The Girls

by Chloe Higgins

  Later, Kris’s mother gives my mother a yellow A4 envelope. Inside, there is a video of the news coverage. Mum makes me promise not to tell Dad. She doesn’t want him to watch it. ‘If he watches the footage once, he will watch it on repeat,’ she says. In the days following, when I am walking between the bathroom and my bedroom, I catch glimpses of my mother and her sister watching or reading snippets of news about the accident. But they hide this from my father and me; my mother has always attempted to protect us from the things she thinks will hurt.

  Dad keeps asking, ‘What happened?’ and no one has an answer.

  Our front veranda is covered in cards, flowers and trays of food; only a narrow walkway to the door is left free. Inside the house, someone has begun lining the bouquets and lasagnes up. Flowers in the lounge room, casseroles stacked on the kitchen bench.

  There are so many people, their faces blurring together, their voices melding into radio static. My mother’s sister from Mudgee, Aunty Lol, has come to stay with us and help organise things at home. She quickens her pace to walk ahead of Mum, picking up things that belong to the girls, pushing them under her arm: Lisa’s favourite skirt, one of Carlie’s Mary-Kate and Ashley books, Lisa’s beige sandals. Carlie’s Sharks jersey is sitting on top of the folded washing pile. My aunt picks it up, and my mother bursts into tears.

  Someone leads me into the kitchen, asks if I’m hungry. I shrug their hands away, head into my bedroom, pull the door closed. It’s three in the afternoon. I change into my pyjamas, climb into bed.

  I stay home for a week, avoiding school. The week I spend at home is like limbo. I move between two spaces: my bed and my desk. I don’t sleep at night, so instead I nap during the day, then get up and study in between. That is all I remember from our first week at home after the accident, before the funeral. I try to picture what my parents were doing. I can’t see their faces. There are lots of people moving through the house, rearranging chairs, cleaning pots, warming up food in the oven, but I can’t tell who they are. They’re trying to take up space. Delaying the inevitable.

  Before the accident, at seventeen years old, I have had only two experiences with death that I can remember:

  When I’m six years old, my mother’s mother dies. I liked her a lot, with her gentle presence, gummy smile and favourite chair in the corner of the lounge room. My parents and I are in Mudgee, staying with family. I walk past Aunty Lol’s lounge room, heading upstairs to bed. My mother stops me and says, ‘Chloe, Nanna Rob died.’

  In my mind: ‘Oh,’ I say. I sit in the rocking chair and cry until I am exhausted before climbing the stairs to bed.

  In Aunty Lol’s retelling: ‘The morning of the funeral your Mum told you and you screamed and screamed for ages.’

  When I am twelve years old, my uncle-in-law Peter dies.

  He is engaged to my cousin, who is sixteen years my senior. A joker, Peter is forever poking fun at something. He has testicular cancer and has been having chemotherapy. My parents and us three girls travel to Mudgee and spend a weekend with them. On the day we leave I tell him about the poems I’m writing.

  ‘Can I read them?’ he asks.

  ‘No.’

  My mother calls out that we’re leaving. Peter and I stand in the doorway. ‘Sure you don’t want to show me?’ he says.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Love ya, kid,’ he says.

  I don’t reply, and climb into the car.

  A couple of months later, I’m in Melbourne, staying with a friend I met at the snow. We both collect Beanie Babies. We are upstairs in her bedroom arranging the bears. Her mother asks us to come downstairs.

  ‘Your mum’s on the phone for you, Chloe.’

  I pick up the phone, listen to my mother’s voice: ‘Peter died. The chemotherapy caused a blood clot and he started having seizures during the night.’

  I start crying, thinking of those poems and the time he said ‘Love ya, kid’, and I said nothing in return.

  The most painful part of grief isn’t immediately after the unthinkable happens, but a little later, once the space empties and other people go back to their normal lives and your mother has only half the washing she used to have, your father has the quiet he’d craved to watch the cricket, and you have the backyard to yourself like you thought you wanted until you actually have it and realise you don’t. You don’t want the empty couch to stretch across, you don’t want control of the TV remote in the empty lounge room, you don’t want to pick which seat you have in the car every time your family goes somewhere. You don’t want to be an only child after all.

  Later, in my mid-twenties, I start watching Keeping up with the Kardashians. It’s my little secret until one day, I start admitting to people how much I love it. A boy I’m seeing comes over. He says he wants to watch an episode of my favourite show to see what all the fuss is about. Afterwards, he says it isn’t as bad as he was expecting and asks what I like about it.

  I say: ‘I love the humour, it’s the funniest thing I’ve seen.’

  I think: I love the way they care for their sisters. That could’ve been us.

  It’s weeks since the accident.

  Nothing is changing. I have been lying here, watching my bedroom window lighten and then darken, lighten and then darken as each day passes. I still can’t sleep at night.

  Most days, I hear people talking in the house. I can’t understand what they’re saying.

