I was thirty-one that summer I came back to see my sister. Plain thirty-one – no need for the one-sixth these days. In a few years I’d be as old as Hannah, Cordie and Ruth all combined: fourteen plus thirteen plus seven. I was planning to live for another thirty-one years as well. Then another thirty-one after that. I might live nine lives in total for the Van Apfels’ short ones.
But that’s assuming Hannah and Cordie weren’t out there somewhere, racking up birthdays themselves.
* * *
Before I flew back to Baltimore I decided to spend a day walking around the city. Start down near the quay and walk along the foreshore. Watch the moss-green ferries pulling away from the quay. It took less than an hour to drive from Macedon Close to the heart of the city. And that’s where I saw her. There. In an underground car park of all places. As though she’d never left the east coast at all. Hadn’t vanished along with her sisters.
She was standing waiting for the lift to arrive so she could ascend to street level. While I cruised past in my car searching for a parking spot, and instead found Cordie Van Apfel in my rear-view mirror.
That blonde hair, those bare arms. Her hips broader now. It was Cordie, all right. Corporate Cordie. With her handbag and her laptop bag in matching black leather. Her dress was a deep russet red. But even without the red dress, Cordie was enough to make you stop. The curve of each calf. The sway of her back. The way she jabbed at the lift buttons even though the arrows were already lit up, and then adjusted her dress expectantly in the reflection of the doors. She couldn’t have been more Cordie-like if she tried.
But this was more than Cordie-like. This was Cordie, I was sure. And I wanted to pull over and leap out of my car and tell her to wait for me. To shout: ‘Cordie! Just wait! Cordie, I’m coming!’
To ask her where on earth she’d been.
But there were cars backed up behind me, snaking away in the dark. There was no room to leave the queue and so instead I guided my car around the corner, down the ramp, and onto an identical level below. I flung my car into a parking spot and wrenched the keys out of the ignition. I was barefoot and my shoes were wedged under my seat but I was faster without them, I reasoned. I ran to the fire stairs and took them two at a time and the concrete was cold under my feet.
When I reached street level I paused on the footpath. For an instant I was dazzled by the day. Then I saw Cordie in the crowd at the end of the block, waiting for the traffic lights to change.
‘Cordie!’ I shouted. ‘Cordie, wait!’
I began to run again. Started to weave in and out of the crowd, and there were elbows and shopping bags and shouted phone conversations. Across the street a jackhammer kicked off. I ran towards the intersection at the end of the block, and the traffic lights changed and Cordie surged across the street.
‘Cordie, wait!’ I yelled. ‘It’s Tikka! It’s me!’
But the pedestrian light flashed red and the traffic resumed and Cordie was gone, swanning up the next block.
At the corner I hesitated. I could still see Cordie across the street. I could still see her and she still looked the same. She had one arm held high across her stomach at a right angle to keep her laptop bag from slipping, the same way she used to keep her cast arm safe. Her blonde hair was brighter, more artificial than it used to be, but I still longed to reach out and touch it. To tug it. To make her turn around. A taxi sped around the corner in front of me. Then another. Then a courier bike. The coast was clear and I darted across the road, and a car blasted its horn at my back.
Up on the footpath I was on the same side as Cordie now, and I started to run again. My soles were burning. Lungs on fire. I held one arm out in front of me as I jostled through the crowd.
Ahead of me her blonde head bobbed along the street. Strands of her hair blew backwards as she strode, like fingers beckoning me on. But the footpath was so congested and I was losing ground. She seemed to drift further away with each step I took.
In the gulf that stretched out between us now, a group of tourists swarmed towards me. They must have been retirement age and yet they travelled along the street in pairs like schoolchildren. They pointed at street signs and graffiti, talking excitedly in a language I didn’t recognise. I watched as one woman in the group smiled beatifically at a pigeon on the footpath. Someone else took a photo of my bare feet with their phone.
Their tour guide walked at the back of the pack, his plastic lanyard swinging around his neck, his flagpole hoisted high into the air. At the top of the pole a small flag whipped and rippled in the breeze.
‘Are you okay?’ The tour guide eyed me suspiciously. He wasn’t really asking, more pointing out the fact I was standing, wild-eyed and barefoot, in the middle of the footpath. I shook my head as the last of his group filed past.
‘No – yes,’ I corrected myself. ‘Yes, I’m all right.’
He nodded and then continued ushering his tour group along the street while I stood watching.
I am all right, I thought, even though my heart felt like it might beat right out of my chest. Maybe it was all of those stairs I ran up, but the street seemed to swim dizzyingly.
On the breeze I caught the sharp smell of brine off the harbour and suddenly I was back – I was back in the valley with the stench of the river in my nostrils, and Cordie was there in her Daisy Duke shorts. A quizzical look on her face.
Why, she wanted to know, wouldn’t I just let her run? Why did I insist on pulling her back, tugging her sleeve, dragging her home? Hadn’t I seen how bad that turned out for Ruth?
I understood as I heard her voice in my mind that the only reason I kept seeing her was because I wanted to see her. Because even after all this time it made more sense than her simply being ‘gone’. But sense wasn’t the thing or, at least, it wasn’t enough. All the new truths, the amassed facts (Who heard what? Who was where?). All our secrets we’d kept subterranean for so long. None of these things explained what really happened to those girls.
Van Apfel. From the apple. From the tree of knowledge.
I could see now: no one ever truly knows.
‘I’m all right,’ I said again. Only when I said it this time I turned my head away from the tour group and I spoke the words softly, whispered them to the woman in the red dress who was disappearing up the street. For a moment I thought I saw her hesitate like she might look around, but she didn’t. She continued walking up the block.
And it was a relief then, to turn away and start walking in the opposite direction, away from that blonde head and back towards the car park I’d come from. I’d retrace my steps, and retrieve my bag and my shoes from under my seat so I could head out into the day for a second time.
And I guess the woman from the car park – the one who’d adjusted her red dress in the lift reflection – made her way to the far intersection. Who knows, maybe she crossed again and rounded a corner, before being swallowed up by the crowd.
Before she vanished back into thin air.