Gerald allowed his voice to rise. “Lying girl,” he spat. “Little slut.”
Mary Ellen recoiled as if he’d struck her.
Gerald spoke louder. “How dare you come here looking for a handout? That bastard isn’t mine, and well you know it. How dare you try to ruin my good name?”
“Gerald,” Mary Ellen said, her voice choked.
“Do not presume to know me, girl!” Gerald’s voice boomed, his words theatrical, affected. “Now go home and tell your family of your disgrace. You’ll get no charity here.”
* * *
—
The next morning, he evicted her entire family. He sent the constabulary to break the windows and doors of their tiny cottage so they couldn’t come back. There was nothing they could do but watch, shock still thrumming through their bodies.
When it was done, Mary Ellen’s parents and siblings gathered up their meager belongings and began the long walk south, toward what family they had left, toward survival of a sort. Mary Ellen stayed behind. She was seventeen, unmarried, pregnant; this was clearly all her fault. Her family did not expect her to join them. She was no longer one of them.
For the second time, she sneaked up to the back door of the Big House. She didn’t know what she would do. She wanted to break the door down, climb the stairs to where Gerald’s guests were sleeping. She wanted to tell them everything. Wanted to hear their cries and curses, wanted her lover to share in her disgrace.
Mary Ellen had lost everything. Gerald had lost nothing. But breaking into his home would do nothing but land her and her baby in the nearest jail.
Consumed with grief and frustration and rage, Mary Ellen spat on the ground. She creaked the back door open, crept through the long hall of the Big House, and grabbed Gerald Rys’s precious sapling. Then she ran away, hoisting the tree in her ropy arms with our great-grandfather kicking in her belly.
* * *
—
The night was dark; a closed door. The moon was new.
Mary Ellen knew the land she walked through. Unlike Gerald with his expensive boots, his hat, his belly full of beer, she had wandered these fields, these rocks and stretches of uncut peat, for years. She knew not to follow the wisps. Her feet found each steady tussock, every gap in stone walls to lead her away from the bog and toward the sea.
When she reached the cottage at the edge of the cliff where this baby had been made, she stopped and watched the waves crash far below her. Her heart was a jagged coastline. She dropped her pack of meager belongings, what food she had scavenged, her wool shawl. Her grip on the sapling was fierce and furious.
The wind tried to beat her back. Mary Ellen held the sapling high in her arms and went to throw it into the sea. From somewhere behind her, she heard a woman scream.
In shock, she dropped the sapling and it landed at her feet. The clay pot cracked and soil spilled out. She turned. Standing on the rocks before her, blurred by the rain and the darkness, blurred by Mary Ellen’s own fear, were three old women, each with gray skin and wild eyes. The first’s mouth was wide, filled with unnaturally sharp teeth. The second had long, matted gray hair with bone combs stuck in the tangles. The third had a wicked grin and pointed nails at the ends of her long fingers. They clustered close.
The stories said that the scream of a banshee foretold a death in the family. Mary Ellen clutched her belly, but the three banshees shook their heads. Their hair was all gray tangles, but it stuck out the way Mary Ellen’s did. Their fingers were long like Mary Ellen’s. Their cheeks, now sunken, could once have been apples. Their chins were just as sharp.
As one, the three women reached out their hands. They curled their fingers, beckoned. Mary Ellen’s heart hammered like boots through a cottage door.
“No,” she said. She bent and gathered the sapling in her arms. “No.”
She turned to face the ocean, churning dark green below her, so far down she could feel the pull, so stormy she could feel the spray. This cliff, this moment, felt like the end of the world.
When she threw the sapling down onto the crashing rocks, Mary Ellen heard the banshees scream.
The wind howled and the spray of the sea flew over the cliff face. Mary Ellen screwed up her eyes against the lashing rain. When she opened them again, the three old hags were gone.
Mary Ellen’s stomach lurched. Her feet hurt. Her breasts were tender. Her head was tight.
She had done what she meant to do: She had stolen Gerald’s precious apple tree, the one he carried around with him, the one he kept alive in its clay pot because it wouldn’t take root on his land. It wasn’t much punishment, but it was all she had.
She had no way of knowing how powerful the tree had been. What magical protection would have been found in its branches, in its fruit.
Slowly, she turned from the cliffside with her shawl wrapped tight around her and a packet of food in her arms, and she followed the road south.
And the curse she had unwittingly cast on the bad apples of our family followed her.
12.
Fine apple cider
Galway and Sligo, 2012
Sometime during the reading—her head so close to mine her hair tickled my cheek—Ida had worked her braid loose, her fingers unconsciously smoothing, untangling, snapping split ends.
Her teeth worried at her lips. “I just don’t get how we found this,” she said. “Lying there right in front of us.”
I didn’t say anything. I simply pointed to the Sligo address on the last page of the letter. Ida eyed it suspiciously, then tapped the details into her phone.
“Two hours north by car. Looks like a house,” she said, her phone on satellite view. She zoomed in closer and read the words next to the little red pin. “Market View Bar. Your sister wants us to go to a pub?”
“Us?” I said.
“You don’t honestly think I’d let you keep following these letters all by yourself? I’m coming with you, Deena.”
Her eyes were the same gray as Mandy’s, but lighter, brighter. “Okay,” I said, my relief like welcome rain on a hot day. “Thank you.”
“Just let me call my best friend,” she told me. “I definitely can’t tell my dad about this, so I’m going to need an alibi.”
While Ida called her best friend, I called mine.
“Don’t move,” was the first thing he told me. “I’m coming to get you.”
“What? No. No, I have to go to Sligo.”
“Sligo? Why the fuck do you have to go to Sligo?”
I took a breath and summarized my day so far to Finn. There was silence for a long time on the other end of the line.