Apples Never Fall, Page 3

  “How did you hurt yourself?” asked Joy.

  “My boyfriend and I got in an argument,” said the girl. She swayed and pressed the heel of her hand to her bloody eye. “I just ran out of the apartment onto the street and jumped in a cab…”

  “Your boyfriend did this to you?” said Stan. “You mean he hit you?”

  “Sort of,” said the girl.

  “Sort of? What does that mean?” said Stan. The man could be so abrasive at times. “Did he hit you or not?”

  “It’s complicated,” said the girl.

  “No, it’s not. If you’ve been assaulted, we should call the police,” said Stan.

  “No.” The girl shifted from Joy’s grip. “No way. I don’t want the police involved.”

  “We don’t need to call the police, darling, not if you don’t want,” said Joy. “It’s your choice. But come and sit down.”

  If the girl didn’t want to call the police, then that was fine with her. She didn’t want police here.

  As they passed under one of the hallway downlights, Joy saw that the girl was older than she’d first thought. Maybe her early thirties? Think, think, think.

  Could she be one of the boys’ ex-girlfriends? There had been a few years where it had been hard to keep track of all the young girls sashaying about their house. Both boys had long-term relationships with tanned blond girls in white sneakers called Tracey. Stan could never tell which Tracey was which. Both Traceys ended up crying at Joy’s kitchen table on separate occasions while Joy chopped onions and murmured comfortingly. Logan’s Tracey still sent Christmas cards.

  But this girl didn’t look like one of the girlfriends. Troy went for glossy princesses and Logan went for sexy librarians and this girl was neither.

  “Then I realized I didn’t have any money,” said the girl as they walked into the kitchen, and she stopped and tipped back her head to study the high ceiling as if it were a cathedral. Joy followed her gaze as it traveled around the room to the sideboard crammed with framed family photos and ornaments, including the pair of horrible sneering china cats that had belonged to Stan’s mother, and lingered on the bowl of fresh fruit sitting on the table: shiny red apples and bright yellow bananas. Was the child hungry? She was welcome to all the bananas. Joy didn’t know why she kept buying them. It was as if they were for display purposes only. Most ended up mushy-soft and black and then she felt ashamed throwing them away.

  “I was just completely empty-handed. No wallet, no phone, no money: nothing.”

  “Sit down, darling.” Joy sat down and pulled out a chair at the kitchen table.

  Stan had stopped barking questions, thank goodness. He silently took down the first aid kit from its place in the cupboard above the refrigerator where Joy couldn’t reach it without standing on a chair. He put it on the table and opened the lid because Joy always struggled with the stiff lock. Then he went to the sink and got the girl a glass of water.

  “Let’s take a look at this.” Joy put on her glasses. “Is it very painful?”

  “Oh, it’s fine. I have a high pain threshold.” The girl lifted the glass of water with a shaky hand and drank. Her fingernails were ragged. A nail biter. Amy used to be a terrible nail biter. The chill of the cold night air radiated off the girl’s skin as Joy cleaned the wound with antiseptic.

  “So you realized you didn’t have your purse,” prompted Joy as Stan pulled out a chair, put his elbows on the tabletop, clasped his hands together, and rubbed his nose against his knuckles, frowning heavily.

  “Yeah, so I was freaking out, thinking, how am I going to pay the fare, and the driver wasn’t one of those friendly cabbies, you know, I could just tell, he looked like he could be the type to be mean, even aggressive. So we were just driving randomly, and—”

  “Driving randomly?” interrupted Stan. “But what destination did you give the driver when you got in the cab?”

  Joy shot him a look. Sometimes he didn’t realize how he could come across to people.

  “I didn’t give him an address. I wasn’t thinking. I said, ‘Head north.’ I was trying to buy myself time while I worked out where to go.”

  “Did the driver not even notice you were hurt?” asked Joy. “He should have taken you straight to the nearest hospital without charging you a cent!”

  “If he did notice, he didn’t want to know about it.”

  Joy shook her head sadly. People these days.

