Burnt (5 page)

‘We?'

‘The kids and I were living with Mum and Dad up until last week. We've just moved into a place of our own.'

‘How many do you have?'

‘Two. Natalie and Sarah. What about you? Do you have any kids?'

‘None that I know about.' He shrugged, then gave a chuckle when he saw her frosty expression. ‘Nah. No kids.'

‘I guess your job doesn't make for great marriage-and-family material.'

‘Not really. Some guys manage to make it work, but I don't think I'd like to put anyone through that. Must suck not having anyone home to depend on.'

‘Yeah, well, you don't have to be in the SAS to put your work before your family.'

‘Is that why your marriage fell apart?'

‘Partly.' Rebecca's voice grew noticeably cooler. She was not about to have this conversation with Sebastian Taylor, of all people. Snapping the clips back in place on the medical kit, she looked up at him with an expression she hoped was professional – and only that.

‘So I guess I'll see you in at the hospital sometime. Don't make me call that number at the bottom of the letter in your file – you know, the one that says to call Major McCady if there's any problems,' she said, and couldn't help smirking, knowing that anyone with ‘Major' in front of his name would have to be in a better position to order Seb around than she was.

‘You never used to be this tough.'

She flashed him a smile. ‘You never used to be this much of a baby. Toughen up, princess; it's just a few bandages.' She walked out the door and waved at his dad, seated at the other end of the wide verandah. ‘Bye, Mr Taylor. It was nice to see you again.'

‘Come back soon, love; it was nice to have a visitor.'

She smiled, but didn't commit either way. No doubt Seb was fuming at his father's generous offer and she didn't want to cause a burst gasket.

Seb followed her as she walked in front of the open doors of the big machinery shed that also held Mr Taylor's workshop. She noticed a tarp-covered bump in the back corner and smiled. ‘Your dad still has his pride and joy, I see.'

Seb let out a small grunt. ‘Yeah. Can't ever see him parting with his precious EK Holden. Holds too many memories – for everyone.'

Rebecca glanced up at him in surprise and felt heat immediately rushing to her face.
Stupid!
she scolded herself silently. Why would you go and open your big mouth about
that
of all things? Dropping her gaze, she turned away from the large white tarp and headed to her own vehicle. Depositing the medical kit on the passenger-side seat, she stepped back to close the door, bumping into something solid behind her.

‘Sorry,' she murmured, moving away from the chest she'd connected with. It didn't appear to have hurt him, but it had felt like a bolt of electricity had run through her.

‘Look, Bec. I'm sorry if I've come across a bit –' He seemed unaccountably awkward, almost uncomfortable.

Rebecca decided to help him out. ‘Pig-headed, rude, surly, arrogant?'

‘I was going to say reserved.'

She smiled, and saw his jaw clench a little.

‘What I'm trying to say is, I don't want you to think –' He irritably ran a hand through his cropped hair and let out a long breath. ‘It's not you, okay? I'm not angry at you.'

‘Then what
are
you angry at?'

He shook his head and let his gaze wander over the green paddocks behind her. Standing together, she was all too aware of his size. He'd always been tall, but he'd filled out and almost dwarfed her now.

‘I'm angry at everything, I guess. At life, myself … the past. Coming home has brought back a whole heap of things I'd rather forget,' he said quietly.

‘Like me.'

He looked down at her and held her gaze steadily. ‘Like
us
,' he corrected. ‘
You
were harder to forget.' An almost tender look flickered over that tough exterior, then it was gone, as though he realised he'd already said too much and was beating a hasty retreat. ‘I just wanted to let you know it's nothing personal. I gotta go. Thanks for coming out.'

She watched him head back through the gate and into the house as she slid in behind her steering wheel and shut the door – shutting it on a past she had no business dredging back up again.

What the fuck had he done that for?
He shook his head uselessly as he took the steps to the verandah two at a time and stormed inside. Twelve years in Special Ops and he'd blabbed his guts out like a baby at the first glimpse of a smile from her. The government trusted
him
with sensitive intelligence gathering? What a freakin' joke!

