‘In a minute,’ she said, and she tipped her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes against the glare. For a moment I thought she was going to try to sleep, then she started speaking again, more deliberately this time.
‘You know,’ she started slowly, ‘how you asked me the other week if I thought we did the right thing by not telling anyone that Hannah and Cordie planned to run away? And did I ever worry we might have got it all wrong?’
I waited.
‘I do worry,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t know if what we did was right. In fact, the longer I think about it, the less certain I feel.’
Her eyes opened momentarily and she squinted in the sunshine. Then she closed them again without waiting to gauge my response. I saw then that this was a conversation she’d been working up to for a while. Maybe the whole time I’d been here.
‘I always thought,’ she went on, ‘that if our intentions were good . . . Like, by keeping their secret I was doing the right thing by Hannah.’
‘But now?’
She hesitated. ‘Now I don’t know if intentions count for much, Tik.’
‘I never thought they did,’ I conceded.
Out the window I watched the fig leaves stir in the wind. They flipped from green to rust-brown and back again, revealing their dark undersides. Seeing their two-tone leaves made me think of the pipis we used to collect in the clearing in the valley as kids. Those pipis were pale on the outside, while inside their shells they were a beautiful glossy lilac. It was because of their colour that we collected them, and we would arrange them in intricate patterns, purple side up, back in our valley of dry bones.
‘So what do we do?’ Laura asked, and for a moment I thought it was some sort of reverse psychology. So I’d be the one to do the reassuring for once.
‘What do we do?’ I echoed.
‘Yeah,’ she said quietly, and I realised she was serious. That I wasn’t the only one who’d been lost in the years since our friends went missing. When they failed to turn up among the dry bones. So many things we used to dig up that weren’t ours to touch. There were so many things in this life better left untouched.
‘I guess we stick together,’ I said eventually, because at least that seemed possible. Was the only thing that made any sense. ‘We stick together, the same way we’ve always done, Lor.’
Across the car park a cleaner stepped outside for a smoke. He leaned heavily against the brick wall. When he exhaled blue smoke above his head in a funnel, the air around him quivered like water.
For so long we’d been haunted by those girls. Since the moment they first disappeared. We were the ones left behind, Laura and I. Defined by what was long gone. And if not that, then what? Who should we be?
I watched the cleaner exhale, then I let out a breath.
‘And we let go,’ I said hesitantly.
‘We let them go,’ Laura agreed.
I nodded. They only ever wanted to run.
And my sister looked satisfied then, like she’d heard what she was after. I watched the muscles in her neck relax.
The two of us got out of the car – Laura slowly, gingerly, with one arm placed across my shoulders. We started walking towards the hospital entrance together. Her arm felt good where it was, slung across my shoulders. I raised my hip slightly on her side to take more of her weight.
My sister still smelled so familiar to me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I was thirty-one that summer I came back to see my sister. Plain thirty-one – no need for the one-sixth these days. In a few years I’d be as old as Hannah, Cordie and Ruth all combined: fourteen plus thirteen plus seven. I was planning to live for another thirty-one years as well. Then another thirty-one after that. I might live nine lives in total for the Van Apfels’ short ones.
But that’s assuming Hannah and Cordie weren’t out there somewhere, racking up birthdays themselves.
* * *
Before I flew back to Baltimore I decided to spend a day walking around the city. Start down near the quay and walk along the foreshore. Watch the moss-green ferries pulling away from the quay. It took less than an hour to drive from Macedon Close to the heart of the city. And that’s where I saw her. There. In an underground car park of all places. As though she’d never left the east coast at all. Hadn’t vanished along with her sisters.
She was standing waiting for the lift to arrive so she could ascend to street level. While I cruised past in my car searching for a parking spot, and instead found Cordie Van Apfel in my rear-view mirror.
That blonde hair, those bare arms. Her hips broader now. It was Cordie, all right. Corporate Cordie. With her handbag and her laptop bag in matching black leather. Her dress was a deep russet red. But even without the red dress, Cordie was enough to make you stop. The curve of each calf. The sway of her back. The way she jabbed at the lift buttons even though the arrows were already lit up, and then adjusted her dress expectantly in the reflection of the doors. She couldn’t have been more Cordie-like if she tried.
But this was more than Cordie-like. This was Cordie, I was sure. And I wanted to pull over and leap out of my car and tell her to wait for me. To shout: ‘Cordie! Just wait! Cordie, I’m coming!’
To ask her where on earth she’d been.
