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Gilbert has never had to share grief. He has always borne it alone — it’s lighter that way. It would be easier if he didn’t have to learn, as he is learning now, that each person — like fingerprints, like freckles, or dimples, or a laugh — has their own way of bearing it, and that sometimes in doing so they may accidentally tear into someone else, and send the burden tumbling like the weight of the world upon Atlas’s shoulders.
With Mary gone, the house is different. Bash is always out on the farmland these days, mending the fence, roaming the orchard, though it’s far from picking season and all that’s left to do now is to let the apple blossoms grow and bloom in their own slow time. This is a relief. True to his name, Bash — well, bashes. Cups, plates, wood. A mirror, once. He’s better out in the open where the force of his grief is no match for the relentless force of nature.
There’s no one left in the house except Delphine, Mary’s most precious legacy. She, at least, feels no sadness at present. Gilbert knows all too well that there will be plenty of time for that later. He holds her close, sometimes for hours, so that she feels the loss of her mother as little as she possibly can, and she babbles her sweet unknown language as he rocks her up and down the well-worn kitchen.
But the house is so, so quiet.
He loses track of the days. One afternoon, maybe a week or so after the funeral, he finds himself opening his door to spring sunshine. That is, he opens his door to find Anne standing there.
‘Anne,’ he says.
She looks at him. Then, wordlessly, she takes Delphine from his arms and brushes past him into the house.
Something about her snags at the grief inside him, and the familiar pain of the tearing begins. The wound, ripping like a claw through his chest, is not a clean cut, but ragged and rough and hurts him terribly. The house has not been silent since his father died. Mary had brought joy, and laughter, and light. Now Anne, the one person who epitomises all these things, has been robbed of them. Gilbert has lost so much. He cannot lose Anne too.
He follows her into the kitchen. ‘Bash is outside.’ It’s very likely she’s guessed that. ‘He’s never in the house now. Except to tend to Delly, and then he goes out again. I… He… It’s been a week,’ he tells her, more for his own benefit than hers. Time at Green Gables probably still goes at its usual pace. He hopes it does.
Delphine is settled in her chair, happily flapping a tiny hand. Anne brushes a thumb across her cheek.
‘She hasn’t had her milk yet.’
The bottle is on the table, and Anne squeezes between him and a chair to reach it.
‘She almost never cries in the night now.’
The water pump creaks.
‘She has Mary’s eyes.’
Water sloshes over onto the floor. Anne puts the bottle back on the table and looks around for a rag.
‘Anne, talk to me.’
‘Excuse me,’ she says distantly, politely, as if he might have by pure coincidence planted himself squarely in her path.
‘Let it be. Let it be.’
‘I have to deal with that.’
‘You have to deal with — with this!’, and he waves his hand wildly to encompass every unsaid frustration, every resentment he feels towards her. Of course it’s cruel to resent her when they’ve both lost someone they loved. Mary was as dear to Anne as she was to Gilbert. But then Anne is as dear to Gilbert as Mary had been, and he needs to hold on to her all the more now.
So he does. As a rule, Gilbert tries not to touch her, because it fuzzies the lines and complicates what should really be a simple friendship. Now, however, he takes her firmly by the shoulders.
‘You’ve been too quiet,’ he says. ‘It’s not like you.’
Anne signals to him by mute disapproval that she wants to be released.
‘It’s not like you to run away from sadness, either.’
‘I do talk,’ she breaks out, a little sardonically. ‘Excessively, as most people will tell you. Or haven’t you noticed?’
‘It’s not excessive to me.’
‘Out of my way, Gilbert, I have a baby to attend to.’
Delphine is fussing behind them, and Anne pushes past him to pick her up. ‘Who is that, Delly?’ she sings, in a voice that grates horribly on his ears. ‘Is it Uncle Gilbie? Uncle Gilbie who forgot to give you your bottle? Do you think Uncle Gilbie will finally be happy now that —’
‘Anne, do not get that baby involved in this conversation.’
‘What’s wrong, dearest? Why are you so — she’s sleepy,’ Anne says sharply, turning to him, and for a wild moment Gilbert realises he had thought the term of endearment was meant for him instead. An easy mistake.
‘How do you know it isn’t hunger?’
‘I didn’t bring up three pairs of Hammond twins for nothing. You’ll have to give her the milk later. Because sweet Delphine is going to take a nap now, aren’t you, my love?’
