How Many Letters Are In Goodbye?

by Yvonne Cassidy

  Twenty minutes ago, this old lady on a cane comes out of your building with the doorman and I imagine it’s Nana Davis, let myself believe it’s her. I only ever met her once, the time she came over with Aunt Ruth and had the fight with Dad because he ruined the teddy bear she brought me by accidentally burning a hole in it with his cigarette. I can’t remember what she looked like, all I can remember is the black charred circle in the teddy’s ear and the smell of burning fur. This woman could be her, I’m able to pretend it’s her until the doorman hails her a cab and says “Have a good day, Mrs. Silverman” as she gets into it. Then I can’t pretend anymore.

  Aunt Ruth has no photos of Nana Davis in her house, or of you, or of Granddad Davis. Is that weird? I think it’s weird, especially with all those photos of Laurie, but maybe it’s only because Cooper’s the snap-happy one. She never talked about Nana Davis either, except when I asked her, and even then she hardly said anything, only that she was in a nursing home. That might have been a lie, about the nursing home. People tell lies more than they tell the truth. That’s one of the things I’ve learned in my seventeen years and 351 days on this planet. If you were to ask me what it means to grow up, I’d say it was learning to spot the lies.

  This is a list of things that people do when they are lying:

  They buy themselves time before they answer the

  question you asked them.

  They say too much or they say too little.

  They laugh at things that aren’t funny.

  They don’t look you in the eyes.

  They change the subject really quickly to something else.

  I don’t know if this list should be longer, there might be other things, but these are the things I know so far. I also know that lies can be things you don’t say, things that you leave out on purpose to make the person think something different. That’s the way Aunt Ruth usually lies, but she tells real lies too, like the time she told me about your favourite ice cream flavour.

  We’re in Jaxson’s after one of my prosthetic fittings. That’s Aunt Ruth’s way of pretending me getting fitted for a prosthetic is fun, by letting me choose where we go for lunch afterwards. It drives her crazy that I always pick Jaxson’s instead of some fancy restaurant along Las Olas. Every time she asks me, “Where would you like to go for lunch, Rae?” all smiley, I smile too and say “Jaxson’s!” and she tries not to let her smile go wonky. I pick Jaxson’s because I love the ice cream sundaes and the monkey outside and the piano that plays itself. I also pick it because she hates it.

  This day isn’t the first fitting but it’s not the last either because I don’t have the stupid hulk of plastic strapped to me yet. I order a cheeseburger and fries and a hot fudge sundae and a Coke just like I always do. Aunt Ruth always orders the Cobb salad and this day, just as the waitress walks away, Aunt Ruth calls her back and orders a waffle for after, with peanut butter ice cream and whipped cream.

  “You never order dessert,” I go.

  She shrugs. “Sometimes I do.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat peanut butter ice cream. I didn’t think you knew peanut butter ice cream existed!”

  She laughs, picks up a knife, cleans it with her napkin. “It used to be my favourite. Every summer on vacation, we used to go to this old-fashioned ice cream parlour called the Candy Kitchen. I’d always get peanut butter.”

  “Where?”

  She puts her knife down, straightens it.

  “Long Island.”

  The waitress brings my Coke and Aunt Ruth’s seltzer with lime. I hold the straw in my hand and pull the paper off with my mouth, the way I always do.

  “Where in Long Island?”

  Aunt Ruth takes a second too long to answer. “Bridgehampton.”

  “Did you always go to the same place?”

  She takes a sip of seltzer, squeezes the lime into it. “Yes, we stayed in a house there.”

  “Was it your mum and dad’s?”

  “No. We stayed with Daddy’s boss and his wife. It was their house.”

  She stirs her seltzer with her straw, is about to say something else, but I talk next.

  “Was that Cal Owens?”

  She can’t keep the shock out of her voice. “Who told you that?”

  I think of the man with the smile in the wheelchair and I think about lying, but I don’t. “My mum had a newspaper article about him and your dad in her things.”

  The waitress is at the table again. She places the burger down in front of me with a red basket of fries. Aunt Ruth’s Cobb salad is giant.

  “I’m looking forward to this,” she says.

  I’ve never heard her say she’s looking forward to it, and it’s something about her saying it that makes me ask what I ask next.

  “Did they have kids?”

  She’s putting the dressing on the salad. She doesn’t look up but her hand pauses.

  “Who?”

  “Cal Owens and his wife?”

  She laughs, dumps on the rest of the dressing. She never uses all the dressing. “No. They didn’t. This salad looks really great today.”

  “Did you like going on holidays with them?”

  She puts down her knife, fixes her fringe. She smiles. “Yes, of course. Daddy always said Uncle Cal and Aunt Annabel were more like family than his boss and his wife. They lived in the apartment upstairs from us. The penthouse.”

  I don’t know why she’s lying, Mum, but I know she is. And then I ask something else, a question that needs a sudden and immediate answer.

  “What ice cream did my mum get? In the ice cream parlour—what was her favourite?”

  “Her favourite?”

  She scrunches up her face like she’s trying to remember, looking up at the glass lightshade as if it’s written there. I hold my burger but I don’t bite it yet. She looks back down into her salad, cuts it with a knife and fork.

