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Anne Shirley-Cuthbert dies on a sunny day in the middle of July, one month to the day she’d graduated high school, class of 2018. They find her body at the dump, and that’s all anybody knows about it.
“I always said she belonged with the trash!” Billy Andrews crows at work, moments before Gilbert Blythe’s fist collides with his cheek and knocks out one of his two front teeth. He’s fired after that, of course, but that punch had been a long time coming.
The Cuthbert’s keep the case closed and refuse to answer questions to anyone who asks. I heard she was murdered , some of the rumours say, I heard she was kidnapped and they dumped her body with the garbage.
I heard she killed herself .
Gilbert isn’t sure which one he wants to be true.
When he first gets the news it’s like the words are coming from underwater – then it hits him, all at once on the walk home. The force of his grief knocks him to his knees just before the front steps of the house he’d once shared with his father.
It doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true – surely, the world would have reacted to the death of Anne Shirley-Cuthbert. The sky should have shone red, the oceans should have receded, something should have happened. But it was a day like any other, starting as insignificant as all the days before.
Except today Anne Shirley-Cuthbert is dead, and Gilbert Blythe will never see her again.
Every day they’d taken the same bus home, walking to the stop like strangers, sitting together like friends. Since ninth grade, their lockers had been only one door apart, and they’d spent all four years of high school standing in silence together at break, at lunch, at the end of the day. He’d lent her Math notes, once, and she’d been the one to beat his streak as spelling bee champion in middle school.
Middle school, where he’d tugged on her hair and called her carrots , cementing their fate forever.
That is what Gilbert and Anne had amounted to, in the end – two stranger-like friends, two friend-like strangers, separated by a youthful mistake and kept apart by the weight of words and time. Nothing special, nothing more . The sum of it all is an invitation to her funeral, and a seat in the row third from the front on the right side.
It’s an open casket, the first Gilbert has attended. Anxiety churns in his stomach as he approaches the front, but it’s not awful, not in the way he was expecting. There’s no gore or unpleasantness – no sign how Anne had died. Her skin and hair are more lifeless, perhaps, but it’s the way they’ve done her up that’s the problem.
In twelfth grade Anne had taken to wearing only one braid on the side of her head, leaving the rest of her hair to hang loose. It had been a bit strange, at the time – whispers had broken out in whatever classroom she’d entered. But eventually, everyone had gotten used to it. As was always the case with Anne. People got used to the rambling, got used to the eccentric clothing, got used to the lengthy answers in English and the seemingly random proclamations in the lunchroom.
In death, both braids are done up, neater than Anne had ever managed.
“She hated makeup.” Gilbert whispers to himself. He has to resist the ridiculous urge to reach out and wipe the garish colour from her eyelids with his sleeve. Tucked under her arm is a Winnie the Pooh plush, face nearly worn off from years of love. Gilbert’s seen it before when Anne had brought it to school once. For some reason she’d thrust it into his arms after school, and he’d held it for the rest of the bus ride home.
For a moment he simply stares at where the yellow plush disappears beneath her pale freckled arm, then he returns to his seat as is expected.
The rest of the funeral is nice, in a lonely kind of way. It’s in the small church almost on the outside of town, the one that everyone had all but abandoned as soon as the big Cathedral had been built a few blocks away. Only the Cuthberts and the Lyndes go here, really. Anne’s casket takes up nearly the whole room – a few pews have been removed to make room.
The Cuthberts stand at the front, of course. Ms. Marilla’s spine is straight, standing tall and proud, while Mr. Matthew is curved over, face pressed into his hat. It doesn’t do much to muffle the sobs. There’s a boy, too, about Anne’s age. Gilbert doesn’t know who he is, or why he was so important that he garners a seat in the front.
(There’s a lot Gilbert doesn’t know about Anne.)
Diana Barry is also in the front row. As Anne’s best (only) friend, it makes sense that she’d be there. She makes quite the image, pretty dark hair pulled back by a dainty bow, black dress falling just-so in all the right places. Silent tears run down her face like a waterfall, but she doesn’t make a sound and refuses all the tissues thrust her way. There’s a damp spot on her collar from where the salt water falls.
