seals #3

Still, there had been this second chance....

A few weeks ago Billy had come home after the sudden death of his dad. He had been sick for a long time, but it was still a shock. Ellen was there at the funeral with Danny. It seemed like the whole day was spent by her side, and he was surprised how easy their conversation had been. He talked to Danny about his travels around the world.
 Late in the evening they were sitting on the living room sofa and Danny was asleep on Ellen’s lap.
“He’s a great wee guy,”  he said to her.
“Aye. Life’s been sore for him,” she said running her fingers through his hair, “it’s like he disny know how to be in the world. But he’s the greatest gift I could ever ask for.”
Billy was full of whisky and burying the dead, and he took her hand and kissed it and put it to his cheek and cried so much that it woke up Danny.
“I’m sorry,” was all he kept saying. No-one knew what it was he was apologising for.
 
Then there was the gift of the seals. Danny had been to Oban with Ellen to visit some relatives and become entranced by the seals in the harbour. He’d talked about nothing else. Ellen said she had never seen him so taken with anything. Her uncle Pat had told Danny stories of the selkies.
 There was one about a woman who had a child to one and then it came back and stole the child away to the sea. The woman married a hunter who ends up killing the selkie and her son. Danny’s imagination flooded and he could feel the familiar eyes that had looked back at him from the brim of the harbour’s water earlier and knew it had felt him look back too.
Her auntie May had said to Danny that maybe his dad was a selkie too and would come back and take him to sea one day. She winked at Ellen. It had been such a lovely exhausting day, and Ellen was in a fine mood seeing Danny this way and laughed along,
“He might as well have been! He was dark and handsome right enough!”
Everyone laughed, Danny too.
“Here!”, said Pat, “ he wisny wan of them Navy Seals was he? You know, the ultra special mob?”
There was a brief pause and then a tide of laughter filled the room. Ellen loved how pleased her uncle Pat was with his own jokes. The laughter swelled and soon rose to a sea of giddy silliness. Pat flapped his arms about and barked like a sealion. Danny jumped up and down and clapped and laughed a funny wee laugh that eventually floored him and started everyone off again. There he was wriggling away on the carpet. Ellen, Pat and May just smiled at him and the open ecstasy of his face. Sight and sound unseen had washed ashore. Laughter had beached Danny, left him helpless and wide open. Joy had entered the room.

 Ellen had been round telling Billy about this a couple of days after the funeral. Since that night on the sofa they had been together a lot and there had been a gliding momentum to his life. It was all so easy and right between them. The seal thing just seemed another obvious step along the way.
  He would be able to give Ellen and Danny a shoreline, this very shoreline where he sat, and its seals. He could give them a night spent in this secret cave where he told Danny that selkies come and hide their seal skins before heading inland to break the hearts of humans. Maybe they’d even see them. It was all so effortlessly perfect...
 
The hush of another wave came, deflating his spirits further.
“I’m just so sorry....”