All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  “A daughter.” My face was expressionless, frozen like a thin sheet of ice formed over a puddle.

  “Don’t be silly,” Rachel said.

  I handed her the note without a word and she opened it with grease-coated fingers and immediately sat down on the floor.

  “Oh,” she said, a lost sound. “Oh.”

  * * *

  —

  It took them a matter of hours to find her car. Them, the police, whom Rachel insisted on calling, convinced that Mandy’s letter was a suicide note.

  It was parked at the edge of a cliff on the other side of the country, unlocked and empty. A woman out walking early that morning had seen a figure jump from the edge. Had rushed over and looked down, had seen nothing but what looked like drops of blood on the jagged rocks below, torn clothes tossed by the crashing waves of the stormy sea. A body could be washed away in seconds, pulled under, never to be found. The woman had called the police to report a suicide.

  Two officers came around to break it to us two days later, after they’d traced the car’s owner, tracked down her next of kin. “It’s unlikely we’ll ever find her body,” one of them told Rachel softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” Rachel said, her voice scratchier than Mandy’s ever had been, her eyes glassy. “Okay.” She looked right through the police, said Okay another few times, and called our father to tell him his eldest daughter was dead.

  I locked myself in my room so nobody could make me hear it again.

  * * *

  —

  It rained all through the funeral and the priest mispronounced our family name, thinning the y so that Rys (which we pronounced like the white grain: rice) sounded reedy and insincere: reese.

  None of us corrected him.

  “Amanda Marrrie Rrreeeese,” said the priest, the r’s rolling drunkenly into his vowels in his Kerry accent, “was a grrreatly loved, rrrespectable young Chrrristian woman who is now living at the rrright hand of the Lorrrd.”

  None of us corrected him on that part either.

  The rain battered at the stained-glass windows of the church. I turned to Finn, sitting in the pew behind me and Rachel.

  “You know, Shakespeare didn’t invent pathetic fallacy,” I told him, one elbow leaning on the back of my pew. “But as a literary device it’s always been attributed to him. Which is typical really. Dead white guys getting all the credit.”

  Finn, who is a guy but is neither dead nor white, said, “What does that have to do with . . .” He trailed off, took a shaky breath, and said softly, “Are you okay, Deena? Do you need to get some air?”

  “Pathetic fallacy,” I said, ignoring his question, ignoring Rachel softly shushing me through her tears, and my father’s glare from the end of the pew, “is when the weather reflects the mood of a play or a story. Sometimes it’s nothing but a metaphor: A man walks sad and lonely in the rain. Sometimes it’s an omen: The storm signals a battle about to be lost.”

  Finn shook his head at me in sympathy. “And what does this storm signify, Deena?” he asked.

  “This one? Oh, that’s easy.” I turned back to face the altar and said loud enough for Finn to hear me, “This one means Mandy isn’t really dead.”

  6.

  Happy families

  Dublin, 2012

  After the funeral, we wrung out our wet black clothes. We brushed the mud from our best shoes. We tiptoed around the house so as not to rouse our father, who was currently in the spare room, sleeping off the five whiskeys he’d drunk at the wake.

  In the morning, there was a sweet, fruity smell in the house. We thought it was one of our cousins’ perfume, but it lingered after everyone left. Rachel opened all the windows, but in the garden the smell was just as strong.

  I poked my head into every cupboard, trying not to think of the woman I’d seen in the water on my birthday, before Mandy left. The banshee. How afterward all the way home I smelled apples, found Rachel pounding them into juice. “Where is it coming from?” I slammed the door of the fridge; no apples in there.

  Rachel rubbed her temples. “Does it matter?” she said.

  “It’s driving me crazy,” I muttered, teeth gritted. “Does he have some kind of fruity cologne? Is he just spraying it in every room like he’s marking his territory?”

  “I don’t think it’s coming from Dad,” Rachel said, exhaustion in every syllable.

  “Well, it’s not coming from anything in this kitchen,” I declared, apple search concluded. “Maybe it’s all in our minds?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” said Rachel.