She’s the first to speak at the front, and she reads a poem Anne had written in an impressively steady voice. It seems to be all she can manage, because she doesn’t say anything more. Next to speak is the boy from the front row, but Gilbert can’t really hear what he’s saying. From where he stands he can just barely see the toe of Anne’s boots over the edge of the casket.
He’s invited to the cemetery, after, to watch the casket be lowered into her grave, but on the drive there Gilbert just can’t take it anymore. Pulling off the road two turns early, he’s thankful that he’s close to the back of the line of cars, so no one really notices him leave.
I’ll visit her grave later , he promises, when I have flowers . As his battered car pulls into the driveway at home, he makes a mental note to look through the lawns in the neighbourhood for dandelions, Anne’s favourite flower.
He means to do something with the rest of the afternoon, he thinks – some task, some homework. But he finds that sitting on the couch in a stupor is all he’s capable of. For hours Gilbert stares into space, listening to nothing, thinking of nothing. It’s only when his father’s old grandfather clock chimes that he’s pulled back to reality, and he stands from the couch.
When Gilbert falls into bed, he’s not alone.
“Do you remember that field trip we took to the museum?” Anne Shirley-Cuthbert asks. “It was in middle school, I think. Or maybe high school, a few years after you pulled my hair and called me those dreadful names.”
Her voice sounds real, as steady and lilting as it’s always been. The bed even dips beside him, like someone is indenting the mattress. If Gilbert concentrates, he swears he can feel the paint puff of someone else’s breath on his neck.
“Gilbert, do you remember the museum?”
Of course, he remembers. They’d held hands as they’d sprinted through the exhibits, both clutching much tighter than was necessary. Other than the hysterical, breathless laughter that had bubbled out of the pair as they’d just barely managed to catch the bus, neither of them had said a word. Anne’s nails had left crescent moons in his palm, and Gilbert had picked at the scabs for weeks to keep the marks as long as he could.
But Gilbert doesn’t say any of this – he keeps his eyes stubbornly closed, both against his room and the tears, for the rest of the night. Maybe he sleeps, and maybe he doesn’t. He can’t tell which image of his room is a dream, and which is real life.
For nights upon nights this repeats – it doesn’t matter what supplements he takes or what meditation he tries. Anne visits him every night, torturing him with her sweet voice and bittersweet temptation.
“Do you remember prom, Gilbert?” She asks.
He does – he remembers finding her sitting on the stairs outside, punch on her dress and a blank look on her face, and sitting with her in silence until Matthew had come to pick her up.
“Do you remember when we danced, Gilbert?”
He does – he’d found her twirling alone outside a church during evening mass, listening to the hymns, and had grabbed her hand before he could think twice about it. They’d twirled and twirled until he thought he might be sick, and until enough people were leaving that they couldn’t pretend they were alone anymore.
“Do you remember, Gilbert?”
Night after night this refrain repeats – she asks, he remembers, she asks, he doesn’t reply. And as time passes, it only feels more and more real. It scares Gilbert, how little it feels like a dream.
“Do you remember –“
Finally, finally , Gilbert breaks. Like a shirt under too much strain he explodes, buttons flying everywhere and under the furniture.
“What do you want?” For the first time since her death he looks at Anne. It’s dark in his room, and he can only see her in the strips of moonlight that invade his window. A silvery patch upon the slope of her nose here, a bit on her collar bone there, a spot on her thigh that draws his eye. The rest of her shape is merely shadow and darkness, hinting at the shape of a woman. “Is this real?”
Slowly, like the sun creeping over the horizon at the first dawn of day, she smiles. The sight burns.
“I’ve been waiting for you to ask that question, Gilbert Blythe. And here I thought maybe I ought to try sleeping on your side of the bed. I was getting desperate, you know.”
A deep, ugly monster rises in Gilbert’s chest. With it comes fat tears and a heavy heart, so heavy it feels like he’s choking.
“Is this a nightmare?” He sobs, futilely wiping his eyes. “Or some sort of punishment? I- I know I was a bad friend, I know you deserved better , but you’re dead! You’ll never get better! You’re dead, you’re dead !”
