“A concussion,” she said flatly when Mandy was done. “Why then didn’t these three call me? Were they concussed too?” She nodded sharply at the banshees, who bared their sharp teeth.
Mandy leaned against the wall of the doorway, still not quite with us in the room. “I didn’t have my phone,” she said. “Or my mind really, if I’m honest.”
“I’ll say,” Rachel mumbled. She sat and poured out more tea, then switched, suddenly and inexplicably, into her usual bustling self. “Would you ever come in and get warm, Mandy! Look, you’re soaked to the skin. There’s room in front of the fire with Deena. Here, have some tea. Hand around the cookies, would you, Ida? Mind you don’t spill crumbs off the plate.”
Ida knelt at Mandy’s side and offered her a cookie. Her hand trembled and the plate shook crumbs into the moth-eaten carpet.
Mandy took her daughter’s hand instead of the cookie. “Hello, Ida,” she whispered.
“Hello.” Ida’s voice was quiet, hesitant, unlike the cool, blunt way of speaking I thought was her usual and had only just about become accustomed to.
This wasn’t the tear-filled embrace of a reunion I had been expecting.
At that moment, I realized that endings are rarely ever endings. I had come all this way—we had come all this way, me and Ida—to find our mother. And we had. Ida had never really met her mother before. I had been told from birth she was my sister. For us both, Mandy had been dead for almost a week. For Ida, she was already twice gone, and how could she be sure her absent mother wouldn’t just leave again?
In the end, this didn’t feel like an ending at all.
“So this is it,” I said. “The stories have been told. This must mean that the curse is broken.”
Rachel didn’t ask what I meant. Her eyes rested on the pile of letters on the little coffee table and I understood that she had read them when Mandy and I were out in the storm. We were on the same branch now, the lot of us. We’d climbed all the way up our family tree.
“Almost.” Three voices spoke at the same time, hitting each syllable like a single set of vocal cords, one mind branched into three. “Takes more than a cuppa tea to break a curse.”
“You’re family,” said Rachel. “Aren’t you? Like Mandy said. Relatives of Mary Ellen’s.”
“Yes,” replied the banshees. “And no.”
Finn stood and took an envelope from the windowsill, which was covered in keys and hairbrushes and toothpicks, things dug out of pockets. He held it up. It was a bill of some kind, addressed to a Ms. Boyle, World’s End, Donegal.
Ida let out a small laugh. “Going to the end of the world?” she quoted.
“Where else?” said the banshees. “What else would you call this place?”
Outside the window, dawn swept over the cliffs, shining on the raindropped cobwebs, the spindly fallen trees, the flooded rocky fields. The wilderness stretched forever on every side but one, and on that side there was only ocean.
“So you are Boyles, like Mary Ellen,” said Ida. “See, Deena? They aren’t banshees. There’s always an explanation.”
“And not a supernatural one,” Rachel said. “There are no banshees. You don’t really believe that.” She gestured toward the three old women. “They don’t actually believe they’re banshees anyway.”
“Oh, don’t we?” The banshees’ eyes wrinkled with mirth. “Who do you believe you are?”
“What do you mean?”
“We meant what we said. Who do you believe you are?”
Rachel sighed, said patiently, “I’m just me.”
“Exactly,” the three gray ghosts said together. “You don’t have to believe in who you are. You just are.” Together they grinned.
They were no great-great-aunts of ours. They were witches; they were goddesses; they were three banshees ready to scream our deaths. To warn us. To help us. So the same thing that happened to the bad apples of our family didn’t keep on happening again and again.
My mother was not my mother. My sister was really my aunt. The girl I thought was my niece was my sister.
Going to the end of the world. Give all my love to my daughters.
Here we were now, together at last, here at the end of the world.
* * *
—
The storm had died down as quickly as it had come. We stepped out of the cottage into a calm, still day in which bright, shining puddles reflected the blue of the sky.
“Pathetic fallacy,” said Finn, “is when the weather reflects the mood of a play or a story. Sometimes it’s nothing but a metaphor: A girl walks sad and lonely in the rain. Sometimes it’s an omen: The storm signals a battle about to be won.”
The past could be the present; my best friend’s words could have been mine, spoken at a funeral for my elder sister, who turned out to be my mother and not really dead at all.
“Maybe the storm isn’t a battle,” I said. “Maybe it just represents confusion: You battle through it to the truth.”
“You battle through it,” the three banshees said in their eerie synchronicity.
Mandy and Rachel and I said, “We all do.”
From the ruined cottage, we took the sapling. It had lived for over a hundred years, alongside our family history, waiting to be found, to be rescued, to be planted.
“It’ll never work,” said Rachel, watching me and Mandy fetch shovels from the shed. “This land is barren. It’s all rock and sand. The air is salty and harsh and the wind is almost constant.”
“Some apples like that,” said the banshees, watching from the arch of the kitchen door. “That’s exactly the kind of air some apples need.”
We carried the tree to the cliff where I had stood just hours before, where Mandy had started the long climb down last week, where Mary Ellen had tried to destroy it over a century ago. We kept well away from the edge and stuck our spades into the hard land as if to dig a grave.
