But, until that happened, he met Mary Ellen every night when the moonlight was shrouded in cloud. He kissed her and whispered nothings that were as sweet as ripe apples, but that meant far less to him. What was love, he asked himself, when he would not be here for more than another season? What was love when she was a peasant and he her landlord? What was love when not state nor church nor family would ever bless their union?
Back home, his mother and his fiancée made wedding plans. Their letters to Gerald were full of lace and beads and invitations. They felt to Gerald as though they came from a world away. Far from the tenant agitators, the political unrest, the scowls of the workers, the rain, and the screams. Far from the hovel in which he met a girl each night, knowing well that he could never make an honest woman of her.
Meanwhile, Mary Ellen was craving apples.
8.
Exit, pursued by a bull
Dublin and Galway, 2012
I turned the last page of the letter over, wanting to be told what happened next. I now realized that Mandy had been researching the family curse. This was what all her notebooks and folders, her library books about nineteenth-century landed gentry had been about. But her letter didn’t explain the curse. Barely mentioned it. And it didn’t finish the story. Instead, on the final page, Mandy had written an address that was on the outskirts of Galway city.
She had been planning a birthday road trip for me. Cross-country, mapped out by her hand. I want to tell you a story, her letter had started by saying. To explain the curse. To explain our family tree. To explain where I’m going. To help you understand why.
Mandy had started the journey without me. And it seemed that she wanted me to follow. Obviously, Galway was the first stop on the map.
I snuck back into the house and packed a small bag. Rachel was in her bedroom with the door shut, so I left a note on the kitchen table telling her I was staying with Finn for a few days, then stared blankly out of the top-deck window of the number 130 bus to Dublin city center, where I would change and get the bus to Galway.
I’d been to Galway a few times before—once with Mandy for some hippie harvest festival her friends were performing at, and a couple of times with Rachel for the Christmas market—but I didn’t recognize the address Mandy had written down, had no idea why she’d send me there.
Stopped at a set of traffic lights, I glanced down at the street below and there, standing in front of a small petrol station missing most of its sign, was a bull.
A horse I would have expected. It wasn’t unusual for Dublin traffic to slow behind a horse. A cow would have greatly surprised me in the inner city, but I might have chuckled to myself and turned away. But a bull—enormous, slate gray, with gleaming white horns—a bull was unheard of. I blinked, convinced I was hallucinating.
The bull looked up and met my gaze through the window. He nodded.
I snapped my own head around and stared straight through the front window, heart thudding. The traffic lights changed and the bus trundled on and I didn’t look back.
* * *
—
My phone was hot with the map open and I was the moving blue dot. I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found it.
The address Mandy had left me was that of a high school. Interdenominational by the looks of it. No statues of Mary in alcoves in the walls, no crosses above the doorways. The students didn’t wear uniforms, so I almost looked like I belonged, slipping through the front gates with my backpack and my earphones, looking for a sign, a reason why my sister had sent me here.
It must have been break time. Students thronged the corridors. I saw hoodies and jeans, hair both dyed and shaved, jewelry on wrists and around necks. Hockey sticks, guitar cases, schoolbags covered with enamel pins. A large bulletin board opposite the library announced music and drama club auditions, helpline numbers, and reminders of the school’s LGBT society meeting times. A bumper sticker at the bottom of the board said RESPECT PERSONAL PRONOUNS.
My chest felt tight suddenly, heavy with a sort of longing. I doubted the bulletin boards in my school were aware that one could use a pronoun to which one had not been assigned. I thought about rainbow enamel pins, purple plastic Venus earrings, protest leaflets. My eyes ran over the notices. I wondered how I would have turned out if I’d gone to a school like this.
The wall beside the noticeboard was covered in A5 prints of students’ pictures under the heading KNOW YOUR CLASS REPS. She was second from the left.
She had pale skin, light freckles, gray eyes. Her hair was auburn, a reddish chestnut, thick and curled. Her cheeks were like apples and she had a gap between her two front teeth. She was every picture I had ever seen of Mandy at sixteen. Underneath her smiling face, somebody had written Class 5B: Ida Nolan.
I had assumed that Mandy’s daughter was a child. Eight or nine years old, her birth aligning with one of Mandy’s longer disappearances, her gestation somehow gone unnoticed.
I had not imagined that my sister’s daughter would be the same age as me.
* * *
—
I waited by the school gates and watched each student as they left. When I saw her, I stood. She was adjusting the strap of her backpack, mouth twisted in concentration, long braid tangling with the strap on her other shoulder. When she saw me, she stopped. The crowd broke like waves around us.
Later Ida told me that for a second she thought I was Mandy. Less than a second. Just enough time to realize that I couldn’t possibly be. That I was barely a year older than her. That there was nothing in my wide eyes to suggest that I had known she’d be here.
But here she was. And here I was. We were undeniably family.
9.
A family reunion
Galway, 2012
I said her name aloud, to test it. “Ida?”
I knew I’d mispronounced it by her slight wince. Not Eye-da, then. Eee-da probably. I wondered who had named her, her father or Mandy.
Emotions played over her face until she seemed to reach a decision and pulled out of the crowd to join me by the gate.
“You’re her sister,” was the first thing she said to me. “Amanda’s.” Her knuckles were white around her bag’s strap.
“Mandy.” My voice was faint. “We call her Mandy.”
“Mandy,” Ida said. “I’m sorry for your loss.” She winced again, spoke louder to cover it. “Which one are you, Rachel or Deena?”
“I’m Deena.” My voice had almost disappeared. I wished I hadn’t come here.
“Deena.”
We stood and stared at each other.
“Look,” Ida said, after several interminable moments of silence. “Why don’t we go around the back of the assembly hall, away from the noise?”