Fear was a big ship moving fast across the water.
* * *
—
I left Finn asleep, threw on some clothes, and took the bus to Mandy’s. I banged, loudly, on her door. After about three minutes of solid pounding, one of her housemates answered. The corridor behind him was black and he squinted as the daylight poured in.
“Hey, Deena,” he said. “Looking for Mandy?”
I couldn’t think who else I’d have been looking for, but I just nodded. He let me in. I opened Mandy’s door and stopped dead.
The previous day, my sister’s bedroom had been a mess as usual. Books and folders and notebooks, discarded shoes and dirty clothes on the floor, empty coffee cups and the wrappers of biscuit packets on every surface, the ashtray on the windowsill overflowing with cigarette butts and ash.
Now it was pristine. In the wardrobe, her clothes hung neatly, her towels folded, her shoes polished and stacked facing the same way. On her bedside table the coffee stains and cigarette ash and remains of yesterday’s birthday cupcake had been wiped away, and her dog-eared books were arranged alphabetically on her shelves. The bed was perfectly made, with the sheets tucked in and the pillows fluffed up, and a white envelope sitting half camouflaged in the middle of the white bedspread.
Inside the envelope was a piece of paper, folded once: a note written in Mandy’s hand. It was short. The ink at the end had run, as if from tears, and the last few words were smudged.
Going to the end of the world. Give all my love to my daughter.
5.
A funeral for someone who was not dead
Dublin, 2012
I never knew my mother. She died of an aneurysm barely four months after my birth. It was sudden, unexpected, and unavoidable. It was not my fault, but I carried it with me.
In the absence of a mother, I had two sisters. Rachel, especially, I told myself, with her busy, no-nonsense nature, her domesticity, her structure and routine, filled the role of mother in my life. Sometimes I even believed it myself.
But sometimes I saw her sitting curled up in an armchair and she looked so tiny, so tiny and still, reading a book or watching TV, that I felt huge looking at her. Huge and wild and restless. Blessed by salt and skull and horns.
If Rachel was like my mother, Mandy was my fairy godmother. The trickster spirit who showed me another world.
Mandy might have been flighty, but she would never leave me. Mandy might have disappeared occasionally, but she said she’d always be there for me. Mandy told stories about ghosts and curses, but she wouldn’t really lie to me.
But Mandy had never left like this.
And Mandy had never told me she had a daughter.
* * *
—
I went back home, dazed. Walked into the kitchen, clutching the letter.
Finn, slightly hungover by the look of him, sat at the table with a plate of rashers and eggs, a pint glass of orange juice. Rachel was frying mushrooms on the stove.
“Where did you come from?” she said, alarmed. “I thought you were in bed.”
I stood in the doorway. “Did you know that Mandy has a daughter?”
“What?” A mushroom slid from the spatula into the pan.
“Did you know. That Mandy. Has a daughter.”
“A what?” Finn said, despite himself.
“A daughter.” My face was expressionless, frozen like a thin sheet of ice formed over a puddle.
“Don’t be silly,” Rachel said.
I handed her the note without a word and she opened it with grease-coated fingers and immediately sat down on the floor.
“Oh,” she said, a lost sound. “Oh.”
* * *
—
It took them a matter of hours to find her car. Them, the police, whom Rachel insisted on calling, convinced that Mandy’s letter was a suicide note.
It was parked at the edge of a cliff on the other side of the country, unlocked and empty. A woman out walking early that morning had seen a figure jump from the edge. Had rushed over and looked down, had seen nothing but what looked like drops of blood on the jagged rocks below, torn clothes tossed by the crashing waves of the stormy sea. A body could be washed away in seconds, pulled under, never to be found. The woman had called the police to report a suicide.
Two officers came around to break it to us two days later, after they’d traced the car’s owner, tracked down her next of kin. “It’s unlikely we’ll ever find her body,” one of them told Rachel softly. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” Rachel said, her voice scratchier than Mandy’s ever had been, her eyes glassy. “Okay.” She looked right through the police, said Okay another few times, and called our father to tell him his eldest daughter was dead.
I locked myself in my room so nobody could make me hear it again.
* * *
—
It rained all through the funeral and the priest mispronounced our family name, thinning the y so that Rys (which we pronounced like the white grain: rice) sounded reedy and insincere: reese.
None of us corrected him.
“Amanda Marrrie Rrreeeese,” said the priest, the r’s rolling drunkenly into his vowels in his Kerry accent, “was a grrreatly loved, rrrespectable young Chrrristian woman who is now living at the rrright hand of the Lorrrd.”
None of us corrected him on that part either.
The rain battered at the stained-glass windows of the church. I turned to Finn, sitting in the pew behind me and Rachel.
“You know, Shakespeare didn’t invent pathetic fallacy,” I told him, one elbow leaning on the back of my pew. “But as a literary device it’s always been attributed to him. Which is typical really. Dead white guys getting all the credit.”
Finn, who is a guy but is neither dead nor white, said, “What does that have to do with . . .” He trailed off, took a shaky breath, and said softly, “Are you okay, Deena? Do you need to get some air?”
“Pathetic fallacy,” I said, ignoring his question, ignoring Rachel softly shushing me through her tears, and my father’s glare from the end of the pew, “is when the weather reflects the mood of a play or a story. Sometimes it’s nothing but a metaphor: A man walks sad and lonely in the rain. Sometimes it’s an omen: The storm signals a battle about to be lost.”
Finn shook his head at me in sympathy. “And what does this storm signify, Deena?” he asked.
“This one? Oh, that’s easy.” I turned back to face the altar and said loud enough for Finn to hear me, “This one means Mandy isn’t really dead.”