The Girls

by Chloe Higgins

  Each room is a small rectangle with two single beds close to the ground. My mother has one, and Kris and I share the other. During high school most of my friends had strict Catholic parents who either forbade their daughters from having boyfriends or made them leave the bedroom door open when they came to visit. My mother (she was, after all, the one making the real household rules) was an exception.

  ‘If they want to have sex, they’re going to do it anyway. I’d rather it be in the house than a dirty parking lot,’ she’d say.

  In our hospital accommodation, there is a television from the nineties and a chest of drawers with a kettle on top. Nan and Pa have their own room a little further up the hall. Dean is staying with a relative. We shower and cook in the communal areas.

  The second morning, we return to the hospital. Dad’s eyesight is back. The blindness was temporary, a response to trauma rather than medically induced. We don’t say much. Dad cries a lot, my mother tries to avoid crying and I keep my head in my books. I have exams coming up, I tell myself. I must study. There is a couch near Dad’s room and I sit there, my folders, books and highlighters spread out, leaving no room for anyone to sit beside me. I always feel that when my study notes are in order, my head is in order.

  I overhear the adults speaking about Dad. The doctors will operate on his knee that night and with enough physiotherapy the leg should heal well.

  ‘Will he walk again?’ my mother asks.

  The nurse nods, explains that if he works with the physio, he should be able to walk before he leaves the hospital.

  The next day, I wake extra early. The light streaming through the small window has a liminal quality to it, that pink-yellow tinge halfway between night and day. I’m desperate to see my father, to make sure he is still there. I march into his room, and it’s overpowering. The place looks like a florist and smells like incense.

  I ask, ‘What happened, Dad?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. He starts crying. He cries every hour now. ‘The last thing I remember is seeing a street sign—Micalago Road—with the same name as the town we were passing through—Michelago—and thinking it was strange that they were spelled differently.’

  I want to say: I meant with your knee operation. But I don’t. I hug him.

  His skin touching mine doesn’t burn as much as my mother’s does. I can hug him longer than I can her. Perhaps because she is the one who sees what I try to keep hidden.

  While we girls were growing up, Dad took care of the practical while Mum looked after the personal. While Dad was out earning money to cover bills and annual ski trips, Mum was tracking our emotions, bearing the brunt of our adolescent angst, being spoken to rudely when we were overwhelmed by school. She was the one who knew the names of all our friends, and how close we were with each of them. Who spoke to the other mothers and knew our moods as intimately as her own. And later, during those years fuelled by self-destructive drugs and sex, she will be the one to read my diaries.

  My father knows so little about my past and inner self—or at least doesn’t outwardly express judgement of what he does know—that I feel less ashamed around him.

  But my mother: she knows too much. It has always been this way.

  There were four people travelling in the car behind Dad’s: the driver and his partner, from Sydney, and their two friends, both from Perth. The police report reveals they first became aware of Dad’s car twenty minutes before the collision, when one of the occupants pointed out that he had recently bought the same car. They later reported that Dad drove smoothly, within the lines and on the speed limit. After thirty kilometres or so, Dad’s car began veering over the centre line, towards oncoming traffic. Gradually, Dad’s car moved more and more into the opposite lane. When his car was almost entirely on the wrong side of the road, a few cars came from the opposite direction. The first car blasted its horn and went around him. The second car flashed its lights, blasted its horn, and swerved onto the verge beside the highway, narrowly avoiding a collision. The third car, a four-wheel drive containing a couple and their two children, didn’t have time to swerve. Their car collided with Dad’s, his front-right corner hitting their front-left corner head-on. Our car was thrown into the air, flipping over and landing driver’s side down on the correct side of the Monaro Highway. The back cabin burst into flames, engulfing my sisters. They were 8.4 kilometres north of the ACT border, at Royalla, heading towards Sydney.

  The car behind stopped abruptly and one of the passengers—Garry—ran to my father’s car. He pushed his body into the small gap between the road and the car window frame, to my father.

  ‘Undo your seatbelt,’ Garry urged.

  My father moaned, but did not undo his belt.

