After the funeral, our mourning clothes hung out on the line like sleeping bats. It had rained in the cemetery and everything was muddy. Wet grass clung all the way up to our knees and clumps of muck stuck to the heels of our best shoes.
“This will be really embarrassing,” I kept saying to anybody who would listen, “when Mandy shows up at the door in a week or two.”
Rachel gave me a pitying look, but my best friend, Finn, was uncertain.
That’s the problem with having a funeral for your sister without really knowing whether she’s dead. Without a body in the coffin, how can you be sure she won’t come back?
1.
A nice, normal girl
Dublin, 2012
On my seventeenth birthday, two things happened.
I came out to my family (somewhat by accident).
And my sister Mandy disappeared.
Died, Deena, Rachel said—our other sister, the middle sister, the one who came between us. Died, not disappeared.
But I knew Mandy wasn’t dead.
* * *
—
It was raining that morning. I’d woken early, surfacing with a shock from dreams of drowning, of cliff faces with sharp teeth and gaping mouths. Rachel was already up when I came downstairs, frowning at her phone.
The table was set with the best china, the plates we saved for Christmas, and on mine were two strawberry Pop-Tarts—the birthday breakfast I’d loved when I was little. They were still hot; my sister must have heard the shower running, timed it perfectly. She had spread the good tablecloth, red with white polka dots, and had set a bunch of violets, my favorite, in a vase in the center. The birthday card beside my plate was the expensive pop-up kind. Rachel was always trying to make up for my lack of a mother by mimicking some ideal fantasy version.
“This is amazing, Rachel.”
But Rachel was distracted, still reading the text she’d just received.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Dad’s on his way,” she said.
“What?”
“He messaged just now to say he’s getting the train. He’ll be here this afternoon.”
“Dad?”
“Yes.” My sister’s mouth was a thin line.
“As in our father?”
“Yes, Deena. Dad as in our father.”
I hovered in the kitchen doorway, watched my sister sigh and tuck a stray red curl—a darker, neater version of mine—behind her ear, rub her forehead with one finger like she was trying to erase the lines there.
“What do you think he wants?”
“Maybe he wants to wish you a happy birthday,” she said with a shrug. “Happy birthday, by the way. Sorry. Should have led with that.”
I couldn’t find the voice to answer. I had a theory as to why our absent father should feel the need to visit this week. I didn’t think it was anything to do with my birthday.
He knows.
My face must have betrayed me. “Is everything okay?” Rachel asked.
I poured myself some tea. “Nothing,” I said. “I mean, yeah, I’m fine. Are you sure Dad didn’t say why he’s coming to Dublin today?”
Rachel sank a mixing bowl into the sudsy sink, wiped at the batter left around the edges. “It’s your birthday,” she said, not quite answering the question.
I gave my sister a come on look. “And when’s the last time he visited for any of our birthdays?”
“I don’t know, Deena.” Rachel sighed. Her impatience was probably more about Dad’s impending arrival than my question. “Maybe he has business in town.”
Or maybe the rumors that had been floating around school recently had somehow gotten back to him and he wanted to come over and confront me about them himself.
Our absent father all but abandoned us—his three motherless children—when I was less than a year old. He oversaw from afar our education (in the strictest, single-sex Catholic school he could think of); he only called us if he’d heard rumors that we were not upholding the Rys family name; he only ever dropped in on us unannounced, as if to try to catch us out, so determined was he to make sure we were the good, traditional, God-fearing daughters he expected us to be. All the while clearly not caring enough about us to actually stick around.
Which left me with my sisters.
My sisters were fraternal twins. Mandy was older by twenty-four hours, although she neither looked like the eldest nor acted like it. Rachel had always been impossibly adult—practical and mature—and was now positively ancient at thirty-four. But while Rachel raised me, did her best to tame me, Mandy wilded me, carelessly undoing all of Rachel’s work: muddying my shoes, tangling my hair, making me question authority.
Mandy and Rachel were night and day, fire and frost, chaos and logic. They were opposites in so many ways, their few similarities were shocking.
They were my family, these sisters, this strange push and pull.
Our father had long since given up on Mandy, and I knew exactly how he would react if he ever found out about me.
Sitting across from me, Rachel narrowed her eyes. “What is it?” she said.
I attempted a breezy tone. “Nothing really,” I said. “It’s just there’ve been some rumors going around school. For the last week or so. About me. I’m a bit worried they might have come back to Dad. Through one of his friends on the school board or the parents’ association. You know.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“All kinds. You know my school.” I wrapped my fingers around my teacup, made the decision to say it almost before I realized the words were coming. Deep breath, dive in. “But mostly there are rumors that I’m. Um. Gay.”
Rachel squared her shoulders. “Our father would know better than to believe a rumor like that.”
I never understood why nerves were described as butterflies in your stomach. This was more like a prolonged electric shock.
“They’re true,” I said softly. “The rumors. I’m gay, Rachel.”
My body could have set off sparks. Rachel opened her mouth to speak.
It was at that perfectly unfortunate moment that our father walked unexpectedly into the kitchen. Panic rooted me to the spot. I could have been felled by a single ax stroke, falling with limbs askew like branches.
For half a second, I thought he hadn’t heard me, but all the wishful thinking in the world couldn’t change the way his face—neutral, lined, neat red hair gone mostly gray—had twisted in fury.