16 SEAN

16 Sean

‘Shh.’ Sean put a finger to his lips. He added a grin as though he could make light of their conversation. But he’d heard the churn of a car travelling the long dirt driveway and he couldn’t let Charlee and Heath find out. Not this way. He had to protect what was left of his family.

The doc looked a bit miffed, tapping together the brochures she’d brought and handing them to him. ‘Of course.’

He’d expected the Regional Action Group meeting to run later, with whatever information Ethan handed over providing a focus for some lively debate. Perhaps Ethan had failed to show up again? Was he deluding himself by insisting that the relationship was good for Charlee? Although, even if Ethan lacked the commitment to front up to a small-town meeting that really had nothing to do with him, Charlee was undeniably more communicative since the skateboarder had been on the scene. She’d looked better, too, the last time he’d dropped into her apartment. Though she wore the usual grungy, ill-fitting clothes, like she was intent on hiding or denying her former attractiveness, at least her hair was washed, her eyes alert and skin less blotchy. Considering the trepidation with which Sean always knocked on her door, never sure if he was going to get an answer or have to call emergency services, he’d take any gain, no matter how small. Heath was right: Ethan was probably twice Charlee’s age, but did it really matter, in the scheme of things? Everyone who lived would die.

Aware that he was letting his mind run away rather than absorb the doctor’s news, Sean made an effort to focus. ‘That sounds like my lot blowing in with the storm. Did you notice if Charlee and Ethan were at the RAG meeting when you dropped by?’

Obviously, he didn’t need an answer—the car pulling up outside the farmhouse meant he’d find out in seconds. But he was desperate to turn the conversation, to make certain the morgue-like silence that accompanied bad news wasn’t suffocating the room when the others walked in. He remembered that silence too well. The awkward call from Jill’s partner to share her terminal diagnosis. The visit from the police after the car accident. The call from Heath about Sophie. Always a greeting, an attempt at forced normality, then the loaded silence, as though the bearer hoped the news would by some osmotic magic simply be absorbed, without needing to be put into words. Eventually a brief statement would follow, the monotonal brevity failing to acknowledge the ripple effect of the impact of each word.

And then there had been Charlee’s silence, months of refusing to utter a word or even a sound.

‘It seemed like most of the town was there. Charlee was actually—’ The doctor hesitated and Sean frowned. Any thought that started with Charlee and ended with hesitation had to be bad. ‘Very involved.’

Car doors slammed and he was surprised to hear Heath chuckle at something, then a female voice he couldn’t immediately identify. And Charlee—she was laughing, too!

Loud and boisterous, they tumbled through the front door, and Sean’s heart swelled with joy. For the first time in months, his family were together, interacting. Almost whole, however briefly.

‘Sprung, Daideó,’ Charlee called as she followed Heath into the kitchen. Obviously, she’d noticed the strange car parked outside. Then she froze, her gaze narrowing on the doctor. Her carefree attitude dropped like a cloak as she wrapped herself in her more usual suspicion. ‘What’s this supposed to be? A fucking intervention or something?’

Doc Hartmann, bless her heart, didn’t skip a beat. ‘Actually, I dropped by to see Sean. But if there’s anything I can help you with, Charlee?’

‘Oh, no.’ Charlee waggled her finger back and forth, although she retreated a couple of steps, brought up short by Ethan and, to Sean’s surprise, Amelia. Charlee turned to Sean, and his guts twisted as he read the betrayal in her thinned lips, her clenched fists. ‘You’re not playing me like that.’

‘ Macushla …’ He wanted to go to her, to embrace her like he would have done a couple of years ago. But if he’d thought, only seconds earlier, that they were on some sort of petal-strewn path to a new beginning—or at least a less tormented ending—her obvious fury meant he could kiss that goodbye.

‘Just because you feel better for doing the “I’m Sean and I’m an alcoholic” crap doesn’t mean it’s for me,’ Charlee snarled.

He knew she was retaliating by revealing what she thought was a family secret, but Doc Hartmann already knew everything about him. More than anyone else, in fact.

Charlee whirled to push from the room, but Ethan gently restrained her, his gaze swiftly assessing the doc, Heath and Sean. He murmured something to Charlee, turning her back to face the kitchen, his arm slung across her chest to hold her steady against him.

