Rachel shook her head. “I hear you,” she said helplessly. “I just don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to understand. You just have to do as I say. Now come upstairs and kiss your new sister.”
* * *
—
Rachel’s new sister was small and red with a wrinkled, alien face that wouldn’t stop crying.
“Colic,” said our mother fondly. “I remember you were just the same.”
“How is this possible?” Rachel asked.
Her question was met with a smile. “Bodies are miracles, Rachel,” our mother replied. “I didn’t think I’d ever have another child. It had been so long since I’d been pregnant my body mustn’t have known how to react. I thought it was the change—you know, the menopause. It hadn’t come yet. I was always a late bloomer. But then I went to the hospital last week and—surprise! Here is little Deena.”
Rachel touched the baby’s cheek and said, “Hello, little Deena.”
Little Deena cried and cried.
* * *
—
The house was loud suddenly, louder than it had ever been. Those were weeks of baby cries and adult tears, doors slammed and plates smashed and harsh words shouted up stairs. Those were weeks of bottles and bibs, dirty diapers and sleepless nights.
Rachel spent entire days in the library, studying after school, and most weekends at Sorcha’s. Her exams were six months away. Her entire future depended on her study, her results, her constant focused determination. She wouldn’t let herself be distracted now.
But on top of the noise of her parents fighting with Mandy and of the baby’s constant crying, her mother’s parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews came in droves to see and congratulate the new mother on this unexpected miracle—and to chastise her husband on the state of their eldest (so rude, so unruly, and there had been rumors she’d run away, and were there drugs involved, and what kind of a teenage girl dressed like that these days, and what was our father going to do about it, that girl brought shame on the family).
As for Mandy, she loved the baby. Because her mother was so tired, it was often Mandy who woke in the night to feed her, who got up early in the morning to take her for walks, along the blustery seafront, across the wooden bridge, and all the way to the Dollymount Strand, down to the statue of Mary at the edge of it, staring out across the water.
The only time the baby stopped crying was when she was being rocked, or when she was submerged to the chin in the warm water of the bath.
“That kid certainly hates staying still,” Rachel observed one morning to her sister. “Must take after you.”
Mandy stared at Rachel for a full minute before answering.
“Yes,” she said. “I guess she does.”
* * *
—
Two months after Deena was born, when the family had just about become used to her presence, their mother suffered another stroke. A cerebral aneurysm, like the one before. She slipped into a coma and stayed that way for almost eight weeks.
It was January, bitterly cold. For weeks, the wind had screamed in under the rafters, echoed around the attic. Nobody could sleep.
Mandy, who had been so attentive to the child until that point, disappeared the moment their mother fell ill. Their father was just as absent, splitting his time between the pub and the church, as if one canceled out the other.
There are things that hold you, and there are things that you hold. Their father held on to pints and prayers, one after the other in rapid succession. Mandy held on to the hands and lips and wallets of any man who’d take her. And Rachel held on to the plan for her future as best she could while caring for the baby.
After almost two months, their mother slipped away. There was no plan in place for this.
* * *
—
The day of the funeral was crisp, uncompromising, so dry and cold the ground snapped mourners’ heels off their shoes and sent them skidding.
Our father shook hands with our family, nodded, stalwart, at their tears. Beside him, poised and graceful in her black pencil skirt, Rachel held her baby sister, rocked her so she wouldn’t cry.
Mandy was almost late, slipped into the church after most of the mourners, skulked up the far wall to the family pew, slumped down beside her sister.
“What the hell happened to you?” Rachel snarled as the congregation settled. Mandy’s hair was lank and tangled, her black shirt wrinkled, her face a pale gray marked with red like she’d been scratching at her skin.
“What do you mean what the hell happened to me?” she snapped back. “My mother’s just died. We can’t all become Polly Perfect at times like these.”
Rachel’s mouth grew thin. She sat as straight as a statue, rocked the baby. Halfway through the service, Rachel’s arms began to shake. She was glad of Mandy then; how she knew without asking to take the baby gently, to make the exchange from one sister to the other without disturbing the rhythm of the rocking.
* * *
—
In the pub for the wake after the burial, the baby finally slept. Rachel slipped into the bathroom to once more attempt to dry her tears, splash water on her face. The door to the bathroom slammed open and Mandy stalked in.
“Fucking family,” she said when she saw that Rachel was the only occupant. “Fucking nightmare family won’t leave us the fuck alone at our own mother’s funeral.”
“Yeah.” Rachel ran the cold tap over her wrists to wake herself up, set herself straight. “I wasn’t expecting a liturgy on sitting like a lady today of all days.”
In reply, Mandy threw up in the toilet.
“Whoa,” said Rachel. “Mandy. Are you okay?”
Mandy took deep breaths. “Yeah. I mean, no, but you know. That helped.”
Rachel felt an unexpected surge of warmth toward her sister. They had never really seen eye to eye, but neither had they fought much. Besides, Rachel told herself, with the father and extended family they had to contend with, they only had each other now.
“Where were you,” Rachel asked, leaning back against a sink, “over last summer? Where were you these past few months, for that matter?”
Mandy spat into the toilet, made a face. “Don’t you start,” she said.
“I wasn’t. That’s not what I meant. I was just curious.”
Mandy searched her sister’s face for signs of judgment and must have decided Rachel was sincere, because she answered truthfully. “Outside London,” she said. “Got a job for the summer working in this orchard.”