Apples Never Fall

by Liane Moriarty

  “Nothing much. I just made brownies on Father’s Day,” said Savannah, as if it were obvious.

  “But how in the world did you know that would upset her?”

  “You’d told me they were her signature dish,” said Savannah.

  Joy hadn’t remembered this. She’d been an old biddy twittering away while Savannah took careful notes. She found herself unable to look at Savannah, because she felt, just for a moment, like slapping her.

  “And me?” Joy suddenly remembered herself, because wasn’t she the worst offender on that day? She’d been the only grown-up.

  “I tried to seduce your husband,” said Savannah. “While you were sick in hospital.”

  “Oh,” said Joy. “That. But you wouldn’t have really…”

  “Yes, I would have,” said Savannah. “Like I said, I’ve done worse, Joy. I’ve done far worse. I’m not a nice person.” It was twilight and they were sitting on the balcony watching hundreds of black bats swoop across a huge orange sky. Joy breathed, and felt her anger rise and fall, and when she was calm again she said, “I think you are a nice person. You’re a nice person who has done some not-so-nice things. Like all of us.”

  “I might have broken up your marriage,” said Savannah.

  “Well, yes,” said Joy. “That was a terrible thing to do. You must promise to never do anything like that ever again, because some marriages couldn’t survive an accusation like that, but you know, I never believed for one moment that Stan harassed you.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” said Savannah. “I meant what I told him about you and sending Harry away.”

  It was true that Savannah may well have ended her marriage with that revelation. “Well, yes, but that wasn’t a secret anyone asked you to keep,” Joy said to her. “That was entirely my own doing. To be honest, I never expected it to stay a secret as long as it did.”

  Savannah sighed as if Joy really didn’t get it. “Okay, but I’m not a nice person.”

  It felt like she was trying to tell Joy something more than she was saying, as if there was a hidden message in her words, and if Joy concentrated hard enough she’d be able to decipher it, but all she saw was a very damaged young girl who had been dealt an awful hand in life, who had come to her house and cooked and cleaned for her.

  Joy waited for Savannah to tell her whatever she wanted to tell her. She could feel her desire to speak, the way she’d once felt her children’s desires to confess some terrible action or unspeakable thought, and mostly, if she was patient and gave them the space, they finally told her what they wanted to say.

  But Savannah sat, one hand wrapped tightly around the key on the chain at her neck, and watched the sky darken until the bats vanished into the inky blackness, and when she finally opened her mouth all she said was, “I think I’ll make a tomato and basil frittata for our dinner.”

  A part of Joy was relieved. Savannah wasn’t her child. She didn’t want to know her secrets. She didn’t need to know.

  When the twenty-one days were up and they said goodbye to their tiny house in the wilderness, Savannah drove them back to Sydney.

  “What are you going to do now?” asked Joy.

  “I might call my brother,” said Savannah. “Tell him I did his ‘challenge,’ for what it’s worth, and then I don’t know what I’ll do. Make another new life somewhere? What about you?”

  “Oh,” said Joy, “I guess I’ll just go home.”

  For the first time she understood what a privilege it was to be able to say that.

  * * *

  “Who cooked for you while I was gone?” Joy asked Stan once, when they were eating dinner.

  “Caro sent over a horrible chewy lamb casserole. Brooke brought around some meals,” said Stan. “But I told her I could cook for myself. Not sure where this ‘Stan can’t boil an egg’ thing came from. I taught you to boil an egg.”

  “You did not,” said Joy.

  “I did so,” said Stan.

  The memory floated to the surface of her mind, perfectly preserved, like an ancient artifact.

  He did in fact teach her how to boil the perfect soft-boiled egg, and that was when he told her that as a kid he’d often had to cook for himself after his father left and his mother was “napping,” and Joy had been overcome with a girlish, sensual desire to feed her man, to nurture him like a real woman would, to mother him the way he hadn’t been mothered, and she’d kept him out of the kitchen, shooed him away until he stayed away, and as the years went by, cooking stopped feeling sensual and womanly and loving and became drudgery.

