Apples Never Fall Page 5

  She turned a page of her magazine and tried not to listen to what was clearly a private conversation.

  “So that explains why Mum isn’t answering our calls.” Brooke’s voice was looser and louder and also somehow younger than the soothing, well-modulated tone she used when addressing her patients. “We just feel like this might be more serious than we first thought.”

  Goodness me. The patient closed her magazine. She wished now that she had rung the bell.

  “I know. Off-grid means off-grid, but it just doesn’t seem like her to leave her phone behind.”

  Pause.

  “Sure, but you know how you said you and Mum argued the last time you talked?”

  Pause.

  “Yes. Yes, I know, Dad, but I just wondered … I just wondered, was it a very bad argument?”

  There was a seismic tremor of emotion on the word bad.

  The patient stood. She tossed the magazine back into the basket. This was not a call that should be overheard.

  Everyone had secrets. The patient had not, in fact, been jogging when she ruptured her ligament. She’d never jogged in her life. She’d fallen out of a taxi after two glasses of champagne and three espresso martinis at a fiftieth birthday lunch. She suspected that Brooke Delaney knew she hadn’t been jogging, and she appreciated the fact that she didn’t push the point.

  The patient quietly got up and left the office. She would come back in fifteen minutes. She didn’t need to know her lovely physiotherapist’s possibly terrible family secrets.

  Chapter 8

  LAST SEPTEMBER

  Brooke Delaney drove to work on Monday morning with breakfast radio on low, her sun visor tilted down. Occasionally she moaned softly, for effect. For whose effect, she didn’t know. Her own, presumably. She wore polarized sunglasses, but the morning sunlight pouring through her tinted car windows still felt hurtful, in an unspecified way, like a mild insult from a stranger.

  She stopped at a pedestrian crossing to let a little schoolgirl cross. The girl waved her thanks like a grown-up and walked hurriedly, gratefully. Flat feet. She broke Brooke’s heart. You are fine, Brooke told herself as her eyes filled with tears and she put her foot on the accelerator. You feel strange and teary and fragile and surreal but you are fine.

  She touched her forehead. The ache is just the memory of the pain, not the pain itself.

  The migraine had attacked with a brutal blow to her right eye early Saturday morning. She was braced for it. She’d known the fucker was coming, so she’d canceled her plans in anticipation. She’d spent the weekend alone in her bedroom, the blinds down, a cold cloth on her forehead. No one but her and her migraine.

  It was her first migraine since Grant had moved out six weeks ago. No one to bring her ice packs or glasses of chilled water, no one to check in or care or lay a firm hand on her forehead. But she’d got through it on her own. A migraine wasn’t childbirth. Although she’d read a survey that showed women who had experienced both rated their migraine pain as the higher of the two, which was oddly cheering to hear.

  She remembered her friend Ines talking about how, after her divorce, she’d constructed a desk from an IKEA flat-pack on her own while playing “I Am Woman,” but then, after she was done, all she’d wanted to do was call her ex and tell him about it.

  Brooke felt the same desire to call Grant and tell him she’d got though a migraine on her own. How pathetic. Her migraines were no longer of interest to him. Perhaps they never had been of interest to him.

  “Are you postdrome, my darling?” her mother would say if she saw her this morning, because now, thanks to her podcasts, she recognized symptoms and spoke the lingo with jaunty ease.

  Brooke wanted to snap: You don’t get to use the lingo, Mum, if you’ve never had a migraine.

  But her mother would be so remorseful, and Brooke couldn’t stand it. She knew her mother wanted exoneration, and she didn’t think she was deliberately withholding it, but she certainly wasn’t giving Joy what she needed.

  “The thing is,” Joy would say, “I was so busy that year, the year the headaches started, I mean the migraines, when your migraines started, that was a really bad year in our family, a terrible year, our ‘annus horribilis,’ as the Queen would say, I might be mispronouncing it, my grumpy old Latin teacher, Mr. O’Brien, would know how to pronounce it, he drowned, the poor man, on Avoca Beach, not swimming between the flags apparently, got caught in the rip, so no one to blame but himself, but still, anyway, that year, that bad year, there was just a lot … and we thought we might lose the business, and both your grandmothers were so sick, and I had no idea what you were going through—” And Brooke would cut her off, because she’d heard all this so many times before, right down to the drowning of the Latin teacher.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mum. It was a long time ago.”