  “Did something, like, crawl into a wall and die or something?” I stared, tapping on the walls, pressing my ear to them as if the smell of apples could speak.

  “Stop that,” Rachel said sharply. “Nothing’s died in the walls. It’s probably one of our cleaning products. It’s fine. It’ll go away by itself.”

  The kitchen door swung open and suddenly our father was standing in the doorway, an imposing stranger in slippers and a fleece dressing gown. His chin was stuck with day-old stubble, ginger streaked with gray, and he ran his hands through his thinning hair like he was surprised to have ended up here, in the kitchen of the house where he once lived.

  I automatically scowled, but Rachel sprang from her spot by the counter, pulled out a chair for him, and offered him tea. He sat like a guest in a banquet hall, waiting to be served.

  “I want you to pray with me, girls,” said our father when Rachel poured his tea. “For your sister’s everlasting soul.”

  “We don’t pray,” I started to say, in a clear voice that surprised me, but Rachel shushed me gently by placing a peaceable palm on my shoulder. Dad bent his head to his clasped hands. The lines across his forehead deepened with every sigh.

  “Our Father,” he began, “who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

  “Mandy’s a good person.” I cut loudly through our father’s prayer. Any fear I’d had of speaking out of turn around him seemed to have disappeared with my elder sister.

  Our father said, “She was a troubled soul.”

  “Well, maybe,” I said, before realizing I was speaking, “do you think that maybe if her father hadn’t abandoned her as a teenager, she wouldn’t have been quite so troubled?”

  Rachel’s eyes were saucers.

  “I’m just saying,” I said, each syllable as sharp as knives. “Might have been a factor.”

  Dad looked at me like he’d never really seen me before. And he hadn’t, not really. My sisters were around my age when he left us; he packed his things not long after our mother’s funeral and got a job as far across the country from us as he could. I’d only just been born. He didn’t know me, this man who’d given me life. He didn’t know any of us.

  “Deena,” he said finally, heavily. “There’s a lot you don’t know about your sister.”

  This was so exactly what I’d just been thinking about him that I snorted with laughter. “Yeah, I’ll bet,” I said. “And there’s a lot you don’t know about me.” I grabbed my cup abruptly and tea sloshed over the side and pattered onto the kitchen tiles. I stalked out into the hall, tea dripping down my fist as I walked.

  But I stopped at the bottom of the stairs, suddenly out of steam. I tiptoed back through the dark hall, following my trail of tea drops. The kitchen door was open a crack and from inside I heard our father say my name, say Mandy’s, say, “She puts her on a pedestal. It isn’t right.”

  “Let her process,” came Rachel’s voice, slow and tired. “She’s in denial. She hasn’t cried. Let her put her sister on a pedestal if that’s what helps her mourn.”

  “One day you’ll have to tell her. Or she’s going to end up exactly the same.”

  I waited for Rachel’s usual deference, for the way she always showed her throat to our father, rolled over backward so as not to step a toe out
of line. But her soft, peace-keeping voice didn’t come. Instead, she said, “If Deena ends up as half the woman Mandy was, she’ll be better than I could ever be.”

  There was silence for a long moment, then our father said, “You girls were put on this earth to test me.”

  Rachel spoke, strong and clear. “Dad, I think you should leave.”

  * * *

  —

  After he left, we covered cakes and sandwiches from the night before with cling wrap. Rachel drove the empty beer and whiskey bottles to the bottle bank. I changed the sheets on the spare-room bed. Neither of us said a word all morning until Rachel came back with the box now empty of bottles and slammed it down so hard the kitchen table buckled. Then she sat heavily on a chair as if that one display of anger had exhausted her completely and she would never be angry again.

  So I got angry on her behalf. “Fuck him,” I said. “Fuck him and his prayers.”

  “Deena,” Rachel said.

  “What? Deena what? You were right there with me.” I put on a gruff voice, quoted, “She was a troubled soul. What absolute bullshit. This is Mandy we’re talking about.”

