All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  Ida held Mandy’s letter like she was afraid to lose it. The next address, as always, scratched hastily onto the last page, led us on, west, closer to the ocean.

  “This was going on for so long,” Ida said, her voice strained. “Some of the girls who went through this place could still be alive today. Women. How do you live a normal life after something like that?”

  Finn kicked a loose stone on the pavement, sent it scudding angrily across the road. “It’s all fucked up. All of it.”

  “That Mandy sent us here?”

  Finn looked up at me, surprised. “No. No. I understand it now, I think. Why she’d do this. Like Ida said back at the cottage, sometimes you have to feel the past to believe it.”

  “It needs to be told like a story in order to be heard,” I said.

  “Right. Exactly.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, shrugged. “It’s the story itself that’s fucked.”

  I took my phone from my pocket, swiped away the three missed calls from Rachel, then called her back.

  “Deena!” she said, relief in her voice. “Where were you? Why weren’t you answering my calls?”

  Ida was typing on her phone, probably messaging her dad, who believed her to be staying over at her best friend’s. Cale called her grandparents. Finn was already talking to his parents, fast and somewhat frantic, offering love and reassurance that he was at my house with me, that we were both okay.

  “Deena?” Rachel’s voice said in my ear.

  “Sorry. Hi. Yeah. I’m fine. I’m sorry I didn’t call you back. I’m in Finn’s house and just sort of couldn’t face talking to anyone else.”

  “Deena,” my sister said again. She took a minute, sniffed softly. “It’s okay. It is. I’m glad to hear from you.”

  My eyes prickled suddenly, my throat thick. “Me too,” I whispered. I turned my back to the broken hulk of the laundry building, took a deep breath. “Me too.”

  Tears ran down Ida’s cheeks as she put her phone back in her bag. Cale’s lip trembled as she talked. Finn’s eyes were watery when he hung up.

  There was so much I wanted to ask my sister. About Mandy, about our father. But if I talked too long she’d hear the sounds of the town around me through the phone. Suspect that I wasn’t three doors down from her, playing video games with my best friend. I was running out of time.

  “I have to go,” I said finally. “I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” said Rachel, then her voice changed very slightly, perceptible only to somebody who had lived with her forever, who knew her better than anyone. She had somehow guessed that something was up. “Call me later. And come home for dinner. I know you’re having a hard time. I understand. But we need each other right now. And you need to be home.”

  “Rachel, I—”

  “There’s loads of leftovers from the wake, plenty of veggie options. You have to keep up your strength. I’ve changed the sheets on your bed and vacuumed your room so you’ll be nice and comfortable. There’s that program you like on the TV tonight, the singing one, what’s it called? Doesn’t matter. We can have dinner on the couch, just this once. You can even have a glass of wine.”

  “But, Rachel—”

  “This is not a discussion, Deena. I’ll see you at six. Okay, I love you, bye. Bye-bye. Bye.”

  I stared at my phone for a minute after she hung up, then turned it off completely. I shook away my worry. Rachel would understand. When I came home tomorrow with Mandy, she’d have to understand.

  * * *

  —

  On the bus, I sat beside my niece. “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  “Yeah. I mean, no. But yeah.”

  The sun outside the bus windows strained to break through low rain clouds.

  The next address on Mandy’s letter—a disused industrial school in a small town west of here—was only a brief drive to the Slieve League mountain, whose cliffs ended, with a steep and brutal two-thousand-foot fall, in the wild Atlantic Ocean.

  It was at these cliffs that my sister’s car had been found.

  24.

  Kisses

  Killybegs, 2012

  Outside the window, the fields alternated cows and sheep, splashes of color on their coats to mark them. I let my eyes skim past them, barely registering, until I realized that I kept seeing the same thing. It started as a quick blur as we drove by, but once I’d noticed it was unmistakable. It was in the sheep fields and the horse paddocks. It was in among the cattle. Huge hulk of a thing, great white horns.

  In every field, the same gray bull.

  “I keep seeing a bull,” I told Ida.

  “A bull?” She leaned around me, looked out of the windows on both sides of the bus, frowning. “Where? I haven’t seen so much as a cow for miles.”

  I turned my head from the window, ill at ease.

  Cale knelt backward on her seat in the row ahead of us, faced me across the rough fabric of the seat back. Her eyes were lined with the gray smudges of yesterday’s makeup, her hair sticking up slightly at the back from the way she’d slept.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  I hated that I blushed at a simple two-word question. I hated how hard it was to look her in the eye.

  “Fine,” I lied, casting about for something else to say. The first thing that came to mind was: “So, what’s your alibi?”

  “My alibi?” Cale asked.

  “For being here. Ida’s supposed to be sleeping over with a friend. I’m meant to be at Finn’s. Finn’s parents think he’s at mine.”

  “Ooh!” Cale laughed. “That’s a risky one.”

  Finn’s head appeared over the seat back beside Cale’s. “She’s right, you know,” he told me. “One call from my mam or Rachel and our cover’s blown.”

  “I had to think fast,” I said. “It’s not exactly like I had another choice.”

  “I don’t really have an alibi.” Cale shrugged. “I just told them the truth.”