  “Strawberry,” she says to the salad.

  Strawberry is my favourite flavour, on its own I mean, not in a sundae. If I’m going to have a scoop of ice cream on a cone or in a cup, I’ll always pick strawberry. Aunt Ruth knows it’s my favourite, has started to stock the freezer with low-fat strawberry frozen yoghurt to stop me buying the proper ice cream at the mall. I want strawberry to be your favourite too, I really do, but I don’t want it to be a lie.

  So I decide to tell my own lie, just to check.

  “That’s funny. Dad always said chocolate was her favourite. He used to tell me that she always went for that, that she’d never get anything else.”

  She blinks, smiles, blinks again.

  “You know what? Now that you mention it, I think he might have been right. I think she went through a phase of strawberry, but, yes, chocolate, chocolate was her thing. She always loved chocolate.”

  I take a bite of my burger. I chew it slowly. She cuts up her salad and starts to talk about the barbecue her work is planning and how she’s hoping that Cooper can leave the restaurant early to be there and that Laurie and I don’t have a soccer game.

  I know she’s lying about the ice cream, Mum, just like she was lying before. I know that she can’t remember or she never knew or that maybe you never had a favourite flavour, but it’s easier to say “strawberry” or “chocolate” than tell me any of those things because it’s not like I’ll ever know, will I? She probably thinks it’s only a small thing, that it’s only a white lie, that it doesn’t matter.

  She might think that, but it does matter.

  It fucking well matters to me.

  Writing all that down about Aunt Ruth makes me think about Sergei. He lied to me too, about how he’d be there last night, how he’d come with me this morning. He’s just like Aunt Ruth with her lies. Why do people keep lying to me, Mum? Why do they think they can do that?

  And what is wrong with me, that I
keep on believing them?

  Rhea

  830 Park Avenue, New York

  28th April 1999

  6:36 p.m.

  Dear Mum,

  The truth is I lie too. The truth is I lied first. I should have told you that. I should have told you before but, fuck it, I’m telling you now. Does that change things? If you lie to someone is it okay for them to lie back? Does everything become lies then? If I hadn’t started it by telling that lie, would things have been different? Would Aunt Ruth have told the truth all along?

  I’ve been on this corner all day. All fucking day. I had to go all the way into Central Park to find a loo because there’s nowhere around here and I’m starving because there’s no pizza places or McDonald’s or anything either. Where the fuck is Sergei? Fuck him. I know I could have missed him when I went to pee, but I was really quick, I didn’t hang around to look for the bench with your name on it or anything, the one Dad said was there, unless he was lying too. I didn’t tell Sergei about the bench. I haven’t told him because I haven’t been able to find it yet—but it’s fun looking—and maybe because that’s something I want to do on my own.

  The lie I tell Aunt Ruth is the time she visits right after the accident. It’s only a few months since her summer visit—usually I’m a different age every time she comes, but this time I’m still seven. No one tells me she’s coming, or maybe they do and I forget because I’m in hospital and sleeping all the time. In the middle of one sleep, I open my eyes and she’s there. I think it’s a dream and I fall back asleep, but then I’m awake again and she’s still there, next to the bed. I don’t know how many times I fall asleep and wake up again until I’m awake enough to stay awake. I know it’s her but because of all the drugs and everything, I make a mistake and I say, “Mum?”

  I don’t know if that’s what makes her cry, or if she was crying already, but she sniffs to make herself stop and picks up a paper bag off the floor. There are furry ears sticking out, grey and white, and I know it’s a bunny rabbit even before she lifts it out so I can see its face and its body and its white fluffy tail. I reach out to feel its fur before the machines and tubes yank me back and she turns away to look out the window, but really I know she’s crying again.

  Time is funny in the hospital. Sometimes when I wake up, Dad is there instead of Aunt Ruth, but it’s mostly her and they’re never there together. I don’t know how long anyone stays or what day it is. After a few days, I’m allowed up and I walk down the corridor to the TV room. Two days after that, I’m allowed to go home. At first, I think it must be Sunday, because it’s the afternoon and Dad is off work, but it turns out it’s Wednesday, and that I’ve been in hospital for over two weeks and that the shop has been closed since the day of the accident.

  Aunt Ruth stays with us, in Nana Farrell’s old room, instead of a hotel the way I always wanted her to, only it’s not like the time she came in the summer. In front of me, her and Dad smile at each other and say nice things, but whenever they think I’m asleep they’re always fighting.

  I know the shop is still closed because they argue about it, and I don’t know where Dad goes during the day, but she’s the one who’s there. She’s the one who cuts a line down my pyjama sleeve so it folds in two flaps and I can get it on over the bandage. She’s the one reading me stories, holding my bandage outside the bath so it doesn’t get wet. She’s the one who practises cleaning her teeth with me, both of us using our left hands, turning it into a game. I don’t remember my stump hurting but it must have been hurting because I remember her in my room at night with a facecloth, wiping my head.

