“Just because I said it, Laurie, doesn’t make it right—it doesn’t make it true.” My voice cracks then and I know I am going to cry and I’ve never cried in front of Laurie.
She takes a step closer to me, then another. Her eyes are as blue as the pool. “You’re still mad at me, aren’t you? You’re still mad about what happened.”
It’s a declaration, it’s a question. I can’t answer her. I forgive her, I’m still mad at her—I’m mad at everyone. A tear comes.
“Having a mom doesn’t make everything perfect, Rhea. Look at me—I’m a fuck-up.”
“No, you’re not.”
“That night of her show, watching her on stage, it was horrible because I felt like I was so proud of her and mad with her and jealous of her all at the same time, like everything was like a ball of elastic bands in my stomach and I couldn’t separate them all.”
Jean and I have talked about this, how I don’t know how to feel more than one feeling at the same time, so I know exactly what Laurie means.
“And all I wanted was for you to be there, sitting next to me, so we could hold hands in the dark.”
Her hand slips into my hand, smooth, familiar. Our fingers interlace. Her fingers are longer than Amanda’s fingers. I don’t know what makes me say what I say next.
“Were there other times you thought about holding my hand?”
The question catches her in a way she didn’t expect. “What?”
“You know, did you miss me at other times? Times when you were happy, I mean.”
I love her frown, the way her face puckers into it, the little lines between her eyes.
“I told you—I missed you all the time. You don’t believe me?”
“I’m not saying that. Just that some fun stuff must have happened too—Aunt Ruth told me you were working at the mall with Cindy. Maybe you guys cracked up over some joke, or maybe you saw a movie you wanted to tell me about or something.”
Her frown is deeper, she doesn’t get where I’m going with this at all and I’m not sure I do either.
“What the fuck, Rhea? You think because I went to see The Matrix and laughed with my friends that it means I don’t care about you? Like I wasn’t allowed to have any fun?”
I’d forgotten, until she says that, that I saw The Matrix too, or at least parts of it, before I fell asleep, which is why me and Sergei went in the first place. He liked it, I remember, but I didn’t really. Somehow it made me think about Laurie, watching it, but everything made me think about her then.
“You’ve no idea what the last few months have been like for me. Dad ignoring me, him and Ruth fighting all the time. It took him weeks to even talk to me, to let me out of the house—”
I pull my hand away from hers. “Is that why you needed your cover story?”
“I knew it!” She points a finger at me. “You’re mad about Ryan. You’ve always been so jealous, Rhea. I knew this is what this was about.”
She’s smiling a big smile, she’s figured it out. She’s on familiar territory, my jealousy about the guys she dates. We’ve been here, had this argument before, ten times, a hundred times. Except I’m not jealous tonight, not anymore.
She takes my hand again, in both of hers this time.
“Ryan doesn’t mean anything, none of them do. You’re the one I want to be with.”
She moves closer, like she wants to kiss me again, and with the light of the pool I bet our silhouettes can be seen from the house, if someone was looking. I tip my head back, and above, the stars are so close and so bright I feel like I can reach out and run my hand through them. And I remember what you wrote in your letter, about the drive to San Francisco and driving up into the universe, and I think about saying this to Laurie, but that’s when I know—she’s not the one I want to say it to.
I shake my head. “I’m sorry, Laurie.”
The pucker frown is back, she doesn’t get it yet. I pull my hand out from hers, take a breath. “I don’t think this is what I want.”
She tilts her head to one side. The pool light is beautiful on her face.
“But I love you. I told you that, Rhea. I’m not making it up.”
“I’m sorry.”
She says something else then, about me needing time after everything that’s happened, how she can give me more time, but I’ve stopped listening. It’s not that I’m not there, I’m more there than maybe I’ve been all night. I’m fully aware of my feet in my Docs, hot even at this time of night, the place where they tighten around my calf. Of the warm air around my body, coming into my mouth, my nose, and out again. Of my left hand, hanging down by my side, my stump, my missing arm, part of me, not part of me.
