Frances and Gillian’s friendship

Frances and Gillian’s friendship persists beyond Gillian’s death as a vivid, imagined companionship in which Frances can expose embarrassment and grief without having either dismissed. In Frances’s dreamlike journey, Gillian does not offer a cure or erase the difference between an imagined child and a living one; she insists that Frances is allowed to mourn what she had hoped to become. Their bond thus becomes a continuing conversation: Frances misses Gillian, while Gillian speaks from a state Frances imagines as bliss, directing her attention toward a beauty that is always present but obscured by restless thought.

Friendship in Frances’s imagined journey

Frances encounters Gillian in a star-filled sky, riding in a sleigh drawn by white horses. The setting gives their conversation the freedom of a dream, but it is also recognizably Frances’s own imaginative world: her books lie open in her lap, and she pulls words from them to scatter across the sky. Sol and Henry are there too, jokingly firing catapults at unnecessary adjectives. Gillian’s presence is not a solemn memorial tableau; she participates in the wry, lively exchanges that belong to Frances’s relationships with the living and the dead alike.

When Gillian says, “They’re just words, Frances,” she cuts through Frances’s attention to the distinction between a rhyme and an imperfect rhyme. The remark is both teasing and pointed: language is Frances’s craft, but the friendship is not reduced to cleverness or literary performance. Sol’s response and Gillian’s sharp retort preserve her individuality within the scene. Frances can still hear Gillian as a particular person, not merely as a generalized voice of consolation.

Grief for an imagined future

The journey brings Frances to the loss attached to Paul Drabble and his son Ari. Paul disappears from her imagined scene, and Frances finds, to her surprise, no pain in the empty space he leaves. She says he had meant nothing, describing him as a credit on her bank balance; Gillian corrects her financial term with familiar bluntness. The joke lets their old conversational ease survive even as Frances identifies what mattered more than the failed romance: the possibility she had imagined of becoming Ari’s mother.

Frances admits to Gillian that this was the only time in her life she had considered motherhood. She feels deeply embarrassed by the admission, as if the unrealized future were too foolish or insubstantial to count as a loss. Gillian answers with a distinction that gives Frances permission to grieve without pretending that Ari was actually her child: it is a loss, and embarrassment does not disqualify it. The friendship’s care is therefore neither indulgent fantasy nor correction from a distance. Gillian recognizes the emotional consequence of Frances’s hope, even though its object was an imagined life.

The snow then falls silently for days. Frances and Gillian remain beside one another until they become frozen, snow-covered figures, an image that makes their companionship durable but not triumphant: they sit with grief rather than making it vanish. When spring arrives and the snow melts, Frances questions why her father is absent from the journey and insists that she is the one writing it. Her exchange with Gillian shows Frances revising the imagined encounter as she goes, while the dead remain figures with whom she can speak and disagree.

Missing Gillian and the continuing bond

Frances watches an emu run across the starry sky, alive again but still unable to fly, and tells Gillian that she misses her. Gillian replies that she does not miss Frances in the same way because she is in a constant state of bliss. Their asymmetry matters: Frances’s longing belongs to the living, while Gillian’s imagined condition is free of it. Yet Gillian does not become remote. She remains responsive, answering Frances and trying to turn her attention from her review toward the beauty she says is always there.

Gillian describes that beauty as something Frances may hear, feel, or see if she becomes quiet, still, and stops wanting. Frances responds by returning to an ordinary preoccupation, asking whether she has told Gillian about her review. The shift makes the scene affectionate rather than purely devotional: Frances’s habits persist even in an encounter shaped by death, and Gillian knows her well enough to call her back from them. Her advice is not presented as a simple solution to bereavement. It is an invitation to attend, while Frances’s answer shows how difficult that attention remains.

Echoes in the living world

The friendship’s influence also appears in Frances’s exchange with Zoe. When Zoe speaks of Zach, the name makes her feel faint; she explains that she and Zach were twins and that she no longer celebrates their shared birthday on the original day. Frances responds by acknowledging the birthday connection rather than pressing Zoe to explain it away. Later, Frances places a hand on Zoe’s shoulder and listens as Zoe describes her anger at Zach and her sense that, during the previous night, they had spoken again.

Frances tells Zoe that she too spoke with Gillian and her father, experiences that felt more vivid than a dream and more real than ordinary life. The parallel does not establish that the dead literally returned; it shows Frances making room for Zoe’s account by relating it to her own. Gillian’s friendship thus shapes how Frances responds to another person’s bereavement: she does not deny regret or prescribe detachment, but recognizes that a felt encounter can matter to the person who experienced it. Across Frances’s imagined journey and her conversation with Zoe, the bond with Gillian remains active as memory, intimate speech, and a model for allowing grief to be named.