Waves

I was on my way home from the post office on that ordinary November morning in Nova Scotia. As the last remnants of fog dissipated, the crunch of the gravel beneath my boots was all too familiar. I had been walking alongside that ocean-hugging street for the better part of my life. A bunch of damp bills and flyers in my hand, I'd been kidding myself for quite awhile about this particular errand. Outwardly, it looked as though I was doing just that: picking up the mail. In actuality, I'd been taking part in an oddly masochistic ritual of sorts for quite some time: having a standoff with the cat in the window, three doors down from my house. 

Licking the salt off my lips, I stopped dead in my tracks once the cat and I locked eyes. The feline was irritatingly blasé as she judged me from her primary blue bungalow, its paint having long chipped away. I didn't know the cat's real name, but I had been referring to her as Fluffy for the last few years. Fluffy was a white marshmallow with opal eyes, and for an animal who did a whole lot of nothing, she continually managed to resurrect my past, no matter how hard I tried to bury it. More specifically, Fluffy was an agonizing reminder of Patrick, and this visit was no exception. 

The steady rhythm of the waves crashing in the distance, I sighed it out and shook it off, giving that cursed cat one last glare before carrying on. My teeth chattered as I walked home—a post-Halloween chill was in the air—my usual cloud of shame, following me overhead.

Things were a little too quiet as I tossed the mail on the kitchen table. I grabbed an apple from the fridge. The first bite was cold and crisp, yet more red than delicious. Leaning against the counter, something felt...off. My grand-mother's old wall clock tick-tocked in the otherwise silent kitchen. I could hear the faint whine of seagulls as they scavenged for food down by Clarke's Point Wharf. Tap-tapping the fingers of my free hand on the cutlery drawer, my gasp no sooner filled the entirety of the room as a square pink envelope, sticking out from the pile of mail, burned into my retinas. My apple sounded hollow as it made contact with the ground, bouncing three times. The piece of mail in question was from Patrick, and even from across the room, it was so horrifyingly perfect how my name and address were handwritten in cursive. I didn't need to open it to find out what it was. He was getting married, and I would have walked out of the house and straight into the violent undertow of the Atlantic, had I not been frozen in time.

Hearing four wheels pull into our driveway shook me back into reality. It was my husband, David. I picked up my apple and started panic cleaning; I wiped down the counter, I scrubbed a few dishes. I could see David from the window above the sink as he carefully got Sidney—our spritely two year-old daughter and the love of my life—out of her carseat from the back of the vehicle. David had just taken her to Sunday night family skating, and suffice it to say, he truly had the Midas touch when it came to fatherhood. Our child had sunflowers in her eyes whenever she looked at David, and my heart both sang and bled every time she looked into mine. I never wanted my baby girl to find out just how much of a fraud I actually was.

My jaw clenched, I forced the corners of my mouth to lift as I met my family at the door. Sidney was cradled in David's right arm with both of hers wrapped around his shoulders. She was affectionately known as my "mini me", but it was uncanny how the cleft in her chin was a carbon copy of her father's. "Mommy," she said. David passed her off to me as I showered her ruby cheeks with kisses. "Hi my sweet girl." 

David leaned in and kissed me too. "Hi babe," he said, "I called for a pizza. Gotta pick it up in twenty." David always loved and took care of us with such calm stability. He was my rock, even though for a long while, I had been a landslide. "That's amazing. Thank you. I had nothing planned for dinner, I uh..... thank you, " I said, setting Sidney down to help her take off her boots and coat. David rustled my hair before making his way towards the kitchen, whistling some kind of made-up-on-the-spot melody. I didn't deserve him.