All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  “Fucking family,” she said when she saw that Rachel was the only occupant. “Fucking nightmare family won’t leave us the fuck alone at our own mother’s funeral.”

  “Yeah.” Rachel ran the cold tap over her wrists to wake herself up, set herself straight. “I wasn’t expecting a liturgy on sitting like a lady today of all days.”

  In reply, Mandy threw up in the toilet.

  “Whoa,” said Rachel. “Mandy. Are you okay?”

  Mandy took deep breaths. “Yeah. I mean, no, but you know. That helped.”

  Rachel felt an unexpected surge of warmth toward her sister. They had never really seen eye to eye, but neither had they fought much. Besides, Rachel told herself, with the father and extended family they had to contend with, they only had each other now.

  “Where were you,” Rachel asked, leaning back against a sink, “over last summer? Where were you these past few months, for that matter?”

  Mandy spat into the toilet, made a face. “Don’t you start,” she said.

  “I wasn’t. That’s not what I meant. I was just curious.”

  Mandy searched her sister’s face for signs of judgment and must have decided Rachel was sincere, because she answered truthfully. “Outside London,” she said. “Got a job for the summer working in this orchard.”

  “You were apple-picking.” Rachel couldn’t hide the incredulity in her voice.

  “What, you were expecting jail? Ibiza? Fucking, I dunno, month-long raves in some punk commune?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Nope. Picking apples. Good, wholesome work, fresh air, decent pay.”

  Rachel shook her head. “You’ll never cease to surprise me.”

  “Yeah,” said Mandy. “About that.”

  But Rachel had spoken at the same time. “So where have you been since Mum went into hospital? A sanctuary for baby seals or something?”

  Mandy rinsed her mouth out. “With a guy.”

  “Right. See, now that I would have expected.”

  “Yeah,” said Mandy. “And now I’m pregnant.”

  * * *

  —

  There was a certain scent in the air when our family was gearing up for drama. We all knew it. I’d smelled it myself at ten when Mandy brought me back from our road trip. Both sisters smelled it when they walked out of the pub bathroom at our mother’s wake. It was a sharp and bitter smell, like metal or unripe apples.

  When they came into the room, the air was rife with it. Electric. The family huddled around their small tables, their well-poured pints of Guinness (for the men) or glasses of chardonnay (for the ladies). Our father stood in the middle.

  What my sisters didn’t know but were about to discover was that the walls between the ladies’ and the gents’ stalls were thin. That, without the taps running or the bathroom flushing or the hand driers humming, voices carried. That, as my sisters were talking, our father had taken a moment in the men’s room alone to compose himself, blink away his tears, ball up and release his cramping fists. That, in the silence of his suffering, our father had overheard everything.

  “Get out,” he said to Mandy. The family was still and silent, hanging on every word. “Get your filthy, disrespectful self out of this place.”

  Rachel reached for her sister’s hand. “Dad—”

  “No. No. She’s no daughter of mine. Not after this. Not anymore.”

  Mandy looked as though she might faint.

  “How could you do this to me?” our father cried. “To your own mother? How could you do this to yourself again?”

  He was haggard and worn, eyes bruised from holding back tears, face lined from grief, breath reeking of whiskey.

  “I’m a cursed man!” he bellowed. “This whole fucking family is cursed. Sluts and whores, the lot of them. It’s cursed. I’m cursed. It’s a curse.”

  “Again?” said Rachel softly.

  Mandy shook her off. “Fine!” she yelled at her father. “That’s fine. I’m leaving—I hope you’re happy. I’m not gonna be your bad fucking apple anymore.”

  “Ha!” roared our father. “Ha!”

  “Stop that,” said Rachel, trying to stand between them. “This is not the time or the place for a fight.”

  Behind her, the family began to murmur. The sharp tang of gossip was so strong she could taste it. Rachel took Mandy and our father by the elbow and led them outside, and in the pub parking lot, surrounded by the big black cars with funeral home logos on the sides, out of earshot of the family trying surreptitiously to peer through the windows, our father faced his daughters with fire in his eyes.

  “What kind of a stupid slut gets knocked up twice in the same damn year?” he said to Mandy, low and dangerous.

  Rachel took two small steps back, stared at Mandy. Of course, she had suspected. She must have unconsciously known. Sometimes we only see the things we want to see.

  Mandy’s face was flooded with tears. She held herself and sobbed. She said, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

  She walked out of the parking lot and onto a bus and Rachel didn’t see her for another five years.

  Two weeks later, in the middle of the night, our father packed his bags and left Rachel in the house alone to raise the baby. To raise me.

  * * *

  —

  After that, Rachel’s best-laid plans fell like a branch of rotten apples from a gnarled and dying tree. She didn’t get the points she needed. She didn’t have the money to go to college. She had to work.

  With only an occasional phone call from Mandy, Rachel’s bitterness grew fruit. She tried not to pick them, ripe resentment straight from the tree. She tried to stay steady. She made a new plan. She would work hard; she’d raise her baby sister; she’d ensure I had every chance she’d never gotten.

  She would make sure we were respectable, good apples, worthy of our family tree. Without Mandy.

  Without my mother.

