I speak to my father about memory discrepancy and he begins emailing me documents I am too afraid to open. There are sixteen of them in total and they sit—flagged and unread—in my inbox for many months. It is odd, I think, how he seems to avoid my questions and yet is voracious in his emailing of records. In 2016, it was the diary he kept immediately following the accident. By 2018, the documents have become more legal in nature. First, the coroner’s report. Then, the doctor’s report. The personal statement I submitted to reschedule my HSC exams, information about carbon monoxide poisoning, the police inquest, a letter from Dad’s solicitor, a list of questions Dad sent to Dean that I glimpse in the body of an email:
Six seconds (180 metres) on wrong side of the road and two cars blasting their horns and flashing their lights, is this normal, does it reflect a micro sleep, does it reflect someone falling asleep?
Why does the medical report say she died of incineration?
How long does it take to get a 17% carbon monoxide reading?
More emails arrive. I continue flagging them and leaving them unread.
In among these, my father sends me memories of things we did together when I was younger. Him helping me make props for the kids party business I had. Us trying to bring a frozen fish back to life during a caravan park holiday. Fine-tuning dance concerts and building cubby houses in the garage. Me, always creating something. Him, always sewing or cooking or answering questions.
There is only one thing worse than failure and that’s regret, he writes to me, a saying from my childhood. This feels ominous, and I can’t help but wonder if I will still agree once this book is out in the world.
When I finally open the documents, my eyes search for information about the police coming to our door. It is not there. I call Dean and ask him what happened.
‘Your mum’s right. The police never went to your house. The car was registered to your dad’s business, so they thought the address was an office,’ he says. ‘When Jackie and I started thinking something was wrong, we called around the hospitals. Eventually we called Canberra Hospital. The staff told us he’d been admitted as a patient but wouldn’t tell us anything else. We told your mum to ring them, and that’s how she found out. When she called us, she was hysterical, screaming into the phone.’
Memory is both fallible and painful.
Through the window, I watch the cops leave. Mum pulls the screen door shut, calls my grandparents, tells them to come over. It’s dark outside.
That’s the door I locked Carlie out of a few weeks earlier. We were fighting, and Dad called us into the kitchen and asked us to explain why. I gave my version of events and Carlie interrupted me to say ‘Bull, sh—’ before Dad cut her off for swearing. I knew she was about to add an ‘e’, not an ‘it’, but neither of us said anything.
A feeling of guilt sits in my stomach. Is this how she died? Thinking she had a sister who wouldn’t stick up for her, wouldn’t love her? I should have told Dad she wasn’t about to swear.
Mum sits on the lounge. This is the lounge we girls tumbled over the top of, somersaulting over the back onto the seat. This is the room where Lisa watched The Jelly Bean Team video on repeat until the whole family knew the words off by heart. This is the room where Dad let us build cubbyhouses made of blankets when Mum wasn’t home.
Nan and Pa arrive, bringing with them a family friend who is staying with them at the time. She is sixty or sixty-five with long, thin arms that pull me into a hug. I punch her arm and she stands there, taking it, me crying and blowing snot into her collar. Someone says we have to go to Canberra and I should pack a bag.
Kris, my boyfriend, arrives and someone tells him what happened.
‘Bub,’ he says, pulling me onto his lap. He whispers something into my hair, but I can’t make out the words. He is eighteen years old.
(Looking back now, eighteen seems so young. We were desperate to rush forward into our lives, to get through high school, attain degrees, start living in our own house. A year or so later, Kris will fumble his university degree, so consumed by my grief and neediness and late-night phone calls that he will begin missing classes, failing subjects, falling behind.)
Someone says something about driving to Canberra Hospital to see Dad. When Kris announces he’s going home to get a change of clothes and toiletries, I want to go with him. I need to get out of the house, sit outside the bubble for a moment.