“Yes, Gilbert, I know I’m dead.” Anne cuts his hysteria off, somehow sounding annoyed . The shock is enough to still Gilbert’s sobs, but not his tears. “And, frankly, I’m offended that you would consider my presence any sort of punishment . I’ll have you know I’m a delight to be around.”
Gilbert can’t help it – he laughs, and nearly chokes on the snot in the back of his throat.
“Yes, yes you are a delight to be around.” He replies. “I only wish you were still around.”
“Well, I’m right here.” It looks like she smiles, though Gilbert isn’t sure. “So there’s no need to wish.”
“ Why are you here?” Gilbert pleads, still not sure that this isn’t just a nightmare in disguise. Anne is quiet for a moment, and when she answers there’s a strange, sad look in her eyes.
“I’ve always wanted to talk to you, Gilbert Blythe, but the time never seemed to be right. Now I have nothing but time – is it so strange I might want to spend some of it with you?”
Yes ! Gilbert wants to exclaim, but doesn’t.
They talk every night, after that, Gilbert and the Anne in his bed. Sometimes for hours, sometimes only one word, but every night nonetheless. Conversation flows easily between them – Anne is a great conversationalist once you get her alone. It’s almost painful how much Gilbert wishes he could have had this before . It’s all he’d ever wanted, and all he’d been too cowardly to pursue.
It hurts more, somehow, to know that Anne had wanted it too.
--
The moon is fuller the next night, allowing Gilbert to look upon Anne more clearly. She looks, for lack of a better word, alive – nothing like the body lying in her casket. There’s no makeup on her face, and her hair is in it’s typical state of disarray. He wants to kiss her freckles.
Gently he reaches out and tugs her one remaining braid – it’s on the opposite side as the one he’d pulled in Middle School.
He’s never noticed that before.
With a knuckle under her chin he turns Anne to face him, reaching up to run his fingers through the loose hair on the other side of her head. It’s tangled and knotted, like it had been brushed only rarely. Soft, though.
“Why did you stop wearing this one?” He asks. She shrugs.
“Every morning it just got harder and harder. Harder to make them straight, harder to undo the knots, harder to lift my arms to do all of that twice once I was finished the first. So, eventually I just thought, ‘why bother?’ and stopped. I think it looks pretty, anyway.” She answers defiantly, daring him to disagree.
Slowly, Gilbert’s hand drops from her hair.
“Yes,” he replies softly, “I think it looks pretty, anyway.”
--
She likes to cuddle things, he’s noticed. His pillow, his sheets, his arm. Anything she can clutch to her chest. It reminds Gilbert of her Winnie the Pooh, all worn out and well-loved, now sitting underneath six feet of dirt in the arms of a body that will never hug him again.
--
“Hmm.” A little nonsense melody, sweetly hummed. It’s a hot summer night, and her hair is soft on his warm, unclothed chest where it pillows her head. Anne has her ear pressed to his chest. “I used to do this on the bus, you know. Whenever you’d fall asleep I’d creep over and just… listen. ”
Like it can tell it’s being talked about, Gilbert’s heart jumps. She snorts, and rearranges herself so she’s looking up at his (red) face.
“I think the bus driver thought I was crazy. It was crazy. But I did it anyway.”
“Wow, I never knew,” Gilbert replies, stunned. “I just thought you drew on my arms when that happened.”
Anne laughs, and Gilbert’s heart jumps again. He’d bottle that noise, if he could – put it in a conch shell so he could lift it to his ear and listen whenever he wanted. He loves her, oh how he loves her. Like a tick, fat with blood off an unsuspecting host, he listens to her words and stares at her lips, drunk on the intensity of her attention.
“Well,” Anne giggles, “I did that, too.”
--
“Hey, Anne? Could I ask you a question? It’s kind of…morbid, I suppose.”
The pair of them are sitting on his bed with their arms resting on the windowsill, staring out the window into the black night. It’s times like these that Gilbert loves Avonlea – you can see every star from here, even as far into town as he lives. It’s a sight he’d stared at many a night. He never thought he’d get to share it with Anne.
