All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  “It can’t have been here long,” I said.

  “What can’t?” asked Finn.

  “The letter. She had to have put it here recently. If it’d been there long, the paper would have disintegrated in the rain. It’s been a week. The ink would have run. It would have fallen out, blown away. An animal would have pried it loose.”

  “Deena—” Finn said, but I couldn’t listen to reason. Not here, in the cottage where my ancestor died.

  “I told you.” I held out the paper. “It’s a map to her. She put it here for me to find.”

  “Deena.” Finn slipped his hand into mine. “If after all this we don’t—we don’t find her, what then?”

  I stared at Ida. My niece. Her eyes—so like Mandy’s—were big.

  It took me a while to form the words. “I don’t know. I don’t know. But I know I need to break the curse. I need . . .” My mouth went thin, down at the edges. “I need to get to the bottom of this. Even if Mandy is—if she did—if she isn’t at the end of the map.”

  “The end of the world,” Ida said softly.

  Above us the sky was low, touching the tips of the branches of trees. Around us old stone settled deeper into the grooves of centuries.

  “It all looks like the end of the world to me.”

  It was strangely warm in the ruins of Mary Ellen’s cottage, several degrees warmer than it had been on the road, as if some residual heat from the ancient fire lingered. Birds sang from the ghost orchard behind the house. The carved symbols on the walls looked down on us.

  “Wait,” Ida said, grabbing the letter. “Where’s the address?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t read the next address.”

  The last page of Mandy’s letter was written on until the end. “We must be missing a piece. A page. It must have fallen. Blown away.”

  “No,” Ida said loudly. “It has to still be here. We need to know where to go next.”

  We split up, turned on the flashlights on our phones, lifted tree branches and brambles, shuffled through dead leaves, ran our fingers over each corner of stone.

  I watched Cale hop over the back wall into the orchard, phone-flashlight beaming through branches. Her short hair, the vest she wore over her shirt, the easy way she’d said If I’d been alive back then I’d’ve been basically screwed on both counts, were as loud as a rainbow pin or a pair of purple plastic Venus earrings. That relationship she’d talked about back at the bar was most likely with another girl. I felt too large for my clothes, the nondescript jeans and hoodie, felt itchy and wrong behind my glasses, my mane of curls.

  I swung my legs over the back wall and followed her into the overgrown orchard.

  “No sign of the page so far, but these are still good,” Cale’s voice called from farther through the trees. “Catch.”

  An apple came out of the darkness, smacked straight into my open hands. “Don’t go too far,” I called back. The fruit crunched perfectly when I pressed it between my teeth. Its juice was sharp and sweet.

  “I’m right here,” Cale said. “Don’t worry.”

  She emerged from the trees like a shadow herself, apple in hand like Eve in jeans and a vest. She took a bite, licked her lips.

  “Are you not afraid?” I asked her.

  “Of the dark?”

  The candles on the walls behind us flickered. “Of the ghosts.”

  “I think the ghosts can tell we’re family,” she said.

  “Do you think they can tell we’re the same?”

  “The same?”

  I was glad of the darkness now, hiding my blush. My skin was warm, almost too warm to be comfortable. “I mean that if we’d been alive then, we might have been kicked out of home too. Locked up. Punished. Just the same.” I could almost see embers smoldering under my feet. A sound like crackling.

  Suddenly she was right in front of me. The scent of apples and smoke. She tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “Would have had to hide, you mean,” she said. “Pretend.”

  If I hadn’t hidden, hadn’t pretended, my father would have kicked me out already like it was 1877. I knew that. I had always known that. But was that a reason to stay silent? To sit out the protests? To let the insults of the girls in school slide? To feel sick at the thought of coming out to my sisters?

  I said, “I’ve been pretending my whole life.”

  The heat was rising. I couldn’t hear the others. My world narrowed to the trees and the sound of the flames.

  “What are you looking for here?” she asked. “Really?” She stood so close to me, the only solid thing in miles. She was so unexpected.