  “That’s right,” said Rachel, her voice breaking like a heart. “This is Mandy we’re talking about. And honestly, I can’t say this was entirely unexpected.”

  For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

  “We needed to be there for Mandy,” Rachel said, and her voice was strangled. “But we weren’t. This is all my fault.”

  I shoved the plastic bottle box off the table, where it fell on the kitchen floor and cracked all down one corner. “This is fine!” I shouted. “This is stupid. She’ll be back in, like, a week. She’ll laugh at how Dad just came home for one night. She’ll laugh at how he wanted to pray for her immortal soul. She’ll laugh at how all these random aunts and uncles turned up and didn’t say a single word to us. She’ll laugh and tell us she could well have guessed all that. And I’ll be saying I told you so. What we need to do now is find Mandy’s daughter. She told us about her and you’ve been completely ignoring that for days—that’s your fault. That’s your fault.”

  I couldn’t read Rachel’s face. There was something stricken to it, something broken. Like I’d smacked her. Like I’d sworn inside a church. Like I’d smashed through the table, not just accidentally cracked a plastic box.

  I couldn’t stand her. I couldn’t stand the lot of them.

  When I slammed the front door behind me, I could hear my sister start to cry. The air was still sweet with the smell of apples.

  * * *

  —

  I stormed down the garden path, seething. Rachel was right, I hadn’t cried. I hadn’t stared blankly at things, like she had, whenever I moved. Sometimes, mid-task, she would stop, bend over at the waist as if from cramps. Like she was giving birth, or dying.

  My mind was a clear, smooth lake. Whatever Rachel said, I wasn’t in denial. I was a woman on a mission. I knew Mandy was coming back. And, in the meantime, I had a secret niece to find.

  Online searches thus far had yielded nothing, so that day, the day after the funeral, I resolved to go to Mandy’s housemates and friends, anybody who might know of her whereabouts, or about the daughter nobody seemed to know she had.

  I threw open the garden gate and stood on something that crunched underfoot. I stopped short. Under the sole of my shoe was what looked like a piece of broken comb. Rough, off-white, the teeth jagged and sharp.

  My breath caught in my throat and I held on to the gate to steady myself. Tangled around the curling handle of my garden gate were wisps of long silvery hair. My arms prickled, goose bumps rising among the freckles.

  Maybe it wasn’t a comb. Maybe it was just a bone left by a dog. Maybe it wasn’t really made of bone. Just white plastic, broken and yellowed. I didn’t want to touch it, to find out.

  Stories, I told myself. Just stories.

  I reached down to pick up the piece and saw something bright white lying on the grass.

  An envelope. Inside the envelope was a letter.

  Dear Deena, it said.

  I knew Mandy’s handwriting. It crowded the margins of the books she lent me, it covered every one of my birthday cards in poems and memories, it was scrawled across the notes she left me in her flat if she’d already left when I arrived: Coffee’s still hot, close the window when you head off, love you, Mandy.

  I read the letter, hardly blinking, hardly breathing, start to finish. It was long. Pages and pages of that rushed, spiky handwriting. Reading it made me dizzy. And when I’d finished, I knew. Knew what I’d suspected ever since the police came to tell us they had found our sister’s car.

  Mandy wasn’t dead.

  Mandy was alive and she wanted me to find her.

  This is what the letter said:

  Dear Deena,

  I want to tell you a story. To explain the curse. To explain our family tree. To explain where I’m going. To help you understand why.

  This story starts in London in 1858 with the birth of the first Rys who would come to Ireland, although our family was here forever before him—funny how history only remembers the fathers. But our family curse begins with him—so I’ll begin with his mother.

  Her name was Marie Lefèvre, épouse Rys. She was French, married to a wealthy Englishman and living in London. And from the moment she conceived her son, our great-great-grandfather Gerald Rys Jr., she had the strangest craving for apples.

  7.

