Work Text:
Gilbert wakes in the dark blue dawn to find the other side of the bed cool and empty.
He should be used to this by now, as Anne has had restless nights for the past fortnight, waking after small bouts of untethered sleep in a trance, drifting out the room into spaces unknown, but he knows where she is, just physically at least. Mentally, she is lost in foggy mazes he has yet to guide himself through.
He knows what the cause is.
Joy was taken from her.
From them.
And yet, she has closed herself off from the world. Away from him.
He understands why. She carried their dear Joyce–Joy– for eight months, allowing their own joy to seep through every crack and crevice of their lives, filling their home with lace and muslin curtains for the nursery, perfectly crocheted sweaters, every single hope and prayer they had. A deeper love between them, something he didn’t know was possible. He felt their child move within her, a universe of dreams he had in a fevered state; as a young man desperately swimming in his love for her; as a child curious of that red-headed typhoon flipping his world upside down. Gilbert had been in awe of her, as if he was unaware of the beauty of creating life. Something he had seen dozens of times. Something he had brought into this world. Something he felt with his own hands. Seen with his own eyes.
But with her, it was like it was all brand new. She held the building blocks of life in the palm of her hand, more than he ever had in pursuit of controlling life and death.
Gilbert hadn’t dared to follow her after the first night of her unwilling drift. She had snapped at him then as he reached out to her, “leave me be.”
It stung, he wanted to comfort her.
Wanted to be comforted.
In truth however, he was almost relieved she avoided his gaze.
The words he wanted to say were trapped in his throat since he saw their baby, their greatest Joy, take her last first breath in the deep, dark night, and her last breath in the morning– one such as this– that same day. Gilbert knew she was poorly by the sight of her, she came too early, yet she was so beautiful. Pale as the moon and as small as his cupped hands. Only Anne could aptly describe her, he couldn’t have found words that befitted such a perfect child. All he knew was enthralled by the red tuft at the top of her small head. Yet her lungs wouldn’t take in a full breath, her heart sounded faint within his Pinard Cone. The midwife had rubbed Joy ferociously trying to force out a strong cry. He hadn’t been able to tell Anne something was wrong at first, not until she begged him with a haunting moan.
“Gilbert,” Anne cried, “the baby–is all right–isn’t she? Tell me– you must tell me now.” Anne wouldn’t let go of her when it was over. Not until Marilla whispered kisses and praises against her damp brow, her red cheeks blistering with tears, was Susan and the midwife able to take Joy away.
Her devastating howls echoed through their House of Dreams as he bent down to her head, brushing her wet, ruddy hair, sliding his thumb down to wipe her tears.
“I’m so sorry, Anne–my Anne, she won’t make it.”
He shudders to think of it. Why was that all he could muster?
Gilbert knew, lying in that lonely bed, that he had been a coward. That he had failed as a husband. He had failed as a father.
No wonder she disappeared in the depths of the morning to sooth herself.
Without thinking, he sits up, brushing his face with his clammy hands, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror across the room. He looked sallow, defeated, dark circles invaded the skin under his eyes. His hair is wild, curls brushing against his forehead and longer than usual, poking under the nape of his neck. A slight shadow of stubble. There was something unkempt and almost feral, a sight that was rare in extreme contrast to his constantly clean-cut look. It is difficult to recognize himself, this backwoods man staring back at him.
The window is open, bringing in the cooler summer morning breeze, a salty scent carried from the sea. The moon’s bright and shining contempt rained down on him, a reminder of how alone he felt, and is.
He knew where she was, he had always known.
His hands reaches for a shirt and pulled up his cotton pants that Anne had expertly sewn with Marilla for him before their wedding. The brown boots besides the bed practically laced themselves.
Gilbert follows every trace of her, the lingering scent of her. Jasmine, lilies, rosemary, fresh soap, something entirely her that he couldn’t explain. He follows her steps by heart, down the stairs, skipping every other step just as she liked him to do on his way home from his rounds. He follows her ghost out the door, down the winding red clay path, through the willow and spruce trees.
“What a sight to behold Gilbert, the earth is welcoming us to our home” She had said as he pulled her along with a nervous grip, after their vows of eternity. “It’s our home, Gil”
The path didn’t seem hopeful anymore, it ached of her pain. His pain.
Every step he felt the fear to go forward, yet a powerful tide that pulled him to her, down to the harbor. Down the dunes, onto the beach. His feet moved on principle, on duty, on love. There was something ancient in the way she tugged him forward. Always pushing him to be better, greater, accepting every existing piece of him, and every change he sprouted. Gilbert felt the need to do the same, even if she didn’t accept it. Even if she told him to leave.
His mercurial Anne, he would love her forever if she pulled him close, held him, let him hold her. He would accept her if she never forgave him, never wanted him again.
Gilbert sees her there, from a distance, but her silhouette still makes his heart quicken, just like the first time he saw her. Everyone told him marriage would lessen that attachment, that feeling of electric nerves, but it never did for him. In her silent grieving, the quiet dinners, the days without words, the cries from her baths, his longing gazes and shunned sweet nothings as she drifted into a tearful sleep. His heart still cried for her, always.
