Only he’s not coming. He’s snoring louder than ever. And I feel so mad now, so mad at him, I want to run in and shake him and punch him awake, but I don’t, not really, it’s not his fault. Even if he was awake, he couldn’t do what I want him to do. He can’t protect me from what’s already happened. He can’t protect me from my memories, from the place the darkness is and the feelings that are still in my body, that live here, that’ll never leave, like a country that was taken over, occupied, and even though the natives can take it back and build stronger borders, the land can never feel the way it did before the invasion, never, ever, again.
Your dad can’t give back the things that were taken from me so long before I knew him, but he can protect you. He can look after you.
I am the link, don’t you see that, Rhea? It’s me. I am the one who is broken. Ruth says I kept her safe and I tried to, even when she got so mad because I wouldn’t let her come upstairs and draw with us, but sometimes I wonder if I kept her safe at all. But I can keep you safe, my love, my darling, darling girl, my anchor, my heart, my breath, my blood, my veins, my cells, my body. I want to give you it all. I want to give you everything. Everything.
I want to give you freedom.
Don’t ever believe anyone who tells you I didn’t love you enough, because I love you more than anyone will ever know. My love for you goes deep, so deep, into that part of me, into the pain, into the part where I can never go again.
I’ve loved you, Rhea, and I will love you. Know that wherever I am, wherever I go, I’ll love you more than any mother ever loved any daughter, that you’ll always be part of me and that the best part of me will always be part of you and you’ll carry me in your heart and together we’ll make your life better, better than it could have been any other way.
I love you, my darling girl.
Mom xoxo
Jean thinks I should write to you again. She didn’t say “should”—she made a “suggestion.” According to her, a lot of people write letters to people who are dead or even to people who are alive that they’re never going to send. People write so many of them, they even have a name—“DNS” letters, like DNA, except it stands for “Do Not Send.” Jean says that some of her clients have sent their “DNS” letters by mistake, so the people end up reading stuff they were never meant to read.
This is not a problem I have.
She read everything, my letters, your letters. She found them all in my backpack in the dunes. She asked me before she read them and I said she could, I remember saying she could, but I think it was only because of that stuff the doctor gave me.
I wish I hadn’t let her read them.
I wish I’d brought them into the sea with me, all of them.
I wish I’d let the water wash the words away.
Jean is coming to my room three times a day. I have to let her in, I’ve no choice. Maybe I do have a choice, but I let her in anyway. All she wants to talk about is your letters—how I felt after reading them, what was going through my mind that day on the beach.
I don’t know how I felt then or what was in my mind—if anything was in my mind. When I tell her that, she crosses and uncrosses her legs, switches tack.
“How are you feeling now, Rhea? Mad, glad, sad, lonely, or scared?”
“Nothing. I’m not feeling anything.”
She’s silent for a minute and I think she’s given up. “If you had to guess at a feeling, what would it be?”
I lie back on the floor, face the wall. “Tired.”
“Tired?”
“I know it’s not a feeling, but I’m just so fucking exhausted.”
“You need to eat, Rhea. David will make you anything you want, you know that.”
“I’m too tired to eat.”
I’m not lying or being dramatic. I don’t have the energy to bite or chew or swallow, it feels like the food would sit in my mouth and clog up my throat. My body feels like it did that night when the water filled up my clothes, turned them into weights.
Jean says I need to come outside, get some fresh air, another “suggestion.” She waits for ages after she says that, only I don’t turn around and I don’t answer her so eventually she leaves. She might fire me if I don’t go outside, she might want me to go back to work, to see the kids, but I can’t, I fucking can’t and I don’t care if she fires me.
I can’t explain it to her, this tiredness, how anything is just too much, how even when I needed the loo I waited so long a little bit of pee came out before I was able to move.
So what if she fires me? So fucking what? What difference does it make?
No difference, that’s what. No difference at all. Amanda tried to talk to me through the door today, but I just lay on the floor, breathing. I prefer the floor to the bed. I don’t know how much she knows, how much Jean told her, how much she’s told anyone. Amanda tells me she made me a mix tape, that she’s going to leave it on the tray of food with a new packet of Walkman batteries and I know I should thank her but I don’t want to thank her. I didn’t ask her for food or her stupid tape. I didn’t ask her to swim out and get me.
I wait for ages after I hear her feet on the stairs and the tray is on the floor, the tape next to a tuna salad sandwich and two banana walnut muffins and a bottle of water. I still don’t think I’m hungry but when I pick up the muffin, I smell it and suddenly, I’m eating like a savage, like I’ve never seen food before. I don’t even sit down before I smash it into my mouth, so crumbs go everywhere. And I’ve barely swallowed it before I start on the sandwich, so the taste in my mouth is a mix of sweet muffin and tuna and things that shouldn’t go together.
After I eat, I lie back down on the floor again. I don’t listen to the tape, I don’t read the track list in Amanda’s neat writing in black felt-tip pen. I’m remembering her face, above the waves, her hands under my head, my shoulders, and then the next memory on the beach, puking salt water and phlegm up all over her feet.
