(10 new photos attached)
And afterwards:
In case you haven’t noticed, I am having the time of my life (other than missing Maurice) #newyorkgirls
I am trying to see my mother’s grief. She did such a good job of keeping it hidden for so many years. Or perhaps she didn’t, and it just plays out differently from what I expect.
Day 14, New York—Where do I start, what a fabulous day (besides being lost on the subway for two hours)! I left the apartment at about 7.30 am and left Chloe still sleeping. I caught the subway uptown to Ellen’s Stardust for breakfast, where the wait staff are all singers and dancers. It was so much fun I could have stayed for hours and watched. Next I headed to the Empire State Building, wow, what a view, next stop was Times Square. I hung around a while, people-watching, then got in line to get discount tickets for the theatre. Sure did make some friends in this very long, long line but eventually got what I wanted and headed home on the subway (that’s another whole story). Quickly showered and got ready and went to Max Brenner’s for a dinner of chocolate pasta, then headed to our Broadway show, Chicago, which was great, starring some famous Japanese performer so there were film cameras everywhere. We headed home through Times Square (which has a little toilet story). It was insane, so many people around. Glad to hit the pillow tonight so goodnight all from New York #newyorkgirls
(28 new photos attached)
I am proud of her today.
This morning, I woke at four, was writing by six, and by the time my mother got up at nine, I’d finished my work for the day. For her, this is a sign it’s going to be a good day. The two—writing and Mum—jostle for space in my waking hours, so when the first is finished before breakfast time, the second is happy. She was upstairs in bed when I texted her to ask if she wanted to go for breakfast. She bounded down the stairs like an excited Labrador. In her eagerness, she forgot her pee bucket and it was only later, when I went up to get something and noticed the half-full container, that she brought it down to empty. She’s getting old now, she says. Doesn’t want to try to navigate the spiral staircase in the dark if she needs to pee. She needs to wee a lot, she tells me. Never makes it through a night without having to go one, two, sometimes three times. Hence the bucket.
Downstairs, in preparation for an early breakfast, she sits on the toilet, door opened directly into the kitchen-lounge area where I am getting ready. ‘Shut the door, Mum!’ I say. ‘It’s going to stink.’
‘Soon you’ll be wiping this bum!’ she laughs, doing as I say.
Wiping my mother’s bum, per se, doesn’t scare me. But the thought of either her death or the loss of my freedom terrifies me.
Sounds and smells travel quickly in this tiny apartment. She’s still talking, her voice muffled through the door now, and I pretend I can’t hear. But it’s a good feeling, having finished the day’s writing and being able to give her this, to see her so excited. You can tell how happy my mother is by how much she talks. I’ve finished my work, had my few hours of silence, can enjoy her company now.
Lately, she’s been wanting to show me her vagina. As is common in women who’ve had children, her pelvic floor has weakened to the point where it struggles to hold up the internal organs. She tells me it sometimes feels like her uterus is hanging between her legs. She tried to show Dad, but he didn’t want to see either, she tells me. Her sisters live several hours away from her. ‘Just one look,’ she says, pink undies around her ankles. I laugh, tell her no, I don’t want to see her fanny, push her away, averting my eyes. Afterwards, I carry the guilt around until my therapist tells me it’s okay to not look.
I imagine, more than anything, my mother wants someone she can share these kinds of intimacies with. It saddens me to feel this is not something I can give her. It also saddens me that she doesn’t seem able to do this with my father. When I am editing, several males suggest I remove mentions of my mother’s prolapsed vagina. An ex-lover; my publisher’s lawyer; a mentor. Scholarly research suggests the condition occurs in 10–20 per cent of women, I want to tell them, the most common cause of which is childbirth. Which is to say, at least one female in your immediate family will probably suffer a prolapsed vagina in her lifetime. When I query this with my mother, she says, ‘Ha ha, all good. Tell them I have a new fanny now after my operation!’
After breakfast, we head south on the subway and spend the morning riding the Staten Island Ferry. She makes me take a lot of photographs—crossing the street, in front of the statue, at the breakfast table over her French toast—and I roll my eyes each time.
I think: This is why I don’t want to hang out with you. It’s hard fucking work.
I say: ‘I’m not your personal photographer.’ And then it comes, the stab of guilt that sits in my brain whenever we are together and I am wishing she would shut up or stop making that smacking sound with her lips that I hate but have somehow begun imitating when alone. Anger wells up inside of me. At myself, for agreeing to let her come on this trip when I needed to do it alone; at her for not realising that. At myself again, for not being kinder to her.
She ignores my comment, smiles, hands me her phone. We have begun training each other in how to have an adult relationship. This is new for us. Despite my being almost thirty, our relationship has always been one of parent and child, not adult and adult. I have been trying to push it towards the latter, but it is difficult. Because of her grief, yes. But also because of me. I can be childlike, in my tone of voice, my moods and whims, my inability to remember she is human and not a machine without feelings. She can also be childlike, in her neediness, the demands she doesn’t realise she makes, her methods of subtle emotional blackmail. I make her sound villainous. She is not. I exaggerate. And I cannot ever really know the inside of her mind.