  Her mother had too much time on her hands. That was the problem. She was going a little dotty. She spent hours looking at old photos and then ringing her children to tell them how little and cute they’d been and how sorry she was for not noticing it at the time.

  The truth was, Brooke didn’t even remember her mother dismissing her migraines. She had no memory of the “unforgivable” time when Joy yelled at Brooke for coming down with a migraine when they were running late.

  What she remembered was the extraordinary, astonishing pain, and her fury with her mother for not fixing it. She didn’t expect her dad or the doctors to fix it. She expected her mother to fix it.

  Brooke managed her migraines now: efficiently, expertly, without resentment. Watch for the symptoms. Get onto the medication fast. This had been the first in six months. She was responsible for the incarceration of a monster, and sometimes the monster broke free of its shackles.

  “Last Tuesday, retired tennis star Harry Haddad revealed that he is planning…”

  The radio announcer’s words slid into her consciousness. She flicked up the volume.

  “… a return to professional tennis next year. The three-time grand slam champion retired after a serious shoulder injury four years ago. He announced his plans on social media last Tuesday and today posted a picture of himself working out under the guidance of his newly appointed coach, former Wimbledon champion Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan. Haddad, who is reportedly soon to release his autobiography, is obviously hoping for one last exciting chapter in the story of his incredible career.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Harry,” said Brooke.

  She changed the radio station to show her disapproval. He was making a mistake. His shoulder would never be the same and Nicole wasn’t the right fit. Former greats didn’t necessarily make great coaches. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was a beautiful, single-minded player, but Brooke suspected she didn’t have the patience for coaching.

  She tapped her fingers against the steering wheel and murmured, “C’mon, c’mon,” to the traffic light. Her dad had no patience with traffic lights either, or children who took too long to put on their shoes, or romantic scenes in movies, but he had all the patience in the world when it came to coaching.

  Brooke remembered how he used to watch and analyze a student, eyes narrowed against the glare—he refused to ever wear sunglasses on the court; it had been a historic moment when he let Brooke wear them in a fruitless attempt to combat the migraines—and then he would beckon the player to the net, holding up one finger while he thought it out: What do I need to say or do to make it click in this kid’s head? He never gave the same lesson twice.

  Brooke’s mother had been good with the group lessons, keeping the little kids running and laughing (she wore glamorous oversized sunglasses when coaching, although never when playing), but she didn’t have the passion or patience for one-on-one coaching. She was the businesswoman, the brains behind Delaneys, the one to start the pro shop, the café, the holiday camps.

  Joy made the money and Stan made the stars, except they’d lost their shiniest star: Harry Haddad.

  Stan could have taken Harry all the way an
d much further, although some would argue that three grand slams were as far as he was ever going to get. Not her dad. He believed Harry could have flown as high as Federer, that Harry would be the Australian to finally break the Australian Open drought, but they would never know what could have happened in the parallel world where Harry Haddad stuck with his childhood coach, Stan “the Man” Delaney.

  The light changed and she put her foot on the accelerator, thinking of her poor parents and how they’d be feeling about this news. They must surely know. The announcement was made last Tuesday. If they hadn’t seen it on the news, someone in the tennis community would have told them. It was strange that her mother hadn’t called to talk about it, and to worry about Brooke’s dad and how he’d feel seeing Harry back on the court.

  It was painful to watch her dad watch Harry Haddad play tennis on television. He quivered with barely contained tension through every point, his shoulders up, his face a heartbreaking combination of pride and hurt. The whole family had complicated feelings about their most celebrated student. Multiple Delaneys Tennis Academy players had done well on the circuit, but Harry was the only one who’d made it all the way to the Promised Land. The only one to kiss that magical piece of silverware: the Gentlemen’s Singles Championship Trophy at Wimbledon. Not once, but twice.

