“Do you want to come to the beach with us?” The tiny voice was filled with wonder, and a compassion only the young and innocent exude. After a moments hesitation, “Auntie Bec, do you?” she repeated, accompanied this time by tugging on her sleeve.
Auntie Bec looked out over the verandah of her sisters’ home, watching the waves rolling in toward the beach in their inexorable goal of crashing to the shore. It was late summer and still warm. She was dressed in shorts, sandals and a light blouse, one sleeve of which right now was apparently being flapped in the inevitable sea breeze. She had one leg crooked under her body as she sat and the smooth softly tanned skin belied her age, as did the radiant but sad features on her face. Her sadness slipped away like the night.
“Oh, I’m sorry Hon.” She turned to face her young niece and the smile was as bright and genuine as a summer day. “What did you say sweetie?”.
“Mom said we can go down the beach; are you ever gonna come with us?”.
She emphasised the word ‘ever’ with a mock exasperation just like she had seen her Mom and her Aunt do many times before.
Becs’ vivid blue eyes lost their focus and once again, saw a time when she was young and innocent and oblivious to the horrors of the real world. Right now, she wished she could go back to that time and share the wonders of life once again with her youngest niece, in fact, with all of her family. She faced the ocean again, her eyes wide and unseeing, and her niece shrugged her shoulders and walked away.
She had seen her Aunt do this many times before as well and knew, even at the tender age of five (‘nearly six’ she’d have corrected), that it would be useless to try and get her attention away from the sea. What she didn’t understand was why her Aunt could sit out there, look at the beautiful blue ocean and the white sand and not want to actually go and play in it. It was so much fun, except when the waves knocked her over, or if it was really windy and the sand hurt her legs. Maybe Aunt Bec had been on the beach on a really windy day? She almost turned to go back but, one glance at her Aunt sitting there, looking lost, and she grabbed the screen door and ran inside to grab her towel and her body board instead.
“Auntie Bec’s not coming Mom” she yelled.
“You okay Beccy?”
A pretty face framed by the same blonde hair and similar piercing blue eyes looked along the verandah. She was older than Bec by nearly eight years but she looked 20 years older. The family resemblance was marked, they could never be anything other than sisters but the look in their eyes were different. They had been through the same pain, but had dealt with it in their own individual ways, and truth be known, Bec probably had the worst of it ‘coz she’d had nobody to depend on. April had been married when they had all found out the truth, so she, at least, had her husband and three children to help her recover. Dad never got over his daughters loss and passed away a year after it had happened. Mom had died over 9 years ago, so as a family, tragedy looked to be a curse. A curse hopefully over now. But Beccy still took it hardest. After all, it was she that had found out the truth. Accidentally, but almost to her peril as well. So April and her husband had taken Bec into their home, because that’s what families do. As soon as she heard her daughters’ voice booming throughout the house she had poked her head out through the french doors leading from the lounge to the verandah.
