All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

“C’mere,” the banshees cackled. “C’mere and we’ll tell you a story. Come closer while we tell you our tale.”

  The tea was strong in front of me, stirred thrice about the pot. Not much of a weapon if it came to it. The bull blocked the only exit.

  “A good cup of tea is a witch’s brew,” the old women said together with wicked grins. “Heals all ills.”

  “I’m not ill,” I said, voice almost choked with terror. I made to stand, run away, but they held out their hands to stop me.

  “Listen to us, Deena,” said the three banshees. “We know your story. We are of your kin.”

  “My family?” The salt still scratched my throat.

  “That’s right. Quiet now and listen. Hear how we’ve been looking out for you all this time. Hear how well we know your quest.”

  “You cursed us.” Behind my voice spoke Mary Ellen, spoke Julia. “You’ve ruined so many lives.”

  “Oh, pet,” they said. “Oh, love.” Their voices hit each syllable at the same moment, created an uncanny chorus. “We never cursed you. We only ever wanted to keep you safe.”

  “Bullshit.”

  The bull himself raised his head, huffed warm air through his ringed nostrils. It sounded a lot like the word stay.

  “You like stories, don’t you?” the old women said. Beside the teapot sat a stack of letters. Mandy’s letters. Mine.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Have a cuppa.” One of them pushed the tea toward me. “Have a cookie. We’ll turn down the TV and have a little chat.”

  “Where’s my sister?”

  “Your sister?”

  “Yes. Yes. My sister. I came here to find her. Where is she?”

  The banshees looked at each other, looked at the bull, nodded in tandem. “She’ll be along shortly. Don’t you worry about that.”

  My head swam with the strangeness of it all.

  “When?” I demanded. “When will she be along? Where is she?”

  A sudden loud knock on the door answered me.

  “There she is now,” the witches said.

  The door opened to reveal Ida, rain-drenched and windswept.

  “Oh, Deena, thank God,” she breathed, and she rushed into the house to embrace me. Behind her came Finn and Cale, followed swiftly by Rachel.

  Rachel grabbed me so hard by the shoulders I thought they would be shaken clean off.

  “What were you thinking?” my sister shrieked. “What in the goddamn world were you thinking? You could have drowned. You could’ve been joining Mandy in her fucking grave and I would have had to bury both of you. Oh God—”

  Rachel collapsed in a heap at my feet and great shuddering sobs shook her body, came out in a keen that sounded like an endless scream. The others stood in stunned silence.

  The three banshees disappeared into the kitchen to boil the kettle for more tea. Finn helped Rachel up and she sank onto the couch beside me, head in her hands.

  “They called us,” Ida explained softly, perching on an armchair by the fire. “Those women. They found you on the shore and got Finn’s number from your phone. We’d already told Rachel you were here. She was already on her way.”

  Rachel’s breath was ragged from her wailing, her sobs now as short and harsh as a cough. She kept her face hidden behind her hands.

  I didn’t know what to do. I had been so sure it would be Mandy at the cottage door.

  “Did you see Mandy?” I asked. “Is she here?”

  Three faces stared at me in silence and sympathy. Maybe they were no longer angry. Maybe they thought I was going crazy.

  “She’s not here,” Finn said finally. “Deena. You knew she wasn’t going to be here.”

  My fingers traced the raised patterns of the sweater I was wearing, the stretchy floral tunic underneath. “Then how come I’m wearing her clothes?”

  “Did you take them?” Rachel’s voice came from between her fingers. “From the boxes of her things.”

  “No.”

  Ida said, “How do you expect us to believe anything you say anymore?”

  “You saw her!” I cried. “You said so. After the funeral, in the rain. You saw her on the bridge at the feet of the angels. You recognized her. You know she isn’t dead, you know it.”

  Ida shook her head.

  “Sisters,” said the three banshees suddenly, re-emerging from the kitchen with a fresh pot of tea. “You can always tell sisters. The trick is in the eyes.”

  They opened theirs wide and each had stormy irises, as gray as the sky. They laughed as one as the others looked unsettled.

  The banshees poured us all tea, sat on the second couch opposite Rachel and me.

  “Not to be rude,” Ida said carefully, “but why is there a bull in the living room?”

  “He frightens the cows,” the banshee in the middle told her.

  “We can’t put him in the barn with them,” the one on the right explained.

  The banshee on the left just cackled and dunked a biscuit in her tea.

  “Thank you,” Rachel said, rather stiffly. “For taking care of Deena. I’ll bring her home once it’s safe to drive, after the storm.”

  “Oh, there’s more storm to come yet, loveen,” said the banshees.

  The wind howled through the cottage. The waves broke on the rocks. Sitting beside the sister who raised me, I felt my heart shatter inside my chest, my emotions sparring, colliding, a battle inside me. The love I held for my ever-practical sister—head of the household, her own love as reliable as the newspaper in our letterbox every morning—and the deep betrayal I felt at realizing, by the ways she had reacted after the funeral, that Rachel had known about Mandy’s daughter all along.

  “Have you been formally introduced,” I asked icily, “to Ida Nolan, Mandy’s daughter?”

