The family that thought she was dead.
* * *
—
How would you know if you were dead? Could you feel it? As an ache—a physical sensation that left behind a hole inside you? Could you sense it as a smell—salty like the sea, or tart like apples? Would you know it in the way you somehow know you are asleep, in dreams?
Nobody seemed to see her. She was sidestepped by pallbearers, looked over by the blank-faced family, assumed to be a distant relative from out of town. After walking all the way into said town in a storm of rain, umbrella-less, childless, lifeless, the only person who saw her could well have been a ghost herself. A mirror reflection, sitting up by the angels on O’Connell Street, looking like the sisters (the daughter and the sister) she had supposedly left behind.
Mandy began to doubt herself. She had a lump on her head the size of a hen’s egg and her extremities were still tinged blue in the cold. Nobody saw her. Nobody looked at this woman, bedraggled, drenched, shivering in the downpour. Maybe the mourners were right. The priest on his pulpit, the newspaper print in black and white. Maybe Mandy Rys had died on that cliff. Maybe she was a ghost after all.
On the bus back to Donegal, no one would meet her eye. She passed through their vision as though she were invisible, and whether it was because she looked wretched, or because she was just a ghost, she couldn’t tell.
Could dead women break curses? Did ghosts have any more stories to share?
Mandy sneaked back up to the cottage, searched the whole place when the banshees were away. When she heard them coming—carrying something heavy between them, with difficulty and great care—she hid under the tree in the old ruins behind their house, at the edge of the cliff: the ancient crumbling cottage from which her family curse had come, with nothing but the knowledge of everything she had done wrong.
And a spindly, ancient, half-alive tree in the corner, lopsided in a cracked clay pot.
* * *
—
Mandy barely had time to touch the tree when the cliffside called to her.
Mandy, Mandy, a wailing on the wind.
Follow, follow.
Mandy followed and in the dark she found me, the only one screaming and screaming her name.
34.
Le Lendemain
The end of the world, 2012
Beside Mandy—beside us—was a small tree. Damp leaves, dull bark, soil half spilling out of a cracked clay pot.
“It’s the sapling,” I whispered. “It’s the Rys family curse.”
“Le Lendemain,” said Mandy. “The next morning.”
* * *
—
However long a life story takes to tell was the time it took them to find us. We were in the last place you’d think to look: a tumbledown ancient ruin, roofed by a gnarled hawthorn tree, facing nothing but the edges of cliffs and the sea. But they found us.
Three banshees stood silhouetted in the storm.
They were family. They were ghosts. They were ancient battle goddesses.
They had the answers. They were the keepers of the curse.
Three gray ladies screaming the voices of those who could not speak, scratching their limbs to wake them, warn them. The screams of new babies in the air. Blood on the sheets. Blood on clean knickers. Girls bending their backs over heat and steam and dangerous machines, washing, always washing, the blood from their clothes. Girls alone in overseas hotel bathrooms, bleeding bright red on new pajamas, washing the bottoms under hotel-room taps, washing, always washing. Bleeding, always bleeding. Left alone to wash and bleed.
And where did that leave me?
That left me in the trembling arms of my mother, who shielded her eyes from the glare of the banshees’ flashlight beams.
The three witches clicked their tongues. They said, “Well, there you are,” as if we’d only stepped out for a bit of air and a chat. “Come on back inside. The open door will let the heat out.”
They sounded so certain that there was nothing strange about our situation that we followed without a word.
The hallway between the little kitchen and the main room was tight, was narrow, could only fit one body at a time. The first banshee led us, followed by me, followed by the second, followed by Mandy, followed by the third.
At the sound of our footsteps, I could hear the others rising from the threadbare couches, upsetting the rickety coffee table, spilling the tea.
“Did you find her?” Rachel’s voice was raw and ragged. She sounded like an old woman.
I knew I was wet by the way my hair hung cold and heavy against my cheeks, with how Mandy’s sweater was a weight on my chest, by how I could barely feel my feet. There was a strange, loud clicking sound reverberating around the cottage, which I realized with a shock was coming from my chattering teeth.
Rachel ran over with the bull-hair blanket, bundled me close to the fire before sitting right in front of me, looking at me and smacking me, once, hard across the cheek. Then she grabbed me and held me to her heart so tightly the heat of it warmed me better than the turf fire spluttering with occasional raindrops in the hearth.
I tried to push myself away, but still she held me.
“Rachel, what the fuck?” My voice was muffled, cracked, barely angry. “You hit me.” It had felt less like a blow and more like the kind of smack you’d give somebody who’d fainted, a wake-up call, a return. Still, it smarted, in more ways than one.
“I was sure you’d jumped.” Her voice was as muffled as mine, lost in the thick tangles of my hair. “I was sure you’d followed Mandy. After everything I said. You don’t do that. You don’t just fucking run out into the storm and off a cliff. You don’t do that.”
I finally untangled myself from my sister. Aunt. From my aunt. “I didn’t do that.” I gestured down at my body—cold, yes, but also clearly alive. “Obviously.”
Finn knelt beside me. His eyes were red, ringed with deep shadows. “What were you doing out there, then?” he asked. I realized I had scared him.
“I went to find Mandy.”
“Deena—” he said.
“And I did.”
“Deena—”
Rachel saw something in my expression that stopped her, made her hold out a hand to cut Finn short. “Wait,” she said. “You what?”
As if she had only been waiting for her cue, Mandy stepped out of the hallway.
* * *
—
How do you react, seeing a sister you thought had died? A sister you’d buried, had barely begun to mourn? It had been three days since Mandy’s funeral, just over a week since she’d disappeared. Ida’s mouth hinged open and her eyes filled with tears. Finn rubbed his own eyes as though the appearance of a dead woman was some kind of speck in his vision, a trick of the light. Cale moved closer to him on the couch, bent to whisper in his ear.