We kicked at the old clay pot that housed the sapling until it shattered under all our feet. We lowered the spindly trunk into the hole, threw earth over its roots, patted it down until there was black, sandy dirt under all our fingernails, like we’d dug up a treasure, a long-buried secret, a family curse.
We stood back, breathless and salty with sweat. The sea air was on our lips and our tongues, but was soon replaced by an overwhelming smell of apples.
The sapling took root. Within minutes, as we stood in a circle and watched in disbelief, the Rys Russet, le Lendemain, grew into a tree.
It takes about seven years to grow an apple tree, in the right conditions. This one shot up at our feet. The trunk widened, the branches multiplied, broke into buds. The buds flowered and grew apples large enough to harvest.
“That’s impossible,” breathed my family.
“Now,” said the banshees, coming in a cluster from the door of their cottage. “Now the curse is broken.”
“The juice of these apples runs in your blood,” said Ida. “Plant the tree on your land and your children’s blood shall run with it too.”
As one, Mandy and Rachel stretched an arm out to pick an apple each from the bottom branches of the tree. They were tall but had to stand on tiptoe to reach them. Mandy handed hers to Ida, Rachel hers to me. They were the perfect mix of tart and sweet. They tasted like every story in our family history. They tasted like endings.
“So this is how you break a curse,” said Finn, impressed, eyes wide and arms folded, watching us.
“Oh no,” said the banshees together. “Not really.”
I threw an apple underarm to Cale and it landed straight in the palm of her hand. Ida grinned and tossed one to Finn. The banshees clustered around Rachel and Mandy, and the unlikely lot of us shared the apples from our family tree.
We were connected, all of us, by blood and beyond blood. Cale’s ancestor and mine had been lovers. Finn and I became best friends because we were both queer. Ida seemed like a nice, normal girl on paper, but Mandy was her mother. Maybe we were all bad apples, no matter what we did. But maybe it wasn’t just us.
“There are no bad apples,” I said into the crisp, sweet silence. “Are there?”
The three banshees grinned with all their teeth. “Now you’re getting it,” they told me.
“What do you mean?” said Mandy.
“I mean, this isn’t just our family. It’s our whole country. Cale’s ancestor Ann Gorman was thrown out of her home for whom she loved. The same would have happened to Cale. If Finn was born a hundred years ago, he’d have been an outcast too: You don’t hear of many biracial, bisexual boys in Irish history. But I bet there are stories like these in almost every family. As you said the day you left. If you’re considered rotten by the rest of the family, by the rest of society, you’re doomed.”
Rachel threw her apple core over the cliffs and into the sea. “The past just keeps on repeating itself,” she said.
The banshees grinned as though we’d made them proud, as though this was a conclusion they had been leading us toward all along.
“The curse isn’t on our family,” I said slowly, thinking as I spoke, speaking with more than just my own voice. “It’s on every woman in this country. Kept in shame and silence for generations. Kicked out, locked up, taken away. Their children sold in illegal adoptions; their babies buried in unmarked graves. Forced pregnancies and back-street abortions, eleven a day on the boat to England only to come home to rejection and stigma. Insults and prayers and keeping up appearances—and how do you break a curse like that?”
We were all crying again, the lot of us. Our tears salted the earth and fed the tree, made the apples taste like the sea.
“You tell the story,” said Mandy slowly. “You tell your story and the story of your family. You speak your truth. You shatter the stigma. You hold your head up to the world and speak so that everyone else who was ever like you can recognize themselves. Can see that they aren’t alone. Can see how the past will only keep repeating itself as long as we’re kept powerless by our silence.”
“Yes,” said Rachel, stunned. “Yes.”
I wrapped an arm around Rachel’s waist and Ida tucked herself under Mandy’s shoulder. Our family tree, in full bloom, heavy with good, ripe apples, swayed, deeply rooted, in the salty sea breeze.
35.
How to break a family curse
Dublin, 2012
When we got home, funeral flowers still crowded the porch. Our fridge was full of food left over from the wake: the homemade quiches and shepherd’s pies, the tarts and bakes, stale sandwiches still cut into triangles, wilted lettuce lolling out of them like tongues. The neighbors’ curtains twitched as we walked up to the front door; loud gasps sounded from behind them.
Turned out it was a bit embarrassing when Mandy showed up at the door. I tried not to smirk too deeply as I gloated.
When word got back to the family, our phones rang off the hook. We silenced the ringers and helped Mandy unpack her boxes into what had been the spare room, but was now her room, our father be damned. Her shoes cluttered the floor and her cigarette ash dusted the windowsills, her hair mingled with ours in the shower drain.
When they received no answer, the family came knocking. Perhaps they expected to find Mandy filthy and matted, covered in earth, fingernails broken and bleeding from having scratched her way out of the grave. Instead, she opened the door halfway through breakfast in jeans and a T-shirt, holding a slice of toast in one hand.
“So it’s true,” the family said in wonder.
Rachel appeared behind her sister, reached around her, and slammed the door in the gawping faces of our family. Mandy’s laughter followed them back down the garden path.
When our father came, we were ready for him. He didn’t ring the doorbell, just let himself in with his key. In the kitchen, Rachel was making breakfast. Mandy was at the table on her laptop, alternating typing furiously and swearing at the hold music on her phone (having been dead for a week was turning out to be a bureaucratic nightmare). I was attaching a rainbow pin to the collar of my school shirt.
We heard his heavy footsteps in the hall but didn’t look up. He stood in the doorway for a long time before speaking.
“What do you think you’re playing at?” was the first thing he said to the daughter he thought had died.
Mandy tucked her phone between her shoulder and her ear, finished typing two-handed. “Trying to get my license renewed,” she said. “Hi, Dad.”
“One of the three of ye is going to tell me what’s going on right now.”
“It was all a mistake,” I told him. “Mandy isn’t dead. Clearly. Or else she’s currently the world’s most boring ghost.”