  Rachel swallowed hard, met Ida’s eyes, nodded once. “Finn told me everything,” she said.

  My broken heart was a landslide of pieces, small stones sticking in my throat. “You told me nothing.”

  “Deena—”

  “NOTHING!” I could have out-screamed the wind. The way she’d dismissed me when I said we needed to find her. The way she hadn’t even seemed surprised when she learned about Ida. The way she had always kept Mandy at arm’s reach from me. “You knew. You always knew. I wondered why you weren’t shocked to read that part of Mandy’s note. Why you didn’t want to look for her immediately. Find her. Mandy’s daughter. Why it wasn’t this big mystery for you like it was for me. Because you knew already.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about our sister,” Rachel said heavily.

  “Yeah. I’ll bet. And there’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

  A twist in my heart, in my head. I’d heard these words before, the day after the funeral, yesterday, Rachel’s words in our father’s mouth. Or vice versa. We said the same things over and over. History just kept on repeating itself forever.

  “You’re just like him,” I said. “You try so hard to be just like him. But you’re the bad apples, the two of you. Not us. Not us.”

  Rivers of tears ran down my sister’s face.

  “You keep on following his lead, but if he knew about me he’d do the same thing to me that he did to Julia. His own mother. He wouldn’t even know her. You think you’re so much better, but you’re still just his puppet. Just as full of fear as he is of hate. You drove Mandy away with it. Thinking she was so messed up and you were so superior. And you wanted me to be just like you, just so you could be the perfect daughter to prove to dear old fucking daddy that we’re good apples, that we’re worthy of his rotten family tree. But he doesn’t deserve me. And neither do you.”

  Rachel gulped, gasped for air like a fish on the shore. I couldn’t stop my words from coming, hardly knew what I was saying through my bright-burning fire of anger and tears, didn
’t think I meant the words; I just wanted them to hurt. Hurt like I was hurt because she had kept all this from me.

  “I’d’ve been better off with Mandy,” I said, voice shaking, loud and terrible. “She would have made a better mother than you.”

  “Oh,” said Rachel. “Oh.”

  I grabbed my sister by the shoulders. I shook her like she shook me the minute she’d come in, and, when she did nothing, I threw myself into her arms and cried.

  29.

  Best-laid plans

  Slieve League Cliffs, 2012, and Dublin, 1995

  Rachel’s arms were an ocean around me. For the first time since Mandy had left, I felt something close to safe. Washed out and weary, rid of all my words, as though my sister’s arms were taking all my anger, my fear, my grief, leeching them out of me and throwing them through the cottage windows back into the sea.

  Slowly, softly, into the silence left by the storm of me, Rachel told a story. Tea grew cold in mismatched mugs. Cookies went untouched. By the door, the bull sighed in his sleep. The three banshees leaned bony elbows on their knees. The world was listening.

  This is what she told us.

  * * *

  —

  Before the age of seventeen, Rachel Rys had her life all figured out.

  At the end of the school year she would pass her exams with all A’s, which would enable her to go to Trinity College to study journalism. She would break up with her current boyfriend somewhere in the middle of Orientation Week and would spend the next year having sexual adventures with exciting undergrads. After three years, she’d graduate with first-class honors and go on to do a master’s in investigative journalism, which would land her an internship with the Irish Times. It was there that she would meet her future husband, a current-affairs correspondent. They would both make their careers in the broadsheets, where her position would be slightly higher and slightly better paid than her husband’s—something he would always secretly resent her for. They would have two children—after the age of thirty, when her career was established enough for her to afford to take maternity leave—and she would then make millions ghostwriting the autobiographies of famous politicians. She expected she would divorce her husband eventually. He would probably have an affair with a much younger woman when their children were in their early twenties (owing in no small way to his resentment of his wife’s great talent and success), finally allowing Rachel to live out her days in a penthouse apartment in Brooklyn, writing for the New York Times.

  At seventeen, Rachel had very little room for maneuver in her life plan. There was room for her study, her folders of newspaper cutouts, and there was also a certain amount of room for keeping her boyfriend happy by going to see inane films and letting him feel up her breasts in the back-row cinema seats. Rachel tolerated a certain amount of cliché as necessary.

  One such cliché was her virginity, which was not something she wanted to carry with her into university, nor was it something she wanted to have to worry about during her exams, when it was crucial that she not be distracted. So she decided that on her seventeenth birthday she and her boyfriend would have sex.

  She planned it all out meticulously. She researched the best brand of condoms; she carefully considered the position that would cause her the least pain; she talked to her more experienced female friends about what to expect.

  She had seen her boyfriend’s penis already; they may not have had penetrative intercourse yet, but they had fooled around more than a few times. It was longish, with a small circumference; somewhat snake-like: Even erect it veered ever so slightly to the left.

  Rachel found it entirely underwhelming. She found the sex underwhelming too, but she’d expected that.

  When it was done, she took a shower and brought the bathroom trash can with the used condom in it out to the bins outside. Her parents were away that weekend and wouldn’t be home until the following day to celebrate her birthday, but she knew that if they came across a premarital condom in the bin her father might well cast her out. He would probably have assumed it was Mandy’s before ever suspecting her, but Rachel’s sister had run away (not for the first time) several weeks before. (“More trouble than she’s worth,” our father spat, while our mother said peaceably, “She’ll have to resit her exams next year. Just don’t tell the family, okay, Rachel love?”)

