—
There is no doubt that William loved our mother. That he cared for and idolized her, placed her on a pedestal like the statue of an angel. He thought of her as his angel, his savior, his bright blond chance at redemption.
He was ten years older than she—the little girl in the window whose father employed him the very day he walked in the bakery door. William was seventeen, had only the clothes on his back and his name, but the baker, Seamus MacLachlan, our grandfather, felt a strange kinship with the young man. Perhaps because the boy was pure and damaged, or perhaps because he knew he could vastly underpay him. And, as time went by, because of William’s devotion and his unwavering morals, which echoed then, as they do now, those of the baker’s family. William fit into the MacLachlan family like he’d always belonged.
Which is why it came as no surprise to Seamus, when his daughter came of age, that William should ask him for her hand.
Until they were married, William refused to give his sweetheart more than a chaste kiss on closed lips. There are things that you hold, and there are things that hold you. What held William was the conviction that sex was a sin outside a marriage sanctioned by God.
Our mother lost six babies in the next ten years: some so quickly she only knew it by the unusual length of her bleeding the next month; some well after she had started to show.
When the two sisters were born, the doctors told our mother she would not be able to birth twins herself—each child pushing over seven pounds and almost full term—but Mandy came out feet first and screaming before the doctors could schedule a cesarean. Twenty-four hours later, Rachel got tangled up in her umbilical cord on the way out, had to be cut from her mother’s womb on the operating table. William would have liked a son, but, after the girls, the doctors told our mother she would most likely never bear children again.
You, Deena, came later.
William grew up with a seventeen-year hole in his past. He was married many years before he told his wife about his origins, about where and how he was raised, and he only did that because his mother’s family had been determined to find him, whether he liked it or not.
26.
On the back of a bull
Killybegs and Fintra, 2012
When I turned over the page, we all saw the next address, written so hastily it was almost illegible: Fintra beach, Glencolmcille, County Donegal.
Closer, again, to the cliffs Mandy jumped from. We were almost there.
My phone vibrated in my pocket, made a sound like bees.
“We need to go,” I said, breathless. “We need to go now. Find a bus. Get a lift. Walk it if we have to.” I ran out of the building.
Outside, the rain had started to fall. The others, their bags half falling off their arms and shoulders, grabbed them to follow me, surrounded me, slowed me down.
“Come on,” I said, head spinning, breath catching, wheezing. “We need to go now.”
“Stop, Deena, stop.” Ida held out her arms in front of me, palms up, a brick wall. I swayed when I hit it.
Cale’s voice was worried, came from beyond my narrowing peripheral vision. “She looks awfully pale . . .”
“Deena.” Finn’s face appeared in front of mine. My vision yellowed at the edges.
“We’ve hardly slept,” said Ida. “We haven’t eaten. She needs to sit down.”
Finn pressed my inhaler into my hand. “Breathe,” he said. “We’re going to find you something to eat.”
I puffed once, coughed, said, “No, we have to go,” puffed again.
My friends frog-marched me to a nearby coffee shop right across the road from the school, beside the bus stop. “We can go after a cup of tea and a sandwich,” said Finn, and I laughed faintly because of how much he reminded me of Rachel.
I didn’t expect to miss Rachel a day and only a few hours’ drive away. Miss her ceaseless bustling around the kitchen, the kettle boiling, a pan on the stove simmering, her fond complaints about my vegetarianism mixing with the clattering of the dishes she needed to have clean before sitting down to any meal.
I wasn’t just doing this for Mandy or for me. I was doing this for all of us.
While the others ordered food and tea in the stuffy, overheated coffee shop, I pulled off my dusty hoodie, threw it on my chair, and went into the bathroom to try to calm down.
I stared at my face in the mirror the way madwomen do in films. My cheeks were still flushed from the heat of Cale’s kiss, the blush of it still on my lips.
My lips had been kissed like in my wildest dreams in the middle of a wild-goose chase. It didn’t fit; the timing was all wrong. I couldn’t fathom what should happen next. What if she had only kissed me because of the ghosts? Why else would she have? Still, a small involuntary smile quirked at the edges of my blurry, mirrored lips—I was on the path to Mandy with my oldest friend, and had gained her daughter and a girl with cat eyes and wild kisses along the way.
I splashed water on my face, swept the splashed droplets from the mirror with the palm of my hand, and in my clear reflection could suddenly see my shoulders, my chest, my neck. Raised red lines ran over the length of them, as though I’d been pulled through briars or scratched by three pairs of hands with long, sharp nails. All the way up my neck, like somebody had tried to choke me.
My breath stuck in my throat like a scream.
* * *
—
When I came out of the bathroom, Finn and Cale were at the table, their expressions grave, Finn holding a piece of paper like a summons. Ida had just arrived with our food.
“What is it?” asked Ida. “What’s happened?”
Cale and Finn exchanged a look. I couldn’t read it.
“What’s going on?” I said.
Cale reached forward and put the piece of paper on the table. A letter. Another letter from Mandy.
“This fell out of the pocket of Deena’s hoodie.”
“No.” I tried to grab the letter, but Ida was faster.
“What is this?” Her eyes darted between paragraphs, narrowing as she understood. This letter contained the next part of the story.
“It’s all there,” said Finn. “The rest of Julia’s life after she left the home. How she found William. Her grandfather’s death. We just weren’t supposed to have found it yet.”
Ida looked around the coffee shop, through the open door at the quiet road outside. She raised her eyebrows questioningly. She still wanted to let herself believe.
Finn shook his head. “Mandy isn’t here,” he told her. “She was never here.”