I sobbed, and the tears fell like a waterfall down my face, burning my cheeks.
“I’m so sorry. Please, don’t cry. If I’d known you wouldn’t like it, I’d never have brought you here.”
“I’m not crying because I don’t like it. It’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
“What is it, then?” His face was full of uncertainty, and I wanted to kiss him again and make it all vanish.
“When my mother got sick, she promised me we’d come visit here together. I think she wanted it to be just the two of us, so I’d have that memory of her.”
“Did you ever make it here?”
I shook my head, but through my grief I could see something special in the way he looked at me, as if I were the only person in the entire world.
“No. A few days before we were supposed to come, my father came to my room. He told me my mother was sick, that if things got any worse, she might die. I had no idea, and that scared me. And he said Mom had only agreed to make the trip because of me, because I was a spoiled and selfish little girl, and that if anything happened to her, it would be my fault.”
“How old were you?”
“Six.”
“Jesus!”
I heaved again, trying to get some air.
“He forced me to tell my mother I didn’t want to do it. I was so young, and my father scared me back then. So I did as he asked. She died thinking she didn’t matter to me.” I blew my nose.
Trey hugged me, and I squeezed his shirt in my fists. I was wailing. I couldn’t stop the storm that had broken out inside me. I was reliving that entire time as though it had just happened.
“Of course she knew you mattered to her. Trust me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because mothers never stop loving their children. They always forgive. No matter what you do.”
His response moved me. And hurt at the same time. But somehow, it allowed me to crawl out of my grief toward something else. I felt his lips on my hair. A kiss that turned my tears of sorrow into tears of bittersweet joy.
“Harper?”
“Yes?”
“Why does your father hate you?”
“I don’t know.”
I felt relieved, grateful to be held by him. And we stayed that way for what felt like days.
“Forget him,” he told me, his voice angry, grabbing my shoulders and stepping back to look me in the eyes. “Screw him. He can go to hell. You don’t need him.”
“I thought you liked him.”
“I could never like anyone who treated you that way,” he said, wiping the tears from my cheeks.
Even now, it’s hard for me to express what that day meant to me.
We visited the house and looked at all the different rooms, which were decorated with furniture and mementos from the era. I shouted with joy when I entered Anne’s room and saw her brown dress with the puffed sleeves hanging on the closet door. The kitchen, the sewing room, Marilla and Matthew’s bedrooms, the actors walking around dressed as characters from the book… All that was like being inside a bubble outside of time, where the normal rules of logic didn’t apply.
The other visitors felt the same. I could tell by the looks on their faces. For a brief moment, we felt it was all real, that the world we had visited in books actually existed.
After walking through the stables and around the property, we headed for the trails, where the story came to life beneath the trees of Lover’s Lane and the Haunted Wood and on the banks of the Lake of Shining Waters. I thought of my grandmother, how much she would have liked knowing that in real life, the area was just as pretty as she could ever have imagined.