(When I am editing this chapter, I spend days to-ing and fro-ing, unable to answer the questions my editor has posed about petulance, being a good person, silence and so on. I send it to a friend, hoping her thoughts will help, but this overwhelms me further. Eventually, after more than a week of being unable to work—a rare occurrence for me—I call my mother.
‘Can I ask you some questions about New York?’
‘Sure,’ she says, in her agreeable way.
Before we hang up, she says, ‘I just want you to call me once a week and ask how my day was and come home to visit once a month.’
And I think: That seems entirely reasonable, so why am I finding this so bloody hard?)
After Staten Island, we briefly run to make the returning ferry and she is so excited to have made it with one minute to spare. ‘You didn’t know I could run, did you?’ she says.
This is true, of course—but it shouldn’t be, because she frequently tells me stories of how she was a runner in primary school just like me—and I smile and raise my hand for a high five and try to make the most of the endorphins. ‘Great job!’ I say, and it feels good to offer her something positive.
Two weeks later, my mother flies home. It is difficult to see her go, to watch her climb into the airport transfer that she booked. She is proud of herself, that she booked it herself. I am equally proud of her, for having gone outside her comfort zone and explored at least part of New York City on her own.
‘I’m nearly sixty, you know,’ she says, each time I try to push her.
‘I know. You ordered a sixtieth cake for your fifty-ninth, remember?’
After she leaves, I stop replying to her messages, which come several times a day. Every couple of days she texts to ask if I’m still alive and I reply to tell her I am.
It takes a few weeks, but we eventually start speaking regularly again.
Still in New York, I go out for a drink one night and message my mother: Guess where I am? Somewhere from a film we watched growing up.
The Mary Kate and Ashley house? she instantly replies.
Coyote Ugly, I reply. You’d love it here.
I wish I was there, she says.
I ask what she and Dad are doing and she says they’re driving to Canberra today instead of tomorrow and it dawns on me that yet again, I forgot the anniversary is coming up. I want to deactivate my Facebook before my account is drenched in photos of my sisters’ faces, or at least turn my phone off for a few days. It is always chaotic at this time of year: people texting me well wishes, being tagged in photos and crying emoticons, friends DMing to ask how I’m going. It is kind of them, and I love that this happens but equally, I am desperate for space, to be cut off from this outpouring of reminders.
Later, talking to my new lover on the phone, I start to tell him about the book I’m reading and interrupt myself to say, ‘While I think of it, just so you know, I’m leaving my phone at home tonight.’
Back home, it’s just before sunrise on the anniversary.
Here in New York, it’s not far off sunset, the evening before.
‘You’re a little girl in a big city,’ he says.
But phones have always felt like false protection to me. An image of my Facebook wall comes to mind and I burst into tears. The tears are unexpected, and I don’t feel sad but I can’t stop them.
‘I was wondering how you were going with that,’ he says.
With what? I almost ask, and then remember what he’s talking about.
It is a constant movement, this shuffling between sudden and unexpected awareness, and ignorance of the past.
After we get off the phone, the tears come on stronger. It feels good. The crying doesn’t hurt as much as I expected it to.
Later, my mother tells me, ‘I never thought I’d get to see New York in my lifetime.’
17
The thing is this: I hardly remember anything about my sisters.
I didn’t realise they were absent from the book until I’d finished a first draft and started showing it to friends. I was shocked when someone pointed it out.
Then, my editor kept asking: ‘Is it possible to say their names?’
This amused me. She was the most recent of many who did not understand. In real life, I do not think of the girls, and I definitely do not say their names. In this way, the girls’ absence from the manuscript was a metaphor for my grieving process: avoidance. I have an impression of them etched inside me, but they do not exist as separate forms with scenes of their lives taking up my headspace. Much of this book I wrote without tears. But as soon as my editor asks me to spell out their names, I start to cry. This is what I have avoided: thinking or writing about Carlie and Lisa, and crying.
My father sends me an email. It’s a link to a shared folder on Dropbox. He’s called it car accident. In it there are multiple folders:
Accident site—Dec 2006
Cemetery
Forever remembered webpage
Girls’ photos
Inquest brief
Lisa’s 15th birthday
Memorial garden
Spiritual readings
Stuff from Chloe
And on they continue. Beneath the folders, twenty-three rows of documents and images. A medication history form, Lisa’s school photo from the year before she died, a road-trauma recovery workbook, an audio file titled Sydney Australia 3rd April 2009.
It is a chronicle of my father’s grief. In one photo, his pudgy finger—its fingernail short, a line of dirt under the free edge of the nail bed—points to the centre of a paragraph in a book:
‘I could eat.’ That’s one thing about me: I can always eat. Nothing interferes with my appetite. And drink. Booze is my friend. Shuts up the worrywart living in the left side of my head.
This makes me laugh. My father is the eater and I the drinker.
