The Girls Read online

  About The Girls

  In 2005, Chloe Higgins was seventeen years old. She and her mother, Rhonda, stayed home so that she could revise for her exams while her two younger sisters Carlie and Lisa went skiing with their father. On the way back from their trip, their car veered off the highway, flipped on its side and burst into flames. Both her sisters were killed. Their father walked away from the accident with only minor injuries.

  This book is about what happened next.

  In a memoir of breathtaking power, Chloe Higgins describes the heartbreaking aftermath of that one terrible day. It is a story of grieving, and learning to leave grief behind, for anyone who has ever loved, and lost.

  PRAISE FOR THE GIRLS

  ‘Higgins spares nothing in her telling of the slow violence of grief, in the puzzlement of transformation and the skewing of sound mind from one instant of catastrophe . . . An exacting act of detonation, The Girls bares a talented writer’s foundations at the same time as it raises the spirit of survival.’ Kate Holden, author of In My Skin

  ‘A tender and heartfelt book, exploring the intricacies and long aftermath of trauma and grief with great frankness and directness. Its honest and exacting exploration of what happens to the body and the self in grief is deeply moving, without being excoriating, and the writing is both lyrical and tough – Higgins has a distinctive and accomplished voice, and this book is a beautiful achievement.’ Fiona Wright

  ‘An astounding new voice whose work mines the slippery regions between grief, sex, love, parents and children. This book is a rare find.’ Felicity Castagna

  ‘An urgent, poetic and skinless howl of a book.’ Lee Kofman

  About The Girls

  Title page

  Disclaimer

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About Chloe Higgins

  Copyright page

  Names and identifying features have been changed for legal reasons or to preserve anonymity.

  For my parents, and Carlie and Lisa

  When my father speaks about the accident, he opens with the line: ‘When I killed my daughters . . .’ Lately, I have been trying to correct him. I give him books to read, make him come running with me, secure us back-to-back appointments with a psychologist. I do not know if it’s working.

  1

  At the thai restaurant near our psychologist’s office, my father and I share one main and one entrée. Outside, people continue their Sydney lives, the summer heat thick in their armpits. A mother is leading two children along, bags of vegetables on her wrists. Perhaps they are on their way home from tutoring. It is December 2016. I am twenty-eight years old, and I am learning what grief looks like.

  My father is losing faith in our psychologist. Or perhaps it is the practice of psychology he is losing faith in. When we began our appointments, he was impressed. She didn’t say the sentence that would have made him stand and leave mid-session: I’ve never met anyone who’s been through something so terrible. My appointment was before his and I’d almost wanted to tell her: whatever you do, don’t say it. But she didn’t, so he concluded that perhaps she was all right after all.

  Now, two or three sessions later, while sharing our post-therapy Thai, it feels like we are back to square one. When I ask him if she’s helping him with the guilt, he says, ‘There’s a difference between people who don’t want to let go of guilt and people who can’t let go of guilt.’

  I don’t understand the distinction, or which category he thinks he falls into, but I nod and keep listening. A few years ago, someone wanted to put Dad in touch with a man who’d lost a daughter in a car accident. They thought it might help him to speak to someone suffering a similar kind of grief.

  Dad declined. ‘No. There’s no point talking to him. He only lost one daughter, and he wasn’t driving. It’s not the same thing.’

  A few weeks later I again travel up from where I live, in Wollongong, to see my parents. Wollongong is an hour’s drive south of their western Sydney home; we have our privacy and yet are close enough to visit each other at will.

  I tell Mum I want to go skiing again with Dad. We’re standing in the kitchen.

  She shakes her head. ‘He won’t go. Don’t bring it up.’

  He doesn’t dance anymore either. He used to dance while singing ‘Don’t Cry Daddy’ and Lisa would tell him he sounded exactly like Elvis. Now he won’t even dance at weddings.

  ‘He doesn’t think he deserves to have fun,’ my mother explains.

  A year or two ago, he danced one song with me. It was a father–daughter number at a schoolfriend’s wedding and I had to physically drag him to the floor. I was surprised he allowed me to. We danced, he cried, I tried not to, and then he returned to his table at the end of the song and never let me do it again.

  There are things we cannot say:

  I love you.

  I’m sorry.

  I’m hurting.

  I’m confused.

  Please stop telling yourself that you killed your daughters.

  My parents and I are on a drive to Mudgee, my mother’s home town. Three hours north-west of Sydney, the place is known for colonial buildings, tourism and countryside wineries. I have brought a friend and during the drive she begins telling a story, a long joke that relies on an in-depth set-up. She starts describing the characters, gives them both names. The first she calls James, the second Lisa. The car goes quiet. She looks at me and realises it’s too late to back-pedal. I watch her eyes asking me: Would it be awkward if I said no, wait, I didn’t mean Lisa, I got confused?

