First Love, Second Chance: Friends to Forever / Second Chance with the Rebel / It Started with a Crush...

‘I have no interest in seeing her.’ He dropped his stiff posture and almost sagged against the whale as he bent to soak his towel again. ‘Working on the trawlers was more than a financial godsend; it gave me space to breathe. Perspective. And an education. I watched some of those blokes popping all manner of pills to stay awake. Improve the haul. I saw what it did to them over a season. When I got back and saw through educated eyes how she was, I was horrified.’ Those eyes grew haunted. ‘She was my mum, you know?’

Beth nodded, her fear-frozen tongue incapable of speech.

‘All Dad’s insurance money, all the money I’d been sending home from up north. She blew most of it on pills. She was no further ahead financially than when I left.’

Beth wanted to empathise. She wanted to comfort. But it was so hard when he might as well have been describing her. Suddenly Janice’s desperate taloned grip on Beth’s forearm all those years ago made a sickening sense. ‘What did you do?’

His sad eyes shadowed further. ‘I tried for three years. I gave her money, she swallowed it. I signed her up to support groups and she left them. I hid her Xexal and she’d tear the house up looking for it. Or magically find some more. I threatened to leave … ‘ he shook his head ‘… and she threw my belongings into the street. One day I just didn’t take them back inside.’

‘You moved out.’

‘It was all I had left to fight back with. She was hellbent on self-destruction and I wasn’t going to watch that.’ He shuddered. ‘I thought losing me might have been enough.’

But it wasn’t.

‘Do you see her at all?’ Beth whispered.

‘Not for four years. The one useful thing I did do was buy out her mortgage. She can’t sell the house without me so I know she has somewhere to sleep, at least. And I get meals delivered to her now instead of sending her cash, so I know she has food. For the rest.’ His shrug was pure agony.

Compassion and misery filled Beth at once. For Marc, who loved his mother no matter how difficult she’d been. For Janice, who lost the love of her life when Bruce Duncannon had a cardiac arrest and who had never truly coped as a single parent. And for herself, whose path wouldn’t have been so very different if not for the blazing memory one Sunday morning of a young boy who’d always believed in her.

A powerful love.

‘Would you ever try again?’ She felt compelled to ask. Knowing if she was in Janice’s shoes she’d want someone not to give up on her. Deep down inside. No matter how much she protested. The way her parents had hung in there for her. Despite everything.

Marc lifted his gaze. His brows folded. His eyes darkened. ‘Too much would have to change. I’ve accepted that the only time I’ll see my mother again is if she’s in hospital, in a psych ward or in the ground.’

The gaping void in his heart suddenly made shattering sense. She remembered what it was like living with Damien in the early days, before she’d succumbed to the bottle. She could only imagine what it must have been like for a child living with that. Then the man, watching someone he loved self-destruct.

But she herself was that hollow. An addict. Never truly recovered, always working at it. As if Marc didn’t already have enough reasons to hate her, this would be too much.

‘Go ahead and say it, Beth. I can see your mind working.’

Startled, her eyes shot up. She couldn’t say what she truly wanted to say. But she found something. ‘What about yourself—did you ever seek help for yourself?’

The frown came back. ‘I don’t need help.’

‘You’re her son. There’s—’ She caught herself just before she gave away too much. ‘I’m sure there’s assistance out there for you, too.’ She knew there was. Her parents had accessed it.

The frown grew muddled. ‘To help me do what?’

Beth lifted her shoulders and let them slump. ‘Understand her.’

His expression grew thunderous. ‘You think I lack understanding? Having lived with this situation since I was nine years old?’

Beth wanted to beg him to reconsider. To be there for his mother, since no one else was. But she burned for the little boy he must have been too. ‘If not understanding, then … objectivity? You had it briefly when you returned from up north and look how clearly it helped you to see.’

‘Objectivity did nothing more than make me realise what a junkie my mother had become.’

Beth winced at the derogatory term. She’d had similar words ascribed to her over the years. Five years ago, they struck her shielded centre and were absorbed into a soggy mass of indifference. These days they cut.

Disappointment stained his eyes. ‘I really thought you’d have understood, Beth. I wasn’t oblivious back in school. I know you stopped coming around because of her.’

I stopped a heck of a lot more because of her. She’d started pulling back from their friendship because Janice had begged her to. And that withdrawal led to everything else that followed.

‘I just … She’s your mother, Marc, and all you have left. I know it’s hard but I just don’t want to see you throw it away—’

‘Throw it away?’ he thundered. ‘I bled over that decision, Beth, even worse than when you—’ He stopped short and snapped his mouth shut, glaring at her through the darkness. ‘She’s an addict. You have no idea what it is like to live with someone who is controlled by their compulsion. The kind of damage it does to everyone around them. How the poison spreads.’

Tears pricked dangerously in Beth’s eyes, welling and meeting the salt that still clung to her lashes. It dissolved and filled her eyes with a stinging mix that she had to blink to displace. He was talking about her. He just didn’t know it. She turned her face away on the pretext of re-wetting her shredded rag. Behind her, pain saturated every word.

‘I have no interest in ever putting myself in that position again, ‘ Marc vowed.

She knew plenty about being an addict but what did she understand about living with one? Her response to Damien’s addiction had been to cave in and join him. Hardly a battle. Walking away from Janice must have been brutal for Marc—on all fronts—but it meant he kept his sanity. He survived. He controlled the spread of the poison.

Misery washed through her.

She lifted damp eyes back to his. Nodded. ‘I understand, Marc. I do understand.’ Only too well. Her eyelids dipped heavily. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,’ she risked after a long silence, forcing her lids open.

Marc was silent for the longest time but finally spoke. ‘I’m sorry you weren’t too. I could have used a friend.’

Did he not even have one to turn to? ‘When did you walk out?’

‘Christmas Eve four years ago.’

She’d spent most Christmas Eves trying to act straight while her over-protective parents threw anxious glances between her and Damien, who’d done his best to appear attentive. Meanwhile Marc had been carrying suitcases away from his mother’s house. Lord, what a contrast. ‘Who did you … Were you alone—at the time?’

‘Are you asking whether I was single?’

She was so tired she could have been asking anything. ‘I’m asking whether you were alone.’ Worrying he’d had no one only made it worse.

He nodded. ‘I was.’

No father. No extended family in Australia. No friends. No girlfriend. Just a long-time addict mother. She closed her eyes for the pain she could hear in his voice all these years later. As a boy, Marc’s defence of his mother was legendary. He held on to love for a long time.

‘I went back out onto the trawlers for another couple of seasons. More than they recommend, but I felt I had nothing to hang around the city for. That decision turned my life around.’

‘You’re still such a glass half-full person, aren’t you?’ She’d clung to the concept when things were at their lowest ebb. ‘I remember that about you.’

He paused the sloshing. ‘We’re responsible for our happiness just as much as our actions. No one else is going to do that for you.’

True enough. She was a walking example. If she hadn’t dragged herself back from the abyss. An exhausted yawn split her thought.

‘I have to move faster, ‘ she said to herself as much as him. ‘If I keep slowing down, I’ll stop for good.’

‘You can stop any time you need to, you know that.’

If only life were that simple. That simply wasn’t true sometimes. As she and his mother knew only too well. ‘I’ll be here as long as you are.’