He puts down the salad. His eyes on me are flint. ‘You will not get better, Lolly, unless you try.’
Grief yawns wide within me. Can this man, who knows everything about me, really believe I can get over losing one daughter and leaving the other by reading and drawing? I will never forgive myself for what I’ve done. Never.
I push my plate away. ‘I want to go out.’
‘What?’
‘Out.’
‘I’m not sure you’re well enough, darling.’
This is the tenderest he’s been in days. I stand up.
‘Lolly, I want you to get better but—’
‘Do you?’ I push his hand away. ‘I wonder.’
58
Strandline
Now
When I start going to the beach, Daniel comes out with me in the mornings, although after two days, we’re both glad that he is busying himself at the post office in Falmouth or the field. He doesn’t like it that I grip his arm as we walk down from the cottage, he likes it even less when I tell him it’s because the twisty Cornish roads, guarded by hedgerows, make me think of the boy he killed. He doesn’t like the feel of the sand or the sun on his laptop or the fact that whenever I hear a child shouting, my head swivels.
‘You need to stop,’ Daniel says, putting his hand on my shoulder after I jumped at the sound of a boy calling his mother over to see a crab he’s found.
‘I can’t help it.’
‘She’s not here.’
‘She might be.’
He stares at me through his aviators, although I cannot see his eyes. ‘You need to be with me, in this moment. Not somewhere else.’
Wasn’t that my struggle in London? That I was a half person, my attention always divided? I thought if I came with Daniel, I would resolve that once and for all. Why am I still in pieces?
Once Daniel leaves, I don’t startle anymore. I give myself over to people-watching. I see Millie in every child, Kit in every man. He is the twenty-year-old student who buys iced frappés for him and his girlfriend. He is the grandfather who takes an order of six ice creams, remembers all the different flake and sauce combinations. He is the dad digging an enormous hole for his two sons. Kit once carved a car for Millie in the sand, sculpted a bonnet, seats, lifted her wriggling into the centre, then buried her, and suddenly, this life with Daniel – books and drawing and bans on carbs – seems unbearably empty.
I start walking the strandline, like I’d do if Millie and I were at the beach, I start collecting. I taught her what Alex taught me, that the strandline – the jagged bands of seaweed – are the best place to find anything because sea glass, shells, drift seeds get tangled. When Daniel sees the buckets I am bringing back to the cottage, he’s pleased. ‘I knew it would work, bringing you here. Can you see? You’re coming back to yourself.’
I am. But not to the fourteen-year-old he wants me to be; I don’t collect pine cones or seaweed. Instead, I pocket pink striped shells for Millie. Bits of Lego for Kit – a red flipper, a scuba tank, a life raft. Pure white scallop shells for Faye. And for myself, tiny shards of blue sea glass, incredibly rare, from centuries-old poison bottles.
‘Why are you just collecting those four types of things?’ asks Daniel, coming up behind me, as I wash them in the sink. ‘It’s not botany.’
‘I just like them,’ I say lightly.
‘Sometimes I have no idea what goes on in that head of yours.’
I keep washing the sand off.
‘You know what it reminds me of?’ he says, his eyes trailing up and down my collection. ‘Voodoo.’
He’s so close. This wreckage calls me home.
59
SeaHeart