She giggles.
“Morbid questions are my favourite !” She replies.
“…How did you die?”
The question has been pressing on his mind. For a while, Gilbert had almost been able to pretend that nothing was wrong, that Anne was alive . But with every passing night her skin wanes and the bags under her eyes grow. Weight drops from her bones, and even her beautiful hair starts to lose its saccharine shine.
Anne’s smile dims, then disappears completely.
“How did you die, Gilbert Blythe?”
Gilbert tilts his head and stares at Anne, eyebrow quirked.
“I didn’t.”
She doesn’t respond.
--
“I’ve been tired for so long, Gilbert.”
“Well… you could sleep here if you wanted. The bed is big enough. Or I could take the floor.”
“…No, thank you. I think I’ll look out the window a little more.”
Anne looks at the stars, and Gilbert looks at her.
---
“Did you kill yourself?”
He’s not sure what pushes him to ask. One night he just realizes that the burning under his skin is something that feels a lot like guilt , and he needs to know if he could have saved her.
Anne stills from where she’d been hovering over him, playing with his hair, and for a moment she just looks at him, face unreadable. A small tilt of the head, and her remaining braid tumbles off her shoulder. It frames the new bruises on her neck beautifully.
“I could tell you.” She finally replies narrowing to a piercing gaze. “And it might even be the truth. But would that make you happy, Gilbert Blythe? What would the truth do to you?”
The night passes in silence, after that.
--
Things only get worse. It is death, after all.
Bruises appear, then scratches, then cuts, then open wounds, until there are injuries all the way up and down her arms. The skin which he used to adore has turned an almost green shade of sickly pale – her freckles look more like pockmarks than anything else.
--
“Will you keep me here?” She asks. “Until I am nothing more than a corpse in your bed? Until nothing but my rotting flesh is left, until I am just a stain on your bedsheets?”
It’s not an accusation. But it feels like one.
“Am I?” Gilbert asks, a not-accusation of his own. “Am I keeping you here?”
--
“…What will happen when you leave?”
A slow, pondering silence. Then, a hand pulling his head to rest on her shoulder.
“You’ll miss me.”
--
“You couldn’t save me,” Anne whispers to the crown of his hair. Gilbert pretends to sleep. “But you can let me go.”
--
For the first time in months, Gilbert feels his eyes start to drift closed as soon as he gets into bed. Anne is uncharacteristically quiet, simply looking at him, face hidden in shadow.
“Come, sleep.” He says simply, holding his drooping arms and the blanket out open towards her. Slowly, and silently, Anne accepts, crawling into his embrace. Gilbert wraps her tightly in his arms and buries his nose in her hair. She smells sweet – like Anne . He pretends he doesn’t feel any quiet sobs against his chest – she pretends she doesn’t feel any tears against her hair.
No more words are needed.
--
This time it’s a dream – it feels like a dream.
“Do you remember, Gilbert?”
Soft-soled sneakers and hard rubber boots tap on the polished linoleum as they sprint through history. Dinosaurs and ancient civilizations and paintings of people long dead blur together, their grip so tight it’s painful. Blood drips to the floor, unnoticed in the laughter.
Knees, knobby and athletic, knock together as their bodies huddle closer together than the staircase necessitates. His elbow presses against her rib cage, her shoulder presses to his – the skin burns. A part of her dress is trapped underneath him. It tears when she stands.
A heartbeat, strong as anything, pressed to a listening ear that disappears before he wakes as the bus comes to her stop. Red hair catches in his buttons, but the pain is worth it. As she runs away her cheeks burn an ugly, blotchy red with embarrassment, with life.
Colour reflections from the glass stain their shadows holy. Blue where her skirt twirls, red where his hair curls, yellow where their hearts are connected, hand in glorious hand. They are outside because she is always outside , but for once it’s all okay.
Red strands are trapped in a clenched fist. He finds a few on his palm, later, after he yanks it away. She holds a hand to the spot, the feeling of a phantom hand heavy long after the stinging stops.
