How To Save A Life (Emerald Cove #1)

by Lauren K. McKellar

  Once standing, I quickly find my shirt and jeans and turn away from him, trying to put them both on, but damn it, girl clothes are way harder to dance a soaking wet body into than boy ones, and it seems to take me years longer than Jase, a fact only emphasised by his gentle laughter in the background.

  "Lia?"

  "Yes?" I harrumph, pulling at the stupid denim that's stuck around my ankles.

  He steps around in front of me. "Let me."

  Somehow, he manages to pull the denim up sensually—sensually! Like you can even do that with wet semi-naked girl and denim—and then I button the fly at my waist. He runs one finger over that scar again, and for a brief moment, the laughter in his face is gone, and it's all sincerity as he says, "You're stronger than this."

  And for the first time in eighteen months, I think that perhaps I am.

  CHAPTER TWENTYNINE

  The lights are on in my house when I pull up in the drive. And I don't mean just one or two. I mean Every. Single. Light.

  "Fan-freaking-tastic," I mutter as I turn off the car's engine. What a way to end what could have been a perfect night.

  Then I straighten my shoulders, because I am better than this. Because I'm not just some kid whose mother should be allowed to flirt with the idea of checking out and leaving. I'm important enough to count.

  I open the car door and walk toward the house, turning the door handle with ease because it isn't locked. No surprises there.

  Inside, the music hits me in the face in an audio assault. It's loud and angry, some kind of metal perhaps, and I frown, because that's not the kind of thing Mum likes to listen to, and I can't see anyone in here to enjoy it. With care, I make my way over to the stereo. I say 'care', because I'm trying not to step on the glasses littered over the floor. There are wine glasses, short glasses, shot glasses—

  Broken glass.

  Blood and broken glass.

  Oh no.

  Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

  I run into the kitchen, ignoring the carnage in my wake. And it's exactly as I predicted. She's standing there, next to the sink, dressed in just a bra and underwear, broken glass poised next to her stomach.

  Today, Smith isn't the villain in my life. It's her. Because no matter how much she tries to change, that black dog just keeps sucking her back in.

  "Mum ..." I start, and freeze when she draws the glass into her skin.

  “It feels so good, baby,” she whispers, tears funnelling down her cheeks and leaving a mascara trail in their wake. “So, so good.”

  “Do you think Dad would want this?” My voice wavers. I don’t know how to make her stop, but I know I must. Because I’m done playing the victim. I’m done sitting by and watching her hurt herself.

  Every cut she makes hurts me.

  It’s as if she doesn’t see that.

  As if she doesn’t care.

  “I just need to f … feel release.” Her eyes glass over, and she moves the glass just a centimetre, but it’s all it takes. Fresh blood blooms, and bile claws its way up my throat.

  “Fine,” I bite out. Blood pumps sluggishly through my veins, angry, and I feel it at my wrist, in my neck. I grab a shard of glass from the floor and lift my shirt up. The scar from that day, seventeen months ago, is ugly and gnarled as I look down at it, and I try to school the grimace from my features. Doesn’t she understand how much she’s already hurt me? Doesn’t she see?

  “Wh … what are you doing?”

  “You need to see!” I gesture down the edge of my scar with the glass.

  “Don’t.” Her face is white. Her eyes are wide.

  “Then stop,” I yell

  She shakes her head, confusion flashing in her eyes. “Baby …”

  “Put it down!” I scream.

  “No!” Her glass hovers above her skin.

  Then glass clatters to the floor.

  My knees weaken.

  And then I’m in my mother’s arms, and her tears are washing over my face, joining my own. It’s salt on a wound. It’s bitter and it’s sweet.

  The glass drops from my hand, and I grab a tea towel from the stove to our left. It’s filthy, but it’s something, and I press it to the small wound on my mother’s stomach. I purse my lips together and swallow, a bitter mouthful, before I rest my bloody hand atop of hers. I’m holding on out of hope. Desperation.