  “I don’t know.” It felt like the truest thing I’d ever said. I shook my head and the orchard spun in circles. Sparks danced when I closed my eyes.

  “Hey,” she said. “Hey. It’s okay.”

  Her hands were on my upper arms. Her feet next to my feet. Her eyes wide in the darkness.

  “Mandy was right,” I whispered. “I am a bad apple. Not because I’m gay. But because I’m a liar.”

  Cale squeezed my arms softly. “Everybody lies,” she said. “If you don’t feel safe coming out, you have to pretend.”

  “I couldn’t even say it to Ida.”

  “You only just met her.”

  “I only just met you.”

  She pressed her palm against the side of my cheek, stroked my skin with her thumb. “Yeah. But we’d’ve both burned,” she said.

  The burning. I felt it in my belly, in my bones. As though somebody else was lighting up inside me. I’d been feeling it this whole time. Somebody with rough skin and callused hands, chapped lips, salt-stained hair. She was as hot as a flame tip you flick your fingers through, a magic trick. She stared out of my eyes.

  The girl looking back at me wasn’t Cale, not exactly. Her hair was fairer, her skin lighter, her eyes blue instead of black in the darkness.

  We stood in the quiet dark of the orchard and her hands were in my hair, mine around her waist. I wondered how much of this moment wasn’t ours at all. The taste of apple in my mouth. Since the first bite, I’d felt the burning. We had only just met, but this was an old love. This was a love that ended in flames. I pressed closer to her, knowing that this wasn’t really me, it wasn’t really her, but it also was, like the kind of knowledge that comes in dreams.

  She tilted her head to kiss me, but before our lips could touch a shout rang out in the night.

  “I found it!” Ida’s voice came as if from far away, but in reality she was just there, behind the tumbledown wall of the cottage. “The next address! We only read half the letter. The rest was hidden here in the doorway.”

  Cale and I sprang apart. The spell was broken. Cold returned, blanketed me in goose bumps; I hugged my arms to my chest to warm myself. The thing that was in me had left, but it also felt as if something that hadn’t been there before had now appeared.

  Cale shook her head, took a shaky breath.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t stay here too much longer,” she said.

  “Yeah.” I wanted to sit with this new thing, examine it up against the light. “Let’s go see what the rest of the letter says.”

  18.

  The bull’s promise

  Drumcliff, 1935

  When Mary Ellen and Ann died, everything changed.

  The whole town felt it. They felt it in the rain. Julia Rys felt it in the animals.

  The cows’ milk was thinner. The chickens were skittish, more so than usual. A week after the fire burned down Ann and Mary Ellen’s house, a fox got into the chickens’ enclosure for the first time in Julia’s almost-seventeen years. It ate half her father’s best hens.

  Julia’s grandfather’s prize bull grew stroppy and strange, as if he was gearing up for a fight. Patrick told her that before he’d married her mother the bull was always l
ike that. Wide-eyed and angry. He told her that only he had been able to tame the beast.

  It was undeniable that Julia had the same way with his prize bull as her father did. More than that, she was genuinely fond of the creature. So she started singing to him from her perch on the fence: songs she learned at school, songs she’d heard on the wireless, songs from church. The rain that had waited to fall until Mary Ellen burned was like a curtain between Julia and the bull and the rest of the outside world.

  Julia was a dreamy slip of a girl who knew she wanted for nothing yet dreamed of wanting constantly. She spoke all her yearning into the silent, twitching ears of the bull: a new dress, a cardigan that hadn’t first been worn by her older sister, shoes with buttons on the sides like Maggie O’Leary’s. A kiss from the son of the grocer, a seat at the table with the village’s prettiest girls.

  The bull was impassive, didn’t much hold with frivolities like dresses and buttons, cared very little for grocers’ sons and popular girls. But he loved Julia, in his own way, and so he listened, and said nothing, until the day the village gathered to celebrate St. John’s Eve.