  The night air cooled her skin as she closed the lid of the bin. A scream sounded, sudden and frightening, through the night. Rachel jumped, then laughed at herself, smoothed down her hair self-consciously, although there was no one but her around. Kids messing about in the park, she thought. Or cats fighting.

  In the jamb of the front door as she closed it were caught a few strands of long gray hair. Bloody cats, she thought, swatting the hairs away.

  When Rachel came back into the bedroom, her boyfriend was asleep, happily snoring. She read a little, rubbed moisturizing cream on the long red scratches on her skin that her boyfriend had clearly given her in the throes of his brief but obvious passion, and then fell asleep beside him, content in the knowledge that everything was going perfectly to plan.

  * * *

  —

  Having a baby at seventeen was not part of Rachel’s life plan.

  It took a while for her to figure it out. She had always had regular, perfectly timed periods that lasted four days for every twenty-eight and gave her virtually no premenstrual symptoms. The first one wasn’t even late. By the time she had understood that the second wouldn’t show up, she was puking three times a day and couldn’t stand behind a man wearing aftershave on a bus without gagging. By the time she figured it out, she was almost eight weeks pregnant.

  The first person she told was not her boyfriend. It was an anonymous voice on the other end of a telephone line. One of the crisis pregnancy call centers advertised on the back of every public bathroom door, the ones you never in a million years think you’ll ever have to call.

  The agency Rachel called promised to “allow women to explore all options, at home and abroad.” Rachel was a smart girl. She knew that “at home and abroad” was a veiled reference to abortion. Terminating a pregnancy was illegal in Ireland. Even taking pills was punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. Going to prison until she was thirty-one was not part of Rachel’s life plan either.

  The only way to end a pregnancy legally was to get out of Ireland. To travel to a clinic in the UK. Rachel had some money saved up for college, hoping that she could move out of her family home and live with friends in a dingy flat-share, which was clearly a large part of what college was all about. She figured that with a bit of financial help from her boyfriend she could afford the flights and medical costs. But she wanted to make sure, figure out what to do. Did she need a referral? Was that even legal? She wanted the agency to tell her. Help her. Send her on her way.

  When she called the center, she didn’t dither. She told the woman on the other end of the line that she was pregnant and didn’t want to be. Couldn’t afford to be. Was far too young to be. She used the euphemism everybody knew. She said: “I want to know how to, you know, take the boat to England.”

  The woman said, “You’ll have to come in for a consultation. I can’t give you that information over the phone.”

  What Rachel got could hardly be construed as a consultation.

  30.

  The boat to England

  Dublin and London, 1995

  The appointment was for evening. Creeping ink splashes in a darkening sky. The crisis pregnancy agency was down a lane a few side roads across from O’Connell Street. The statues by the bridge—giant stern angels, iron or bronze; grumpy-looking things, Rachel thought, so haughty—stared blankly in the other direction. They wouldn’t be watching out for her tonight.

  Rachel followed the phone woman’s directions to a small plain door with a laminated sign beside a vacant shop that might once have been a bakery. A ghos
t of the smell of apple pie still floated on the air.

  In the waiting room, she sat in a blue plastic chair, ignoring the adoption services leaflets with smiling, dimpled babies on the front. A crying older woman was the only other person there.

  The counselor was friendly, shook Rachel’s hand warmly. “Rachel, isn’t it?” she asked. When Rachel nodded, nervously taking a seat, the woman said, “My name is Joyce. It’s lovely to meet you. Please don’t be nervous—I’m here to help.”

  Rachel tried to relax, crossed and recrossed her legs as Joyce asked how far along she was, if the baby’s father knew.

  “I, um,” Rachel said. “I’m going to tell him tonight. Ask him to lend me some money for the procedure if he can. It’s a lot, with the flights and all. I think I might be okay to come home the same day, not need to pay for a hotel room or . . .” She ran out of steam, waited for Joyce to pick up the thread of the conversation, to tell her what to do and how to go about it. I’m here to help.

  “Well, I definitely think it’s important to tell him.” Joyce smiled. “To give him all your options. How long did you say you’ve been together?”

  “Almost two years. But I don’t see it lasting. I’m going to college next year and—”

  “Two years is a long relationship, for your age,” said Joyce, still smiling. “Shows true commitment. Real maturity.” The woman smiled some more.

  “Um. I suppose.”

  Joyce reached into a drawer and pulled out a leaflet like the ones in the waiting room. “I think you’ll agree,” she said, “that being armed with all of your options, all the relevant information, is the most important thing when it comes to making choices like this one. Life-changing choices.”

  “Sure,” Rachel said. “Of course.” She took the leaflet. It unfolded like an accordion when she stretched out her arms.

  Joyce leaned over the desk and pointed to one of the accordion’s panels. “Nine weeks, is that right?” Under her painted fingernail was a picture of a tiny palm-sized baby with its thumb in its mouth.