Yet for some reason her apple crumble tasted of love. It was a mystery.
“Maybe the secret ingredient is some kind of alcohol,” said Savannah. “Whiskey?”
Joy pointed her spoon at her. “Now that would make sense. Clever.”
“I’m going to try it this weekend,” said Savannah, and Joy could see that she’d pleased her by calling her clever. “I’m going to crack the De- laney family apple crumble mystery.”
Joy watched Savannah touch her spoon with the tip of her tongue and put it down again. She didn’t really eat. All she did was cook. She was too thin. Joy wanted to tell her she was too thin, but she’d learned that you had to be careful what you said. Amy and Brooke had once overheard Joy saying, “My daughters have enormous feet,” and she’d never heard the end of it. She hadn’t meant anything bad by it! They did have enormous feet.
“You don’t eat much, do you?” she said to Savannah. Surely that wasn’t offensive. “For someone who loves to cook so much, I mean.”
“I used to have a big appetite when I was a kid.” Savannah dug her spoon into her apple crumble and swirled it around. Did she think Joy couldn’t tell that she wasn’t actually eating? “I was always hungry.”
She looked at Joy with a fixed, almost belligerent expression, and Joy backed down. Perhaps she’d accidentally “body-shamed.” There were a lot of new rules for life, and she hadn’t caught up on all of them. Her children, who had come into the world completely uncivilized and learned all their good manners from her, sometimes cried, “Mum! You can’t say that!” She always laughed as if she didn’t give two hoots, but in truth these inadvertent transgressions upset and embarrassed her.
“How long had you been going out with that boy?” she asked Savannah. “The one who—” She touched her own eyebrow where Savannah’s injury had been.
“About a year.” Savannah’s face was impassive. She scraped a spoonful of froth from her cappuccino.
“Had he ever hurt you before?”
She wasn’t checking up on her story. Absolutely not. She was just asking questions, trying to understand her.
Savannah put down her spoon and said, “Can I ask you a question? About your … marriage?”
Joy had that odd feeling again that here was the real Savannah, relaxing for a moment, being her true self, taking off her mask.
“Go right ahead,” she said expansively.
“Was there ever any … infidelity?”
“Oh!” said Joy. She wiped her mouth with her napkin and sat back.
“It’s a very personal question, I know,” said Savannah.
It was a personal question, but Joy had just been asking Savannah personal questions about her relationship, so why shouldn’t she ask them back?
“No,” she said, and it was no problem at all to bat away that blurry, shameful image of another man’s lips bending toward hers.
“As far as you know,” said Savannah.
Joy blinked.
“I didn’t mean to imply anything by that,” said Savannah.
“Of course you didn’t,” said Joy. “You’re right: as far as I know.”
“You were lucky,” said Savannah thoughtfully, “to meet your soulmate when you were so young.”
“Soulmate,” repeated Joy. “I don’t know about that. He was just a boy. He’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. When you’re young you get so worked up about things you think you could never forgive, like, I don’t know…”
“Birthdays?” Savannah lifted a crumb of the apple crumble topping and rubbed it between her fingertips. “Like forgetting a birthday?”
“That sort of thing, yes,” said Joy, although she’d never cared that much about birthdays or anniversaries. She wanted to say, Oh, darling, you’ve no idea.
She remembered that day they were all driving to the Northumberland Open on the Central Coast and the boys wouldn’t stop fighting in the back seat, and she could feel Stan becoming unnaturally still in the driver’s seat and her stomach was churning in anticipation, and she turned and hissed at the children, violently, silently contorting her face to try to make them stop. It was during the height of the battles between Logan and Troy, when it seemed like each argument between them was a matter of life and death.
And then Stan put on his turn signal. His flicker. That’s what they used to call the turn signal back then. Funny how words disappeared, became quaint and ridiculous, like fashions and opinions you once held dear. He put on his flicker, stopped the car, undid his seatbelt, got out, closed the door, and Joy thought, You must be joking, Stan. We’re on a highway. But he wasn’t joking. He missed that day’s matches. The kids all lost their matches. Bizarre behavior.