‘You have a substance abuse issue, too, Charlee?’ Doc Hartmann asked smoothly, despite the fact that this wasn’t what she’d signed up for tonight and she’d already looked drained when she arrived. ‘Is that something you’d like help with?’

‘No, I wouldn’t like help ,’ Charlee sneered. ‘It’s not anything that can be fixed with your pathetic words, anyway. Don’t you think if it was as simple as saying, “I’m Charlee and I killed my mother” I’d be all over it?’

Amelia gasped, reaching one hand toward Charlee, but Heath staggered, his face a rictus of anguish.

‘You didn’t!’ Sean protested. ‘It wasn’t your fault, macushla .’ Though Charlee had intended to hurt him before, nothing could compare to the pain her self-loathing caused him.

‘Oh, I know that. It was his,’ Charlee spat, twisting in Ethan’s arms to spear her father with an accusatory finger.

Heath froze, as white and rigid as an ice carving.

‘No!’ The denial ripped from Sean as the remains of his family imploded before his eyes. ‘Charlee, you know that’s not how it was.’ All this time they’d thought Charlee was blaming herself.

‘It is,’ Charlee gasped on a chest-wrenching sob. ‘It’s his fault because he chose me . And I know he’s regretted it every day since.’

Amelia had one hand clapped across her mouth, the other on Heath’s arm, but he seemed unaware of her.

‘I didn’t choose you, Charlee,’ he said, his voice almost imperceptible. ‘But if the choice had been mine, yes, I would have.’

‘See?’ Charlee said on a broken sob, as though her father had proved her point. ‘You let Mum die for me.’

‘No. Mum also chose you, Charlee,’ Heath said softly, tears carving channels of grief down his face. ‘She wouldn’t let me get her out of the car. She insisted I move you first.’

‘But you shouldn’t have! I was driving, it was my fault! Mum didn’t deserve to die. You shouldn’t have let her die.’

‘No one deserved to die.’ Heath’s tone was measured, but Sean knew he wouldn’t be able to maintain it; already the veins in his son’s neck were corded, his forehead furrowed as he fought to control his sorrow. ‘And I’ve told you—the police told you, the court told you—it was the other driver’s fault. They ran the stop sign, not you.’

‘But you know I took my eyes off the road, Dad,’ Charlee cried, and Sean held his breath. It was the first time he’d heard Charlee use the title in two years. ‘You know I was joking around with you.’

Heath nodded. He ran the back of his hand under his nose. ‘I know. But I also know that if you’d had your eyes on the road, you still couldn’t have done anything about a car ramming us.’

He tried to sound definite, but Sean knew his son well and caught the note of doubt. And he knew, from the late nights when Heath had opened up, when he’d been unable to exert the steel control he demanded over his emotions, that Heath was wondering whether, had he been driving, his experience would have meant they could have avoided the accident. Or all survived it. Perhaps he would have been driving faster. Or slower. Perhaps the other car would have impacted the bonnet or the boot. Anywhere but directly into Sophie’s door.

‘But how, Dad? How could you just leave her in there?’ Charlee demanded.

Heath’s face crumpled. ‘I couldn’t. I didn’t. I got you out and I went back for her, but—’

‘But she burned, didn’t she?’ Charlee screeched. ‘She burned alive! I heard her, Dad. You thought I was unconscious, but I heard her. ’

‘Jesus,’ Ethan blurted.

It shouldn’t have been possible for Heath to turn any paler than he already was, yet his words were suddenly firm. ‘No, you didn’t, Charlee. You were completely unconscious until the ambulance arrived. And Mum … I went back to the car, Charlee, but Mum was already gone. She didn’t b-burn.’ His son choked on the bile of memory.

‘She burned,’ Charlee spat venomously.

Heath closed his eyes for a long moment. ‘She burned,’ he whispered, his eyes still closed, his face equally shuttered. ‘She burned. But she was already gone, Charlee. You have to believe me.’

‘Why? Because that makes it any better?’ Charlee’s chin wobbled, and Sean knew in that instant that his granddaughter had been hoping for some miracle, perhaps even clinging to the wildly childish notion that her mother wasn’t really dead.

