Four of us around the fireplace and only the sound of the fire filled the room. What was there to say?
My parents were looking blankly into the fire. Sean’s eyes were pacing around the room.
The sound of footsteps instinctively turned our faces towards the stairs. It was Aleta in her nightgown that hung loosely on her worn out body.
“There’s my little girl!” It was Sean, who leaped to his feet at the sight of his daughter, with a slight shiver in his smile. My parents stood up as well but said nothing. “I would like, to go out,” said Aleta with a weak smile, “to the water, if that’s alright.” For a short instance I caught Sean gazing wistfully at his daughter, before he retrieved his cheerful face. “Yes! Yes, of course!” He began running around, gathering anything he could get his hands on. “Right away, love! Just let me get a few things – there, some blankets, your deckchair. Some warm water perhaps, in the thermos! Yes, God knows it’s cold out there today!”
“Actually, I was wondering if, I could go with…Vince?” she looked at her father guiltily. The mention of my name startled me, as well as Sean, but he handed me the blankets and the folded deckchair and the thermos with a surrendering smile, then turning to Aleta, gently wrapped her coat around her shoulders. “Thank you...dad.” She smiled weakly. He took her hands and began swinging them playfully, resisting the urge to pull her into a hug. There was no need for such foolish things. As if he needed to hug her goodbye every time he let her out of his sight. He could be so irrational sometimes - she was going to come back. This wasn’t their last parting. Of course he knew that. But the final look I saw on his face before I shut the door behind us was that he didn’t know.
We walked on quietly and stopped just as the waves were about to touch the tips of our shoes. I opened the deckchair and helped her on it, wrapped her legs with one of the blankets her father had handed me and spread the other one on the sand for me to sit on.
She leaned her head back, closed her eyes, and inhaled the ocean air deeply. “You know how, how many nights I spent dreaming of this, this moment...and yet, I could never dream this smell.” She smiled down to me with her eyes slightly squinting from the sun peeking out behind the clouds. I waited impatiently to find out why she had really asked me to come here with her, alone. She must have noticed the nervousness on my face, for immediately she became serious and reached out for my hand. I let her hold it and she stroked it with her thumb before speaking.
“You know, I’ve been thinking, about the day we went to that, lousy bookstore, remember? Muffins something - what was it called?”
“Word Muffins.” I smiled at the memory. We had asked the shopkeeper for The Lord of the Flies, and thinking that it was a book about flies, he had explained to us regretfully that they only sold fiction. We had apologized for our “mistake” and, barely holding our laughter, had burst out of the store. “I remember.”
“Yeah.” For a moment her eyes got lost in reverie as she gazed at the setting sun. But then her smile faded as she turned to me.
“After that, we sat down somewhere near that place, on a bench in some park, remember?” she continued, now looking serious. “And you were telling me, about the - the bullies in your school.” I felt myself pulling away. Why was she bringing this up?
“I know you said, you’d never forgive them. Or yourself. You’d been too weak, to defend yourself, hadn’t you?” Why was she doing this to me?
“What I wanted to say was,” she continued, now leaning back, “I spent so many years, just angry. So many nights, I tossed and turned in bed, replaying in my head over and over, how certain people hurt me, or humiliated me. ‘How could they get away with that?’ ‘How could they think that they could treat me that way and not pay for it?’ I couldn’t rest, you know?
“But now I’m here,” she smiled, looking at the cottage she had chosen to spend her final weeks in. I frowned; I hated that cottage. “And all those people, what they did, it hardly matters to me anymore. I wish I’d known that sooner, you know?” She smiled at me like the warm sun and squeezed my hand.
I nodded. I only wish that back then I had truly understood what she meant.
