Apples Never Fall

by Liane Moriarty

  She said faintly, “He told him Savannah had cancer?”

  “Like father, like daughter.” He smiled with grim satisfaction, as if he’d predicted exactly this bizarre outcome, and pushed the manuscript across the table toward her. “He told Harry that he had to win prize money so his sister could get some kind of lifesaving medicine. Dumb kid thought he was playing to save his sister’s life. No wonder he cheated. If he’d stayed with me, I would have found out and put a stop to it, but I never got that opportunity because you made a unilateral decision to send him away!”

  His hands were splayed like claws, like he wanted to strangle her.

  She could not think about Harry now. She focused instead on the information she’d had back then.

  “Your children needed your support!” she shouted back. “I needed your support!”

  “You had no right! Coaching was my profession!” Stan towered over her, and she was not frightened, she was exhilarated, because the fractured shell of their marriage was finally cracking open like a coconut. She wanted it all out. She wanted to finally say everything she’d never said.

  “What about my profession?” She banged her chest with her fist. “What about me? What about my career? My sacrifice?”

  “Your sacrifice?” His disbelief was like a public shaming. As if she had anything to sacrifice. She wasn’t worth anything: not a smile from the mini-mart man, not a phone call from her children.

  “I gave up my tennis for you,” she said. Finally she’d said it out loud. All these years it had been there, never on the tip of her tongue, not at the back of her head, but right at the center of her chest, beneath her collarbone, between her breasts, right where she continued to bang her fist, over and over.

  What about me, what about me, what about me?

  She’d never wanted his gratitude, just his acknowledgment. Just once. Because otherwise, what had been the point of her entire life? Of all those lamb chops she’d grilled? Of all that spaghetti Bolognese? My God, she despised spaghetti Bolognese. Night after night after night, plate after plate after plate. The laundry, the ironing, the mopping, the sweeping, the driving. She’d never resented it at the time, but now she resented every moment, every single bloody lamb chop.

  He said quietly, “I never asked you to give anything up, Joy.”

  But that was the point. He didn’t have to ask her.

  “If you wanted it, you would have done it,” he said. The anger had gone from his voice. She could see that familiar deathly stillness coming over him. He was removing himself from the situation: first mentally, then physically.

  She knew what came next, what always came next. In a moment she’d be alone in this big silent house with her thoughts and regrets.

  Stan said, “If you’d really wanted it, nothing would have stopped you.”

  She couldn’t speak. Did he not see that the only thing that could have stopped her was her love for him?

  Then he delivered his final damning judgment. “You were never going to rank in the top ten, Joy. If I thought you could have got there, I would never have let you stop.”

  The air whooshed from her like a fist to the stomach. He would never have let her stop. As if her sacrifice had been his considered decision.

  If she had been the one to be injured it wouldn’t have occurred to him to give up his career.

  He was wrong, and there was no way in the world that she could go back in time and prove it, to him or to herself.

  Instead, she reacted instinctively. “You weren’t good enough to coach Harry. He was better off without you. You would have held him back! He needed a better coach than you!”

  It wasn’t true. She believed Stan to be one of the best coaches in the country, maybe the world. She knew what he could have been without the tethers of a family, but didn’t he know what she could have been? How far she could have flown?

  He put Harry’s memoir back on the table. He patted the pocket of his jeans, pulled out the car keys.

  She dug deep for the most glittering pieces of vitriol she could find. “I was the one who made Delaneys a success. Everyone knows it. If it wasn’t for me, you’d have nothing, you’d be nothing but a washed-up, useless … nothing!”

  The words bounced off him. He turned to walk away, and she could not stand it. It was not fair that he got to leave. It had never been fair. It had never been right. And yet she’d endured it, over and over again, and her children had endured it, and it was unacceptable, inexcusable behavior, and she would no longer accept, she would longer excuse. This time he would stay.

  She ran after him, and even as she ran, part of herself registered the shame and indignity and inappropriateness of her actions. She floated up to the skylight and observed herself: a small, sweaty senior citizen running out of her nice kitchen and down the hallway toward the front door after her husband, shouting incoherently, alongside an old dog barking confusedly, trying to work out where the danger lay because there were no strangers in the house, so what could there be to fear?

  Joy reached for the back of her husband’s checked blue-and-white shirt, the shirt she’d ironed, to wrench him back, to make him stay. Steffi ran in crazed panting circles around them. Stan swung around, and the dog tripped him. He lurched forward, nearly falling. One hand grabbed at the wall, causing the framed photo of Brooke with her Under 8s regional trophy to swing and bang and crack. Joy’s outstretched hand, clawing for his shirt, instead raked down Stan’s cheek, drawing instant blood with her vicious broken nails.

  He grabbed her, his fingers painful on her shoulders.

  She froze because his face was no longer his. It was an unfamiliar mask of ugly rage.

  Her heart stopped. The world stopped.

  For the first time in her sixty-nine years she felt the fear: the fear every woman knows is always waiting for her, the possibility that lurks and scuttles in the shadows of her mind, even if she’s spent her entire life being so tenderly loved and protected by good men.

  Chapter 54

  NOW

  “Let’s see it one last time,” said Christina.