Anne’s disordered hair blew against the wind, her white cotton nightdress glowing in the morning glory. Her knees were tucked into her chest, feet covered by the sand. He passed Joy’s grave behind her, which sat on a grassy hill beyond the dunes. It took everything in him not the collapse beside it, his body weak and wobbly.
As he heard the waves more clearly, she heard his feet brushing the sand, turning her head slightly, slowly, matching his gaze for only a moment before turning back forward.
“Hi,” he breathes, barely above a whisper. “Can I sit here?”
“If you must,” she says, casually and despondent, then shaking her head and once again turning her head away from him as he gently sat down next to her. “I’m sorry, that was unkind.”
Gilbert feels the bile in his stomach rise. Secretly, he is just as mercurial and argumentative as she is, but he throws the ugly feelings to the wind, simultaneously vexed with her and enamoured with her all at once.
“It’s alright,” he decides it is true as he says it. “I wanted to be with you… I–I needed to– I need you.”
The stumbling words replace the bubbling feeling in his chest, pouring out of him like the vomit his body wants to expel.
Anne is silent for a long while, wiggling her toes deeper into the sand and breathing heavily. He can tell she’s holding back more tears than the ones already coating her cheeks “I cannot… I can’t do it.”
“What can you not do?” He asks expectantly, hand reaching out to touch her shoulder, but she shifts away. Once again, his heart shatters, less from her rejection of his trembling fingers reaching out for her, but the sight of the fresh tears collecting on her lashes like the morning dew that covers the beachgrass above them.
“If you need me, I cannot help you.”
He blocks the sound of the waves just to hear her breath hitch on every syllable.
“There is less of me than there has ever been before.”
There is nothing between them. There is everything between them. It is devoid of anything, yet full of every single person they’ve once been. He understands her, he feels less of himself, unfamiliar with this version of him, the old him slipping away just as the sand slips through his fingers. But he pushes it down, he must, for her.
It’s moments like these that he misses his father, wishes he was here to tell him what to do, how he helped his mother in her many losses before him.
“What can I do then, how can I help you, what do you need?” He begs, slipping onto his knees and tugging on her arm. “Anne, I desperately want to know what I can do to relieve this pain, to shoulder some of the burden.”
She scoffs, lifting herself off of the sand and towering above him, wiping the sand off of her nightgown just as quickly as she brushed his hand away from her.
“Burden? Pain?” She shouts, barreling backwards down closer to the water, exasperatedly throwing her hands up at him. “That is all I have left of her, why would you take that away from me?”
He stares back up at her through furrowed brow, biting his bottom lip raw until he follows her, running to catch up to her, following each of her faded steps in the sand. Anne winces, slightly in pain as she steps back. Gilbert knows her body is still healing, he wants to check on her, bring her inside, but she moves further away like a trapped animal in a cage.
Her eyes are wild, tepid and stormy. “What do you know of my pain and my burdens? I can’t escape them, they are there in my still swollen belly, and in the milk that she cannot be nourished from. I feel the pain of them, they are embedded within me, I cannot get away from them like you can.”
“How can I know if you won’t speak to me?” He yells back, “She visits me in my dreams, and in my nightmares, I cannot get away from her.”
Anne looks back at him almost betrayed, like he should know. He should know every thought that ever crosses her mind. “What… What must I speak of? How I held her only for such a brief moment in time? How everyone looked at me in silence, pitying me before I even knew I was to be pitied? All that pain… All of that pain and suffering for one blissful night? How I would do it all over and over and over again just to see her once more?”
“It is… impossible what you are going through,” Gilbert sighs, hand on his heart, clutching at his shirt. “I fee– I feel awful, it has been more horrible than any others I have seen before, nothing prepared me for this, I- it has never felt like this, because she was ours”
“Oh, Gilbert, the lord giveth and the lord taketh away,” She rolls her eyes with a caustic edge. “Isn’t that what the Minister said? What Marilla said? What they have all said?”
He can’t answer her then, for his mouth quivered and cowered once more, dumbly looking at her, speechless.
“I am not special, we are not special, other babies just as well-loved have been taken away, so then why…why does it feel like the very first time it’s happened in this world?”
“Because she was yours, because she was ours,” he repeats, for her, but also for himself. Like a mantra.
“I was buried along with her.” Anne turns away again, drifting closer and closer to the water, ignoring as he paces just diagonally from her, searching for her from a comfortable distance. Her face turns to the lighthouse and he wonders if her heart beats in tandem with the waving light, just as his does. The light dances across the light of her face, so mystically beautiful. He wants to tell her that, he would tell her that– if it was any other night.
