How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? (28 page)

“She looks a lot like the woman at the soup kitchen yesterday who was looking for you. They could be sisters.”

Dumbass
.
Laurie's voice is in my head before mine. What was I thinking, showing her the photo of you? Did I think she wouldn't see the resemblance? That she'd forget yesterday had happened?

I stand up quickly, nearly stepping on Olivia. I take the photo back from Winnie, put it back in the Ziploc bag, put the bag back inside the Carver book.

“Lisa?”

I pick up my backpack. I want to pack it properly, nicely, but there isn't time.

“Lisa, what's the matter?”

I shove my jeans in, my Hendrix T-shirt. “I thought I could trust you, that's what's the matter.”

She watches me packing, not smiling, but not mean-looking either.

“You can, I just don't know if I can trust you. You lied to me about who you are. I know your name's not Lisa.”

When she says that I stop packing, just for a second. She's known my name was Rhea all along, since yesterday. Of course she knew.

“So why'd you go along with it? Keep calling me Lisa, write that stupid note?”

She shrugs. “I was waiting to see when you'd tell me the truth.”

My stuff is nearly all packed. I'm still wearing her clothes but I can go into the kitchen, take them off and be out of this apartment, back on Ninth Avenue, in five minutes, less.

“I had to lie, you wouldn't understand.”

“Try me.” Olivia is by my feet again, licking my big toe. Her tongue is rough and scratchy and kind of nice. Lisa had a cat but I never saw it lick anyone. “She seemed really upset, the woman who wanted to find you. Your aunt. She seemed concerned.”

I stand there looking at Winnie, I don't sit down. “I'm not going back there—I don't care what anyone says. I'm not going back, you can't make me! No one can make me!”

Winnie stays sitting down, looking up at me. She doesn't interrupt me. She doesn't tell me to keep my voice down.

“You're right, I can't make you go anywhere or do anything, no one can. But if you're going to stay with me—that is, if you want to—you're going to have to tell me the truth.”

We stay like that for ages, it feels like, me standing, her sitting, Olivia in between. She makes it sound really simple, and maybe it is simple. I think about what she said about your photo, the Columbia one. She'd understood that, without me having to tell her, so maybe, just maybe she'll understand this too.

So I sit down on her couch and put my toes around the edge of the coffee table, just like her toes.

“I don't know where to start,” I go. “I don't know where the beginning is.”

She slides her glasses up her nose.

“Start where you are, start at the end.”

And I laugh, because it kind of makes sense, and she laughs too.

And that's where I start.

I start at the end.

Rhea

Dear Mum,

This is going to be the shortest letter ever because there's only another fifteen minutes until my clothes will be dry and then I've got to bring them home and collect the sandwiches Winnie made and our art stuff and meet her at the jewellery shop where she works. She'll be finished with her shift then and we're getting the subway to Brooklyn, the A train. I'm writing this from the coolest little garden in the world by the way, down the block from the Laundromat. You need a key to get in and Winnie has a key because she's a volunteer and I'm going to volunteer too, that's one of the things I've decided.

Today feels like a day for deciding things, it feels like the start of something. If I'd known it would feel like this, telling Winnie the truth, I wouldn't have taken so long to get the whole story out, I wouldn't have been so scared. Yesterday, sitting on her couch, it takes me ages to even get to the part about me and Laurie, and it's nearly dark when I tell her about us kissing during Truth or Dare. Her face doesn't change, even though she knows by then that Laurie is Cooper's daughter, and it doesn't even change when I tell her about us being in bed together. The only time in the whole story that her face changes is when I tell her about Cooper hitting me and the things he said. Her face gets really kind of hard then, like someone else's face, and she shakes her head over and over and says she's so sorry I'd had to go through that.