  Ethan pressed play and they sat, side by side at his desk, transfixed by the jerky but clear color footage from the CCTV provided by the neighbors who lived two doors away in the same cul-de-sac as the Delaneys. The camera had been smashed by a hailstone in the big storm two days after Joy had disappeared and Caro Azinovic’s son, who had installed the camera for his widowed mother, had been getting it fixed. He was the one who had brought police this damning video revealing a fish-eye view of the front of his mother’s house. It captured, accidentally, a pie-shaped sliver of the Delaneys’ driveway.

  Christina and Ethan watched Stan Delaney emerge from the front door of his home, at two minutes past midnight on the day after his wife disappeared, struggling to carry an unwieldy, floppy object wrapped in a blanket to his car.

  He opened the trunk of his car, dumped the object, leaned in to rearrange it, reached up with both hands to slam the trunk shut, and then he stood—for exactly three minutes and forty-seven seconds—both hands flat on the car, his head bowed, like a man in solemn, reverent prayer, before he finally lifted his head and walked off camera.

  It was eerie and powerful to watch.

  “Jesus,” said Ethan. “The way he stands there, for all that time. It’s so … my God.”

  “I know it is,” said Christina. She would get her confession today. She could feel it. She would play this footage to Stan Delaney and she would not say a word or make a sound for the entire length of the video. She would watch him watch himself bow his head over his wife’s body. She knew he was not a churchgoer, but she knew he’d been brought up Catholic, as had she, and she recognized the stance of a man in prayer, a man who longs to confess his sins.

  Tonight she and Nico would go to meet their parish priest to discuss the holy sacrament of marriage, and she would try not to think about the fact that Joy and Stan Delaney had once made the same vows that she and Nico would make next s
pring. She would not think about a young Joy Delaney or Polly Perkins promising their husbands to have and to hold, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part, until you carry my body out to the car in the dead of the night and dispose of it somewhere it will never be found, until I speak too loudly, until I spend too much money on a new iron, until I hold back your career for the sake of our family, until I kiss another man at a party, until I displease you in some way I cannot yet imagine.

  “Christina?” said Ethan.

  “Sorry,” said Christina. “What were you saying?”

  He said, “Nothing really. Just that I didn’t pick it. That first day we interviewed him, I knew he was hiding stuff from us, but when he looked at that photo of his wife, I thought, No way did he do it. He loves her.”

  “I never thought he didn’t love her.” Christina adjusted her engagement ring so the diamond was centered again on her finger.

  But she’d always known he’d killed her.

  That was the cruel knowledge that she would carry down the aisle on her wedding day along with her bridal bouquet of white roses and blush-pink gardenias: it was possible for both things to be true.

  Chapter 55

  VALENTINE’S DAY

  Stan Delaney had always known that women had the power to draw blood with their words. It was his mother’s favorite hobby: to knife the soft, stupid, defenseless egos of her husband and her son.

  Don’t tell the boy he’s going to play at Wimbledon one day, he’s dumb enough to believe it. The two of you are as dumb as dog shit.

  Not every day, just most days. Not when she was drunk, when she was sober. That’s when she got nasty.

  She’d jab her finger at the side of her head and smile her beautiful smile at her husband and say, The lights are on, but nobody’s home, isn’t that right, my love?

  Stan’s father had no arsenal of clever words with which to defend himself. He quailed and recoiled. He smiled stupidly as if his wife had made a joke that was too clever for him. He shut down and went silent. He took it and took it.

  He took it and took it until one day he didn’t take it anymore.

  Fourteen-year-old Stan ran to his mother where she lay crumpled and still on the floor, and it was good that he did that. He could always tell himself that his first instinctive response had been to run to his mother, to put his body between her and his father, but he also could never forget the first tiny, terrible, traitorous thought that came into his head:

  She deserved it.

  So faint, so tiny, he sometimes pretended he’d imagined he thought it. It happened so fast, but it also happened so slowly, and it was so long ago, who knew what he’d really thought at that moment? You couldn’t rely on memory. It was an unreliable source.

  * * *

  Stan was just like his father. He’d always known it. Not clever and quick like his mother. Not clever and quick like his wife. Not good at school. Thick as a brick. Not the sharpest tool in the shed.

  * * *

  At the age of seventy, he felt his wife’s flesh beneath his hands as his father’s colossal rage and humiliation, his pain and hurt, ballooned within his chest and exploded behind his eyes.

  Chapter 56

  NOW

  “I think they’re going to arrest my dad any day now,” said Claire Geer’s ex-husband, his eyes on the early-morning glitter-blue of Sydney Harbour. There was a croissant flake on his lower lip, and something so childlike and anguished about the way he said “my dad.”

  They sat side by side, with takeaway coffees and almond croissants in white paper bags, on a park bench overlooking the ferry stop where Troy had kissed her for the first time. She wondered if Troy remembered this, if he’d even deliberately suggested this location for that reason. Surely not. He had big, terrible things on his mind right now.

  Claire reached over and moved the crumb from his lip with her fingertip. “Why do you think that?”

  “We heard the police have CCTV footage from the neighbors across the street.” He stopped. “That apparently shows something … very bad. I can’t even imagine what.”

