Apples Never Fall

“Your husband would never have been convicted,” Christina told her.

Then Joy asked her if the pandemic was affecting her wedding plans and Christina said that her wedding was going ahead, but it was going to be a much smaller event than originally planned.

“What a pity!” said Joy sympathetically.

“Such a pity,” said Christina, but she sounded like she might actually be smiling.

* * *

“What did you and Savannah do all that time you were away?” Amy asked Joy. “That’s a long time to spend together. Did you get bored?”

“Did you play games?” asked Brooke, because that’s what the Delaneys would have done. There always had to be a competition going on. Someone always had to be winning and someone always losing. “Did you … argue?”

Joy understood that her daughters felt conflicted about the time she’d spent with Savannah, because Joy had never spent that much time alone with either of them, and they all three knew that if they had, they would have driven each other right around the bend.

“Oh yes, it got very boring at times,” Joy told her daughters. “And we did annoy each other sometimes, yes.”

It wasn’t true. She and Savannah had got on just fine.

Probably because Savannah wasn’t her daughter, although she did feel maternal toward her, and she wasn’t really her friend, although it was like a friendship. She felt fond of Savannah, but she didn’t adore her in the fierce, complex way she loved her daughters, which meant, paradoxically, that she could spend three weeks with her no problem at all. Two tiny women in a tiny house.

Now when she looked back on those twenty-one days she first had to work her way through feelings of shame for the dreadful hullabaloo she’d caused, but once she got past that, she remembered that time like a sun-dappled dream, a holiday from her life and a holiday from herself, or the self that she’d become.

The wooden house where they’d stayed was surrounded by a four-hundred-year-old rainforest, waterfalls, and walking trails. Kangaroos and wallabies regularly streaked past the oversized window, like passing cars on a quiet suburban street.

Joy slept deeply and dreamlessly in a single bed. There were no mirrors in the house, and without evidence of her own face, or a husband or children, it felt strangely as though she were once again Joy Becker, with most of her life ahead of her, not most of it behind her.

Every couple of nights someone delivered a basket of food to their doorstep. It was simple fresh food: fruit and eggs and bread and vegetables. Not much meat. All curated to give the wealthy guests their rustic “back to basics” experience, but knowing it was curated didn’t seem to matter.

She and Savannah took long walks on their own and sometimes together. They read, for hours at a time. The house had a shelf full of very old paperbacks, none of which had been published after 1970. Time slowed and softened like a long hot summer from childhood.

She noticed that Savannah seemed to settle on one personality and stick with it. It seemed to be the personality of a young, reflective, quiet girl. All those strange little quirks of speech vanished. Sometimes they shared stories of their childhoods. Just happy stories. Savannah spoke about when she and Harry were brother and sister, before tennis, before ballet, before their parents’ divorce, when an afternoon in a fort made of bedsheets could last as long as a holiday. Joy talked about her grandparents. One day she told Savannah that her grandmother always called her underwear her “unmentionables,” and Savannah got the most delightful case of the giggles.

Then there were days when she and Savannah exchanged no more than a handful of words.

Joy loved the silence. She knew that she didn’t have the personality to do this on her own—she wouldn’t have lasted—but having Savannah there, half stranger, half friend, was the perfect compromise.

For the first time in decades she stopped.

She thought she’d stopped when she and Stan retired, but she hadn’t stopped at all. She’d kept on running hopelessly toward some unspecified, unattainable goal.

She found that the less she thought, the more often she found simple truths appearing right in front of her.

For example, she had given up her dream of a professional tennis career with clear eyes. No one could have convinced her to do otherwise, even if she found a way to travel back through time and tap herself on the shoulder and say, “He’s just a boy.”

He was never just a boy. He was Stan. She wanted him and she wanted his babies. She believed that Stan would not have been able to bear his wife’s success. She was probably wrong about that, because that was before Stan had ever coached. She didn’t know the man he would become and the pleasure he would take in seeing other players succeed. She was a girl of her time and she was a girl whose father had walked out and never returned. She believed men’s egos were as fragile as eggs. She believed that you needed to do everything possible to make sure that your man returned home.

She made the right choice for the girl she was then.

One day Joy might have a granddaughter who played tennis—all her grandchildren would play, it was impossible to imagine otherwise—and it wouldn’t occur to that precious girl of the future to give up her dreams of competitive tennis, or anything else, for a boy.

Also Joy wouldn’t let her.

* * *

One morning, while Savannah was still asleep and Joy sat on the veranda and drank a cup of tea and watched the sunrise—it was the same sun, but it seemed to move so much more slowly and elegantly than it did at home—she thought: I didn’t send Harry away only for the sake of the children, I sent him away because I was angry with Stan for the times he walked out, and I was angry because I was tired and because I felt responsible for everything: from Troy’s drug-dealing to Brooke’s headaches to tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s laundry. It was secret petty marital point-scoring and she would never admit that to Stan, because if he was going to forgive her he would need to believe that her motives had been nothing but motherly, but there was relief in admitting it to herself.

Surely Joy’s clever granddaughter would know how to have it all without actually doing it all.