All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  The girl stared at me. “Someone who looks just like you, then. Tall, red hair. The same gray eyes.”

  “Oh,” I breathed. “Mandy.”

  The girl’s own eyes were large and so dark I could hardly distinguish the iris from the pupil. Speaking was suddenly difficult.

  “Is that her name?” the girl asked. “Mandy? She seemed really familiar, but maybe that was some weird sense of déjà vu. She looked like you two. Stormy eyes.”

  “My sister,” I whispered to the girl. “Ida’s mother.”

  The girl made an ah face, nodded like that somehow made sense.

  “Mandy was here?” Ida twisted her head around, searching. “When? How long ago? What did she look like? What did she say?”

  “She passed by here. We can tell the ones passing by. She liked our cider.” The girl stared straight at me. “I knew there was something about her. Some reason she stuck in my head. You’re trying to find her. How come?” She tilted her head, clearly sensing a story. I couldn’t explain, felt my sister’s presence too keenly to talk about anything but the possibility of another letter, another clue, another step closer to her.

  “Did she leave something for us?” I asked, my tongue still too heavy for my mouth.

  “What would she have left?” the girl asked.

  “A letter,” I said, too fast. “No stamp or return address. It would be thick, full of pages.” Full of secrets, I thought.

  “When was she here?” Ida asked again.

  The girl’s eyebrows were raised. “About a week ago? Just passing through. Said she needed some luck, some liquid courage.” From behind the bar, she produced a bottle of pale, cloudy liquid without a label. She pushed it toward us, her mouth a small, knowing smile. “Something tells me you’ll need a little courage tonight too.”

  “Are you allowed to serve us cider?” I asked, staring stupidly at the bottle.

  “I’m not serving you,” the girl said, grinning. “It’s a present. Just don’t tell my grandparents. They own this place.”

  Ida put her hands palm down on the bar. “About a week ago, you said? Did Mandy say anything? Did she look . . . I dunno, how did she seem?”

  The girl kept her gaze fixed on me as she spoke. “She seemed . . . like you. Like both of you. Like she was searching for something.”

  “Searching for a place to hide a letter,” I whispered.

  The girl leaned on the bar, her necklace—long, some kind of jagged stone wrapped in gold wire—clinking against the glasses, the bottle of cloudy cider. “Why would she leave a letter here for you to find?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But there has to be a reason.” I turned to Ida. “The last one brought me to you.”

  The girl behind the bar smiled and said, “Maybe this one brought you to me.”

  My insides were suddenly uncomfortably warm.

  “You mind if we look around?” Ida asked.

  “Of course,” the girl said, dark eyes still on me. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  Ida and I split up, moved around the bar. Outside, the evening was calm and still. The pub owners propped open the doors. A breeze sighed in like a breath and on it a church bell sounded out its call to evening mass. Several of the pub patrons paused what they were doing, crossed themselves, and went on as if no interruption had taken place.

  I went from table to table, muttering excuse mes to the people seated, looking for any trace of white, of paper, but finding only napkins, receipts, forgotten shopping lists. Ida met me back at the bar.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  The girl behind the bar poured us all—herself included—a glass of cloudy cider. She pushed the glasses toward us and said, “Maybe this will help.”

  It was sweet, crisp, strange. Pooled inside me like honey. I could feel the tension in my shoulders lifting. I could almost feel myself trust that we were exactly where we were meant to be.

  Ida took a sip, eyed the glass suspiciously. “What’s in this besides cider?” she asked.

  The girl laughed. “Secret family recipe,” she said. “Passed down to my grandparents from previous generations. We infuse each batch with herbs. Some for calm, some for clarity, some for finding what you seek. Some for love. Some for death even. My granda says there’s nothing like fine apple cider for masking the taste of poison. But he won’t teach me that recipe.”

  The second sip warmed me; it rose like a small fire in my chest, tasted like courage.