But there were cars backed up behind me, snaking away in the dark. There was no room to leave the queue and so instead I guided my car around the corner, down the ramp, and onto an identical level below. I flung my car into a parking spot and wrenched the keys out of the ignition. I was barefoot and my shoes were wedged under my seat but I was faster without them, I reasoned. I ran to the fire stairs and took them two at a time and the concrete was cold under my feet.
When I reached street level I paused on the footpath. For an instant I was dazzled by the day. Then I saw Cordie in the crowd at the end of the block, waiting for the traffic lights to change.
‘Cordie!’ I shouted. ‘Cordie, wait!’
I began to run again. Started to weave in and out of the crowd, and there were elbows and shopping bags and shouted phone conversations. Across the street a jackhammer kicked off. I ran towards the intersection at the end of the block, and the traffic lights changed and Cordie surged across the street.
‘Cordie, wait!’ I yelled. ‘It’s Tikka! It’s me!’
But the pedestrian light flashed red and the traffic resumed and Cordie was gone, swanning up the next block.
At the corner I hesitated. I could still see Cordie across the street. I could still see her and she still looked the same. She had one arm held high across her stomach at a right angle to keep her laptop bag from slipping, the same way she used to keep her cast arm safe. Her blonde hair was brighter, more artificial than it used to be, but I still longed to reach out and touch it. To tug it. To make her turn around. A taxi sped around the corner in front of me. Then another. Then a courier bike. The coast was clear and I darted across the road, and a car blasted its horn at my back.
Up on the footpath I was on the same side as Cordie now, and I started to run again. My soles were burning. Lungs on fire. I held one arm out in front of me as I jostled through the crowd.
Ahead of me her blonde head bobbed along the street. Strands of her hair blew backwards as she strode, like fingers beckoning me on. But the footpath was so congested and I was losing ground. She seemed to drift further away with each step I took.
In the gulf that stretched out between us now, a group of tourists swarmed towards me. They must have been retirement age and yet they travelled along the street in pairs like schoolchildren. They pointed at street signs and graffiti, talking excitedly in a language I didn’t recognise. I watched as one woman in the group smiled beatifically at a pigeon on the footpath. Someone else took a photo of my bare feet with their phone.
Their tour guide walked at the back of the pack, his plastic lanyard swinging around his neck, his flagpole hoisted high into the air. At the top of the pole a small flag whipped and rippled in the breeze.
‘No – yes,’ I corrected myself. ‘Yes, I’m all right.’
He nodded and then continued ushering his tour group along the street while I stood watching.
I am all right, I thought, even though my heart felt like it might beat right out of my chest. Maybe it was all of those stairs I ran up, but the street seemed to swim dizzyingly.
On the breeze I caught the sharp smell of brine off the harbour and suddenly I was back – I was back in the valley with the stench of the river in my nostrils, and Cordie was there in her Daisy Duke shorts. A quizzical look on her face.
Why, she wanted to know, wouldn’t I just let her run? Why did I insist on pulling her back, tugging her sleeve, dragging her home? Hadn’t I seen how bad that turned out for Ruth?
I understood as I heard her voice in my mind that the only reason I kept seeing her was because I wanted to see her. Because even after all this time it made more sense than her simply being ‘gone’. But sense wasn’t the thing or, at least, it wasn’t enough. All the new truths, the amassed facts (Who heard what? Who was where?). All our secrets we’d kept subterranean for so long. None of these things explained what really happened to those girls.
Van Apfel. From the apple. From the tree of knowledge.
I could see now: no one ever truly knows.
‘I’m all right,’ I said again. Only when I said it this time I turned my head away from the tour group and I spoke the words softly, whispered them to the woman in the red dress who was disappearing up the street. For a moment I thought I saw her hesitate like she might look around, but she didn’t. She continued walking up the block.
And it was a relief then, to turn away and start walking in the opposite direction, away from that blonde head and back towards the car park I’d come from. I’d retrace my steps, and retrieve my bag and my shoes from under my seat so I could head out into the day for a second time.
And I guess the woman from the car park – the one who’d adjusted her red dress in the lift reflection – made her way to the far intersection. Who knows, maybe she crossed again and rounded a corner, before being swallowed up by the crowd.
Before she vanished back into thin air.
EPILOGUE
Imagine it. Dream it, the way that I’ve dreamed it so many times. Three shadows fill my dreams, fluid and small, and pulling away from the amphitheatre. See how they peel off and spread out like drips down a pane of glass. By the time they reach the brick toilet block on the left-hand side of the stage, they have fallen back into step and they move as one undiluted being. Always was, always is, and always bringing up the rear. In this dream, there are no other shadowy figures. Just the three of them. That unholy trinity.