  ‘Someone get me a knife,’ Garry yelled to the people gathering nearby.

  A knife was pressed into his hand and he cut through Dad’s seatbelt. He slid backwards, pulling my father most of the way out.

  ‘Is there anyone else in the car?’ Garry asked.

  My father did not respond.

  The man from the other vehicle called out, ‘My baby’s in the car.’ Garry ran to the other vehicle, and someone else took over pulling my father out. The fire intensified. There was talk of the car exploding. A member of the ACT SES—Aaron—arrived on the scene and helped drag my father away from the flames.

  ‘Where are the girls?’ Dad asked him.

  ‘Everyone is out,’ he said.

  (Later, my father tells me this was a gross misunderstanding: Dad was talking about Carlie and Lisa, Aaron was talking about the passengers in the other car.)

  A few days after the accident, Aaron visited my father in the hospital.

  ‘I’m sorry about your girls, we thought everyone was out,’ he said.

  It wasn’t his fault. I know this. My father knows this. But still, more than a decade later, I don’t think my father has been able to forgive him.

  The physio tells Dad he must learn to walk again. Since being brought here, he has been bedridden. He doesn’t want to come out from beneath the sheets.

  ‘If you don’t learn now, you might never walk again,’ she tells him.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he replies.

  Dad refuses to get up but he gives in to the physio’s demands and does some exercise in bed. Kris, Mum, one of Dad’s friends and I walk to the nearby shopping centre for lunch. We make our way through the hospital car park on foot. My mother is a couple of metres ahead and I watch as, too fast for me to react, the boom gate at the car park exit comes down on her head. It breaks, the arm snapping from its hinge and falling to the ground. I scream, picturing my mother’s funeral.

  Kris and Dad’s friend rush to where she lies on the concrete. They crouch down, and I see them pause, unsure how to proceed. My mother looks up at them, smiles, begins laughing.

  This is what I love about my mother: somehow, in the midst of chaos and shit and pain, she finds a way to laugh.

  Now, as a thirty-year-old, I wonder how she feels when she is alone in her bedroom with her dead children, and I am off travelling for months at a time, and her husband sits on the couch watching re-runs of NCIS, and neither of us asks how she is really doing. She is desperate for company, and seems lonely, and probably sad underneath it all, and I do not always know how to be the comfort that she needs without draining myself. She wants touch and companionship; I want space. She is desperate to not lose her last child; I am trying to break free of shouldering the weight of this. These things are not easily compatible.

  In those early years, I ran away from her, towards self-destructive behaviours. And then, in my guilt, I spent years agreeing to her level of boundaries and space because she said I was selfish. Now, I am trying to find a middle ground and it is enormously painful for her. I try to acknowledge that she is human and acting out of hurt, but also that setting boundaries around myself does not mean I am unconce
rned with her feelings.

  Sometimes she makes comments about how I don’t like her. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not that I don’t like her; it’s that I don’t like the me I am around her. The shame of my past feels so heavy when she is near me.

  Born to a baker and homemaker in rural New South Wales in the late fifties, my mother grew up without TV, and sharing bathwater with three siblings. Her highest level of education was the equivalent of today’s Year Ten. Her father was a binge drinker, her brother died of cancer at twenty-three. Her second-born child was strangled by his umbilical cord before birth, her third- and fourth-born killed in a car accident. Now, she emotionally supports a husband who lives with depression and PTSD, and the daughter who wrote this book. And through all of this, she has retained her optimism. When we talk about any of these things, her response is always the same: ‘Oh well,’ she says. ‘That’s the way life is. I’m going to enjoy it anyway.’ I deeply admire this about her. At other times, her survival strategy hurts. Once, I sat at a dining room table and listened to her and my aunt talk about how promiscuous girls are these days. Another day, another dining table, and I listened to her talk about someone’s ‘gay phase’—that lasted several years. These comments hit a nerve.

  Often, it is physically painful to be around her.