  “So,” the girl said, when each of us had been soothed by her cider. “Tell me about your sister. Tell me why you’ve lost her and how come you thought you’d find her here.”

  It took almost an entire glass of that strange cider to explain our story to this stranger and she didn’t for a moment look like anything we said was difficult to believe.

  Cale, we learned in turn, was seventeen, and also entirely unafraid of oversharing with strangers. Her parents were currently protesting against oil companies in the Amazon and had invited Cale to come with them, but she’d been in a relationship at the time (that had since ended, I was embarrassingly relieved to hear) and had elected instead to finish the school year living with her grandparents.

  “They’re just happy I want to learn the family recipes,” she said. “Plus they pay me for working here.”

  Finn walked into the bar as Cale finished speaking, breathless, shirt rumpled from the bus. The first thing he did was grab me and bundle me into a hug. “Are you okay?” Concern swam in his brown eyes and an unexpected lump formed in my throat.

  “Peachy keen,” I said around it, and moved aside to introduce him to Ida. When he saw her, his eyes went wide.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “That is Mandy’s daughter.”

  Ida raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “Yep.”

  Finn shook his head, still slightly stunned. “Deena,” he said. “Your life is like a soap opera.”

  Rachel chose that moment to call. I watched my phone vibrate slowly across the bar in front of me, but only picked it up when it was still. The voicemail lasted a few seconds, just enough time for Rachel to hitch a sigh, change her mind, hang up, call again.

  I couldn’t reply. I wasn’t ready to talk to her yet, and I didn’t want her to ask where I was.

  Her second voicemail was longer.

  “Deena,” she said. “I wanted. I just wanted to check in. After this morning. Things are tense—can be tense—at times like these and I want you to know I’m still here for you, even if I said some things I shouldn’t. You were right to be angry. But— And, I mean. And it’s okay if you need some time. I know you’ve got Finn, and his family.” Here her voice grew thick with the kind of vines that wrap around you, steal the air from your lungs. “But I’m here for you if you need me. I’m not going anywhere. And I love you. Okay, bye. Call me if you want. Okay, bye. I’ll be here when you get back. Okay, bye. Bye, bye-bye, bye.”

  Here, on the other side of the country, it could have been easy to forget what Rachel had said about me the week before. But, even if I’d wanted to forgive her, I knew my sister would never understand what I was doing here. It was best to leave her in the dark until I found Mandy.

  Beside me, Finn was chatting to Ida and sizing up Cale, trying to figure out where this short-haired, punky witch girl fit into our impromptu road trip.

  He rested one elbow on the bar and said, “Howya. If you don’t mind me asking, who are you and can I have some of your cider?”

  Finn upped his accent—and his attitude—in inverse proportion to how well he knew someone. With me, his accent was almost neutral: He could have been from any middle-class household in the country. With strangers, he slipped into the thickest Dublin accent this side of Finglas, as if to counteract their reactions to his appearance. A name like Finbarr McCormac came with certain expectations. People imagined a Celtic mountain
: a great pale, bearded warrior with flaming hair and bulging muscles, dressed in denim, fresh from the tractor. What they didn’t expect was a lean, queer, bespectacled black guy in a Penguin Classics T-shirt and skinny jeans.

  Cale didn’t even blink an eyelid, just grinned and stuck a hand out over the bar to be shaken. “Cale Gorman,” she said. “Short for Michaela. No relation to the salad. Although, truth be told, my parents are total hippies.”

  Finn let out a laugh that I took to mean he was warming to this strange girl almost as much as I already was. “I would never have guessed,” he said.

  She pushed a glass of cider across the bar for him.

  I put my phone into my back pocket and leaned briefly against the wall. It was covered in family crests and framed photographs, ticket stubs from fifty-year-old Gaelic football matches, rusty old keys, signed pictures of Cale’s grandparents with their arms around minor Irish celebrities.

  There was something caught under one of them—something jammed under the frame. I pulled it out and held it between my thumb and forefinger, turning slowly so the others could see.