And the way she listens makes me want to tell her everything, Mum, and somehow we get onto this conversation about Dad, and I'm telling her about his music and how I'd read his mood by it, that usually Hendrix meant he was happy, unless he was listening to “Voodoo Child” because he only listened to “Voodoo Child” when he was angry about something. Lennon was his “loving music”—he always said that—and that could mean he was happy too, except for the times he was sad. She's interested in the times he was sad, asks a lot about that and I end up telling her about the times he cried in my room when he got home from the pub, talking about you or Nana Farrell—and just then Winnie jumps up and puts on her shoes. I haven't even gotten to the part where Dad found Nana Farrell on the floor and had to take her to the hospital but Winnie says she needs to run to the payphone because it's after nine and she always calls Melissa at nine. And I never get to tell her about that part because when she comes back, she heats up some beef stew she'd brought home from the soup kitchen and she sends me to the Chinese on Tenth Avenue for a pint of brown rice to go with it. On the way back, I'm thinking that I'm glad I stopped there because I might have ended up telling her too much, like about what Aunt Ruth said on my last night in Coral Springs.

And I'm glad I didn't tell her that, because I know that if I mentioned it, even if I told her it was a lie, it'd be in her head every time we talk about you, every time I showed her a photo, she'd be thinking about it, wondering. And I prefer the way it is now, like when she sees your Columbia photo and she says she sees your essence, and how alive you are, because that's the real you, Mum.

I can see it and Winnie can see it, and just because Aunt Ruth can't doesn't mean we have to listen to her pack of lies.

Rhea

Dear Mum,

Dumbass. Dumbass.
Dumbass, dumbass, dumbass.

That's what Laurie would say, and she'd be right. I hate that she's right.

You're such a dumbass, Rae
.

At first the afternoon started off nice, just like I thought it would, taking the A train under the water, getting out in Brooklyn. When we get out, it's like being in another country—the houses and the streets and the sky, nothing like Manhattan at all. Winnie knows her way to the promenade and across the other side of the water, the whole of New York is there, a giant blocky puzzle, like Lego, like you could reach out and pick it up. And as if that's not enough, there's the Brooklyn Bridge too, stretching out to reach it, and the Statue of Liberty, floating out in the haze. Winnie says you have to get out of Manhattan to see it properly and that reminds me of what Dad said at the Cliffs of Moher, about having to be far away to see the waves.

While we eat our sandwiches I'm making a photo of it all in my head, the way I always do before I draw anything—the greeny black of the Statue of Liberty, the shapes the buildings cut out of the blue sky. Winnie's talking about Brooklyn, the history and about famous people who live here, and even though I'm listening, I'm thinking about you at the same time, and I'm trying to understand how you could turn your back on all this. And I can't figure out how you could trade it in—the statue, the city, this whole beautiful city—for a nothing village in Dublin. How you could have left it all behind for Dad, for me.

After we eat, she holds out two pieces of charcoal in her palm and I choose the long skinny bit. And then I make the mistake.

“Did you ever come here to draw with Melissa?”

Winnie is adjusting her paper against the board, holding the charcoal between two fingers like a cigarette. I've done mine already but I'm waiting for her before I start.

“No.”

“Did she not like drawing?”

The paper's not totally straight so Winnie unclips it, lines it up again.

“Not really. It's not really her thing.”

When it's lined up perfectly, she sits next to me on the bench, starts to study the skyline.

“What is her thing?”

The wind has come up a little bit off the water and it ruffles our paper.

“To be honest, I'm not sure, Rhea. Farmers' markets, wheatgrass drinks. I'm sure she likes other things too, but that's as much as I know these days.”

Her hand is over the paper and I know she wants to start, that I should stop asking questions, but somehow I can't seem to stop.

“Does she ever come to New York?”

“Not much.”

“Does she not like it here?”

“I guess not.”

“How can someone not love New York?”

Winnie hits her charcoal down against the page, hard so it leaves a mark.

“Probably because she doesn't want to take a trip down memory lane by coming back here. She has a lot of painful memories I guess, with a drunk as a mother when she was growing up.”