Heath’s tone was weary and grief-heavy. ‘Nothing makes it any better, I’m just telling you the truth. It’s up to you what you do with it. You’re an adult now.’

‘No!’ Amelia gasped, clearly horrified by Heath’s exhausted surrender. She stepped forward, slipping an arm around Charlee’s waist. ‘You can’t say that. She’s still a child. A child who has lost her mother.’

Crioste , he was surrounded by grief, Sean realised, suddenly crippled by the weight of their tragedies. Even the introspective pilot was mired in her own tragedy, battling to keep her head above water, to summon the will to face each day as it arrived. Perhaps—and he knew it was a dark thought, but God, he was exhausted—perhaps the doctor’s news actually heralded the relief he craved.

‘Okay, so she’s a child,’ Heath retorted, his sorrow turning to anger as Amelia challenged him. ‘That’d be my child. Are you going to tell me how to look after her, care for her, fix her? She’s not a damn sheep, or a bloody bird or something.’

‘I know—’

‘No, you don’t!’ Heath lashed out. ‘You can’t possibly know the level of grief that is gutting my family. You can’t imagine what we’ve been through.’

‘Heath!’ Sean interjected as Doc Hartmann raised a hand, holding it toward Heath as though to stop him speaking.

‘I have lost—’ Amelia started, but there was no stopping Heath’s torrent of anguish.

‘Why do people— you —pretend to understand what we’re feeling?’ he raged at her, having finally found a focus, a target for his pain. ‘Why do you try to minimise our tragedy, our guilt by, I don’t know—’ he swivelled to point out of the window, his mouth twisted bitterly ‘—by comparing our reality to some backyard burial for farmyard pets? You understand nothing about grief, so why pretend?’

Sean gripped the back of a kitchen chair. Good Christ, he felt sick. It was like watching a train wreck, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Amelia had staggered backward under the onslaught of Heath’s words, but now, white-faced, she crossed one arm over her chest, cradling her bandaged hand. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps you don’t have a monopoly on grief?’ she said, coldly controlled.

Heath took a deep breath, raking both hands through his hair like he was searching for patience to deal with Amelia. ‘That’s ridiculous. I’d do anything to have no ownership of it. But it’s a fact. One you can’t possibly fathom.’

He may as well have drunk himself into a soft-edged stupor, Sean realised, because even completely sober, he still couldn’t find the words to ameliorate his idiot son’s statement.

Amelia stared at Heath with open loathing for a long second. Then she turned and strode from the room, brushing off the doctor’s attempt to accompany her.

Heath groaned, sinking into a chair.

‘Lad—’

‘Don’t even start, Dad,’ Heath mumbled. ‘I know I’m supposed to offer visitors a cup of tea, not home truths. But what the hell’s with her? It’s not a contest.’

‘She was trying to tell you, you leathcheann ,’ Sean said, suddenly angry. Why could Heath never see beyond his own pain?

‘I know, got it. Some story that was going to be about her childhood dog or cat or whatever. It’s not the same, Dad. You know it’s not.’

‘No. How she went off at the meeting …’ Charlee said in a small voice, suddenly subdued. ‘It wasn’t a dog or cat, was it?’ She stood near Heath, but looked from Sean to the doctor.

Christ, if even Charlee could work it out, how could Heath be so buried in his own misery that he didn’t understand?

‘The fact is, Amelia can’t even imagine what it’s like to lose someone,’ Heath said, doubling down on his justifications.

‘She can’t?’ Doc Hartmann asked softly.

Heath paused a moment, then waved off her question. ‘So she was married? Look, they can beat up divorce all they want, say the trauma rates up there with a death in the family. But I can tell you for a fact that it bloody doesn’t.’

The doctor kept her voice low but intense. ‘What could be worse than losing your spouse?’

‘Not bloody much.’ Heath’s gaze rested on Charlee across the room. The loss Sophie had sacrificed herself to avoid. ‘Well, losing your child, obviously.’

Silence stretched out, the only noise the scrape of fabric as Heath massaged his bad leg and scowled at the doctor.

The doc, bless her, didn’t say a damn word. Didn’t even condemn Heath with her level grey gaze. But she wound her necklace around her fingers until they whitened, struggling to hold onto her professional demeanour before she finally spoke. ‘From what I understand of your tragedy, no matter what you did, you were going to lose your wife or lose your daughter.’

