All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  I had never, to my knowledge, seen Mandy, but I recognized her. Rachel had made sure of that. Whatever resentment she had for her sister she’d tried to put to one side. She told me stories of her childhood with her twin sister, the wild one, the one off on wonderful adventures. The walls of our house were covered in pictures of the lot of us: Rachel and me, Mandy, our dead mother, our absent father. I recognized them all.

  I shoved my arm into the remaining sleeve of my coat, shrugged, said, “Hi, Mandy, are you coming to stay?”

  Mandy’s eyes met Rachel’s. Her sister’s mouth was a thin line.

  “We’re going to be late for school,” she told me. “Give your big sister a hug and hurry up and get in the car.”

  Mandy only let go of me when I pulled away, waved cheerfully at her, skipped over to the car, and threw my schoolbag in. Mandy stood.

  “So,” she said to Rachel. “I’m home.”

  Rachel locked the front door behind her, readjusted her handbag on her shoulder. “It’s been five years,” she said, face impassive. The slightest warmth came through the stiffness of her words. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Sorry I didn’t call to say I was coming.”

  Rachel looked toward the car, to Deena—to me—fastening my seat belt in the back seat. “How long will you stay?”

  Mandy took a breath. “I’m home,” she said again. “I’m home for good.”

  They both watched the small child in the car open her schoolbag and sneak a snack from her lunchbox. Watched me.

  Mandy could tell that her sister was also surreptitiously watching her, taking in her unkempt clothes, her tangled hair, the one backpack she’d brought with her. Mandy knew she didn’t look like someone who was home for good.

  Still, she asked, “Can I’ve a key?”

  Rachel took a breath. “You know you can’t stay in the house.”

  “Rachel—”

  “Dad won’t have it. And, besides, Deena and I have our routine. I can’t let you disrupt that if you’re just going to disappear again for half a decade. I have Deena to think of. Her home, her stability.”

  Mandy felt as though she had been kicked, hard, in the stomach. “Rachel, Deena is my—”

  Rachel cut her off. “I know,” she said. “She’s your sister too. Which is why I know you’re going to do what’s best for her.”

  There was so little left of Mandy. She was raw, ragged, a cursed thing.

  “You can stay a couple of nights,” said Rachel, unlocking the door for Mandy. “There are towels in the spare room; the bed is made. There’s a lasagna in the freezer or leftover spaghetti in the fridge. I don’t think Deena ate all the scones—there should be a couple in the bread bin. Take a shower, eat something—you look like you need a decent meal. I’ll pick up a paper to find you a flat-share if you’re set on staying in Dublin. I’ll get some money out to help you set up. But you can’t stay here, Mandy.”

  “I don’t need your money,” Mandy said, temper hot, words like bullets. “And I don’t need your charity either. But I will see my daughter.”

  Rachel shushed her, looked with panic again toward me. Her shoulders slumped; her voice grew weary. “I’m not a wicked witch, Mandy, keeping the child locked in a tower. But I have been raising her—alone—for the past five years. Alone, Mandy.”

  Mandy looked deflated. Rachel took out her car keys, made a move to leave.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said again, touching the handle of the car door. “It’s good for Deena to see you too. But show me that you can stay. Prove that you can be still. And then we’ll see.”

  But being still was never something Mandy was good at, and wavering from her rules was something Rachel could not do.

  33.

  Sisters and mothers, part II

  The end of the world, 2012

  So Mandy remained as my sister, my fairy godmother, my flighty but loving kin. And at the same time Mandy dug deep and muddy, got her hands dirty, asked for favors, and uncovered secrets. Mandy researched our family curse without knowing that she could one day break it. That she could one day make sure her daughters never had to change their true selves, damp down, pretend. Never had to live in fear.