Just after his acceptance into the SAS, he'd undergone resistance to interrogation – RTI – training, the aim of which was to prepare and train soldiers to handle the situation should they ever be captured by the enemy. The only way he could politely explain the training to anyone, if he ever had the desire to try, was that it was seventy-two hours of living hell in the depths of some unrelenting nightmare. He'd survived the course: three days of sleep deprivation and relentless interrogation, repeating only a basic litany: name, rank, regimental number and date of birth. He'd put up with derogatory comments and humiliation; had been forced to sit cross-legged and naked on a cold cement floor for most of the time. Through all this, he hadn't given away a single thing other than the information allowed. And now look at him – spewing his guts about all kinds of weird, sappy-arse feelings to a woman. And not just any woman, either.

He'd survived RTI training, but one look into those big brown eyes had caused his self-control to waiver, and had him recalling the night Bec had lost her virginity to him – in the back seat of his dad's old EK Holden. He really needed to get back to the unit before he started getting manicures and buying man-moisturisers.

Rebecca drove back to town, deep in thought. Seb's admission had both touched and saddened her. Over the years, she'd tortured herself, wondering about his true feelings. Grief had ripped them apart, but after the shock had worn off, she remembered all too well the ache of missing him. In the weeks following his departure, her emotions had swung from anger to despair and back again in a never-ending cycle. In her darkest moments, she'd clung to the belief that he still loved her; that he'd be back. But eventually she'd had to accept that he'd moved on and it was time she did the same.

It should have made her happy to finally hear him acknowledge what she'd once so desperately wanted to hear, but it didn't – it made her angry. He'd chosen to abandon her, to ignore his own feelings and find his own way of dealing with his grief.

As she rounded the bend in the road, Rebecca felt her stomach tingle as she recognised where she was. Carefully, she pulled over and turned off the engine. For a moment she sat and debated the wisdom of her actions, but something compelled her to climb out of the car. The sun was shining and a gentle breeze stirred the leaves of the massive gums trees that lined the road. The gravel crunched beneath her feet as she walked around the car to stand on the edge of the embankment.

There was nothing the least bit remarkable about the place. There were no visible signs of the carnage that had been left behind that night. The undergrowth had long since grown back, covering the earth ploughed up by the twisted metal of the car as it had been swept from the road by the force of the tree crashing across it. People probably pulled off the side of the road all the time to answer their phone or the call of nature, not even knowing that right beneath their feet – deep beneath the surface – rivers of blood had once seeped.

Flashes of images caught her unaware. It'd been years since she'd allowed memories of the accident to emerge from the tightly guarded recesses of her mind, but here, in this peaceful stretch of bushland, they came flowing back.

They'd been on their way home from a long day at the football. Seb was driving, concentrating on the road because the wind, blowing sheets of blinding rain against the windscreen, made it difficult to see. She remembered he'd been debating whether to pull over and wait out the worst of the rain only moments before a great crack of lightning lit up the road ahead like a spotlight. Then the shadow of the giant gum tree began to fall towards the road.

There hadn't been time to scream a warning – all Seb could do was plant his foot on the accelerator and try to outrun it. His efforts were in vain; the massive tree gathered momentum and collected the small car as it smashed across the road. She could still recall the sound of ripping metal and the ear-splitting scream of the engine revving fruitlessly as it slid sideways across the road. Then it stopped and all she heard was the sound of the pelting rain on what remained of the car above her head as it pounded down upon them.

She'd faded in and out of consciousness before the arrival of the first car on the scene. Parts she remembered clearly, others she often wondered about; they didn't match with what the doctors told her later. Rebecca remembered she'd tilted her head to the side to see Reggie beside her – eyes open, hair across most of her face – and as Rebecca had blinked to try to clear her vision, she'd heard Reggie tell her to hang on, that everything would be okay. She'd glanced down to see that she held Reggie's hand, as though they'd reached for each other at some point during the impact.

Everything had been cold, except the warmth of Reggie's hand, and Rebecca held on tight. She'd tried to speak – to call out – but she couldn't seem to find her voice. Her chest had felt tight and there was a coldness spreading through her body, and she remembered thinking this must be what it was like to feel the life seeping from your body.

