The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

by Felicity McLean

  ‘Do you know what it means, Tik?’ he said eventually. ‘It means nothing. We’re talking about something that happened twenty years ago, to a group of people who are all long gone. Mr and Mrs Van Apfel. Mr Avery. In some form or another, all three of your friends. None of them are here, so you’re not going to change anything now.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said hotly. ‘It affected everyone. It still does. You said yourself you wish you’d done more. You knew there was something bad happening at the Van Apfels’ place, you had your suspicions, you and Mum, and you didn’t do anything to stop it. How can you say that doesn’t matter now?’

  I could tell, even before I’d finished speaking, that I’d overstepped the mark, and now I felt a childish pang of shame. In the street outside the engine sounds started thrumming again, and the two of us stood, unspeaking, and listened as the revving sounds were joined by tyre squeal and whoever it was test-drove their handiwork in noisy circles around the cul-de-sac.

  ‘Of course I wish I’d done more, Tik,’ Dad said after a pause.

  He turned back to the car then and slid another Foodbank box towards his chest.

  Did I know, he said, almost as an afterthought, about the time he tried to talk to Mrs Van Apfel? When he went over and stood on the doorstep of the Van Apfel house after Hayley Stinson’s sleepover party and asked Mrs Van Apfel what she knew about the schoolteacher and her daughter? Enquired how things were at home.

  ‘What did she say?’

  Dad couldn’t remember exactly. Or if he could, he wasn’t telling me.

  ‘I don’t remember getting very far,’ he said ‘But then, no one ever did with Carol. Not that I’m saying that what we did was enough. But jeez, Tik, telling yourself “if only” for the rest of your days sounds like hell to me.’

  And at the mention of the word ‘hell’, Cordie’s singsong voice was in my ear: Mr Avery said there is no hell.

  Maybe Mr Avery was right and hell wasn’t a destination, it was just some state we exiled ourselves to when we couldn’t bear where we really were. Maybe Mr Avery was right, and maybe Dad was too and none of it mattered in this instant, inside the garage at home, with Dad working quietly beside me and the dust motes swirling around us, catching the sunlight that streamed in through a gap in the door.

  Dad slid the last box towards us and we lowered it onto the floor.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ Dad suggested, and I nodded and followed him out into the late afternoon sunshine.

  ‘You never know, Tik,’ Dad said as we walked across the front lawn to the house. ‘It’s not something I ever seriously entertained until I found out what they’d had planned, but maybe Hannah and Cordie got away safely in the end.’

  He held the screen door open for me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  After Ruth’s funeral my world split in two. There was before and there was ever after. Left behind were the school plays, all those trips to the milk bar. Abandoned handstand competitions in the pool. Over there, in the past, on the far side of the abyss, neighbours still passed potato salad recipes and power tools across their brushwood fences while they talked about how it never rained. There, kids still played Knock ’n’ Run like no one could explain the empty space that stood, wiping its feet, when the neighbours opened their front doors. They still collected cicada shells, those crunchy coffins that got left behind long after the insects went winging away. Greengrocers and Redeyes. Shrill Yellow Mondays. Black Princes, fresh from being buried in the earth. And at number one Macedon Close, on the corner, opposite the Van Apfels, Mrs McCausley still supervised the comings and goings of everyone in the street through the gap in her pinch-pleat curtains.

  On that side was my childhood. Over here: a different animal. Here, I stood by the sign to our street every day before school. But Ruth never arrived, asking what I had for recess. And so each morning I walked to school on my own.

  Plans were made to hold a memorial service for Hannah and Cordie – a combined one – at the Hope Revival Centre, like Ruth’s. Only no one wanted to be the person to say it was time to go ahead with the service, even though the police search had been called off and the taskforce had taken over the investigation.

  ‘Wait another week if you’re not ready,’ the pastor advised. He was the same pastor who had presided over Ruth’s service. ‘Jesus is cool with patience,’ he said.

  And so while songs were chosen and Bible readings were selected, while the order of service was word-processed and formatted and saved on a floppy disk, nobody had the heart to go and press ‘print’. (They couldn’t anyway, without a date for the front.)