  It’s not like Dad wasn’t there at all, he’s nearly always there at dinner time, but he hardly says anything. At the end, he stands up and brings his plate to the counter before kissing my hair and saying “I’ll leave you two to it” and going out the back door. One night, he comes home from the Drop Inn early and he sees me drawing with my left hand, holding the page with my stump the way Aunt Ruth showed me, and he puts his head into the inside of his elbow and leaves again. That’s the night she follows him out and they argue in the garden, but low, because they think I won’t hear.

  I want her to stay, that’s what makes me tell the lie. I want her to stay and even though she stays for ages and ages, even after I go back to school, I know she won’t be able to stay forever. She’s on the phone more, nearly every night, whispering in the hall, waiting until she thinks I’m sleeping or watching telly and not listening, but I’m always listening.

  That night, I’m going to the loo when I hear her.

  “I know,” she says. “It’s been a month and a half. I’ve used up all my time. Steve put it to me straight—either get back or I’ll have no job to get back to.”

  I make myself breathe the way a feather would breathe.

  “She seems much better. They’re so resilient, it’s amazing. She’s back in school already.”

  I peek over the banister. I can see the top of her hair. There’s a row of silver in the brown I don’t remember from before.

  “He’s not great.” She pauses and looks out through the porch glass, as if she’s checking to see if Dad is coming home, even though it’s dark so you can only see black. “I’ve persuaded him to open the shop again, but he won’t talk about what happened. I’ve tried, but he gets so defensive, runs out to the pub. The only thing he’ll say is that he’s sure the safety guard was on, that he always leaves it on.”

  I close my eyes.

  “I know, that’s what I keep asking myself too: how does a seven-year-old get a safety guard off a meat grinder?”

  I make my steps tiny, squinchy little baby steps that take me back to my room. In bed, I remember I still need the toilet but I’m afraid to go out again. I can hear her voice but not the words anymore. The phone gives a little ring when she hangs up.

  When I start to cry, I’m crying for real, not faking, only maybe making it a bit louder so I know she’ll definitely hear. The floorboard on the landing squeaks and the door opens and she’s there.

  “Rhea, honey, what’s the matter?”

  She sits on the bed and I move my legs over.

  “Was it another nightmare?”

  I nod. Her fingers are cool on my forehead.

  “It’s okay, honey, those dreams aren’t real. They’re scary but they’re not real.”

  She pulls a tissue from her sleeve and holds it for me. I blow my nose into it.

  “Are you hungry?” she goes. “Would you like a treat?”

  I’m not, but I say I am, because she buys fancy biscuits to make me feel better and she wants to give me a treat. When she comes back, she has a tray with a glass of lemonade and a plate with Viscounts and Jaffa Cakes. I take a Viscount but before I can unwrap the foil, I start to cry again.

  “Honey,” she goes, “what’s wrong?”

  The crying is worse than before—breath and snotty tears all caught up together. She puts her arms around me and I smell her perfume, and that makes me cry harder.

  “Ssssh, it’s okay. It’s okay, baby.” Her hands rub ovals on my back. I don’t think she’s ever done this before but it’s like I remember her doing it, I remember someone doing it.

  “What is it?” she goes. “You can tell me.”

  I cry. I hiccup. I cry more. She thinks I can tell her, but I can’t. Not because I don’t want to, but because it’s all tangled up in my head and I don’t know where the beginning is to start to unravel it. It might have been Dad not letting us write the letters or it might have been when he stopped listening to Hendrix or going on our Sunday walks. It might have been after her visit last summer. It’s all knotted together, along with the safety guard on the meat mincer and the way I go to sleep every night pretending that I’m sleeping in her apartment in New York and not in my bed in Rush. I want to ask her to take me to America with her, or to stay in Nana Farrell’s room forever, only I can
’t ask her because she might say no, and that’d be worse than never asking at all.

  “Sorry,” I go, when I stop crying enough to speak.

  “Honey.” She brushes my hair back from my face. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for. What are you sorry for?”

  I can barely hear my own voice. “I didn’t mean to make you and Daddy sad.”

  “Baby, Rhea.” She holds me a little away from her so I can see her properly. “You didn’t do anything wrong. What happened—it wasn’t your fault. You know that? You shouldn’t have been there on your own.”

  I shake my head. “Lisa was with me.”

  “But your Dad, Rhea, an adult—”

  “Daddy was in the big fridge. The delivery came, it was only a few minutes—”

  “Even for one minute, honey, you shouldn’t have been alone.” She looks close into my face. Her eyes are brown like yours in the pictures. “Can I ask you something, honey? The machine—can you remember if the safety guard was on? Had your daddy put it on the machine?”

  There are webs of red across the white bits of her eyes. I don’t want her to be annoyed with me, to hate me. I want her to stay. And that’s when I think of the lie.

  “No.”

  She’s too quiet and I know I need to say something else to make her believe me.

  “Before the delivery, Daddy was making Mrs. Sinnott’s order. I wanted to help him and show Lisa that I knew how to do it.”

  That part is true, but I don’t tell her the rest—how Dad put the safety guard on and I tell Lisa I know how to take it off, and that if I do the order right he’s going to let me work in the shop every Saturday.