“Finn?” I said. “You still there?”
“Yeah,” he answered finally. “I’m just trying to decide if you’re serious or going crazy.”
“Serious.” I rolled my eyes even though he couldn’t see me. “Obviously.”
There were another few minutes of silence, in which I could tell my best friend was wrestling with something. Eventually, he said, “Where in Sligo?”
* * *
—
The bus from Galway to Sligo took almost three hours, stopping at every small town along the way. The countryside was green and gray outside the window, with the kind of sunlight that cuts through underneath the clouds, sharpens each blade of grass until the whole landscape is shining.
I took pictures of both of Mandy’s letters and sent them to Finn, who was on a different bus, from Dublin, coming to meet us in Sligo. We would arrive at about the same time. He kept up a steady stream of exclamation marks to my messages as he read them, echoing my and Ida’s feelings succinctly.
“I would have told on Gerald,” Ida said as a quick pattering of light rain danced across the bus window behind her head. “I would have hammered on the door until he came down, told his whole family.”
“You’d’ve ended up in jail, like she said.”
To me, Mary Ellen’s revenge on Gerald made sense. She knew she couldn’t hold him to account, couldn’t tell his family the truth. She knew it would be her word against his, and that he held all the power. So instead she did the only thing she knew would really hurt him. She couldn’t have known that by destroying his prized possession, his precious apple tree sapling, she had cursed the lot of us—her own unborn baby included.
Ida was clearly somebody whose father had taught her from the moment she showed up on his doorstep that she deserved respect. Somebody who could speak out, speak her truth without repercussions. Somebody not accustomed to secrets, or to shame. She might look like Mandy, but there was something straightforward about her that put her in direct contrast to her mother.
Maybe I was more like Mandy than I thought.
“I still don’t understand,” she said, “what exactly the curse is supposed to be. You know? Like, okay, at the turn of the last century an unwed teenage girl getting pregnant and being abandoned, I get that. But I don’t understand why Mandy thought something bad was going to happen to you. You seem perfectly normal to me.”
A nice, normal girl. I winced.
“I am perfectly normal,” I said. “I just . . .” An errant raindrop raced down the bus window. “I suppose not everybody is of the same opinion.”
“What do you mean?”
The faces of the girls in school floated past my eyes like disembodied talking heads. Then Rachel’s. Our father’s. “Like . . . my dad. He’s very . . . traditional. Very religious, conservative. He still believes that a woman’s place is truly in the home. Which is actually backed up by our constitution, you know, so he clearly isn’t alone.”
Ida rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but nobody actually thinks that anymore.”
“You’d be surprised.”
Ida said, “Deena, if your family is like that, they sound like the bad fucking apples, not you”—and I finally heard my sister in her words.
“And yet we’re the ones who are cursed.”
“Do you really believe in this curse?” There was no trace of ridicule in Ida’s voice.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But Mandy would have researched all this meticulously. When it comes to finding answers, she’s relentless. She said Mary Ellen heard the banshees scream. Found their gray hairs tangled around her things. Woke up with their scratches on her skin. And look what happened to her.” I tapped Mandy’s letter, making it flutter.
“But she got pregnant before her seventeenth birthday,” said Ida. “And from Mandy’s story it sounds like she wanted the baby. Loved it. Kept it safe.”
“But it was illegitimate. Back then that was a huge deal. Enormous. You read what happened, how her whole family was evicted. How they just left her.”
“I know.” Ida pushed her hair behind her ears. “But I’m just saying it sounds like that was the curse. Not that she got pregnant—that was before her birthday, with someone she loved—but that her lover rejected her and her family wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Do you know what I mean?”
Her hair fell back across her cheeks. She looked so like Mandy. “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” I said, a strange lump forming in my throat. “But you’re right.”
Ida touched her hair, straightened her necklace. “What do you really think we’re going to find at the end of this . . . journey, treasure hunt, whatever you want to call it?” she asked.
I watched the fields roll by, sharp and bright. “I think we’re going to find Mandy,” I said.
“But what if—”
“I think we’re going to understand the curse properly. If there even is a curse.”
“But—”
“I think she’s gone to break it. At the end of the world. I think the end of the world is somewhere real, and she’s gone there to break the curse.”
Things were beginning to make sense, slot into place. Mandy’s reaction to Dad having overheard my coming out to Rachel, so uncharacteristic, was because of the curse. She didn’t think I was a bad apple because I was gay. She thought I was cursed because of how our father reacted. On the morning of my seventeenth birthday.
That was why my sister disappeared so suddenly. She left to break the curse.
She was doing it for me. Before anything terrible happened to me.
* * *
—
We arrived at the end of the market, stalls shutting down for the evening, the scent of soap and seafood still in the air. Children fished the last sweets from deep buckets set out in rows while dogs lapped fallen ice cream from the pavements. There was a match showing in one of the pubs and every so often the sound of rowdy cheers spilled out of the open doors into the street.
We stepped into the dark interior of the pub, a wash of barley and hops hitting our nostrils. There was a girl pulling pints behind the bar, chatting animatedly to some tourists. She was our age maybe, wearing a gray tweed vest over a pale pink shirt. She had short, choppy brown hair, dramatic eyeliner, and an electric smile that I could only look at out of the corner of my eye.
When we walked in, her eyes swung from me to Ida and back again. “I know you two,” was the first thing she said.