  His voice shook.

  “Jesus,” said Claire. The coffee tasted sour in her mouth. She rested the takeaway cup on the bench next to her and looked at their bare legs, stretched out side by side in front of them. They both wore shorts. Their legs looked like the legs of a couple with a sunshiny weekend ahead of them, not a divorced couple with seedy infidelity behind them and a potential tragedy in front of them, not to mention an awkward procreation arrangement.

  Claire Geer was thirty-four years old. She had long curly red hair that everyone commented on, a world history degree that didn’t interest potential employers or anyone really except for her father (he was a history teacher), and an unexpectedly fulfilling career in the US in health administration, or not that unexpected, because she was the kind of girl who made the best of things, whose school reports and job references always mentioned her “positive attitude.” “I bet you were a cheerleader,” her new husband had said when they first met, and of course that wasn’t a thing in Australia and Claire couldn’t even do a cartwheel, but she’d let him categorize her as a sunny, sweet Aussie girl. She was nearly the girl he believed her to be. She was a people pleaser, as sunny and sweet as an Australian summer. No need to mention the humidity or mosquitoes, the bushfires or hailstorms. She loved Geoff dearly, but not in the helpless, hopeless way she’d loved Troy. The point of history was to learn from it, not repeat it.

  She would have happily never seen Troy Delaney ever again, or even returned to Australia. The wounds had healed nicely, no visible scars, and she’d found a new life, a new love, so she could once again watch romantic comedies without scoffing.

  But here she was, in Sydney, sitting next to her ex-husband.

  She knew that Troy had only consented to her trying to get pregnant with their embryos as a form of penance. She’d seen the instant, instinctive horror on his face when she’d put it to him in New York last year.

  She also knew her husband, Geoff, did not want her pregnant with her ex-husband’s child. He didn’t want a family that badly. She’d seen the exact same instinctive horrified response on Geoff’s face when she’d put it to him.

  Both men were doing it for her: one out of guilt and one out of love. It was the first time in her life she’d asked more of someone than they wanted to give, more than she maybe deserved, but the truth was that she didn’t think twice when it became clear it was her only option. She couldn’t long for her own biological child and leave five possibilities frozen for eternity.

  She’d been in Australia now since last November, trying to get pregnant, while Geoff had stayed in Texas, except for a two-week trip at Christmas. It had been a strange, surreal time: the longest period in her life since she’d graduated that she hadn’t had a full-time job. She was reading and doing a lot of walking. She’d met with her ex-husband a handful of times: always for businesslike coffee, and they seemed to have found an acceptable, companionable rhythm. She’d even introduced him to Geoff when he visited in December—it seemed the polite, grown-up thing to do considering their arrangement—but it had been weird and clunky, awful really, and she could tell the two men hated each other. Both men had been at their worst: show-off-y and insecure.

  But now Troy’s mother was missing, none of that mattered.

  “I just don’t believe it,” she said. “I know I haven’t seen your parents in years but it just doesn’t seem possible to me.”

  She remembered the toast that Stan had given at their wedding.

  “In my profession, love means zero,” Stan had said, champagne glass in hand, and he’d waited a moment to be sure everyone got the joke, nodding happily as all the guests groaned. Then he said, “But in life, love means everything. Love wins the match. I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I made the smartest decision of my life when I married Troy’s mother, and I reckon Troy just made the smartest d
ecision of his life when he married this beautiful girl right here. Don’t ever let her go, mate, and welcome to the family, sweetheart.”

  Then he raised his glass to Claire and sat down and kissed Joy, his hand at the back of her head, pulling her to him as if they were the young bride and groom.

  It was impossible to imagine that man hurting his wife—that man would have died for his wife—but then again, it had been impossible to imagine his son, with whom she’d been so besotted, cheating on Claire for no good reason.

  That’s what had been so painful. They weren’t in a rut. They weren’t having “issues.” He didn’t fall in love with someone else. He wasn’t even drunk or high. He just randomly, arbitrarily, idiotically broke her heart.

  Unimaginable things happened every single day and there wasn’t always a good reason.

  “Brooke has found Dad a good criminal lawyer. We know exactly what to do when the call comes through,” said Troy. “Brooke is standing by Dad. She said that even if he did it, she’ll stand by him. Brooke says one moment of madness doesn’t nullify a lifetime of love, but I think it does, I think it does nullify it, don’t you?”

  Claire lifted her hands. “You’re in an impossible situation, Troy.”

  “Brooke and I aren’t talking,” said Troy painfully.

  “You’ll work it out,” said Claire. “It’s all too raw at the moment.”

  “Dad never gave me an inch.” He made a harsh jarring sound that only just resembled a laugh. “He can hardly expect me to forgive him for killing my mother.”

  “I don’t think he would expect your forgiveness,” said Claire. “If this happened, if there really was a moment of madness, he would never forgive himself.”

  Troy glanced sidelong at her. “He was so angry with me. For what I did. To you.”

  “Ancient history,” said Claire. It wasn’t. Technically it was “contemporary history,” a subset of modern history. She crumpled her empty croissant bag into a ball.