  Mandy did her research, coaxed rumors from our family. With what she found, she was able to speak to Lizzie, who knew Julia’s story, to old classmates of William’s, who knew his. She was able to trace the family tree to an old burnt-out cottage, found its history in the skull of the bull. There were letters, things Mary Ellen had left for her granddaughters, so they would know where they came from. A journal that Lizzie left to lie with the bull. And there was Mary Ellen’s magic, the memories she spoke to the bull made manifest for when her ancestors would need them.

  But for all the beauty and sadness, all the wisdom in Mary Ellen’s story, Mandy couldn’t find anything concrete about the woman; didn’t know where she’d come from; couldn’t find a record for a Rys man who had died of diphtheria in Donegal, which is what was still widely believed had happened to her husband. But in Mandy’s travels somebody gave her a phone number for three sisters by the name of Boyle, said they might know, had lived in the area Mary Ellen had said she was from for years. Three old sisters, they said, might be relatives, might be family, you never know.

  When she spoke to the old Boyle sisters, Mandy understood. She pieced together their talk of local history that said that many years ago the Big House, long since rebuilt as a spa hotel, was still inhabited by a landlord, a wealthy Englishman named—what was it again—Rice? Rumor had it he’d impregnated a peasant, then evicted her whole family. She had left, never to be seen again. And from that moment the landlord’s family fortunes were ruined. The Big House fell into disrepair; the Englishman’s father was forced to sell his orchard. Nobody knew what had happened to the peasant girl. Nobody ever knew what happened to peasant girls.

  But Mandy did. And now she knew from which cliffs the peasant girl had thrown her lover’s sapling. She now knew where the curse began.

  Suddenly she had it. The Rys family curse. The three banshees. The reason all of those bad apples had been shaken off our fallen family tree. She understood how to break the curse.

  It all came from the sapling. The magical Rys Russet, the lucky Lendemain. What had Gerald’s mother told him, all those generations ago? The juice of these apples runs in your blood. Plant the tree on your land and your children’s blood shall run with it too.

  That was what Gerald had failed to do. That was what Mandy had to do now, and she set off to find it. To find the sapling.

  Mandy believed there was a curse on our family, but for the longest time she didn’t think to break it. She didn’t believe it would ever hurt quiet, nerdy Deena, Rachel’s protégée. She didn’t imagine that it could reach Ida, so far from our family, a Nolan, not a Rys. For all her research, she didn’t understand that the curse didn’t work like that. Nobody was immune from being branded. Bad apples, the lot of us.

  But she understood that soon enough. The moment she knew I had inadvertently come out to my father, she knew the curse would come to me too.

  * * *

  —

  Mandy did write one of the letters. The note she left on her bed before she disappeared. I was the first to read it, but already her tear stains had blurred the words. I had missed a single letter at the end of the last word: a crucial letter, a letter that changed everything.

  Daughter.

  Daughters.

  Going to the end of the world. Give all my love to my daughters.

  I suppose my mother was never quite sure she would return. I suppose that was why she wrote the note, left her bedroom pristine, her things tidied, her loose ends tied.

  It seemed an impossible task. For all my mother knew, the sapling had been thrown into the Atlantic, left to rot at the bottom of the seabed, seaweed-tangled, fed by salt and blea
ched seal bones. But something pushed Mandy onward. Guided her car to the cliffs just over yonder, close to where our ancestor once lived and loved and was betrayed with her unborn son swirling in the depths of her.

  Three voices urged my mother on.

  Cliffs are a bitch to climb backward. Hand under foot and foot over hand she scaled them, down, down, trying to keep from falling. She could see something far below. Farther than most had ever thought to look, to search, to photograph. A sharp jut of rock and a dark spill of soil so unlike the muck and mud of the cliffs. And, at its edge, a branch. Not a peace offering. Not a laurel. A thin and spindly, barely living tree. But it was alive. After all these years. Impossibly, it lived.

  Mandy scrambled to reach it. Her footing grew erratic, her blistered hands sore. Her muscles screamed surrender. The sea was stormy. The wind was fierce. One gust was all it took. She fell.