  Cale gawped. “I never noticed,” she said with wonder.

  “What’s that?” said Finn, but Ida recognized it right away.

  “Where did you find it?” she breathed.

  I pointed at the wall behind me, mouth still unable to form words.

  “Wait, what?” said Finn.

  “You were right,” said Ida, head turning, trying to take in the whole room at once, trying to see something that wasn’t there. Someone. “She was here. Like Cale said.”

  I opened the envelope and the letter from Mandy slid easily into my hands. I read it aloud into the warm, sweet air of the bar.

  Dear Deena,

  Do you remember when you were eight years old and I brought you to that harvest festival in Galway at Halloween? How you made me buy herb bundles, incense, and charms? Rachel hated those but she let you hang them up around the house anyway, just for Halloween. She said they made the place smell like a hippie commune. She wasn’t wrong.

  Do you remember the parade on the last night? The one that went through the village, ending in an empty field where everybody danced afterwards? You were so frightened of the costumes. Hand-made from leather and feathers and bone, like the ones our ancestors would have worn in pre-Christian times, to keep the ghosts away, the banshees at bay. You said they all looked like witches. I bought you a crown of mugwort from one of the sellers. She said it would connect us, keep you safe.

  I’m not sure it did a very good job.

  I’m not sure I did a very good job.

  I should have told you this long ago, but here it is. Our family history is complicated, but we both fit into it. We’re both defined by it. By the curse, by those who came before us. By Mary Ellen, who cast it.

  And by those who came after.

  13.

  Blood and herbs

  Sligo and Drumcliff, 1880

  The nights were long that winter. There wasn’t much to eat. The ground froze solid—sheets of ice as thick as a fist over the deep grooves of wheels on the dirt roads—and Mary Ellen could barely keep her feet. Unbalanced by her belly, she picked her way gingerly over field and fen, imploring farmers on carts drawn by skinny horses to let her sit on their hay a while to rest her weary legs some of the way.

  The farmers were kind sometimes and shared scraps of food. Sometimes they were harsh, throwing her right back onto the road when they gleaned she had no husband. As if her wickedness might be catching. As if they were guilty by association; as if they’d be damned simply for having offered her a ride.

  She drank from rivers and collected roadside berries. She begged for scraps from country pubs. But, even when her stomach was a gnarled and bony fist inside her, all she wanted to eat was apples.

  She ended up in Sligo, a busy port town of fishers and farmers, clustered around the mouth of the river that rushed into the sea. The same ocean in which she had drowned her former lover’s cherished sapling.

  When she arrived, her shoes were almost worn through. She came to the town on market day. Before approaching the square, she stopped to run her cold and aching fingers through her hair, to smooth down her dress and knock as much of the mud off the hem as possible.

  “I’m looking for work,” she told the first stallholder, a sullen farmer’s wife who glared pointedly at Mary Ellen’s protruding belly.

  “You’re in no condition to work,” she said.

  “I’m looking for work,” she told the second stallholder, a fishmonger with a neat gray beard who barely looked at her, knowing she had no money to buy his fish.

  “The workhouse is five miles out of town,” he said. “And good luck to you.”

  The workhouse—a word guaranteed to freeze the listener with something close to panic. Great gray buildings filled to the brim with men and women, even children, too poor to live and work in the towns. They broke their bent backs over impossible labor; they slept on thin cots in endless cold rooms; they survived on the bare bones of hope.

  Mary Ellen had known it might come to this. She’d known from the moment her lover had ordered the constabulary to break every window of the house she was born in. But, as long as she could, she’d resist. The workhouse was no place to birth her child.

  “I’m looking for work,” she said to the third stallholder, a woman a few years older than Mary Ellen, selling speckled fruit and cloudy cider. Peeking out of the bags at the woman’s side were what looked like tinctures, small glass bottles and vials nestled in among an assortment of plants and dried herbs.