  Hannah and Cordie’s memorial service was put on hold for the whole of that summer. It wouldn’t have been the same anyway. It wouldn’t have been like Ruth’s. Not without any bodies.

  And not while there was still a chance the two of them were alive.

  The thing about Ruth’s funeral was it was so appallingly final. Ruth was gone, forever after.

  * * *

  One afternoon, after Ruth’s service and while we waited for Hannah and Cordie’s, Laura and I saw Mrs Van Apfel in the bush. ‘What’s she doing down there, you reckon?’ I said to Laura. ‘Putting food out for the birds?’

  The two of us stood side by side, safe on the back deck at home, looking out over the scrub on our side of the valley.

  ‘That’s not bird feed, Tik.’ My sister spoke cautiously. The two of us had been sizing up each other’s grief for weeks. Observing it, stepping around it, recalibrating it by the hour. Treading warily with one another ever since the Showstopper.

  ‘What then?’ I asked her.

  We watched as Mrs Van Apfel walked through the bush on the fringe of the fire trail. She stuck to the scrub where the shadows were longer. On her left, our line of houses discreetly turned their backs. To her right the valley fell away to the river. She walked purposefully, methodically, her head bent towards the dirt. Tracing a deliberate path through the dappled sunshine. Every few metres she stopped and stooped to the ground and left something in the dirt, and the only thing to say that the whole thing wasn’t a dream was the breeze that made goosebumps on my arms.

  ‘She’s laying crosses,’ Laura said.

  Palm crosses they were. Bent out of dried, twisted fronds. They were homemade, but they’d been folded tightly, pressed together with care. Mrs Van Apfel tried to stand them up but the soil was too shallow so she left them lying in the dirt.

  ‘But why?’ I asked Laura. ‘How does she know Hannah and Cordie are dead?’

  ‘Don’t say that!’ my sister said.

  ‘What, “dead”?’

  ‘Don’t say it, okay?’ Laura said again. ‘Crosses don’t mean anyone’s dead.’

  She was right, I supposed. At Easter, didn’t they mean new life?

  ‘What do these ones mean then?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe it’s her way of praying.’

  Then I had a thought: ‘Or maybe she’s leaving them like breadcrumbs for Hannah and Cordie to follow her home.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  As for Ruth, can’t you see her? Hope Revivalist to the end. Can’t you picture her in the instant she abandoned their plan? Abandoned their plan and abandoned her sisters. When she headed back to the amphitheatre on her own.

  ‘It’s a sin!’ she would have hollered when they refused to go home. ‘It’s a sin to run away, and I’m not gonna go with you!’

  I must have imagined it a thousand times. When she left Hannah and Cordie, when she slipped and she fell. When she disappeared down that crack, in the rock, by the river.

  You can see how easily it happened.

  * * *

  Already that night Ruth is tired. And she’s got sore feet in her jelly shoes. She is hungry, hungry, hungry the whole time they walk.

  ‘I want to go ho-ome,’ she whinges mournfully.

  And Hannah snaps: ‘We’re not going home. Not unless you get us caught, that is.’

  Because that’s the real
danger at the rate Ruth is walking. Their parents will work out they’re missing soon, and then there’ll be hell to pay. Hannah knows. But Ruth is slow. She plods and stumbles. She’s scared of the dark.

  Though mostly she moans and wants to go back. And Cordie turns and places one hand on her hip where her T-shirt is tied in a knot. ‘So go back,’ she says coolly. ‘You weren’t supposed to come in the first place, you know.’ And Ruth scowls and stops to pick a stick out of her shoe. It’s impossible being seven when your sisters are thirteen and fourteen. Impossible to keep up. Impossible to be taken seriously.

  ‘She can’t go on her own,’ Hannah points out to Cordie. (See how she acts like Ruth’s already not there?) ‘She’d never find her way back. No way she would. And what if something happens to her?’

  ‘Yes, I would! I would find my way back, Hannah!’

  Ruth’s even more determined now. She’ll prove she can do it. She’ll show Cordie, and she’ll show Hannah too. (Though it is very dark, and she hasn’t been concentrating on the route Hannah has taken to get them this far.)