  When I suggest that perhaps these belief systems are problematic, that perhaps we have internalised the misogyny and homophobia that underlies so many of our social structures, her response is the same: ‘Oh well,’ she says. ‘That’s the way life is. There’s nothing we can do about it.’ The very thing that I love most about her is the thing that feels like she is ripping skin from my body and expecting me not to scream.

  A while ago, she started watching the news. This broke my heart. She wasn’t really interested in the news; it felt like she did it to give us something to discuss. Like she wanted me to think her smart. This was difficult to watch—I don’t want her to feel insecure around me any more than I want to feel insecure around her.

  Once, after I’d spent months pushing her away, she said to me: ‘Tell me what I have to do, and I’ll do it.’ A block of nausea sat in my stomach for days.

  ‘How about we stop trying to change each other, and work towards understanding?’ I replied. I am trying to work out how to support her, without eating myself alive.

  Before all of this, long before, at the car park of Canberra Hospital, the boys help her to her feet. She is still laughing as she rubs her head.

  I burst out crying.

  While we are eating sushi at the shopping centre, everyone goes over the details. I find out why Dean called our house on Sunday afternoon. My father and the girls left Smiggin Holes at around 1.30 pm. Dean’s family skied a little longer, and then packed their car and followed, at around 3 pm. Dean’s trip started smoothly. Halfway home, as he neared Royalla, the traffic worsened. The cars slowed, eventually stopping. Along with some other drivers, Dean got out of his car and enquired about what had happened.

  I imagine how it might have gone: ‘There’s been an accident, traffic is backed up for another few kilometres,’ someone tells him. ‘We could be here a while.’

  Dean thanks the other driver, goes back to his car. Families are standing around their vehicles, snacking or running around on the verge. Some stay in their cars, complaining about the inconvenience.

  A valuer by trade, Dad had worked in the property department at Campbelltown Council but he resigned when we were very young. He wanted to spend more time with us, be able to work around our schedules, so he started his own property valuation business. Our house wasn’t large, but he was always handy and he built himself a home office in the garage out the back. Once mobile phones became commonplace, my father always appeared to us kids as if he were permanently attached to his. It became a running joke. My father would go missing for a few minutes and we would know he was on his phone. He always had the hands-free connected while driving.

  So Dean called him to check if he was also stuck in traffic. My father’s phone went straight to voicemail.

  We wake early as usual. The first one out of bed, my mother is standing, getting ready to go into the hospital, when she falls to the floor.

  I rush to her, grab her arm. She opens her eyes and looks up at me.

  I picture her funeral, again.

  She’s been having trouble sleeping—it has been less than three days since the accident—so one of the doctors gave her sleeping tablets. Later, they tell us the medication can sometimes make people dizzy, occasionally causes fainting.

  ‘It’s nothing to worry about. Your mother isn’t going to die,’ a nurse tells me. She’s trying to be reassuring.

  We both know that isn’t true, I want to say.

  The physiotherapist continues Dad’s leg exercises. He squints in pain, so I go outside and continue studying. I am trying to memorise how the nervous and immune systems function and interact.

  The next morning, I take a shower. The disabled bathroom is a single cubicle, lockable, with the door opening straight onto the hallway by our bedroom. The women’s bathroom has numerous cubicles with gaps above and below the partitions. They feel insecure, too large and empty to feel safe. It scares me that anyone could walk in while I am inside.

  I lock myself in the disabled bathroom, drop my clothes to the floor, turn on the hot tap and stand to the side as I wait for the water to warm. Six tiles, each the size of my face, in line with my head, shoulders and torso, simultaneously unstick themselves from the wall and smash to the floor, shattering where I’d have been standing if I’d stepped forward under the running water.

  There is a pounding on the door, and Kris’s voice: ‘Are you okay?’

  I stand there, staring at the exposed wall and fragments of shattered porcelain. The world has become so surreal, so foreign; I am so frazzled that nothing comes as a shock anymore. I am reminded of that horror film Final Destination, in which death relentlessly chases a group of teenagers until each of them is taken.

  ‘Chloe, answer me,’ Kris calls.

  I unlock the door and he wraps his arms around me as my mother rushes towards us, the panic clear on her face.

