Page 38 of Wings Above the Mallee

‘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 hechose 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.Youshouldn’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, butI 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 faceeach 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 bemychild. 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?’

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