  “The truth.” Ida looked about as incredulous as I felt.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Finn. “You told your grandparents that you were following three complete strangers to an unknown location given by a woman who everyone else believes to be dead?”

  “Pretty much,” Cale said.

  I tried to pick my jaw up off the floor. “What did they say?”

  “I dunno, like, have fun, be safe, let us know where you are?”

  I was glad to see that Finn and Ida were both staring wide-eyed at Cale; it wasn’t just me whose mind reeled at the thought of being able to tell a family member the actual truth.

  “Your grandparents sound . . . kind of unreal,” I told her.

  “They trust that I know how to handle myself,” she said. Her eyes stared straight into mine, her mouth half a smile. “And I told them I’m with good people. Important people. People I have a connection with.”

  My face lit up like a beacon at how much I wanted to connect with this strange, pretty girl who seemed to live her life with an authenticity I could only dream of. Instead, I let Ida lead the conversation to talk of childhood and grandparents, music and TV, as if to keep us all from memories of the laundry, of Mandy’s letters, of old ghosts. As if to keep me on the bus with them, instead of deep inside my head, staring out of the window at the same bull in every field: a sight that apparently only I could see.

  * * *

  —

  A little after midday we arrived at the next address. The bus left us on a windswept road in a small village, in a sprinkling rain. The northwest of Ireland felt more remote than any place I’d been before. These were not destinations you chanced upon, took a wandering road toward. To get to these far-flung places, at least from Dublin, you needed to really mean it.

  Our destination was a large redbrick building with arched doorways. Dumpsters
stood half full on the street in front of it and a large sign announced the site as the new vocational college, opening next September. The concept art on the sign showed the imposing structure modernized with glass-fronted conference rooms, wheelchair ramps, tech labs. But today the place was closed, empty, looking more like the bleak industrial school it was decades before.

  We stopped on the street, Finn and Cale circling the building to find a way in. Somewhere in the village, car brakes screamed. A sense of foreboding washed over me. I reached into my bag for my inhaler and, when my sleeves hitched up, I caught sight of scrapes on my arms. Raised red lines like I’d been scratched.

  A cat, I told myself, closing my bag with shaking hands. A stray cat who’d crept through the old laundry last night. Brambles, from climbing through the thickets. Branches in the orchard at Ann and Mary Ellen’s cottage. Somehow I just hadn’t noticed. That’s all.

  I rolled my sleeves over my hands, bit holes in the seams to poke my thumbs through. If you can’t see something, it may as well not exist.

  Cale and Finn returned, pointed to the far side of the building where a door had, inexplicably, been left open.

  “Time’s almost up,” I whispered without really meaning to. Ida shot me a strange look.

  Finn came closer, touched the back of my hand. “You know we’ll have to go home soon,” he told me. “It’s been twenty-four hours already. They’re going to notice we’re gone. If they haven’t already.”

  My phone sat heavy in my pocket. “I know.”

  “Deena, if Mandy isn’t out here—”

  “I know.”

  “Okay. Okay.” He squeezed my hand.

  Inside, the school was as black as night, one long beam of gray daylight stretching from the open door. The windows were boarded over with hammered iron sheets, and the thick walls kept in an unnatural cold. We clustered in the doorway, shone our phone flashlights at the high ceilings, the stark blocks of the stairs, the folded tables and workbenches the builders had set up. Everything was dust and rubble, coils of electrical wire and stacks of bricks, uncut sheets of glass.

  “Let’s get this over with quickly,” said Ida. “Find the letter and get back outside.”

  We dumped our bags and jackets in a pile by the door and split up, moving slowly through the hallway, flashlight seeking out a white envelope amid all that dust and grayness.

  On the ceiling there was a flaky stain where the paint had peeled and it looked like the shadow of a bull’s head, gray and horned. It winked.

  “I’m going upstairs,” I said.

  “Deena, wait—”

  On the bottom step, my footsteps crunched. I shone my phone light at my feet. There were bits of bone comb smashed under the staircase, silver hairs tangled around the banisters. From upstairs there came a short, sharp scream.

  Somebody grabbed my arm and I jumped so hard my phone fell from my fingers.

  “Don’t go up there,” Cale whispered, panicked, beside me.

  Follow, follow.

  The banshees were getting closer, getting stronger. It was so hard to resist the pull.

  I turned my face back toward the light shining weakly from the open door and let out all my breath in a sharp gasp of fear. Tangled around our bags and jackets were shining silvery gray hairs.

  They were here. They were close. I think I knew where they wanted me to go. The cliffs that Mandy jumped from were about twelve miles away. I could feel their pull from where I stood. Could hear the scream of the wind. A scream that sounded a lot like it came from the open mouth of a banshee. A scream that sounded like it was coming from a room at the top of the stairs. Before I even realized I’d moved, I took three quick steps toward the sound.

  A pressure on my shoulder; the pinch of long nails on the top of my arm. I turned, expecting a ghost. Someone with tangled hair and gray skin wanting to lead me away. I think I might have followed.

  “Don’t go.”

