How Many Letters Are In Goodbye?

by Yvonne Cassidy

  Maybe some things do just happen but what you did, it didn’t just happen. It was your fault, your fault, your fault, not Dad’s, not anyone else’s, only yours.

  Even as I’m writing that I want to give you an excuse and I’m thinking about the dreams and what you said about that horrible bastard and his hands and his face at the window and I get to thinking that it’s his fault. It’s his fault, definitely, him and your dad’s. Maybe your dad is worse, even, because he knew and he did nothing, fucking nothing at all. If he’d listened, believed you, he might have got you help, someone to talk to, and maybe you would have been okay.

  But maybe if that had happened, then you wouldn’t have come to Ireland and you wouldn’t have met Dad and had me.

  Sometimes I wish life was like maths, like algebra, where there’s always a proper answer, a right one.

  But what if there isn’t an answer? What if someone did something to that man to make him do what he did to you? Or to your dad? How far back does the blame go? And what if it’s a lot of people’s fault, not just one person’s? Does that mean it’s no one’s fault? Does it mean that these things just happen? Because if no one is to blame, then you can’t control them, can you?

  And if you can’t control anything, isn’t that the scariest thing of all?

  Dear Mum,

  That’s force of habit, that’s what that is, starting this letter like that. I’m not crossing it out, I hate crossing stuff out. Anyway, people write “dear” to strangers all the time—“Dear Sir” or “Dear Madam”—it’s not like it means anything. It’s not like it has to mean anything.

  Jean’s been on at me about it, why I don’t address the letters to you the way I used to, it’s another of her suggestions, just like she suggests that I start the letter with “I feel.” But I don’t know how I feel, and even if I did, that’s not why I started this letter. I started this letter to tell you what happened today.

  Robin hurt herself, that’s what happened. I could tell you that, just that, but I want to tell you the proper story, how I’m on Winnie’s bed listening to the mix tape and next thing Zac’s hammering on the door and when I turn the music off I hear him saying that Robin fell by the pool, that she’s hurt herself bad.

  I run downstairs after him and it’s only when I jump down the back steps that I realise I’m not wearing my Docs or even my Converse. The car park stones cut my feet, but I don’t care, I run after Zac over to the car.

  The back door is open and Jean is down on her hunkers, leaning in. There’s a cluster of other kids around her and some of them are crying. Erin lifts up Maleika because she’s crying louder than the others.

  “Rhea’s here,” Zac goes, loud so they all turn around. “Rhea’s here.”

  For a split second, it’s really weird because I haven’t seen them since what happened, but then Jean stands up so I can see Robin in the back seat and I forget about that. Her left hand is holding the top of her right arm. She’s not crying.

  “Rhea, you go round, get in the other side,” Jean goes. “Robin, how are you feeling now, honey? Do you think you’re going to be sick?”

  The stones are sore but there’s no time to get shoes. I slide in the back next to Robin.

  “If you need to be sick, honey, you tell Rhea, okay? She’ll tell Amanda to pull over.”

  I haven’t even noticed Amanda in the front seat until Jean says that, even though she’s looking back through the gap in the headrests. Her hair is wet and it’s making little drips on her white shirt.

  “Here’s the insurance information,” Jean says, handing her papers, “and the credit card in case there’s a co-pay.”

  Amanda takes everything, puts it in the glove compartment.

  Gemma appears behind Jean and gives her something that she hands across Robin to me. A plastic bag. “I hope you don’t need it, but just in case she needs to be sick on the way.”

  Before I can respond, Jean closes the door and the car starts to reverse and it’s only then it sinks in that she’s not coming, that it’s only me and Amanda. And that I don’t have any shoes.

  Beside me, Robin feels very small. We are close, our legs touching. Someone has draped a dry towel over her bathing suit and her pink hoody top around her shoulders.

  “You okay?”

  She nods but she doesn’t look at me again, she doesn’t smile.

