CHAPTER EIGHT

Day 153? - the next day

I tried to sneak back into the house without anyone seeing me, but of course Chris was there as I tiptoed towards the main stair. My dress crumpled, my hair a mess and my make up, which I’d not been able to clean off before we fell asleep, all over everywhere. She very diplomatically didn’t mention anything, but I caught a smile as she let me go upstairs to wash and change. Although I wanted nothing more than to take to my bed for another couple of hours, she’d asked that we go for a walk, and I knew that there were still things we needed to discuss.

I met her in the front garden, and we set off down the main gravel path leading eastwards away from the house. As was our habit, we walked hand-in-hand. My head was still fuzzy from lack of sleep and Chris, despite appearing to have had some urgency when she requested that we walk, was also quiet. I’d walked this way myself many times in the last few months when I’d been building Pete’s cairn. The path ran predominantly through woodland but, just as we approached the beach, there was a bend in the path and the woods thinned, giving a view of the rocks on each side of the beach and the jetty which ran out from the shore. As we walked through the final few trees I thought at first it was a birch with an unusually straight trunk, but when we rounded the corner there was no mistaking it. The mast of a yacht, tied up on the jetty.

I called out. “Chris, we must have visitors!”. She smiled enigmatically and I dropped her hand and broke into a run towards the jetty. The yacht was around forty feet in length with a single mast, a gleaming navy blue hull and freshly oiled teak decks. She was a real beauty - as pretty as any I’d sailed. But there was something odd about her. If someone had sailed her here, I’d have expected to see the mainsail furled around the boom, and the foresail reefed at the forestay. But the boat wasn’t rigged at all - the mast and boom were completely bare. I walked around to the stern. There was no flag; no name. No sign of where the boat had come from. No sign of any crew. The boat looked brand new and unused. As I was trying to understand how it had got here Chris arrived alongside.
“I don’t understand” I said. “Whose is it? Where are they?”
She smiled. “It’s yours.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“It’s yours. Yours to name. Yours to keep. The sails are all inside.”
“But I still don’t understand”
“She’s a gift. From me. You can take her and sail away from here.”
“My god! Chris! I mean…she’s beautiful. She’s the prettiest boat I’ve ever seen. My god!…” I had a vision of skimming along the waves, salt spray crashing over the bows. “You mean, she’s mine?’
“Yes!”
I ran my hand along the smooth gunwale, tracing her curves and then stopped, abruptly.
“You want me to go? To leave Aeaea?”
“I didn’t say that. But you’re free to go if you wish.”
“And what if I don’t want to?”
“Then you can stay.”
“She’s beautiful, Chris. And no-one’s ever given me a gift anything like as generous. But….but…” I was trembling now, and tears were rolling down my face. “Ash and Drew are my sisters. I can’t leave them now. And I think I’m falling in love with Penn. And then there’s you! I never knew my mum, or my dad. I never had any brothers or sisters. You make me feel like I’m home, Chris. Aeaea is my home!”
She held out her arms and I fell into them. That comfort that I’d felt that first day, when she’d laid her hand on my back as I lay retching on the floor of my room, was still the same. I knew now what it was. It was how you felt when you had a mum.

We walked home slowly, hand-in-hand, along the gravel path. Chris spoke softly as we walked.
“Many, many years ago, longer now than I can almost remember, a man came to Aeaea like you, after travelling lost for years at sea, trying to get home. I took him in. Nursed him back to health. Gave him love. I wanted him to stay, but I knew he had another who was waiting for him, so I let him go home. He told me that one day another would come, like him, but I have waited so long. I am too old now to give you the kind of love that I gave to him, but I will be proud to be your mother if you will have me.”

This is going to be my final diary entry. My story ends here. For now, anyway. Maybe in the future we will have other strangers that arrive here on Aeaea, or places like it, that need a place to call home, and it will be for me to help them find it. Tomorrow I will take my diary to the yacht, and set it and her adrift. Who knows - maybe someone will find it and read it and learn something from it.

Life is simple now. I know that all I need to do is to love Penn, and Ash and Drew, and Chris, and my goats, and my squirrels and the grandmother oak and all her grandchildren, and all of the plants and animals and rocks and pebbles and soil and dirt that is Aeaea. For all of it is me, and I am all of it.

I re-read the opening page of the diary that I started a lifetime ago. ‘I am David Sydos’ it reads. I chuckled softly to myself. There is only one way now that I can finish.

I AM SUE SYDOS. I AM HOME.

THE END