  My dead sister’s name hangs in the air, filling up the cabin of the four-wheel drive, sucking the breath out of my father’s chest. My friend stops talking. My mother reaches forward in the passenger seat, turns the radio on, and starts singing along, out of tune, to a song by the Beach Boys.

  I’m sitting behind her; my father is in the driver’s seat. I can see the profile of his face: the sunspot below his eye that’s been darkening each year; the red drinker’s tinge of his nose, even though he never consumes alcohol; the skin starting to hang beneath his chin as his own father’s does. I watch him do that thing he does with his lip when he’s trying not to cry.

  This is what grief looks like: trying not to weep when someone uses the wrong name in a joke.

  My father’s favourite entrée at the Thai restaurant is satay chicken skewers.

  We have been having back-to-back monthly therapy sessions and dinner dates for almost half a year. I have been hopeful. He has lasted this long without finding fault. His pattern seems to involve seeking help, becoming upbeat for two or three months, then dismissing whatever new practice or practitioner he is trying. Each time I find something that helps me I push it towards him, as I did with this psychologist.

  He orders a serving of the skewers and starts explaining how the levels of certain gases in the girls’ blood suggests something about the timing of their deaths. But he loses me somewhere around the part where one of the girls—Lisa—had carbon monoxide in her blood and the other—Carlie—didn’t.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I say. This is n
ew information to me and I’m curious what’s brought it to his mind. For years after the accident, my father tried to have the vials of bodily fluids that had been extracted from the girls examined and re-examined, as if there was a chance each new attempt might return some previously unknown piece of information. His requests were declined.

  ‘It means Carlie was already dead when we hit the other car,’ he says. This happens again and again: Dad latching on to some new, often contradictory, piece of information that he thinks might be the thing to bring him answers. There are so many theories, so many unanswered questions that we will never know the truth of what happened.

  ‘And Lisa wasn’t?’

  ‘And Lisa wasn’t,’ he answers.

  I try to keep my question in my head, but it comes out. ‘I thought they were both already gone before the fire started?’

  ‘No,’ he says.

  I don’t want to think about what this means. Lisa was alive when the car burst into flames? I think about the tiny, white, gift-wrapped packages of their bodies, small in the centre of their open caskets. There was so little of them left that their remains were scooped up and held together with bandages and white sheets.

  The satay chicken skewers arrive.

  (Who scooped them up? Was there anything inside those bandages?)

  ‘But there was only a small amount of carbon monoxide in her blood,’ Dad says. He hasn’t touched his food.

  At the table next to us, a lady stands and advises her friends loudly, ‘I am filled to my eyeballs with urine.’

  My father stares, unblinking, at the food in front of him. Tiny pools of water have accumulated above each of his lower eyelids. The short grey stubble along his jaw is too thin to conceal his slight double chin.

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  ‘So she was alive for less than a minute after we hit the other car.’

  I stare at a poster of a woman sunbathing on a beach in Phuket behind him. ‘Okay.’

  I am trying to teach myself to cry at the appropriate times. In the evenings, I drink and smoke and read and do not cry. During the day, I’ll be standing at the front of a university seminar room, about to do a presentation on a Japanese novelist, and I’ll start to cry. Someone shouts at me for being late, and I cry. Sometimes, when I am alone and driving and the sun is shining and something good has just happened, I look up and say, ‘Thanks, God,’ and I cry. This is the closest I come to crying at an appropriate time.

  My father cries all the time. When the ship sinks in Titanic, when someone asks him how he is and one of the girls’ birthdays is less than a month away, when our neighbour’s kid gets an award at school.

  My mother doesn’t cry much. But when she does, she lets the tears hang there on her cheeks until they run down to her lip and she has to snuffle loudly to stop her nose running. She does this only when I have said or done something she doesn’t believe is a good idea, and she needs me to know she disapproves. I try not to encourage this behaviour, so I mostly pretend I don’t notice. It hurts too much to hug her, anyway.

  She is the one who holds us together.

  I tell her I think she should see a psychologist too and she texts back:

  What for? I have friends.

  It’s not the same, I reply.

  It is for me, she says. And then goes back to whatever she was doing.

  Once, while at a writers’ festival in Perth, I began chatting with a local writer about what she was working on. She wore work boots and a chequered shirt, used her self-deprecating humour as a way of connecting. Much of our banter was interspersed with laughter. Halfway through the conversation she paused.

  ‘And what are you writing?’ she asked, bits of laughter still on her lips.

  ‘A memoir.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I lost my two sisters in a car accident when I was seventeen.’

  At which she burst out laughing.

  To which I also burst out laughing.

  I have been observing this impulse in myself more and more lately. Someone tells me about a death, and I have to remind myself not to laugh. It’s not that I find it funny. But the absurdity of the situation, how abstract death is when you didn’t intimately know the person who has gone, how we try to find causes despite how random it all is, strikes me as amusing. But mostly, because what else is there to do?

