Jean’s full of it with all this feelings shit. Facts are more important, everyone knows that. Everyone knows that facts are what things all boil down to, that facts are what matter in the end.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
Amanda asks me to go to the beach with her after dinner. The movie tonight is Free Willy and I’d planned to watch it, but she’s never asked me to do anything with her before, so I go, even though I’m not sure I want to.
The sand is wet, from the rain this afternoon.
“Want to sit there?” Amanda goes, pointing at the rocks.
“Do you want to go for a walk instead?”
She scrunches her nose. “We don’t have too much time before it gets dark—we wouldn’t get very far before we’d need to turn back, is all.”
I don’t care about that, but I know she does and I don’t want to get her into trouble. “Okay, we can sit on the rocks.”
We find a flat one, wide enough for both of us to sit on without touching. The sea is dark tonight, grey, not blue, with flecks of white for waves.
“I needed to get away from that house,” Amanda goes. “Sometimes, being around those kids all the time is too much, they make me crazy.”
“Me too. I thought I was going to strangle Maleika over dinner. The way she wouldn’t stop snivelling about there being no cookies left.”
Amanda rolls her eyes. “I know, thank God Erin gave her hers, otherwise she’d probably still be crying about it.”
“She’s really good with them,” I go. “I don’t know how she’s so calm all the time.”
“Well, she does smoke a joint in our room every night.”
Amanda keeps her voice serious and, for a split second, she has me, until I see her head dip into her breathy laugh.
“Shut up!”
“I had you there.”
“No you did not.”
“For a second, I did. I had you for a second.”
I sit back on the rock. It’s hard to get comfortable. Amanda pulls her feet up, hooks her arms around her knees. “She was asking me the other night about boyfriends back home and stuff, and I nearly told her. But then I didn’t because I didn’t want to make her feel weird about sharing a room with me.”
I dig my heels into the sand, make imprints with my Docs. “You could have just been really casual about it, said you had a girlfriend, to see what she’d say.”
“I could, but that would be a lie, because I don’t.” She rests her chin on her knees. “Do you?”
I shake my head. “Not now. I did.”
She sighs. “You’re a step ahead of me. I’ve had drunken kisses and crushes—one huge crush on a girl called MacKenzie who I worked with in a record store. That’s it.”
I picture MacKenzie in my head. She has tattoos and a pierced tongue. People call her Mac.
“Were the drunken kisses with MacKenzie?”
“Mostly they were with my friend Ellen, from middle school, but, yeah, once with MacKenzie. We went to some party after work once at one of her friends’ houses. We drank ouzo.”
“Ouzo?”
She wrinkles her nose. “I know, gross. It was the only thing they had—I think the kid’s parents had just come back from Greece. I don’t remember too much after I drank it, except for this part where I was in the backyard by the garage and MacKenzie was kissing me, up against a wall.”
“She was kissing you or you were kissing her?”
She smiles one of those smiles that changes her whole face. “We’re both doing the kissing but I’m the one against the wall. I was so mad at myself after, because I was so wasted I could barely remember the details, after wanting it to happen for so long.”
“Did it happen again?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
“Did you ever talk about it afterwards?”
“Are you kidding? I don’t know if she even remembered and I wasn’t going to bring it up. We worked with each other for a few months after that, but she never asked me out with her friends again.”
When she says that, I know MacKenzie did remember, and I think Amanda knows it too. There’s silence between us then, only the sound of the waves. She’s the one who breaks it. “Tell me about your girlfriend, I mean, your ex-girlfriend.” It sounds weird, calling Laurie that. She was always Mike’s girlfriend or Ryan’s or Ben’s, never mine.
“I don’t know if she was technically my girlfriend,” I go. “I mean we had this thing for nearly a year, but she was dating guys too. She always dated guys.”
“How did you get together? Did you know her from school?”
I take a breath of the sea air, it feels fresh in my lungs.
“Laurie was my aunt’s boyfriend’s daughter. We lived in the same house.”
