All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  * * *

  —

  There are things in life you hold, and there are things that hold you. William’s name was his power, his strength, the secret he wrapped around himself like the warm woolen coats the town kids had. The ones that weren’t handed down from ten other older orphans. The ones that didn’t have holes in the armpits, too-short sleeves. The ones that hadn’t faded to a homogeneous brown gray from decades of washing.

  He knew Home Baby was not his name. His name was William Patrick Rys. There was great power in a name like that. He held it like a fist.

  The things that held him were passed on by the nuns and had their grip tightened by the Christian Brothers when he left the home in Donegal town at the age of eleven to live in St. Brendan’s Industrial School in Killybegs.

  In the industrial school, there were no town kids with their fancy black coats, their new shoes, their penny sweets and magazines. In the industrial schools, there were only boys like him. Bastards and thieves, vagrants and orphans. All they had were fists and spit, cocked heads and cheek.

  William found that, strangely, the boys in the school fought more seldom than the children in the home. He soon realized that this was because the home babies were neglected, while the boys in the industrial schools were never for a moment left alone.

  William had grown up with the strict and disciplinarian nuns, but never had he known so many rules as this.

  Everything moved fast in the school. If you were last to make your bed in the morning, you were clouted about the ears. If you had the misfortune to wet your bed, you could expect a beating. If you were last out of the classroom at break time, you’d get a wallop on the back. If you were last to the latrines, you’d get a kick in the ass. If you were last to finish your school work, you’d get a ruler across the knuckles. The smacks and slaps became a metronome by which to measure your days. Sleep, food, smacks, class, chores, slaps.

  William missed the nuns. The ones who’d shush them, knit in silence. The ones who hummed hymns. The ones who’d shout that they were dim. The ones who’d tell them about the sins of their mothers.

  The brothers called their mothers sluts and whores, but this was hardly news to most of the boys. The brothers who shushed and shouted weren’t the ones to look out for. The ones who smacked and slapped, who hit with rulers or leather straps, those weren’t the ones to look out for either.

  The ones to look out for were the ones with tempers. Like Brother Jack, who beat a boy unconscious for sniffing all through class because he had a cold and no handkerchief. Like Brother Francis, who broke a boy’s arm for laughing at the crumbs in his beard one morning. Like Brother Carl, who gave a boy a black eye for doodling a cartoon picture of him farting.

  But knowing whom to look out for didn’t mean you wouldn’t get hurt. In William’s six years at the school, the local doctor was only called once, and that was when Daniel O’Callaghan fell from the second-floor stairwell running away from Brother Jack’s beating and cracked his head on the bottom step. He died in the hospital three days later. The police never came.

  Knowing whom to look out for didn’t mean you could avoid a nighttime beating, after you knew you’d angered a brother that morning and had hoped he’d let it go, until he swooped into the dormitory, black cloak billowing like some kind of demon bird, woke you up, and threw you into the nearest wall.

  Knowing whom to look out for didn’t mean you could keep a brother from forbidding you to go to the bathroom during football training, didn’t mean you could help pissing yourself where you stood and getting caned for the smell on your trousers. It didn’t mean you could avoid following the summons of a brother into his office, where he stood with his robes all askew, didn’t mean you could run when he brought you inside and shut the door. Didn’t mean you could move your eyes from the statue of Mother Mary the Blessed Virgin hanging above the brother’s door, halo all shiny and golden, blue dress like a summer sky, arms outstretched.

  These were the things that William held. His name, and the angels and saints. The Blessed Virgin on her pedestal, St. Brigid celebrated in woven rushes, St. Agnes the virgin martyr, Mary Magdalene, who renounced a life of sin to serve at the right hand of the Lord. All these glorious women, pure and virtuous, arms outstretched to save him.

  * * *

  —

  When he left school at seventeen, William walked out of St. Brendan’s with the clothes on his back and he hitchhiked all the way to Dublin. He arrived on O’Connell Street with no idea where he would spend the night. He looked up at the statue of Daniel O’Connell (whoever he was; William’s history was patchier than Brother Francis’s temper) and was awestruck by the giant bronze angels supporting the base of the statue of the man.

  There were four of them, all stern and stunning, with long, straight noses, crowns of laurels in their metal hair, and huge wings like those of great black birds, taller than William twice over.

  William wanted to curl up on the cold laps of these giant winged women and fall asleep. Instead, he followed the stony gaze of the bullet-wounded angel holding a snake, away from O’Connell Bridge, walking past the shops and offices across the busy road, down side streets and along alleyways until he found himself in front of a St. Brigid’s cross. Below it was the door of a bakery. Inside was a small iron statue of the Virgin Mary, the same color as the angels on O’Connell Street.

  Also inside was a little girl with her mother, folding down the pastry edges of a row of apple pies.

  * * *

  —

  There is no doubt that William loved our mother. That he cared for and idolized her, placed her on a pedestal like the statue of an angel. He thought of her as his angel, his savior, his bright blond chance at redemption.