  The police could not determine the cause. Later, the case will go to court and Dad will be asked to speak. I’m not allowed to attend. Now, I picture him up there, on the stand, crying so much that he can’t speak as the coroner releases her findings:

  ‘. . . the only explanation for the fact that Mr Higgins’ car drove onto the wrong side of the road was that he was asleep at the time. I accept that Mr Higgins had not been alerted by any symptoms or warning signs before the accident that he was at risk of falling asleep, and there is certainly no evidence before me that there were any steps that Mr Higgins could have or should have been aware he should take to avoid the accident. As unsatisfactory an explanation that may be for the cause of the accident, that is simply the way it is.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Dad says. ‘I want to know what happened.’

  But the car is so badly burnt there is no way to prove any theory that the car had a fault.

  My father takes no solace from the inquest: he is not convinced by the coroner’s ruling.

  ‘I want to know what happened,’ he will say, over and over.

  Today is the funeral. It is August 12, 2005.

  ‘Do you know what you’re going to wear?’ someone asks.

  The lasagnes are still piled high in our freezer; uneaten stews sit, starting to collect mould, on the kitchen bench. The phone rings constantly, like an alarm someone forgot to turn off.

  ‘Listen, go straight there . . . Yes, we have someone to drive us . . . Yes, there will be a wake,’ my father’s mother repeats into the phone.

  We enter the empty church. This is a private, immediate-family-only viewing of the open caskets. It is dark and cool compared to outside, the high ceilings and stained-glass windows blocking out the heat and light. The carpet is soft under our feet and it takes us several minutes to walk the length of the aisle, rows and rows of wooden pews running outwards on either side of us. There is a staleness to the church, as if the place hasn’t been aired out for many years. Kris has a tight grip on my hand, as if I too might slip away. My parents walk side by side. They don’t touch. I don’t recognise the other faces. I can’t see beyond their tear-streaked cheeks and downcast eyes.

  Two wooden caskets nurse bundles of white blankets wrapped in white sheets. I place the letters I wrote inside, with what’s left of my sisters.

  While Carlie was dying, I was sneaking into her room to steal her pen.

  My favourite one had run out, and I knew she ha
d some good ones in her bedroom. She wouldn’t be home for hours anyway, I told myself, wouldn’t notice if I took it and returned it after my exams were done.

  ‘I’m sorry for stealing your pen,’ I wrote in her letter. ‘I was going to give it back.’

  Kris is by my side. My parents love Kris. So did Lisa. For several years after the accident, even after Kris and I broke up, my mother kept a photo of them pinned to the fridge. Lisa, dressed in white on the morning of her Holy Communion, sitting on Kris’s lap. He is wearing a beige suit, he is coming to church with us for the ceremony. They’re both looking straight at the camera, smiling. Lisa’s arm is wrapped around Kris’s neck, her cheek pressed against his.

  ‘No, he’s not,’ Lisa said once, when I tried to tell her he was my boyfriend, not hers.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I wrote in her letter. ‘Kris was visiting you too.’

  We leave the church and walk next door to the school courtyard, where the funeral will be held as the church can’t fit everyone. The courtyard is the centrepiece of the school playground, and easily fits several hundred chairs. Around the perimeter, the infrastructure of a school day: a double-storey block of classrooms on one side, and on the other a retaining wall with handball squares above. A canteen at the back, at the front an area raised four or five stairs that is used as an impromptu stage. All around us, concrete and blue sky. I’m sitting in a row of chairs beside my parents, Kris, some other people. I turn around, glance out over the crowd behind us. Later, my mother tells me more than 2000 people came to farewell them. The people are seated in neat rows, as if a little organisation will make everything okay. At the back, those unable to get a seat stand in groups, in lines, in layers five or six deep, their eyes focused on the front.

  I’ve come to this school every day, five days a week, for six years. The emblems on the students’ school shirts feel mocking; it feels like they’re saying: This is the uniform Carlie will never wear again.

  Everyone is standing now.

  We’re in front of the audience gathered to watch what death does to people in public: it orders them into tight, straight lines, small groups and shallow faces with eyes rimmed in red. I take my sunglasses off.

  Face, after hand, after hug. I stand next to my mother, trying to block out the sobs choking her voice. Someone says sorry, and Mum tells them it’s okay. Later, Dad will tell me it’s not okay. If this were a film, and we were more religious, this is where Dad would push the Bible off his desk. At seventeen, I feel angry that all these people say sorry for something that wasn’t their fault.

  I think I must have been away from school the day they taught everyone how to hug. I don’t know where to put my hands. How hard to squeeze. How long until I’m supposed to let go. I don’t know which way to look. Or if it’s okay to snot all over these people’s clothes, or to blow my nose loudly.

  There are too many faces. It feels like I’m lying in a bath and someone has laid a film of glass across the water’s surface to prevent me from getting any air. I put my sunglasses back on and feel a little safer.

