Once, alone as always, I drove in a rented car to the place she was discovered on the morning of December 15, 1974. I parked the car so that it blocked me from the view of passersby.
Her family and friends had erected the roadside memorial to her about twenty feet from the woods, a few feet from the pavement—not a memorial like those you see at the sites of fatal traffic accidents, not a wooden cross and plastic flowers and, perhaps, a graduation photograph. Facing the road, on the edge of the woods on the far side of the ditch, is a black marble gravestone like the one erected at Bergen-Belsen for Anne Frank and Margot Frank. It has a rounded top, below which is etched in white the Star of David, the name Anne Wilansky, and the dates of her birth and death.
As with Bergen-Belsen, the place seemed too ordinary to have been the site of anything exceptional, let alone what it was famous for. The stunted spruce had been cut back to make room for hydro poles, whose hum was constant, almost soothing. On the other side of the road, you could just make out the ocean in the gap between two hills. Perhaps, on a cloudy night, you could see the faint glow of the city in the sky.
It was a typical early morning in May, sunny but cold, the dew frost not yet melting from the trees and grass. There was no reason for the foghorn at Cape Spear to blow, and yet it did, just once, perhaps by accident.
Dressed in jeans and a peacoat like the one she wore, I knelt on the ground and sat back on my heels. I moved one hand over the letters of her name as if they were written in Braille.
Every word I said came out as a puff of breath.
“Anne, I’ve been writing to you and your namesake for so long I feel as if I know you, but I don’t know you at all and I don’t know her and I don’t know what to say. I feel the way I did when we lined up with all the others to visit Anne Frank’s stone. It’s just me today and the sky is clear, not grey like it was at Bergen-Belsen. They found you here on a morning much like this one, just as sunny but much colder. He must have thought you were a fluke, an opportunity that dropped into his lap, until it hit him that you knew him and he couldn’t let you go. I think of you every day. I remember your voice, the smell of your hair when we hugged outside the car. They’re such small, normal things, aren’t they, to get into a car, to get out of it, to get back in. They all seem so momentous now, so laden with foreboding, so obviously leading to something that need not have happened. I’m so sorry I didn’t stay in the car. I’m so sorry.”
Beside the stone, encased in glass, there was a plaque that bore this verse:
THIS STONE MARKS THE PLACE
WHERE ANNE MARIE WAS THROWN,
SURROUNDED BY THE WOODS SHE LOVED
BUT OTHERWISE ALONE.
SHE IS FREE, AS WE SHALL BE,
FREE FROM ALL CONCERNS,
FREE FROM DARKNESS AND DESPAIR
WHEN THE LIGHT RETURNS.