Both forearms on the table now, Heath hung his head wearily, his eyes closed as though he was done with the conversation. ‘Like I said, Sophie insisted I get Charlee out of the car. By the time I did it was … too late for Sophie.’

Doc Hartmann nodded. ‘And Sophie made that choice because she knew that no mother can ever escape the nightmare of losing a child.’

Heath barely slit his eyes to frown at the doctor. ‘What does that have to do with Amelia’s fondness for handing out unwanted empathy and unqualified parenting advice?’

Doc Hartmann looked at him steadily. ‘No mother can ever escape the nightmare of losing a child,’ she repeated, more slowly.

‘You said that—’ Heath broke off. Hollow silence echoed around the room. ‘Jesus,’ he eventually whispered.

‘How?’ Charlee asked tremulously from the security of Ethan’s embrace.

‘Not my story to tell.’ The doctor picked up her bag with an exhausted exhalation. ‘Sean, call into my office in the next week or so, okay? We’ll finish talking then. But there’s no rush.’

‘Will do, Doc.’ He appreciated that, even in her urgency to go after her friend, Doc Hartmann was trying to ease his own fears.

As Ethan escorted the doctor to the back door, Sean took out the bottle of scotch that Heath had hidden in the old blue Metters wood-burning oven. Heath stiffened, his hands locked into fists, but Sean shook his head. ‘It’s not for me, lad. I already knew Amelia’s story. But I’d say you could do with a medicinal tot.’ He fought the desire to lick the splash that briefly darkened the back of his hand. ‘Ethan? Charlee?’ He held the bottle up, noticing that Charlee looked to Ethan, then followed his lead in refusing.

‘I think we’ll hit the sack,’ Ethan said. ‘Got to head into Settlers early tomorrow, if you could give us a ride, Sean? My car bit it, so Amelia gave us a lift out here. I’ll get the local garage to take a look. But that’s a problem for another day, as they say. You staying up, Charls?’

Charlee looked undecided, then shook her head. ‘No. I’m wrecked. I don’t know about getting up early, though. Someone here owes me breakfast in bed with all the trimmings.’ Her voice was tremulous, but she was clearly trying to ease the air of despair and tension. ‘I’ll leave you to fight among yourselves for who gets the privilege of cooking. Night, Daideó. Night, Dad.’

She was out of the room before the words had a chance to settle, but both Sean and Heath stared after her, as though blinking might obliterate the unexpected magic of the moment, the flash of brightness in the consuming darkness.

‘My God,’ Heath muttered.

‘When one door opens …’ Sean agreed, goosebumps racing up his arms. Was this the breakthrough they’d been waiting and praying for?

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that was a huge step forward with Charlee. And a huge screw up with Amelia.’

‘Nothing to screw up,’ Heath said sullenly as he poured another slug.

Sean tried not to stare at the glass; every day was a battle. ‘You know you have to make it right.’

‘What I know is that the thought of what I said makes me sick to my guts, but how the hell do I make that right?’ Heath tossed back the drink. ‘I’ve been so wrapped up in my own damn head that it never occurred to me that Amelia might have her own reason for sorrow.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘She got it in a nutshell: I act like I have a monopoly on grief.’

‘And on guilt,’ Sean said softly. ‘And maybe this proves it’s time you started letting some of that go.’

‘Short of this—’ Heath lifted the bottle, but didn’t pour any more ‘—any ideas on exactly how I’m supposed to do that?’

‘I guess you could start with Amelia. Now you know you’ve got something in common, maybe you could actually talk, instead of pulling that closing-yourself-off rubbish. Could be good for both of you.’

‘You don’t reckon it might be a bit odd to tell some woman I barely know all about my dead wife?’ Heath snorted, his lips tight the second he’d spat out the words.

‘You’re asking someone who goes to AA meetings whether it’s odd to share your pain?’

Heath twisted the glass between his fingers, leaving monochrome rainbows on the tabletop. He blew out a tense breath. ‘How come the doc was here, anyway?’

‘Waterworks thing.’ Sean waved off the question and headed for the door. ‘Nothing important.’

He had to leave the room before he took that drink.