“You were apple-picking.” Rachel couldn’t hide the incredulity in her voice.
“What, you were expecting jail? Ibiza? Fucking, I dunno, month-long raves in some punk commune?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Nope. Picking apples. Good, wholesome work, fresh air, decent pay.”
Rachel shook her head. “You’ll never cease to surprise me.”
“Yeah,” said Mandy. “About that.”
But Rachel had spoken at the same time. “So where have you been since Mum went into hospital? A sanctuary for baby seals or something?”
Mandy rinsed her mouth out. “With a guy.”
“Right. See, now that I would have expected.”
“Yeah,” said Mandy. “And now I’m pregnant.”
* * *
—
There was a certain scent in the air when our family was gearing up for drama. We all knew it. I’d smelled it myself at ten when Mandy brought me back from our road trip. Both sisters smelled it when they walked out of the pub bathroom at our mother’s wake. It was a sharp and bitter smell, like metal or unripe apples.
When they came into the room, the air was rife with it. Electric. The family huddled around their small tables, their well-poured pints of Guinness (for the men) or glasses of chardonnay (for the ladies). Our father stood in the middle.
What my sisters didn’t know but were about to discover was that the walls between the ladies’ and the gents’ stalls were thin. That, without the taps running or the bathroom flushing or the hand driers humming, voices carried. That, as my sisters were talking, our father had taken a moment in the men’s room alone to compose himself, blink away his tears, ball up and release his cramping fists. That, in the silence of his suffering, our father had overheard everything.
“Get out,” he said to Mandy. The family was still and silent, hanging on every word. “Get your filthy, disrespectful self out of this place.”
Rachel reached for her sister’s hand. “Dad—”
“No. No. She’s no daughter of mine. Not after this. Not anymore.”
Mandy looked as though she might faint.
“How could you do this to me?” our father cried. “To your own mother? How could you do this to yourself again?”
He was haggard and worn, eyes bruised from holding back tears, face lined from grief, breath reeking of whiskey.
“I’m a cursed man!” he bellowed. “This whole fucking family is cursed. Sluts and whores, the lot of them. It’s cursed. I’m cursed. It’s a curse.”
“Again?” said Rachel softly.
Mandy shook her off. “Fine!” she yelled at her father. “That’s fine. I’m leaving—I hope you’re happy. I’m not gonna be your bad fucking apple anymore.”
“Ha!” roared our father. “Ha!”
“Stop that,” said Rachel, trying to stand between them. “This is not the time or the place for a fight.”
Behind her, the family began to murmur. The sharp tang of gossip was so strong she could taste it. Rachel took Mandy and our father by the elbow and led them outside, and in the pub parking lot, surrounded by the big black cars with funeral home logos on the sides, out of earshot of the family trying surreptitiously to peer through the windows, our father faced his daughters with fire in his eyes.
“What kind of a stupid slut gets knocked up twice in the same damn year?” he said to Mandy, low and dangerous.
Rachel took two small steps back, stared at Mandy. Of course, she had suspected. She must have unconsciously known. Sometimes we only see the things we want to see.
Mandy’s face was flooded with tears. She held herself and sobbed. She said, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”
She walked out of the parking lot and onto a bus and Rachel didn’t see her for another five years.
Two weeks later, in the middle of the night, our father packed his bags and left Rachel in the house alone to raise the baby. To raise me.
* * *
—
After that, Rachel’s best-laid plans fell like a branch of rotten apples from a gnarled and dying tree. She didn’t get the points she needed. She didn’t have the money to go to college. She had to work.
With only an occasional phone call from Mandy, Rachel’s bitterness grew fruit. She tried not to pick them, ripe resentment straight from the tree. She tried to stay steady. She made a new plan. She would work hard; she’d raise her baby sister; she’d ensure I had every chance she’d never gotten.
She would make sure we were respectable, good apples, worthy of our family tree. Without Mandy.
Without my mother.
32.
Sisters and mothers
The end of the world, 2012
Rachel’s hand was a rock on my knee, so heavy, keeping me in my place.
“Deena,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Deena. Look at me.”
There was nothing but a void inside me. I hadn’t come here for this.
“I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I’m sorry.” The past was the present and those were my mother’s words. The words she said when she knew she couldn’t keep me. Everything kept looping around, unraveling.
I stood. “I just need a minute. Just need a minute to myself.”
I walked woodenly on bare feet through the little cottage in Mandy’s old clothes (did I take them? I must have taken them. I wrote the letters, after all, couldn’t be trusted with the truth, bad apple that I was).
I lifted the latch of the back door and ran out into the storm.
* * *
—
At the cliffside, the rocks were sharp, the mud slippery, the ground uneven. The wind was a wild thing, pulling, pulling. The rain fell in glass shards. Everything was so cold. Everything was screaming.
Everything became this haunted darkness, this sharp cliff’s edge, there, right there, my bare feet toeing the line between ground and sky. Steep fall to the ocean below, tempest-tossed and foamy. The wind was fierce. Pushing, pushing. One more step and I’d be falling.
One more step, one more push, and I’d be on the back of a bull on my way to Tír na nÓg. Wasn’t that what was out here? Wasn’t that why Mandy came? Isn’t that what everybody else thought? Not that she’d made her way here to break a family curse, but that she’d come to escape it?