  "You can't keep doing this." I beg with my eyes for her to believe me. For the words to sink in this time.

  She pauses, and for a second I think she really means it. I think that maybe this could be the start of something. The start of something new.

  "I ... I'm sorry, Lee Lee," she sobs, her eyes awash with tears. "I’m so, so sorry."

  We both lie there, a broken mess of a family. My stomach stops hurting, and a new pain kicks in. This one runs lower than skin-deep. I can’t believe what I’ve just done. I feel revulsion for myself, for my actions.

  And for the first time, I feel the slightest hint of revulsion for her. Because she’s supposed to protect me. And she never should have let it go this far.

  She sings promises of change, and how she’ll be different, but her words are too similar to a story I've heard before. It's one of pain and suffering, but it's entirely self-inflicted. She's the hero and the villain, all rolled into one.

  And all I can do is hope that what I just did is the equivalent to her salvation. That I’m her knight in shining armour.

  I pray.

  ***

  This time the nightmare isn't at all like I remember it.

  We're in a car. It's me, and it's Mum, and we're speeding down the highway.

  "Mum?" My hand clenches the car door. I can't see the speedometer, but I know we're going fast. Too fast for what the limit is in this residential area.

  "Yes?" she trills, and looks at me, but I want her to look at the road, God, do I want her to look at the road. And not just because I want her to pay attention to where we're going.

  Also because I want those fixated, too focused eyes off me.

  "Nothing."

  I clench the door tighter, the whites of my knuckles painfully obvious through my skin.

  We keep driving, and we pass the gates of my high school, speeding through the pedestrian crossing and almost taking out a group of seniors.

  "Mum!" My eyes bug out of my head as I stare again at the woman behind the wheel. This isn't my mother. My mother packs sandwiches, bakes cakes on the weekends and puts parcels of lavender in our underwear drawer to try and make things nicer. She is not the sort of woman who speeds through our city streets. She is not the sort of woman who nearly kills three football players simply because they crossed the road when she decided to break the law.

  "Yes, dear?" Her voice is unnaturally bright, and that's when I know something is definitely wrong. She came to school, walked right into class and dragged me out, saying we had an appointment.

  The only appointment Mum had was with death.

  "Your father ..." Mum shakes her head, and I wonder if she even heard what I said. If she was even listening.

  We hurl across the line into Emerald Cove, and I wonder what we're doing here, this neighbouring township where we hardly ever go.

  It's as if Mum reads my mind because she quickly fills in the blanks.

  "Do you know where your father took me on our first date?"

  I open and close my mouth, speechless. Somewhere slow are the only words coming to mind.

  "He took me to Emerald Cove, Lia. To this little bar. It was a really nice fucking night," she spits, and suddenly I feel like the one who screwed up here. Is there something I should have done? Could I have made things different?

  "That's ... good," I say, more to have a voice, to remind her that I'm still here more than anything else.

  "And then he somehow thinks it's okay to just leave. Because things got tough. You know what is tough?" On this word, she roars, a deep husky sound that grows within her throat to a full-blown yell when it reaches its potenti
al. "Looking after a family. Looking after him when he got so bloody depressed."

  Her voice is jagged, and each word cuts like a knife, straight through my stomach.

  "You ... it wasn't that bad ... was it?" I squint. And I don't know what I mean. I don't know if I mean me, or him, or us, or all of it. All I know is that she can't mean all of it.

  Dear God, she can't mean all of it.

  "That bad?" she squawks. "Lia, can you imagine listening to someone who every day comes home and tells you how hard it is? Who doesn't care if your day was shitty, or below average? Who just needs you to know that no matter how bad you might feel your day was, his was worse, so you owe him this huge debt of gratitude."

  "I ..."

  "I tried to be enough, and I wasn’t," she cries. “I tried so hard for him …”

  Tears well in her eyes, and I want to tell her to wipe them away, because dear God, she can't possibly see where she's going and we’re flying, flying down the main streets, heading quickly for the beach and the lake I know are at the my northern end of Emerald Cove.