Husbands could do worse! That’s what she’d always told herself. She knew of husbands who hit or shoved or shouted terrible abuse. If Janet Higbee lost a game on a double fault, her husband tweaked her nose and said, “Stupid goose!” Janet always laughed merrily, but it wasn’t funny, anyone could see that it hurt and humiliated her, and poor Janet was annoying but she didn’t deserve her nose tweaked just because her ball toss was too low.
Joy remembered another club member from years ago, a pretty girl called Polly Perkins who was an absolute demon on the court, not scared of coming to the net, as aggressive as any man, but had to record every cent she spent in a little notebook for her husband, a hotshot university professor. Once, Polly told Joy about a terrible argument she and her husband had the previous night because he wouldn’t “give her permission” to buy a new iron. Polly said the old iron kept spitting rust stains onto her clothes. She showed Joy the brown dots on her white tennis skirt. Six months later Polly walked out on her husband and moved back home to New Zealand, and Joy often thought of her when she did the ironing and hoped that she’d found happiness and a new iron that didn’t spit rust.
A husband could leave, like Stan, but a husband could also never return, like Joy’s father. Stan always came back.
The truth was that most of the time Stan was more patient and less prone to anger than Joy. When the kids were little her mood remained set at a permanent low level of simmering irritability.
Did he not think that she too dreamed of walking straight out of her life when she got angry? She regularly fantasized about doing what her father had done all those years ago: walk out the door to “see a friend” and never come back. Sometimes she abrogated responsibility by fantasizing about kidnappers bursting into the house, bundling her into the back of their van, and taking her away for a long rest in a nice, cool, quiet dungeon.
But walking out the door was never a real option. She was too necessary. Only she knew the children’s schedules, where everything was, the vet’s name, the doctor’s name, the teacher’s name.
But Stan could walk out without a moment’s thought. Sometimes he simply left the room and that was fine. Normal people did that. Sometimes he walked around the block and perhaps normal people did that too. Sometimes he went for a drive and came back an hour later. Two hours later. Three. Four. The longer he went, the less normal it became. The longest time was five days.
“Here’s what you do,” Joy’s mother said when Joy finally confided in her about her husband’s strange, shameful habit. “Make sure you’re wearing lipstick and your nicest dress when he walks back in the door. Don’t cry. Don’t shout. Don’t ask a single question about where he’s been. Hold your head up high, and act as if you didn’t even notice he was gone.”
She’d followed her mother’s instructions to the letter. If she gave those same instructions to her daughters they would have howled.
She only broke her mother’s rule once. It was late at night and she and Stan were in bed, the door shut, both still breathing heavily from sex.
“Why do you do that?” she’d whispered into his chest. “Disappear? Walk out?”
At first she’d thought he wasn’t going to answer, and then he finally spoke.
“I can’t talk about it,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
> “It’s okay,” she’d said, and it was okay, but it also wasn’t okay. There were tiny seeds of bitter resentment at the center of her heart, like the tiny bitter seeds at the center of even the sweetest apple.
They never talked of it again. When she said, “It’s okay,” she accepted the deal. He always came back, and it only happened maybe once, twice a year, and as his hair grayed and receded and eventually vanished, and his cartilage crumbled, he did it less and less, until one day she realized it was something from their past, like his long curly black hair, like her PMS.
“You have to make compromises in a relationship,” she said to Savannah. “You muddle along.” She stopped because she could see Savannah watching a woman and a little girl in a pale pink leotard and tutu who were sitting at the next table. The girl’s hair was pulled back in one of those ferociously smooth ballet buns.
“Cute,” she said to Savannah.
“I did classical ballet.” Savannah’s eyes were still on the child.