She’s still talking when I interrupt her. “I’m sorry, Laurie, but I’m not in love with you.”
She plucks a strand of hair, brings it to her face, sucks it. I love her hair, the feel of it in my hand. I’ll never feel it again. Her face crumples.
“There’s someone else, isn’t there? I know there is.”
The image that comes to my mind isn’t a clear one, not the way I like things to be clear. It’s not even all an image—there’s sounds and texture in there too, warmth and coolness, a dark car, a Scrabble board, the sound of the waves, a kiss. I don’t answer her, but she knows, I think she knows.
And standing there, by the pool, two feet and twenty thousand miles apart, there’s more I want to say to her—that I don’t know if what we had was love or something else, that I’ll never forget her, that maybe she doesn’t love me either. But I don’t get a chance to say any of that, because she pushes through the gate and starts to run up the steps. And there’s a moment then, with the gate swinging and her shadow, black against the darker shadow of the house, that I nearly call her back. And if Jean asked me the feeling right then, it’s sadness, a wave of it, an ocean of it, and I don’t know if it’s my sadness or Laurie’s or if that even matters, but it’s nearly enough to make me call her name, call her back, to hold her and comfort her and let her kiss me again.
Nearly, but not quite.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
I was walking on the beach earlier and listening to the mix tape Amanda made me and writing this letter to you in my head at the same time. And I had all these things that sounded really great, these words that went in time with the music and the waves crashing, but now I’m sitting here to actually write them down, those words from the beach are all gone and there’s only these ones and they’re not the same at all.
Jean says it’s one of the hardest things in the world to say what you really mean all the time, that it’s even harder to write it down. She was talking about me writing to you, when she said that, but it made me think about your letters, to me and Aunt Ruth, and I wonder if they were 100 percent what you meant or 99 percent or only 75 percent, and I know that trying to apply maths to things like letters and feelings doesn’t work, but sometimes I need to try something that doesn’t work loads and loads and loads of times before I stop and try something else.
Until those other words come back, I’m going to tell you what’s on the mix tape Amanda made me, the newest one. I like mix tapes because I like music and they’re a list and you can’t get lost in a list. Here’s what’s on the tape:
“My Oh My” by David Gray
“Seasons of Love” from the Rent soundtrack
“Stay” by Lisa Loeb
“Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” by Sophie B. Hawkins
“This Woman’s Work” by Kate Bush
“Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls
“You Got the Love” by Candi Staton
“November Rain” by Guns N’ Roses
“Babylon” by David Gray
The only songs I knew before were “November Rain” and the Sophie B. Hawkins one, but I didn’t know she’d written
it about a woman and it’s cool, learning that, like there’s a whole other layer of stuff underneath the song that I didn’t know. I’d never heard of David Gray, even though he’s English, so I should have heard of him, and his two songs are my favourites. I let myself rewind “My Oh My” seven times the other day so I’m glad it’s at the beginning of the tape. Amanda says if she’d known that I always made myself listen to songs in order that she’d have put it on a few times in a row, that next time she’s making me one, she’ll do that.
I’m making her one too and it’s taking me ages because I haven’t got all my music here, and I want the songs to be right and in the right order. In the beginning, I was going to have Hendrix and Lennon and Cash on it, but they’re Dad’s music, not mine, not really, and I want to put on the songs I want, the ones I’d choose without having to worry about anybody else.
Jean’s letting me use the stereo in her office to make the tape and last night she played me this record of her mum singing. It sounded so old, even the silent bit at the beginning sounded old, and listening to her mum’s voice, I could picture the club in Harlem, smoke hanging in the air, her on stage, in a circle of white light. During the song, Jean closes her eyes, and when it’s over she picks up the photo of the lady with the cigarette and points to it and says, “That’s her, that’s my mom,” as if I didn’t already know.
And that’s when I decide to ask her what I’ve been meaning to ask her.
“You know what you said, about cleaning out the emotional scars? Do people always get better when they do that? Or do some things never go away?”
