We walked out the front door and turned right onto the street. Turning left at the end of the block and walking for another block put us on the esplanade. It was a typical warm evening with no clouds. The sky had become a deep blue, fading into a lighter blue on the western horizon. The seagulls were all squabbling over roosts for the night, and the coloured lights that were hung in loops along the shopfronts were flickering randomly with a mixture of colours. We found a place selling fresh-caught and cooked fish and ordered some as well as some chips. Nothing seemed to cry out beachside holiday like fish and chips on the foreshore for me. Not that this was a holiday.
We collected our order and wandered across the road. The beach stretched out before us in a long, soft arc, and the water lapped quietly at the shore. Just before the beach, there was a section of soft grass and picnic tables for a couple of hundred meters. At one end was a kids playground and the public toilets, but we sat at the other end, where the grass slowly changed from manicured lawns to natural sand dunes, native grasses, and ti-trees.
Being that school holidays didn't start until next week, it was still fairly quiet. It was a nice time of year to avoid mosquitoes, flies, and midgies. Even the seagulls pretty much left us alone, as they were all settling down for the night. Next week, it will be a completely different story. The Easter holidays were second only to the Christmas holidays for tourists here. By midday on Friday, they would start to descend upon the town with their caravans, campers, and tents, and the population would triple or more.
I can understand why people wanted to come here. It's a beautiful little seaside town with great weather and a relaxing vibe; however, when you add twenty thousand tourists, the atmosphere evaporates. Financially, the tourists are good for the town, but by the end of the holidays, the locals can't wait to see their backs.
The convoy of caravans leaving on the last day is absolutely absurd. It's about a forty-five minute to an hour drive to the nearest city, but on that weekend, it will take at least three hours to get there. While the local tow truck companies have a heyday as the nose-to-tail fender benders happen en-masse. I honestly couldn't think of anything less relaxing.
I spread out the warm white paper, and the smell of the freshly cooked fish wafted into the air, causing my stomach to rumble. We both sat down and began to eat, but we had both been pretty quiet so far. I looked across at Mum, and she looked pretty much how you would expect anyone to look given the circumstances. I reached across the table and took her hand. She looked up, and her sad eyes met mine.
"I know you're not really, but are you okay?"
She half-smiled and chuckled.
"Well. Obviously not, but yeah, I think I'm going to be okay."
"She's a lot worse than we expected."
She dropped her head and looked at the table for a while, but she never let go of my hand.
"Jeffery, I feel so goddamned guilty."
She didn't elaborate straight away, but I knew just how serious she was by the way she said my name. I waited a few moments, and when she didn't say any more, I spoke up.
"You have absolutely nothing to feel guilty about."
She gave a small, bitter, humourless laugh.
"Yeah, right."
"I'm serious. What on earth do you have to feel guilty about?"
"Alright, well, how's this for a list? A failed marriage, an incarcerated son, ignoring the needs of my dying mother, feeling joy and excitement for reliving my youth when I should be focused on the needs of someone I love who is fucking dying, and just to add a cherry on top, the sexual abuse of my other son."
I shook my head and even chuckled a bit. She looked at me like I had lost my mind, and she even looked like she was about to get pissed off with me but then burst into tears instead. She cried like I had never seen her cry before. I moved around to the other side of the table, sat down next to her, and just held her to me. She sobbed for what felt like an hour, and all I could do was hold her to myself and try to comfort her. It was scary to see her lose it like this. I had never seen her lose control, ever. Even when Peter was sentenced, it wasn't this bad. But we all have our breaking points, I guess.
My mind was wandering through the things she had so egregiously accused herself of, and I couldn't help but wonder if I had added to her burdens today instead of easing them. I noticed after a while that she had stopped sobbing and was now just clinging to me like her life depended on it. Her face was buried against my neck, and I could feel the cooler air on my skin that had been wet by her tears. After a few more minutes, I felt her body relax, and then she began to straighten herself up.
She sat up and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then blew her nose. Finally, she looked up at me with swollen eyes.
"I'm so sorry, Kiddo."
I gently kissed her forehead.
"I meant what I said. You have nothing to be sorry for. If you want to beat yourself up over any of this, I can't stop you. I don't see how you can hold yourself responsible for all this, though."
"You don't understand."
"You're right. I don't understand. I'm not stupid; I can see why you might want to blame yourself, but if you are going to do that, then I have the right to reply."
She chuckled and shook her head.
"If you say so."
"Alright. So you say the failed marriage is your fault, yet everything we have discussed today seems to say otherwise. Are you guilty of marrying someone who wasn't entirely suitable for you? Sure, but that's no crime. Did you not try and make it work for the last twenty years?"
"Well. Yeah, I guess."
"It takes two to make a marriage work, and despite you telling him what you needed, he deliberately denied you the very things that made you you. That is abuse, and to expect anyone to be okay with that is completely unrealistic. I don't see why you should be holding yourself to a higher standard than he holds himself. He has shown you no care or love for a long time and outright animosity this year. That is not your fault. While we are speaking of fault, how on earth are you responsible for the behaviour of another adult who simply made a terrible decision and ruined his own life? Decisions made while you weren't present, nor were you expected to be present, and about a subject that we had been thoroughly taught about the dangers of. We were taught by you as well as in school and pretty much every form of media that we have access to. Peter made that decision knowing the dangers and knowing you would not approve. He's an adult, made an adult decision, and is now suffering adult consequences for it."
"I get what you are saying, but I am his mother, and I must have failed in some way, or he wouldn't be in this position."
"Bullshit! We were raised in the same household with the same rules and the same conditions. The thought of ever trying something like that absolutely terrifies me, and that was true even before Peter did what he did. He just made a dumb decision under the influence of alcohol and his peers. He never expected it to go this bad, or he would never have done it. None of it was your doing. Stop trying to take ownership of that away from him. It's his and his alone."