“Did you?” said Joy, with interest. In spite of Savannah having said that she had “highly superior autobiographical memory,” she hadn’t shared all that many of those memories that she remembered in such superior detail, presumably because they weren’t such good memories. It was nice to get a new concrete detail. It made sense too. Savannah had that beautiful straight-backed posture and a kind of grace to her movements.
“My mother would have loved me to do ballet. Did one of your foster carers get you into it?” asked Joy.
Savannah looked at her with unfocused eyes. “Huh?”
“The ballet?” said Joy. “How did you get into ballet?”
It didn’t seem like a typical pastime for a child shunted between foster homes, particularly “classical” ballet.
“Oh,” said Savannah. “I just did a few introductory lessons. That’s all.” She looked at the little girl and her lip curled. “She shouldn’t be eating a cupcake if she wants to be a ballerina. So much sugar!” She spat the words out through thin, pursed lips. She sounded once again like someone else. Joy wondered if she was unconsciously imitating some awful authority figure from her life.
Savannah pushed aside her apple crumble with contempt, as if someone had been forcing her to eat it. “I’ve had enough of this.”
“Yes. Me too,” said Joy. She sipped her tea and looked again at the little ballet dancer, her tan-stockinged legs kicking as she happily munched on her cupcake.
Joy felt all at once desolate, because she knew that Savannah had just lied to her about ballet, and Joy didn’t understand the lie, but if she was lying about that, then perhaps Joy’s children were right about Savannah, and she so didn’t want her children to be right about Savannah.
“Joy?” said a familiar voice, and Joy quickly rearranged her face into one of warm sympathy for her widowed friend Debbie Christos, who had walked into the café, which was disconcerting because Joy had moments earlier been thinking about her dainty wrists, and also about kissing her dead husband.
Chapter 31
NOW
“I actually met that girl the police want to talk to,” said Debbie Christos to her friend Sulin Ho. “I bumped into Joy at the David Jones cafeteria last year. They’d been out shopping. I remember thinking they looked like mother and daughter.”
“I heard about her, of course,” said Sulin. “But I never met her.”
Sulin was driving Debbie to Monday-night tennis, as she had done for the last month.
Losing one’s husband, like so many of life’s milestones, had turned out to be an interesting test of friendship. Debbie had lost friends, like the one who imperiously told her not to “wallow in her grief” when she didn’t want to go to the theater, and she’d deepened her friendship with others, like Sulin, who was not a widow, yet seemed to intuitively understand the way Debbie felt six months after losing Dennis: so raw and sensitive the very air was harsh against her skin.
Sulin hadn’t said, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, Debbie.”
She’d said, “I’ll pick you up at seven.”
When Debbie’s son delivered the eulogy at Dennis’s funeral, he said, “Dad died doing what he loved, just after he’d won the match at Friday-night tennis.”
Debbie wished he’d let her fact-check his speech. Dennis had won the point, not the game, and certainly not the match. They were playing against Joy and Stan, and no one beat the Delaneys. About twenty people listening to that eulogy would have thought, In your dreams, Dennis.
“What was she like?” asked Sulin. “The girl?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Debbie. “I didn’t take much notice of her. I wish I had. I’ve been looking back, trying to remember things that Joy said or did, if she seemed unhappy or depressed, but she seemed fine! She was fine with me, anyway.”
“Oh, where is Joy?” said Sulin suddenly as they stopped at a traffic light. She turned to look at Debbie. “It’s just not like her, is it?”
“No,” said Debbie. “It is not like her. Not at all. That’s what worries me.”
It was seventeen days now.
Both Debbie and Sulin had been part of an organized search yesterday through bushland near the bike path that circled the St. Helens Reserve. The bike path was the closest biking area to the Delaneys, and Joy had received a new bike from her son Troy at Christmas, which she supposedly loved, although not a single person had ever seen her riding it.
The four adult Delaney children had taken part in the search. Stan Delaney had not. Debbie didn’t know what to make of that, although a lot of other people knew exactly what to make of it.
“There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” said Sulin now, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. “It was last October.”