We drive the ten minutes through suburbia in silence, Kris at the wheel with one hand steering and one hand holding mine. His frame is large, almost too large for the second-hand Nissan Skyline he loves, his height inherited from his father, his arms thick from the hours spent at the gym with his Italian, Greek, Croatian friends. We pass through the suburbs: small pockets of streets and restaurants where communities of migrants from various countries have settled over the past fifty years. First, the economic migrants from Europe. Then the post-war Vietnamese. Afterwards, former Yugoslavians from the Yugoslav Wars.
Kris must have texted ahead because when we arrive at his house his extended family sit silently around the dinner table. Their plates are piled with pasta and soup and vegetable dishes. No one eats or makes eye contact with me.
I pull myself down into one corner of the kitchen, scrunch up on the cold tiles, the cupboards behind giving me some sense of support. Kris’s mother crouches down, tries to hold my wrists while I cry and tell her, over and over, ‘It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real.’
I am outside my body, looking at my messy hair and scrunched-up fists, Kris’s mother’s short blonde hair, her back; I hear her voice soothing me in her familiar Polish accent. I’m surprised at myself for being such a good actress, for knowing how to perform what I think grief might look like. It isn’t a real sadness—that would be too painful. It’s a performed sadness, one I absorbed from TV and movies. It’s easier this way.
When we return to my house, Nan, Pa, Kris, Mum and I pile into my grandparents’ four-wheel drive. My grandparents’ friend is gone, presumably back home. The whole carload of us drives down to Canberra, stopping to meet Dean at Woodbine. If I picture a group of relatives driving to a hospital to visit the only surviving family member of a car accident, I imagine the conversation alternating between the sound of sobbing and stories about happier times, when everyone was still alive. In reality, you speak of everything except those who have just died. Someone makes a joke and everyone laughs, even if they don’t find the punchline funny. Someone mentions craving ham with butter on a fresh bread roll. Someone else talks about how modern architecture doesn’t live up to the older buildings, as the car moves through various towns and semi-rural Australian villages. The only thing giving away our destination is the discussion of what time visiting hours end, whether the hospital staff will let us see Dad.
I don’t remember much else of the trip to Canberra, except feeling partly suffocated and partly comforted by the number of bodies crammed into the car. I can’t picture anyone’s face, except my grandfather’s. His large nose, the grey hairs growing out of his ears, his slow but dominant voice. It’s late evening now. There is a ring of light around his face. He’s illuminated by the dashboard as he drives into the night.
When we arrive at Canberra Hospital, it’s past midnight. The air is thick and cold: the capital is known for its icy winters. The accident happened around 4.20 pm and the death toll and traffic jam were on the news before we found out. Two local officers are waiting for us. A nurse will later tell us these officers had been waiting several hours. I remember thinking how kind they were, giving up their Sunday night to sit in a hospital waiting room.
I was expecting emergency room chaos, filled with screaming patients and stern nurses with clipboards telling people their injuries are not as serious as they think. We don’t enter through the emergency room, and nobody tells us the accident isn’t as bad as we expect. We enter through a side door. White-rimmed with glass panels in the
centre. It slides open quietly. The two police officers make eye contact with the adults. There are words exchanged but they are above my head or beyond my memory. I can’t tell the difference.
It filters down to me that my father is in the Intensive Care Unit.
‘He’s going to be fine,’ the police tell us. The doctors are keeping him there to monitor his injuries. The seatbelt lacerations on his right shoulder are deep, his knee has partly come out of its socket, but besides that—physically—he’s fine. The real focus is that he doesn’t know the girls didn’t survive. The nurses didn’t want to tell him until we arrived.
The police officers walk ahead, inviting us to follow them. There are several of us—Mum, Kris, Nan, Pa, Dean, me—and we follow in pairs down the hallway. Again, somebody makes a joke. Again, we laugh and the humour feels both out of place and natural.
A lady is waiting for us at the ward. She introduces herself as a social worker.