  "Mum, can we please slow down?" I tentatively ask, pressing my body as far back in my seat as it will let me. I try and imagine I can meld with it, that I'm doing this out of choice and that perhaps if we crash, the seat will protect me.

  She doesn’t hear me, though. She’s too focused on chasing a demon that taunts her from the past.

  There's one person in life who's supposed to want you forever.

  That's your mother.

  And mine hates me, more than she can describe.

  I know this because of how often she threatens to check out.

  I know this because of how fast she's driving.

  And because of how she turns the wheel, yanks it to the left, and suddenly, we're not driving along the road anymore.

  Now we're bumping along a natural footpath.

  Now we're flying through the air.

  Now we’re in the lake.

  "Baby." Mum's voice is soft. "I'm sorry."

  ***

  I wake with a start as I most frequently do. The house is quiet, no noise, and I wonder if Mum is still here, or if she's gone somewhere else. If she's left.

  Then I shake my head. I just don't have time to worry about that. My audition is coming up. Every spare moment I have has to be devoted to that.

  And at the same time, I still wonder. Because even though I know I shouldn't, and even though I know I pushed her so far last night, I want to know that she's all right.

  I need to know she's okay.

  After I shower, I gently push open the door to her bedroom.

  She's lying on her back, white sheets draped across her mid, and not for the first time in eighteen months, I wonder why the hell she insists on that colour. Doesn't she know how stark it is? How plain and clean it looks?

  How dark blood can stain it?

  How deep those scars can run?

  Right now, the sheets across her stomach have small pinkish looking smudges over them, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I didn't think she'd have crawled to some desolate place and bled out without telling me. As screwed up as we are, as dysfunctional as a family as you'll ever find, one thing she isn't is solitary. She likes an audience for her actions.

  And something as gruesome as her death?

  After what my father did to us, I can only imagine she'd want to go bigger and better.

  God, it's sick to think of your family that way, and I wish I didn't have to.

  I'm about to turn away and head downstairs, off to school, when she groans, a deep, gut-wrenching noise that comes deep from within her stomach. I spin back around just as she opens her eyes, and those brown orbs, mirrors of my own, latch onto me.

  "Lee Lee," she croaks, an arm outstretched.

  I don't know anything else.

  My life is a series of forgive and forget.

  Armed with the knowledge that at least this time I didn't let her get away with it, at least this time I put up a damn fight, I walk slowly back into the bedroom. I drop my schoolbag on the floor, right in the spot where I stained those boards a short week ago, and I sit at the foot of the bed, my hand on her feet, which are also small, as is every other part of her—her body, her face, and her standards. For herself, more than anyone.

  "Where are you going?" She cracks one eye open and truly drills it into me, and I almost feel as if I'm the one who did something wrong, as if I'm sneaking off somewhere, when in reality, I'm going to school, and the only one who should be feeling like crap is her, for what she did to her body last night—

  Realisation sets in.

  What she tried to do to me.

  I stand and take two steps forward, hyper aware of every cell in my body, of every move I'm making. "You need to stop this, Mum."

  She groans and buries her face back in the pillow. "I've told you, I'm going to AA."

  "It's not enough! It's not working." Desperation rings true in my voice, and I hope she can hear it. "You hurt me."

  "I would never." She slams upright, her eyes wide and indignant. "You're my baby girl."

  I untuck my school shirt and lift it, exposing my stomach underneath. "See this?" I run my hand back and forth along the scar. "It was an accident, but you did this. You."

  Her mouth opens and shuts as she slowly shakes her head, as if she can't begin to comprehend what I'm telling her. "You have to get help. I won't be here forever."

  Mum's hand floats down to her own stomach, as if those words were a trigger for her to somehow remember parts of last night. She turns her head down, and her eyes widen at the pink sheet, then she lifts it to look at her body underneath. Her head still shaking, she pulls the sheet up tight to her chest. "I didn't ... I can't ..."