We kicked at the old clay pot that housed the sapling until it shattered under all our feet. We lowered the spindly trunk into the hole, threw earth over its roots, patted it down until there was black, sandy dirt under all our fingernails, like we’d dug up a treasure, a long-buried secret, a family curse.
We stood back, breathless and salty with sweat. The sea air was on our lips and our tongues, but was soon replaced by an overwhelming smell of apples.
The sapling took root. Within minutes, as we stood in a circle and watched in disbelief, the Rys Russet, le Lendemain, grew into a tree.
It takes about seven years to grow an apple tree, in the right conditions. This one shot up at our feet. The trunk widened, the branches multiplied, broke into buds. The buds flowered and grew apples large enough to harvest.
“That’s impossible,” breathed my family.
“Now,” said the banshees, coming in a cluster from the door of their cottage. “Now the curse is broken.”
“The juice of these apples runs in your blood,” said Ida. “Plant the tree on your land and your children’s blood shall run with it too.”
As one, Mandy and Rachel stretched an arm out to pick an apple each from the bottom branches of the tree. They were tall but had to stand on tiptoe to reach them. Mandy handed hers to Ida, Rachel hers to me. They were the perfect mix of tart and sweet. They tasted like every story in our family history. They tasted like endings.
“So this is how you break a curse,” said Finn, impressed, eyes wide and arms folded, watching us.
“Oh no,” said the banshees together. “Not really.”
I threw an apple underarm to Cale and it landed straight in the palm of her hand. Ida grinned and tossed one to Finn. The banshees clustered around Rachel and Mandy, and the unlikely lot of us shared the apples from our family tree.
We were connected, all of us, by blood and beyond blood. Cale’s ancestor and mine had been lovers. Finn and I became be
st friends because we were both queer. Ida seemed like a nice, normal girl on paper, but Mandy was her mother. Maybe we were all bad apples, no matter what we did. But maybe it wasn’t just us.
“There are no bad apples,” I said into the crisp, sweet silence. “Are there?”
The three banshees grinned with all their teeth. “Now you’re getting it,” they told me.
“What do you mean?” said Mandy.
“I mean, this isn’t just our family. It’s our whole country. Cale’s ancestor Ann Gorman was thrown out of her home for whom she loved. The same would have happened to Cale. If Finn was born a hundred years ago, he’d have been an outcast too: You don’t hear of many biracial, bisexual boys in Irish history. But I bet there are stories like these in almost every family. As you said the day you left. If you’re considered rotten by the rest of the family, by the rest of society, you’re doomed.”
Rachel threw her apple core over the cliffs and into the sea. “The past just keeps on repeating itself,” she said.
The banshees grinned as though we’d made them proud, as though this was a conclusion they had been leading us toward all along.
“The curse isn’t on our family,” I said slowly, thinking as I spoke, speaking with more than just my own voice. “It’s on every woman in this country. Kept in shame and silence for generations. Kicked out, locked up, taken away. Their children sold in illegal adoptions; their babies buried in unmarked graves. Forced pregnancies and back-street abortions, eleven a day on the boat to England only to come home to rejection and stigma. Insults and prayers and keeping up appearances—and how do you break a curse like that?”
We were all crying again, the lot of us. Our tears salted the earth and fed the tree, made the apples taste like the sea.
“You tell the story,” said Mandy slowly. “You tell your story and the story of your family. You speak your truth. You shatter the stigma. You hold your head up to the world and speak so that everyone else who was ever like you can recognize themselves. Can see that they aren’t alone. Can see how the past will only keep repeating itself as long as we’re kept powerless by our silence.”
“Yes,” said Rachel, stunned. “Yes.”
I wrapped an arm around Rachel’s waist and Ida tucked herself under Mandy’s shoulder. Our family tree, in full bloom, heavy with good, ripe apples, swayed, deeply rooted, in the salty sea breeze.
35.
How to break a family curse
Dublin, 2012
When we got home, funeral flowers still crowded the porch. Our fridge was full of food left over from the wake: the homemade quiches and shepherd’s pies, the tarts and bakes, stale sandwiches still cut into triangles, wilted lettuce lolling out of them like tongues. The neighbors’ curtains twitched as we walked up to the front door; loud gasps sounded from behind them.
Turned out it was a bit embarrassing when Mandy showed up at the door. I tried not to smirk too deeply as I gloated.
When word got back to the family, our phones rang off the hook. We silenced the ringers and helped Mandy unpack her boxes into what had been the spare room, but was now her room, our father be damned. Her shoes cluttered the floor and her cigarette ash dusted the windowsills, her hair mingled with ours in the shower drain.
When they received no answer, the family came knocking. Perhaps they expected to find Mandy filthy and matted, covered in earth, fingernails broken and bleeding from having scratched her way out of the grave. Instead, she opened the door halfway through breakfast in jeans and a T-shirt, holding a slice of toast in one hand.
“So it’s true,” the family said in wonder.
Rachel appeared behind her sister, reached around her, and slammed the door in the gawping faces of our family. Mandy’s laughter followed them back down the garden path.