Gilbert draws a chair away from the table for her and puts his softest cushion down on it. Anne sits; he thinks she might have glanced at him, but Delphine is making little grabs at her braids, pulling ecstatically at the brown ribbons she always uses to tie them. One lands on the floor at her feet.
They both look at it. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ says Anne, and shakes her head at him when he picks it up for her. ‘I’m holding a baby, Gilbert. Here, you take her for a minute.’
‘No, she prefers you.’
‘It’ll be two seconds.’
‘I’ll help you.’
Anne looks at him suspiciously, but Gilbert is already moving, manoeuvering himself so that he can get close enough without bumping directly into Delphine. He quickly finds that, deft as his fingers usually are, he’s unaccustomed to tying hair ribbons; and Anne huffs at his ineptitude as he struggles.
‘Hurry, Gilbert,’ she says. ‘It’s not exactly surgery, you know.’
He gives her hair a little tug for old times’ sake. ‘Carrots.’
‘You’re very fortunate that what I’m holding is a baby and not a slate.’
‘At least you’re talking to me this time, too.’
‘Take Notice: Anne Shirley-Cuthbert is talking to Gilbert Blythe.’
She says it off-handedly, but with enough sting to make Gilbert drop her braid, narrowly missing Delphine’s nose. Yes, his moral negligence is shocking. ‘Done,’ he tells her, and tries not to sound too curt. ‘Pretty as a picture,’ and he regrets that.
‘Aha! Take notice of that.’
‘Can’t you talk about anything else?’
‘I thought you were complaining that I didn’t talk at all.’
‘I mean about things that matter. Not the empty prattle that’s going on at school, when you’re pretending everything’s alright, because no one really understands about Mary. Not about whether Moody prefers Diana or Ruby. Or about how ardent Tillie’s Pauls are becoming.’
‘Do you,’ asks Anne pertly, ‘have any thoughts on whether Moody prefers Diana or Ruby?’
He feels the muscle in his jaw twitch. ‘I do not.’
‘Pity… although Diana is divinely beautiful and one ought to favour one’s bosom friend, you, on the other hand, are quite free to —’
‘Anne, inane chatter about the Take Notice board doesn’t count.’
‘And what have you got against the Take Notice board?’
‘You’re missing the point, I haven’t got anything against the Take Notice board!’ It’s then that Gilbert realises that their very heated discussion is being conducted in perfectly civil, friendly tones, out of respect for their sole and very impressionable audience, who is currently making valiant attempts to eat her fist. No one wants to shout in front of a baby. He might as well be asking Anne about the weather. The ludicrousness of it shocks him enough to take a step back and say, ‘Sorry. I don’t want to argue. Let’s start again.’
‘Let’s not,’ she says pleasantly, and bounces Delphine a little on her lap. ‘Let’s talk about you instead. Let’s talk about how insufferably put together you are, with what awful self-possession you continue to carry yourself —’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Bold of you to accuse me of running away when you’re always running off to Charlottetown, too busy to bother with your classmates who haven’t got high-flown aspirations to be doctors —’
‘You’ve always been supportive of —’
‘Always setting yourself apart, even about the Take Notice board! Couldn’t you, just once, condescend to lower yourself to the level of the rest of us? Is it really beneath the great and good Dr Gilbert Blythe —’
She jerks to a stop.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Gilbert, I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry.’
‘No, it’s alright.’
‘Of course it isn’t.’
‘Did you mean it?’
‘No! I don’t!’
‘I appreciate it, you know, when you’re honest with me.’
‘That wasn’t honest!’ Anne looks ready to smite him, and for a moment they both seem almost surprised that she doesn’t. Gilbert certainly is, because she’s never withheld her fury from him before. (In fact, she often creates opportunities where there are none — he is painfully reminded of the time she accused him of eavesdropping on her conversation with Ms Stacy, when all he had been mulling over was the endocrine system.) ‘That was unfair, and unfounded, and unfeeling, and you’re — you’re just being ridiculous!’
‘Not really. I have to tell you something.’
‘Oh, here we go.’
‘I’m not going to be a doctor.’
Her mouth falls open.
‘I’ve been thinking it over,’ says Gilbert simply. ‘After Mary.’
‘Say that again.’
‘I grew up without a mother. All I wanted was to be able to save someone else that grief. After my father died, I was so, so sure… but I’m not going to be a doctor, Anne.’
To his surprise, she says nothing. She looks at him — he’s tied her braids crookedly, he realises — and down at Delphine. Gilbert can’t be sure what she’s thinking of. Perhaps it’s her own parents. Perhaps it’s Mary. Perhaps it’s about how much, despite all their disagreements, they are alike.