  Brooke’s dad had discovered Harry. The kid had never held a racquet, but one day Harry’s dad won a one-hour private tennis lesson at Delaneys Tennis Academy in a charity raffle and decided to give the lesson to his eight-year-old son. The rest, as Brooke’s mother liked to say, was history.

  Now Harry was not just a beloved sporting icon but a high-profile philanthropist. He’d married a beautiful woman and had three beautiful children, one of whom had been very ill with leukemia, which was when Harry became a passionate advocate for childhood cancer research. He raised millions. He was saving lives. How could you say a bad word about a man like that? You couldn’t.

  Except Brooke could, because Harry hadn’t always been a saint. When he was a kid, back when Brooke and her siblings knew him, he was a sneaky, strategic cheat. He used cheating as a tactic: not just to score points but to rattle and enrage his opponents. Her dad never believed it. He had always suffered from tunnel vision when it came to Harry, but then again, nearly all adults used to have tunnel vision when it came to Harry. All they saw was his sublime talent.

  While playing a match against Brooke’s brother Troy when they were teenagers, Harry kept blatantly calling balls out that were plainly in. Troy finally snapped. He chucked his racquet, jumped the net, and got in a couple of good hits. It took two adult men to drag Troy away from Harry.

  Troy was banned from playing for six months, which was better than he deserved according to their father, who took a long time to forgive Troy for shaming him like that.

  And then, just two years later, Harry Haddad betrayed Stan Delaney when he dumped him as a coach after he won the Australian Open Boys’ Singles. Brooke’s dad was blindsided. He had assumed, with good reason, that he was taking Harry all the way. He loved him like a son. Maybe more than his own sons, because Harry never questioned a drill, never rebelled, never sighed or rolled his eyes or dragged his feet as he walked onto the court.

  It was supposedly not Harry’s but his father’s decision to leave Delaneys. Elias Haddad, Harry’s photogenic, charismatic father, was his manager, and there in the player’s box at every match with a beautiful new girlfriend by his side. Brooke and her siblings never believed that Harry wasn’t involved in the decision-making process to dump their dad, in spite of the heartfelt card he sent their father, or the earnest, disingenuous way he spoke in fawning magazine profiles about his gratitude for his first-ever coach. Her dad never let himself get that close to a player again. He was beloved by his students and he gave them his all, except he kept his heart safe. That was Brooke’s theory, anyway.

  Brooke drove into the busy car park of The Piazza, as her local shopping village was now called after its recent redevelopment. Everyone enjoyed mocking the “Tuscan hilltop town” theme, but Brooke didn’t care much either way. The new Italian deli was great, the café had put up some nice photos of Tuscany, the hanging baskets of artificial flowers seemed almost real if you didn’t look too closely, and at least the fake cobblestones didn’t catch heels like real cobblestones.

  “Although the occasional twisted ankle would probably be good for your business, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, hey, Brooke?” the local MP had said on opening day last month, after he’d cut the ceremonial ribbon with a pair of giant novelty scissors. The MP was one of those men who gave everything he said a vaguely sexual connotation.

  If this trial separation maintained its momentum and rolled all the way toward a divorce, which it seemed to be doing, Brooke would have to date. She’d have to put on lipstick and endure vague sexual connotations over coffee.

  She pulled into her favorite parking spot, turned off the ignition, and looked at her bare left hand on the steering wheel. No indentations to mark her missing wedding and engagement rings. She never wore them to work anyway, and often she’d forgotten to wear them on the weekend, which was maybe relevant, but probably not. She was looking for signs she’d missed.

  Brooke’s clinic, Delaney’s Physiotherapy, was a two-room office she rented in between the café and the fruit-and-veg shop. The previous tenant had been a tarot card reader whose customers still sometimes turned up hoping for an “emergency reading.” Just last week a guy in a paisley shirt and tight pants had said, “Oh, well, if you can’t read my cards you might as well check out this dodgy knee of mine.” Brooke had predicted surgery in his future.

