“Did you take them?” Rachel’s voice came from between her fingers. “From the boxes of her things.”
“No.”
Ida said, “How do you expect us to believe anything you say anymore?”
“You saw her!” I cried. “You said so. After the funeral, in the rain. You saw her on the bridge at the feet of the angels. You recognized her. You know she isn’t dead, you know it.”
Ida shook her head.
“Sisters,” said the three banshees suddenly, re-emerging from the kitchen with a fresh pot of tea. “You can always tell sisters. The trick is in the eyes.”
They opened theirs wide and each had stormy irises, as gray as the sky. They laughed as one as the others looked unsettled.
The banshees poured us all tea, sat on the second couch opposite Rachel and me.
“Not to be rude,” Ida said carefully, “but why is there a bull in the living room?”
“He frightens the cows,” the banshee in the middle told her.
“We can’t put him in the barn with them,” the one on the right explained.
The banshee on the left just cackled and dunked a biscuit in her tea.
“Thank you,” Rachel said, rather stiffly. “For taking care of Deena. I’ll bring her home once it’s safe to drive, after the storm.”
“Oh, there’s more storm to come yet, loveen,” said the banshees.
The wind howled through the cottage. The waves broke on the rocks. Sitting beside the sister who raised me, I felt my heart shatter inside my chest, my emotions sparring, colliding, a battle inside me. The love I held for my ever-practical sister—head of the household, her own love as reliable as the newspaper in our letterbox every morning—and the deep betrayal I felt at realizing, by the ways she had reacted after the funeral, that Rachel had known about Mandy’s daughter all along.
“Have you been formally introduced,” I asked icily, “to Ida Nolan, Mandy’s daughter?”
Rachel swallowed hard, met Ida’s eyes, nodded once. “Finn told me everything,” she said.
My broken heart was a landslide of pieces, small stones sticking in my throat. “You told me nothing.”
“Deena—”
“NOTHING!” I could have out-screamed the wind. The way she’d dismissed me when I said we needed to find her. The way she hadn’t even seemed surprised when she learned about Ida. The way she had always kept Mandy at arm’s reach from me. “You knew. You always knew. I wondered why you weren’t shocked to read that part of Mandy’s note. Why you didn’t want to look for her immediately. Find her. Mandy’s daughter. Why it wasn’t this big mystery for you like it was for me. Because you knew already.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about our sister,” Rachel said heavily.
“Yeah. I’ll bet. And there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
A twist in my heart, in my head. I’d heard these words before, the day after the funeral, yesterday, Rachel’s words in our father’s mouth. Or vice versa. We said the same things over and over. History just kept on repeating itself forever.
“You’re just like him,” I said. “You try so hard to be just like him. But you’re the bad apples, the two of you. Not us. Not us.”
Rivers of tears ran down my sister’s face.
“You keep on following his lead, but if he knew about me he’d do the same thing to me that he did to Julia. His own mother. He wouldn’t even know her. You think you’re so much better, but you’re still just his puppet. Just as full of fear as he is of hate. You drove Mandy away with it. Thinking she was so messed up and you were so superior. And you wanted me to be just like you, just so you could be the perfect daughter to prove to dear old fucking daddy that we’re good apples, that we’re worthy of his rotten family tree. But he doesn’t deserve me. And neither do you.”
Rachel gulped, gasped for air like a fish on the shore. I couldn’t stop my words from coming, hardly knew what I was saying through my bright-burning fire of anger and tears, didn’t think I meant the words; I just wanted them to hurt. Hurt like I was hurt because she had kept all this from me.
“I’d’ve been better off with Mandy,” I said, voice shaking, loud and terrible. “She would have made a better mother than you.”
“Oh,” said Rachel. “Oh.”
I grabbed my sister by the shoulders. I shook her like she shook me the minute she’d come in, and, when she did nothing, I threw myself into her arms and cried.
29.
Best-laid plans
Slieve League Cliffs, 2012, and Dublin, 1995
Rachel’s arms were an ocean around me. For the first time since Mandy had left, I felt something close to safe. Washed out and weary, rid of all my words, as though my sister’s arms were taking all my anger, my fear, my grief, leeching them out of me and throwing them through the cottage windows back into the sea.
Slowly, softly, into the silence left by the storm of me, Rachel told a story. Tea grew cold in mismatched mugs. Cookies went untouched. By the door, the bull sighed in his sleep. The three banshees leaned bony elbows on their knees. The world was listening.
This is what she told us.
* * *
—
Before the age of seventeen, Rachel Rys had her life all figured out.
At the end of the school year she would pass her exams with all A’s, which would enable her to go to Trinity College to study journalism. She would break up with her current boyfriend somewhere in the middle of Orientation Week and would spend the next year having sexual adventures with exciting undergrads. After three years, she’d graduate with first-class honors and go on to do a master’s in investigative journalism, which would land her an internship with the Irish Times. It was there that she would meet her future husband, a current-affairs correspondent. They would both make their careers in the broadsheets, where her position would be slightly higher and slightly better paid than her husband’s—something he would always secretly resent her for. They would have two children—after the age of thirty, when her career was established enough for her to afford to take maternity leave—and she would then make millions ghostwriting the autobiographies of famous politicians. She expected she would divorce her husband eventually. He would probably have an affair with a much younger woman when their children were in their early twenties (owing in no small way to his resentment of his wife’s great talent and success), finally allowing Rachel to live out her days in a penthouse apartment in Brooklyn, writing for the New York Times.