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 means “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.