But Savannah was her guest and Joy had no parental rights to justify her actions. The only justifications she had were Logan’s bizarre accusation about the television documentary he’d seen on TV the other day, and the gently ringing alarm bells in her own head.
Savannah was not at home right now. She’d announced earlier today that she was “going out.”
“Where are you off to?” Joy had asked. “Do you need a lift?” Apparently Savannah was having dinner “with a friend” and she didn’t need a lift, she’d walk to the station and catch the train into the city.
Joy had managed to stop herself asking, What time will you be home?
Savannah had suggested that Joy and Stan eat the leftover cottage pie from the night before, and she’d even prepared a pea, fennel, and feta salad before she went, leaving the good salad servers resting conveniently on the drum-tight piece of cling film as if Joy and Stan were her children, incapable of finding the right cutlery in their own home. It was very sweet.
It was peculiar without her in the house. For such a small, quietly spoken person, Savannah’s absence was strangely noticeable. Joy felt as if a spell had been broken. There was a buzzing sensation in her ears, as if she’d walked out of an intense movie or a loud party.
She didn’t really believe that Savannah was out with a friend. She couldn’t even imagine her having a friend. What sort of friend? That was the problem. She was so very fond of Savannah, but she didn’t understand her. She didn’t really know her. All she had were these tiny jigsaw pieces of a personality that didn’t fit together: a love of cooking and a dislike of eating, classical ballet and foster care, grandmotherly manners and a tattoo of a vine.
Joy wasn’t angry or frightened, but she did want the facts, before her children proudly presented her with them, which she suspected they desperately wanted to do. Brooke had made such a big deal about the fact that Joy had initially said Savannah’s surname was Polanski rather than Pagonis, which could happen to anyone. She’d acted as if Joy was a dithery old lady. Joy had reminded her that Brooke had believed that carpenters laid carpet until she was sixteen, and Brooke said, “That was actually a completely logical assumption, Mum,” and Joy said, “So Jesus laid carpet then, did he, Brooke?”
Remarkably, they’d both got the giggles at that point. It was nice to hear Brooke laugh. She had a lovely laugh. Grant was very witty, very clever, but he never seemed to make Brooke laugh like that.
She had a lightweight duvet folded up under her arm, as an excuse, should Savannah suddenly, impossibly materialize and catch her snooping. “The nights are getting warmer,” she’d say. It was also in case Stan caught her. She didn’t want him to know that she had any concerns about Savannah. He already seemed to have turned against the girl.
As she stepped into the room, the house phone rang and she gasped as if there had been an explosion. For goodness’ sake.
“Can you get that?” she called as the phone stopped mid-ring and she heard the deep rumble of Stan’s voice. Good. That was him out of the way. It would either be for him or a telemarketer, not Joy. Everyone called her on her mobile, because she was progressive.
Savannah’s room was spick and span, in stark contrast to the cyclonic aftermath that appeared when Amy lived here, both as a child and when she intermittently moved back in as an adult. Savannah’s bed was made with hospital corners, the covers pulled army-straight, and the windowsills and skirting boards gleamed in a way that neither Joy nor Good Old Barb ever achieved.
Amy’s old school desk was clear except for a foolscap-sized hardbound journal, sitting right there in the middle of the desk, with a pen next to it. Well, if it was a diary, Joy certainly would not read it. Absolutely not. That sort of gross invasion of privacy was only appropriate for one’s own children. Anyway, hadn’t Savannah implied that the problem was that she remembered too much about her past? She wouldn’t need to record her days if they were permanently recorded in her memory.
Joy looked over her shoulder, walked toward the desk. She would not look. There was no point in looking. It was not a diary. If Savannah had something to hide, she wouldn’t leave it there in plain sight.
Who was she kidding? Of course she was going to look.
She flipped open the book. The pages were covered in tiny, rigid handwriting. She put her fingertips to the page. The surface was bumpy. Joy’s mother used to write like that, pressing so hard with her pen it left an imprint on the page, as if she were trying to engrave her words forever.