  He was ten years older than she—the little girl in the window whose father employed him the very day he walked in the bakery door. William was seventeen, had only the clothes on his back and his name, but the baker, Seamus MacLachlan, our grandfather, felt a strange kinship with the young man. Perhaps because the boy was pure and damaged, or perhaps because he knew he could vastly underpay him. And, as time went by, because of William’s devotion and his unwavering morals, which echoed then, as they do now, those of the baker’s family. William fit into the MacLachlan family like he’d always belonged.

  Which is why it came as no surprise to Seamus, when his daughter came of age, that William should ask him for her hand.

  Until they were married, William refused to give his sweetheart more than a chaste kiss on closed lips. There are things that you hold, and there are things that hold you. What held William was the conviction that sex was a sin outside a marriage sanctioned by God.

  Our mother lost six babies in the next ten years: some so quickly she only knew it by the unusual length of her bleeding the next month; some well after she had started to show.

  When the two sisters were born, the doctors told our mother she would not be able to birth twins herself—each child pushing over seven pounds and almost full term—but Mandy came out feet first and screaming before the doctors could schedule a cesarean. Twenty-four hours later, Rachel got tangled up in her umbilical cord on the way out, had to be cut from her mother’s womb on the operating table. William would have liked a son, but, after the girls, the doctors told our mother she would most likely never bear children again.

  You, Deena, came later.

  William grew up with a seventeen-year hole in his past. He was married many years before he told his wife about his origins, about where and how he was raised, and he only did that because his mother’s family had been determined to find him, whether he liked it or not.

  26.

  On the back of a bull

  Killybegs and Fintra, 2012

  When I turned over the page, we all saw the next address, written so hastily it was almost illegible: Fintra beach, Glencolmcille, County Donegal.

 
Closer, again, to the cliffs Mandy jumped from. We were almost there.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket, made a sound like bees.

  “We need to go,” I said, breathless. “We need to go now. Find a bus. Get a lift. Walk it if we have to.” I ran out of the building.

  Outside, the rain had started to fall. The others, their bags half falling off their arms and shoulders, grabbed them to follow me, surrounded me, slowed me down.

  “Come on,” I said, head spinning, breath catching, wheezing. “We need to go now.”

  “Stop, Deena, stop.” Ida held out her arms in front of me, palms up, a brick wall. I swayed when I hit it.

  Cale’s voice was worried, came from beyond my narrowing peripheral vision. “She looks awfully pale . . .”

  “Deena.” Finn’s face appeared in front of mine. My vision yellowed at the edges.

  “We’ve hardly slept,” said Ida. “We haven’t eaten. She needs to sit down.”

  Finn pressed my inhaler into my hand. “Breathe,” he said. “We’re going to find you something to eat.”

  I puffed once, coughed, said, “No, we have to go,” puffed again.

  My friends frog-marched me to a nearby coffee shop right across the road from the school, beside the bus stop. “We can go after a cup of tea and a sandwich,” said Finn, and I laughed faintly because of how much he reminded me of Rachel.

  I didn’t expect to miss Rachel a day and only a few hours’ drive away. Miss her ceaseless bustling around the kitchen, the kettle boiling, a pan on the stove simmering, her fond complaints about my vegetarianism mixing with the clattering of the dishes she needed to have clean before sitting down to any meal.

  I wasn’t just doing this for Mandy or for me. I was doing this for all of us.

  While the others ordered food and tea in the stuffy, overheated coffee shop, I pulled off my dusty hoodie, threw it on my chair, and went into the bathroom to try to calm down.

  I stared at my face in the mirror the way madwomen do in films. My cheeks were still flushed from the heat of Cale’s kiss, the blush of it still on my lips.

  My lips had been kissed like in my wildest dreams in the middle of a wild-goose chase. It didn’t fit; the timing was all wrong. I couldn’t fathom what should happen next. What if she had only kissed me because of the ghosts? Why else would she have? Still, a small involuntary smile quirked at the edges of my blurry, mirrored lips—I was on the path to Mandy with my oldest friend, and had gained her daughter and a girl with cat eyes and wild kisses along the way.

  I splashed water on my face, swept the splashed droplets from the mirror with the palm of my hand, and in my clear reflection could suddenly see my shoulders, my chest, my neck. Raised red lines ran over the length of them, as though I’d been pulled through briars or scratched by three pairs of hands with long, sharp nails. All the way up my neck, like somebody had tried to choke me.

  My breath stuck in my throat like a scream.

  * * *

  —

  When I came out of the bathroom, Finn and Cale were at the table, their expressions grave, Finn holding a piece of paper like a summons. Ida had just arrived with our food.

  “What is it?” asked Ida. “What’s happened?”

  Cale and Finn exchanged a look. I couldn’t read it.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  Cale reached forward and put the piece of paper on the table. A letter. Another letter from Mandy.

  “This fell out of the pocket of Deena’s hoodie.”

  “No.” I tried to grab the letter, but Ida was faster.

  “What is this?” Her eyes darted between paragraphs, narrowing as she understood. This letter contained the next part of the story.

  “It’s all there,” said Finn. “The rest of Julia’s life after she left the home. How she found William. Her grandfather’s death. We just weren’t supposed to have found it yet.”