Dad used to say this thing about people’s eyes being out “on stalks,” and when I turn to look at Amanda, that’s what she looks like, her eyes big in her face. They change colour sometimes, I’ve noticed that, and today they look more grey than blue.
“Oh my God, are you serious?”
“Yep.”
She starts to laugh, dipping her head down, breath and the squeak. The story is almost worth it, to hear that laugh again.
“Holy shit,” she goes. “Did they find out?”
“Yep.”
“Holy shit.” She’s still laughing and I am too and I think she’s going to ask me about Cooper and Aunt Ruth finding out and I’m ready to tell her, only she asks me something else instead, something simple that I wasn’t expecting.
“What was she like?”
It’s getting colder now and the clouds are low against the horizon. It’s getting towards dark, time to go in. I can end the conversation here, but instead I push my feet harder into the sand and think of words to describe Laurie.
“Pretty. She was really pretty. And smart. She could be very funny sometimes too.” I look down and I see I’m cupping my stump and I let go. “And she was manipulative and selfish and two-faced.”
“Whoa,” Amanda goes. “She was sounding perfect, up until that.”
I laugh. “I only found all that out after—although maybe I didn’t, maybe I knew all along. She was one of these cheerleader girls, all the guys loved her. She was used to all that, you know?”
“The attention?”
“Getting her own way.”
The wind is getting stronger, blowing more of Amanda’s curls out of her ponytail so they whip around her face. I have goose bumps on my legs, but neither of us move. I know what she’s going to ask me next, before she asks.
“Did you love her?”
Of all the images in my mind of Laurie, the one that comes then is that first one, the time I saw her leaning at the front door, sucking the ends of her hair, one foot on top of the other. I want to be honest, I want to tell the truth.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. I thought I did, but it was all fucked up. The whole situation was fucked up.”
I think that Amanda is going to push me on it, to say it has to be one answer and not the other, but she doesn’t, she only listens.
“If I did love her, I don’t love her now,” I go. “I fucking hate her now.”
Amanda has a look on her face that I haven’t seen before, one I don’t know yet.
“Well, they say that hate is the other side of love.” She lets her feet slide down the rock, onto the sand, folds her arms across her body. “We should probably be getting back.”
We don’t say much on the way back up the beach path and I’m thinking about Laurie, how weird it is that she’s still sleeping in her white wooden bed and talking on the pink phone next to it and going to the mall. How it’s fifty kinds of crazy that we can be so far apart and still breathing and existing and living. How you can go from being almost part of someone to just being nothing to each other
at all.
Amanda’s walking in front and I think about saying it to her, trying to explain what I mean, but it’s not even making sense in my own head and I don’t want to sound all show-offy about it, going on about Laurie when she’s never even had a girlfriend.
We’re almost back at the house when we see David coming down the steps.
“Hey, girls, enjoy your walk on the beach?” He checks his watch. “Good thing you’re back before the witching hour.”
“Shut up!” I turn to Amanda. “Don’t worry, he’s only messing, he’s not going to say anything.”
She smiles. “I know.”
“Listen, Rhea, hold on a minute, will you?” David goes. “I have some mail for you. I meant to give it to you earlier, but I forgot. It’s a big old parcel, had to wait in line to get it, took me forever.”
Something happens then, to my heart and to my breath at the same time.
He smiles a cheeky smile through his beard. “What’s up? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Worried you can’t keep up with all the fan mail?”
I clench my toes, unclench, smile. “I’m just shocked you bothered queuing, that’s all—you’re usually such a lazy bastard.”
He winks. “Ah, you know, I thought there might be something valuable in it, but there isn’t, I already checked.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Hold on, I’ll just get it from the van. Be right back.”
He jogs off, before I can tell him not to worry about it, that I’ll get it tomorrow. Listening to his feet crunch over the gravel and around the corner, I remember Amanda is there, as if I’d somehow forgotten.