  It wasn’t a banshee. It wasn’t a ghost. It was only a girl with smudged black-cat eyeliner and choppy hair, shivering through her vest.

  “I would have followed.” I closed my eyes. “They’re calling me.”

  Cale looked nervously toward the stairs. “Stay here,” she said. “Stay with me.”

  “I think there’s only so far left to go,” I said—Mandy’s next letter was in my hoodie pocket. I crinkled the paper between my fingers like a dried leaf. Crumbling.

  “Do you think we carry them with us?” I asked. “All the stories of the past?”

  Cale touched her fingertips to the spot above her belly button that mirrored the place on my own body where I had first felt the burning back at Mary Ellen and Ann’s cottage. “For a while maybe.”

  That spot still burned. The cliffs still called. There was still a screaming on the wind. Panic froze me like a shock of cold water, the same sensation as falling, hard, into the sea.

  I voiced something I was too afraid to say to Finn, who knew me, or to Ida, who was my sister’s daughter. “What if that’s the only place Mandy is?”

  “Hey,” said Cale, and she put her arms around me. “Hey. It’s okay.”

  When she kissed me, I didn’t expect it, and I’m not sure she did either. Her lips were soft and tasted of Burt’s Bees. She touched the side of my face and her hand was soft too, and cold. The kiss started slow and deepened so fast I didn’t even realize what I was doing until her hand was halfway up my shirt and I was pulling her hips toward mine as if we could fuse together, grow into each other like trees over wooden fences, meld muscle and bone.

  If pain stayed on in places like this, maybe love did too. Maybe Ann and Mary Ellen had followed, recognized us as their own. Maybe their lips guided ours—how else would I have known how to hold another girl’s hips, how to touch my tongue to hers, how to press, press, press myself against her while her hands lit up the skin under my clothes? How else would I have actually let myself?

  My first kiss was interrupted by my friends, who tumbled back into the entrance hall from another room. Cale and I didn’t manage to break apart fast enough for Finn and Ida not to notice. Their eyes widened; their mouths moved to make silent O’s.

  “Right,” said Ida, a drawn-out vowel cut off by a t. She touched her hair, straightened her long, thick braid. “Okay. Wow. Sorry.”

  “Sorry.” Cale looked sheepish but not ashamed. “Got a bit carried away there.” She bumped her hip gently with mine as if kissing me had been the easiest thing in the world, simple and spur-of-the-moment.

  My breath was short, my head spinning. My return to earth was a crash-landing.

  Behind Ida’s back, Finn gave me a sly thumbs-up, a wink. I must have still looked terrified, because I definitely felt it. I cast about the room for something to say, hands in my pockets, then out of them, as if I didn’t know how to control my own body—which didn’t seem unlikely given what had just happened.

  “What’s that?” I said, pointing.

  “What’s what?”

  “Under the workbench there.”

  “Under here?”

  Ida crouched to peer under the wooden bench by the boarded-up window. She surfaced with a frown on her face and a letter in her hand.

  I couldn’t help but let a small sigh of relief escape me.

  “Here,” I said. “Give it here. Let me read.”

  Dear Deena,

  You’re almost there. Only a few more branches left to climb before we get to you. Before we get to me.

  I want to tell you I’m sorry. I want you to know this was the only way for me to share this story. I would have brought you with me if the curse hadn’t come to you too. Instead, I left to break it.

  Help me break it, Deena. We’re almost there.

  25.

  Things that hold you

  Donegal, 1936–1947, Killybegs, 1947–1953, an
d Dublin, 1953–1978

  They had a name for William Rys and it wasn’t the one he was born with.

  Home Baby, they called him. As if he was still suckling at his mother’s breast. As if he even knew what a home was.

  He left through the front door of the home with the other children every morning at half past eight and they walked, silent and in single file, to school. They sat at the back of the classroom.

  They didn’t speak to the town children, the ones with mothers and fathers. They hardly spoke to each other. They saved all of that for the home, and when they spoke in their rooms or in the gardens, with the nuns turning a blind eye, it was all in shouts and insults, and the desperate, lonely language of fists and kicks.

  There were only three ways out of the home for the home babies. Some were adopted as infants, usually to wealthy Catholic Americans, usually without the consent or knowledge of the babies’ mothers. The rest were sent to industrial schools after the age of ten, and the industrial schools were almost identical to the home except that they were run by the Christian Brothers, not the nuns, and there were a lot more beatings. The third option was the unmarked grave at the back of the garden, behind the perfectly tilled rows of cabbage and lettuce, behind the greenhouse, behind the septic tank that treated the home’s waste after it was flushed away.

  Nobody wanted to go to the bottom of the garden. If a ball rolled past the cabbages, it was never recovered. The bravest, oldest children dared each other to run down there at dusk, to touch the back wall of the home’s land, to feel under their feet the earth that was turned over once every few weeks when a fresh tiny body was buried.

  There were no headstones, no names, no markers. Most of the time, the mothers were never even told.

  William Rys didn’t remember his mother. He didn’t even know what she was called. She was gone before he’d learned to speak.

  William didn’t miss what he’d never had, but he held closely to the one thing his mother had ever given him. His name: William Patrick Rys.