  “Maybe we could take turns with the cooking,” she said. “During lockdown.”

  “Sure,” said Stan.

  “Careful what you wish for,” warned Debbie Christos, who still had bad memories of the year Dennis decided to become a Cordon Bleu chef and spent hours preparing distressing fiddly French dishes often involving innocent ducklings.

  Stan wasn’t interested in ducklings, thank goodness, but it turned out he could cook a perfectly adequate roast dinner.

  When he put the plate down in front of her, he’d set up his new phone to play “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” from 1974, when they were entirely different people, and also exactly the same.

  “Haven’t I?” asked Joy.

  “Nope,” said Stan.

  * * *

  Sometimes, at two a.m., it was always two a.m. for some reason, Joy would sit bolt upright in bed because a kind of horror had seeped into her dreams and she would find herself thinking about Stan in handcuffs, and the lines of coffins on the TV news, and Polly Perkins, who had not gone on to live happily ever after in New Zealand as Joy had always believed, but whose body had been discovered while Joy was away, and people had briefly thought it might have been Joy’s body, and she would find herself thinking about all the women who assumed their lives were just like hers, far too ordinary to end in newsworthy violence and yet they had, and all the ordinary people, just like her and Stan, who had been planning “active retirements” and whose lives were now ending cruelly, abruptly, and far too soon.

  She tried the “techniques” suggested by Amy, who was handling lockdown far better than her friends, because they had never experienced the permanent low-level sense of existential dread that Amy had been experiencing since she was eight years old.

  Eight! Joy wasn’t completely sure what existential dread was, but it sure didn’t sound good.

  First, she tried Amy’s breathing exercises, but they always reminded her of being in labor, and as her labors had all been very aggressive and fast—those four children of hers barreling their way into the world—that wasn’t exactly relaxing.

  Amy also suggested “practicing gratitude,” which was a technique where you listed all the things for which you were grateful, and Joy was good at that.

  There were many things for which to be grateful. For example, Indira and Logan were not only back together but were also engaged. The ring was awful! But Indira seemed to like it, and the girls said Joy should absolutely not say a word about the ring’s awfulness, so she was keeping her lips zipped. She just hoped that one day, years from now, when their marriage went through a bad patch, Indira wouldn’t suddenly shout, “I’ve always hated this ring!” Joy could hardly bear to think of poor Logan’s hurt feelings if that happened. “Yeah, I think he’ll live, Mum,” said Troy.

  Brooke’s clinic was still afloat, thank goodness, because physiotherapy was considered an essential service and Brooke said people were giving themselves dreadful injuries trying to do their own exercise routines at home and undertaking overly ambitious DIY projects, so that was great news.

  Troy’s ex-wife, Claire, was pregnant with Troy’s baby, and because of the pandemic she had decided she wanted to make a life in Australia, and her Poor Husband had reluctantly agreed to move here. Troy had decided he wanted to share custody of his child, and Claire had agreed. The Poor Husband wasn’t too happy about that.

  “Stop calling him the Poor Husband
, Mum,” said her children with blithe partisan cruelty. “It’s Troy’s biological child.”

  (Joy’s first grandchild was due Christmas Eve. That son of hers always did give the very best gifts.)

  Joy hadn’t met the Poor Husband yet, but she was going to be particularly nice to him when she did, because she had a terrible secret suspicion.

  She remembered one particular match when Troy was playing against his nemesis, Harry Haddad, and Harry sent a crosscourt shot so impossibly wide any other player would have let it go, but Troy went for it. He had to run almost onto the next court, but he not only made that impossible shot, he also won that impossible point, and the small crowd of spectators whooped like they’d gone down a roller coaster. Even Harry grudgingly clapped one hand against his strings.

  Troy always went for the impossible shots.

  Well, Claire wasn’t a tennis ball.