‘He’s hooked up to a lot of tubes, but he looks worse than he is,’ she says. ‘He’s sustained some physical injuries, but they will heal with time and physical therapy. Maybe just one or two people should go first.’
Mum reaches for my hand. I want to pull away from her touch, but I don’t. The need for touch is both repulsive and deeply desired. I don’t know if I will ever feel comfortable with my mother’s body against mine. Her skin is too soft, too real; any contact is as shocking as that of an electric fence.
I make myself hold on, because she’s already had her heart broken today.
‘C’mon, Chlo,’ she says. ‘Me and you.’
The social worker nods and motions the others along the corridor towards some pale chairs with too-soft cushions. The hospital is whiter than I imagined. I pictured it grey and drab, bits of paint peeling off wall corners, but it is bright, almost shiny in its cleanliness and lack of decoration. The white walls, white ceiling, white sheets stacked on a table all melt into each other. Even the nurses look pale under the fluorescent lighting. It smells like disinfectant and freshly washed tea towels in here, and sounds like waiting on an empty street with only the beep, beep, beep of a pedestrian traffic signal to keep you company.
The social worker leads the two of us in to Dad and leaves the room. Dad’s body is tucked in tightly beneath white sheets. He’s an overweight man, but between the tubes, blankets, machines and blank walls around him he looks small, like a wrinkled child. There is a needle sticky-taped to the inside of his elbow and a tube stuck up each nostril. He opens his eyes a little before closing them for a long time. A string of dribble hangs down his chin.
The room is partitioned off: four beds, each separated by a thin white curtain. Beside each bed, a slim set of drawers, a portable table that can be moved back and forth across each patient. Blank televisions are suspended from the ceiling at the foot of each bed.
A beeping noise keeps time with Mum’s blinking. The machine next to Dad’s bed flashes a pinprick-sized red dot each time there is a beep. The door to the corridor is closed; the hushed whispers, the sounds of our family’s feet, have all disappeared.
I start to cry.
‘Maurice,’ my mother whispers. Her fingers still feel too hot wrapped around mine.
Dad opens his eyes again. He inhales, and I watch his nostrils flare as the corners of his mouth turn slightly upwards. He’s trying to smile.
Mum begins crying and his lips lose their upturn. He starts to cry too. He lifts a hand towards us but Mum steps forward, pulling me with her, and pushes his arm back to the bed. His shoulder is wrapped in gauze and white cloth.
His face is scraped and bruised purple. His hand is connected to a drip, fluids flowing into his body. There are three other patients in the room. They can hear everything that’s happening. Grief is never as private as it feels.
He speaks slowly, as if struggling to control his tongue and lips. ‘Where are the girls?’
Mum leans her body over his on the bed, pulling me down with her, hugging our bodies together, her face speaking into his skin. ‘They didn’t make it.’
I lean back, unable to cope with hearing these words while their skin is against mine.
It is almost cartoonish, the way his mouth spreads open and his eyes push together, his forehead scrunching in on itself. His fingers flex, as if he is trying to push something out of their tips, trying to expel what he has just been told. The beeping is swallowed by the sound coming from my father’s throat.
He howls. I have never seen my father howl. I have never seen any adult howl, the sound halfway between a child throwing a tantrum and a wild animal in the bush. If they ever were, the three other patients are no longer asleep.
Before the accident happened, I saw it in my mind. Dad’s car would pull into our driveway, Mum would go outside to greet him and the girls. Dad’s door would be the only one to open and, when she looked inside, the back seats would be empty.
‘The girls are gone,’ my father would explain.
Mum would start to cry.
I have been having visions of bad things for as long as I can remember. I often told myself that my mind had a red marker and if I drew a cross through these waking nightmares, they would never come true.
At home, our bathtub sat under a square skylight looking out into the night air. When the light was on inside, the window became so dark you couldn’t see what was on the other side. I would lie in the bath reading—often for hours at a time—and when I looked up, I’d imagine aliens looking in through the skylight, preparing to abduct me. Several of them could be peering in, their faces made invisible by the contrast of light and dark. Each time I pictured it, I couldn’t leave the room without first putting a red cross through the image.
