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It isn’t right that the scrappy remains of Anne’s new-old life can fit into only four carboard boxes. To be fair, she’d donated half of Marilla’s clothing and all of Matthew’s pants, and thrown out most of the junk they’d kept in the basement from people Anne had never met. But even cut in half, they should still fill up a room – a universe. Instead, they fill four carboard coffins on the floor. MARILLA. MATTHEW. LIVING ROOM. PICTURES.
Anne shakes her head, imagining all the thoughts leaving it like fleas on a mutt. It doesn’t work, of course. Grief is made of a stronger glue than that. With shaking hands she spreads one last strip of packing tape onto MATTHEW. Then, she’s done. The house is empty, the boxes are packed, everything is ready for the trip to its new home. She itches with the desire to rip apart the tape, stomp on the boxes. Don’t let it be over, it can’t be over. One more second in the house, just one more – but it won’t bring Matthew and Marilla back. It would just be a waste of everyone’s time.
So instead of trampling on the work she’s done to keep living, Anne stands with a huff, takes a moment to crack her back, and shoves the tape roll into her pocket. It was kind of them to die in the winter – Anne has so many less trips to make, and she doesn’t have to suffer through the manual labor in the heat. Ha. Lucky.
The echo of her dry laugh bounces against the roof into the first floor of the house. It’s exactly the kind of noise that Marilla would scold her for, because all the neighbours could hear it. Anne lets out another, louder laugh, and wonders if the neighbours are listening. This is the last time you’ll hear me, she thinks, and wonders what the last they heard of Marilla was. Maybe it was her scolding Anne for this very thing. Matthew probably sent them off with a gunfire sneeze.
Ding! Anne’s phone chirps from her pocket. It’s probably Diana with one of her million check-in messages. No one else is as concerned as Diana – guilt is the most likely motivator, seeing as Diana hadn’t been able to fly back for the funeral. Anne doesn’t resent her for it. There had been enough of a crowd already, sitting in their parlour and messing up the blankets that Marilla had folded, the newspaper Matthew had left lying around.
Diana thinks she’s left Anne alone but she isn’t going to be alone – her and Jerry had finished the arduous process of finding an apartment in the city before Matthew and Marilla had passed. Most of her bedroom is already over there, in similar boxes. If she had died with them would it be Jerry here, staring at her name written in bold sharpie letters? Or would he die, too, and would it continue on and on until there was no one left that had loved any of them at all? That feels like it would be a proper reaction, rather than the quiet birdsong Anne had woken up to and the cheery murmur of street traffic that muffles her thoughts right now. A car horn blasts through the thin walls, closer and more familiar than the rest.
Anne darts back into Marilla’s bedroom, keeping her eyes closed from the moment she opens the door until her palms touch the far wall. This way, she doesn’t have to see the stains on the floor from where Marilla’s queen bed had sat, or the bright spots on the wall where her pictures had hung. She catches a glimpse of Gilbert just as he starts heading up the stairs of the duplex. His head disappears beneath green awning and soon after the doorbell rings.
“Coming!” she calls, as the front door opens. Gilbert never had a problem inviting himself in, even before he’d been welcome.
Anne darts back to the hallway with her eyes closed again but pauses as her foot stops on the metal threshold. This is her last chance in Marilla's room. She could turn around and see the shadows of where the bed had stood, relive memories of jumping on top of a sleeping Marilla and bringing soup up on mother's day. It's the same thing she'd been doing for days now, rather than cleaning and packing.
Anne shakes her head. Another moment staring into Marilla’s empty room won’t change anything. A last glimpse isn’t going to do Anne any favours. It won't bring either of them back from the dead, won't turn her memories into anything more than that. Just memories.
She isn’t going to be alone, but Anne is certain that she’ll be lonely for the rest of her life.
There’s nothing to do but heft MATTHEW and MARILLA into her arms and start down the stairs. This half of Anne’s new-old life doesn’t weigh more than ten pounds put together.
Something shifts inside the bottom box with a soft clunk – if Anne had to guess it’s probably Marilla’s music box. It’s heavy enough that she has to shift her balance before she trips down the stairs. Or, she could let the box go. Let both of them break, let all of it break. There’s so much left behind for Anne to deal with, wouldn’t it be easier to deal with none of it at all?
It wouldn’t be easier. The boxes only weigh ten pounds, but Anne wishes they weighed more.
“There’s two more up there,” she says shortly as she passes Gilbert and sweeps out the front door. The walls aren’t so thin that his reply is muffled, but Anne pretends that she can’t hear him anyway. It’s just the two of them, so she doesn’t bother putting the boxes in the trunk. On the drivers side she sits MATTHEW, on the passenger’s side, MARILLA. After a moment of thought she buckles them in with the seatbelt.
