Chapter 1 Kate
KATE
To be, or not to be.
To be, or not to be . . .
That is all that is written on the orange card.
Six little words. Nothing more. Kate scans the rest of the noticeboard for a clue.
There are the usual advertisements for toddler groups, RNLI bake sales, and Pilates.
A testament to the customers who gather in this small Italian-style coffee shop.
Locals, in the winter months; incomers, in the summer months, or when the sweep of migration draws the birders in their flocks.
She turns her attention back to the noticeboard.
Reflexology.
Yoga for Dogs.
Kate smiles.
But there is nothing that sheds any light on the orange notice. She glances over her shoulder to the young girl behind the counter, tempted to ask her. But she has her head down, texting on her phone. Or is she filming herself?
The owner, Luigi, appears from the back. “Phone!” he barks at the girl who flicks it into her apron pocket with a fluid twist of the hand.
“I wasn’t!” she declares, eyes wide, head shimmering with indignant shakes.
“Tay, you know the rules.”
“Chill out,” she mutters, head ducked low. But her voice holds the suspicion of a grin that Kate cannot see, although she spots the answering ghost of a smile on Luigi’s face.
I bet he likes having her around. I bet it makes him feel alive.
Kate looks around at the café, with its speckled marbled tabletops circled by chairs painted duck-egg blue or teal.
Along one wall is a long bench filled with orange and turquoise patterned cushions, a long wooden table set in front of it, ready for larger groups.
On the wall in pale ash frames are retro posters of colorful houses, spilling into Mediterranean Seas, and behind the counter, a large, square oil painting of lemons, their skins flecked with sunshine.
She fleetingly wonders if there will come a time when the café will start to look dated and tired.
Luigi has not changed a single thing in here since his wife, Tina, died four years ago.
The espresso cups she collected still hang from hooks below a shelf stacked with the café’s terra-cotta and white china.
If the time comes, perhaps Tay—she thinks that’s what Luigi called her—will sort it out for him.
“Now that is the question.”
“I’m sorry?” Startled, Kate turns to the woman who is standing beside her. She didn’t hear the woman, and a man she presumes to be her husband, come in.
“To be, or not to be, that is the question,” the woman repeats, smiling at Kate. She looks to be in her late seventies, wrapped up against the wind and squally rain—it’s late March—but not a birder, Kate decides. Smart raincoat and black boots.
“Ah, Shakespeare,” her husband proclaims, joining them.
The woman raises an eyebrow at Kate, “Yes, Leonard, I think we gathered that.”
“I was wondering what it—” Kate starts.
Leonard’s words roll over hers, flattening them. “Hamlet, of course. He is talking about life. To BE, or not to BE coffee and cake?” he continues all in one breath.
He doesn’t wait for an answer, and his wife’s eyes follow him as he bustles toward the counter.
“Are you married?” she asks Kate, still watching him.
“Divorced,” Kate replies, with more relief than regret.
“Wise,” the woman comments, looking at her husband, who is gesticulating at each cake in turn.
“Coffee, or blueberry and almond? Or are there brownies? Don’t much like the look of the carrot cake,” Leonard calls, oblivious of Tay’s eye roll.
“Coffee,” the woman responds, smiling at Tay. She continues reflectively, “When you were married, did you ever have dreams where you were hitting your husband over the head with a frying pan?”
Kate laughs. “No, can’t say I did.”
She had thought a lot of things about Doug, or Dougie, as he now likes to be called. But that hadn’t been one of them. “Do you?” she inquires.
“Oh, yes, I often dream that,” the woman says mildly. She leans in closer as she moves away. “And sometimes, I’m not even asleep.”
Kate smiles at the memory of this as she collects her bicycle from where it is propped beside the café wall.
She takes the narrow road leading from the square at the top of the town, down to the harbor.
The rain has stopped—as she hoped it would—and as she sails past the fishing boats lining the quay, she can see that the sun is doing its best to break through.
She steers her bike between the boat sheds and the lobster hatchery, snaking between the puddles.
Then she is out, following the creek, leaving the town behind her, heading into the world she loves—the marshlands.
First comes the freshwater marsh protected from the sea by the great shingle banks and seawalls so ancient they are protruding green ribs within the body of the landscape.
Water in the pools and reedbeds rises and falls with the breath of the seasons and in time to the creak and clank of the dike sluice gates.
But salt water is crafty, and it creeps in through the creeks and tributaries.
Still, it pays its dues for this invasion—the salt marsh that it brings protects this lowland like nothing else does from its sister, the sea.
Within this land and rising above it in the vast skies are the birds.
Some are true home birds that will never leave until death claims them; some are visitors, happy to stay a while.
A few have got lost and made their home here, accepted neighbors—only exotic to the birders.
While others are passage migrants, journeying through on their way to far-flung lands.
Today, the pink-footed geese are leaving, the long, lazy V that drifts across the sky a mirage masking the hard honking work of leaders constantly changing places at the tip of an arrow pointing north.
Kate watches the retreating silhouettes through narrowed eyes and wonders if she is now a home bird.
This is where she has lived since her daughters were little.
Three mud-spattered creatures that quickly evolved from city park dwellers to creek dwellers.
As they grew in confidence, they eventually managed their own small rowboat, The Rose.
It was named by the girls’ aunt—Kate’s sister, Alice, who had declared this with a grin and a knowing look thrown in Kate’s direction.
Jess had insisted on being the captain, but it seemed to Kate they usually ended up doing what the second in command demanded—Bella.
Kindness on Jess’s part or giving in to a stronger will?
Kate was never quite sure. Ellie had just bopped along, life jacket bumping the tip of her nose, happily turning the three of them into orphans lost on the Mississippi.