  The woman squinted up at Mary Ellen and her eyes were the same bright blue as the sky.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Yes. You’ll do.”

  * * *

  —

  The young woman’s name was Ann Gorman and she lived alone in the middle of the countryside, a good hour’s walk from the town, with a mangy-looking mongrel and a one-eyed cat. Ann had been cast out of her mother’s house two years before for reasons she did not like to discuss. Mary Ellen found the woman to be curt and direct, but also warm and pleasant company.

  It took months for Mary Ellen to grow accustomed to the quiet. Used to a family of seven children under the one thatched roof, living with only one other woman was strange to her. She filled the silence with her mother’s songs, chattered both to Ann and to her belly while she worked.

  Ann’s daytime business was in apples, which seemed a cruel coincidence to Mary Ellen, whose downfall had been so tied to a now-destroyed apple tree. Still, she did not complain. She picked and tended the small and scraggly orchard; she helped to bottle the bitter, cloudy cider; she piled the apples too tart or rotten to use into baskets to sell to the farmers for their pigs.

  Food was scarce and the cottage was tiny. She and Ann were lucky if they made nine shillings a week from the apples, but they shared what little they had. They also shared the profits from Ann’s nighttime business, which was something else entirely.

  Ann’s cottage was the only dwelling in sight. Surrounded by the scrappy orchard, it was hidden from even the narrow dirt road that led to it by tangles of hedgerows and blackberry bushes. After nightfall, Ann’s skinny mongrel could hear even the softest footfall on the path outside. The creature would rise from its spot by the cottage wall and fetch Ann or Mary Ellen from the garden, or the bed, or the chair by the fire. And Ann would open the cottage door before the woman outside—for it was always a woman outside—could knock timidly on the wood.

  Some women visited Ann and Mary Ellen monthly. They were mostly locals, faces Mary Ellen recognized from market days. The majority of the women were peasants and tenants. Some were servants. A few were the wives of millers and greengrocers, and they came to see Ann too, late at night, alone. Some came from as far as Galway town, making the six-hour journey there and back in t
he one night.

  The women paid Ann in coin and grain, in meat and cheese, in leather and in poitín, a clear alcohol made from potatoes, distilled illegally in the darkest parts of the bog. Some women came and could not pay and Ann was forced to turn them away. Mary Ellen would see them some months later, trying to hide the shape of their slowly swelling bellies.

  In the garden behind the cottage, Ann grew herbs. For the women who came monthly, she made and distilled tinctures of valerian root to ease the pain of their bleeding, or crushed monk’s pepper and tansy for them to eat if they wanted to get with child. For some, she chopped fennel and hogweed for them to feed to their husbands.

  For the women who came only once, the quietest ones who appeared only when the moon was dark and they were sure they could not be seen, she brewed teas of pennyroyal and mugwort, wild carrot and rue. In front of the fire with Mary Ellen learning all she could, ready to be told which herb to fetch from the garden, Ann would listen to the dazed or frenzied or sobbing women, would examine their bellies and between their legs, would ask when they had last bled. And, depending on the answer, she administered her teas.

  Some of the women looked at Mary Ellen with pity; others barely saw her at all. Ann had, from the moment she took her in, let it be known to the town that Mary Ellen’s husband had died of diphtheria in Donegal. The townsfolk’s pity was better than their scorn, and Mary Ellen was glad of the lie.

  When the time came for Mary Ellen’s baby to be born, Ann laid blankets over rushes on the floor. Instead of having Mary Ellen drink laudanum and spirits, as the physicians did for the upper-class women who occasionally visited Ann, she gave Mary Ellen only water. She pushed her onto all fours and delivered her baby like a farmer would an animal’s, and Mary Ellen’s labor was half as long and half as painful as any of the well-to-do ladies, had ever been.

  When Mary Ellen’s son slid out of her, bloody and gasping, Ann gave his rump a sharp smack and declared the squalling child to be named Patrick. Mary Ellen didn’t dare to disagree.