  “Would you like to hold on to me?”

  She shakes her head. Amanda is driving carefully up the drive and even though she goes slow over the bumps I see Robin wince.

  “Sorry,” Amanda goes, after a bigger bump than the others. “This driveway—”

  “What happened?” I go.

  “She was running by the pool and she slipped. She fell down right on her arm. It was horrible, you could hear it when she smacked the tiles.”

  Robin doesn’t say anything, just sits silently through this. When Amanda pulls onto the highway from the gate, I release my breath.

  “How come Jean didn’t come?” I call over the engine, which is louder now. “Or Erin?”

  “Some big donor is coming to visit this afternoon so Jean and Gemma have to be there. Erin’s car is too small and she can’t drive stick shift.”

  “She still could’ve come with you, though.”

  In the rear-view mirror, Amanda catches my eye. “Robin asked for you.”

  We don’t talk much after that because it’s too loud with the wind through the open windows, and even though I’m scared for Robin I’m enjoying being out of my room, out of the house. And it seems like the first time in ages I’m not thinking about your letters, not thinking about you, until we’re going through Bridgehampton and we pass right by the Candy Kitchen. It looks cute, with its blue and white stripy awning, really old fashioned, and it’s weird because one second I’m thinking I’d love to ask Amanda to stop on the way back, and the next I feel raging, so fucking mad at you, because after wanting to go so bad now I never want to go there at all.

  There’s traffic for a bit and then we pick up speed again, past shops and restaurants and houses and flat fields four times as big as fields in Ireland. And one of the shops has a statue of an Indian standing outside, waving his hand, and when I turn to point him out to Robin, I notice she’s shivering, despite the heat. I roll up my window, reach over to touch her leg.

  “We’re nearly there,” I go, for the hundredth time. “You’re being such a brave girl. Hold on and the doctors are going to make you all better.”

  “Look,” Amanda says from the front. “There’s a sign, we’re only five miles away.” When we pull into the car park, Amanda drives right up to the entrance to let us out before she finds parking. At first, Robin won’t move and when she finally slides across the seat, the hoody and towel fall off. I pick them up and try and put the hoody on her shoulders but it’s hard without her help and it keeps slipping off. I wish I could pick her up and carry her, but instead I throw the towel over my shoulder and keep her hoody on with my hand.

  At the reception desk, the woman gives me forms to fill out and it’s only then I remember Amanda has all the insurance stuff, so we have to wait until she arrives, all out of breath and pushing her hair out of her face, before the woman will put anything about Robin in her computer.

  There’s only a couple of people ahead of us, but we’re waiting forever and it’s only when an old lady on a walker asks what’s taking so long that we find out there’s been a big car crash on Route 27. Hearing that makes me think about Dad, the ambulance rushing him into Beaumont that night, through the same glass doors where he’d carried me all those years before. But the policeman said he was dead when they got there, so maybe they hadn’t brought him through those doors, maybe they’d taken him to some other part of the hospital. And suddenly, sitting with Amanda and Robin watching Family Feud, I need to know where they brought him, but there’s no one to ask, and
I get annoyed all over again with Lisa’s mum for not letting me go and identify his body and insisting that Lisa’s dad go instead.

  At five o’clock, Amanda says she thinks we should call Jean, to give her an update, and when I come back from doing that, she and Robin are gone. It’s worse, then, waiting on my own—freezing, with the air conditioning being so high. I want my Champion hoody and my Docs and I hate being there with no shoes on. I’m starving too, really hungry, but I don’t have a single cent for the vending machine and I wish there wasn’t one because it’s harder to be hungry and see the chocolate and crisps behind the glass and not be able to have any. And it’s fifty kinds of crazy but I start to get kind of panicky, as if Amanda and Robin might have left without me, as if we could somehow have missed each other, even though I know we can’t have missed each other. Ten minutes pass and then fifteen and I’m just about to go and look for the car when they come out.

