10.
After the funeral
Galway, 2012
I heard Ida’s words but didn’t understand them.
“It could have been someone who looked like her,” said Ida. “Like you said about the woman in the water. A trick of the light.”
“Wait,” I said. “Back up. After the funeral when? What did she look like? Where was she?”
Ida bit her lip at my eagerness, looked unsure. “I think I saw her,” she said again. “Yesterday after the funeral, a few hours after they buried her. In Dublin, in the street, in the dark, in the rain. I couldn’t make her out very well. She was looking the other way. I just thought it might have been her.”
“No,” I breathed. “You must have seen her. She must have been there. She’s alive; I know she is.”
Ida twisted her hair around her fingers, frowned. “I don’t know, though, Deena,” she said. “I mean, how could I be sure? I’d never seen her before in my life. All I had were a few pictures of her as a teenager with my dad.”
“You’d know,” I said. “You’d know your own mother.”
“Up until two days ago,” said Ida, “I knew nothing about my mother.”
From somewhere nearby, there came a sudden scream. I jumped, then told myself it was only children in the playground, kids messing about in front of the school. Ida didn’t seem to hear it. She teased the end of her braid with her fingers.
“My dad was telling my aunt on the phone how he met Mandy,” she said. “Except he called her Amanda. He thought I was asleep upstairs, but I heard everything he said. Everything he’d never told me.”
Ida stared at the end of her braid, at her fingers twisting the strands of her hair, and, echoing Mandy’s letter perhaps without realizing it, told me what she’d heard like it was a story. Something happening to somebody else. This is what she said.
Ida’s dad was nervous, breathless on the phone, didn’t know what to do. For a week, Amanda Rys had been dominating his dreams. Every night he’d woken in tears, arms reaching for something he had never been able to hold. He hadn’t looked her up in years, but that morning he typed Ida’s mother’s name into the search bar on his laptop. The first thing that came up was a funeral notice.
In his strange and sudden grief, he called his sister. And, while Ida listened in, he spoke about the woman he had once known.
Jeremy Nolan didn’t know much about Amanda Rys, but he knew she was a liar. When they met in a crowded pub in Galway seventeen years ago, she asked him to buy her a drink to celebrate the end of her master’s degree, told him she was in her mid-twenties.
Their time together was brief, electric: two weeks of deep intensity until he awoke one morning to find her gone, realized he’d never asked her surname, had no idea where she lived.
When Ida said that, I let out a little laugh. “Mandy has that effect on people.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I figured.”
“How did he find her then, in the end?”
“He didn’t find her,” said Ida. “She found him.”
Ten months later, one Sunday dinnertime, Ida’s father answered the door to an infant in a car seat on his front porch, a taxi turning out of his driveway, red curls in the back seat. Under the child’s blanket was a birth certificate for Ida Miranda Nolan, daughter of Jeremy Nolan and Amanda Rys.
In the years that followed, Ida’s father taught himself not to think of Amanda much. He now had a full name, had the means by which to look her up, to contact her, but as time went by he wanted to less and less. His parents and family rallied around him, became the village that helped to raise a child. Leaving Ida had been Amanda’s choice, he told himself. There must have been a reason she had never come back to him, to her baby. He had to respect that, even if he would never understand it. She could come to him, he figured, if she ever wanted.
“You’d think he could have let me decide that for myself,” said Ida. “You think he could have given me the choice.”
“He didn’t tell you anything about her?”
“Only stories. Fairy tales.”
Ida’s father built Amanda into a fairy spirit, at the same time larger than life and far too small to fit comfortably into Ida’s world. Little by little, the myth that was Amanda grew smaller. Until two days ago.
Jeremy Nolan was unaware that his daughter had heard every word he spoke, that the moment he hung up on his sister Ida typed her mother’s name into a search bar on her phone.
The funeral notice on RIP.com was brief. Stark black pixels that stayed on the back of Ida’s eyelids like a photo negative. She read them every time she blinked.
Ida thought it strange that she should cry. She hadn’t yet let herself imagine she might ever find her mother. But the thought must have been there, somewhere deeper down. When she realized she’d never get that chance, it tore a hole right through her.
* * *
—
When she left for Mandy’s funeral the following day, Ida told her father her school had organized a last-minute field trip to Dublin. He had no reason to suspect his daughter was lying—other than the fact that she owed half her DNA to Mandy Rys. Ida was clearly a golden girl, bright and focused, friendly and open, so different from her summer storm of a mother. Even I could tell already that she studied hard, had plenty of friends. She probably never got in trouble, never talked back. She seemed unfailingly honest, to the point of bluntness, so it made sense that, to her father’s knowledge, she’d never told more than a white lie in her life.
He signed her fake permission slip and asked no further questions, just told her to let him know when her bus came back to Galway in the evening so he could pick her up from the station.
* * *
—
After the funeral, Ida’s head was a wild wood of words, each branch a sentence she’d heard in the churchyard: the drone of the priest in his rain-speckled robes, the whispers of the family (her family) in their damp mourning clothes, the condolences of strangers under large umbrellas.
Ida heard the words I’m sorry for your loss so many times that the sentence was stripped of meaning, but nobody was saying it to her. She’d placed herself apart, hidden her hair under the hood of her raincoat, covered half her face with her scarf. She looked exactly like her mother but nobody saw her. She was sidestepped by pallbearers, looked over by the blank-faced family, assumed to be a distant relative from out of town. Which was true, except for the distance.
And, from the sidelines, Ida heard the words whispered out of the corners of the mouths of neighbors, of teachers, of family friends: suicide, crazy, bad apples, the lot of them.