  Ida looked around the coffee shop, through the open door at the quiet road outside. She raised her eyebrows questioningly. She still wanted to let herself believe.

  Finn shook his head. “Mandy isn’t here,” he told her. “She was never here.”

  My heart beat so hard it choked me.

  For a moment, Ida looked like she was about to cry, but when she turned to me her face hardened. “She hasn’t been leaving these notes for us to find. Has she.” It wasn’t a question, so nobody answered. “Mandy didn’t put the notes anywhere.” Ida’s voice was loud; people around us paused to listen with teacups raised partway to their mouths. “Deena’s the one who’s been leaving them. Leading us around. Mysteriously finding pristine letters in bizarre places—how were we so stupid?” She threw the letter across the table and it fluttered on top of our plates, our uneaten sandwiches, our cups of tea.

  “I knew it was impossible,” Finn whispered, mostly to himself. The three of them faced me with deep hurt in their eyes.

  Cale shook her head very slowly. “Why didn’t you just tell us, Deena? I was honestly starting to think it was magic. All this talk of ghosts . . . You could have told us. You know we’d have followed you anyway.”

  “I didn’t put them there,” I said, my voice a tiny vanishing thing.

  “How can you expect us to believe that?” Ida cried. “For all we know, you wrote these. For all we know, it was never Mandy at all. Whose handwriting is this really? Is it yours?”

  “It could be,” said Finn. “It’s similar. Like she’s disguised it.”

  My voice was going. My voice was half gone. “It’s Mandy’s handwriting. It was Mandy all along.”

  “But—” said Cale.

  Ida cut her off. “Why are we here, Deena? Really? To walk back through your family tree? You know all this already. Obviously.”

  “I don’t.” My words were strangled. I didn’t know anything. “I don’t know. I just know that I have to break the curse. Find Mandy.”

  “None of this is even real, Deena,” Ida said.

  “Okay,” said Finn with a single clap of his hands, all business. “Maybe it’s time to bring this road trip to a close.”

  “But we’re not there yet!” I cried. “We haven’t found Mandy. We haven’t broken the curse. The banshees are still following us. Look at my arms, my neck. Look! You’ve felt them. You’ve all heard them. You know what that means.”

  Right then all I could feel was our ragtag group unraveling at the seams.

  Finn pulled gently at my sleeve. “Time to go, Deena.”

  “No.”

  “Deena,” Cale said.

  “No.” I couldn’t leave. “I don’t have time for this bullshit. I have to go. You can come with me or you can leave. That’s your choice. This is my journey.”

  The letter was sprinkled with crumbs when I grabbed it and shoved it back into my hoodie pocket with the others. What did it matter who left them where? All that mattered was that this was my family tree, branch by fragile branch, reaching back through a weathered trunk to the very beginning, to the casting of the curse, to the key to being free of the banshees forever. To finding my eldest sister, if I still had a sister to be found.

  “We’ve come all this way,” I said.

  Finn’s voice was gentle, in contrast to the fire in Ida’s eyes. “And now it’s time to go home.”

  “I didn’t ask you to follow me.” I only realized I’d shouted when the coffee shop fell silent. “I never said I needed any of you. You just latched on, came along. You did the cider and haunted houses bit, gold stars for you. This is serious. For me. For my family. I never asked any of you to follow me.”

  Quiet settled on the room.

  “Okay,” said Finn. “Okay, Deena. We’ll stop following. We’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want.”

  “But really,” Ida continued his sentence as if it’d been hers all along, “you should proba
bly just go home. Your sister’s obviously worried about you. And honestly, I think she should be.”

  “I called her,” said Finn slowly. “I told her where you are. She’s on her way. It’s over, Deena.”

  My head shook, spun me dizzy. He’d called my sister. My so-called friends were abandoning me, safe in the knowledge that Rachel was coming to fetch me. They’d seen me safely here, so now they were free to leave. They’d promised to look out for me, but now they were disappearing too.

  Finn took Ida’s bags and her hand and they walked away without turning once. At the door, Cale looked back and gave me a strange, sad smile. She half waved and walked out.

  I didn’t follow.

  * * *

  —

  It didn’t matter that my friends were right. That I didn’t tell them about the letters. There was enough to tell already. They were enough, I thought: Mandy’s words written by my hand. Mandy’s work, pulled together, pieced together, dropped like bread crumbs across the country. Everything in those letters was true.

  Mandy believed there was a curse on our family, but for the longest time she didn’t think to break it. The first she heard of it was rumors. Whispers at infrequent family events. Our mother’s family, the MacLachlans, were a tight but judgmental clan, more concerned with appearances than affection. In families like that, gossip is like air: constant, intangible. Impossible to know where each rumor came from or if it was true.

  Family rumor spoke of the Rys bad apples, a tree full of them, rotten almost to the core. (Our father, obviously, had avoided being given that particular label.) Family tattle said that at seventeen bad things happened to Rys women who deviated from the family tree. Family gossip said they always deserved what they got.

  “It’s a curse,” Mandy said to Rachel.

  “Nonsense,” her sister replied.