  32.

  Sisters and mothers

  The end of the world, 2012

  Rachel’s hand was a rock on my knee, so heavy, keeping me in my place.

  “Deena,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Deena. Look at me.”

  There was nothing but a void inside me. I hadn’t come here for this.

  “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I’m sorry.” The past was the present and those were my mother’s words. The words she said when she knew she couldn’t keep me. Everything kept looping around, unraveling.

  I stood. “I just need a minute. Just need a minute to myself.”

  I walked woodenly on bare feet through the little cottage in Mandy’s old clothes (did I take them? I must have taken them. I wrote the letters, after all, couldn’t be trusted with the truth, bad apple that I was).

  I lifted the latch of the back door and ran out into the storm.

  * * *

  —

  At the cliffside, the rocks were sharp, the mud slippery, the ground uneven. The wind was a wild thing, pulling, pulling. The rain fell in glass shards. Everything was so cold. Everything was screaming.

  Everything became this haunted darkness, this sharp cliff’s edge, there, right there, my bare feet toeing the line between ground and sky. Steep fall to the ocean below, tempest-tossed and foamy. The wind was fierce. Pushing, pushing. One more step and I’d be falling.

  One more step, one more push, and I’d be on the back of a bull on my way to Tír na nÓg. Wasn’t that what was out here? Wasn’t that why Mandy came? Isn’t that what everybody else thought? Not that she’d made her way here to break a family curse, but that she’d come to escape it?

  The storm took a deep breath. The wind screamed. Only it wasn’t the wind—it was me. I screamed my mother’s name to the crashing waves, the cliff face hard and fatal beneath me. I screamed my mother’s na
me to the sea.

  I didn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe it. Mandy was my mother. She wouldn’t leave me like that. She had to be here still. She had to be here, somewhere, at the end of the world.

  A figure appeared on the rocks behind me, gray of skin and tangle-haired. I could barely see with the dark and the rain. But I saw her. Not a batty old lady dunking biscuits in her tea and watching reality TV. This was a real ghost. A real banshee. Her mouth was a wide ruin. She opened it to scream for me.

  I turned to run, to search the cliffside in the dark, to climb down if I had to, to find Mandy. To find my mother. Before the banshee could get me. But the banshee’s voice stopped me. Not a scream. Not a whisper. Just a voice on the wind.

  “Deena,” she said. “Deena. I see you. Step back. Come here.”

  The rain clawed my skin.

  “Deena,” said the ghost. “Come away. Come to me.”

  Like Mary Ellen so many years before me, I stepped back from the edge of the cliff and I walked toward the banshee. The rain was a curtain blurring the world. I couldn’t see.

  The barest, lightest touch of a hand. “Follow, follow,” said the ghost. Tangle of curls and apple cheeks. “Follow, follow me.”

  There was nothing to do but let her lead.

  The gray ghost—or was she so gray? Did her hair not have a hint of red in the rainy darkness?—gestured at me to come. I stepped away from the cliff. I followed. I followed her around the back of the banshees’ cottage to an ancient, crumbling hovel, the ruins of which the three old sisters’ house had been built around a century ago. The cottage and the ruins still shared a wall, the one closest to the edge of the cliff, practically falling into the sea. The rest of the ruin had tumbled down, was only held up by a large, gnarled hawthorn tree that grew right over it, roofed it, provided shelter from the storm. The wind whistled through its branches. I knew at once what this place must be.

  The end of the world. The ruins of the cottage in which Gerald and Mary Ellen met in secret, in which Patrick, Julia’s father, was conceived. The cottage near where Mary Ellen tossed the magic sapling to the crashing waves below. The cottage in which the curse began.

  My eyes took some time to adjust to the low light. To the impossible sight. At first I thought my sanity might have cracked completely.

  But then I threw myself into Mandy’s waiting arms.

  * * *

  —

  Instead of an explanation, Mandy told me a story. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose; the apple, after all, does not fall far from the tree. I stilled the sudden anger that was in me. The confusion and relief, the grief and fear. It was my turn to listen. The storm came close to hear it too.

  Here is what she told me.

  * * *

  —

  Mandy was a restless child with bright eyes and wild hair she had to be caught to brush. Catching Mandy wasn’t easy. Her father tried it—tried grabbing at her hair and smacking her bottom, locking her in her room. Her mother tried it—tried cries and bribes and empty threats. The teachers tried it with punishments, prayers, and failed tests. The parish priest tried it with tales of temptation, damnation. The local boys tried it with kisses. None of it ever worked for long.

  Had her parents been any other parents, they would have understood Mandy to be a wandering soul, fast-acting and quick-thinking. Would have known she had a precociousness that should have been nurtured, not scorned. But, as it was, Mandy came of age in a family so focused on what others would think, they didn’t stop to think of what was best for her.

  The first time Mandy ran away, she was eleven. She made it halfway to Galway before the police caught up with her at the bus stop, told her to get off the coach and come with them. The second time she was thirteen and there were four friends with her. They lasted two days on a beach in Wexford before their money ran out and they came home, filthy and triumphant.

