‘Nice poem.’ Mara took the card. ‘This was made for my grandfather’s funeral, then. I wonder if Mum went. She never told me.’ Mara turned it over in her hands. ‘No date on it.’
‘Maybe you should take this all home and look at it there?’ Ellie suggested, seeing that this was becoming more and more emotional for Mara. ‘I’m sure your son would like to see it too.’
‘Yes.’ Mara wiped her eyes quickly and flashed a bright smile. ‘That’s a good idea. Come on, Fran. Let’s let Fee and Ellie get on with their day. We’ll catch up with you soon, guys.’
‘Okay.’ Ellie could see that Franny was fascinated with the box, but Mara was walking a difficult line between wanting to see what else there was, and not wanting to see, either. She could understand that. Mara was someone who had rebuilt her life in Magpie Cove; she had found Brian, and they were happy. Whatever was in the box, it could tell her about her past. But some things were better left unknown.
Ellie knew that memories could hurt. Sometimes she wished she could put her grief at losing her mum in a box and lock it away somewhere in her heart, out of harm’s way. Instead, she had lost herself in her work, over the years. If she worked hard enough, she could fall into bed at the end of the day so exhausted that she didn’t have to think about her mum at all.
But, here, with more time on her hands than she’d had for twenty years, she’d found her thoughts coming back to her mum. Her intense bravery, fighting the cancer she too had found – first, in her breast and then later, all over her body.
Ellie shivered, though it was a hot day. She saw Mara and Franny out, and grabbed her sunglasses from the table.
‘I’m heading out for a walk,’ she called over to Fee. ‘I’ll be back later.’
‘You okay?’ Fee asked, surprised, but Ellie shook her head.
‘I’m fine. Just need to get out.’
‘All right. Take some sunscreen, then. You’ll burn otherwise.’ Fee tossed her a tube of sun protection, a concerned look on her face. ‘You sure you’re okay?’
‘I’m fine.’ Ellie waved in Fee’s general direction and walked onto the beach.
* * *
It was better outdoors. It was a Wednesday, and the beach was relatively deserted: just a few surfers milled at the water’s edge. Ellie started walking around the sandy perimeter of the beach, rubbing sunscreen onto her arms and chest, and doing as best as she could with her back, hoping that she wouldn’t come home with a hand mark on her back like she had the last time she’d applied her own sun cream.
Though it was late lunchtime and the sun was high in the sky, the breeze off the sea made it feel more hospitable than the close heat inside. Ellie wondered how Fee could work in it, but she had two fans up in the office which kept it relatively cool.
Since she’d been in Magpie Cove, Ellie had avoided thinking much about her mum’s cancer and her own, but she knew she couldn’t avoid thinking about it anymore. If the wild swimming and the fresh air had been helping her to heal, then it was also breaking down the barriers she had painstakingly built up to avoid thinking about the things in her past that she didn’t know how to handle.
Her mum had got breast cancer when Ellie was just fifteen. She had been forty-five. It was no age at all, Ellie thought – just eight years older than she was now. That, in itself, made her take in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She was actually younger than her mum to have had it. Despite her healthy-living regime. Despite her dawn runs along the river Thames.
Like Ellie, her mum had had a mastectomy. She had minimised the impact as best she could for Ellie, to the point of telling her not to bother coming into the hospital to visit. Ellie had been sent to stay with her dad, who was still living nearby, before he moved abroad.
Obviously, Ellie had insisted on being by her mum’s bedside every available moment. In fact, the nurses had had to tell her to go home. She’d prayed to a God she had never really believed in to save her mother:Please, please, let her be okay. She had bargained with the powers that be, offering her teenage life in exchange.Please, save her, she had repeated, thousands of times, in her mind, under her breath, whispered to the beeping of the heart-rate monitor and the rough, clean white sheets that covered her mother as she slept.
If there was a God, it had not taken her life in return for her mother’s, but Ellie’s mother had nonetheless gone into remission and that was blessing enough. She’d stayed that way until Ellie had started university three years later. But that time, no amount of tears and prayers had been able to make the cancer submit to mercy.
Is that my fate?Ellie thought as she walked up the beach and onto the road that led out of the village.Should I be planning for a shorter life than I expected? How long do I have?
She started climbing the steep path that led to Magpie Point, the cliffs that overlooked the cove to the right of the beach. She’d been up there a couple of times, but so far it had always been an effort to get there. Today, she noticed that she was stronger than she had been before, and though she still got out of breath, it wasn’t as bad as before.I am healing, she thought.I have to focus on that.
When she reached the top of Magpie Point, Ellie sat at the edge of the cliffs and stared out to sea, catching her breath. Her arm had better movement than it had, and the feeling was definitely coming back. She moved it in gentle circles, rotating her shoulder.
What had happened to her mum was sad. But even though she had had cancer, too, at such a young age, it didn’t mean that she would end up in the same boat. She knew that. But it was one thing to know something in your mind, and another thing to know it in your heart.
She was scared of what might lie ahead, and she felt the weight of her mum’s legacy like a weight around her neck.
