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.’