I didn’t ask her to do that, any of that. I didn’t want her to.
And I definitely don’t have to thank her.
Jean has a new rule. It’s a rule, not a suggestion. I have to shower and change my clothes and I have to come to her office to talk to her once a day.
“What happens if I don’t want to do it?” I go.
She’s sitting on Winnie’s bed, her foot crossed over her knee. “It’s for your own good, Rhea.”
“What happens if I won’t do it?”
She pulls her hair, above her ear, the grey part. “You’ll feel better, trust me.”
She’s not answering me, she always answers me. I ask another way. “Do I have a choice?”
She looks out the window, back to me. “You always have a choice, Rhea. I hope you choose to stay.”
I sit in the swing chair, far back in the basket part. You know what I keep thinking? Who else knew? Aunt Ruth and Cooper knew. Did Laurie? Dad must have known but if he knew then why didn’t he tell me? He would have told me.
I can’t see Jean but I can hear her. “Where are you, Rhea?” she goes.
“I’m here, I’m in the chair.” Only I’m not in the chair, I’m back in Rush, going through lists of people I haven’t thought about in years—Mrs. McLean from the shop, Ms. Bennett in school who was always extra nice to me, who once left a pound note in my copy when she handed it back to me. Did she know? Did she feel sorry for me?
Did Lisa? Her mum? Susan Mulligan? Nicole Gleeson?
Did Nicole fucking Gleeson know?
STOP. JUST FUCKING STOP IT.
Can you know something and not know it at the very same time?
Jean wants me to write to you and tell you what happened that day on the beach. She says if I can’t tell you the feelings, I can describe what it felt like to walk into the water, to feel it lapping up over my Docs, my legs, up over my shorts.
Fuck
that. Fuck her, with her suggestions. Fuck you and your letters. Why should I tell you anything more about me? I’ve told you everything, you know all there is, but I still don’t know anything. I’ve more fucking questions now, more questions than answers.
What questions, Rhea?
Jean’s not here, but that’s her voice in my head, as if she is.
I want to make a list, you can’t get lost in a list, but I don’t know where the beginning is, what the first question is. Maybe I do know. Maybe this is the first question:
Did you always know? Did you always know you were going to do that?
You sounded happy, really happy, in the letter before, the August letter. Ten months. If even. When did you even write the last letter? How long before? What happened? What the fuck could have happened? Why didn’t you write to Aunt Ruth again? Or talk to Dad? Talk to someone?
What did it feel like? The water, that day, swallowing those pills? Was it hard to push yourself out through the waves? The waves here would knock you down—they knocked me down, that was scary, I don’t mind saying it. I was afraid of the way they pushed me over and twisted me under the water until I didn’t know which way was up and which way was down. I wasn’t expecting to find the air again, I didn’t want to, but even though I didn’t want to, even though my clothes were pulling me under, I tipped my head back, I opened my mouth and I breathed in air because I wanted to live.
I don’t know why, but I wanted to live.
WHY DIDN’T YOU?
Why didn’t you?
Today, Jean talked about secrets. She talked about her mother being a singer and that she only found out when she saw a record with her mother’s picture on it in a second-hand store on Broadway. She bought the record and took it home and on the back it said that one of the songs was dedicated to her daughter, “Lady.” I spin around while Jean is telling me this and it’s nice, listening to her for once.
“I asked my grandmother who ‘Lady’ was, why she never told me I had a sister.” I keep spinning.
“And she told me that my mother had named me Lady, after Billie Holiday, but that she decided to change my name to Jean after my mother died. My grandmother thought she was doing the right thing, that I’d have a better life with a name that meant ‘God is gracious’ rather than being named after a prostitute who died of a drug overdose.”
The chair stops and I spin it back, the other way. I ask her about Billie Holiday dying from drugs and then we talk about Hendrix and I tell her about it being Dad’s happy music and about Cash being his crying music, but that sometimes Lennon made him cry as well, even “Beautiful Boy” sometimes.
And she just listens, while I spin, she doesn’t ask any questions and I tell her about the nights he came into my room crying and saying it’s all his fault, how he never should have stopped playing music for you, how he loved playing you music.
Jean says it’s good to talk about Dad’s feelings, but she’s wondering how I felt when all this was happening, what were my feelings?
I spin. I try and find them. I tell her it was my job to hold his hand and pat his hair, to memorise all the stops on the subway map hanging on the wall. To listen.
It wasn’t my job to have feelings.
Jean’s changed the rules again. If I’m going to sit in the swinging chair I have to help David in the kitchen for two hours and eat a meal that’s not in my room. It doesn’t have to be with the kids.
I nearly say no, but then I think about it and decide to eat breakfast with David, really early, so no one will be up and the muffins will still be hot.
I don’t always hate her anymore but sometimes I do, like yesterday when she asked me what I would say to a friend whose mother had committed suicide. I hate that fucking word and I’m glad I’m in the swinging chair because if I’d been on the couch I’d have smashed my Doc through the glass table, I know I would. That’s if I’d been bothered to put on my Docs.
“Stop saying that word.”