  Perhaps she slept. Perhaps she died. She couldn’t tell. The three old women told her, after, that they’d found her. Found her car parked by their cliff (they didn’t hold to notions like national parks; no, this land was their land, bound to their family name). Found her lying half alive by the remains of an apple tree, miles and miles down the rock and steep slope, the breakneck fall of the storm-swept cliffs.

  How the three old biddies dragged her back up was a mystery, but Mandy suspected it involved a rope, a pulley, and a great gray bull.

  * * *

  —

  She came to in a cottage with a thatched roof and whitewashed walls built from the ruins in which her ancestors met, secretly, in the night. She’d been out for days. Out of time, out of mind.

  “Rest,” said the old ladies. “Recuperate. Gather back your strength.”

  Their voices sounded familiar. She allowed herself to trust them.

  When she was well enough to get up from the slouchy couch in the cottage living room, Mandy had connected it all. She slipped out of the house in the dead of night and walked for miles through the darkness to take the nearest bus to Dublin.

  She didn’t imagine they’d have buried her. Them, her family, the ones who’d known how many times she’d run away before. Who hadn’t batted an eyelid. Who’d barely called the guards.

  The family that thought she was dead.

  * * *

  —

  How would you know if you were dead? Could you feel it? As an ache—a physical sensation that left behind a hole inside you? Could you sense it as a smell—salty like the sea, or tart like apples? Would you know it in the way you somehow know you are asleep, in dreams?

  Nobody seemed to see her. She was sidestepped by pallbearers, looked over by the blank-faced family, assumed to be a distant relative from out of town. After walking all the way into said town in a storm of rain, umbrella-less, childless, lifeless, the only person who saw her could well have been a ghost herself. A mirror reflection, sitting up by the angels on O’Connell Street, looking like the sisters (the daughter and the sister) she had supposedly left behind.

  Mandy began to doubt herself. She had a lump on her head the size of a hen’s egg and her extremities were still tinged blue in the cold. Nobody saw her. Nobody looked at this woman, bedraggled, drenched, shivering in the downpour. Maybe the mourners were right. The priest on his pulpit, the newspaper print in black and white. Maybe Mandy Rys had died on that cliff. Maybe she was a ghost after all.

  On the bus back to Donegal, no one would meet her eye. She passed through their vision as though she were invisible, and whether it was because she looked wretched, or because she was just a ghost, she couldn’t tell.

  Could dead women break curses? Did ghosts have any more stories to share?

  Mandy sneaked back up to the cottage, searched the whole place when the banshees were away. When she heard them coming—carrying something heavy between them, with difficulty and great care—she hid under the tree in the old ruins behind their house, at the edge of the cliff: the ancient crumbling cottage from which her family curse had come, with nothing but the knowledge of everything she had done wrong.

  And a spindly, ancient, half-alive tree in the corner, lopsided in a cracked clay pot.

  * * *

  —

  Mandy barely had time to touch the tree when the cliffside called to her.

  Mandy, Mandy, a wailing on the wind.

  Follow, follow.

  Mandy followed and in the dark she found me, the only one screaming and screaming her name.

  34.

  Le Lendemain

  The end of the world, 2012

  Beside Mandy—beside us—was a small tree. Damp leaves, dull bark, soil half spilling out of a cracked clay pot.

  “It’s the sapling,” I whispered. “It’s the Rys family curse.”

  “Le Lendemain,” said Mandy. “The next morning.”

  * * *

  —

  However long a life story takes to tell was the time it took them to find us. We were in the last place you’d think to look: a tumbledown ancient ruin, roofed by a gnarled hawthorn tree, facing nothing but the edges of cliffs and the sea. But they found us.

  Three banshees stood silhouetted in the storm.

  They were family. They were ghosts. They were ancient battle goddesses.

  They had the answers. They were the keepers of the curse.

