downstairs to greet the dawn, perhaps no longer trusting Anne to remain in the house without physically barring further exit, whilst David found absolutely no refuge in his room with Anne just down the hall, hating him. As the birds sang out on another bright Glen morning, her last, his Grandpa James arrived again, as unspoken reinforcement, whilst his father drove Tessa back to the hotel to collect their things.
David paced up and down in pained indecision before quietly shuffling from his room to knock on a certain door, convinced it would either remain barred to him or that Anne might open it only to then have the satisfaction of slamming it in his face.
Instead, she called out to enter, and he found her showered, calm and coiffed, her bright coppery auburn hair in a long plait thrown over one shoulder, in an old-fashioned style he found sweetly appealing and curiously sensual. For want of any change of clothes, her jade dress now dirty and soiled from the previous day, having been through so much at the summer house, the hospital, back at Ingleside and then worn on her perilous passage through the valley to the cemetery, she had found and donned one of his button down shirts, and this image of her was easily set to torment him for the next decade or so.
They were all so very past the need to safeguard anyone's reputation and so he closed the door firmly behind them, in a move she could not fail to note now.
"Anne…" he began in a low-voiced rush, lest she decide, after all, to throw him out, "I don't know what your mom has told you about arrangements today, but you're not leaving on the afternoon ferry. Tessa arranged to have your Grandad fly out and he's going to be arriving at the airport out of town around 10 am… in about two hours."
Anne processed this news with a stilled, stricken face. "And so it begins…" she whispered.
"What does?"
"Nothing. Are you playing double agent, now?"
"Anne…" his lean face was pained and his look intense as he stepped closer to her standing stiff sentinel by the window. "I don't know what to think about anything that happened yesterday, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let one day spoil all our weeks together. And I am not going to let some obsession with the past ruin our future!"
"We still have a future?" she challenged, wavering slightly, eyes shadowed and dark.
"I think that we do, but you are the one with the casting vote, here."
She looked so mournful at that it took all his Blythe self-control not to wrap his arms around her and draw her close, resting her head against his beleaguered heart.
"Anne, despite what you think of me at this moment and despite all that's happened, I still mean every word of those song lyrics. I'll have you run away with me this second. Or I'll move to Toronto. I don't care where I am or what I do anymore! As long as I'm with you!"
She gaped at him, his words obviously a surprise and his renewed vow completely unexpected.
"But you said that I was sick! You said that I might be suffering some form of psychosis!"
He shook his head vehemently. "I regret implying that you were sick, Anne, apart from physically. And I never said… psychosis… except in trying to clarify what points Tessa was raising, not me! And I'm sorry again for my responses yesterday. I should… I should have heard you out properly and not been so dismissive. If you want to believe in past lives - if you want to believe I was Genghis Khan – then that's your right. I don't mind. People believe in aliens, for God's sake."
That elicited the smallest of smiles.
"To be fair, you are far better looking than Genghis Khan, and I'm sure a lot less marauding."
He spluttered a desperate laugh.
"We can still do this, Anne, like we planned. Nothing has to change."
Her response was halting.
"But everything already has! David, how can I ever trust you again?"
She looked like a broken toy he had deliberately stepped on, and his eyes burned with the effort to keep himself in check and not add further hurt or heartache.
"Anne, nothing I say will be able to convince you of that. It's something you'll have to feel yourself. Maybe… in time…" he shrugged, defeated, sighing as he sat on the edge of the bed.
He could have pleaded any number of points… how he had proven himself trustworthy over and over again … how he had saved her in the lake, and saved her from herself in his bedroom at the guest house in Avonlea. How he had come rushing through the dark of the valley to find her. How she remembered his panic and anguish on the edge of her consciousness as she relived the birth and death of Joy at the House of Dreams… and how he had cradled her in his strong arms, carrying her out again as if the most precious cargo.
But he didn't advocate for himself at all, and in that moment she saw him so clearly… the pride but also the goodness in him… the strength as well as the vulnerability… the earnest seriousness and the wry humour… the man he was becoming and the man, a century and a half ago, he had been.
She crossed over to him and leant at his feet as he looked to her, astonished, rapidly blinking the laser-bright hazel eyes she had so quickly grown to love and look towards to guide her.
"I think… I could trust you with my life, David," she whispered. Both of them… came the errant thought, unbidden. "But maybe there are other things in play, now."
He drew her up to sit beside him, his dark brows drawn together in question.