The door opens, and after a long, hesitating minute, Gilbert closes it behind him. Anne doesn’t turn around to look at him. When he finally rounds the car into her line of vision, he hefts PICTURES and LIVING ROOM questioningly into the air. Though he’s carrying them in the say way she’d carried MARILLA and MATTHEW, it looks a thousand times more precarious on him, and Anne has to bite her tongue at the anger that spikes through her.
“Just put them in the car,” she says sharply. Gilbert hesitates, eyes wide in another stupid worrying question, and this time Anne can’t help the roll of her eyes. She jerks her head towards the car.
“It’s just stuff.” It’s a stupid thing to say and Anne regrets it as soon as the words are out of her mouth. It’s not just stuff, it’s LIVING ROOM and PICTURES and it’s half of Anne’s everything – why did she say that?
Hesitantly, Gilbert nods, and even more hesitantly he lays the boxes on the floor of the back seat. The anger leaves Anne just as suddenly as it had arrived as she watches the way Gilbert gives PICTURES a gentle pat.
Then, it’s just the two of them, standing in the street. Wind knocks snow from the branches of the old trees overhead – the trees in Anne’s new neighbourhood aren’t half as old as these are.
“Hi, Anne,” Gilbert says softly. Reluctantly she drags her eyes from the trees to his face. A painfully soft expression drags his eyebrows upwards and his lips down. He wants to say something but isn’t sure what.
It’s the first time she’s seen him since the funeral. Anne would have put it off longer if she could, but he’s the only one with a car right now, what with Jerry back home in Charlottetown packing up his own things. That’s a cruel thing to think about your boyfriend, isn’t it? I don’t want to see you right now.
They’ve only been dating six months – five, when Matthew and Marilla passed. Gilbert isn’t sure what to do with her, and she doesn’t know what to do with him, either. There’s a breakup text sitting in her notes app right now, along with about fifty shaky letters about grief and anger and stupid, awful rubber ducks.
Gilbert had told a lovely story at the funeral when it was his turn to speak. Apparently his father had been close with Marilla, and Gilbert had fond memories of playing in Marilla’s garden as they chatted. One summer day, when he was about six, as he recollected, there had been an emergency at work, and his dad had to leave him with the Cuthberts. Marilla, of course, had never even thought about being alone with a child, and hadn’t the foggiest of how to handle him. In a panic she’d given him the only toy in the house, which was barely a toy at all – a single, old, rubber duck. Anne knows exactly the one, because Matthew had kept it on the shelf by the TV. Despite her Athenian coming into their life at a whole thirteen years of age, Anne had never been allowed to touch it. Gilbert had, though. He reminded her that day, standing in front of Marilla’s urn, that he’d known Marilla longer than Anne would ever have the chance to.
Anne’s fingers had dug into the pew until her skin was white and her arm hurt up to the elbow. Rachel, too, had a story about years before Anne was even born let alone Matthew and Marilla’s. Then another friend, and another – stories and stories and stories about a Matthew and Marilla that weren’t hers. Parts of them that Anne would never know because they were dead.
That anger still hadn’t really left. It curls Anne’s fingers now, though she tries to hide it in the pocket of her jacket. It’s more than time for her to greet Gilbert back, but she’s afraid that venom might come out instead of words if she opens her mouth. Gilbert’s smile breaks into stilted pieces in the silence.
This is what you signed up to do, Anne thinks unkindly, this is who you’re dating, if only you could hear the thoughts inside my head, you’d run-
Gilbert’s face suddenly brightens. “Oh, uh, hold on a minute.”
He darts over to the passenger’s side of the car, opening the door and leaning in to undo the seatbelt. When he leans back out, Anne’s Winnie the Pooh plush is sitting in his hands. She’s had the bear since the orphanage, still sleeps with him every night. Last, she’d seen him he was in her new apartment, sitting on a box in the entryway waiting for her return. Just the sight of him is a comfort.
“Jerry gave him to me,” Gilbert says with a kind smile. It’s wrong that he’s smiling at all. “He thought you might need him.”
He holds Winnie out in one hand. Anne almost accepts the offer, almost snatches the bear out of the air and clutches him to her chest and never lets go.
“Why are you doing this?” she demands instead of following the itching in her fingers. Gilbert holds Winnie in the air for a beat longer before gently bringing him back to his chest. His grip on the bear his firm – his eyes never leave Anne’s.
“Because I love you,” he says simply.
Anne doesn’t like the way she almost believes him, doesn’t like the way the anger in her chest cools at that and her feet sway towards him. It’s inexplicable, the sudden rage she’s feeling at the man that for all intents and purposes should be the one person she wants to see right now. Except, the people she wants to see right now are dead.
