“Let’s get this over with quickly,” said Ida. “Find the letter and get back outside.”
We dumped our bags and jackets in a pile by the door and split up, moving slowly through the hallway, flashlight seeking out a white envelope amid all that dust and grayness.
On the ceiling there was a flaky stain where the paint had peeled and it looked like the shadow of a bull’s head, gray and horned. It winked.
“I’m going upstairs,” I said.
“Deena, wait—”
On the bottom step, my footsteps crunched. I shone my phone light at my feet. There were bits of bone comb smashed under the staircase, silver hairs tangled around the banisters. From upstairs there came a short, sharp scream.
Somebody grabbed my arm and I jumped so hard my phone fell from my fingers.
“Don’t go up there,” Cale whispered, panicked, beside me.
Follow, follow.
The banshees were getting closer, getting stronger. It was so hard to resist the pull.
I turned my face back toward the light shining weakly from the open door and let out all my breath in a sharp gasp of fear. Tangled around our bags and jackets were shining silvery gray hairs.
They were here. They were close. I think I knew where they wanted me to go. The cliffs that Mandy jumped from were about twelve miles away. I could feel their pull from where I stood. Could hear the scream of the wind. A scream that sounded a lot like it came from the open mouth of a banshee. A scream that sounded like it was coming from a room at the top of the stairs. Before I even realized I’d moved, I took three quick steps toward the sound.
A pressure on my shoulder; the pinch of long nails on the top of my arm. I turned, expecting a ghost. Someone with tangled hair and gray skin wanting to lead me away. I think I might have followed.
“Don’t go.”
It wasn’t a banshee. It wasn’t a ghost. It was only a girl with smudged black-cat eyeliner and choppy hair, shivering through her vest.
“I would have followed.” I closed my eyes. “They’re calling me.”
Cale looked nervously toward the stairs. “Stay here,” she said. “Stay with me.”
“I think there’s only so far left to go,” I said—Mandy’s next letter was in my hoodie pocket. I crinkled the paper between my fingers like a dried leaf. Crumbling.
“Do you think we carry them with us?” I asked. “All the stories of the past?”
Cale touched her fingertips to the spot above her belly button that mirrored the place on my own body where I had first felt the burning back at Mary Ellen and Ann’s cottage. “For a while maybe.”
That spot still burned. The cliffs still called. There was still a screaming on the wind. Panic froze me like a shock of cold water, the same sensation as falling, hard, into the sea.
I voiced something I was too afraid to say to Finn, who knew me, or to Ida, who was my sister’s daughter. “What if that’s the only place Mandy is?”
“Hey,” said Cale, and she put her arms around me. “Hey. It’s okay.”
When she kissed me, I didn’t expect it, and I’m not sure she did either. Her lips were soft and tasted of Burt’s Bees. She touched the side of my face and her hand was soft too, and cold. The kiss started slow and deepened so fast I didn’t even realize what I was doing until her hand was halfway up my shirt and I was pulling her hips toward mine as if we could fuse together, grow into each other like trees over wooden fences, meld muscle and bone.
If pain stayed on in places like this, maybe love did too. Maybe Ann and Mary Ellen had followed, recognized us as their own. Maybe their lips guided ours—how else would I have known how to hold another girl’s hips, how to touch my tongue to hers, how to press, press, press myself against her while her hands lit up the skin under my clothes? How else would I have actually let myself?
My first kiss was interrupted by my friends, who tumbled back into the entrance hall from another room. Cale and I didn’t manage to break apart fast enough for Finn and Ida not to notice. Their eyes widened; their mouths moved to make silent O’s.
“Right,” said Ida, a drawn-out vowel cut off by a t. She touched her hair, straightened her long, thick braid. “Okay. Wow. Sorry.”
“Sorry.” Cale looked sheepish but not ashamed. “Got a bit carried away there.” She bumped her hip gently with mine as if kissing me had been the easiest thing in the world, simple and spur-of-the-moment.
My breath was short, my head spinning. My return to earth was a crash-landing.
Behind Ida’s back, Finn gave me a sly thumbs-up, a wink. I must have still looked terrified, because I definitely felt it. I cast about the room for something to say, hands in my pockets, then out of them, as if I didn’t know how to control my own body—which didn’t seem unlikely given what had just happened.
“What’s that?” I said, pointing.
“What’s what?”
“Under the workbench there.”
“Under here?”
Ida crouched to peer under the wooden bench by the boarded-up window. She surfaced with a frown on her face and a letter in her hand.
I couldn’t help but let a small sigh of relief escape me.
“Here,” I said. “Give it here. Let me read.”
Dear Deena,
You’re almost there. Only a few more branches left to climb before we get to you. Before we get to me.
I want to tell you I’m sorry. I want you to know this was the only way for me to share this story. I would have brought you with me if the curse hadn’t come to you too. Instead, I left to break it.
Help me break it, Deena. We’re almost there.
25.
Things that hold you
Donegal, 1936–1947, Killybegs, 1947–1953, and Dublin, 1953–1978
They had a name for William Rys and it wasn’t the one he was born with.
Home Baby, they called him. As if he was still suckling at his mother’s breast. As if he even knew what a home was.
He left through the front door of the home with the other children every morning at half past eight and they walked, silent and in single file, to school. They sat at the back of the classroom.
They didn’t speak to the town children, the ones with mothers and fathers. They hardly spoke to each other. They saved all of that for the home, and when they spoke in their rooms or in the gardens, with the nuns turning a blind eye, it was all in shouts and insults, and the desperate, lonely language of fists and kicks.