The wind howled from the northwest adding white caps to the placid waves of the bay as the sky darkened.
“It’s going to rain hard,” said Gram, who felt the storms in her bones an hour or two before they hit, “I’d say you still have an hour or so before it gets here, but you should start bringing in anything you don’t want to get wet.”
“Okay.”
I’d come up to see her on a whim. I needed to get away and the cottage was the best place for that. No one who knew about what had happened knew where it was. I’d turned my phone off when I hit the state line, so they wouldn’t be able to call either.
It wasn’t the biggest mistake of my life, but it was close. As Gram said when I told her about it, no one had died, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened and that a few people hadn’t been hurt. Gram had offered that “aches and pains are part of life, whether they are of the body or the soul, you can’t avoid them.”
As much as those words helped, they were only a momentary balm. Hour after hour my mind played out the events over and over again. I don’t know what I would have changed. Everything had to happen the way it did. I’m not proud of it, it just…there wasn’t another way.
“Here it comes,” Gram announced from the front windows, looking out across the bay.
I looked out and saw a wall of water coming towards us. A low rumble of thunder echoed out ahead of it. This is what I had been waiting for.
I opened the side door and stepped out onto the deck. The first drops of water slammed into my skin. I stretched my arms out wide and looked to the sky. I turned in a slow circle hoping to be cleansed.
Though she didn’t say a word, I could feel Gram’s eyes on me. I knew there was no judgement. Just love. That’s what I needed. That’s why I’d come.
Soaked to the bone, I went down to the water’s edge. Gram always said salt water healed everything. I lay down in the water, hoping my wounds had been washed clean by the rain and that the salt would now do its part.
