Trevallyn
by Patrick Maher

Michelle had inherited a haunting beauty from her mother and her mother before her.

"Trevallyn," she whispered. Her soft ways enchanting his senses. 

He knew he had to finish his homework. But she wiggled into his brain spaces like an aroma of roses or baking bread in his grandmother's house. Quiet, insistent, and gentle. Always gentle. But he knew Michelle would not let it go.

He lifted his eyes to look into hers and nosy Racine sniggered across the library sounding like a jackhammer cracking ice. Racine was Michelle's best friend but she just couldn't get her head around the feelings Michelle had for Trevallyn. Some fourteen year olds were just younger than other fourteen year olds. Feelings embarrassed them.

"Is it true?" she asked.

Trevallyn gave up, his concentration fading fast. The homework he was trying to research would have to take care of itself. He would probably be gone before the teacher had marked it anyway.

"Yes, we fly out on Saturday".

Michelle didn't cry, but the sadness in her eyes and the tears that wet her pretty face made Trevallyn think of ways he could somehow stay. Maybe his grandmother in Ontario would take him? No, that would also take him away from Michelle and anyway she lived out on the edge of North Bay. Fog to freeze your heart and winter temperatures to freeze your soul are probably part of what made him sick in the first place.

"Why?”

Trevallyn had spent most of his life resigning himself to his fate and often wondered if someone, sometime, would tell him that there was a happy ending. Now, with the steamy heat of the library pressing in on him, he just sighed as he glanced out of the window at the crystal white landscape of a deep Canadian Winter.

Michelle would not be fobbed off with one of Trevallyn’s mysterious silences. Something he had learned to do to escape from the sterile hospital ward after his heart operation. She coughed and he looked back at her with a shrug.

“Because my father's got a job in Australia.”

“Doing what?” Not understanding why the only boy she had ever really loved had nearly been taken from her once and was going to be taken from her again.

Racine, was standing behind them at the library shelves performing a full on vomit mime, making out she was throwing up into a trash can. Michelle looked over and frowned. Racine poked her tongue out as if to say, ‘Idiot’.

“There's a big mining boom going on there and that’s what he does. You know that.”

“Yes Trevallyn, exploration geologist, I know. But there’s lots of exploration to do right here in Canada.” Even when she was feeling angry she was still the only person who could call him Trevallyn. Everyone else called him Trev or Trevor, but never Trevallyn. Even his mother and father called him Trev. Trevallyn was reserved for Michelle and Michelle alone.

The door to the library foyer opened and a tall blonde man looking like an ancient Viking in furs and gloves filled the space, saying nothing. He stood with a perfect stillness that felt like a magnet. Every eye in the room, students and librarians alike turned to the powerful image in their midst. He looked over at Trevallyn and smiled.

Quietly, Trevallyn picked up his papers and books and walked toward him. Trevallyn looked back at Michelle, almost forming the words, ‘I love you’, with his lips, then, without a word, Trevallyn and his father both left.

Even Racine sensed that this was a time to be respectful and she vacantly thumbed through the pages of a book of Calculus equations that she would never understand. She even checked to see she had it the right way up.

A minute or so later the sound of a snowmobile snapped through the crystal cold air and Michelle stood still at the window as Trevallyn and his father left her life forever.

Trevallyn spent the journey in quiet reading. They went first by boat, then car, then train, then plane, then bus. It all seemed long, tedious and rather pointless to Trevallyn. The moments where he drifted off to sleep, in that space where his mind would hover between waking and sleeping, he was sure he could hear Michelle whispering, “Come back, Trevallyn.”

They used to amuse themselves by playing little games of extra-sensory perception when the teacher had droned on and on. Michelle would draw a simple picture and concentrate on it and Trevallyn would try to draw the picture she had in her mind. At the beginning their attempts were not very successful but the teacher was going to be at the school for a long time, so they persisted, and they eventually became quite good at sending each other mental pictures.

Sometimes she would embarrass him by sending him something a little risque. He then had to explain to the teacher that he had burst out laughing because he had just got the point of a joke his father had told him that morning and he was sorry and he would not do it again. Which was OK because he had his fingers crossed behind his back and it did not really count as a lie.

That is how he knew she was sending him mental pictures all the way to Australia, no matter that he was on a boat or a train or a plane. Every now and then he found he had to laugh out loud, which is a bit embarrassing when you are half asleep on a crowded bus. People do stare at fourteen year olds. They seem to forget that they were fourteen once and the only difference is that he had a computer and an iPod and they had books and what his dad called a ‘wireless’. What he really needed was a mobile phone so that he could call Michelle to check whether he was reading her messages correctly. Maybe when they got to Australia.