Chapped lips pressed to his – the taste of morning breath and pine and the dollar store toothpaste she brushed with twice a day.
This is it – Gilbert realizes, then, that this is it.
He’d never kissed Anne in her life.
When he wakes the next morning, Anne is gone. Not even an indent in the sheets is left.
Gilbert cries for a long time.
Life goes on, time moves forward, though, and it takes him along for the ride whether he likes it or not. Anne’s funeral grows smaller in the rearview mirror. College starts, Gilbert gets a new job, he meets new people, and he tries not to think too hard about whether those late night talks were real, or a dream. Gilbert’s never really believed in ghosts, but he wants to now.
--
He sees Diana Barry for the first time since the funeral at Pride that year, looking lonely and out of place. It’s been eleven months since Anne died, yet Diana looks like she only received the news yesterday. Well, Gilbert undoubtedly looks the same, so he can’t exactly judge. But his heart twinges at the sight of Diana Barry sitting in her mourning colours on the front lawn of a café, surrounded by love and life and yet never having looked further from it.
For a moment Gilbert thinks about hesitating, thinks about turning around and going home, blasting the radio so loud he can’t think these painful thoughts anymore. But Anne had loved Diana, and that’s enough for him.
“I was meant to come here with Anne.” She says.
“Well… would you like to go with me?” Gilbert replies, and that’s that.
They don’t leave that moment as friends, but they’re something more than strangers, and Diana’s number finds its way into his phone. Eventually they are friends, the type that meet up for coffee once a week and laugh at their own inside jokes. Diana even opens up about Anne, sometimes, and only teases Gilbert for his obvious crush a little.
It’s strange, how he can continue to get to know Anne even after her death.
--
The first anniversary hangs over Gilbert like a dark cloud, months before it even arrives. He takes to avoiding calendars and clocks, stops checking his phone in the fear of checking the date and finding that July has rolled around again. Of course, a little grief has never stopped time, and it comes around all the same.
Anne Shirley-Cuthbert has been dead for a year, and Gilbert is still here.
The date is marked by, of all things, Marilla Cuthbert standing on his doorstep, clutching a box to her chest. Gilbert is stunned to silence by the sight of her – he’s known Marilla all his life, and he’s never seen her look so disheveled. Not even at Anne’s funeral.
“Gilbert.” Marilla greets with a nod. “I – I apologize for stopping by so out of the blue, but I was going through Anne’s things and I found… well I found this .”
She thrusts the box at Gilbert, and he has no choice but to grab it, lest it fall to the ground instead.
“I’m sure Anne wanted you to have it… Well, that’s all.” Marilla stands for a moment, eyes on the box, looking unsure of what to say. Gilbert is equally at a loss for words. The older woman makes to leave but turns over her shoulder at the last second. “You should come for supper sometime, Gilbert. Our doors are always open.”
Then she’s gone, leaving Gilbert alone on his porch in his pajamas, a gift from Anne clutched in his hand.
The box is tiny – the label has long been ripped off, but it looks like it might have once held a watch. Gilbert opens it with shaking hands, terrified of what he might find. Part of him wants nothing more than to run to the ocean and throw it as hard as he can. That this is from Anne to him is a fact that burns his soul like a brand.
He opens it, though.
There is only one item inside the box - a note, written on what looks to be a receipt for a grocery trip that Anne took a few weeks before she died. Rather than being folded nicely, it’s crumpled, like someone had taken it in and out of their pocket a few too many times.
Sometimes , it reads, in Anne’s chicken scratch writing, clear as day in bright red pen, you would fall asleep on the bus home. I would watch you, as your chest moved and your eyelashes fluttered. Sometimes I’d draw on your arm in pen, although that was only when I was mad at you. Sorry about that. But other times, when my brain got too loud and I was so, so tired, I’d lean over, until my ear was right above your heart, and I would just. Listen. Your heartbeat is loud, did you know that? It was like I could feel it, not just hear it. Like your heartbeat was keeping me alive, too.
I just thought you should know. Thanks for pulling my hair that day (although I don’t forgive you for it).
Anne (with an e.)