  It was the morning of Julia’s seventeenth birthday and the girl was all chatter. She told the bull every tiny detail of the evening’s plans after having tired of repeating them to her mother and sister. She’d be going to town with her sister and her parents in her grandfather’s car. They would attend the party together, then later their parents would return home with their neighbors, allowing their teenage daughters to attend the evening dance for the first time. Their grandfather would stay on as chaperone, and would bring them home before midnight.

  Julia felt like a girl in a fairy tale, and she chattered to the bull about how she and her sister had been practicing their steps for the ceilidh, had curled their hair in rags all night, how their Sunday shoes were sitting, shined and waiting, by the door for them to dance in.

  The grocer’s son would be there, and the pretty village girls. There would be no chores that night, no muck or chickens or—no offense intended, friend—bulls, and it would surely be the best night of young Julia’s life.

  But the bull knew better. Showing under the sleeves of Julia’s new dress and just above the tops of her stockings as she clambered onto the fence, unnoticed by her as of yet, there were long, raised red lines, as though she had scratched herself in her sleep.

  It was Julia’s seventeenth birthday. The bull knew this too.

  Julia’s sister called out from the house, wanting help tying the ribbon in her hair.

  “Coming, Lizzie!” Julia called, and she climbed carefully off the fence, not wanting to dirty her beautiful body, pale and freckled, stockings white and cheeks flushed. She was a picture.

  The bull came up to the fence, pressed his head against her back to make her turn. When she did, there was a fleeting trace of fear in her expression, watching the great beast right before her, his eyes wide, his horns thick, the ring in his nose bright and gleaming.

  The bull spoke. He said, “Stay.”

  But Julia only heard the word as a grunt and a sigh, an animal sound, something that could never have been a warning.

  “I’ll be back to feed you in the morning,” she told him, and she pressed a palm against his warm, bristled cheek. “Wish me luck!”

  In the morning, the farmhands would marvel at the state of the fence, how the bull had reduced it to splinters, how he had knocked down half the stone wall at the edge of the farm in an effort to break through before collapsing, as though from exhaustion, or pain.

  * * *

  —

  At the feast there was lamb stew and carrots, potatoes roasted and buttery, bread baked fresh that morning, and berries picked straight from the vine. There was beer and stout aplenty, and the best poitín brought up from Mayo to wet the whistles of anyone who wouldn’t tell. Julia and Lizzie were allowed to drink half a small glass of stout each, and both agreed that the bitter, iron taste was barely worth the treat.

  They sat on the benches that lined the hall beside their classmates, the grocer’s son, and the prettiest village girls, and they felt pretty themselves, with their rag-curled hair, their berry-stained lips.

  Later, when their parents left for home, they were all clapping hands and stamping feet, turning around and hand in hand as the dance took up the whole barn, everybody stepping in time to the fiddles and flutes, their feet kicking over hay and dried rushes, sending up sparks.

  The sisters’ hair came loose; their cheeks were flushed. They hung on to each other for dear life, skipped back to their tables to drink long drafts of water and returned, vibrating with energy and filmed in perspiration, to the best dance they’d been to in their lives.

  The dance was fast. The barn was hot. The hay was trampled underfoot. Julia spoke to the pretty girls from the village, danced with the grocer’s son. They stepped outside for some air and her grandfather was there, looking out for her, keeping an eye on her for her father, he said. Julia’s head spun from the heat and the dancing. Dizzy, she drank more water to cool herself.

  The water didn’t taste like water anymore. It stung her mouth, made her cough. Her grandfather gave her another gulp to wash it down, but it tasted the same. Less like water and more like strong liquor, not that she’d ever had any before.

  A hand wrapped around a glass bottle of that same something clear that wasn’t water, but she was so thirsty. Her throat was a desert. Her throat was a storm. Fires and flames. Going down her throat, the liquid was like burning and her sister was nowhere to be seen. She slid down the wall outside the barn. Her grandfather held her hair as she retched into the hay. She wanted to go back in, enjoy the dance, but her legs just wouldn’t hold her.

