Chapter 17 #3
I had a brief flashback to high school as Linda loaded a sheet of microfiche onto its plate.
She showed me how to use the dials to zoom and move around between the little pictures on the screen.
Tanesha settled down in the chair next to me.
She had her homework open on the table but clearly wasn’t paying much attention to it.
Linda explained, “These letters were included with the estate of a gentleman by the name of Grant Williams. His ancestors lived on the island, and he kept a bundle of their correspondence. The earliest was named Timothy Williams.”
My eyebrows rose at the name Williams. Could these actually be Annabelle’s letters? I wasn’t sure if I was excited to find her or afraid of what I might find.
“There was also a set of letters from A.W., but who she was is unclear. Timothy’s wife was named Jane, but in their correspondence, he does make mention of an earlier marriage in which his wife—”
“Drowned,” I said, finishing for her.
Linda frowned. “We don’t know how she died.” She pointed to the screen and said, “I’ve loaded the first sheet, and here are the others. I’ll be back to check on you.”
“Thank you.” I zoomed in on the handwritten pages, trying to decipher the old, faded cursive script.
Each letter was addressed not to a person, but “To The Other Side.” They varied in length, but all were addressed similarly and all were signed with the initials “A.W.” The first few were hesitant, filled with mundane details about her life.
She filled pages of letters with details about the weather and the birds she’d seen that day, but rarely talked about herself.
That was consistent with Annabelle, at least from the few days I’d spent with her.
In the letters, she wrote about her fascination with the indigenous fisherman and fur traders who came to camp and her love of walking in the forest that surrounded the quarters where she lived.
She wrote a poem about a butterfly and described her joy at witnessing the migration of birds that arrived with the onset of June.
Yet, at other times, she seemed desperately sad.
A.W.’s father was a Royal Army Chaplain who arrived at the new Fort George with his daughter, then promptly died.
After her father’s death, she remained on the island alone, staying with a friendly local farmer and his wife.
Though she still addressed her letters “To The Other Side,” the phrase took on a melancholy note as A.
W. wrote about the oncoming of a brutal winter.
She wrote, “The first snow has yet to abate and though this is not my first winter here, it’s the first one I face alone.
Without my father or a sense of home, I walk through the forest as if a spirit not entirely bound to this world.
The silence presses me. Though I’m only being nipped by the teeth of winter and not yet living in its belly, I feel forever and irrevocably cold. ”
Was this Annabelle? I remembered her wrapping her hands around a mug each morning, even though the August days were hot and sticky. I assumed she, as a ghost, didn’t feel the temperature of the world, but she seemed to gravitate toward the comforts of life, including warmth. I read on.
“To The Other Side; I am overcome with emotion today and know not how much I’ll be able to write.
Not only has Timothy asked to marry me despite my many flaws (of which I will spare you the recounting), but his gift to me is a treasure that brings tears to my eyes even now, several hours after I first encountered it.
He has brought me a teapoy. How he managed it, I cannot imagine!
And though it stands empty until his savings are replenished, the thought of blending tea in a house of my own fills me with such an intense longing for a home I never really knew.
I could scarcely thank him through my tears.
Though I’m loath to stay on this island, having no attachment to it now, Timothy has been a dear friend and a comfort to me. I’ve agreed to the marriage.”
I took a deep breath and read on. Annabelle only mentioned her husband once, but she hadn’t seemed traumatized by her marriage, just wistful. Of her wedding day, A.W. simply wrote, “It was a nice day. Many people attended.”
Skimming through the next few entries, which mostly talked about how difficult it was to figure out what quantities of lard to purchase, I stopped when I came across a recipe for tea.
Half the page was made up of doodles of leaves and teacup patterns, and the other half was a particular ratio of Earl Grey black tea leaves, vanilla, botanical lavender, and a small pinch of white tip.
“Oh my god,” I whispered. This was Annabelle. No doubt about it. The writing sounded like her, and I’d seen her make a rapturous face over the steam from that exact blend of tea. My ghost was real. I’d found her.
But there weren’t many letters left.
She wrote of one day, “Mr. H allowed me on the boat again today. Timothy was cross when he found out how far we’d gone.
” Several times after that, she mentioned badgering Mr. H to let her borrow his fishing boat.
She described taking long walks along the shore and occasionally wading out to her waist, before the icy water drove her, shivering, back to the beach.
As I reread the earlier letters and finished the later ones, I noticed several themes emerging.
Annabelle was clearly lonely. She often mentioned being sad, despondent that her father had died and left her on the island.
She also longed to leave. Timothy never explicitly forbade her from leaving the island, but he worried about her being on the water by herself. Then, one day, she met someone new.
“My heart has found a new reason to beat. It’s as if spring has come early, though the ice is still thick and the days still brief. But Lucy is like a beam of light on the darkest of days. Her voice is like a bell, and truthfully, hearing her singing is the only reason I desire to leave my room.”
Lucy was the wife of the new chaplain. Prior to this, Annabelle only mentioned going to church in the sort of perfunctory way she might mention visiting a relative she didn’t really want to see.
Lucy’s husband belonged to the same denomination as Annabell’s father—one that required absolute piety and left very little room for frivolities like special blends of tea or reading novels.
Although Annabelle had clearly loved her father, I wondered how often he caused her to suppress her enjoyment of life’s pleasures.
But now that Lucy had arrived, Annabelle made regular attendance at church service, despite her earlier indifference.
I felt a flush coming over my face as I read about Annabelle’s feelings toward her friend.
“Yo, she had a crush on Lucy, don’t you think?
” said Tanesha, interrupting my thoughts.
She was reading over my shoulder, scrunching up her face to read the text.
Linda had rejoined us and put up a sign on the reference desk to tell patrons where she was.
Keeping one eye on us, with the other, she silently read a thriller novel.
Tanesha said, “When Janice and I first scanned these, she didn’t believe me, but it’s super obvious.”
“Umm,” I said. “It’s certainly possible.” This was ridiculous—I couldn’t be jealous of a woman who’d known Annabelle two hundred years ago. I shook my head.
Tanesha doodled on the margins of her notebook absently.
Her folders were brightly colored, with photos of dogs wearing glam collars on them.
“I don’t get why she didn’t just write about it.
I write about my crushes all the time,” Tanesha said.
On my other side, I could feel Linda radiating disapproval at the thought of young Tanesha having crushes, but she didn’t say anything.
“Maybe she didn’t know,” I said, mostly to myself.
“What?”
“I just mean that, back then, she probably didn’t have access to people who thought differently.
Even now, it’s hard enough to figure out how to live, but in her time, without the internet?
Without books? I mean, how would you know what you felt was love if you didn’t have any frame of reference for it?
If you weren’t a dude, you wouldn’t have had much choice on—”
“A white dude,” Linda said, eyebrows raised.
I nodded. “If you’re weren’t a white dude, you wouldn’t have had much choice on how you got to live. That’s ...”
“Tragic as shit,” finished Tanesha.
Linda murmured, “Language.”
Tanesha rolled her eyes. “But it is! Sometimes, I write stories where Timothy dies and Lucy’s husband, the reverend, dies. Then A.W. and Lucy get together and they live in a nice little cottage.”
Linda looked scandalized. She rested her open paperback on her chest and gave Tanesha the stink eye. “You do know that Timothy is the reason you have these letters, right?”
“I don’t make him die horribly! Just earlier.” Tanesha shrugged. “I want her to get a happily ever after.”
“So do I,” I said. “So do I.”