  A craving for apples

  London, 1858, and Donegal, 1879

  Marie had a craving for apples. It began with the first small lapping wave of nausea and grew stronger until the waves became an entire sea storm inside her that would not allow her to keep anything down, as if the baby were pushing against the bread, the cheese, the meat and greens with its tiny hands, throwing it all back out.

  Our great-great-great-grandfather, her husband, Gerald William Rys, brought her King Pippins and Ashmead’s Kernels, the tartest strains he could think of, but none tasted sharp enough to his wife’s tongue. He brought her cider apples, crisp and bitter. He brought her cooking apples too sour to eat. But everything she tried tasted too sweet. The bones in her face grew sharper by the day. Finally, her husband bought an orchard west of London and had his gardeners pollinate acre upon acre of different cultivars to find the exact apple his wife craved.

  It takes about seven years to grow an apple tree, in the right conditions. The gardeners knew this, knew that at the rate she was going Marie and her baby would be dead within the month, but they did as they were told. They planted seeds and saplings, crossed tart dessert apple trees with those of the sourest cooking strains. They swept pollen into blossoms by hand with paintbrushes, they set up hives and let loose the bees. Meanwhile, Marie lay in bed, rocked by stormy seas. She dreamed of a gray-faced, wild woman with bone combs stuck in her wild hair, a wild baby suckling at her breast. When Marie screamed, it was in the woman’s voice. Glass shattered and windows cracked. The doctors shook their heads and sighed.

  “She’ll be dead by morning,” they said. The servants closed the drapes.

  The next morning, in the middle of the newly planted orchard, among the spindly saplings and tiny shoots of seeds, there was a tree. A chance sapling: the cross-pollination of a common English russet with a particularly acidic French reinette that resulted in an apple so bracingly tart one had to grit one’s teeth to eat it.

  It takes around seven years to grow an apple tree. This one had sprung up overnight.

  When Marie first ate an apple from the new tree, the baby kicked for the first time, and he continued kicking for the rest of her pregnancy. When he was born, the room smelled of apples.

  Gerald William Rys, who was not a man of great imagination, named the cultivar the Rys Russet. He named the baby Gerald William Rys Jr. Marie called the apple le Lendemain, which me
ans “the next morning.” She called the baby mon amour.

  * * *

  —

  Gerald William Rys Jr. arrived in Ireland at his father’s request in the autumn of 1879, holding a letter from his mother (in her native French), a lock of his sweetheart’s hair (thin, fair), and a small sapling.

  “The juice of these apples runs in your blood,” Marie told him as he climbed aboard the PS Violet at Holyhead. “Plant the tree on your land and your children’s blood shall run with it too.”

  Gerald tried again and again to plant the sapling, but it would not take root. The problem, he thought, was that the land was not his land. The Big House at Glenliath in the barony of Banagh, County Donegal, with its eight hundred acres of dismal bogs and granite hills, sheep and small stone shacks, belonged to his father, who until now had overseen its tenants from afar, from the warmth and comfort of his London home. But with the bad harvests of the previous years, the hunger and unrest of the tenants, and the rumors of further Land Acts blowing in from Westminster, Gerald William Rys Sr. decided to send his eldest son as his agent to supervise the estate. His eldest son had had very little say in the matter.

  The place was bleak, gray, and cold. Every night the wind howled past the windows and every night it sounded like a woman’s screams. The tenants were sullen. The food was bland. Gerald couldn’t imagine bringing his sweetheart here, couldn’t imagine lasting in this landscape for more than a year.

  The land to the west of the estate was too sandy for the sapling, the land to the east too rocky. Everything smelled of the sea. As the months passed and the apple tree refused to take root, Gerald began to associate the smell—salty, fishy, wet with rain—with the unrest of the estate and his unease at the helm of it.

  At night the screaming kept him awake.

  He took to wandering the hills with the sapling in his arms. The staff of the Big House hushed when he came near. The tenants in their small stone huts averted their eyes when they caught sight of him. When he was out of earshot, the men spat on the ground.