  She was a sensible, intelligent girl who would make her own life choices, and if Troy did somehow charm her out of her marriage, it wouldn’t be Joy’s fault, would it?

  There was nothing Joy could do to change the outcome of her children’s lives, any more than she could have changed the outcome of their matches, no matter how hard she bit her lip, which she used to do, sometimes until it bled, or how much Stan muttered instructions they couldn’t hear.

  Sometimes their children would do everything exactly as they’d taught them, and sometimes they would do all the things they’d told them not to do, and seeing them suffer the tiniest disappointments would be more painful than their own most significant losses, but then other times they would do something so extraordinary, so unexpected and beautiful, so entirely of their own choice and their own making, it was like a splash of icy water on a hot day.

  Those were the glorious moments.

  That’s how she finally made herself fall back to sleep: by remembering all the glorious moments, one after the other after the other, her children’s ecstatic faces looking for their parents in the stands, looking for their approval, looking for their love, knowing it was there, knowing—she hoped they knew this—that it would always be there, even long after she and Stan were gone, because love like that was infinite.

  Chapter 69

  At first Brooke thought she imagined the sweet fragrance that drifted like a memory into her consciousness as she cleaned her exercise equipment with antibacterial spray.

  She was cleaning with even more desperate vigor than usual because her last patient had mentioned, at the very end of his session, that he’d woken with a sore throat this morning “but he was pretty sure it wasn’t COVID.” Then he’d coughed. Straight in her face.

  People were idiots. People were heroes—she had friends working in intensive care units right now, facing far more than the occasional head-on cough—but people were idiots. She had learned, when her mother was missing, that it was possible to simultaneously hold antithetical beliefs. She had existed in the center of a Venn diagram. She loved her father. She loved her mother. If her father had been responsible for her mother’s death, she would have stood by him. She knew she was the only one of her siblings who had stared directly at the solar eclipse of this possibility. Troy thought he had faced it, but he had only done so by pretending that he didn’t love their father.

  It was not that Brooke loved her father more, or that she loved her mother less. The body could find balance between opposing forces. The mind could do the same.

  She could see her decade with Grant as a failure, or she could see it as a success. It was a relatively short marriage that was now ending in a mildly acrimonious divorce. It was also a long-term relationship with many happy memories that ended exactly when it should have ended.

  She sniffed. What was the smell? It was so familiar. So obvious. And yet obviously not obvious, because she couldn’t put a name to it. She studied the label on the bottle. It was the same brand she always used, but overlaid with the comforting antiseptic smell was something else: like baking.

  Was it the café next door? They were only doing takeaway coffees now. No table service. It was sad to see the tables and chairs piled up on top of each other gathering dust in the corner and the red masking-tape crosses on the floor to keep everyone apart.

  “Hey, did you guys ever find your mother?” one of the young waitresses asked Brooke just this morning as she handed over her coffee.

  “We did,” said Brooke. “She’s fine. She’s good. Great, in fact.”

  There had only been a small paragraph in the newspaper about Joy’s return. There was a touch of chagrin in the tone of the reporting. People didn’t want the old lady to be dead, but it was kind of disappointing that she was alive.

  “Oh, I’m so happy to hear that!” The waitress’s eyes sparkled above her mask, entirely disproving Brooke’s theory. “It’s so great to hear some good news for a change. Stay safe!”

  “Thank you,” said Brooke. People were awful. People were wonderful. “You stay safe too.”

  Brooke was a self-employed single woman living through a pandemic. She couldn’t date. She couldn’t play basketball. She couldn’t go out to dinner with friends. Instead there were drinks over Zoom and sudden, intense, beautiful moments of human connection like this (although also awkward: were they going to say “Stay safe!” to each other every single day now?).

  No, she was not imagining that smell. It was from childhood. Like cut grass. It was normally accompanied by cigarette smoke and Chanel N°5.

  She put down her spray and walked out to the reception area like she was in a dream, and there it was, sitting on top of her desk.

