All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  “So what is it then?”

  “Before she left, Mandy told me that there’s a curse on the bad apples of our family tree. That our family will cast off anyone who doesn’t conform, and when these bad apples turn seventeen they fall off the family tree, metaphorically speaking, and the curse comes to them. You’ll know you’re a bad apple—that you’ve been cast off and cursed—when the banshees come for you.”

  Ida’s eyebrow was still raised. “What happens when they come for you?”

  “She says it’s different for every bad apple. Losses, tragedies, even death maybe. Things that could be chalked down to bad luck, but that are really a curse on bad apples.”

  “Do you believe this?” Ida asked. “I kinda can’t tell.”

  I let out a sigh. I kinda couldn’t tell either. “I don’t know. Mandy has always believed in all sorts of things that I haven’t. But there are things I can’t explain. And honestly there are things that are starting to scare me.”

  Ida nodded at me to go on.

  I recounted my vision of the banshee in the bay. How there were silvery gray hairs caught in my window, tangled around the handle of my gate when I found Mandy’s letter. As I spoke, I watched my niece’s face carefully for signs of disbelief or scorn but found neither.

  “Eyes play tricks sometimes,” she said.

  “I know. I’m not discounting that. That’s probably what’s happening. My sister told me all these things and my imagination ran with them. I’m just telling you what I think I saw. I’m just telling you the things I can’t explain. Like the fact that this letter appeared in our garden gate this morning, almost a week after she disappeared.”

  “You know she could have sent this before she died.”

  “She didn’t.”

  Mandy’s daughter considered me. “Is it crazy that I kinda believe you?”

  “Only as crazy as this whole situation.”

  Her gaze was unwavering, cool but curious. “I think I saw her after the funeral,” she said.

  10.

  After the funeral

  Galway, 2012

  I heard Ida’s words but didn’t understand them.

  “It could have been someone who looked like her,” said Ida. “Like you said about the woman in the water. A trick of the light.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Back up. After the funeral when? What did she look like? Where was she?”

  Ida bit her lip at my eagerness, looked unsure. “I think I saw her,” she said again. “Yesterday after the funeral, a few hours after they buried her. In Dublin, in the street, in the dark, in the rain. I couldn’t make her out very well. She was looking the other way. I just thought it might have been her.”

  “No,” I breathed. “You must have seen her. She must have been there. She’s alive; I know she is.”

  Ida twisted her hair around her fingers, frowned. “I don’t know, though, Deena,” she said. “I mean, how could I be sure? I’d never seen her before in my life. All I had were a few pictures of her as a teenager with my dad.”

  “You’d know,” I said. “You’d know your own mother.”

  “Up until two days ago,” said Ida, “I knew nothing about my mother.”

  From somewhere nearby, there came a sudden scream. I jumped, then told myself it was only children in the playground, kids messing about in front of the school. Ida didn’t seem to hear it. She teased the end of her braid with her fingers.

  “My dad was telling my aunt on the phone how he met Mandy,” she said. “Except he called her Amanda. He thought I was asleep upstairs, but I heard everything he said. Everything he’d never told me.”

  Ida stared at the end of her braid, at her fingers twisting the strands of her hair, and, echoing Mandy’s letter perhaps without realizing it, told me what she’d heard like it was a story. Something happening to somebody else. This is what she said.

  Ida’s dad was nervous, breathless on the phone, didn’t know what to do. For a week, Amanda Rys had been dominating his dreams. Every night he’d woken in tears, arms reaching for something he had never been able to hold. He hadn’t looked her up in years, but that morning he typed Ida’s mother’s name into the search bar on his laptop. The first thing that came up was a funeral notice.

  In his strange and sudden grief, he called his sister. And, while Ida listened in, he spoke about the woman he had once known.

  Jeremy Nolan didn’t know much about Amanda Rys, but he knew she was a liar. When they met in a crowded pub in Galway seventeen years ago, she asked him to buy her a drink to celebrate the end of her master’s degree, told him she was in her mid-twenties.

  Their time together was brief, electric: two weeks of deep intensity until he awoke one morning to find her gone, realized he’d never asked her surname, had no idea where she lived.

  When Ida said that, I let out a little laugh. “Mandy has that effect on people.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I figured.”

  “How did he find her then, in the end?”

  “He didn’t find her,” said Ida. “She found him.”

  Ten months later, one Sunday dinnertime, Ida’s father answered the door to an infant in a car seat on his front porch, a taxi turning out of his driveway, red curls in the back seat. Under the child’s blanket was a birth certificate for Ida Miranda Nolan, daughter of Jeremy Nolan and Amanda Rys.

  In the years that followed, Ida’s father taught himself not to think of Amanda much. He now had a full name, had the means by which to look her up, to contact her, but as time went by he wanted to less and less. His parents and family rallied around him, became the village that helped to raise a child. Leaving Ida had been Amanda’s choice, he told himself. There must have been a reason she had never come back to him, to her baby. He had to respect that, even if he would never understand it. She could come to him, he figured, if she ever wanted.

