The sea stretched for miles like a never ending blanket of blue and out of the country side sprouted luscious green hills with cattle grazing. Tessa sat soaking up the sun on the beach that her holiday house backed onto. She’d missed this place the last few years. They hadn’t come down as her father was so committed to work in the heart of Melbourne. Shed begged and begged him with little success until the recent circumstances finally made him wake up and realise that family should come first. The city was so busy and fast paced everyone was always in a hurry and whilst having an apartment with Yarra river veiws was nice it wasn’t essential to Tessa. After all as far as she was concerned why have that when you could have the ocean on your doorstep. Her father however was in love with the city just as he had her mother up until the day she died. Yet she died questioning whether he still did as he was a man of little or no emotion that had been drained from him when his own mother died. It wasn’t long after their marriage that this death occurred and it happened before Tessa was born. He showed no grief when his wife passed. Leaving Tessa to grieve by herself. Her father wanted to stay with her mother’s memory in the city. Where as Tessa wanted to do the opposite she wanted to escape those memories of her mother and go to the place where the happiest memories where the holiday house. As the apartment whilst it had good ones it also had the pain that her mother was going through in the last few hours of her life. And of course the hideous way she died also played out like a movie in her mind. How anyone could stab someone to death was beyond Tessa’s comprehension. The man charged was mentally ill and the police believed it not to be a personal attack at her mother and her family. But rather just plain bad luck and a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But this didn’t make it any easier for Tessa. As now she felt she was parentless. She had no siblings and her father was as unconnected to her as he had been all her fourteen years of life.
“Night” grunted her father as he passed her room to get to his.
“Night dad” she said weekly back as he disapered through the door closing it behind him with a click. Tessa looked at the photo of her mother on the wall and burst into an uncontrollable wail. Her father didn’t even emerge from his room though this came as no surprise to Tessa. After all it was always her mother who comforted her when she was upset. She’d put a hand on her sholder and tell her how much she loved her and wait until she was calm before planting a gentle kiss on her forehead. ‘I’ll never get that kiss again’ thought Tessa. ‘Or that gentle hand on the shoulder, or hear those heart walming words I love you from my mothers lips again.’ She forced her eyes away from the picture before pulling back the covers of the bed and climbing in.
The water felt divine as Tessa dived into the waters depth feeling the ripples caress her slender form. She wished shed been able to swim with her mother one last time. She wished she was able to have water fights with her mother one last time but she had to face reality. That there were a lot of things she wanted to do one last time but it wasn’t going to happen as you can’t bring people back from the dead. She had to focus on the memories not what could have been. If she were to get through this horrific situation fate or God had thrown at her.
