Apples Never Fall

“What was she like?” asked Sulin. “The girl?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Debbie. “I didn’t take much notice of her. I wish I had. I’ve been looking back, trying to remember things that Joy said or did, if she seemed unhappy or depressed, but she seemed fine! She was fine with me, anyway.”

“Oh, where is Joy?” said Sulin suddenly as they stopped at a traffic light. She turned to look at Debbie. “It’s just not like her, is it?”

“No,” said Debbie. “It is not like her. Not at all. That’s what worries me.”

It was seventeen days now.

Both Debbie and Sulin had been part of an organized search yesterday through bushland near the bike path that circled the St. Helens Reserve. The bike path was the closest biking area to the Delaneys, and Joy had received a new bike from her son Troy at Christmas, which she supposedly loved, although not a single person had ever seen her riding it.

The four adult Delaney children had taken part in the search. Stan Delaney had not. Debbie didn’t know what to make of that, although a lot of other people knew exactly what to make of it.

“There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” said Sulin now, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. “It was last October.”

She looked worried, as if she were confessing something.

“I was driving home from book club, about nine o’clock at night, when I saw a man sitting in the gutter on Beaumont Road. I thought it was some drunk teenager, but then the headlights caught his face, and I thought, That’s Stan Delaney.”

“Sitting in the gutter?!” Debbie was scandalized. Stan Delaney was not the sort of man to sit in a gutter. He was far too tall.

“I know! So I pulled over, and he told me he’d been out walking and tripped and hurt his knee again. It just seemed odd because he was wearing jeans. He certainly wasn’t dressed for exercise. It was more like he’d wandered out of the house.”

“Gosh,” said Debbie. “That does seem a little bit odd.”

“Yes, and something else,” said Sulin carefully. “I think … I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure he’d been crying.”

“Crying?” Debbie tried to work it out. “Because of his knee?” Men did get tearier as they got older.

“There was something going on,” said Sulin. “I know there was, because I helped him into the car and drove him back home and all four children were there at the house. I didn’t get the feeling it was a celebration of any sort, that’s for sure. It was more like they’d just got terrible news. Something had happened … the atmosphere! You know how you just know? You could cut the air with a knife.”

“Was the girl still staying with them then? Savannah?” asked Debbie.

“I didn’t see her,” said Sulin. “I think she must have been gone by then. By the way, I haven’t told anyone else that.” She took her eyes off the road and shot Debbie a brief, anxious look. “I don’t know if I should.”

“I don’t know if you should either,” said Debbie.

She thought of the gossip and rumors swirling about the tennis club. Joy and Stan’s marriage had become public property. Everyone had an opinion to give. Some people said they’d never seen a happier partnership, on or off the court. People were in awe of the way the Delaneys silently communicated when they played doubles, switching spots without a word; it was like they had a telepathic connection. You never heard the anguished cries of other married couples: “Yours!” “No, yours!” “I said I had it!” When they w

on, which they invariably bloody did, Stan would lift Joy up like she was a child, spin her around, and kiss her smack-bang on the lips.

Others were eager to explain that it was all a front. People were sharing the subtle signs they’d witnessed over the years of marriage difficulties, violence, unhappiness, infidelity, and financial trouble. Late last year Joy had begun coming to Friday-night tennis on her own. It was supposedly because of Stan’s latest knee injury, but still, and then Joy herself had stopped coming sometime around Christmas. It felt like an awful invasion of privacy to hear people discussing the Delaney marriage. It was as if people were rummaging through Joy and Stan’s bedroom, and in fact, everyone knew how Barb McMahon had found Joy’s phone under the marital bed. It made Debbie feel obscurely angry, and she knew it had something to do with all the opinions people now had about her life and choices. When Dennis was alive she was part of a solid, respectable, unassailable unit: Mr. and Mrs. Christos. But the moment he died she was untethered. An elderly lady living alone. She was vulnerable, said her son. She must be so lonely, said her daughter. It all came from a place of love, but sometimes she wanted to scream.

Thank God for Sulin, who still treated her like a person.

“We’ll play hard tonight,” said Sulin. “For Joy. Distract ourselves.”

“Yes,” said Debbie. She saw the old folksy Delaneys sign with the smiling tennis ball on the skyline. Everyone still called the courts and clubhouse “Delaneys” even though Joy and Stan had sold the tennis school over a year ago. It was not as if the Delaneys had ever owned the courts, they leased them from the local council, but it was true that Joy and Stan had been the ones who led the way in lobbying the council to build them in the first place.

Debbie and Dennis had been there at that first meeting with the council. Joy did most of the talking. They were all four founding members of the tennis club. They’d been so young, with no idea of their youth or beauty.

For many years, Stan was president and Dennis was treasurer and Joy and Debbie made sandwiches. This seemed outrageous now. Joy should have been president, and Debbie should have been treasurer (she was a bookkeeper!), but they hadn’t thought anything of it at the time.

Dennis’s death had made those years of their early marriage so much fresher in her mind. Was it just the slideshow her daughter had made for the funeral? There had been a photo of the four of them at a party at the clubhouse, where they all got quite drunk on Joy’s homemade Hawaiian punch. It had been so strange sitting in the chilly church, seventy-four years old in stockings, seeing herself up on the screen in her orange miniskirt. She could literally taste the sickly sweet punch and feel the fabric of that miniskirt against her thighs. It felt like it was all still there, that time of their lives, somewhere metaphysical, accessible through some magical means other than memory.

Joy had been smiling sideways at Dennis over her glass of punch in that photo, while Dennis, with a huge handlebar moustache, looked back at her suggestively, and Debbie and Stan smiled unsuspectingly at the camera. Debbie had forgotten what a bombshell Joy used to be. (Wasn’t that the word Dennis once used for Joy? The Delaney Bombshell?)

Debbie’s daughter hadn’t noticed that she’d chosen a photo for her father’s memorial slideshow of him flirting with another woman. (She’d been more intrigued by the 1970s refreshments: cheese and pickled onions on toothpicks stuck in oranges so they looked like hedgehogs. “Oh my God, Mum, what are those things?”)