  “But anyway, then, for some reason, I don’t know why, something made me do it, I put my hand in the pocket of my jeans and I couldn’t believe it! I pulled out a twenty-dollar note! It was so random! I never find money like that!”

  The girl’s face lit up with childlike pleasure as she remembered the moment she’d found the money.

  “Someone was looking out for you,” said Joy. She cut a piece of gauze from the roll.

  “Yeah, I know, so as the fare got closer to twenty dollars, I started giving the cabbie random directions. Like, turn left. Second right. I don’t know, I was kind of delirious. I was just following my nose. Wait. Did I make that up? Following your nose. It sounds funny now I say it. How do you follow your nose?”

  The girl looked up at Joy.

  “No, that’s right,” said Joy. She tapped her own nose. “Following your nose.”

  She looked over at Stan. He was pulling on his lower lip the way he did when he disapproved of something. He never followed his nose anywhere. You need a game plan, kid. You don’t just hit the ball and hope to win, you plan how you’re going to win.

  “The moment the fare clicked over to twenty dollars I shouted, ‘Stop!’ And I just got out of the car. It’s so cold outside tonight, I didn’t realize!” The girl shivered convulsively. “And I’ve got bare feet.” She lifted her dirty foot and pointed at her toes. “I was just standing there in the gutter. My feet felt like blocks of ice. I thought, You idiot, you stupid, stupid idiot, what now? And then I started to feel dizzy and I looked at the houses and yours seemed the friendliest, and the lights were on, so…” She tugged on the sleeves of her shirt. “So here I am.”

  Joy paused, the gauze midair. “So … but … so are you saying, we don’t, you don’t…” She tried to think of a more elegant way to put it, but couldn’t. “You don’t know us?”

  She saw now that she’d been kidding herself thinking the girl was familiar. She was only familiar in the way everyone seemed familiar these days. They’d just let a stranger into the house.

  She checked for signs of criminal tendencies and found none, although she wasn’t exactly sure how those tendencies would manifest themselves. The nose stud was really quite pretty. (Amy had had the most dreadful lip piercing a few years back, so Joy wasn’t too concerned by a nose piercing.) A tattoo of a leafy green vine wasn’t exactly intimidating. She seemed fine. A bit flaky perhaps. But she was sweet. This girl couldn’t be dangerous. She was too small. As dangerous as a mouse.

  “You didn’t have any friends or family you could go to?” asked Stan.

  Joy gave him another look. It was true she wanted to ask the same question, but there had to be a nicer way.

  “We’ve only just moved down here from the Gold Coast,” said the girl. “I don’t know a single person in Sydney.”

  Imagine, thought Joy. You’re all alone, without money, in a strange city, and you can’t go back home, what can you do except throw yourself on the mercy of strangers? She couldn’t imagine herself in the same situation. She had always been cushioned by people.

  Stan said, “Do you … maybe want to call someone? Your family?”

  “There isn’t really anyone … available, right now.” The girl lowered her head, so that Joy could see her poor, defenseless, thin white neck between the clumpy strands of her hair.

  “Look up at me, darling.” Joy pressed the gauze over the cut. “Finger there.” She guided the girl’s hand to the gauze, taped it in place with a strip of adhesive, and sighed with satisfaction. “There you go. All fixed.”

  “
Thank you.” The girl looked at Joy with clear pale green eyes framed by the fairest eyelashes Joy had ever seen. They looked like they’d been dusted with gold. Joy’s children all had those dark matador eyelashes. Joy herself had very ordinary eyelashes.

  The girl was unexpectedly pretty now that the blood had been cleared up. So pretty, and so very skinny and dirty and tired. Joy felt an overwhelming desire to feed her, run her a bath, and put her to bed.

  “I’m Savannah,” said the girl, and she held out her hand for Joy to shake.

  “Savannah. That’s a pretty name,” said Joy. “I have a friend called Hannah. Quite similar! Well, not that similar. Savannah. Where do I know that name from? I know, I think Princess Anne has a granddaughter called Savannah. She’s a cute little girl, a bit wicked! I don’t think she’s Princess Savannah, I don’t think she has a title at all. Not that you’d be interested in that. I’ve just always had a special interest in the royal family. I follow them on Instagram.”