“You go on inside,” I go. “I’ll wait for him.”
She has her hands in her back pockets. “It’s okay, I don’t mind.”
“It’s cold, plus it’s dark now. No point in us both getting in shit with Jean if she comes out.”
“She won’t say anything, we’re not on the beach.”
“You know what she’s like, no point in risking it. You go on, I’ll be right behind you.”
She looks down at her feet, then back to me. “Okay. See you inside.”
And she’s climbing the steps to the back deck when I see David coming over, walking now, not jogging. Behind him, the trees are almost fully black, and the only parts of him that I can see properly are the white of his smile and the large envelope he’s holding out in front of him.
“Here you go,” he says. “Don’t be up all night reading whatever’s in there. You’re on early breakfast tomorrow, remember?”
“I know, I haven’t forgotten.”
It’s lighter than it looks. It has the red sharpie writing again and $2.80 worth of postage—that’s what I notice first.
Now the envelope is sitting on Winnie’s bed and I don’t know if I’ll read it tonight or save it till tomorrow or Saturday when we’re supposed to be going on the boat whale watching. I’ve been looking forward to whale watching, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to see Free Willy tonight but maybe I’ll fake that I’m sick, stay behind.
After all, I’ve been waiting ages for this package. It’s nearly three weeks since I wrote to Aunt Ruth. So what’s another two days, on top of three weeks? Nothing, nearly nothing. Two days is nothing at all, not when you’ve been waiting so long for something, not when you’ve been waiting your whole life.
Rhea
July 12, 1999
Dear Rhea,
Thank you so much for writing back to me. It didn’t matter that it was short, just seeing your writing on the envelope made me so happy! I’m sorry I upset you with what I said about teenagers going through phases. Maybe you’re right, maybe it’s not a phase. I didn’t mean to judge you or your feelings and I’m sorry if it felt like that. It’s just been a lot for us all to take in—I’m sure you understand that. Sometimes things take time to adjust to.
You asked about Laurie and she’s well. Yes, she’s still in therapy
—she goes once a week on Tuesdays over by the mall where she has a summer job at the Gap. She’s happy because she gets a staff discount and her friend Cindy from school works there too. Do you know her? No, we’re not going to Hawaii on vacation. We’re not going away at all.
It’s not too late to change your mind about Columbia, you know. You’re right about the fall term but I spoke to them and they can hold your place until January. You could do your extra credits after the summer—here or in New York, wherever you want, I can sort it out for you. Just tell me what you want, Rhea, and I’ll do my best to make it work.
I’m not surprised you want to see your mom’s letters. I’m sending you everything she ever sent to me. I’ve put them in chronological order, so they will make more sense, although they are disjointed anyway because they span several years. I hope I’m doing the right thing sending them to you. I’ve thought long and hard about it and it’s driving me crazy going over and over it in my head, but you’re eighteen now and I know it’s not up to me to shield you from anything. I know you deserve to know the truth.
I wish I could be there with you when you open them, so that we could read them together, but since I can’t be, I hope that you get support from someone else, that maybe you read them with a friend, but my therapist says I have no control over any of that, and she’s right.
Now you have everything I have, Rhea, everything from the past. There were photos I thought I had from a time we went over to visit you and your mom and I wanted to include them too but I can’t find them. I don’t know where they are. I want you to have everything, I don’t want to hide anything anymore. There have been a lot of secrets in our family, Rhea, too many secrets, too much shame.
I showed your dad these letters once, the time I went to visit when you were six or seven—the summer before your accident. I brought them with me but he refused to read them. I left them on the kitchen table one night, in case he changed his mind, but the next morning they were all still piled up neatly, the way I’d left them, so I don’t think he ever read them at all.
I love you, Rhea, you know that, don’t you? I know you don’t owe me anything, I know I have no right to ask you for anything after how I let Cooper treat you that night, but I’m going to ask you something anyway. When you read these letters, will you call me? Please? Just to let me know you’re okay, that you’re safe. It would mean so much.
