6.
Happy families
Dublin, 2012
After the funeral, we wrung out our wet black clothes. We brushed the mud from our best shoes. We tiptoed around the house so as not to rouse our father, who was currently in the spare room, sleeping off the five whiskeys he’d drunk at the wake.
In the morning, there was a sweet, fruity smell in the house. We thought it was one of our cousins’ perfume, but it lingered after everyone left. Rachel opened all the windows, but in the garden the smell was just as strong.
I poked my head into every cupboard, trying not to think of the woman I’d seen in the water on my birthday, before Mandy left. The banshee. How afterward all the way home I smelled apples, found Rachel pounding them into juice. “Where is it coming from?” I slammed the door of the fridge; no apples in there.
Rachel rubbed her temples. “Does it matter?” she said.
“It’s driving me crazy,” I muttered, teeth gritted. “Does he have some kind of fruity cologne? Is he just spraying it in every room like he’s marking his territory?”
“I don’t think it’s coming from Dad,” Rachel said, exhaustion in every syllable.
“Well, it’s not coming from anything in this kitchen,” I declared, apple search concluded. “Maybe it’s all in our minds?”
“Don’t be absurd,” said Rachel.
“Did something, like, crawl into a wall and die or something?” I stared, tapping on the walls, pressing my ear to them as if the smell of apples could speak.
“Stop that,” Rachel said sharply. “Nothing’s died in the walls. It’s probably one of our cleaning products. It’s fine. It’ll go away by itself.”
The kitchen door swung open and suddenly our father was standing in the doorway, an imposing stranger in slippers and a fleece dressing gown. His chin was stuck with day-old stubble, ginger streaked with gray, and he ran his hands through his thinning hair like he was surprised to have ended up here, in the kitchen of the house where he once lived.
I automatically scowled, but Rachel sprang from her spot by the counter, pulled out a chair for him, and offered him tea. He sat like a guest in a banquet hall, waiting to be served.
“I want you to pray with me, girls,” said our father when Rachel poured his tea. “For your sister’s everlasting soul.”
“We don’t pray,” I started to say, in a clear voice that surprised me, but Rachel shushed me gently by placing a peaceable palm on my shoulder. Dad bent his head to his clasped hands. The lines across his forehead deepened with every sigh.
“Our Father,” he began, “who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”
“Mandy’s a good person.” I cut loudly through our father’s prayer. Any fear I’d had of speaking out of turn around him seemed to have disappeared with my elder sister.
Our father said, “She was a troubled soul.”
“Well, maybe,” I said, before realizing I was speaking, “do you think that maybe if her father hadn’t abandoned her as a teenager, she wouldn’t have been quite so troubled?”
Rachel’s eyes were saucers.
“I’m just saying,” I said, each syllable as sharp as knives. “Might have been a factor.”
Dad looked at me like he’d never really seen me before. And he hadn’t, not really. My sisters were around my age when he left us; he packed his things not long after our mother’s funeral and got a job as far across the country from us as he could. I’d only just been born. He didn’t know me, this man who’d given me life. He didn’t know any of us.
“Deena,” he said finally, heavily. “There’s a lot you don’t know about your sister.”
This was so exactly what I’d just been thinking about him that I snorted with laughter. “Yeah, I’ll bet,” I said. “And there’s a lot you don’t know about me.” I grabbed my cup abruptly and tea sloshed over the side and pattered onto the kitchen tiles. I stalked out into the hall, tea dripping down my fist as I walked.
But I stopped at the bottom of the stairs, suddenly out of steam. I tiptoed back through the dark hall, following my trail of tea drops. The kitchen door was open a crack and from inside I heard our father say my name, say Mandy’s, say, “She puts her on a pedestal. It isn’t right.”
“Let her process,” came Rachel’s voice, slow and tired. “She’s in denial. She hasn’t cried. Let her put her sister on a pedestal if that’s what helps her mourn.”
“One day you’ll have to tell her. Or she’s going to end up exactly the same.”
I waited for Rachel’s usual deference, for the way she always showed her throat to our father, rolled over backward so as not to step a toe out of line. But her soft, peace-keeping voice didn’t come. Instead, she said, “If Deena ends up as half the woman Mandy was, she’ll be better than I could ever be.”
There was silence for a long moment, then our father said, “You girls were put on this earth to test me.”
Rachel spoke, strong and clear. “Dad, I think you should leave.”
* * *
—
After he left, we covered cakes and sandwiches from the night before with cling wrap. Rachel drove the empty beer and whiskey bottles to the bottle bank. I changed the sheets on the spare-room bed. Neither of us said a word all morning until Rachel came back with the box now empty of bottles and slammed it down so hard the kitchen table buckled. Then she sat heavily on a chair as if that one display of anger had exhausted her completely and she would never be angry again.
So I got angry on her behalf. “Fuck him,” I said. “Fuck him and his prayers.”
“Deena,” Rachel said.
“What? Deena what? You were right there with me.” I put on a gruff voice, quoted, “She was a troubled soul. What absolute bullshit. This is Mandy we’re talking about.”
“That’s right,” said Rachel, her voice breaking like a heart. “This is Mandy we’re talking about. And honestly, I can’t say this was entirely unexpected.”
For a moment, I couldn’t speak.
“We needed to be there for Mandy,” Rachel said, and her voice was strangled. “But we weren’t. This is all my fault.”
I shoved the plastic bottle box off the table, where it fell on the kitchen floor and cracked all down one corner. “This is fine!” I shouted. “This is stupid. She’ll be back in, like, a week. She’ll laugh at how Dad just came home for one night. She’ll laugh at how he wanted to pray for her immortal soul. She’ll laugh at how all these random aunts and uncles turned up and didn’t say a single word to us. She’ll laugh and tell us she could well have guessed all that. And I’ll be saying I told you so. What we need to do now is find Mandy’s daughter. She told us about her and you’ve been completely ignoring that for days—that’s your fault. That’s your fault.”