How Many Letters Are In Goodbye?

by Yvonne Cassidy

  Maybe it doesn’t sound like much, Mum, but it’s enough.

  For me, for today, it’s enough.

  Rhea

  Dear Mum,

  I told Jean that yesterday’s letter was the last one I was writing to you, that I was never writing to you again. She says that saying “never” and “always” is something called “black and white thinking” and she asks me why I need to decide right now. And I guess she’s right, I guess I don’t need to decide. Which is why I’m writing to you again.

  The other reason I’m writing, the real reason, is because I want to tell you about tonight, with Laurie. Because some day, maybe I’ll want to remember everything exactly as it happened tonight, someday I might wish I’d written it down.

  Laurie and Aunt Ruth drove back here this afternoon and Jean said it was okay for us to have a shorter session, so I had time to talk to Aunt Ruth before dinner.

  We did a quicker walk on the beach this time and it was different than yesterday because we weren’t talking about you or her and Cooper or even what to do about Columbia. We got into a conversation about music and how the two things she always wanted were a grand piano and a house by the beach with a room to put it in, and how she has neither. It sounds like it could have been a depressing conversation, but it wasn’t because if she wanted, she could have both things, she just needs to decide if she wants to give them to herself.

  She seems happier, Aunt Ruth. At dinner, she chats a lot to Erin about Ireland and to David about the garden. Laurie sits down at the other end of the table, in between Ezekiel and Brandy, but I don’t see her talk to either of them. The only person I see her talk to is Zac, who watches her the whole time, and once I catch Amanda watching her too.

  I’m helping clear the table when Laurie comes over. She picks up the empty bread basket, puts it on top of my pile of plates. “When you’re done here, can we go somewhere? Talk?”

  “Sure,” I go, all casual, like talking is nothing. “What about Aunt Ruth, though?”

  Laurie shrugs. “Can’t she stay here with her new friends? Drink tea or something?”

  “I suppose she could watch the movie—I think it’s The Lion King tonight.”

  “Perfect.” Laurie smiles. “I’ll go tell her. Hurry up.”

  In the kitchen, David tells me I can leave the plates, but I clean all the bits of leftovers into the bin in the corner, help him stack them in the dishwasher one by one. After that, I sweep the floor, and I never sweep the floor, and that’s when I know some part of me wants to delay the conversation with Laurie, that even though I’ve been dying for it, some part of me doesn’t want to talk to her at all.

  I find her in the hall, sitting in the chair by the door.

  “Finally,” she goes, pushing herself up. “So where are we going—the beach?”

  “We’re not allowed to go to the beach when it’s dark.”

  “It’s not even dark yet.”

  “It nearly is, we’d have to be back really soon.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Okay then, what about the pool? Are we allowed to go there?”

  “Yeah, sure. We can go there.”

  Walking down the steps to the pool, the low lights are already on and I’m thinking of the last time I came down here in the dark, the night of the storm.

  “So what do you do here at night?” Laurie says from behind me.

  “Not much, hang out. Play games. Watch the movie with the kids.”

  “Ugh.”

  I can’t see her, but I know she’s making a face.

  “You’re not allowed to go into the Hamptons or something?”

  “Most of us work in the evenings, help put the kids to bed.”

  “Sounds like a Nazi prison camp. Bet you can’t wait to get out of here.”

  The little gate that should be closed is open and I’m not surprised when I see her, sitting at the end of one of the loungers, pulled up closer to the water than the rest. It’s Amanda. I hold the gate for Laurie and I walk through after her. Amanda turns around, stands up, waves.

  “Hey, Amanda!” I call her name way too loud, as if there are miles in between us, as if she hasn’t already seen us.

  “Hey.”

  We walk towards each other until we’re standing there, the three of us in a semicircle between the gate and the pool. “Laurie, did you officially meet Amanda yet? She’s our lifeguard. She’s brilliant at teaching the kids to swim. She’s going to teach me as well.”

  We’ve talked about that—Amanda teaching me how to swim—and up until then I hadn’t fully decided if I want to or not, but right then I do. The light from the pool catches Amanda’s necklace as she leans forward to shake Laurie’s hand. “Hi.”

  “You obviously like a challenge, trying to get this one in the water.” Laurie laughs, puts her hand on my bare shoulder. “I’ve been trying to get her to take lessons for years.”

  “Years” makes it sound way longer than it is. Her hand on my skin has a ripple effect through my whole body and into my breath. I think about the last time we touched.

  Amanda fixes a curl behind her ear and it bounces out immediately. “Thanks for the warning. Good thing I’m pretty tenacious.”

  Laurie laughs again, like that’s really funny, and Amanda does too, so I join in even though none of us are laughing our real laughs. And it goes on for ages, the fake laughter, like it’s never going to end, like we’ve all forgotten what’s even supposed to be funny.

  Amanda’s the one who breaks it. “I’ll leave you guys to it.” She puts her hands into her back pockets.

  “You don’t have to go.”

  It’s a stupid thing to say and I pretend I don’t notice Laurie staring at me.

  “I’m beat,” Amanda says. “Long day. I think I’ll take a bath.”

