Page 45 of Wings Above the Mallee

‘You’ve got a baby and a husband to look after,’ Charlee countered. The hairs on Heath’s neck prickled at her sudden insistence. ‘I’ll be fine here. Amelia already said I could come over and help out with the animals whenever, so I guess this is whenever.’

‘I’m not sure,’ Heath said carefully. His chest tight, he eyeballed Taylor, willing her to understand. ‘Doesn’t Amelia need professional care if she’s on prescription meds? Wecould get her into the hospital in Murray Bridge. Or maybe pay a nurse?’

‘Jesus, Heath!’ Charlee exploded, reverting to his name. ‘I’m not going to steal the woman’s drugs to get a fix!’ Her hands were fisted and he wasn’t sure whether it was anger or tears that glinted in her eyes. She rounded on Taylor. ‘In any case, you said she’s on antibiotics? Not much of a hit there. But that’s fine. If you lot don’t want my help, I’ll fuck off.’

‘Macushla,’ Sean soothed. ‘That’s not what your dad meant. Is it, Heath?’

Heath started to agree, but somewhere between brain and lips, something went wrong. He realised he couldn’t do this dance anymore, couldn’t pretend that he didn’t care what Charlee did to herself, pretend that he was willing to give her whatever time it took to find her own way out of the darkness. ‘It’sexactlywhat I’m worried about.’ The words ripped from him, even though he knew it would be smarter to swallow them. ‘Last night—this morning—you gave me the tiniest glimpse of the old you, Charlee. And I’m not willing to risk losing that again.’

Charlee glared at him, her loathing obvious. But instead of letting fly, she spun around and stomped into Amelia’s house.

Sean groaned. ‘Lad, you’re not only losing her—you’re forcing her away.’

Heath shook his head, trying to mask the anguish that gutted him. ‘I know. But I’m out of options. I think maybe Ethan’s having a positive effect on Charlee. No, I’m sure he is. But you know how dangerous—howunfair—it is to put temptation in an addict’s path. If Ethan is, for whatever bloody reason, her main support right now, but he’s not here, surely we have to back him up by making certain she’s in a safe space?’

‘You’re right,’ the doctor said thoughtfully, and gratitude surged through him. He was pretty damn sure he hadn’t got a single thing right in the last two years, as far as Charlee was concerned. ‘Charlee needs a safe environment. But you also have to allow her independence. She has to know that her choices are her own.’

‘She has chosen. For two years, she’s chosen drugs. Where’s the incentive for her to give that up?’ The brief accolade he’d imagined in the doctor’s words made her judgement now sting worse.

‘Again, that’s up to Charlee. But like Ethan said at the meeting, she needs to discover a connection, a purpose. And then we have to hope that focus becomes enough of a passion to replace her addiction.’

‘Most adults never discover their purpose.’ His mind flashed back to Sophie. With Charlee’s birth, she had lost any purpose other than being a mother to their daughter. That had worked well for a few years, but the older and more independent Charlee became, the more irresolute and dissatisfied with life Sophie had grown. ‘Hell, I don’t even have a purpose anymore.’

19

Amelia

Noah pressed against her, curled into the curve of her body as he always did when he snuck into their bed. Amelia smiled sleepily, pulling her son closer as she pushed away the nightmare.

The pillow she cuddled gave way too easily in her embrace and she froze, holding her breath until her chest cramped, terrified to open her eyes to the reality.

Therewasmovement in the room, though. She was sure—as sure as she could be, given that her head felt … not stuffed with cotton wool, more like filled with wet cement—that the lambs had been contained in the playpen at the foot of the bed. Were Dusty and Biggles loose? She couldn’t recall. Red light played over her closed lids: it was daytime and her menagerie would be hungry. She had to force herself up. Pry her eyes open and face the horrific truth of her life, because she couldn’t let the animals suffer while she wallowed in the remembrance of her own failure, trying to recapture the nightmare now, because at least it was a memory of her lost son.

‘Oh!’ She gasped as she pushed her elbow into the mattress to lever up. Pain shot through her hand up into her shoulder and her eyes flashed open. She blinked furiously, trying to force away the agony and focus on the blurry figure alongside her bed. ‘Charlee?’

‘The one and only,’ the girl said cheerfully. ‘Nice to see you back in the land of the living. Though, I gotta say, all that muttering you were doing kind of interrupted my reading.’ She hefted a textbook, the movement making a breeze, and Amelia responded by trying to push down the heavy blankets, suddenly aware that she was burning up.

‘Too hot?’ Charlee asked. ‘Doc said that you’d be running a temperature from the infection for a couple of days, until the antibiotics kick in.’

‘Infection?’ She had no idea what was going on. Why was Charlee in her house? Her life was spiralling out of control.

Charlee pointed at her hand with a grimace and Amelia slowly lifted it, squinting at the heavy bandages. ‘Apparently, it’s something gross you caught from the sheep. From the blisters on their lips, according to the doc’s hubby. I still fed them, though.’ It was obvious that Charlee was proud of the fact.

Fear spiked through Amelia. ‘Where are they? How much did you give them? They’ll get—’

‘Bloat. I know,’ Charlee said. ‘I called that woman who runs the animal rescue, the one with the vet husband, and asked her how to look after them. I could have asked Daideó, but I figured you were going to be a whole lot more intense about them than he would.’

‘They’re okay?’ Why didn’t her brain work properly, why was it so hard to make sense of what Charlee was saying? ‘What … Why are you here?’

Charlee stood, pulling down the top cover that Amelia was still ineffectually pushing at. ‘Just call me Florence. Apparently your dad called the doc because you vagued out when you were talking to him. Doc said you can’t be alone, I had nothing much better to do, so I volunteered to hang out with your animals. And you, I guess,’ she added, suddenly seeming self-conscious as she fiddled with the bedclothes.

‘Why would you do that?’

‘You weren’t a bitch to me.’

‘A bitch? Who was a bitch to you?’

Charlee shrugged, not meeting her gaze. ‘Well, not so much bitches being bitches, but it’s not like I don’t know what all the people in those meetings were thinking about me. Or like I didn’t notice they were all avoiding the empty seat next to me. You sat there.’

---