“What word? Suicide?”
“Stop! Anyway, we don’t know if that’s what happened. We can’t know for sure without a body.”
“That’s true. All we know for sure from the letters is that it appears she was suffering from depression, maybe some form of posttraumatic stress disorder.”
I like when she uses words like that, proper words, medical words, words that make sense.
“What do you think he did to her?” I go. “Why do you think she had nightmares?”
I’ve been wanting to ask that for a while, and even though I think I know the answer, I want to hear her say it. When she answers, her voice sounds the same as it always does. “I think he sexually abused her.”
The chair keeps swinging. I look at her through the basket part. I know she can see me looking but I pretend she can’t.
“Child sexual abuse leaves very deep scars on a person, Rhea, particularly if it was an ongoing situation, particularly if it was denied in the home, as it sounds like your mother’s was.” Her voice is still a normal voice. I want to hit her. I want to cry. I want her to hug me. I want to run. “She needed help and she didn’t get it. I’m here to help you.”
I used to tell her to fuck off when she said things like that, but now I’m too tired. Now when she asks about something I wrote to you in my letters I just answer her. Why not? It’s all fucking stupid. The letters are nothing. Worthless, useless pieces of paper filled up with nothing.
They’re nothing.
Nothing.
They’re all I have.
Today, Jean takes out the paper and crayons, but I know better.
“I’m not drawing. I don’t want to draw.”
She’s rolling out the paper on the table. “Oh really? I thought maybe you might miss it?”
It’s like she knows that I’d thought about going down to the rec room to look for drawing stuff last night when I couldn’t sleep, but she couldn’t know. She leaves the paper on the table, sits back in her chair. “So if you don’t want to draw, what do you want to do today?”
I spin away from her, shrug, even though she can’t see me.
“Do you want to read me out what you wrote to your mom last night?”
“No.”
“How about I read you the letter she wrote you?”
“Whatever, knock yourself out.”
That was stupid, I know now that it was stupid, but I’ve read it so many times, your letter, I don’t expect it to be different out loud, hearing it in her voice. And the whole way through I spin and spin and spin and I don’t fucking cry and you know what part gets me? You know the stupid retarded part that gets me? The way you sign it off with “Mom.”
I feel sick then, from the spinning, and I need to sit on the floor against the wall under the window. And I know already that I’m going to cry, but when it comes, it’s not like normal crying, it’s like it’s coming from somewhere else, not only my eyes but my whole body. And it’s not just the tears and the snot, it’s the sounds as well, noises that sound like they are coming from someone else, only they’re coming from me, from my stomach, deeper than my stomach, like they could be coming from my soul.
And I try and scrunch smaller, up against the wall, and Jean gets down on the floor too and I think she’s going to try and hug me or touch me or something but she just sits cross-legged in front of me and leaves a box of tissues on the floor, between us. And every time I open my eyes, she’s looking at me, not looking away, just looking at me and whispering that it’s okay, I just need to let it out, let it out, let it out.
When I stop, the clock says 5:37 but it couldn’t have gone on that long. I think it’s going to be over then because it’s dinner time and Jean never misses dinner time, but instead she calls downstairs and Gemma comes up with two glasses of milk and a plate with banana walnut muffins and David’s brownies.
And when we’re e
ating, Jean spills milk on her black T-shirt and then she makes a mess of muffin crumbs and she starts to laugh and I laugh too, proper ones, and it’s weird how I can go from all that crying to laughing like that, at something that’s not even really funny.
Jean says that if you don’t let feelings out, they get stuck inside, frozen like glaciers. That what we’re doing is melting the feelings so they can come out.
I tell her I hope that’s all there is, that I hope there’s not any more in there. She doesn’t answer me but she puts her hand on my shoulder and when she smiles, it’s a nice smile.
I listened to Amanda’s mix tape tonight. You know what’s fifty kinds of crazy? The first song on it is that song by 4 Non Blondes, “What’s Up?”—the one I listened to seventeen times in a row in Coral Springs. And I don’t get on to the next song, I don’t care that I’m using up the batteries, I just rewind it and play it, again and again and again.
Jean would freak out about me going down to the beach at night, especially after everything, but I don’t care, I really don’t and I run down the steps of the house and onto the beach trail and the wind is hot in my face but the sand is cool and I’m singing the words out loud, shouting the words. And I turn the music up, so I can’t hear myself anymore, but I know I must be screaming because my throat is sore—it’s fucking sore—but I don’t care, I stop, rewind, and play again.
After ages, I turn it down a bit and then a bit more and then more and the last time I play it I can hardly hear it.
I click “stop,” pull my headphones off, and there it is, the sound of the sea. And I think about that line in your letter, the one that makes me laugh—that I’d only ever have to hear Dad’s snoring and the sound of the sea.
Did you ever stop to think what I might think about when I hear the sound of the sea?
Today, Jean says this really dumbass thing about blame and things being people’s fault. We were sitting cross-legged on the floor by the coffee table and colouring in and she says that some things aren’t anyone’s fault, that some things just happen.
How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? Page 36