The rain continued to fall; Rebecca had stuck out her tongue to catch the drops as they trickled down her face. After that, all she remembered was someone lifting her and voices calling urgently against a background of groaning metal as it was pried away from their bodies.

As she was lifted, she held tightly onto Reggie and someone reached over her to untangle their hands. She'd protested then – she remembered trying to reach for the warmth of her friend's hand as the deep voice of a firefighter tried to calm her.

‘She's gone, sweetheart. Just let her go.'

Gone? Was he crazy?
She was right there beside her.
Gone where?
It wasn't until much later that she'd been told Reggie had died when the tree had completely shattered the left-hand side of the car, as had Marty. But to this day, Rebecca remembered the warmth of Reggie's hand in hers and her calm voice whispering to her to hold on. She found it impossible to believe her best friend had been dead for the entire two hours they'd been trapped in that car.

The approaching sound of a vehicle dragged Rebecca back from the past and she quickly slid her sunglasses back onto her nose and returned to her car. There was nothing to be gained from coming back to this place. There was no closure or redemption – there was nothing. No one would even know this had been the place where four lives had ended. Seb and Rebecca may not have died that night, but their
youth
had ended just as surely as Reggie's and Martin's had.

Behind the wheel, Rebecca shut her eyes and took one last deep breath, filling her lungs with the smell of musty earth and bush around her. A deep void within her ached for a moment. In the back of her mind, she'd hoped to somehow feel Reggie around her. Rebecca knew her friend wasn't in the cemetery – that just held her body. Reggie – the real Reggie – had already left that poor battered body, long before the funeral, while she was lying out here. It came as a disappointment that she couldn't sense her friend at all. There was nothing, just birds tweeting and the warmth of the sun on her face as she sat and took it all in.

After a few minutes, she opened her eyes and reached for the key in the ignition.

Rebecca sat in her car outside the pretty house at the end of a quiet street and took a few deep breaths. She'd been home almost four months now and she'd finally made it all the way to the front of the house without turning the car around and breaking out in a cold sweat.

As she walked up the footpath, she could feel her heart thudding painfully against her chest. Her palms were sweaty and she felt nauseated, but she gritted her teeth and pushed on. This path had never felt so damn long before. Then she was standing in front of the Federation-green door with its polished brass knocker and the gleaming nameplate that said M
C
D
ONALD
C
OTTAGE
.
Closing her eyes and dropping her head, she rattled the knocker and concentrated on breathing evenly.

The light footsteps on the other side of the door stopped and the doorknob rattled and when the door opened, Rebecca caught sight of the serene face of her best friend's mother. The best friend she'd lain beside in the wreckage of their car.

Holding her breath, Rebecca waited for some sign of grief-stricken outrage or cold indifference, but instead a gentle smile spread across the lovely face as the screen door eased open and she was engulfed in a warm, surprisingly strong, hug from a woman who'd always seemed so small and fragile.

‘Hello, Rebecca. I've been waiting for you to visit,' the woman said softly against her hair, and Rebecca felt hot tears stream down her face.

She wasn't sure how long they stood there for, her tears and small sobs racking her body, but all the while, Roma McDonald held her tightly and let her vent her sorrow. There was a lot of it – eighteen years' worth to be exact.

Later, seated at the scrubbed timber table in the McDonalds' kitchen, Rebecca felt as though time had been suspended and she was ten years old again, eating homemade biscuits and drinking milk after school. But as her eyes rested on the empty chair across from her, she felt that familiar, overwhelming rush of pain and loss. Reggie wouldn't ever be sitting in her spot again. They'd never laugh so hard they snorted milk through their noses, or tease each other over boyfriends or plan sleepovers or birthday parties. So many memories came from sitting around this old table. They'd sat here and discussed their debut dresses and quizzed each other over the road rules before they went for their learner's permits and celebrated getting their P plates. So many beautiful memories happened in this cheerful old kitchen with the sunflower wallpaper.