  “At least there’ll be no schmozzle in the bathroom.”

  I smile and she half-smiles back. Laurie holds the gate open for her and we both watch her slow walk up the steps towards the house, a shadow of dark between the lights.

  Laurie turns to me and rolls her eyes. “Who takes a bath in ninety-degree heat?”

  I don’t answer her, instead I walk towards the sun loungers and sit on the one that Amanda had been sitting on. I think that Laurie is going to pull over another one and sit beside me, but instead she sits on mine, but to the side, so we’re facing different directions. Her back is close to mine though and I can feel her heat, as if some outer force fields of our bodies are touching even though our skin is not.

  “What’s her deal?” she goes.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, she seemed kind of edgy or something. Was she homeless too?”

  “Amanda? No! She lives in Connecticut with her family.”

  I sound impatient, defensive, but if Laurie hears it, she doesn’t react.

  “That makes sense. Her type wouldn’t survive for five minutes on the streets.”

  I know that Laurie is waiting for me to ask what “type” Amanda is, and in some other version of this conversation I would have asked, and Laurie would have dissected Amanda and her family and made up clever things about them and we’d both have laughed. That’s what we might have done another night, but not tonight.

  “What did you want to talk to me about?” My voice sounds hard, harder than I thought it would. “I have to help get the kids to bed after the movie.”

  “It’s only just started.”

  I shrug. I don’t know how to say that just because the movie will be on for an hour and a half, that doesn’t mean I want to spend it all with her.

  “Okay then, let’s get to it.” She pulls her hair into a ponytail, lets it fall. “God, I’ve missed you, Rae. There are so many things I want to tell you—”

  “Rhea,” I go. “I’m back to Rhea.”

  “Really?” A l
ook skims across her face. Disapproval, maybe? Disappointment? “I thought that was just for Ruth’s benefit.”

  I don’t react. “No—I prefer Rhea.”

  “Okay,” she nods, “Rhea. I can get used to Rhea, I can tell Rhea how much I missed her.”

  I cross my right foot onto my left knee, feel the lace holes of my Docs, starting from the bottom, up to the top.

  “Listen, I know you’re mad at me. Don’t say you’re not—I can tell. I don’t even blame you for being mad, I know I was an asshole.”

  I turn my head a little and she’s looking at me. In the light from the pool, her eyes are shiny.

  “Yeah,” I go, “you were.”

  “I’m sorry. I was scared. I just … I didn’t know what else to do. I panicked.” Her first tear dislodges, slides down her cheek. I want to trace it with my finger, the way I always do. But she cried that night too, in the kitchen at Coral Springs. I picture it, I make myself picture it. Another tear follows the first. “I know it’s not an excuse, being afraid, I know it doesn’t make what I did go away.”

  I cup my stump. “No, it doesn’t.”

  “You might not believe me, Rae—Rhea, but I knew you could handle it. You weren’t scared of Dad or Ruth. You’re never scared of anything.”

  Jean’s voice comes into my head then. You don’t do fear. We talked about it again this afternoon, about Columbia. How “not doing fear” is not the same as not being afraid.

  “I get scared, Laurie.”

  She’s shaking her head, sniffling. “Not like me. You don’t go around worrying all the time about what everyone thinks of you—trying to be perfect for them all—the kids at school, Dad, even Mom. Not that she’d care.”

  She starts to cry properly and I grip my stump hard. It’s not my job to comfort her, not anymore.

  She reaches into her shorts pocket for a tissue, blows her nose. “The night of her show was horrible, Rhea. I wanted you there so bad, you were the one who was supposed to be with me. Backstage, she practically ignored us, like we were two fans or something.”

  I’d forgotten all about the show, hadn’t even registered the date as it slipped by. After all the times I’d wanted to meet Laurie’s mum, it seems weird that I hadn’t thought about it at all.

  “Did you go with Cooper?”

  She brushes her tears away and her eyes close, just a little. I ask her again.

  “Who’d you go with, Laurie?”

  It’s going to be Becky or Tanya. It’s got to be them.

  “I went with Ryan.”

  I breathe in slow and out even slower.

  “I would rather have gone with you, Rae. I wanted to go with you.”

  Something has landed on the water of the pool, an insect, a mosquito maybe. There are little folds in the water where it is trying to get out.

  “You’re dating Ryan again?”

  She reaches out again to touch my collarbone, traces her fingers up the soft skin of my neck.

  “We’re not dating, dating. I needed to keep Dad off my case. It’s just a cover—”

  “Does Ryan know it’s a cover?”

  Her fingers are up higher, on my cheek, her little finger grazes my lip.

  “It doesn’t mean anything, Rhea, none of them do compared to you. Compared to us.”

  She turns my face so it’s closer to hers, half lit up from the pool light, half in shadow. It’s a beautiful face, the slope of her nose, the shape of her cheek, her mouth, her chin. “I was so stupid, Rae. It’s just like all those movies and songs … it wasn’t until you were gone and I missed you so much that I figured out what it meant.”

  I almost correct her, tell her again to call me Rhea, but I don’t, because I want to hear what she’s going to say next.

