Apples Never Fall

But this girl didn’t look like one of the girlfriends. Troy went for glossy princesses and Logan went for sexy librarians and this girl was neither.

“Then I realized I didn’t have any money,” said the girl as they walked into the kitchen, and she stopped and tipped back her head to study the high ceiling as if it were a cathedral. Joy followed her gaze as it traveled around the room to the sideboard crammed with framed family photos and ornaments, including the pair of horrible sneering china cats that had belonged to Stan’s mother, and lingered on the bowl of fresh fruit sitting on the table: shiny red apples and bright yellow bananas. Was the child hungry? She was welcome to all the bananas. Joy didn’t know why she kept buying them. It was as if they were for display purposes only. Most ended up mushy-soft and black and then she felt ashamed throwing them away.

“I was just completely empty-handed. No wallet, no phone, no money: nothing.”

“Sit down, darling.” Joy sat down and pulled out a chair at the kitchen table.

Stan had stopped barking questions, thank goodness. He silently took down the first aid kit from its place in the cupboard above the refrigerator where Joy couldn’t reach it without standing on a chair. He put it on the table and opened the lid because Joy always struggled with the stiff lock. Then he went to the sink and got the girl a glass of water.

“Let’s take a look at this.” Joy put on her glasses. “Is it very painful?”

“Oh, it’s fine. I have a high pain threshold.” The girl lifted the glass of water with a shaky hand and drank. Her fingernails were ragged. A nail biter. Amy used to be a terrible nail biter. The chill of the cold night air radiated off the girl’s skin as Joy cleaned the wound with antiseptic.

“So you realized you didn’t have your purse,” prompted Joy as Stan pulled out a chair, put his elbows on the tabletop, clasped his hands together, and rubbed his nose against his knuckles, frowning heavily.

“Yeah, so I was freaking out, thinking, how am I going to pay the fare, and the driver wasn’t one of those friendly cabbies, you know, I could just tell, he looked like he could be the type to be mean, even aggressive. So we were just driving randomly, and—”

“Driving randomly?” interrupted Stan. “But what destination did you give the driver when you got in the cab?”

Joy shot him a look. Sometimes he didn’t realize how he could come across to people.

“I didn’t give him an address. I wasn’t thinking. I said, ‘Head north.’ I was trying to buy myself time while I worked out where to go.”

“Did the driver not even notice you were hurt?” asked Joy. “He should have taken you straight to the nearest hospital without charging you a cent!”

“If he did notice, he didn’t want to know about it.”

Joy shook her head sadly. People these days.

“But anyway, then, for some reason, I don’t know why, something made me do it, I put my hand in the pocket of my jeans and I couldn’t believe it! I pulled out a twenty-dollar note! It was so random! I never find money like that!”

The girl’s face lit up with childlike pleasure as she remembered the moment she’d found the money.

“Someone was looking out for you,” said Joy. She cut a piece of gauze from the roll.

“Yeah, I know, so as the fare got closer to twenty dollars, I started giving the cabbie random directions. Like, turn left. Second right. I don’t know, I was kind of delirious. I was just following my nose. Wait. Did I make that up? Following your nose. It sounds funny now I say it. How do you follow your nose?”

The girl looked up at Joy.

“No, that’s right,” said Joy. She tapped her own nose. “Following your nose.”

She looked over at Stan. He was pulling on his lower lip the way he did when he disapproved of something. He never followed his nose anywhere. You need a game plan, kid. You don’t just hit the ball and hope to win, you plan how you’re going to win.

“The moment the fare clicked over to twenty dollars I shouted, ‘Stop!’ And I just got out of the car. It’s so cold outside tonight, I didn’t realize!” The girl shivered convulsively. “And I’ve got bare feet.” She lifted her dirty foot and pointed at her toes. “I was just standing there in the gutter. My feet felt like blocks of ice. I thought, You idiot, you stupid, stupid idiot, what now? And then I started to feel dizzy and I looked at the houses and yours seemed the friendliest, and the lights were on, so…” She tugged on the sleeves of her shirt. “So here I am.”

Joy paused, the gauze midair. “So … but … so are you saying, we don’t, you don’t…” She tried to think of a more elegant way to put it, but couldn’t. “You don’t know us?”

She saw now that she’d been kidding herself thinking the girl was familiar. She was only familiar in the way everyone seemed familiar these days. They’d just let a stranger into the house.

She checked for signs of criminal tendencies and found none, although she wasn’t exactly sure how those tendencies would manifest themselves. The nose stud was really quite pretty. (Amy had had the most dreadful lip piercing a few years back, so Joy wasn’t too concerned by a nose piercing.) A tattoo of a leafy green vine wasn’t exactly intimidating. She seemed fine. A bit flaky perhaps. But she was sweet. This girl couldn’t be dangerous. She was too small. As dangerous as a mouse.

“You didn’t have any friends or family you could go to?” asked Stan.

Joy gave him another look. It was true she wanted to ask the same question, but there had to be a nicer way.

“We’ve only just moved down here from the Gold Coast,” said the girl. “I don’t know a single person in Sydney.”

Imagine, thought Joy. You’re all alone, without money, in a strange city, and you can’t go back home, what can you do except throw yourself on the mercy of strangers? She couldn’t imagine herself in the same situation. She had always been cushioned by people.