✅ My Sister's Problem

65. The Home Straight

By the time we arrived, I was squirming in my seat. I knew that I could have let go and wet my diaper; and that was probably the result Lindy had been hoping for, so she could tease me even more. But I was determined to hold it until we arrived. As much as they might treat me like a baby, I really wasn't one. I wasn't going to lose control, not again.

I almost despaired when we pulled up outside Stanleigh's Bar and Grill. I'd expected to go to the beach house first, but it was clear that we were already running late. Would Mum let me use the bathroom here? I wasn't sure. More likely than not, she would insist that I was still a baby. Like it was my own fault that I needed punishment like this, and she wasn't going to give me a free pass. If I couldn't hold it until after dinner... that didn't even bear thinking about.

"Let's get takeout," Mum suggested. "We can take dinner back home. And then we don't need to be embarrassed by the baby eating with her fingers in front of everyone." Lindy teased me a little, and I knew I wasn't allowed to say anything about her behaviour today. This was my punishment; this was what I had earned.

I waited in the car while the two of them went into the restaurant. They came out just a few minutes later, with their food in cartons. They had probably ordered the same thing we always decided on after twenty minutes of staring at the menu. They had just decided to streamline the process a little. I was really glad about that. Even when they got into the car andI saw Lindy putting the boxes down on the seat, I couldn't think about anything but how long it would take to get back to our house. I did notice that one of the boxes was smaller. They had decided I needed a kids' meal today, but that kind of made sense. And as long as we got back quickly to the beach house, our home for the next week, I would be a happy baby. I didn't know what the children's options even were here, but I knew that Mum wouldn't give me anything that wasn't enough for my health and nutritional needs. That was the benefit of having a grown-up to look at all the details for me. I could have looked at it as the loss of my freedoms, but if I let myself see it differently it felt more reassuring.

They were both smiling as well, and only one of those grins had any trace of malice.

Two minutes out of town, the rural road entered what could charitably called a woodland. On a previous visit we'd seen a scientist from a local logging mill give a talk about these trees. He had called the tall firs 'iceberg trees', and that was the name that had stuck in my mind. It was fascinating to see pictures of one of the giants felled and lying on the ground, excavated so that we had been able to judge its actual size. Under the road here was sand deep enough to easily swallow our house, collected and packed down. Fine sand blew in from the beach, was caught in the tree branches, and was trapped in a blanket of pine needles as it fell. The ground rose by a couple of inches every year according to the experts; dunes slowly migrating inland. If we'd been walking along this road, the sand at the sides would have been almost knee-high, so before next year a construction crew would probably have been through here, pouring concrete over the road surface and laying a new layer of asphalt on top. That was something we would need to keep an eye on; it had stopped us from going anywhere by car when our trip happened to coincide with resurfacing a few years back.

A mile through the woodland, we turned off the main road onto a rougher track. The surface here wasn't maintained by the authorities, but by locals. It was a dirt track, built up where necessary by whatever materials came to hand. It was a sign that we were off the beaten track now, but we knew we were as far from civilization as we were going to get when the trees to either side were replaced by open dunes; and a couple of minutes later we were driving along the beach itself. A mile and a half of white-gold sand arced around a small bay, hidden from the more touristy areas. The ownership of the land here was complex, but nobody really paid attention to the boundary lines. The houses were all shared between multiple owners, and just about all of them had reached an informal agreement years before that nobody would try to control who used the beach. The whole bay was ours to explore as we wanted, and we extended the same freedom to any neighbours who might want to cross "our" patch of land.