Which they did.

The house was about as ordinary as you could get for a cold coastal climate in Canada or North America. Why anyone would build a Cape Cod House in Australia though was bewildering. However, that is where the family ended up. A place called Shoalwater. One street from the ocean. Waiting for the summer furnace of Western Australia to cook him in his upstairs study bedroom.

He made few friends at school. Rockingham Senior High School was neither uplifting nor defeating. It was just plain vanilla bland and left him uninspired. His English teacher asked the class about their aspirations. What did they want to be when they left school? When it got to Trevallyn to answer, he could not think of a single thing he wanted to do. Nothing.

Days slipped by from spring into summer and then into autumn and winter. Each night he fell into a kind of trance where he lost awareness of the flutter in his heart and focused his mind on Michelle. Each time he did it she became more real. Then one night he was sure that she was standing at the end of his bed, smiling. His eyes opened and there was a shadow that vanished as he looked at it.

From then on he became aware of a shadow near him most nights. He and Michelle swapped drawings and sometimes love letters by just concentrating on each other. She wanted news and he couldn’t think of anything. He just felt more and more disconnected from his surroundings in Australia.

He spent time in hospital recovering from an episode of what the doctors called ‘tachycardia’, where his heart raced all by itself and he couldn’t get enough blood to his lungs and his body so they ‘zapped’ him with a set of paddles. It worked but left him quite weak.

An elderly lady with grey hair, soft white skin, a huge smile and a cultured English accent came to see him when he was in hospital. She seemed to know about Michelle and sensed his despair. Then she revealed more and more about Michelle. She knew about her family and, more importantly, about her grandparents and even her great grandparents. Who was this person? Trevallyn let her call him by his proper name. She lived just three streets from Trevallyn and invited him to call on her when he got out of hospital. Which he did. Often.

Her name was Grace. She was somehow connected to both him and Michelle. He found it spooky but compelling to discover that she had come from a family of Canadian emigrants who moved to England in 1917. The first world war drew her father to England to do research on heart disease. He was a doctor and was puzzled by how some members of his family had suddenly died so early in life and others had lived to be in their seventies. He thought there had to be an inherited factor.

Grace made the connection for Trevalln when, on one of his visits to her seaside cottage, she showed him an old note book belonging to her father. He had put together all of the connections he could find that made up his family tree. There it was as plain as could be. He  and Michelle were distantly related. Connected cousin by cousin by cousin.

Trevallyn belonged to the line that had so many of its members die at an early age with a heart attack. Michelle belonged to the line that had lived into their seventies. Grace pointed out, ‘Of course, there is no real way of knowing how fate will treat you. After all I'm on your line and I should be dead by now. and here I am, still going strong at seventy six.’

Then when night came and Trevallyn was in one of his trances concentrating on Michelle, he drew the family tree he had seen and wrote, ‘I love you. I want so badly to be with you again.’

It was as if she was taking dictation. In her trance, Michelle wrote, ‘I love you. I want so badly to be with you again.’

That was all the prompting Michelle needed. She asked her parents if she could go to Australia to see Trevallyn. At first they they refused, but she said she was old enough now and it was safe and she finished school in a month. They gave in and she booked her trip.

It was meant to be a surprise so she had not told him she was coming. She had blanked her mind to her trip in the month before so that she did not inadvertently make a mental picture that Trevallyn could see.

The trip to Australia was uneventful and helped her clear her thoghts so that Trevallyn got no inkling of her coming.

The taxi took her from the Airport straight to Trevallyn's house and his mother let her in.  Michelle put her finger over her mouth in "Shhh!" gesture, she climbed the stairs to his study calling, ‘Trevallyn, Trevallyn’, knowing it would be a huge surprise.

Trevallyn did not answer.

She missed him by minutes. He had gone to see Grace. However, when he arrived there was an ambulance outside. She had died that night. He went inside to see her lying peacefully in a pool of honeyed light that seemed to come from nowhere. Her face was lit by a glow of happiness. Her life and her duty were done.

Then Trevallyn’s heart started to race. He could feel the fluttering and, as he watched the ambulance officers preparing to take Grace, he felt faint and found himself flying along a tunnel of bright light.

Grace took his hand and led him on toward the glow ahead saying his name so gently, “Trevallyn”. Then he heard another voice behind him calling, “Trevallyn, Trevallyn”. It was Michelle. She reached out and took his arm and the tunnel spun the three of them to a place of eternal peace and light.

Michelle had inherited the gene for heart failure after all. Now, in a certain Cape Cod house set one street back from the ocean, a hauntingly beautiful ghost floats up and down the stairs like a sea mist calling, “Trevallyn, Trevallyn”.