She squinted. She needed her reading glasses. Heavens to bloody Betsy. Leaving the room to retrieve her glasses made the whole process feel too calculated. Perhaps if she got them fast? She darted from the room, ran down the hallway. She could hear Stan on the phone. His voice was raised. She hoped he wasn’t telling off some poor telemarketer who was only trying to earn a living.
She retrieved the glasses from the kitchen table, ran back down the hallway. He was properly shouting now. She dithered. Should she go try to help sort it out?
But the volume of his voice dropped, became conciliatory. That was Stan. The telemarketer might even be making a sale now.
She went back into Savannah’s room, put on her glasses, and picked up the book. Right, then. She read:
Sunday
Quarter apple
Five sultanas
1 x Toast. No crusts. No butter.
Bolognese pasta. Eleven spoonfuls.
Half orange
Day after day it went. Detailed listings of tiny portions of food. She flipped to the last page and saw the beginning of that day’s entry. All it said was: Eight spoonfuls of Chia Yogurt Pudding. Savannah had made the chia yogurt pudding last night. It was delicious. Joy must have had at least a hundred spoonfuls.
She closed the book and carefully placed it back in exactly the position she’d found it.
All that time Savannah spent creating beautiful food, and then she came back to her room and recorded every mouthful in bleak, rigid detail. The pleasure she’d given Joy and Stan with her cooking. It was almost humiliating how much pleasure Joy had taken in it, especially when contrasted with this disciplined transcription.
She sat on Savannah’s perfectly made bed and pressed her palms to the tightly pulled sheets. Oh, darling. What’s going on in that head of yours?
It wasn’t a surprise. Not really. She’d seen the way Savannah swirled the same spoonful of food around her plate, putting it down and picking it up again. Was she suffering from a full-blown eating disorder? Or was it just a strange, compulsive habit to record everything she ate that made her feel in control of her life?
Joy’s first instinct was to fix it: to get Savannah in to see a professional. As if that would be the silver bullet. It was exactly the way she’d felt when Amy was growing up. They would wait and wait, sometimes months, to get the next available appointment to see the next person. All those different diagnoses they were offered with varying degrees of confidence. She remembered that nice, tired-looking psychologist who, when Joy said, “You lot keep changing your mind!” replied, “Ours is not an exact science, Joy. It’s not like she has a headache.” Joy had thought, resentfully, Well, no one can bloody well fix headaches either!
“Where are you?” shouted Stan. She could hear his heavy footsteps pounding through the house.
“In Savannah’s room!” she called back.
“You mean Amy’s room,” he said, furiously, in the doorway.
“Amy doesn’t live here,” said Joy. She looked up at him. His face was white, his eyes red. He radiated fury.
“What is it?” she asked. “Who was on the phone?”
“It was Troy. Helpfully letting me know that he has just paid Savannah some exorbitant amount of money not to tell you that I harassed her.”
“You harassed her?” Joy looked at him blankly, trying to understand. Her first confused, irrational thought was that he’d harassed her to do tennis drills, like he’d once harassed the children.
; “Sexually harassed her,” said Stan. “Your idiotic son actually believed it. He genuinely believed it.”
Joy stood. She crossed her arms. “What happened?”
“Well, I didn’t bloody well sexually harass her if that’s what you’re asking!”
“Oh, of course you didn’t,” sighed Joy.
Neither of them had been perfect. There had been parties. It was the seventies. They didn’t exactly embrace the free love movement, but there was flirting. She was reasonably sure that Brooke once caught her kissing Dennis Christos at the Delaneys’ Christmas party in the clubhouse kitchen after too many glasses of punch. Dennis couldn’t serve to save his life, but the man could kiss. Joy confessed it to Stan years later, and he certainly wasn’t thrilled, but he didn’t make a big deal of it, although poor old Dennis did start to look alarmed at the speed of Stan’s serves.