  And I don't know if she can't remember or can't believe, but I hope that seeing that proof will be enough to drive it home. "Just going to meetings isn't enough." I try to soften my voice. "You have to actually try to give up, too."

  "Smith and I—"

  "Smith isn't really helping."

  "He is!" The ferocity in her gaze is a slap in the face. "That man has done so much for me. Don't speak about him like that."

  The words from the policewoman ring in my head, and I suck in a breath. Here goes nothing. "Mum, the other night he came into my room and watched me sleep."

  Her face remains blank. "And?"

  "And don't you think that's kind of creepy? He kissed my cheek."

  "Lia, I think you're overreacting. He sees you as a daughter." She licks her cracked lips, and says, "He ... he lost his daughter. I can't imagine what that'd be like."

  Her eyes go all wistful and glaze over with tears. I purse my lips. Am I just being overly sensitive? The man lost his kid, for crying out loud. The loss of someone you love can make the strongest person loosen their grip on reality.

  My mum is living proof of that.

  "He's even talked about buying you something nice for your eighteenth. He's a good guy, Lee Lee." Mum gives a small smile. "Please, can you let me be happy?"

  And I can't say no to that.

  I could never say no to that.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Twelve days.

  Twelve days until I play the piano in front the esteemed judging panel from VCA, the Victorian College of the Arts, and they decide if I am worthy enough to receive their scholarship.

  Well, based upon that performance and my end of year grades, of course.

  Six days.

  Six days until I turn eighteen, and then that's one less lie, one less obstacle in the face of Jase and I. One less thing I have to hide.

  I feel as if I'm walking on a tightrope, and if I can just make it to the end of this one song, I'll be okay.

  But I can't let things slip.

  Hell, is this a precise line to walk.

  My hands fly across the piano this afternoon, every ounce of my body willing them to get there, to reach the notes they need to, to sing the songs they need to sing, and at the end of a gruel
ling four-hour rehearsal, relief beads my brow, along with perspiration. Because I did it. I played all the songs I need to for the scholarship, back to back, and they worked. And they sounded good.

  When I get to my car, there's a note under my wiper. I grin as I look up at the bar. I can't help the small laugh that escapes me as I read yet another heartfelt letter that somehow captures all of me.

  I AM PROFESSIONAL

  I AM KICK-ARSE

  I AM LIA STANTON!AND I SHOULD TOTALLY MAKE OUT WITH MY BOYFRIEND TOMORROW AFTERNOON … JUST SAYIN’

  ***

  My birthday dawns like any other day. I wake up covered in sweat, the memory of a dream that's way too close to reality lingering in my mind. The calendar on the back of my door greets me though, makes me smile.

  Only 123 more days ...

  "Hello?" I ask as I walk downstairs to the kitchen. I throw my bag on the floor and make myself a bowl of cereal, looking around for any sign of life or disturbance that indicates Mum came home after her AA meeting last night.

  Nothing.

  "Huh," I mumble. Apparently, Mum decided to stay at Smith's again.

  I try to pretend that doesn't sting just a little bit. That she chose him over me.

  My phone dings from somewhere inside my schoolbag, and I grab it out.

  Happy birthday to my baby girl. Eighteen—wow! See you tonight for a special dinner. Love Mum xx

  It's something. And it's a damn sight better than nothing.

  ***

  When I pull up at school, there's an ambush waiting for me in the parking lot. Kat, Ellie and Ana are waiting in my usual space, Ana sitting on the wooden plank that denote the end of the car space, Ellie staring at her phone and Kat glancing surreptitiously over her shoulder at the imposing brick building behind us every few seconds.

  I narrow my eyes. As far as I knew, the three girls barely knew each other. What on earth ...?

  The engine patters out and I open my car door, head tilted to the size. "What's going—"