When I google the source of the quote, I smile. Smuggler’s Blues: A True Story of the Hippie Mafia. I’ve never seen my dad read anything about hippies in his life. The mafia bit is less surprising. He loves true crime stories.
The next photo I open is confronting. A tarmac road stretches away from the camera, two lanes visible, one sidebar of grass to the left of the highway. In the centre of the image, there is a large circle where the road is blackened, as if burnt in a fire. That is exactly what happened: this is the place on the road where the car, my sisters inside, burst into flames.
It is February 10, 2019. I am almost thirty-one. I have been putting off this remembering for thirteen years, and I am terrified.
When I open the folder titled Lisa’s 15th birthday, it is empty.
But later, in another folder titled 31 Jul 2010, I find a document with the same name as the empty folder. I open it and see a series of images pasted into the Word document beneath a short letter, in the middle of which Dad has typed: Make sure Carlie helps you blow out your candles, remember how much trouble you have and also the trouble you have dribbling on the cake. So please take care.
To the right, on the Dropbox logo that pops up with every document opened, a note saying this file was last updated by Maurice Higgins eight days ago.
Further down, beneath another document of images:
Five years on. I miss you both so much and I wish I could be with you both. It has got a little easier but I keep feeling the pain of knowing that you both died because of something I did. I just wish I knew what it was and why it happened. Love you both heaps, Dad xoxoxoxoxoxo
I feel physically sick.
There are folders named Relaxation and Slow breathing, etc.
Both are empty.
My mother and I head to Towradgi Beach.
The sand is wet and flat underfoot, making the walk to the water easy. I watch the waves and will myself to ask the question in my head. All I want is to be able to ask her without crying. This is the real work I need to do: thinking about my sisters, something I have successfully avoided until now.
‘What do you think Carlie and Lisa would be doing today?’ I say. And then realise I need a qualifier because she sometimes talks about how Carlie would be looking after everyone in heaven and Lisa would be making people laugh. ‘If they were alive, I mean.’
There are only a couple of seconds of hesitation from my mother, and I am surprised at how strong and calm her voice comes out.
‘I think Carlie would be a teacher,’ she says, and it occurs to me that this question is not as shocking to her as it is for me and that actually she’s probably thought about this many times over the years.
‘Yeah, I can imagine that,’ I say.
‘And Lisa, I don’t know.’
We are both at a loss trying to picture what Lisa’s adult life might have been.
‘Helping Dad with the van. Or making everyone laugh,’ she says.
We reach the flagged area of the beach, and Mum holds out her hand for my towel, hat and dress. She’s forgotten her swimmers, so only I will be going into the water. Neither of us mentions the girls again that day. I am surprised at how painless that was.
Several weeks later, as we are shifting into autumn weather, I post on Facebook asking for family and friends to send me their memories, hopeful I might ignite my own.
The next morning, I open my computer to check what responses have come in. There are two texts from my mother that she’s sent in reply. I open Facebook. There are fifty-four comments on my status update.
My cousin Chantelle posts:
I remember strange things, like snippets in time that I didn’t realise, then, that I should put so much effort into remembering: you learning and teaching Lisa sign language. Us all sitting in the front room (the one with the brown lounges), eating hot chips from white paper and teaching Carlie that if she broke it in half and dipped it in tomato sauce it would cool down faster. I remember you, Adam, Carlie and myself building a little ‘cubby house’ out of old red bricks around the side of the house. Lisa laughing that her knees were different heights when she would sit
on the ground. Eating cheese and tomato on Jatz biscuits around the kitchen bench. Riding bikes and rollerblades in the street. Slip and slides on the orange tarp with a sprinkler hanging off the clothes line and washing-up detergent to make it slippery. I remember Lisa on her communion day—in that white dress . . .
Then come the posts from family friends:
I remember Lisa’s love for the Teletubbies and how she was Laa-Laa, and we would come to your house and call her Po. She would yell, ‘I’m not Po, I’m Laa-Laa, look,’ and would pull at her t-shirt and yell, ‘It’s yellow,’ and we would tell her, ‘That’s not yellow, that’s red, you’re Po,’ and she would lose her mind.
I remember . . . pie and sauce all over her face after a lunch order and Lynda taking her aside and cleaning her up.
My best friend from the time of the accident writes:
I remember we were all hanging out at Lauren Hernandez’s house and your dad dropped you off. After about 10 minutes there was a knock at the door. It was Lisa crying, she was so upset she didn’t get a chance to say hello to all of us. And she came in and hugged us all.
In among all of the comments, my mother writes: I’m loving all these beautiful stories. Please keep them coming. This is the post that makes me cry.
More family friends:
My favourite memory of Lisa was when we were on the way to Una Voce. We were sitting next to each other in the car talking about school. She was adamant that she had five boyfriends and had the biggest smile on her face. When I asked for their names I got back: ‘Bob, Jack and the others aren’t important enough to remember. But they sure do love me!’
The Girls Page 22