When our father came, we were ready for him. He didn’t ring the doorbell, just let himself in with his key. In the kitchen, Rachel was making breakfast. Mandy was at the table on her laptop, alternating typing furiously and swearing at the hold music on her phone (having been dead for a week was turning out to be a bureaucratic nightmare). I was attaching a rainbow pin to the collar of my school shirt.
We heard his heavy footsteps in the hall but didn’t look up. He stood in the doorway for a long time before speaking.
“What do you think you’re playing at?” was the first thing he said to the daughter he thought had died.
Mandy tucked her phone between her shoulder and her ear, finished typing two-handed. “Trying to get my license renewed,” she said. “Hi, Dad.”
“One of the three of ye is going to tell me what’s going on right now.”
“It was all a mistake,” I told him. “Mandy isn’t dead. Clearly. Or else she’s currently the world’s most boring ghost.”
“Ha,” said Mandy.
“Will you have some eggs?” Rachel asked our father. Her father. My grandfather. “I’m making bacon too, or you can have some of that squeaky Greek cheese Deena likes instead.”
Our father’s face got progressively redder, a volcano about to erupt. “I don’t want fucking cheese!” he bellowed. “I want you to tell me what this slut is doing in my kitchen.”
Silence fell like a cast-iron pan on the stovetop.
Rachel took a breath, cracked another egg. “It’s not your kitchen, Dad,” she said calmly. “If you don’t want breakfast you can just have coffee, and if you only want to insult us you can leave. I’ve to drive Deena to school in fifteen minutes. I’d advise you to take that time to talk to your elder daughter.”
“Aren’t you happy to see me?” asked Mandy.
Our father’s face was a traffic light, a stop sign, a warning. “I’m happy to see you didn’t kill yourself,” he said. “But your blatant disrespect is—”
“Wow,” said Mandy. “The bar’s set low.”
“There,” I said, my pins in place. “What do you think?”
The pins were a late birthday present from Cale, who had sent them by mail the moment she got home, in an envelope sealed with a purple lipstick kiss. One was an enamel rainbow flag. The other was a round pink badge that said POLITE YOUNG LESBIAN. I took a picture to send to our group chat, even though my face was burning with the force of my grandfather’s gaze, even though my hands were shaking at the thought of wearing them to school.
My grandfather spluttered. The red of his face deepened to purple. He didn’t seem to be able to speak. Finally, he choked out, “This isn’t over.” When he left, he slammed the door.
My heart hammered like the reverberations. “Well. That’s it. We can kiss this house goodbye.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” said Rachel, soaking the frying pan before sitting down to eat. “The house is in our name. As per Mum’s will. And, right now, I’m changing the locks.”
* * *
—
Fifteen minutes later, Rachel pulled up at the school.
“You sure you’re ready for this?” Mandy asked from the front passenger seat.
“Nope.”
“That’s the spirit. Knock ’em dead.”
I straightened the pins on my shirt collar and walked into the school hall ten minutes early for Friday assembly. I had lost my invisibility; a crowd of eyes watched me. News spread fast, and it had been five days since my sister had returned from the dead. I messaged my friends a running count of the whispers and rumors until the vice principal bustled in and called for us to please stand for morning prayers.
Stay strong, Finn messaged, his usual parting words.
I tucked my phone back into my pocket and as the sea of girls rose around me I stayed seated, head held high, sitting on my shaking hands and hoping my face wouldn’t go up in flames.
Afterward, I waited by the doors for the two seniors who had organized last week’s protests. I handed them the leaflets I’d had Rachel print the day before. A r
ecord of sources and numbers. A list of every Magdalene laundry, every church-sanctioned mother-and-baby home, every Christian Brothers industrial school ever opened in the country, alongside the recent dates that each had closed. A call for our school to secularize our education. A student petition to separate church and state.
Please stand up to do away with morning prayers, it said. It garnered almost two hundred signatures before it was confiscated, but pictures of the leaflets made their way online, were circulated so widely our school ended up, again, on local news pages:
Schoolgirls’ confiscated history of Magdalene laundries goes viral
Secondary-school students demand accountability of the church
Beyond gossip and selfies: Teen girls petition for separation of church and state
* * *
—
I carried their stories with me—Mary Ellen and Ann, Julia, Rachel and Mandy. They were less of a weight and more a reminder that the truth could be hard to hear, but was the only thing that brought us together.
“That and the banshees,” said Ida, flicking through the letters I’d written in Mandy’s handwriting, propped up on one elbow on my bed. She was visiting for the weekend, had decided she’d drop by every month or so. “Someone has to keep an eye on this crazy family,” she’d said.
Cale had also persuaded her grandparents to let her visit regularly, though it wasn’t to keep an eye on anybody’s family.
“I wonder—are all legends kinda warped?” I said to Ida. “The scream of a banshee is supposed to foretell a death, but really it’s a warning. They’re supposed to be evil ghosts, but they only ever wanted to help. At least I think so.”
“I bet if the banshees were men, the myths wouldn’t have gotten it wrong.”
“Huh.” I watched her touch Mary Ellen’s name, Julia’s. “It’s always the fault of the women, isn’t it?”
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