She looked worried, as if she were confessing something.
“I was driving home from book club, about nine o’clock at night, when I saw a man sitting in the gutter on Beaumont Road. I thought it was some drunk teenager, but then the headlights caught his face, and I thought, That’s Stan Delaney.”
“Sitting in the gutter?!” Debbie was scandalized. Stan Delaney was not the sort of man to sit in a gutter. He was far too tall.
“I know! So I pulled over, and he told me he’d been out walking and tripped and hurt his knee again. It just seemed odd because he was wearing jeans. He certainly wasn’t dressed for exercise. It was more like he’d wandered out of the house.”
“Gosh,” said Debbie. “That does seem a little bit odd.”
“Yes, and something else,” said Sulin carefully. “I think … I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure he’d been crying.”
“Crying?” Debbie tried to work it out. “Because of his knee?” Men did get tearier as they got older.
“There was something going on,” said Sulin. “I know there was, because I helped him into the car and drove him back home and all four children were there at the house. I didn’t get the feeling it was a celebration of any sort, that’s for sure. It was more like they’d just got terrible news. Something had happened … the atmosphere! You know how you just know? You could cut the air with a knife.”
“Was the girl still staying with them then? Savannah?” asked Debbie.
“I didn’t see her,” said Sulin. “I think she must have been gone by then. By the way, I haven’t told anyone else that.” She took her eyes off the road and shot Debbie a brief, anxious look. “I don’t know if I should.”
“I don’t know if you should either,” said Debbie.
She thought of the gossip and rumors swirling about the tennis club. Joy and Stan’s marriage had become public property. Everyone had an opinion to give. Some people said they’d never seen a happier partnership, on or off the court. People were in awe of the way the Delaneys silently communicated when they played doubles, switching spots without a word; it was like they had a telepathic connection. You never heard the anguished cries of other married couples: “Yours!” “No, yours!” “I said I had it!” When they w
on, which they invariably bloody did, Stan would lift Joy up like she was a child, spin her around, and kiss her smack-bang on the lips.
Others were eager to explain that it was all a front. People were sharing the subtle signs they’d witnessed over the years of marriage difficulties, violence, unhappiness, infidelity, and financial trouble. Late last year Joy had begun coming to Friday-night tennis on her own. It was supposedly because of Stan’s latest knee injury, but still, and then Joy herself had stopped coming sometime around Christmas. It felt like an awful invasion of privacy to hear people discussing the Delaney marriage. It was as if people were rummaging through Joy and Stan’s bedroom, and in fact, everyone knew how Barb McMahon had found Joy’s phone under the marital bed. It made Debbie feel obscurely angry, and she knew it had something to do with all the opinions people now had about her life and choices. When Dennis was alive she was part of a solid, respectable, unassailable unit: Mr. and Mrs. Christos. But the moment he died she was untethered. An elderly lady living alone. She was vulnerable, said her son. She must be so lonely, said her daughter. It all came from a place of love, but sometimes she wanted to scream.
Thank God for Sulin, who still treated her like a person.
“We’ll play hard tonight,” said Sulin. “For Joy. Distract ourselves.”
“Yes,” said Debbie. She saw the old folksy Delaneys sign with the smiling tennis ball on the skyline. Everyone still called the courts and clubhouse “Delaneys” even though Joy and Stan had sold the tennis school over a year ago. It was not as if the Delaneys had ever owned the courts, they leased them from the local council, but it was true that Joy and Stan had been the ones who led the way in lobbying the council to build them in the first place.
Debbie and Dennis had been there at that first meeting with the council. Joy did most of the talking. They were all four founding members of the tennis club. They’d been so young, with no idea of their youth or beauty.
For many years, Stan was president and Dennis was treasurer and Joy and Debbie made sandwiches. This seemed outrageous now. Joy should have been president, and Debbie should have been treasurer (she was a bookkeeper!), but they hadn’t thought anything of it at the time.
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