These words dug under her skin. Maybe this family, all held apart—nobody hugging, nobody crying but for the woman with the dark red hair and neat mourning clothes—really were nothing but a bunch of bad apples, not even worth her time. She had no history with these people. No kinship apart from a striking physical resemblance.
She left without telling us that she was Mandy’s child.
* * *
—
After the funeral, Ida took a bus back to the depot in the city, wet to the skin. On her way to the station, she stopped at the statue of the four angels below Daniel O’Connell, staring out in four different directions. There were still bullet holes in them from the Easter Rising in 1916—a pockmark on the breast, a shot straight to the stone heart.
Ida’s heart was stone and every word she’d heard that morning was a bullet wound.
She climbed the slick marble and she watched the world melt. She held her face out to the blessed rain. That’s how she spotted the only other person standing still in the downpour.
A woman on the bridge right in front of the base of the statue, half turned, staring at the river. A woman with wet red hair.
It was her. Amanda Rys. It was Ida’s mother. Her mother, whose funeral Ida had just secretly attended.
Her mother, who was supposed to have died five days before.
* * *
—
Ida spoke for a long time, omitting nothing—not the words she’d overheard, not her rejection of our family, not her continual anger at having been abandoned by her mother, my sister. Tears welled up in my eyes, brushed softly down my cheeks when I blinked.
Our phones both vibrated beside us, at intervals, but remained untouched.
“They were saying at the funeral how they didn’t find her body.” Ida said the words softly. “How they found torn scraps of her clothes, blood on the rocks. How there was no chance she’d have survived. How they sent divers but she could have been washed far out to sea.”
“She wasn’t,” I said, my tone matching hers, my voice thick with tears. “Because she’s still alive. You know that. You saw her.”
“I’m not sure what I saw.”
“But you know,” I insisted. “You can feel it. You’re her daughter. You’d know it if she’d died.”
Ida gave a small laugh. “I don’t think that’s science.” She checked her phone. “My friends want to know where I am,” she said, standing. “I was supposed to meet them after class. Just give me a sec to talk to them so they stop freaking out. I’ve five missed calls already. Next thing they’ll be ringing my dad.”
Ida moved away from the steps, toward the side of the building, phone to her ear. I watched how fast her mouth moved when she spoke, made the same shapes as Mandy’s. I watched how she touched her hair unconsciously, exactly like her mother. I caught myself making the same gesture.
My hair was short and often tangled, carrots to Mandy’s copper. And Ida’s. I fluffed up my curls and shook my head to tousle them and in the corner of my vision something rustled. I jumped to my feet, imagining rats, but seeing—half a second later—the whisper of long silvery strands of hair floating down the high gray wall.
Sometimes shock is a splash of cold water.
The wall was blank concrete cracked with climbing weeds. The only other soul I could see was Ida, behind me, voice low and insistent on the phone. There was nobody here; there was no explanation. Although I had agreed with Ida that all this was surely my eyes playing tricks, I had to fight the urge to run away. And something else caught my eye, something that was neither tangled hair nor ghost: white paper, trapped beneath a small stone.
It was an envelope. Inside was a letter, bulging. Ten thick pages covered in rushed, spiky writing.
“What’s wrong?” Ida called out behind me. She appeared at my elbow before I could find the words to speak.
Dear Deena, the letter started.
A letter from my sister, right there, basically nowhere, the place she’d sent me. Left under a stone as if she’d somehow known we would sit on the steps around the back of the assembly hall building. As if she was watching us while we spoke.
Ida’s breath warmed my shoulder. “That’s not—”
“It’s Mandy.”
“But that’s not possible.”
I walked five careful paces backward until I reached the railings and slowly sat down on the top step. “She said to come here. She gave this address. I thought it was just to find you. But she must have wanted me to find this too.”
“But, Deena, that’s not possible.” I just about registered Ida sitting beside me, my eyes so focused on the page that nothing outside my sister’s words existed. “What if we’d just talked at the gate? What if we’d gone into an empty classroom? What if we’d just walked away?”
“Somebody knew we’d come here,” I whispered, a shiver.
Ida and I raised our heads to look around. A blank gray wall, weeds, rustles. Emptiness and silence.
“No.” Ida shook her head, touched her hair, rubbed at her arms. “That’s not possible.”
I breathed out. “None of this is possible.” And I started to read.
Dear Deena,
I’m sorry. This is hardly the best way to tell you this story, but it’s all I’ve got time for. You’ll understand. You’ll understand it all in the end. I thought I wouldn’t have to rush but here we are. Rushing.
I told you to look out for the banshees who herald our family curse. To begin to fear if you hear them scream. You’ll understand why I have to hurry.
There are three of them, I told you that. The first comes alone, but the other two soon follow. That seems to be the pattern. Reports are mixed. My sources aren’t always reliable. But in my experience that’s how it happens. When it starts, you’ll hear the first one’s screams. When the second joins her, she leaves gray hairs from her bone comb caught in your window or outside your door. You’ll know the third has come as well when you wake up with scratches on your skin; you’ll know it’s too late when the three of them have touched you.
Mary Ellen was the first to learn this because it was she who cast the curse. She did it unknowingly, but still, she did it, and now the three ghosts haunt our family. I don’t know where they came from. Maybe they were always there. But, since Mary Ellen, the three banshees have heralded the curse that nudges each bad apple right off our family tree.
11.
Three banshees