Stan might have strayed. It was reasonable to think that he might have considered it in the bad year when they truly thought they were going to separate. Women found him attractive. Joy had never asked the question because she didn’t care to hear the answer. She knew it was possible to be kissed by another man and for it to mean nothing at all except that she’d put too much gin in the punch and Dennis was an outrageous flirt, although she still never doubted his love for Debbie.
There were worse betrayals.
But there was no way in the world Stan would have been inappropriate with Savannah. He had always been hyperaware of the propriety of his position when it came to children and young girls. Joy had seen the way he interacted with Savannah. He saw her as a daughter or a student.
“Did Savannah misinterpret something you said?” Joy asked him. It could have happened when she wasn’t there to smooth things over and explain to Savannah what her clueless husband really meant. “Did you try to make a joke? Because these days you have to be so careful—”
“For Christ’s sake, I didn’t try to make a joke,” said Stan. “If you must know, while you were in hospital, she gave me certain signals—”
“What?” Joy guffawed. “Darling, she didn’t, she wouldn’t. You misunderstood.”
“I don’t think so.” He pressed his lips together in the way he did when Joy served tuna casserole, the smell of which supposedly made him feel sick, so she only made it when she wasn’t happy with him. “I don’t think I misinterpreted anything. Not now she’s done this. Not now she’s taken Troy’s money.”
Joy looked around the neat room, at the book on Amy’s desk full of her tiny inscriptions about food. She had no idea who this person was. Her heart quickened. She’d opened her home to a stranger.
“Tell me.” She cleared her throat. “Tell me what happened.”
“It was subtle,” said Stan. “So subtle that at first I thought I was imagining it. Just, you know … eye contact, and a hand on my arm, and there was one day she came into the kitchen straight from the shower wearing nothing but a towel and she kept talking to me and I didn’t know which way to look, and I thought, Well, the girls always used to walk around in towels…”
“They’re your daughters!”
“Well, I didn’t know,” said Stan defensively. “I got out of the room as fast as I could. I felt very … uncomfortable.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Joy.
“I thought you’d laugh at me,” said Stan, and Joy’s stomach lurched with love and guilt because he was right, she would have laughed. It would have been inconceivable. It still felt inconceivable. How far would Savannah have taken it if Stan had responded?
“That’s why you wanted her to leave,” said Joy.
“I felt sick about it.”
“Oh, Stan,” said Joy. She went and put her arms around him and put her face to his chest.
He stood for a moment and then put his arms around her.
“I can’t believe Troy,” said Stan. “He handed over money before he even asked me if it was true. He thought I’d thank him. I said, ‘Mate, that was borderline moronic.’”
Joy stepped back and out of his arms. He never gave Troy the benefit of the doubt. Borderline moronic. What a thing to say to his own son who was only trying to help.
She said, “Stan. He obviously thought he was protecting you. Protecting me.”
Troy thought he was giving them a gift. She thought of Troy’s hopeful face whenever he watched a family member open one of his thoughtful gifts.
“How much money did he give her?” asked Joy. She sat back down on Savannah’s bed.
“He said it wasn’t that much,” said Stan. “It couldn’t have been that much. It wasn’t like she was covering up a murder.”
“Did he write her a check?” asked Joy. “Can’t he cancel it?”
“I don’t think he has a checkbook. No one writes checks anymore.” Stan sat down next to her on the side of the bed. “I think he transferred it straight into some kind of account. The height of stupidity. You know what Troy said to me when I finally convinced him he’d been scammed? He said he didn’t care. He can afford it.”
“He only wants to impress you.” Joy sighed.
“Yeah, well, that didn’t impress me. It was dumb. And disrespectful. To you and me. To our marriage. For him to think that I would … in our own home…”
His voice trembled and her heart softened again. It was always like this with Troy and Stan. She was caught in the middle, her sympathy flying back and forth like a ball.
She put her hand on his thigh, and they sat in silence for a moment.
“So … what happens now? Where is Savannah?” asked Joy.
“I don’t know where Savannah is,” said Stan. “But I told Troy to call his brother and sisters, and get them over here now, so we can discuss next steps.”
Discuss next steps. He was puffed up with the self-righteousness of a wronged man. A rarely wronged man.