  She couldn’t seem to stop talking. It happened when she felt upset or shocked, and she realized that she possibly did feel a little upset and shocked, right now, by the blood and the story of violence she’d just heard. She saw she was still holding the girl’s small icy-cold hand, and gave it a quick comforting squeeze before releasing it.

  “There’s another Savannah I’m thinking of, besides the royal one, I’m sure there is … Oh, I know! My youngest daughter, Brooke, has a friend who just had a baby, and I’m ninety percent sure she called her Savannah, or it could have been Samantha.”

  She remembered the baby’s name was actually Poppy, which was nothing at all like Savannah or Samantha, so that was embarrassing, but no need to mention it. “Brooke herself isn’t ready to have a baby yet, because she’s started her own physiotherapy practice, which is exciting.”

  Not exciting at all, infuriating, but as her grandfather used to say, “Never spoil a good story with the facts.”

  “She’s very busy focusing on that. It’s called Delaney’s Physiotherapy. I have a card somewhere. She’s really very good. Brooke, I mean. My daughter. Very calm and patient. It’s interesting because we never thought—”

  “Joy,” interrupted Stan. “Take a breath.”

  “We never thought we’d have anyone medical in our family…” Joy trailed off. She put her hand to her neck and felt the headphones that were still sitting there like a giant statement necklace. “I was listening to a podcast,” she explained, idiotically. In fact she could hear the tinny disembodied voice of her podcast host still chatting obliviously on, unaware that Joy was no longer listening.

  “I like podcasts,” said Savannah.

  “We never said our names! I’m Joy!” Joy switched the headphones off and put them on the table. “And this is my grumpy husband, Stan.”

  “Thank you for fixing me up, Joy.” Savannah gestured at her bandaged face. “Even though you’re not a medical family, I think you did a tip-top job!”

  Tip-top. What a funny word. A blast from the past.

  “Oh, well, thank you,” said Joy. “I never—well.” She made herself stop talking.

  “I had a good feeling about this house.” Savannah looked around her. “As soon as I saw it. It just felt very warm and safe.”

  “It is safe,” said Joy. She avoided looking at her husband. “Would you like something to eat, Savannah? Are you hungry? Have a banana! Or I have leftovers from dinner I could heat up.” She didn’t give the girl time to accept the offer before she rushed into the next. “And then you’ll stay the night, of course.”

  She was so glad her cleaning lady, Good Old Barb, had been today and that together they’d vacuumed and dusted Amy’s old bedroom.

  “Oh,” said Savannah. She looked uneasily over at Stan and then back again at Joy. “I don’t know about that. I could just…”

  But it was clear there was nowhere else for her to go at this time of night, and there was no way in the world that Joy was sending this tiny barefoot girl back out into the cold.

  Chapter 4

  NOW

  “We’re trying to track down that girl who stayed with Mum and Dad last year.”

  The beauty therapist, dressed in immaculate white, knelt at her client’s enormous feet as she gently guided them into a footbath filled with warm scented water, floating rose petals, and smooth oval-shaped pebbles manufactured to look like they came from a mountain stream.

  “She turned up on their doorstep. Late one night.”

  The client, who was booked in for the Deluxe Power Pedicure, “a luxury experience for the busy executive,” wiggled his feet against the stones and kept talking, fortunately at an acceptable volume. He’d politely asked the beauty therapist if she minded if he made some calls while he had his pedicure. Most people just started randomly shouting.

  “She’s probably got nothing to do with it,” he said. “We’re just calling everyone Mum knows.”

  The client’s phone was in the pocket of his slouchy soft white shirt. He wore AirPods. The therapist’s dad said people wearing AirPods looked like peanuts. (Her dad had recently turned fifty, and it was cute the way he thought his opinions still had value.) The client didn’t look like a peanut. He was very attractive.

  “It’s just strange for Mum not to be in touch for this long. Normally she calls me back within two minutes all breathless and horrified that she missed the call.”

  The beauty therapist scrubbed apricot kernel exfoliator into the heel of his right foot in hard, vigorous circles.