  “Brrrr! It sure doesn’t feel like spring yet!” said the weather reporter.

  Brooke fixed a stray eyelash in her rearview mirror. Her eyes were red and watery. She would tell today’s patients she had allergies. Nobody wanted a physio with migraines.

  Nobody wanted a wife with chronic migraines. A daughter or a sister with migraines. Or even a friend with migraines. All those cancellations! Brooke let the self-pitying train of thought unravel only so far before she snipped it short.

  “Who’s looking forward to the last few weeks of the snow season?” said the weather reporter.

  “I am,” said Brooke. Spring skiing meant torn and strained knee ligaments, back injuries, wrist fractures.

  Please God, let there be injuries. Just enough to get that cash flow flowing.

  God replied in the same aggrieved way Brooke’s mother answered the phone when her children left it too long without checking in: Hello, stranger.

  Forget I asked, thought Brooke. She turned off the radio, undid her seatbelt, and sat for a moment. Her stomach roiled. Mild nausea was expected the day after a migraine. Come on, she told herself, like she was a toddler. Out you get.

  Even on a good day, when she wasn’t postdrome, when she had arrived somewhere she actually really wanted to be, she always experienced this resistance to getting out of the car. It was a little weird, but it wasn’t a thing. Just a quirk. No one noticed. Well, Grant noticed, if they were running late, but no one else noticed. It dated back to her days of competitive tennis. She’d arrive at a tournament and be paralyzed by her desire to stay in the warm musty cocoon of the car. But she always did move in the end. It was not a thing. She was not her sister.

  No rush. She had half an hour before her first appointment.

  She hugged the steering wheel and watched a big-bellied man pick up a hefty box from outside the post office without bending his knees. That’s the way, buddy, strain those back muscles.

  When she’d taken on the lease for the clinic, she’d known about the planned redevelopment and been offered a substantially reduced rent as a result, but she hadn’t anticipated that months would slide by with delay after delay. Business slowed for everyone. The overpriced patisserie closed after forty years of business. The hairdressers’ marriage broke up.

  It was stressful, and Brooke needed to manage stress in order
to manage her migraines. Migraine sufferers shouldn’t start new businesses or separate from their husbands, and they certainly shouldn’t do both at the same time. They should move gingerly through their days, as if they had spinal cord injuries.

  Brooke had just managed to keep her fledgling practice afloat, barely. There was a period where she didn’t have a single patient for twenty-three days in a row. The words “You need more money, you need more money, you need more money” buzzed in her ears like tinnitus.

  But now the renovations were complete. The diggers, trucks, and jackhammers were gone. The car park was full every day. The café that had replaced the patisserie bustled. The hairdressers were back together and booked up six weeks ahead.

  “It’s now or never,” her accountant had told her. “This next quarter will be make or break.”

  Her accountant reminded her of her dad. He used to grab her by the shoulders and look her in the eyes. Leave it all on the court, Brooke.

  She could not have her business fail at the same time as her marriage. That was too many failures for one person.

  She was leaving everything on the court. She was giving it her all. She was being the best she could be. She was writing free articles for the local paper, doing letterbox drops, studying her Google Analytics, contacting possible referring physicians, contacting every contact she had, even God, for God’s sake.

  “If it doesn’t work out, the door is always open,” her old boss had said when she handed in her notice. New clinics failed all the time. Brooke had two friends who’d had to cut their losses and close up shop: one cheerfully, and one devastatingly.

  She put her hand on the car door. Out you get.

  She opened the door and her phone rang. At this time of day it had to be business-related. Friends and family didn’t call before nine.

  She answered at the same time as she registered the name on the screen: Amy. Too late.

  “Hi,” she said to her sister. “I can’t talk.”

  Brooke once had a boyfriend who could always tell which family member she was talking to on the phone just by the tone of her voice. Amy, he would mouth if he heard her now. “When it’s Amy you sound pompous and put upon,” he told her. “Like you’re the school principal.”