  ‘And then you’d blab,’ Cordie says meanly. ‘You’ll tell everyone where we’ve gone so they come straight after us.’

  And Ruth can’t argue with that – they all know it’s true. She can’t be trusted to keep her mouth shut.

  And that’s the other thing: Ruth’s starving-hungry mouth. Ruth needs almost constant feeding. Ruth knows it, and Cordie knows it, and Hannah’s aware of it most of all. She’s worried that, without Laura’s money, it’s going to be hard enough to try to feed herself and Cordie, let alone fill Ruth’s stomach too.

  But there hadn’t been time to meet Laura in the clearing like they’d arranged. (Mr Van Apfel had hung around too long for that.) They’d been lucky to get away from the Showstopper at all. Hannah’s not so naïve she can’t see that.

  But now they have Ruth slowing them down. Ruth with no sense of urgency. Ruth who wants to go back so badly she drags her feet in the dirt.

  ‘Wouldja hurry up?’

  ‘Slowcoach.’

  ‘I’m going home!’ Ruth announces, as if the words have been waiting there, simmering just below the surface all along.

  Then she stomps back down the slope in her pink plastic jelly shoes, her chin tipped defiantly to the sky, and she vanishes into the scrub, plait swinging, fists balled, sending up startled birds like flares.

  She’ll find her way back. She’ll show her sisters. All she has to do is head downhill and she’ll come to the river. But she’s further south than she thought, and it’s very dark now and she can’t see the amphitheatre across the water. Can’t make out the oval, or the footbridge to take her there. She’ll get higher, that’s what she’ll do. That way, she’ll get a better look at where she is. At where she needs to get to.

  I imagine her climbing grimly up and onto the boulders by the river, her stubby nails scraping against the sandstone. The rocks are jagged and high and she moves awkwardly. Crab-walks across their moss-kissed surface. Until she slips and suddenly she’s falling, she’s slipping between the rocks, and the night swims high above her and the walls of the valley loom like a lid, and she’s home. She is home.

  Ruth’s done with running away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The hospital where Laura went for chemotherapy was not in a single suburb. Instead it sprawled between two towns, dwarfing the weatherboard homes and Californian bungalows that survived all around it. As if the whole huge facility had been dumped in the wrong place. Unceremoniously, beside the highway.

  ‘You didn’t think we’d get here so early, did you?’ I asked.

  Laura and I sat in her car outside the hospital. She was in the passenger seat for once.

  ‘I didn’t think we’d get here at all,’ she said. ‘Not the way you took on that truck changing lanes on the bridge.’

  I grinned. I’d had to slide the driver’s seat forward in order to reach the pedals that morning. My sister had four and half centimetres on me. Three weeks I’d waited before I was allowed to drive her car, and now I’d gone and mucked up her seat settings.

  We were waiting to go inside for chemotherapy. I’d been by her side for the past two days too. (Though Mum said she’d do the next shift so I could stay home and pack. I was flying back to Baltimore on the weekend.)

  It was blisteringly hot in the car, even with the windows down, and even in the deep shade of a Moreton Bay fig that sheltered half-a-dozen parked cars under its canopy. That tree must have reached twenty metres into the air. The car park was littered with fermenting purple-speckled figs. Its roots ruptured the asphalt with their collarbones.

  ‘You too hot?’ I asked Laura. ‘I can switch on the airconditioning.’

  I was sticking to the vinyl seat with sweat. But Laura was curled up with a fleecy jacket laid over her like a robe. It made her look strangely regal.

  ‘No aircon. Please,’ she said. ‘I need to soak up the heat.’

  She wouldn’t be able to get warm once the chemo kicked in. She said it was like the cold got into her bones.

  So we stayed in the car – in the heat – with the windows wound down, though I would have much preferred to wait inside the hospital. In there it smelled of sickness but at least there was airconditioning and filtered spring water in the cooler.

  ‘When’s Jade Heddingly’s engagement party?’ I asked to distract Laura. She looked ashen wrapped in that jacket.

  ‘The Saturday after you fly out,’ she said. ‘Shame you can’t come, you’d know just about everyone there.’