  “I know, but it’s not like she disappeared without a word. She texted us all on Valentine’s Day.” He paused. “I’ll tell you exactly what it said. Hold on a sec.”

  He scrolled through his phone with his thumb.

  “Here it is.” He read out loud, “‘Going OFF-GRID for a little while! I’m dancing daffodils 21 Dog Champagne to end Czechoslovakia! Spangle Moot! Love, Mum.’ Heart emoji. Butterfly emoji. Flower emoji. Smiley face emoji. ‘Off-grid’ was in capitals.”

  The beauty therapist’s mother used a lot of emojis in her texts too. Mothers loved emojis. She wondered what all that “dancing daffodils” stuff could possibly mean.

  “It just means she was texting without her glasses,” said the client to the person on the phone, who must have been wondering the same thing. “Her texts are always filled with weird random phrases.”

  The beauty therapist tried to massage his calf muscle. It was like trying to massage granite. He must be a runner.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m going over there now to talk to Dad to see if I can find out more, not that he’ll tell me anything—”

  At that moment his foot gave a sudden spasm, the toes splayed at an unnatural angle.

  “Cramp!” he cried. The beauty therapist swerved her head just in the nick of time.

  Chapter 5

  LAST SEPTEMBER

  Joy closed their bedroom door with a gentle, apologetic click, as if Savannah would overhear and know they were only closing it because she was there. They had always slept with their door wide open throughout their married life: so that small anxious children could hurtle straight into their bed after nightmares, so that they could hear teenagers crashing through the house, drunk but thankfully home alive, so that they could rush to administer medication, advice, comfort, so that they could leap from their beds each morning and run straight into the action of their busy, important lives.

  Once, closing the bedroom door had been a signal that someone thought sex might be a good idea. Now it was a signal that they had a guest.

  An unexpected guest.

  Savannah was hopefully warm and comfortable in Amy’s old bedroom, wearing an old pair of Amy’s pajamas. Amy, their eldest, their “free spirit” as Joy liked to call her, their “problem child” as Stan liked to call her, was turning forty next year, and she hadn’t officially lived at home for two decades, but she still used her old bedroom as a kind of permanent storage unit, because she never seemed to settle at one address lo
ng enough to properly relocate her possessions. It was admittedly strange behavior for a nearly forty-year-old, and there had been a time when Joy and Stan had talked about putting their foot down, and friends had suggested they should do so, as if it were possible to use sheer force of will to mold Amy into a regular person. Amy was Amy, and right now she had a job and a phone number, her fingernails were generally clean, and her hair (albeit currently dyed blue) did not look like it was crawling with lice, and that was all Joy wanted from her, although it would be nice if she combed her hair occasionally.

  “Is she in bed?” asked Stan as he came out of the bathroom, wearing boxers and a V-neck white T-shirt, from which sprang white chest hair. He was still a big, muscly, overbearing man, but he always looked vulnerable to Joy in his pajamas.

  “I think so,” said Joy. “She seemed sleepy after her bath.”

  She had insisted on running a bath for Savannah. The taps were tricky to manage. She’d added some of the peach-scented bubble bath someone had given her for Mother’s Day, and laid out two of the fluffiest guest towels she could find, and it had been so pleasing to see Savannah come out of the bathroom, pink-cheeked and yawning, the tips of her hair wet, Amy’s dressing gown trailing on the floor behind her.

  Joy could hear the rounded notes of contentment in her voice. It was the long-ago primal satisfaction of feeding and bathing a hungry, tired, compliant child, and then tucking that clean, pajama-clad child straight into bed.

  “Amy’s dressing gown was so long—” Joy stopped.

  What the heck? Her mouth dropped.

  “Oh my word,” she said. “You didn’t.”

  A pile of random objects was crammed, higgledy-piggledy, on top of their chest of drawers: Stan’s ancient laptop that she was pretty sure was broken, her iPad that she never touched, their desktop computer, including the monitor, their ten-year-old television, a calculator, and an old jar of twenty-cent coins that probably had a total value of ten dollars, if that.