  Three gray ladies screaming the voices of those who could not speak, scratching their limbs to wake them, warn them. The screams of new babies in the air. Blood on the sheets. Blood on clean knickers. Girls bending their backs over heat and steam and dangerous machines, washing, always washing, the blood from their clothes. Girls alone in overseas hotel bathrooms, bleeding bright red on new pajamas, washing the bottoms under hotel-room taps, washing, always washing. Bleeding, always bleeding. Left alone to wash and bleed.

  And where did that leave me?

  That left me in the trembling arms of my mother, who shielded her eyes from the glare of the banshees’ flashlight beams.

  The three witches clicked their tongues. They said, “Well, there you are,” as if we’d only stepped out for a bit of air and a chat. “Come on back inside. The open door will let the heat out.”

  They sounded so certain that there was nothing strange about our situation that we followed without a word.

  The hallway between the little kitchen and the main room was tight, was narrow, could only fit one body at a time. The first banshee led us, followed by me, followed by the second, followed by Mandy, followed by the third.

  At the sound of our footsteps, I could hear the others rising from the threadbare couches, upsetting the rickety coffee table, spilling the tea.

  “Did you find her?” Rachel’s voice was raw and ragged. She sounded like an old woman.

  I knew I was wet by the way my hair hung cold and heavy against my cheeks, with how Mandy’s sweater was a weight on my chest, by how I could barely feel my feet. There was a strange, loud clicking sound reverberating around the cottage, which I realized with a shock was coming from my chattering teeth.

  Rachel ran over with the bull-hair blanket, bundled me close to the fire before sitting right in front of me, looking at me and smacking me, once, hard across the cheek. Then she grabbed me and held me to her heart so tightly the heat of it warmed me better than the turf fire spluttering with occasional raindrops in the hearth.

  I tried to push myself away, but still she held me.

  “Rachel, what the fuck?” My voice was muffled, cracked, barely angry. “You hit me.” It had felt less like a blow and more like the kind of smack you’d give somebody who’d fainted, a wake-up call, a return. Still, it smarted, in more ways than one.

  “I was sure you’d jumped.” Her voice was as muffled as mine, lost in the thick tangles of my hair. “I was sure you’d followed Mandy. After everything I said. You don’t do that. You don’t just fucking run out into the stor
m and off a cliff. You don’t do that.”

  I finally untangled myself from my sister. Aunt. From my aunt. “I didn’t do that.” I gestured down at my body—cold, yes, but also clearly alive. “Obviously.”

  Finn knelt beside me. His eyes were red, ringed with deep shadows. “What were you doing out there, then?” he asked. I realized I had scared him.

  “I went to find Mandy.”

  “Deena—” he said.

  “And I did.”

  “Deena—”

  Rachel saw something in my expression that stopped her, made her hold out a hand to cut Finn short. “Wait,” she said. “You what?”

  As if she had only been waiting for her cue, Mandy stepped out of the hallway.

  * * *

  —

  How do you react, seeing a sister you thought had died? A sister you’d buried, had barely begun to mourn? It had been three days since Mandy’s funeral, just over a week since she’d disappeared. Ida’s mouth hinged open and her eyes filled with tears. Finn rubbed his own eyes as though the appearance of a dead woman was some kind of speck in his vision, a trick of the light. Cale moved closer to him on the couch, bent to whisper in his ear.

  Rachel stood. “Where were you?” she said.

  “Here.” Mandy’s voice shook. “I’ve been here.”

  “Are you going to explain why you let us all think you were dead?”

  Mandy pressed her lips together in a gesture so reminiscent of her sister it made me catch my breath.

  “I’m going to explain everything,” she said.

  Mandy told her whole story again, history repeating itself over and over in the main room of the tiny cottage, and, as she spoke, the storm died slowly, the wind stopped wailing, the rain stopped dripping in through the cracks around the windows. The three banshees floated into the living room, shared the longest couch. Rachel stood in front of the fire, with me at her feet like a cat.