Petra's Ghost by C. S. O'Cinneide

Author:C. S. O'Cinneide [O'Cinneide, C. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2019-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

She’s hanging laundry outside the albergue when Daniel catches sight of her. Clipping her socks one at time on a long line strung between two trees. He doesn’t trust his eyes at first. He had been hoping to see her all afternoon and was frequently disappointed. Now she looks like a mirage of his own making as she bends down to get her damp T-shirt out of the basket, two brightly coloured clothes pegs held gingerly in her mouth.

“Ginny?” He stands beside the grassy triangle formed by the meeting of the Camino on one side and the one narrow street of Espinosa on the other. She stops and considers him for a moment then picks up the wash basket and saunters over.

“Hi, Daniel.” She balances the basket on her hip, like a fifties housewife.

“Sure, Ginny, about yesterday …”

Ginny shocks him by raising two fingers swiftly and placing them on his lips. “Let’s go find someplace to talk.”

The picnic table behind the albergue borders on rolling empty fields, the soil grey and cracked from a summer of harsh Spanish sun. Ginny has dropped her wash basket inside the back door and come to join him there. She holds two lemonades she purchased from the vending machine inside.

“Here, you look like you could use this.”

He can. Lemonade is the elixir of the gods on the Camino. It’s the perfect balance of salt and sugar to restore a pilgrim’s electrolytes with some vitamin C mixed in. That, and it tastes fabulous.

“Thanks.” He tries to twist the top off, but it won’t budge. Ginny reaches for the bottle and deftly pops the cap with the opener she had ready in her pocket. She does the same with her own. They sit with the bottles in front them, not drinking, but not talking either. Daniel doesn’t know where to start.

“What happened yesterday, Daniel?”

“I went off my nut, is what happened.” He reaches out and takes a sip of the lemonade. It wakes up his tongue, maybe loosens it a little. “It was the painting. The one of the hanging.”

“That was pretty damn obvious.” She keeps the mood light. She wants him to feel at ease.

He is grateful for this. It makes getting ready to tell a half-truth easier.

“I reckon it reminded me of what happened to Petra.”

“She hung herself?” Ginny asks, surprised.

“No, no, nothing like that,” he says. “She had cancer. It got fairly bad toward the end.” He pauses, considers the memory of his wife wasting away in front of him. Her eyes still so alive, so her, but the rest of her body just a painful shell. A flesh prison she couldn’t escape. “Sure, it got really feckin’ bad,” he says.

Ginny nods and waits for him to go on.

“We made the decision to take her off the life support. That was how she wanted it. We’d discussed it. Before.” And they had. Petra was adamant. No heroic efforts. A DNR when the time came.

“That must have been really difficult.”

“It’s not like it is in the movies, of course.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.