Gilbert has before, here, on this beach– likely this time of the late night and early morn, during their honeymoon– when they risked loving touches out in the open, their quiet laughs of abandon as they removed their clothes with newly deft fingers. It was all so new to them, but every movement, every touch against skin was as if they had done it a million times, not once, twice, thrice, maybe a handful more. He had dreamed of her in this way, separated by hundreds of miles, through heated letters exchanged that they promised to burn in fire but neither actually did. Anne was more perfect than she ever was in those quiet, loud, everything in between dreams, those in nights before exams, those deep in his Typhoid fever. The real thing was always better with her. In that night the waves had acted as symphonic accompaniment to their whispers of love and admiration.
“You are beautiful– no, you are incomparable, Anne-girl”
“I love you more than words can express.”
“You’re out of words? How rare.”
It was so different then from how it was now. Tonight, the waves act as a break between the uncomfortable silence.
He doesn’t know the path to get back. They probably will never get it back.
“It is my fault,” he quietly whispers into the wind, so matter-of-fact. “I feel it is though… my fault.”
Suddenly, she turns to him, Anne’s gaze softens for the first time that night, for the first time in what felt like an eternity. She seems to be searching for something in his expression, eyes flittering about his face, blinking the tears from her eyes as his own well up.
Her hand reaches for him, but falls back to her side. “Gil-”
“No, Anne,” it is his turn to back away, unable to show her those hideous feelings he had harbored these past two weeks in the depth of night, alone in that cold and lonely bed. “If.. if perhaps there had been more time, if Doctor Dave had reached us and I didn’t deliver her, maybe she would still be here.”
His hands pull out in front of him and he stares at them as if there was evidence of his guilt.
“What if there is something I should have noticed, something I should have done before she came? Anne, I was supposed to protect you, protect you both, I feel as though I have failed you. I failed to shepherd her into this world like I promised you I would, just as I have done for so many other mothers. I failed to comfort you truly, that night. I was a coward.”
The words break at every moment, shattering onto the ground and lifting up in the air and he feels her eyes piercing into him, until she sneaks out in front of him. It is his turn to break as a choked out sob escapes his previously gated lips and his knees buckle out beneath him. He hadn’t realized how close they were to the water, that their slippers were sopping wet until his knees are soaked and the calm waves brush up against his thighs. Anne is swift to follow him, tucked in between his legs, practically on top of him, a death grip on his shoulders and gaze seeking his, which he refuses to match. He does not know what she’s looking for. Maybe she is searching for the man she fell in love with.
He can’t seem to call him up for her.
“Gilbert, I-” she utters, low and raw, rubbing her wet hands along every curve of his face, lowering it to face her, slightly smushing his cheeks. “Don’t talk like that.”
“It’s true. I’m supposed to protect you and our family, and I failed.”
“Do you know why I’ve left you every night to come out here on my own?” She asks, with all of her capricious might. “I felt as though it was my fault, and I can’t be in that room, any longer, not when she was lost there.”
Gilbert shakes his head as much as he can within her grasp still tight around his face.
Anne continues on. “All we’ve ever wanted was a family to call our own, to fill our House of Dreams with little footsteps and laughter, I wanted so badly to give that to you, to us. You have always protected me, and I wanted to give something made of the two of us for you. I couldn’t look at you for fear I would see your disappointment that you were left with just me.”
He sees then how alike they are, how alike they’ve always been. If it weren’t for the crushing weight of their loss, he would laugh at their ridiculousness.
“Just you?” Gilbert mutters as she releases him from her cupped hands. “Anne, you are not just anything, you are everything.”
The sun is starting to peak above the far east, past the horizon of things long felt and long lost between them. The purples, blues, and pinks start to dance across her face, painting her swollen and red eyes, unveiling the stubborn freckles that she hates so, but that he loves. He wonders what he looks like to her now, but with the way her lips quirk upwards into a quiet whisper of a smile, and he thinks perhaps she recognizes this man once more, just as he sees her now and is flooded by all the girls and women she once was, as well as this new woman before him. This new woman had a glossy stare that seemed dark and changed, and that smile was not as, and never would be as bright again, but she was still his, and he was still hers; in this water, on this beach, in this town and in this world.
The seasons will continue to change, and the world will continue to turn, but he knows they will forever be here. They change and he still chooses her every time.
“There are moments where I feel like I can be strong and go on, and then I remember what we have lost, and I can’t.” Anne cries, leaning against him, and the feeling of her wet tears in his dry shirt weigh more than the soak of saltwater on his pants. “I’m afraid to let go of this pain, I am afraid that if we forget this pain then we will forget her.”
“We will never forget her, and we will never let go,” he breathes, a full breath after weeks of shallow ones.
“But let’s try to bring her along with us, take her into our hearts and take her forward.”
Anne nods, then reaches up for him, pulling at the curls at his neck, almost marveling at their length before bringing him back down to Earth and kisses him slowly, tired, but still full of the might she always has brought to him. It’s wet and salty as they relearn each other. He knows she will regain her strength then, that she will find her resolve, and that he might too, for her. He knows that she too chooses him with all of his change.
It all starts to make sense to him as they sway along with the tides, whispering renewed vows, and holding each other as they should have held each other this whole time.
And as the sun rises over the ever-changing wispy sea, Joy cometh in the morning.