Anne is aware enough to know that her next words are meant to hurt. “What if I don’t love you back?”
That’s enough to make Gilbert pause. His expression closes down a little, though he doesn’t look away from her. His thumb strokes back and forth over Winnie’s worn fur.
“I’d still be here-“
“Why?” Anne demands.
“Because I love you,” he repeats, but this time he doesn’t let Anne interrupt, “and Jerry is in Charlottetown, Diana is in England, and your parents are dead.”
This is the bluntest anyone’s been with Anne save herself since Matthew and Marilla died. Whatever rebuttal she’d been forming dies on her lips as she stares at Gilbert, mouth agape. He doesn’t smile though Anne knows him well enough to know that normally he would. Instead, he takes a step closer, brown eyes intent on hers.
“You’re allowed to mourn them, Anne, no matter what that looks like. We’re all expecting it, you have no reason to hide it from us. I – I’m not going to leave you, no matter what you say. If you don’t want to be together anymore, fine. But you were there for me the day my father died, and I’m going to be there for you, too. And don’t say you don’t need it, because you do, and I know you do.”
Anne feels childish, suddenly. She wishes she’d taken Winnie from him, after all. Sometimes she forgets that she’s known Gilbert just as long as Diana, just as long as Matthew, and Marilla. Her anger doesn’t disappear but guilt and grief and a thousand other emotions she can barely feel let alone name swallow it whole. The shadow lurking under the surface finally prevails. Futilely, Anne attempts to blink away the tears forming in her eyes.
“What about all the things I have left to do? How do I do any of it without them?” Stupid, irrelevant question – Anne expects to be scoffed at.
“Those things will happen, and you’ll miss them,” Gilbert replies honestly, without missing a beat. “But I can promise you that you’ll still be alive. And you’ll be happy. You’ll be happy again, Anne.”
Gilbert knows her well. She blinks again, but this time she’s only successful in pushing a hot tear down her cheek.
“I’m angry with you,” she admits, “I shouldn’t be, but I am, just like I’m angry with everyone who got to had a piece of them. It’s selfish, and terrible, but I wish no one else had ever known them. They should have been mine.”
Gilbert nods. “I know that feeling. It gets better. Even if you don’t believe me.”
Anne doesn’t believe him. They’ve only been dating six months, and she’s so angry with him for stupid, childish reasons that wants to bash her head against the car door. But Gilbert patted PICTURES like he knew what was inside it, and he’d listened to Jerry about Anne’s Winnie the Pooh bear, and Anne loves him, even though she hasn’t told him that yet. She doesn’t believe him, but she wants to. What alternative is there?
Gilbert graciously allows Anne a moment to grind her fists into her eyes and will away all traces of tears. It doesn’t work, of course, and only leaves her with starry vision, but when she speaks again she can pretend, at least, to be normal.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean - I shouldn’t have said any of that horrible nonsense. None of it was true. I can’t believe I’m being so irrational-“
Gilbert shuts her up by closing the distance between them and pressing Winnie to her chest. When Anne’s hands come up on instinct to grab him, Gilbert closes his arms around her, too. His next words move the hair on top of her head.
“Anne,” Gilbert says with a soft laugh, “I have never, not once, expected you to act rationally. Ever.”
If he notices that she starts crying, he doesn’t mention it. Instead he just strokes his hand up and down her back, up and down, up and down, until the neighbours have pulled into their driveway and Jerry will definitely be wondering where they are. With a sniff, Anne quietly detaches herself from her boyfriend and heads to the car. Gilbert opens the door for her, waits for her to situate Winnie on her lap, and then he even does up the seatbelt. He has to lean over her to do it, so closely that she can feel the heat radiating off of him. She appreciates that he knows she needs the silence right now.
It’s a short drive to Anne’s new apartment – she’d wanted to stay close to Green Gables. Gilbert’s car trundles over familiar bumps in the road until slowly they start to turn into strangers. She’s never come down this street from this direction, never turned that corner before. It’s scary, no, it’s unfathomably terrifying. Anne clutches Winnie to her chest with shaking arms. This isn’t the first time his fur has absorbed her tears, but they’ve never been heavy like this before. Gilbert doesn’t bother her the rest of the ride.
When the car rolls to a stop he lets her sit for a moment longer. The silence is somehow stifling and comforting, like a heavy blanket in a thunder storm.
“We’re home,” he says gently after a few minutes. His hand rests gently on the top of her head. He doesn’t expect her to move just yet, doesn’t expect her to do anything at all.
“…Okay,” Anne says, and lets him guide her out of the car and up the stairs. Later, she’ll work on believing him. For now, she’ll just let him hold her hand.