  ‘Bad timing,’ I said, pulling a face, though we both knew I was lying.

  ‘Your mate Mrs McCausley will be there. And the Townsends from number nine, and the Tooleys. The Gonskis can’t make it – they’re away in Bali. Did I tell you Anna has a sarong shop over there now?’

  I shielded my eyes from the sun as Laura told me a long story I couldn’t follow, about Anna Gonski’s sarong shop and the tax breaks they got, about how they spent each winter in Seminyak.

  ‘And who’s Jade marrying again?’ I asked when she’d finished explaining. I was fairly sure Mum had told me, but I hadn’t been paying much attention to all the talk about Jade’s wedding.

  And my sister gave me a look that said: was I serious?

  ‘She’s marrying Jacob.’

  ‘Jacob who?’

  ‘You know. Jacob Hunter.’

  ‘What? The kid with the trombone?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s in the New South Wales Police Band now.’

  ‘That’s a long way from Tipperary.’

  But if Laura remembered, she wasn’t playing along.

  Jade was having seven bridesmaids, Laura told me, including Hayley Stinson from swimming club. ‘It’s going to be a massive wedding,’ she commented, and we sat and considered this in the heat and the quiet.

  ‘Hey, what about Reverend Richmond?’ I asked. ‘Will he do the ceremony?’

  I thought about the way he always wanted to be invited. And the way he could be counted on to fall asleep mid-event. Laura looked surprised. ‘Reverend Richmond is dead. He died more than a year ago.’

  She smiled wryly, and for the first time all morning. ‘He died in his sleep.’

  Mr and Mrs Van Apfel were dead too, though I knew that, of course. They’d died almost ten years ago, within weeks of one another. Laura had assured me at the time that it wasn’t uncommon. ‘Lots of married couples die close together, one after the other. We see it in the hospital all the time.’

  ‘But surely that’s only couples who are really old?’ I’d said. ‘The Van Apfels were only in their sixties, weren’t they?’

  Mr Van Apfel had died from an undetected pulmonary embolism – a blood clot that travelled to his lung. But when it came to Mrs Van Apfel, no one ever found out. An ambulance turned up, just weeks after Mr Van Apfel’s death, and took her body away.

  ‘And we only know that because Trent Rainer saw them wheel her out with a sheet pulled up over
her face. It was in the middle of the day,’ Laura had said. ‘We were all at work.’

  ‘Did Trent ask them what had happened?’

  ‘He said there wasn’t a chance.’

  Their house was sold a few months later. And then resold at fairly regular intervals after that.

  The silver frame of the car window glinted in the heat. Sparks of sunlight flickered along the ledge. Beyond the window, giant fig leaves shifted gently in the wind and showed their rust-brown underbellies.

  ‘You’re still going back to Baltimore then?’ Laura asked, even though she knew the answer.

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘Three and a half weeks was the longest I could get off work. Although . . .’

  ‘Although?’

  I glanced at her, at her jacket laid across her like a rug, its fleecy collar pulled right up to her chin. At the way the cuffs flopped, empty-handed, over the sides of her seat. She had dark circles under her eyes.

  ‘Although, I don’t know if I’ll go back to my old job,’ I said cautiously. ‘I was thinking, I don’t know . . . I guess I was thinking I might even go back and do some more study,’ I said shyly. ‘I was thinking, maybe medicine. Then paediatrics or something.’

  ‘Paediatrics?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Laura looked thoughtful.

  ‘You’d be good at that, Tik.’

  I waited for the punchline but it never came. Instead she looked at me sincerely, then she worked up a smile. ‘You would. You’d be a natural.’

  ‘You reckon?’ I was elated. ‘I’ve only just started thinking about it since I got back.’

  Then she smirked. ‘You’ve always been good at getting along with kids. It’s like you’re already down on their level.’

  I grinned like a loser. She rolled her eyes and it only made me grin more. I wasn’t stupid enough to go looking for Laura’s approval these days, but it was still wonderful to stumble across it.

  ‘Do you think you’re nearly ready to go inside?’ I asked then.

  Ahead of us the hospital looked like an enormous cool, white Esky.