  “I love you, that’s what I wanted to tell you. I’m in love with you.”

  Her fingers are still stroking my cheek and I feel my throat tighten. She loves me, Laurie loves me, Laurie’s in love with me. So many times I’ve wanted her to say that, imagined her saying it, hoped she’d say it, dreamed she’d say it.

  And now she’s saying it, I want to talk about something else.

  “Aunt Ruth said they’re splitting up—her and Cooper.”

  If she’s surprised that I’m asking this now, after what she just said, she doesn’t let on. “They are.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “No, seriously. He’s looking at places closer to the restaurant. He even looked at one on Las Olas.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep. And she’s talking about moving up here, taking some transfer to her company’s office in New York for a few months or something.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugs. “I’m sure it’s got something to do with you. She’s been into the admissions office at Columbia so much, trying to figure out how to keep your place.”

  Laurie’s too close and I push back a bit, feel the plastic edge of the seat bite into the backs of my knees.

  “She never said anything to me. She hasn’t even mentioned Columbia to me since she got here.”

  Laurie blows her hair out of her eyes. “I don’t know. But I bet if you told her you’d come back to Florida, then she wouldn’t leave. She’d stay in Coral Springs, I know she would.”

  “Why would I go back to Coral Springs?”

  She leans in closer. “So we can be together, why else?”

  That’s when she kisses me, at the end of that sentence, before I know she’s going to, before I’ve taken in what she’s saying, what she’s not saying. Her mouth is so familiar, I know her feel, her shape, my hand knows just where to touch her hair at the nape of her neck. My body likes this, loves this, and my legs turn towards her so our knees are touching. But my head is still whirring, there is something wrong—I’m just not sure what.

  I pull away.

  Laurie doesn’t get it at first, comes in to kiss again.

  “Laurie, stop.”

  “What?”

  The same look is there, the one from earlier, only it’s so fast this time I might have imagined it. “What is it, Rhea? What’s going on?”

  I take her hand off my shoulder, gently place it on her leg. I can’t think with her touching me, I can’t think and I need to think.

  “This—it’s not going to work. Cooper’s not going to let you see me, let us be together.”

  She pulls her hair into a ponytail, holds it there for a second, lets it go.

  “We won’t be under the same roof anymore. What’s he going to do—keep me under surveillance twenty-four hours a day?”

  “So, you wouldn’t tell him? You wouldn’t tell him about us?”

  She rolls her eyes. “’Course I’m not going to tell him, don’t be a dumbass!”

  “But he’ll know, he’ll find out—you know what he’s like.”

  “I’ll be eighteen in April, then I can do what I want. Plus, if we’re both at school in New York, he won’t be able to do anything about it.”

  She puts her hand on my knee, and I let her leave it there but I don’t hold it. Inside my Docs I scrunch my toes.

  “I don’t know, Laurie. It feels like we can’t just pick up where we left off.”

  “Why not? I said I’m sorry.”

  “Things have changed, though—”

  Her fingers caress my knee. “What’s changed? Did something happen on the streets?”

  It irritates me, the way she asks that, the same way Aunt Ruth asked, as if that’s the only thing that can happen. I pull my knee away.

  “Yeah, a lot of fucking things happened. I was scared, hungry. People threatened me. I peed outside, in alleyways with rats, I lost my friend—”

  She juts her chin out, the way she always does when she’s angry.

  “Don’t blame me, Rhea. Don�
��t blame me because you ran away—”

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t even think you ran away because of what happened with us. I think it was because of what Dad said about your mom.”

  I’m about to deny it, but there’s no point in denying it, not when it’s true. I stand up, turn my back on her, walk away. Behind me, I hear her stand up too.

  “I know about what happened to your mom. Ruth told me and I know you know.”

  I’m walking close to the edge of the pool, where the tile is dark blue. I put my heel down slowly, right in front of the toe of my other foot, pretend the line of tile is a tightrope.

  “It was shitty the way you found out, what Dad said, but at least you know. At least you can deal with it.”

  She sounds so rational, as if it all makes sense, but nothing makes sense. I spin around fast, my Docs making a squeaking noise on the tiles. “You don’t get it, Laurie. You don’t just ‘deal with it.’ It changes everything, don’t you see?”

  She holds her hands out. “How? How does it change things between us?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “So, try me. Explain.”

  I shouldn’t have to explain, that’s what I’m thinking, but maybe if I talked to Jean about it, maybe she’d say something different, maybe she’d say I should give her a chance. I take a deep breath.

  “I don’t know, it’s just … ” I run out of words, start again. “I mean, she drowned, I always knew that, but it’s different knowing, you know, knowing that maybe she did it on purpose.”

  It’s crept in, the “maybe.” I don’t know where it came from, but I let it stay.

  Laurie’s frowning again, the shadows and light on her face.

  “But you were the one who always said it didn’t matter how someone died? You said it didn’t make any difference if someone was hit by a car or abducted by aliens or whatever, that the only thing that mattered was that they were gone. You were the one who said that, not me.”

  I did say that, I can hear my own voice saying it, meaning it.