  An apple crumble. Still warm from the oven. Like it had come from another dimension. From heaven or hell or the past. It was wrapped tightly in aluminum foil. There was a sheet of handwritten paper sticky-taped to the foil. The writing was neat and childlike. There was no heading. It began: Four medium apples, peeled, cored, and diced.

  She opened the door of her office to look outside but saw no one except for a masked elderly lady pushing a shopping trolley and frowning ferociously in Brooke’s direction, as if daring her to approach.

  Brooke went back inside. She peeled back the foil and breathed in deeply. She didn’t need to taste a single mouthful to know that Savannah had cracked the recipe.

  Chapter 70

  It was a cold, blue, sunlit August morning. Hard to imagine a deadly virus in this crystal-clear air.

  Stan Delaney diligently went through the stretching routine prescribed by his daughter to protect his crappy knees before he went on the court. He and his wife were going to have a hit. Just a gentle hit.

  “You two have never had a gentle hit in your lives,” Brooke said.

  Joy was next to him doing her own Brooke-prescribed routine when his mobile phone rang.

  “For heaven’s sake.” Joy rolled her eyes. She complained that he was too attached to his phone. He had it in his pocket all the time and placed it right next to his plate when they ate. She said that was poor etiquette. He thought that was the point of the damned thing.

  Stan peered at the screen. “It’s Logan.”

  “Quick, quick, answer it, then!” Joy would never let a call from one of their children go unanswered, especially not now, after everything that had happened. They might laugh over it one day, but their laughs would always be tinged with horror.

  “Dad,” said Logan. Stan clenched the phone tight. Logan didn’t sound like himself. “Yeah, mate?” He steeled himself for death or disaster.

  “You remember my friend Hien?”

  “Of course I remember him.” A car accident? Did Hien have the virus?

  “He has a son. Six years old. Hien has been asking me to come and watch him play tennis for months now, and I’ve been putting it off, but this morning I thought, Oh, to hell with it, the kid has been stuck at home doing online learning. So anyway, I finally did, and, Dad—”

  He paused, and in the pause, hope rushed like mercury through Stan’s veins.

  Logan
said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Stan watched the hair on his arms stand up. “He’s pretty good then, is he?”

  “Yeah, Dad, he’s pretty damned good.”

  The first time Stan saw Harry Haddad play—a kid who had never set foot on a court before—it was like seeing one of the world’s natural wonders. Only a coach sounded the way Logan sounded right now, and Stan knew that Logan was a natural-born coach even if the fool boy didn’t seem to know it himself.

  “So, I know it’s been a long time,” said Logan tentatively.

  Don’t ask me.

  Please don’t ask me.

  Do it yourself, son, do it yourself, please say you want to do it yourself.

  Logan lowered his voice as though he were sharing a shameful secret and said, “I think I want to coach him.”

  It was the high of an ace or a perfectly executed smash.

  Stan silently fist-punched the air.

  “What?” said Joy. “What is it?”

  Stan waved her quiet. He kept his voice controlled.

  “He’d be lucky to have you,” he said.

  There was silence, and the next time Logan spoke his voice had firmed. “You think I can do it?”

  “I know you can do it.”

  “He listens,” Logan said.

  “Yeah,” said Stan. “It’s satisfying when they listen.”

  The true talents were thirsty for anything you could give them. They listened and applied. They flourished before your eyes.

  “I think he’s going to go all the way, Dad.”

  “He might,” said Stan. “You never know. He might.”

  He wanted to say that it didn’t matter if the kid did or didn’t go all the way, that all that really mattered was that Logan was participating in his life again. He wanted to say that being a coach wasn’t second best or a fallback or a compromise and that Logan could still be part of the beautiful world of tennis, that everyone counted, not just the stars but the coaches and umpires, the weekend warriors and social players, the crazy-eyed parents and the screaming fans whose roars of appreciation lifted the stars to heights they would never otherwise reach.