  A voice said, “Here,” as a hand held out a bottle.

  “Try some,” the voice said. “G’wan. Try some.”

  It hit her mouth like an icy wind at the cliffside. Slid down her throat like a scream.

  “Good stuff this, eh?”

  His body was so close to hers.

  “I’m . . . tired.” She didn’t know what made her say it, but once the words were out she realized they were true. Her eyelids drooped. She was so tired.

  She heard a Heh. Heard an Is she all right? Heard a Poor child, too much excitement, she isn’t used to all this dancing, to staying up so late.

  She heard a Don’t worry, I’ll take her right on home.

  The wheels of the car ran over rubble and puddles. Her eyelids twitched in not-quite-sleep. When the car stopped, she half wondered that they weren’t home yet, could see no welcoming lights in the windows. A car door opened and shut, opened and shut again. Her eyes were too heavy to keep open. She drifted, uneasily, into sleep on the back seat.

  She thought she felt something—a light breeze perhaps, a cat’s back arching against her—touching up under the hem of her skirt.

  Good stuff, this.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, when she woke up in her own bed, there was blood on the sheets.

  19.

  Ghosts and other night terrors

  Drumcliff and Donegal, 2012

  When I read the last sentence, I was so full of adrenaline I had to stand, pacing the ruined cottage, wall to carved stone wall, back and forth. Ida was pale, her mouth wide open. Finn frowned as if he hadn’t yet understood. Cale sat tense and still.

  “That’s . . .” Finn said finally. “That’s fucked up.” His voice sounded as raw as I felt.

  Mandy knew how to tell a story, Ida had said as much that morning, but this was something else. I could see her—see Julia up on the wooden fence, stroking the gray hide of a bull. I could smell the sweat and the hay of the barn, could feel my own legs shake with the thrill of the dance. I could taste the spirits sliding down my throat.

  I swallowed once, twice, three times, then turned and vomited over the broken st
ones of the missing wall.

  “Let’s just go, okay?” Ida said. Tears slid slowly down her cheeks. “This isn’t like before. Finn’s right—I don’t know what Mandy’s playing at. Finding clues, reading letters. Let’s just go.”

  “No,” I said. “This isn’t supposed to be some wild-goose chase. We have to follow. We have to honor the story.”

  I turned over the last page of the letter and there was an address written there, hastily, in thick black ink. Just outside Donegal town.

  Ida hadn’t stopped crying. “I know that,” she said. “I know that. It’s just getting to be a little much right now.”

  Finn moved carefully, slowly put his arm around her, as if waiting for her to push him away. Instead, she leaned into him, taking comfort. Friendship comes fast in trying times.

  But I wasn’t listening to anything except the feeling in me that said we needed to keep going. “One step ahead maybe,” I breathed. “What if she’s only a couple of steps ahead?” I started to gather our bags and jackets in the candlelight with quick determination. “We can’t stop now,” I said. “We need to catch up. We need to find her.”

  “Whoa, wait a sec.” Finn held up his hands to stop me. “It’s the middle of the fucking night. Where do you expect us to go?”

  “South of Donegal town,” I said, reading out the address.

  Ida tapped the details into her phone. “It looks like a factory,” she said. “There’s no name for it on the map, but it’s on that road. This must be it.”

  Finn kept his hands up, shook his head in disbelief. “That’s hours away, Deena. We can’t walk it. There’s no bus. How the hell do you expect us to get there?”

  “She might be there, Finn. Mary Ellen was from somewhere in Donegal. This might be it. The end of the world. The place where the curse began. This might be where we find her.”

  “I mean—” he shook his head again, “—I agree that fucking Donegal is pretty close to the end of the world, but that doesn’t change the fact that we can’t get there tonight, Deena. We’d be walking all night and we still wouldn’t be there.”