Pain.
I moved further away and he immediately put the axe down. His eyes widened. Fear, maybe, or guilt.
“Fuck. I’m sorry. Really sorry.” He left the axe on the ground and moved towards me, stopping about seven feet away.
A blackbird started its song in a nearby bush.
I breathed. In and out. Counting the seconds of the inhalation, slowing the air as it went out. I hadn’t had a panic attack for three weeks, but then I hadn’t had someone walk towards me with an axe in that time. Or at any time.
Because I hadn’t been there.
I hadn’t been able to stop what happened. A small boy and his baby sister.
I breathed, smelling the brine in the air.
“It’s okay.” I heard the quiver in my words. “I should’ve just left you in peace. You made it clear you didn’t want company.”
He reached up and pulled the bobble from his hair, letting it loose about the most sculpted shoulders I’d ever seen.
“I shouldn’t have walked towards you carrying a fucking axe. What did you say your name was again?”
“Anya.” He hadn’t listened.
“Anya.” He made my name sound like he was playing with it in his mouth with his tongue. “It’s a pretty name.”
“Thank you.” His eyes were a pale blue.Pretty. I wasn’t sure what to say. Or what to do. I’d never been socially awkward; growing up in a guesthouse meant that you acquired social skills fast and well. I could always read people in the past, something that had made me a good teacher. I got body language and facial expressions – at least I had in the before, or thought I had. “I’ll leave you be. I might see you around – I’m here for the summer.”
“Helen’s granddaughter?”
I nodded. “One of them. The non-pregnant one.”
He smiled. It wasn’t a smile that drowned his face and shone. It was muted, shy. Tentative. As if he didn’t think he was allowed to smile.
“Are you going inside?”
I shifted a footstep closer to him, my heart rate almost back to normal after he’d walked towards me with the axe. “I probably should. They’ll have seen my car so they’ll be wondering where I got to.”
“You haven’t been in to see them yet?”
A chorus of seagulls dismantled the steady peace. “Not yet. I’ve never been here when Marcy hasn’t been. Sorry – you might not have known who she was.”
His eyes darkened and I saw his shoulders relax. He was now close enough for me to be able to see the detail on his tattooed arms; shaded pictures, words, symbols. They were a story of someone’s life.
“I met Marcy a few times when I first got here. I went to her funeral.”
Meaning I didn’t. Not knowing that I couldn’t. I was advised not to by my therapist and my family. But he didn’t know that and his words had an undertone.
“Thank you for being there.” My training kicked in. Do not show the chink his words have created. Don’t let him see the weakness.
His nod was short. “She was a good lady.”
“She was. I’d best see my family. Sorry to disturb you again.”
I felt his eyes on my back as I turned around, needing to get the hell away from him before I found myself confessing to a stranger why I hadn’t attended the funeral of the woman who had meant the world to me.
“Anya.” He used my name to pull me back.
I didn’t look at him.