  “You’d think he could have let me decide that for myself,” said Ida. “You think he could have given me the choice.”

  “He didn’t tell you anything about her?”

  “Only stories. Fairy tales.”

  Ida’s father built Amanda into a fairy spirit, at the same time larger than life and far too small to fit comfortably into Ida’s world. Little by little, the myth that was Amanda grew smaller. Until two days ago.

  Jeremy Nolan was unaware that his daughter had heard every word he spoke, that the moment he hung up on his sister Ida typed her mother’s name into a search bar on her phone.

  The funeral notice on RIP.com was brief. Stark black pixels that stayed on the back of Ida’s eyelids like a photo negative. She read them every time she blinked.

  Ida thought it strange that she should cry. She hadn’t yet let herself imagine she might ever find her mother. But the thought must have been there, somewhere deeper down. When she realized she’d never get that chance, it tore a hole right through her.

  * * *

  —

  When she left for Mandy’s funeral the following day, Ida told her father her school had organized a last-minute field trip to Dublin. He had no reason to suspect his daughter was lying—other than the fact that she owed half her DNA to Mandy Rys. Ida was clearly a golden girl, bright and focused, friendly and open, so different from her summer storm of a mother. Even I could tell already that she studied hard, had plenty of friends. She probably never got in trouble, never talked back. She seemed unfailingly honest, to the point of bluntness, so it made sense that, to her father’s knowledge, she’d never told more than a white lie in her life.

  He signed her fake permission slip and asked no further questions, just told her to let him know when her bus came back to Galway in the evening so he could pick her up from the station.

  * * *

  —

  After the funeral, Ida’s head was a wild wood of words, each branch a sentence she’d heard in the
churchyard: the drone of the priest in his rain-speckled robes, the whispers of the family (her family) in their damp mourning clothes, the condolences of strangers under large umbrellas.

  Ida heard the words I’m sorry for your loss so many times that the sentence was stripped of meaning, but nobody was saying it to her. She’d placed herself apart, hidden her hair under the hood of her raincoat, covered half her face with her scarf. She looked exactly like her mother but nobody saw her. She was sidestepped by pallbearers, looked over by the blank-faced family, assumed to be a distant relative from out of town. Which was true, except for the distance.

  And, from the sidelines, Ida heard the words whispered out of the corners of the mouths of neighbors, of teachers, of family friends: suicide, crazy, bad apples, the lot of them.

  These words dug under her skin. Maybe this family, all held apart—nobody hugging, nobody crying but for the woman with the dark red hair and neat mourning clothes—really were nothing but a bunch of bad apples, not even worth her time. She had no history with these people. No kinship apart from a striking physical resemblance.

  She left without telling us that she was Mandy’s child.

  * * *

  —

  After the funeral, Ida took a bus back to the depot in the city, wet to the skin. On her way to the station, she stopped at the statue of the four angels below Daniel O’Connell, staring out in four different directions. There were still bullet holes in them from the Easter Rising in 1916—a pockmark on the breast, a shot straight to the stone heart.

  Ida’s heart was stone and every word she’d heard that morning was a bullet wound.

  She climbed the slick marble and she watched the world melt. She held her face out to the blessed rain. That’s how she spotted the only other person standing still in the downpour.

  A woman on the bridge right in front of the base of the statue, half turned, staring at the river. A woman with wet red hair.

  It was her. Amanda Rys. It was Ida’s mother. Her mother, whose funeral Ida had just secretly attended.

  Her mother, who was supposed to have died five days before.

  * * *

  —

  Ida spoke for a long time, omitting nothing—not the words she’d overheard, not her rejection of our family, not her continual anger at having been abandoned by her mother, my sister. Tears welled up in my eyes, brushed softly down my cheeks when I blinked.

  Our phones both vibrated beside us, at intervals, but remained untouched.

  “They were saying at the funeral how they didn’t find her body.” Ida said the words softly. “How they found torn scraps of her clothes, blood on the rocks. How there was no chance she’d have survived. How they sent divers but she could have been washed far out to sea.”

  “She wasn’t,” I said, my tone matching hers, my voice thick with tears. “Because she’s still alive. You know that. You saw her.”

  “I’m not sure what I saw.”

  “But you know,” I insisted. “You can feel it. You’re her daughter. You’d know it if she’d died.”

  Ida gave a small laugh. “I don’t think that’s science.” She checked her phone. “My friends want to know where I am,” she said, standing. “I was supposed to meet them after class. Just give me a sec to talk to them so they stop freaking out. I’ve five missed calls already. Next thing they’ll be ringing my dad.”

  Ida moved away from the steps, toward the side of the building, phone to her ear. I watched how fast her mouth moved when she spoke, made the same shapes as Mandy’s. I watched how she touched her hair unconsciously, exactly like her mother. I caught myself making the same gesture.

  My hair was short and often tangled, carrots to Mandy’s copper. And Ida’s. I fluffed up my curls and shook my head to tousle them and in the corner of my vision something rustled. I jumped to my feet, imagining rats, but seeing—half a second later—the whisper of long silvery strands of hair floating down the high gray wall.