  Later, she told me she’d recently lost her stepfather.

  I don’t know when exactly it happened, but my father has stopped telling me the truth.

  When I was younger, I’d save up my father’s opinion, as if his thoughts were a finite resource that I didn’t want to exhaust. I would go to him only when I wanted an opinion on something serious or scary or important.

  ‘What do you think, Dad?’ I’d ask. ‘Should I change schools?’

  Or: ‘Dad, can you read my essay?’

  When I was eleven: ‘Can you bring my fish back to life?’

  And later: ‘Do you think I could study psychology and do a property course at the same time?’

  And he would tell me the things I did not want to hear.

  These days, he only tells me what he thinks I do want to hear. These days, I open our conversations with the line: ‘Tell me the truth, Dad. Tell me what you really think.’

  I never say it, but sometimes I think it: sparing my feelings now won’t change how much it hurt when I saw you covered in white sheets and hospital tubes and we had to break the news and you howled like a wild animal.

  2

  I remember clearly what happened that night, the hour before the police arrived: my mother lets herself in through the front door, balancing keys in one hand, Bellissimo’s garlic pizza and a plastic container of fettuccine carbonara in the other.

  ‘It’s ready,’ she calls to me, her small mouth turned up into a smile.

  I stack my study notes on top of my books and push them to one side, knowing I’ll need them again soon: it is my final year of high school. Along with thousands of students around Australia, I am about to sit a series of trial exams that will contribute to my final grade for high school, which will in turn determine what university course I am accepted into. I am overeager and studious, and the first of those trial exams is scheduled for the next day.

  After dinner, Mum moves into the lounge room. I don’t know what she was watching that night, but at the time her favourite TV show was Home and Away, whose small-town characters were hit by cancer or murder or drug use each week and who took long walks by the ocean to figure out solutions together.

  I return to the dining room to continue rote-learning quotes from The Tempest for the exam essay the following morning. I have little interest in the Shakespeare play, but putting the study notes away at 7 pm isn’t how you get accepted into the University of Sydney’s Bachelor of Psychology program.

  Dad and my two sisters are away skiing for the weekend in the Snowy Mountains, five hours south of our home in western Sydney. It is an annual routine. Each winter my father takes us girls skiing while my mother stays home, away from the cold. This is the first year I’ve not gone. Carlie and Lisa are fourteen and nine, and have both been skiing since they were eight.

  The sound of knocking rings through the house and my mother stands to answer it. The front wall of our house is one large window and I see two police officers: light blue button-up shirts, navy slacks, hard-capped boots, a pistol at each of their waists.

  My parents are in their mid-forties and have been together twenty-four years. It is July 31, 2005. I am seventeen years old.

  Earlier that Sunday, I had friends over for a group study session. Spread out across the dining-room table, our notes were a mess; we were convinced the score given at the end of the year would determine the rest of our lives.

  As my friends and I recited quotes memorised off flashcards, the phone rang. My father’s friend D
ean was calling, to ask if I’d heard from Dad. Dean and his family had gone on the trip too. They’d taken separate cars, two kids in each. That afternoon, I later found out, Dad and the girls had headed home before Dean’s family.

  ‘No, I haven’t heard from Dad,’ I answered, skimming my study notes.

  That was around 5 pm.

  Now, around 8 pm, my mother answers the door. I’m hunched over my books.

  ‘Mrs Higgins?’

  ‘Yes?’ Mum says, confused. Her body is thick but short, and she looks small beside the officers.

  I put my pen down.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ she asks.

  ‘There’s been an accident.’

  ‘What kind of accident?’

  I push my chair back, the timber legs scraping against the kitchen tiles. The table has been handed down through the generations and one day, one of us girls will own it.

  ‘There was an accident on the Monaro Highway. Your husband’s in Canberra Hospital. You might want to pack some things and go there.’

  ‘And my girls? Jackie must be looking after them?’

  Jackie is Dean’s wife.

  Here, my memory fails me. (I had lunch once with a 72-year-old woman. She told me stories of growing up north-east of Kalgoorlie in outback Australia and teaching her nine-year-old to drive. I was impressed with how detailed her memories were. I told her so. ‘I haven’t suffered real trauma,’ she replied.)

  I imagine the cop saying, ‘No ma’am, I’m sorry. Your girls didn’t make it.’

  Years later, when I explain what I’m writing, my mother says, ‘The police didn’t come to the door, they rang the phone.’

  Another time, she tells me that she doesn’t remember my friends being at our house that afternoon. This freaks me out. What else am I not remembering correctly? I open Facebook, send my friend a message asking if she remembers studying at my house the day of the accident.

  Yes! comes her reply. And we were eating tinned spaghetti.