Cordie leads.
In the impossible dark, she steers her sisters close enough to the toilet block that they can hear someone inside. Movement. The clink of a metal belt buckle. She draws the three of them past the light outside the entrance, sidestepping its stippled glare. Then she veers around the back and dumps a stack of brochures in the rubbish bin before she disappears from sight.
She is headed towards the river.
They walk in formation as they approach the oval: Cordie, then Hannah, then Ruth. Hannah’s almost a head taller than their sloe-eyed leader and she stoops anxiously, unsure what to do with the view. Under one arm, a bag of XXL buttered popcorn sags sadly inside its plastic like a netted animal.
Cordie wears a T-shirt and shorts. Converse sneakers on her feet. Her hair still flipped over to one side. She’s complemented the outfit with a locket that until just yesterday contained a good-luck tuft of Madonna’s ginger fur but now holds sacred mouse fluff instead.
A shiver ripples along their line and Ruth hurries to catch it. She’s not missing out on a thing. Though she’s hungry already, and her pockets are empty, and please God, popcorn aside, let Hannah have packed snacks.
At the oval the lights glow a strange samphire green as though the world is submerged in the river. A dog barks and it bolts out of nowhere and onto the oval, and the girls stumble back in alarm, as if the two things are connected by a thin strand of wire so that the dog breaking free and running onto the pitch pushes the girls back into the shadows.
‘It’s C’mere!’ Cordie laughs at herself in the dark. ‘Look! It’s only C’mere.’
They watch the red dog as it runs in circles, deer-leaping, high-stepping. Mouth stretched in a tongue-lolling grin. While in the distance a trombone prwrrp-prwrrp-prwrrps comically. That kelpie’s come with his own brass band.
‘C’mere’s come to say goodbye,’ Cordie says wistfully. ‘Wish we could give him a pat.’
Instead they keep moving, towards the mangroves, towards the river. Towards the footbridge that crosses the water.
They’re careful where they walk – they stick to the shadows. They stay outside the boundary markings spray-painted onto the oval, then they weave through the ghost gums that lead to the river. In and out, in and out. Here and gone. And the leaves gleam like silver in the startling moonlight. They ripple like the scales of a fish.
But the river itself – that black slash of water – is deathly unmoving tonight. It’s slack water, and Hannah knows the tide will rise further, the current will push closer before the tide turns later this evening. But right now it’s still, and the whole world’s stopped turning, except for three ghosts who skitter along the shoreline casting strange shadows. Long-limbed streaks. Night-birds dancing in the dark.
Meanwhile, back at the amphitheatre the trombone gives its final, triumphant blast and the audience breaks into applause. The girls stop. Hold their breath.
They peer into the summery gloom.
Then the stage lights go up and the audience settles down, and they know there’s more Showstopper to come.
‘What is it, you reckon?’
‘Dunno. There’s not enough of them for it to be the choir.’
Hannah squints at the figures standing on stage.
‘Who cares?’ Cordie says dreamily, because nothing matters now that they’re gone. She wraps her arms around her midriff and hugs herself, grinning.
Back at the oval, C’mere is agitated. The dog can sense a charge in the air. He twists and flips, runs in frenzied circles. Won’t c’mere or c’mhome when he’s called.
And the girls run on, in the mangroves and the moonlight. In the miasmic dark. They’re still coming, still running. They’re living and breathing. Still tracing the vein of the river. As they run their footprints sink into the sand and the silt, and they dare the rising tide to erase them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FELICITY MCLEAN is an author and journalist. She has ghostwritten six books, most recently Body Lengths, co-written with Olympian Leisel Jones. Her picture book, This is a Book! (no wifi needed), was published in 2017.
The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is her first novel.
COPYRIGHT
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2019
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Felicity McLean 2019
The right of Felicity McLean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
HarperCollinsPublishers
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive, Rosedale 0
632, Auckland, New Zealand
A 75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201 301, India
1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF, United Kingdom
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower, 22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor, Toronto, Ontario, M5H 4E3, Canada
195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, USA
ISBN 978 1 4607 5506 8 (paperback)
ISBN 978 1 4607 0942 9 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia
Cover design by Mark Campbell, HarperCollins Design Studio
Front cover image: B&J/stocksy.com/18701
The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone Page 23