“It’s in her best interests,” they said. “It’s for the baby. We’re only doing this for the baby.”
“Her name is Deena,” Mandy said.
* * *
—
It was too much. Too much for Mandy. The screaming and sleepless nights, and days, the coos and sickly smiles of the neighbors, the extended family, the exclamations over this miracle, this baby girl, Mandy’s little sister. She slept fitfully, woke even when the baby slept to discover that she had clearly been scratching at her skin in her sleep. Soon her body was covered in raised red lines running up and down her arms and legs, her torso, her chest, even her neck. Some mornings she awoke to find them on her face. So when her mother fell ill, was hospitalized, slipped into a coma, Mandy did the only thing she knew to do.
Running away had always been how Mandy faced her problems.
She was drinking in a bar in Galway when she met him. Jeremy Nolan. He believed her lies (they all did) but he, unlike most of the others, was kind. He listened. He cared. She lost herself in him for a time. Then her mother died and she ran away all over again, with raised red scratches all over her pale, freckled skin, and her belly slowly swelling for the second time.
In the next nine months, Mandy’s belief in the curse became something real. A pip inside her that grew into a spindly skeleton tree. What else, thought Mandy, could this hellish year have been? How else could so much be stacked on top of the one person, the one family?
My father was right, Mandy decided. The Rys family name is cursed. My daughter will be better off without it. Better off without me.
When her second daughter was born, she nursed her for a month, then wrapped her warmly in her car seat and left her on her father’s front porch. This one she was sure of. This one had a family outside hers. It was the right thing, Mandy told herself, over and over throughout the years. Ida was a Nolan, not a Rys. She was good. She was safe. The curse could never come to her.
But as for the first one, the first baby, Mandy was forever torn.
* * *
—
Mandy showed up at Rachel’s door on a Wednesday morning early, straight from the airport, tired and haggard, her clothes wrinkled and musty, with only a backpack and fifty quid to her name. She hadn’t seen her sister in five years.
She stood on the front step and listened to the sounds coming from inside: the doors opening, wardrobe drawers closing, five-year-old feet clattering about in tiny shoes. Rachel’s voice came through the closed door, firing off instructions and reminders, brisk and practical, telling the child off when she was too slow, saying they were going to be late: Hurry up now, Deena, get your coat on, quick as you can.
Rachel opened the door to leave the house before Mandy could ring the bell.
She stopped on the threshold, Deena—me—ahead of her, the tiny coat of my school uniform hanging by one sleeve, Rachel still wrestling with the zip of my oversized schoolbag. The zip shut with a sound like a tear.
Mandy tried a smile, sank down onto her haunches, and stared into the face of her younger sister—sister, she told herself again and again, sister—and said, in a voice made faint by love and guilt, regret and exhaustion, sorrow and relief, “Hi, Deena.”
I had never, to my knowledge, seen Mandy, but I recognized her. Rachel had made sure of that. Whatever resentment she had for her sister she’d tried to put to one side. She told me stories of her childhood with her twin sister, the wild one, the one off on wonderful adventures. The walls of our house were covered in pictures of the lot of us: Rachel and me, Mandy, our dead mother, our absent father. I recognized them all.
I shoved my arm into the remaining sleeve of my coat, shrugged, said, “Hi, Mandy, are you coming to stay?”
Mandy’s eyes met Rachel’s. Her sister’s mouth was a thin line.
“We’re going to be late for school,” she told me. “Give your big sister a hug and hurry up and get in the car.”
Mandy only let go of me when I pulled away, waved cheerfully at her, skipped over to the car, and threw my schoolbag in. Mandy stood.
“So,” she said to Rachel. “I’m home.”
Rachel locked the front door behind her, readjusted her handbag on her shoulder. “It’s been five years,” she said, face impassive. The slightest warmth came through the stiffness of her words. “It’s good to see you.”
“Sorry I didn’t call to say I was coming.”
Rachel looked toward the car, to Deena—to me—fastening my seat belt in the back seat. “How long will you stay?”
Mandy took a breath. “I’m home,” she said again. “I’m home for good.”
They both watched the small child in the car open her schoolbag and sneak a snack from her lunchbox. Watched me.
Mandy could tell that her sister was also surreptitiously watching her, taking in her unkempt clothes, her tangled hair, the one backpack she’d brought with her. Mandy knew she didn’t look like someone who was home for good.
Still, she asked, “Can I’ve a key?”
Rachel took a breath. “You know you can’t stay in the house.”
“Rachel—”
“Dad won’t have it. And, besides, Deena and I have our routine. I can’t let you disrupt that if you’re just going to disappear again for half a decade. I have Deena to think of. Her home, her stability.”
Mandy felt as though she had been kicked, hard, in the stomach. “Rachel, Deena is my—”
Rachel cut her off. “I know,” she said. “She’s your sister too. Which is why I know you’re going to do what’s best for her.”
There was so little left of Mandy. She was raw, ragged, a cursed thing.
“You can stay a couple of nights,” said Rachel, unlocking the door for Mandy. “There are towels in the spare room; the bed is made. There’s a lasagna in the freezer or leftover spaghetti in the fridge. I don’t think Deena ate all the scones—there should be a couple in the bread bin. Take a shower, eat something—you look like you need a decent meal. I’ll pick up a paper to find you a flat-share if you’re set on staying in Dublin. I’ll get some money out to help you set up. But you can’t stay here, Mandy.”
“I don’t need your money,” Mandy said, temper hot, words like bullets. “And I don’t need your charity either. But I will see my daughter.”
Rachel shushed her, looked with panic again toward me. Her shoulders slumped; her voice grew weary. “I’m not a wicked witch, Mandy, keeping the child locked in a tower. But I have been raising her—alone—for the past five years. Alone, Mandy.”