The day I pictured the accident, I pushed the image aside, continued studying. I did not put a cross through it.
Now, years later, the waking nightmares have become less frequent, but they still occur. Often, as I walk the streets of Wollongong, I picture the person coming towards me pulling a knife from their pocket and stabbing me. Or sometimes, as I stand in the cul-de-sac outside my apartment, having my evening cigarette, if a car does a U-turn, I picture the driver leaning out the window and shooting me. I didn’t realise this wasn’t normal until I mentioned it to a friend recently. I put crosses through these visions to lessen my anxiety, even if I know these things are unlikely.
They’re not impossible.
The logical part of my brain knows I didn’t cause the accident that took my sisters’ lives. But when the occasional vision comes to mind, I don’t dare forget to cross it out.
I follow Kris into the main entrance of the hospital, and he walks over to the elevator.
‘How do you know where to go?’ I ask.
‘This is where we came last night.’
As we walk into the ward I am shaking.
A nurse approaches us. ‘You must be looking for your parents.’
Kris nods and says yes. No, I want to say. I am looking for my sisters. I look at the picture of a waterfall hanging on the wall. We follow the nurse to a grey door. She smiles and says she will be at the nurses’ station if we need anything. There is a window next to the door leading into Dad’s room but, inside, blue curtains have been pulled across it and I can’t see in. There are three chairs beneath the window. I sit down. Kris sits next to me. A stranger walks past and I look down to avoid eye contact. We sit in silence until I start crying.
‘Do you want a tissue? I’ll ask the nurse for some?’ Kris asks.
I don’t want him to leave me. ‘I’m supposed to be sitting my exams.’
‘I know. It’s okay. Come here. Use my sleeve.’
I laugh at the suggestion but as he puts his arm around me and pulls me into that spot between his shoulder and neck, I do it anyway.
The door opens and Mum steps out, closing the door behind her. Her hair is a mess. Her
skin is blemished and her eyes are red around the edges.
She sits down next to me and I shuffle closer to Kris so my legs don’t touch hers. She tries to put her arm around me but I lean into Kris and then I’m crying again. Mum starts crying, I can hear her crying, but I pretend I can’t because I don’t know how to comfort her. We sit without speaking for a while, and then Mum says she’s going to check on Dad and asks if we want to come.
No, I want to say, but I don’t. When Mum stands, Kris and I stand too, and when she opens the door and walks in, we follow her.
When I was growing up, my dad was a sensitive man. My friends told stories about their fathers refusing to buy tampons for them and I couldn’t relate. My father is the type of dad whose favourite films are The Sound of Music and Titanic, who plays Whitney Houston as he works in his home office, and who cried as much as his daughters during sad films.
When my father wakes, he cannot see.
‘Who is it?’ he asks.
‘Maurice, it’s me and Chlo,’ my mother says.
He reaches towards us.
‘What’s wrong with your eyes, Dad?’
He begins to cry. ‘I don’t know.’
Silver metal rails are raised either side of his bed. The white sheets are tucked in severely, swaddling his limp body. His head hangs to one side, eyes open, but empty. He stares in the direction of our voices, begins to sob. Mum goes to one side and Kris goes to the other. I follow Kris. Mum wraps her arms around Dad’s neck, so I do that too. We stay like that and sob and hug and I pretend I know what I’m doing. I thought the hardest part was last night and I have just realised it isn’t.
We stay at Canberra Hospital for seven nights. Just off the main hospital grounds there is a brick building that used to be the old nurses’ quarters, now used as emergency accommodation for interstate families whose loved ones are hospitalised. The lino hallways squeak underfoot. A small window lights up one end of the boxy room each morning. It’s winter, and we wake most mornings watching rain run down the windowpanes.
The Girls Page 2