Melissa's Daughters

Shelley. She turns the corner and walks towards us, on the other side of the road. Maybe five hundred meters away, so far she’s still a line against the lighter trees and the grasses and the sand. She’s been walking by the house every day for the last week. It took me almost that long to figure out who she was. I knew there was something familiar, the way she walked. Her right foot swings out and turns in again, just slightly, you can see it when she walks straight towards you head on, once she gets closer. I’ve never seen anyone else walk like that, she was twelve when I saw her last, at the trial. She comes along this road every day, walks by our place, up to the corner by the old school, and then turns and comes back. She’s got a cottage somewhere, renting probably, which is why she showed up a week ago. She was twelve. Thirty five plus twelve -- forty seven. She’s forty seven. I can’t believe it. I’m fifty four. As old as Stan, the last time I saw him. Dead for ten years. Poor old Stan. He never got anything he ever wanted. I’m not sure he ever knew what he wanted. A whole lifetime ago. She takes me back a whole lifetime ago. She was still a kid. I haven’t told Page and Erica anything about -- any of that, Noreen or any of that. They’re too young, I tell myself, I don’t have to tell them that yet. I’m more afraid of those two little girls than anyone else I’ve ever had anything to do with. They’re the only people I’ve ever been afraid of. Afraid of what they’ll think when I tell them about their mother, where I was for twenty five years. Why I was. Afraid they’ll hate me, their mother the convict. All that stuff. So small, and they scare the living hell right out of me.