  Robin runs straight over to me to show me her sling and the watermelon lollipop the doctor gave her, and after all her silence in the car, she won’t stop talking now about the x-ray machine and the nurse. And when Amanda comes back from the phone and says that Jean said we should go to McDonald’s on the way home, I think Robin is going to explode from excitement, dancing between me and Amanda the whole way back to the car. It’s only when she’s eating that it hits her, the tiredness, and halfway through her burger she puts her head down on the table and me and Amanda almost have to carry her back to the car.

  “She was really brave,” Amanda goes, when we’re back on the highway. “I was shocked when they said her arm was fractured in two places. With her being so quiet I thought it must only have been a sprain.”

  I glance at Robin, conked out in the back seat under the towel. I knew that because she wasn’t crying it meant it would be worse than if she was bawling her head off. I don’t know how I knew, but I did.

  Trees are whizzing by the side of the highway, thin skinny trees close together, their trunks black in the orange light behind. Amanda squints into the sun, pulls down her visor. “When we were in with the doctor, she said this thing that shocked me. She asked him if he’d have to cut her arm off.”

  She laughs a bit as she says it, looks at me quickly. The highway turns and the sun is somehow behind us now, reflecting in the mirrors. Robin is still asleep, her little chest rising and falling under the towel.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that of course he wouldn’t have to do that. He asked her if that was something she’d seen on TV.”

  I hold my stump, I don’t care if Amanda sees.

  “She didn’t answer him, but she must have said it because of you. Did she ever ask you about how you lost your arm?”

  Amanda says it like that, comes straight out and asks, and I’m glad she doesn’t leave the question hanging there, in both our heads but not said out loud.

  “She asked me one time and I told her. She must have remembered.”

  Amanda switches lanes, passes out a pickup truck. “What did happen?”

  The road seems narrower than before, darker. The car in front has a broken brake light.

  “My dad was a butcher and I was playing with his meat mincer. My arm got stuck in it.”

  Amanda takes a deep breath. She holds her speed steady. “Oh God, Rhea. How old were you?”

  “Seven. Old enough to know better.”

  A beat of silence passes and she fixes a curl behind her ear. “Come on—seven? Robin’s age. That wasn’t your fault.”

  “Well, it wasn’t Dad’s fault!” My words are sharp, loud in the car. The carpet is gritty under my feet and I wish I was wearing my Docs.

  When she speaks, her voice is quiet. “Maybe it wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

  We don’t talk for ages then and I think about turning the radio on but I don’t. It’s properly night now, the lights reflecting on the road signs. In the dark, in the car, it’s kind of comforting, close. When I talk again, it’s as if we are still having the conversation, instead of it being ten minutes since either of us said anything.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, what happened. I don’t know why, just been remembering it.”

  Amanda looks over at me to let me know she’s heard me. I try and organise the words in my head so they’ll make some kind of sense.

  “Not the accident so much, but everything leading up to it. That day, just before it, and it’s weird, like I knew something bad was going to happen, going near the machine.”

  I can feel the spongy car seat underneath me, but I can feel something else too, the scratchy wood of the counter where Dad cut the meat. Next to me, the machine was scary-looking, metal and dark bits. Even though it was clean, it was never clean.

  “This is going to sound crazy but I think, in a way, some part of me wanted to have an accident—not what happened, but you know—something. I don’t know … ”

  Maybe it’s the glare of the lights that is making me a little dizzy. Or maybe it’s remembering Lisa in her white polo neck and her black dungarees telling me to get down, not to touch it, that it’s dangerous. I take a breath.

  “He used to be fun, all the time, my dad. That’s how I remember it. We’d go for walks on Sundays and he’d play me his records.” I think about telling her about writing to you, but I leave that bit out. “And then, I don’t know, he was different. We never did anything, he hardly talked—it was like he didn’t even see me. The only time I could get him to play Hendrix was when I was off sick from school with the mumps.”