  For years, all Mandy heard were variations on Why can’t you be more like your sister? Mandy’s sister was studious. Mandy’s sister was still. Mandy’s sister stayed silent in the face of emotional manipulation. Mandy thought her sister was the worse off for it. So Mandy kept on running away.

  She didn’t know which boy it was, the one who got her pregnant the first time. She and a few friends had planned to spend that summer hulling corn in rural France, but by chance one of them had a relative who worked in an orchard close to London. They set off for England without saying much to their families and spent three magical months bunking one on top of the other, climbing ladders, picking apples from the sun-drenched trees, and taking the train to London on the weekends to party their wages away.

  There were deer in nearby forests that screamed in the night, woke her up, heart racing, hands clutching her chest. There were strange silver foxes that no one ever saw, but that left long gray hairs caught on her windowsill in the morning.

  There was something strange about the orchard, Mandy thought, something magical. She listened to the tales told by the owners’ grandparents about a mysterious sapling that had grown up overnight to feed the cravings of a starving pregnant woman, a witch perhaps, or some kind of mythic queen. Mandy took it all in, wide-eyed and full-stomached, crunching on apples she knew were not magic, but that she craved deliriously nonetheless.

  It was there that Mandy realized she was pregnant. Six months along, according to the doctor. She’d just thought she was getting fat. She had no idea who the father was and she didn’t care.

  She came home with a daughter. A small, squalling, milk-drunk secret, a few months after her seventeenth birthday. A wonderful secret. A beloved secret. An impossible secret that belonged only to her that she took into her family home and shared, joyously, with her parents.

  Mandy’s parents did not agree with her opinion.

  It didn’t take them long to wear her down. To employ every trick in their arsenal they’d ever tried before. Denying and threatening, screaming and smacking, crying and bribing and locking her in.

  “You’ve no money to your name to raise her,” they said. “You’ll get no charity from us.”

  “She’ll grow up knowing her ma’s a little slut,” they said. “Never worked a hard day in her life, doesn’t even know the father. She’ll be shunned, you mark my words.”

  “You’ve no business raising a baby,” they said. “You’re barely more than a baby yourself. No schooling, won’t graduate, what kind of a life d’you think you can give a child, you selfish, ungrateful wretch?”

  There was nothing to do but follow their lead. For the first time in her life, Mandy listened to her parents, let them make her decisions, let them claim her child as their own.

  “It’s in her best interests,” they said. “It’s for the baby. We’re only doing this for the baby.”

  “Her name is Deena,” Mandy said.

  * * *

  —

  It was too much. Too much for Mandy. The screaming and sleepless nights, and days, the coos and sickly smiles of the neighbors, the extended family, the exclamations over this miracle, this baby girl, Mandy’s little sister. She slept fitfully, woke even when the baby slept to discover that she had clearly been scratching at her skin in her sleep. Soon her body was covered in raised red lines running up and down her arms and legs, her torso, her chest, even her neck. Some mornings she awoke to find them on her face. So when her mother fell ill, was hospitalized, slipped into a coma, Mandy did the only thing she knew to do.

  Running away had always been how Mandy faced her problems.

  She was drinking in a bar in Galway when she met him. Jeremy Nolan. He believed her lies (they all did) but he, unlike most of the others, was kind. He listened. He cared. She lost herself in him for a time. Then her mother died and she ran away all over again, with raised red scratches all over her pale, freckled skin, and her belly slowly swelling for the second time.

 
In the next nine months, Mandy’s belief in the curse became something real. A pip inside her that grew into a spindly skeleton tree. What else, thought Mandy, could this hellish year have been? How else could so much be stacked on top of the one person, the one family?

  My father was right, Mandy decided. The Rys family name is cursed. My daughter will be better off without it. Better off without me.

  When her second daughter was born, she nursed her for a month, then wrapped her warmly in her car seat and left her on her father’s front porch. This one she was sure of. This one had a family outside hers. It was the right thing, Mandy told herself, over and over throughout the years. Ida was a Nolan, not a Rys. She was good. She was safe. The curse could never come to her.

  But as for the first one, the first baby, Mandy was forever torn.

  * * *

  —

  Mandy showed up at Rachel’s door on a Wednesday morning early, straight from the airport, tired and haggard, her clothes wrinkled and musty, with only a backpack and fifty quid to her name. She hadn’t seen her sister in five years.

  She stood on the front step and listened to the sounds coming from inside: the doors opening, wardrobe drawers closing, five-year-old feet clattering about in tiny shoes. Rachel’s voice came through the closed door, firing off instructions and reminders, brisk and practical, telling the child off when she was too slow, saying they were going to be late: Hurry up now, Deena, get your coat on, quick as you can.

  Rachel opened the door to leave the house before Mandy could ring the bell.

  She stopped on the threshold, Deena—me—ahead of her, the tiny coat of my school uniform hanging by one sleeve, Rachel still wrestling with the zip of my oversized schoolbag. The zip shut with a sound like a tear.

  Mandy tried a smile, sank down onto her haunches, and stared into the face of her younger sister—sister, she told herself again and again, sister—and said, in a voice made faint by love and guilt, regret and exhaustion, sorrow and relief, “Hi, Deena.”