I don't know if she's angry or sad because her voice and her face are switching between both.

“But that was years ago—isn't she thirty or something?”

She looks at me, right into my eyes. “These scars run deep, Rhea. I only got sober when Melissa was eighteen. I took her childhood away. If I could give it back to her, I would, but I never can.”

There's more pain in her face than it feels I should be seeing, so I look down at the paper, shiny white, waiting for my first mark. I want to make her feel better, to make the day clean again, like the paper.

“She looked happy in the picture you showed me. I'm sure it wasn't that bad.”

Winnie's hair blows across her face and she flicks it back behind her ears.

“I was an active alcoholic, Rhea. You know what that's like, growing up in a house like that.”

It takes me a second to fully hear what she's said.

“What do you mean?”

She glances at me. “You know, the stories you told me about your dad.”

At first I'm not angry, just shocked. I even laugh.

“What are you talking about? Dad wasn't an alcoholic—”

She bites her lip. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought your dad into this. Come on, we should get started.”

She straightens her board, lines it up against the skyline.

“He liked a drink in the pub, but everyone's dad did that. That was normal.”

She draws really fast, her hand skimming over the page, making quick shapes. She smudges some of the charcoal, but she doesn't seem to care.

“Sure,” she goes. “Forget it.”

Her eyes flick from the skyline to the paper and back again. She doesn't look at me, and I look at the skyline and try to let its shape replace the things she'd said. But it doesn't work, because the shock turns into anger then, and I can't stop it, thinking back on all the things I'd told her and how she wasn't listening at all, only judging me.

I know then that I'm not going to be able to draw. Looking at the skyline, the gaps between the buildings turn into tiny streets. And I can picture the miniature yellow taxis, bumper to bumper on the miniature streets, tiny people teeming along the sidewalks. And it's too alive to draw, with all this life, all these people—miniature versions of Sergei and Michael and even Pat with her headphones and my Red Sox cap, living their teeny lives right in the middle of it all. I wanted to pick the city up and shake it until they all fall out—Pat and Sergei and Michael and even Aunt Ruth, a miniature Aunt Ruth, scurrying along putting up microscopic pictures of me.

Winnie's stopped drawing. She's looking at me. “I'm sorry, Rhea, talking like that about your father
…
It's none of my business.”

The charcoal feels slippy in my hand. There's a mark on the white paper, kind of a circle, a smear, where I've been pushing it against the page.

“I didn't mean to upset you,” she goes.

“I'm not upset.”

She nods and starts drawing again, quick like before. She'll probably want to talk about it again when we get back to her apartment. And thinking about her apartment makes me worry about the fridge, how it was nearly empty except for the cream cheese and a jar of mixed garlic and some salad dressing and I hope she has a plan to get some food on the way home, because even though it's only half an hour since the sandwiches, I'm hungry again already.

“What do you think?”

Winnie holds up her picture to show me. It's smudgy and a bit of a mess. The windows of the buildings are all done in dashes or L shapes but what's strange is that even though it's not exactly how the buildings look, it looks real.

“It's good.”

“You don't feel like drawing today?”

I shake my head, put my board down on the bench between us. She places hers down too, carefully, on top of mine.

“I was hoping you would. I was hoping you'd do something new so I could show my friend Jean.”

“Who's Jean?”

She unwinds the pink and silver scarf from around her neck, holds one end in each hand. “She's someone I know from years back, from a rehab I was in. She's a counsellor and she runs a camp out in Long Island where we take kids from shelters for a few weeks every summer.”

“You're going away?”

“I go every year.”

“When?”

“Next week. Thursday.”

Thursday is six days away, not even a whole week. I want to say that, but I don't say anything. I want to ask her why she didn't say anything before, but that's a dumbass thing to even think because she doesn't have to say anything, tell me anything. I'm just a dumbass for getting sucked in with all the “we's.”