"What if…" Anne hesitated, swallowing hard. "What if my mom is right, and I do have some form of mental illness? All that stuff about my dad, David! That was all completely new information to me! All she ever said about him in that way was that he was a bit highly strung at times, a bit of a stress head, like a lot of creative people are. I always knew about the substance abuse and everything but she never said anything about those other things! Or Grandad! I mean, at least they kept that part out of the papers, but…"
Her next words were muffled by his shirtfront, as he did indeed crush her to him, and a moment later her own arms came around his waist, tightly, and she began to sob in a way that threatened to unravel him.
"Anne…" he crooned, laying his cheek against her crown, "Anne, darling… you can't start down that track. You don't know the full story about your dad yet. And no one is saying any of this relates to you. That's unfounded and unfair. Regardless, there's no stigma to any of that anymore, anyway. Illness is illness no matter what the form, it's just treated with its own particular medication and therapies, like anything else."
He waited until she had cried it out, thinking of all the sorrows he wished he could save her from… this sudden yearning to safeguard her, to shut everything out of (her) life but happiness and pleasure… ***
"Anne…" he ventured. "We don't have very much time… and there's something I want to give to you. I actually planned to give it to you yesterday, but…"
As she dried her eyes, he reached into his faithful cargo shorts, pulling out the small box that had been in his pocket so long it had almost built a home for itself in there. It was white and velvet lined, all the better to showcase the delicate pendant inside.
"I saw this and just, instantly, thought of you…" his tanned cheeks wore the slightest endearing flush.
"Is it… a goodbye gift?" she asked tremulously.
"I guess so," his cheeks brightened, further, "but it's only a goodbye for now, of course. Pretty soon I'll be – "
"David –" her hand enclosed around the box, preventing him from opening it for her, "I know down to my marrow that this is gorgeous and I'll adore it, and thank you so much for it, but I don't want a goodbye gift from you, because I don't want this to be goodbye."
"Anne," he frowned. "You know that's not going to happen!"
"That's just it – we don't know. We can make all the plans and promises under the sun, but we don't know what's around the next corner, that bend in the road people talk about."
"Anne, we've had enough bends this past day. I'm looking forward to a straight, clear path that I can see from here to the horizon. A straight path from Ingleside right to your door in Toronto."
His hazel eyes were so steady and determined, she wished with everything in her she could believe in their loving intensity.
"David, I'm very afraid that what happened yesterday will… affect us. You don't know how hard my dad's death was for Mom. The publicity… the circumstances… she completely withdrew from everything, and I became her everything. If she thinks for a moment that something that troubled my dad could be troubling me, she won't stop until she… until she… quashes it. She may look like a marshmallow on the outside, but underneath she's steel."
"I'm beginning to see that…" he flashed a crooked smile. "And here you are the exact opposite. All steel and reinforced by iron prickles on the outside, and on the inside, the softest, most delectable marshmallow."
"Delectable?" she gave a shy, burning-faced smile.
"Irresistible…" he claimed throatily.
Their kiss was a hovering, tender thing of ache and hurt and hope, seasoned with the flavour of last times. David could feel Anne's tears on his cheek and wondered how he was holding back his own.
"Davy-boy!" an impressive bellow sounded from downstairs. "Finish up with your girl and look lively, your dad and Anne's mother are back!"
They tore apart at the unexpected summons, laughing despite themselves.
"Davy-boy?" Anne repeated, delighted.
"My Grandpa James, everyone," David flushed and rolled his eyes. "Obviously channelling more of sailor-daddy Wally Blythe than anyone ever realised."
The comic moment allowed them to compose themselves, and again David tried to have her accept his gift.
"Save it for me, David," she gave a loving, twisted smile. "I will accept it gladly if you still feel the same in a few months. But if there ever is a… bend in the road… for you… then if you send it, I know it really will mean goodbye."
"Oh, God, Anne…" he despaired. "How can I bear to let you go?"
She brushed away new tears. "How can I bear to leave?"
"Anne!" Tessa called up, breaking the moment in every respect. They both darted, suddenly panicked, for the door. "Anne darling - are you awake?"
She opened the door, hollering impressively down the hall.
"Just out of the shower, Mom!" she paused to huff aggrievedly. "Anon, good nurse!" **** she grumbled, almost to herself, shutting it again.
He chuckled sadly, roguish eyes twinkling.
"There is a definite vibe about our situation, Anne," he reached out to trace his knuckles softly down her cheek.
She looked to him, trying to memorize his smile and the lights in his eyes for later.