  Sometimes shock is a splash of cold water.

  The wall was blank concrete cracked with climbing weeds. The only other soul I could see was Ida, behind me, voice low and insistent on the phone. There was nobody here; there was no explanation. Although I had agreed with Ida that all this was surely my eyes playing tricks, I had to fight the urge to run away. And something else caught my eye, something that was neither tangled hair nor ghost: white paper, trapped beneath a small stone.

  It was an envelope. Inside was a letter, bulging. Ten thick pages covered in rushed, spiky writing.

  “What’s wrong?” Ida called out behind me. She appeared at my elbow before I could find the words to speak.

  Dear Deena, the letter started.

  A letter from my sister, right there, basically nowhere, the place she’d sent me. Left under a stone as if she’d somehow known we would sit on the steps around the back of the assembly hall building. As if she was watching us while we spoke.

  Ida’s breath warmed my shoulder. “That’s not—”

  “It’s Mandy.”

  “But that’s not possible.”

  I walked five careful paces backward until I reached the railings and slowly sat down on the top step. “She said to come here. She gave this address. I thought it was just to find you. But she must have wanted me to find this too.”

  “But, Deena, that’s not possible.” I just about registered Ida sitting beside me, my eyes so focused on the page that nothing outside my sister’s words existed. “What if we’d just talked at the gate? What if we’d gone into an empty classroom? What if we’d just walked away?”

  “Somebody knew we’d come here,” I whispered, a shiver.

  Ida and I raised our heads to look around. A blank gray wall, weeds, rustles. Emptiness and silence.

  “No.” Ida shook her head, touched her hair, rubbed at her arms. “That’s not possible.”

  I breathed out. “None of this is possible.” And I started to read.

  Dear Deena,

  I’m sorry. This is hardly the best way to tell you this story, but it’s all I’ve got time for. You’ll understand. You’ll understand it all in the end. I thought I wouldn’t have to rush but here we are. Rushing.

  I told you to look out for the banshees who herald our family curse. To begin to fear if you hear them scream. You’ll understand why I have to hurry.

  There are three of them, I told you that. The first comes alone, but the other two soon follow. That seems to be the pattern. Reports are mixed. My sources aren’t always reliable. But in my experience that’s how it happens. When it starts, you’ll hear the first one’s screams. When the second joins her, she leaves gray hairs from her bone comb caught in your window or outside your door. You’ll know the third has come as well when you wake up with scratches on your skin; you’ll know it’s too late when the three of them have touched you.

  Mary Ellen was the first to learn this because it was she who cast the curse. She did it unknowingly, but still, she did it, and now the three ghosts haunt our family. I don’t know where they came from. Maybe they were always there. But, since Mary Ellen, the three banshees have heralded the curse that nudges each bad apple right off our family tree.

  11.

  Three banshees

  Donegal, 1880

  Mary Ellen was pregnant. She was about to turn seventeen. She was only aware of one of those things.

  On the eve of her seventeenth birthday, in the near-dark of crescent moonlight moving between deep gray clouds, she met Gerald at the cottage on the cliff. The night was cold and he had brought blankets: rough woolen things that were habitually used for horses, the only kind he could take from the house without raising suspicion. He had also packed two green-and-yellow-speckled apples, bought at the market that morning, especially for her. Mary Ellen saw these gifts—the blankets, the apples—as proof of Gerald’s love. As evidence that
he would soon ask her to marry him.

  “Your sapling,” she said, her mouth full of the sweet, tart taste of his gift. “Is it an apple tree?”

  Gerald nodded, kissed her neck. Everywhere, the smell of apples. That morning, before leaving for the market, he had received a letter from his mother announcing that she and his sweetheart would visit the following week. Some plans must be made in person, Marie had written. And it has been so long since you have seen your love.

  Gerald knew that tonight, once Mary Ellen was asleep, he would slip away home, to continue his preparations for the visit.

  “It was a gift,” Gerald told her, his mind still on the letter. “From my mother. A tree to plant in this new land. She told me to cherish it like a prized possession, a family heirloom.”

  He could have told her what his mother believed the tree symbolized, but in his short time administrating his father’s estate, Gerald had become a man of logic, fast in the footsteps of his father. A woman’s flights of fancy—tall tales of seeds growing into trees overnight, of magical apples that had saved his mother’s life—these were only stories. Things his mother told him to lull him to sleep as a child. The tree was just a sapling. Something sentimental. Still, he could not deny his deep need to find soil in which to plant it.

  Mary Ellen was also a woman of logic. But her logic dictated that if all evidence seemed to point to magic, then it would be unwise, logically, to discount it. Unlike Gerald, Mary Ellen was at home in her wild landscape. A woman of rock and bog, salt and sea wind grating her skin. Mary Ellen had seen the wisps in the darkness, had heard the keening of gray ladies in the night before unexpected deaths. She knew not to walk inside a fairy ring, never to cut a hawthorn tree. Had Gerald told her the truth about the sapling, she would have treated it with the reverence it deserved. Especially once she knew about the baby.