“We need to be sure nobody else is handing over their hard-earned cash,” Stan continued. “We obviously need to get the police involved.”
“Oh, I don’t know if that’s necessary.”
“You need to check our bank accounts. She’s probably had plenty of opportunities when you were out of the room to go through your purse and take all your credit card details.”
Joy decided not to mention that not only had Savannah had plenty of opportunities to do exactly that, but she’d literally handed her credit card to Savannah on multiple occasions.
“All her things are here.” Joy looked around her at the neat room. “Surely she won’t just leave them.” She picked up Savannah’s pillow and hugged it to her. “I think she might have some sort of eating disorder.”
“Eating disorder?” Stan said eating disorder like it was some kind of newfangled fashion choice. “Who cares if she has an eating disorder! She just blackmailed our son!”
“Oh, well,” said Joy, trying to imagine what in the world they would say to her. She didn’t feel angry so much as blindsided. It felt like there had to be another explanation.
“Oh, well? Joy, did you seriously just say, Oh, well?”
“She’s obviously troubled,” said Joy. “Have a heart.” She could feel herself and Stan slipping into their old parenting roles in response to Savannah’s actions. The angrier Stan got with a child, the more likely Joy was to defend them, and the worse the transgression, the calmer Joy’s response. She was more inclined to shout about dirty laundry thrown on the floor instead of the basket than a serious-sounding telephone call from the school principal. If she hadn’t witnessed the crime herself, she wanted proof, or at least to hear her child’s version of the story first. Stan was always too ready to deliver a damning verdict before they’d heard all the evidence. She needed to talk to Savannah. She needed to talk to Troy. She believed Stan’s side of the story, but part of her still felt as if this must be some kind of dreadful mix-up only she could sort out.
“Joy, for Christ’s sake, do you understand the implications of this? If she went public with this kind of accusation? In this da
y and age?”
“Well, I’m sure she had no intention of going public,” said Joy uneasily. “And of course this is all very upsetting but—”
“But what?”
“Don’t you dare call me borderline moronic.” Joy threw the pillow away from her and stood. Her eyes fell upon Savannah’s glory chest. The boys had struggled to carry it inside that day they’d picked up her things.
She lifted the heavy hinged lid. There wasn’t much inside: a stack of hardbound journals like the one on Amy’s desk and a handful of old-style battered-looking photo albums. Nobody really did photo albums like that anymore. They got those professional-looking bound books printed.
Joy picked up the first spiral-bound album and flipped through it. It was clearly a child’s album. The photos had been stuck in crookedly, and some of them were so out of focus only a child would consider them worth keeping. The edges of the photos were peeling away from the sticky backing. She looked at a page of photos of two children sitting under a Christmas tree. It could have been a scene from her own albums: the dated summer pajamas, tousled hair, strewn wrapping paper.
“Stan,” she said quietly.
“What?”
She sat back next to him on the bed and dumped the open album on his lap.
“What?” he said again.
“Look who it is,” she said.
“It’s her,” said Stan. “Savannah. Obviously. When she was a kid.”
“Yes, but look who the boy is.” Joy slid her finger over to the child sitting next to Savannah: the big eyes, pudgy cheeks, and shock of hair.
Stan stiffened. “That’s not … it couldn’t be, why would it be?”
“It is,” said Joy. “It’s Harry Haddad.”
“But why is Savannah with Harry?” asked Stan.
“She’s Harry’s sister,” said Joy.
“I don’t remember a sister,” said Stan.
“You only met me once,” said a voice, and they looked up to see Savannah standing at the bedroom door.
Chapter 41
For just a moment the man and woman seemed to cower, their lined faces slack-soft with shock, as they looked up at Savannah from where they sat side by side on her bed, in her bedroom, except that it was clearly no longer her bed or her bedroom. This was no longer her room. No longer her home. What did she expect? That she could take a hammer to this delightful life and yet find it still magically intact? It was always meant to be temporary. Everything was always meant to be temporary.
Apples Never Fall Page 31