Love always,
Aunt Ruth xoxo
Dear Mum,
I wanted to write to you one last time before I opened the letters. There are five of them, in order like Aunt Ruth said. The last one is the thickest and it has a whole line of Irish stamps across the top, the other ones have little groups of three or four. The first one has an American stamp and it’s the only envelope that I can read the postmark on. It was sent in January 1979, two years and four months before I was born.
Your writing is the same as the writing on the Columbia photo (I knew that was your writing, I always knew!)—the slant is the same and the t and the h in “Ruth” are higher than the capital R, just like the l and the b are higher than the capital C in “Columbia.”
The envelope paper is very thin, Mum, like tissue paper, and I love that I know you touched it, smoothed it, licked it. I run my hands over the envelopes, I smell them, I shake them to listen to what’s inside. It sounds crazy, it is crazy, I’m just excited, Mum, that’s all. It’s like after all these letters, you’re finally writing back.
Love,
Rhea
January 18, 1979
Dear Ruth,
I know you’re mad at me, but hopefully you’re not so mad that you won’t open this letter. How’s school? I hope you’re doing well at school. It seemed like a nice place, that night I visited with Chuck. You seemed like you were getting on well there. I’d like to come and see you again sometime soon. What’s the weather like there this time of year? Is it cold? I
hope you’re not too cold.
So, I guess I owe you an apology. I know everyone was mad that I missed Christmas and I know I made it worse by not telling anyone. I would have told you, I tried to, I called you at the dorm but you were already gone. I spoke to some girl—I don’t remember her name. She said you’d already left for New York.
When I got back from California, Daddy had sent a letter to me. Can you believe that? He lives on the other side of the park and he sends me a letter. I read it, I knew I shouldn’t but I did anyway. It was full of all this stuff about how he wasn’t going to stand by and watch while I made a mess of my life and let things fall to pieces. He threatened me—can you believe that? He said that if I didn’t get it together that was going to be that—he wasn’t going to pay for school anymore and I’d be on my own! Just because I went on a road trip to San Francisco with my friends. That’s making a mess of your life apparently, according to Daddy.
Part of me wants to drop out anyway. To say, fine, fuck it, I don’t need your money, stop paying the damn tuition then if that’s how you feel. But then, I like it here, you know? Even though it’s only a fifteen-minute cab ride to their apartment, it feels like a whole other New York here, like a whole other city. Cathy, one of my friends, couldn’t get campus housing and she’s over on Amsterdam and there’s an abandoned building on one side of her and a bunch of Hare Krishnas on the other. Daddy would have a shit fit if he knew I was walking around there and it is kind of scary, but it’s an adventure too. Some girl from Israel got mugged in Morningside Park, but she was stupid because it says in the handbook to stay away from there. So don’t worry, Ruth, I don’t want you to get worried, I’m totally safe here. Columbia is like an island in the middle of everything, and apart from being on campus, I mostly only go as far as the diner and the West End anyway.
The West End is cool. I have to bring you there when you come. It’s a bit like the bar you brought me to that night Chuck and I drove up to see you, but it’s bigger. And dingier! That’s where we were the night we decided to go to San Francisco—one minute we were there and the next we were in Frankie’s car on a road trip!
The journey there was wild, all that driving. We hardly stopped, just kept going, taking turns driving through the day and night, stopping for gas and coffee and food at these ancient diners like some throwback from the 1950s. This one night, I was driving, and Chuck was in the front next to me, and I was chatting away about something and then I turned and saw that he was asleep and in the back, all the others were asleep too. And it was so weird then, because I was the only car on this road, stretching out for miles, there was only me and the dark and the stars, like I was the only person in the universe. And I had this feeling that the road was going to lift up—I could picture it happening, like a movie—and I was going to be able to steer us up right into the middle of all the stars. And no one would ever know where we’d gone but we’d be up there, lost in the stars but not lost at all.
How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? Page 32