"I was wrong, you know, about our parents," he clarified. "Dad and Tessa were never Romeo and Juliet. We were."
He kissed her again, feather-light, before darting back to his room, leaving her with the romance of his assertion, perhaps forgetting, in the moment, their unfortunate end.
Everything happened regrettably fast, then, like a train hurtling towards its inevitable destination. Dressed and ready, they forwent breakfast and instead his dad packed a haphazard collection of drinks and snacks for their guests' journey. Anne had repacked the bags Tessa had brought back and tripped downstairs in that fetching long braid and a defiantly cheery top with that swirly, multicolored gypsy-like skirt she wore under the oak, the first time he met her; a message and statement all in one. He couldn't gift her his pendant – yet - but he did gift her his grin at this, which she accepted with a knowing smile. She is all eyes; disconcertingly, Tessa's eyes are always on Anne, when they are not darting back to him with a new if reluctant wariness he did not want to pause to interpret.
They were bundled, deliberately, into separate cars; Rob took Tessa and Anne whilst David, frowningly, rode shotgun with his Grandpa, and their parents' machinations would have been insulting if not so amusingly obvious. There is nothing amusing about the reality of the windswept airport, however, nor the expensive-looking light aircraft already waiting astride the runway.
Thomas Carlyle Ford was tall, fair, rangy and handsome as his father Gil Ford was reputed to be, as keen and sprightly as anyone in their seventies had any right to be, and his reunion with Anne and Tessa came almost secondary to the hearty bear hug shared between he and James Blythe, with much back slapping and exclamations of how ridiculously long it had been. He saved a firm handshake for David and Rob, smiling and affable, exchanging easy pleasantries as he had done every day of his life, as the scion of the famous, fabulous Fords, with their businesses and their connections and their eye-watering wealth. It's back into this privileged embrace he must relinquish Anne; it became suddenly, startlingly clear to David that if anyone needed to worry about any bends in the road it was him in relation to her.
David averted his eyes from his father's final, whispered moments with Tessa, as his Grandpa met the co pilot and helped Tom Ford stow their luggage, and then they settled back on Anne.
"Too late to make a run for it?" he joked, badly.
Her composure was wavering ... and he was not helping. He grabbed helplessly for her hand.
"Call or text me, Anne. Any time. Or Messenger… FaceTime… email… carrier pigeon… whatever. I am always here for you. We can lock in some plans after my results and I know better what the hell I'm doing this year."
She nodded helplessly, trying to rally herself.
"Good luck with everything, Gerald David Blythe," she began in a breathless gush. "With the MCAT and med school offers and all of it. And take care of my tree."
He spluttered a pained laugh, reaching to hug her close. "And you take care of yourself, Anne Alexandra Ford, dryad and fourth cousin."
There were whispered I love yous into her hair and his chest, and then he had to let her go, as his Dad gave her his own embrace, full of feeling, and Tessa, eyes swimming, kissed him fondly on the cheek and wished him well.
Thomas C Ford gave them all a cheery wave and settled himself into the cockpit, as Grandpa James stepped back to join them and the co pilot ushered Anne and Tessa up into their flying chariot.
He is certain it is Anne's hand at the small window, resting there, and he raised his own… and palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss… *****
His heart bounded, leapt, tried to chase after her down the runway, as he was anchored by his Grandpa's hand on his shoulder, having positioned himself between his sad and silent son and grandson.
Airborne, the plane climbed, then dipped to the left, as in salute, before reaching higher and higher still, becoming one with the sky.
Ingleside is an echo chamber of memories, and so David seeks escape through any ways and means, as he lives in torturous limbo with Anne gone and his MCAT results due within the week.
He meets Max for a drink in town; walks the shorefront; dips down to the beach to find the dunes he and Anne dived into as if waves, kissing passionately and talking hierarchies of wants and needs.
He drives out to the lighthouse at Four Winds; contemplates the sea as he walks the circumference of the light; looks back with daggered glance high up the red sandstone bluff past the aged care home, to the clam shell dwelling thankfully obscured from sight.
He takes himself off with a heavy heart to the Valley; seeks their tree; carves her initials above his own, encased in a heart, and takes a photo for her that he sends to her eager, loving text in reply.
Apart from brief notes, communication has been sporadic, and he has not yet talked to her. His father has not received any return calls from Tessa, either, apart from the briefest message to say they had arrived back safely, but it has only been three days, and they obviously need time to settle in.