Ellie had always had a taste for the dramatic and, as it turned out, for travel.
Kate passes two elderly walkers, and her thoughts return to the couple in the café.
To be, or not to be . . .
To be, or not to be . . . alive?
That is what Leonard seemed to think it was all about. Well, she would take that. She has come close enough to the alternative and still feels like she “got away with it.”
Kate stops the next thought that naturally follows from this and feels the wind whip away her tears as she pushes down hard on the pedals.
Birds are nestled, half submerged in the sea blight and sea lavender edging the creek, and as she passes, a small flock of gulls lifts as if swept up by her momentum. They twist erratically in the wind, filling the air with their staccato song of the seaside.
She slows and pulls up beside a long patch of grass. This is where her cottage sits, one in a row of small, redbrick houses, set looking out over the creek, and beyond that, the marshes.
To be, or not to be . . .
Pregnant?
Could Jess be pregnant? She turns to this thought with a sense of relief. On their last call, her eldest daughter had sounded . . . Was there suppressed excitement in her voice? She knows Jess and Matt have been trying.
To be, or not to be . . . a grandmother?
She smiles. She thinks she would go with “Granny.” What would Doug want to be?
He would probably insist the child call him “Dougie.” She can’t imagine “Granddad” would sit well with his Californian lifestyle.
Her husband had left her for a girl (you could hardly call her a woman) who was crewing on one of the yachts moored here twelve summers ago.
In the café, when she had told the woman that she was divorced, she had genuinely felt more relief than regret. But it doesn’t take much to stir the waters and be washed in old memories.
When Doug had told her he was leaving, she had been hollowed out by the shock of it.
She had been numb for weeks and then felt more like someone suffering from the flu than a wife facing a husband’s betrayal.
During all of this, she had had no option but to hold it together for the girls.
Her husband had morphed from a man in his forties into a teenager—a teenager who had just lost his virginity.
He swaggered and grinned, apparently oblivious of the carnage and the hurt he was inflicting.
He had even told Kate that she would get on well with his new love.
“You really would.”
Did he expect her to sail away on their love yacht with them?
Now, she suspects he hadn’t thought any of it through and was swept away on a cliché. She sometimes wonders if he regrets it, but mainly, she cannot be bothered to think about him at all.
In the end, there hadn’t been a final goodbye.
Just a gradual leeching of his possessions (and some of hers), and one day Doug had receded like the tide.
She was left trying to stop seventeen-year-old Jess from obsessing about how the dishwasher was loaded and had taken the axe from her hands when she tried to split the logs.
Jess was amazing at math, rather than being hands-on or practical; Kate remembers the injuries Jess had once inflicted on her hand with a linoleum knife.
Bella had been bloody in a different way, and it seemed she wanted (but didn’t really want) Kate to show the same degree of rage.
While Ellie, at twelve, had regressed into cuddly toys and made Kate feel sick with how frightened she could look.
But they had survived. When Alice visited, she made them laugh like no one else could.
And eventually Kate and the girls became a team of four, Kate part confused, part incredulous with the realization of how little Doug had actually done for his family.
Still, she had encouraged the girls to contact him and he had responded with an alacrity which she suspects was fueled by guilt as much as gratitude.
Kate takes off her helmet and leans forward on her bike.
The wind eddying across the creek tugs at her hair.
Not that the strands of gray move much in the sharp breeze; her hair had grown back bristle-brush tough after the chemo.
Her girls tell her it suits her. That it looks good.
Kate’s never sure. She is sure there are easier ways to get a new hairstyle.
The last treatment was over four years ago now.
By then, Doug was long gone.
So much other loss.
But not her.
And during all of it, her girls had been incredible.
Even Ellie, who was just eighteen when she was first diagnosed.
Popping back from college with every sort of Haribo (which seemed to be the one thing that curbed the sickness), holding her hand and chatting, as Kate sat on the sofa, head flung back, eyes closed.
Jess had organized the online rotation for friends and family to take her to the hospital, and had been there for weekends in between her teacher training.
Bella had returned from the States for a prolonged visit—she was taking a course in sports physical therapy in Florida.
And on the good days, they had pretended everything was normal.
Picnicking on the beach, the wind tugging at the ends of the soft silk scarf Bella had brought her back from the Keys to wrap around her head.
Returning home via the creek, Kate wedged between them in The Rose as the girls tucked a blanket more securely around her against the cold that only she could feel.
She had read about the reversal of roles in old age—children looking after parents.
She just hadn’t expected it as she turned fifty.
Looking back, it is the thought of her girls that always makes her cry. Not the fact of her cancer and the surgery. Or even how unfair it sometimes seemed. Nor the nights of pitch-black terror or the crippling, clammy nausea and exhaustion that seemed to want to wring the life out of her.
But seeing her girls as the women they had become?
The memory of that will always make her cry.
Kate gazes across the broad breadth of the creek, at the exposed sand lying in plump pockets as if quilted by the outgoing tide.
The piping trill of oyster catchers rises above the clinking halyards of yachts stranded at tipsy angles in the sand.
The water within the creek bed is a shallow stream—a shoal of ripples breaking the surface.
This habit of pausing and checking grounds her in the place she calls home.
Today, it doesn’t come with the usual contentment.
To be, or not to be . . . happy?
Kate’s eyes travel across the sweeping salt marsh beyond the creek to the thin line of indigo that is the sea. Against the horizon, the wind turbines appear tiny—white cocktail-stick angels, arms and wings spread wide.
She knows she has much to be happy about. That she should be grateful just to be standing here.
But knowing it doesn’t make it so.
Kate wonders when it was that she lost her way to happiness.