To do that, she thought, she had to go back to the very beginning. To the apple-tree sapling. To the end of the world.
She left her notes behind. The papers and books and diaries that had been stacked in folders on her desk. A decade of research.
I found them, the morning after my birthday, in Mandy’s room with her note. I brought them home.
I wrote the letters. It took days, while Rachel spoke to the police, while they searched Mandy’s flat, while her car was found, while they interviewed the witness who’d seen my sister falling to her death.
While Rachel sobbed and stared into space, organized the funeral, fended off our family’s meddling and backhanded insults to the memory of our sister, I locked myself in my room and wrote.
I scratched down the story as though I were possessed, and the words came out of my pen in Mandy’s handwriting. It felt like she was talking to me. It was the closest I could get to her. Maybe it was her working through me. It was all so much like a dream.
Follow, follow.
I knew I had to follow, suspected that once Ida had heard my story she would want to join this pilgrimage, recognizing the desperate need to understand where you came from. I kept the stack of letters in my backpack—later, my pockets—and placed each one when nobody was looking, and every time it was as if Mandy’s hand left them, not mine.
Belief was a fraying rope bridge over a stormy sea. Strand by silver strand, I unraveled.
* * *
—
When I stepped outside, there was a bull.
Maybe it wasn’t a white horse that carried the warrior Oisín on its back to the fairy land of Tír na nÓg. Maybe it was never a horse. Maybe it was a bull. I climbed onto his back.
Bulls travel fast. You wouldn’t think it, great beasts that they are. Especially this one. This huge gray mountain of a monster, horns twice as big as my forearms, hair coarse and legs long, loping across the countryside like an animal on a mission. But then I suppose we both were.
The journey would have taken an hour and a half on two human feet, but on this enormous creature the trek was halved. We crested the coast, then veered inland, across fields and boglands that nobody was allowed to cut anymore to make turf for the fires in the way they used to.
I don’t know how I knew he was the same bull as the one in the story, as the one who’d been haunting my steps since I left Dublin, the same as the one whose skull I’d been blessed with protection by Mandy years ago. But I knew, deep in the bones of my own skull. Mary Ellen had cursed him never to rest if he failed to protect her granddaughter. Maybe Mandy had called him back to protect me. Maybe my ancestors worked through her the way they did through me.
I wasn’t afraid. I knew where I was going.
I could tell we were close to the shore by the wind, wild and restless. This coastline kept its own climate, and right now it was mirroring all the storms I’d ever known. It stole my breath. It tangled my hair. It chilled my skin to a dull gray. It screamed.
The bull took me down, down, down the steep steps and the dunes until his hooves sank into sand. I slid off his back and my muscles hurt as if it had been me running across the landscape. What was it the ghosts in the laundry had said? Julia’s and Cecilia’s voices in whispers; Nellie at the window, candle lit, ready to jump. The landscape remembers. Pain stays on in places like this.
On the beach, the bull left me like everybody else had left me. He turned and walked away. I wanted to call out to him, ask him to stay, to hold my hand through all this, but he didn’t have any hands, and at this point I couldn’t feel mine either. I was numb to the bone. No hands, no arms, no feet, no heart. My voice was just a scream on the wind.
Listen, said the ghosts. Listen.
There were big black crows flying out over the sea and I knew that was where I needed to go somehow, the knowledge clear and immediate. I took off my shoes and left my bag on the shore.
In this country, everything happened in the water. I had seen the banshee in the sea and Ida thought she’d seen Mandy in the rain, watched over by stone angels. Iron and bronze. I wondered how they decided whom to make statues of. Daniel O’Connell and all the angels, Jesus on everything, all these Marys, but only the virgins, not the Magdalenes. Our Lady, Star of the Sea, who watched over Dollymount Strand and Bull Island. Who watched over the ferries to England. She should have been the Magdalene, not the Virgin. Crying over the baby at her breast.
“Our Lady, Star of the Sea,” I said to the water. “Different sea. This one’s an ocean. Goes all the way to America, like a bunch of babies with different names on boats and planes. Never to be seen again.”
A voice came from the top of the dunes, called down to me on the wind. “Deena, stop, you don’t have to do this!”
But I did. I didn’t have a choice. None of us did, all the bad apples.
Follow, follow.
I thought the shock of the first wave would bring all my blood to the surface, fill in my skin like a watercolor painting. But I could barely feel the water. So I went in deeper.
Numb feet, numb knees. Numb belly when I got in that far. I might not have been in water at all. Rising, rising, rising numb where my breasts used to be. The rolls of my waist, the swell of my belly over tight jeans, an extra hole in the belt I borrowed from Rachel. Thighs that rubbed together when I ran. All that, gone. The skin pale and prone to flushing. The freckles like grains of sand that got stuck and decided to stay. Stray hairs everywhere that I plucked and shaved. Spots and pimples. Nerve endings. Endings.
My neck barely felt the tug of the ocean. My lips barely felt the water’s kiss. If my lungs were this numb already, how would I know that I was drowning? If I was this close to dying, how could I tell I wasn’t already drowned?
When I went under, I tasted apples.
Dear Deena,
It’s almost finished. I don’t have much time. I’m leaving, but I’m not leaving you. I wouldn’t do that. The story is almost done and after this you’ll find me. I believe with all my heart you will.
27.
Happy families, part II
Sligo, 1938–1995
It took Julia Rys almost sixty years to find her son.
Julia never married. Never wanted to. She never had children after William, her only son. After she returned to her parents, she set herself to work.
She still felt a compulsion to clean, to scrub and bleach each piece of fabric in the house. Her clothes, the towels, and bed sheets were always worn and soft from so many washes. But in the laundry she had hated the heat and steam, the thick gray walls of the building closing in around her, so she was happy to be out in the fields. Little by little, she took over the farm, getting in good dairy cows to mate with her favorite bull and selling their milk all over the country. She would travel herself to shops and pubs, to schools and hospitals, saying, “Just wait, just taste. I know you think the bigger dairies’ milk tastes better, but just wait till you taste mine.”