  “You like Jimi Hendrix,” Amanda goes. “I’ve noticed your T-shirt.”

  I smile in the dark. “It’s twelve years old, that T-shirt. He bought it for me when I was six.”

  Amanda laughs. “When I was six my mother was buying me frilly dresses.”

  Through the back window, the sky is black. I’m halfway to telling Amanda what I want to say. I could stop now and make a joke, something about her in a frilly dress. Or I can say it—finally say it.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have been messing with the machine, that it was dangerous to take the safety guard off. I don’t mean I wanted to lose my arm, or anything crazy, but maybe I wanted to be sick for a while.” I pull my foot up on the seat, thread my fingers through my toes like Jean does. “So he’d be nice to me, play me music. So he’d notice me. I know that sounds crazy though, it doesn’t make any sense.” We pass by the Indian statue again, the one I’d pointed out to Robin. I can barely see him waving in the dark.

  “What doesn’t make sense about wanting your parents to notice you?” Amanda asks the question simply, like it’s the easiest thing in the world to answer, to understand. “Everyone wants that. Whether that’s by getting straight A’s like me, or being the quarterback like Zac, or slashing your wrists like my friend Judy.”

  “You’ve a friend who slashed her wrists?”

  The dashboard lights reflect on Amanda’s face. “Yep. We’d been at the mall that day. I went home and did my math homework, she went home and slashed her wrists.”

  I don’t know if it’s okay to ask, but she brought it up. “Did she die?”

  “No, they found her in time. I still felt really guilty though, like I should have known or something. Like I should have stopped her.”

  I want to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, that she couldn’t have stopped her, but what if she could have? So I say something else instead.

  “Your way of getting noticed sounds better than mine or your friend’s,” I say. “Straight A’s beat losing an arm or slashing your wrists.”

  In my head, it sounds funny, but out loud it just sounds stupid.

  “I guess, but I don’t know how well it works.” Amanda’s voice is different than before, harder. Her hands on the steering wheel look like they are gripping tighter. “Because everyone thinks you must be fine, because you�
��re doing great at school; even when you try and tell them you’re having a hard time about something, they don’t even notice, they don’t want to know.”

  “You mean about your friend—Judy?” It feels like the car is moving faster but the speed dial is still on fifty-five, the same as when we left the hospital.

  “All of it. Grandma getting cancer, dying. Judy trying to commit suicide. Daddy moving up into the guest bedroom on the third floor. No one ever talked about any of it, like it wasn’t happening.”

  “Your mum and dad never said anything about your granny dying?”

  She laughs but it’s not her real laugh. It’s like someone else is in the car next to me now, someone else is driving. “Are you kidding me? Dad got busier ‘working’—he was never home. Like we didn’t all know he was banging his secretary.”

  “What about your mum?”

  “Mom?” She raises an eyebrow. “Mom went shopping.”

  “Shopping?”

  “Shopping.” She nods. “My mother thinks the solution to any problem can be found at the mall.”

  I laugh.

  “You think I’m joking, but I’m serious. The night I came out to her I was so upset, all the MacKenzie stuff was going on, she hadn’t returned my calls or anything. So I went into Mom’s bedroom and she was reading a magazine and I told her that I was in love with this girl and do you know what she said?”

  I tighten my fingers around my toes. “What?”

  “She said that there was a big sale on at Macy’s and we should go and get some new clothes for me.”

  Amanda bows her chin to her chest and for a second I think she’s going to cry, only then I hear the squeak that comes after it and I realise she’s not crying, she’s laughing, and that it’s okay for me to laugh too.

  “So did you go? Did you go shopping?”

  She laughs more, catches her breath. “I’d love to say I didn’t, but we did, the next day. I kept waiting for her to say something about MacKenzie, to bring it up, so I tried on all these hideous dresses and I even let her buy one for me, because I thought maybe if I wore one, maybe she’d say something, but she never said anything at all.”