Mandy looked deflated. Rachel took out her car keys, made a move to leave.
“It’s good to see you,” she said again, touching the handle of the car door. “It’s good for Deena to see you too. But show me that you can stay. Prove that you can be still. And then we’ll see.”
But being still was never something Mandy was good at, and wavering from her rules was something Rachel could not do.
33.
Sisters and mothers, part II
The end of the world, 2012
So Mandy remained as my sister, my fairy godmother, my flighty but loving kin. And at the same time Mandy dug deep and muddy, got her hands dirty, asked for favors, and uncovered secrets. Mandy researched our family curse without knowing that she could one day break it. That she could one day make sure her daughters never had to change their true selves, damp down, pretend. Never had to live in fear.
Mandy did her research, coaxed rumors from our family. With what she found, she was able to speak to Lizzie, who knew Julia’s story, to old classmates of William’s, who knew his. She was able to trace the family tree to an old burnt-out cottage, found its history in the skull of the bull. There were letters, things Mary Ellen had left for her granddaughters, so they would know where they came from. A journal that Lizzie left to lie with the bull. And there was Mary Ellen’s magic, the memories she spoke to the bull made manifest for when her ancestors would need them.
But for all the beauty and sadness, all the wisdom in Mary Ellen’s story, Mandy couldn’t find anything concrete about the woman; didn’t know where she’d come from; couldn’t find a record for a Rys man who had died of diphtheria in Donegal, which is what was still widely believed had happened to her husband. But in Mandy’s travels somebody gave her a phone number for three sisters by the name of Boyle, said they might know, had lived in the area Mary Ellen had said she was from for years. Three old sisters, they said, might be relatives, might be family, you never know.
When she spoke to the old Boyle sisters, Mandy understood. She pieced together their talk of local history that said that many years ago the Big House, long since rebuilt as a spa hotel, was still inhabited by a landlord, a wealthy Englishman named—what was it again—Rice? Rumor had it he’d impregnated a peasant, then evicted her whole family. She had left, never to be seen again. And from that moment the landlord’s family fortunes were ruined. The Big House fell into disrepair; the Englishman’s father was forced to sell his orchard. Nobody knew what had happened to the peasant girl. Nobody ever knew what happened to peasant girls.
But Mandy did. And now she knew from which cliffs the peasant girl had thrown her lover’s sapling. She now knew where the curse began.
Suddenly she had it. The Rys family curse. The three banshees. The reason all of those bad apples had been shaken off our fallen family tree. She understood how to break the curse.
It all came from the sapling. The magical Rys Russet, the lucky Lendemain. What had Gerald’s mother told him, all those generations ago? The juice of these apples runs in your blood. Plant the tree on your land and your children’s blood shall run with it too.
That was what Gerald had failed to do. That was what Mandy had to do now, and she set off to find it. To find the sapling.
Mandy believed there was a curse on our family, but for the longest time she didn’t think to break it. She didn’t believe it would ever hurt quiet, nerdy Deena, Rachel’s protégée. She didn’t imagine that it could reach Ida, so far from our family, a Nolan, not a Rys. For all her research, she didn’t understand that the curse didn’t work like that. Nobody was immune from being branded. Bad apples, the lot of us.
But she understood that soon enough. The moment she knew I had inadvertently come out to my father, she knew the curse would come to me too.
* * *
—
Mandy did write one of the letters. The note she left on her bed before she disappeared. I was the first to read it, but already her tear stains had blurred the words. I had missed a single letter at the end of the last word: a crucial letter, a letter that changed everything.
Daughter.
Daughters.
Going to the end of the world. Give all my love to my daughters.
I suppose my mother was never quite sure she would return. I suppose that was why she wrote the note, left her bedroom pristine, her things tidied, her loose ends tied.
It seemed an impossible task. For all my mother knew, the sapling had been thrown into the Atlantic, left to rot at the bottom of the seabed, seaweed-tangled, fed by salt and bleached seal bones. But something pushed Mandy onward. Guided her car to the cliffs just over yonder, close to where our ancestor once lived and loved and was betrayed with her unborn son swirling in the depths of her.
Three voices urged my mother on.
Cliffs are a bitch to climb backward. Hand under foot and foot over hand she scaled them, down, down, trying to keep from falling. She could see something far below. Farther than most had ever thought to look, to search, to photograph. A sharp jut of rock and a dark spill of soil so unlike the muck and mud of the cliffs. And, at its edge, a branch. Not a peace offering. Not a laurel. A thin and spindly, barely living tree. But it was alive. After all these years. Impossibly, it lived.
Mandy scrambled to reach it. Her footing grew erratic, her blistered hands sore. Her muscles screamed surrender. The sea was stormy. The wind was fierce. One gust was all it took. She fell.
Perhaps she slept. Perhaps she died. She couldn’t tell. The three old women told her, after, that they’d found her. Found her car parked by their cliff (they didn’t hold to notions like national parks; no, this land was their land, bound to their family name). Found her lying half alive by the remains of an apple tree, miles and miles down the rock and steep slope, the breakneck fall of the storm-swept cliffs.
How the three old biddies dragged her back up was a mystery, but Mandy suspected it involved a rope, a pulley, and a great gray bull.
* * *
—
She came to in a cottage with a thatched roof and whitewashed walls built from the ruins in which her ancestors met, secretly, in the night. She’d been out for days. Out of time, out of mind.
“Rest,” said the old ladies. “Recuperate. Gather back your strength.”
Their voices sounded familiar. She allowed herself to trust them.
When she was well enough to get up from the slouchy couch in the cottage living room, Mandy had connected it all. She slipped out of the house in the dead of night and walked for miles through the darkness to take the nearest bus to Dublin.
She didn’t imagine they’d have buried her. Them, her family, the ones who’d known how many times she’d run away before. Who hadn’t batted an eyelid. Who’d barely called the guards.