Then she says quietly, ‘Why?’
‘Because there’s so much we don’t know about medicine, and… and I couldn’t bear my patients looking at me like an instrument of divine authority when I’m just… me.’ He remembers the unwavering trust and confidence with which Mary had asked him, When is Dr Ward coming back? Is he bringing some kind of medicine?, and a shudder goes through his entire body. ‘Completely helpless. A fraud. Anne, I can’t submit to that.’
‘Then fight,’ she says, with such fierceness, but such great gentleness, that he looks up in surprise to see that Delphine has finally fallen asleep in her arms. ‘Why are you giving up, Gilbert?’
‘I’m not giving up! I’m simply —’
‘Tired. You’re tired of struggling, you’re tired of disappointment and anguish and heartbreak. You don’t want to hurt anymore. I know. Goodness knows we’re all tired, and we need rest. But don’t give up.’
‘If I can’t give people what they most want, then what good am I?’
‘And what do they want? To live? Everyone wants a myriad of different things, but what they most want is not to suffer anymore. Even you, with all your brilliance, can’t give them eternal life. No doctor can. You will fail, and your heart will break, and so will other people’s. But if every doctor gave up because of that, we would be desperately wanting for those who can give us what we want: Hope where there is any. Comfort where there’s none. Commitment to finding new ways of helping and healing, because you care.’
He can’t meet her eyes.
‘You want to help,’ Anne says. ‘You want to heal. You will be an incredible doctor for the way you understand someone else’s pain — because you, too, have felt it. Gilbert, you are falling short in no one’s eyes but your own. So rise. If this is what you want, then fight for it.’
She’s pushing him. Why is she always challenging him, why does he always end up fighting with Anne? What he doesn’t realise until much later — almost too late — is that struggle, with great love, makes you strong.
But today is not a day for such revelations. There will be plenty of time for that later. Today, sitting with his head bowed in his messy kitchen and a puddle of spilled water pooling gently around the leg of his chair, Gilbert Blythe just feels like a failure. And Anne Shirley-Cuthbert, knowing this, reaches out across the table, takes his hand, and squeezes it. Just the fingertips. Tightly. To his astonishment, with great love.
For once he feels that the overwhelming burden of his grief is lessened by sharing it.
‘Mary called me loving, and tender, and bright,’ Anne says. ‘And what I said to you before wasn’t any of those things. I’m sorry. It’s as if when she died… she took them with her, and I don’t know how to be them anymore.’
‘Mary would say that was the greatest gift you ever gave her. You’ll find them again. You won’t even have to look — they’ll be there.’
‘And she would say — and this is the truth — that if you care for your patients the way you did for her, you really will be an incredible doctor.’
‘And you,’ he tells her, smiling through his tears, ‘will be an incredible teacher.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You’ll see. Trust me.’
‘Tragical romance and all?’ she says.
‘I suppose that remains to be seen.’
Gilbert feels that tugging deep in his chest again, except it’s a good feeling this time. It’s the kind of ache he always thinks that love ought to feel like — of course, he’ll know for certain when he does fall in love. It’s alarming sometimes when Anne stirs up emotions like that, but he reasons that when one’s best friend is smart and funny, ambitious and thoughtful, trailblazing, uplifting, steadfast, and beautiful, it’s perfectly natural that one should be fond of her. Isn’t everyone a little in love with their best friend, anyway?
Carefully, Anne gets to her feet, cradling her precious consignment. She drops a butterfly kiss, like a snowdrop, on each of Delphine’s hands. ‘I’ll put her in her basket,’ she whispers, ‘and then Marilla will be looking for me, so I’d better go.’
‘Of course.’
‘Oh, grief is a funny thing, Gilbert.’
‘Funny how?’
‘Strange, and surprising, and — good. Isn’t grief a kind of love? Born of love, and of itself, bears love, too.’
She waves to him as she slips out the door.
Silence settles over the house again, not the empty echo it was before she came, but the sound of peace. The sound of knowing that Bash is resting in the shelter of the apple trees; the sound of Delphine asleep in her basket, dreaming. The sound of knowing that Mary is slumbering by his parents’ side in the freshness of the spring breeze, and that tonight Gilbert can lay his head on his pillow and blow out his candle in the steadfast belief that it is good, this grief.
And yet he clasps his hands together and, alone in his quiet house, prays that Anne Shirley-Cuthbert need never again bear a grief like this.