  A couple of days later Dad is at the far end of the hospital hall, with a walker in front of him, a nurse on one side and the physical therapist on the other. A group of us are waiting at the other end. He takes his first unassisted step towards us. We all cheer. My mother cries.

  Dad’s car was almost new when he bought it. It had been a demonstration model at a dealership. The salesman told Dad that his boss had taken the car for one short cross-country trip before it was sold to my father. At some point after the accident, someone tells me there is a valve in every car responsible for funnelling the toxic gases outside the car. Carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide. Occasionally—and this is known to happen even with high-end cars—the valve is fitted the wrong way and toxic gases are funnelled back into the car. If this were the case, it would explain some things. If the two toxic gases were released inside the car instead of out, all three passengers would have been knocked unconscious. This would explain why the girls had not screamed when Dad slowly veered onto the wrong side of the road and the oncoming cars started flashing their lights and honking their horns. No one can confirm this.

  For years, this is the story I tell myself and others when they ask what happened. Only later, while researching this book, do I realise: this theory is completely absent from the reports. I have latched on to it, until my father shakes his head, and says no, that was not the cause.

  ‘I have a vague recollection of this,’ he tells me, ‘and also people saying Pajeros were fire-prone. But I think these were people trying to make sense of a situation that no one could.’

  Before we leave Canberra, Dad wants to visit the crash site.

  I remember many things about this visit. It’s Sunday, and we are taking D
ad home to Sydney the next morning. I am surprised at how much wide-open space there is, as if car accidents only happen on sharp bends and narrow verges. There are two crucifixes, one silver, one blue, both heavily adorned with ribbons, pictures and flowers. As if we were a family who took comfort in God.

  At the time, it doesn’t occur to me to wonder who put those crosses there. Nothing feels odd: I am a passive observer going along for a ride orchestrated by other people. When I write this scene, I text my mother, asking who put the decorations there. She replies: There was just one cross there until we put ours up. It was from the people in the other car.

  I remember thinking how far it was from the accident site to the closest house. The way I heard someone in the hospital describe the road, I expected the house to be within shouting distance. It isn’t. When the two cars collided, the impact must have made an explosive bang because the family in that house ran over to help. They were emergency service volunteers.

  Although they are all temporarily hospitalised, the family of four from the other car survived. Later someone told Dad that if the back cabin of our car hadn’t burst into flames, everyone would have survived.

  At the site I collect objects, as if by keeping bits and pieces of the leftovers, I can keep the girls a little longer. A small piece of curved black plastic, a short length of the car’s radio antenna, a piece of ribbon. I wonder where the ribbon came from. Was it tied to a suitcase? Was it pulled loose from Lisa’s ponytail? I put the pieces in a plastic bag, hold them tight against the side of my thigh.

  Several of us move around the site, together but alone in our disbelief. It’s difficult to turn to other people for comfort in the light of day. The grief feels at odds with the brightness of the sun. I remember the curve of my parents’ shoulders, the shape of their silhouettes against the road, but I cannot remember the expressions on their faces the first time we visit the place where the girls died.

  Eleven years later, I still have the plastic bag containing those pieces.

  When I think of returning home for the first time after the accident, again my memory fails me. There is a hazy image in my mind of there being reporters waiting outside our house. This is not a concrete memory, but an imagined one I have carried with me since, not long after returning, I heard someone say reporters came to our home while we were at Canberra Hospital. In this way, as trauma and time erode memory, fragments of stories told by other people are incorporated into my own narrative-making. For so long, I had pictured us turning into our street, several cars parked outside, huddles of people standing around, drinking coffee or reading newspapers. As we pulled into our driveway, microphones and cameras would come towards us. Surely the accident was so significant, so singular, that it would dominate the national news for weeks. Someone would drag my parents and me from the car, push us towards our front door. The reporters would disappear from our line of sight. When I ask my mother, though, she tells me there was no press waiting for us. Even before I asked her, part of me knew this. But it is still a shock to admit that Carlie’s and Lisa’s deaths did not dominate the national psyche for more than an afternoon or two.