Chapter 8 — The Tide Turns

Molly’s next trip to her Grandad’s felt different. For one thing, her parents let her take the bus. They’d even asked her to. It was a Friday and she’d been allowed to miss school. Molly hadn’t asked why.

The rods were the first thing she noticed, standing in the corner of the porch. Someone had oiled the reels and coiled the lines properly, which nobody had ever bothered doing in all the years Molly had been coming down.

Molly found Grandad in the kitchen rinsing cups at the sink. He turned when he heard her come in and gave her a smile. He looked old to Molly, but brighter somehow. As if he were being bathed in light.

“You look different,” he said.

“Do I?”

“A little.”

Molly caught a cup he tossed to her.

“How?”

Grandad dried his hands on a tea towel and looked at her for a moment.

“Less tangled.”

Molly laughed.

They sat together on the porch with their cups of tea, and for a while neither of them said anything.

“I know how the story ends,” Molly said.

Grandad smiled, but he didn’t look surprised.

“Do you?”

“Nin comes down off the mountain,” said Molly, “and her grandfather’s at his table with the pen, waiting. And he asks her, did you find it. And she says: there isn’t one. It’s one water. It just keeps changing its clothes.”

Grandad sipped his tea and watched the sea.

“And the feather?”

“She pressed it into the bark of the old tree that leaned over the spring,” said Molly. “To mark the moment.”

Grandad chuckled quietly at that. For a long moment he said nothing. Then he nodded, once, the way he nodded at the sea.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s how it goes.”

Grandad’s whole body softened. He turned to look at Molly, proud of her, and not bothering to hide it.

“Most people think peace is something they have to earn,” he said after a while, “but really it’s always right with them.” He tossed his remaining tea over the porch banister. “I still don’t know why they seem to just keep stepping over it.”

Later, as the sun closed in on the horizon, they walked down to the beach. They didn’t fish; they just walked.

Grandad stopped and dropped to the sand.

“Funny thing,” he said.

“What’s that?” asked Molly.

“I spent half my life looking for the right place to stand.”

Molly waited.

“Then one day,” he said, “I realised I’d always been standing in it. It was my attention that had wandered off to God knows where.”

That night, lying in bed in a room that still smelled of salt and old timber, Molly thought about her Grandad’s words while she listened to the house settling around her.

Her mum arrived late. Molly heard the car, then the screen door, then the low sound of the two of them talking in the kitchen. It seemed a good thing to fall asleep to.

Molly was already awake the next morning. The house was too quiet. She watched the ceiling and waited to know for certain what she guessed the knot in her gut was telling her.

Down the hall her mum’s voice was a soft murmur on the phone. There was silence, then Molly heard her mum’s footsteps coming up the hall.

Molly didn’t cry immediately. A strange stillness surrounded them both after her mum told her that Grandad had passed. Molly looked at her mum’s drawn, grey face and asked if she was okay.

“Oh, Moll.” Her mum’s lips formed a thin smile, then trembled as she burst into floods of tears, opening her arms wide. As they stood there holding on to each other, Molly began to sob as well.

The funeral ceremony took place on the beach. They came down the same track, around the same time, to the same spot where Molly and her Grandad had sat contemplating the sea so many mornings before.

“You know, we used to sit right here together when I was a girl,” said Molly’s mum. Molly was surprised that she hadn’t known.

“What did you talk about?” Molly asked.

Her mum thought about it.

“Not much,” she said. “That was the good bit.” She watched the water for a while. “I stopped coming down for a long stretch there. Work. Always something.” She took Molly’s hand. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

Almost everyone in town was there to share in the celebration of her Grandad’s life. They were all welcomed back to his house, which looked odd with the ebb and flow of people, voices, laughter and tears. Molly could still smell salt and old wood though, and she hoped that would never change.

The next day, Molly rose early and was surprised to find that her Grandad wasn’t standing at the kitchen sink looking out toward the sea. Everything was still there. The kettle, the fishing rods, her Grandad’s mismatched furniture. Nothing had moved, and yet everything felt different.

Later Molly walked down the track toward the beach. She watched the tide move the same way it always had. Watched waves roll toward the shore, breaking and running up the sand, only to fold and run back the way they came.

“Everything finishes somewhere,” she mouthed in time to her Grandad’s voice, giving the sea one of his little nods.

Molly felt the sadness of her Grandad’s absence keenly, but knew it would soften.

Molly stayed on the beach until the sun began to set, then she turned and walked slowly, headed for home.