  It is time to go to the cemetery. Kris will ride with me, but there will be an empty seat beside us. My parents and grandparents will take a separate car. I look for a familiar face. Tarni. She is there, looking straight at me, an angular chin, dark hair spread across her shoulders. We haven’t known each other long, but we connected like siblings when I joined her soccer team a year ago. Her presence calms me. I pull her into the black funeral car. She takes my arm. Or my hand? I don’t remember. I don’t recall the drive. Or the few feet we walk from the refuge of the car’s tinted windows to the freshly dug hole. The sun is inappropriate, like someone giving you the finger in church.

  Four men lower the caskets, one on top of the other, into the hole, using thick black belts to lever them down. They will be buried together at least, stacked in their separate boxes. It is too hard to say their names in my head.

  We throw rose petals in.

  I stand opposite my parents. Kris asks if I want to stand with them. Yes, I want to say, take me to them. Instead, I stay where I am and watch them across the hole being filled with dirt.

  My father’s hands are filled with scrunched-up tissues. Someone has their arm around his shoulders, trying to still them as they heave up and down in time with my mother’s sobs. My mother is looking away, her eyes moving as if counting birds flying overhead. There are no birds. Just bodies and babies and flowers and misplaced ribbons, discarded on the muddy grass and dirtied under people’s shuffling feet.

  At home, the front veranda is again covered. Flowers, packages, cards, trays of food. I dawdle behind the others. My mother stands in the mess, her hair stuck to her forehead like a tattoo gone wrong. My father stands by the door, desperate to get inside, to go back to normal, to search the internet for clues that might provide an answer to how and why and who can take the guilt away.

  As someone turns the key in the front door, I bend and pick up the first package my fingers fall on. The August issue of Girlfriend magazine is enclosed in a sealed plastic sleeve. The cover letter reads: ‘Miss Carlie Higgins’.

  A while after the funeral when I am back at school, my friends and I are sitting cross-legged against the courtyard trees, eating salami or egg and lettuce sandwiches. They’re talking about their weekends. One girl is enthusiastic, as always. She tells a story about how her sister made the academic honour roll again, how inspiring she is, always putting so much effort into her studies. Then she says, ‘I love my sister.’

  The group goes quiet.

  My eyes tear up a little, but mostly this warms my heart. In the years immediately after the accident, when friends are still young enough to casually throw out lines like ‘I hate my sister’, it’s a lack of gratitude that I find more difficult to handle. I’ll take her, I always want to say.

  Someone breaks the silence with a story of their own weekend and the conversation starts up again.

  One night, my father says to me, ‘I understand if you and Mum want to leave. I understand if you can’t be around me anymore.’

  I don’t know how to reply. I ask why he would think that.

  ‘I killed them,’ he says. ‘I killed Carlie and Lisa.’

  3

  It is a sin in our house to forget.

  When we go to the cemetery for the eleventh anniversary of the girls’ deaths, my father arranges the flowers people have brought in symmetrical lines. It is important to him that the spacing and balance of flowers are perfectly matched on each side of the girls’ shared grave. More people arrive, bringing with them more bouquets. Some try to help by pushing their flowers into the ground in small pots provided by the cemetery, but mostly by now they know it’s no use: he’s going to pull them out and arrange them again anyway, and so they hand them directly to Dad. It is July 2016. I am twenty-eight years old.

  Numbers vary between occasions—birthdays, Christmas, anniversaries and so on—but a large network of extended family and friends gather at the girls’ grave semi-regularly. Often it seems as though my father’s mood on the drive home is in direct correlation to the number of people who turn up.

  My mother spreads a picnic blanket beside the grave and I sit on one corner of it, my legs straight out in front, with two other people either side of me doing the same. A family friend has brought her camping chair and opens it on the grass, plonks herself into it, begins talking about how much she hates her job. To us, this is normal. My grandfather stands opposite me, on the other side of the grave, leaning on his walking stick. The grass is trimmed, tidy around the edges of the girls’ shared headstone and the few others around it, because my father whipper-snippers them every week after the cemetery staff have done a rough mow. He keeps the area as neat as a display-home front lawn. Someone arrives with cheese and Jatz and I pull my legs into my chest to make space on the blanket.

  This year, my father cries more than usual
.

  When we get back to my parents’ place, I ask my mother why that might have been and she says, ‘There were less people than usual. He’s afraid people are beginning to forget them.’

  I try to write down what I remember about the girls, but it’s harder than writing down the things I did to forget.

  I text my mother, asking for happy memories of Lisa. She replies quickly, her phone never on silent. When I make a joke about this she doesn’t send me her usual lol or laughing emoticon, and instead replies: Yes, my phone will never be off. What if you need me at three in the morning?

  My mother is the only person I can always rely on.

  She texts me:

  Remember she always thought I was twenty-three and no one could convince her otherwise. You girls used to say ‘Mum show her your licence or birth certificate so she knows it’s wrong’.

  And Lisa was everyone’s friend whether they wanted her to be or not.