Apples Never Fall

A quietly shattering moment marks the beginning of the novel’s movement into solving the twin mysteries of Savannah’s sudden appearance and Joy’s sudden disappearance. “It was no coincidence,” a stunned Brooke realizes, staring into the dead eyes of an old newspaper photograph of a young girl, “that [Savannah] had turned up at her family home; she’d been there before” (296). A banana, of all things, sparks the memory’s return: A young, ravenous, and desperate Savannah, denied food because her mother was bent on molding her into perfect “prima ballerina” shape, snuck into the Delaney home—where her brother was training with Stan—and snatched a banana from Brooke’s backpack in the kitchen. Although it’s a small-scale theft, the Delaney clan goes ballistic on the hungry child. The treatment of the desperate young woman reflects how far the family must move emotionally and psychologically to overcome its tennis-ethics of paranoia and exploiting the vulnerabilities of others to protect its territory—the us-versus-them perception—to reclaim its humanity.

When Savannah finds Joy and her kids poking through her room, she decides that she must reveal the story of that long-ago day. As she recounts how they treated her then, it’s clear that the emotional shortcomings of the Delaney clan were at a fever pitch, as the parents were running the academy, nursing their protégé, and working to develop each of their children. Stan’s confession to a shocked Joy reveals Savannah’s attempt to seduce him when Joy was in the hospital; Joy’s discovery of the photo album confirms that Savannah is Harry Haddad’s sister; Simon’s investigation reveals Savannah’s ties to an illegal tennis memorabilia internet scam. Now Savannah begins to confirm suspicions about her motivations and her character, and she appears to be a credible villain who tricked her way into the Delaneys’ confidences to secure memorabilia she could then turn into quick cash. When she’s cornered, with no other strategy left to play, Savannah shares the story of her day at the Delaney Tennis Academy. Suddenly, she inspires sympathy. Even as her brother feasted on steaks as part of his regimen at the Delaney home, Savannah explains, she was on a strict diet due to her mother’s misguided efforts to give her the “ethereal” look of a “ballerina.” Hungry and without money, she simply entered the Delaney home through the unlatched sliding door. Her reception was being chased from the kitchen and out of the house—and being called a “vulture” by Troy. Amy tells her father, “We were awful to her” (329). Just when sympathy shifts a bit to Savannah, she weaponizes truth and lobs her truth-bomb into the Delaney clan: Joy, not her father, was responsible for Harry’s decision—on the verge of his rise to tennis greatness—to leave Stan’s academy.

The revelation immediately shatters the family. The siblings are uncertain how to interpret their mother’s action. Joy tries to explain that she did it for the good of the family, that the father being gone to coach a world-class athlete would cost him months, even years away from them. A dream, it seems, is easy to destroy. Harry’s departure left Stan festering in bitter dissatisfaction, a free-floating discontent that now, years later, had an object: his wife: “Had Savannah understood the power of Joy’s secret she’d just shared?” (338). The moment of the revelation marks the nadir of the family’s dysfunctionality. The siblings’ loyalties are divided, Joy is in emotional chaos trying to explain her actions, and Stan simply leaves the home, unable or even unwilling to be in the same room as the woman who destroyed his dreams. The family seems shattered beyond repair.

These chapters show the extent to which the family is fragmented. In addition, they appear to point to a solution to Joy’s disappearance. It now appears more likely that Stan killed her in a fit of rage. Given Savannah’s revelation, the siblings (and the detectives) at last have what was missing. As Troy explains, “They know Dad has a motive” (346). Suddenly, they see their father’s odd behavior since Joy disappeared in a new light—his curt answers to detectives’ question, his complete lack of emotional response regarding his missing wife, his curious decision the day after Joy disappeared to spend $400 for a top-of-the-line car cleaning, the neighbors’ surveillance video that shows him struggling to put a roll of carpet into the car, the scratches on his face, Joy’s cell phone left under her bed, even Joy’s garbled text message to her kids—which now seem to reflect her struggle to send a message as she was dying. The entire body of evidence adds up to a mistaken conclusion, an outcome suggested by the discovery of the woman’s dead body in a remote stretch of nowhere just outside of Sydney. Initially certain that the is Joy’s, the detectives are dismayed to discover that the body’s decomposition proves it was there months before Joy went missing.

Just as Savannah Haddad is unmasked and appears ready to become the novel’s antagonist, she reveals the heartbreaking story of why she targeted the Delaneys, her ruthless mother’s domestic abuse, and how the Delaneys coldly rejected her as something, not even someone, not worth worrying over: “the awful truth at the heart of her awful lie” (317). Stan Delaney—defended by his children and cautious of being involved in a police investigation not because he’s guilty of something but because he’s so sure that Joy isn’t dead—appears increasingly likely to be the culprit in his wife’s murder: “All the pieces were falling and slotting into place” (331). Joy, the presumed victim of some violent end, reveals that for all her protestations, for all her rationalization, she had in effect deliberately destroyed Stan’s best and (as it turned out) last chance to realize his dream of coaching a world-class tennis player. She acted to preserve her family but, as she reveals on Christmas Day, nursed a dark grudge of her own: that she was the better tennis player—and that she gave up her career to be Stan’s wife and their kids’ full-time mother. Certainly, her behavior is both selfish and self-sacrificing. The developments in these chapters call into question who is the victim and who is the villain. As the novel heads into its final chapters, which presumably will resolve both storylines, it now has a villain who appears suddenly sympathetic and a sympathetic husband who suddenly appears villainous. The more that is revealed, the less is certain. It’s time for Christmas and its symbolic promise of epiphany.