That evening, he is home alone with Netflix and his beer, as his father comes through the door, having decided he had better check in with his junior partner at the law practice, both so neglected by him these past weeks. Rob totes a stack of legal folders and his overlooked mail, sitting down at the dining room table to sort things and coming across a large envelope stiffened by cardboard so as to protect its precious contents.
"Hey son," he calls. "The Avonlea Historical Society finally got back to me!"
From the couch, David rolls his eyes.
"It's only taken them, what, a month since you first called them?"
"Three and a half weeks. And be kind. They are a small country outfit staffed by volunteers, as most of these places are. And it has been the summer."
"If you say so, Dad."
In truth, David can hardly think of Anne in Avonlea any less painfully than he can remember her here in the Glen. The panicked drive out to rescue her from the lake; the fraught conversation in that airless little attic room; and then the breathless magic of their night together, even if their amour was limited, on that occasion, to Shakespeare and three buttons.
His father is shuffling papers behind him, making indeterminate noises of interest, before a murmured exclamation of amazement.
"David, you'd better come and look at these."
By mutual decree since they have left, he and his father have not discussed the visit to the House of Dreams or its aftermath, Anne's dash to the cemetery or that horrible grilling over Anne's thoughts on Anne and Gilbert Blythe or anyone else. He is slightly annoyed with his father for taking Tessa's side that evening, thus pitting him against Anne, but it is not an easy thing to quantify, let alone express. But as David looks over his father's shoulder at half a dozen or so enlarged and reprinted black and white photos, laid before them on the table with a stark, uncompromising beauty, all the confusion and shock of those twenty four hours comes back to him like a slap across the face.
"Can… can Anne have seen any of these?" his question seems strangled even to his own ears.
"I can't know how, son. I had to put in a paid special request, and then they had to search the archives for them."
David sits uneasily and scans the photos one by one. There is the main street of Avonlea, a century or more ago, with its post office and general store… a photo of a farm surrounded by orchards identified as belonging to Blythes… and a succession of class photos from Avonlea School from 1876 to 1882, beginning with an easily identifiable girl, pale complexioned and in pinafore and long plaits, growing in age and beauty before his eyes, until such time as she is not seated, but has returned from her studies to stand proudly beside the pupils, many of whom had once been peers.
Anne. Anne but not Anne. The resemblance is breathtaking.
And standing tall in the back in most photos, with dark curly hair and impish grin, always positioning himself as close as possible to a particular girl, is David looking at Gilbert Blythe, and seeing, indisputably, his younger self.
Chapter Notes
This chapter title also refers to the poem referenced in the previous chapters from Walt Whitman 'Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances' in Leaves of Grass (1892) Book V Calamus:
'I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond the grave'
*Ophelia in William Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act 4 Sc 5)
**Anne of Ingleside Ch 2
***Anne of the Island Ch 6 'In the Park'
****Anon, good nurse is of course a Romeo and Juliet reference, specifically the balcony scene (Act 2 Sc 2)
*****Romeo and Juliet (Act 1 Sc 5) and itself an earlier call back to Ch 11 of this story 😊
Obviously, regarding the Avonlea School photos, Anne wasn't there the entire span of years identified, as she spent one year up at Queen's College.
And some correspondence…
A: Ch 16, (Nov 23rd): Dear A, thank you for your interesting and enlightened questions and responses! I hope you can see how fortuitous was your musing about where Anne and Gilbert are buried, given this latest chapter! I am determining as yet that David genuinely doesn't know, and it may take his father to set him straight. Thank you for seeing that David did try regarding Anne's revelations. I was very glad with this latest chapter to have him concede a little – as Anne felt she had to do – but it is mostly to avoid more unpleasantness, and not because he as yet believes or has tapped into any of his own much more subtle feelings. You can be assured that quite a way down the track (in chapters I've already written!) there are some shocks for him when the past and the present align… And yes, the links to Anne and otherworldly happenings definitely go back through her side of the family all the way to John Selwyn, and poor Walter and his premonitions! He will in the future have a moment in this story, too. Thank you so much for reading and reviewing!
Guest of Ch 16, (Nov 24th): Oh, I was such a meanie with this extended wait time! I'm very sorry and hope it wasn't too arduous! Thanks for your comment – it is thrilling to have readers eager for the next update!
Guest of Ch 16 (Nov 28th): Thank you so much for your lovely comments! I'm so glad you enjoyed this chapter and its many revelations!
Bright Promise: So lovely to hear from you, and I am delighted that you are enjoying the ramping up of the complications in the narrative – and sorry for the wait!