She puts her mum’s photo back on the shelf, next to the fern. She won’t lie to me, I know she won’t.
“I think that people heal,” she says, “I know that people heal.”
“What’s the difference between healing and getting better?”
She pulls at her curl, the one over her ear.
“I think that to heal, you have to be prepared to feel it all, good and bad. Some people don’t want to heal, they just want to feel better.”
I’m still not sure that I get the difference and I don’t want to have to ask again—but I don’t have to because she explains it more.
“Usually, with some kind of trauma, the bad feelings come up first and some people get scared and stop there, go back to doing what they were doing before, to numb out again. But if you stick out the bad feelings, you make room for the good ones too. You feel everything—that’s healing.”
I get what she means then, I think I do, because yesterday when we were washing down the deck, Erin puts her cheesy Riverdance CD on and Matt and Zac are egging me on to dance because they think that, because I’m Irish, I should be able to. At first, I concentrated really hard, trying to make myself remember Irish dancing from when we learned in school. I tried to follow the rhythm and the steps, but then Amanda joined in, and she just did any old dance and she looked so funny, with her hands on her waist and her curls jumping around her head and into her eyes. And that was when I let the music take my legs and my body, so I was doing this crazy dance too, that was nothing like the real Riverdance and nothing like Amanda’s dance either. Matt was the next to join in and Zac was shaking his head, leaning against the railing, but Erin pulled him in too, so we were all dancing then, and laughing and dancing and laughing and dancing. And I was out of breath and it was too much to do both and I let my knees crumple and my body fall down and I lay there on the hot wood of the deck that was bouncing from everyone’s pounding feet, and I let myself laugh and laugh and laugh.
I smile, remembering all that, but I still have something else I need to ask Jean.
“What if the bad feelings get too much?”
I want her to say they won’t get too much, that they won’t get as bad as that day on the beach but she can’t say that because she can’t know for sure and she won’t say something if it’s not true.
“The dark feelings can be intense, for sure, but you’re learning tools—you don’t have to stay in the dark places.”
We’ve talked about this before, the dark places, the day that she said it was easier to increase the light rather than shrinking the darkness. I wrote that down, that day, in the new notepad I bought in East Hampton, so I won’t forget. I can’t forget.
“I feel scared sometimes—”
I stop. It’s new, starting sentences like that and sometimes I can’t do it, even with Jean. She waits, I think she knows what I am going to say, but she never guesses. She never fills in my words, always lets me find my own.
“My mum—she wasn’t able to handle the dark places. What if … I can’t either?”
I used to think she was really young, Jean, but up close you can see the little lines, little wrinkles, and I bet she’s older than Aunt Ruth, probably even older than you would be now.
“You’re not your mother, Rhea. Remember?”
“I’m not my mother.”
We’re covering old ground now, stuff we talked through all around going to Columbia, if it’s still the right decision, if I’m making it for me or for you. If I’ll be able to keep myself intact in a place I knew you’d been, where sometimes I get confused and think you still are.
“Your mother was an untreated victim of sexual abuse. People didn’t know how to talk about things like that back then.”
“I know,” I go. “You told me all this.”
Sometimes it annoys me when she repeats things, especially when it’s something I already know, especially when it’s something I should have gotten already.
“And being a victim of sexual abuse wasn’t the only thing she was. She was a daughter, a mother, a wife, a friend.”
I nod, I know this. If I know this, why do I need her to keep telling me?
“She had her own journey, Rhea, and you have yours.”
Jean talks about journeys a lot and it reminds me of the subway, with all the different lines, different people all going different places, switching trains and running across platforms and down stairs and some of them are going the same way but nearly everyone is making the journey on their own. You know how sometimes you can be on a local subway train and the express one leaves the station at the exact same time as your train? And for a bit they’re side by side and you can see into the carriage next to you, as clearly as if it was your carriage—the people and the ads and everything, so it feels like you’re in there with them, like you’re on the same train? Today, when Jean says that about you having your journey and me having mine, I think about those two trains, that no matter how well I think I can see into your carriage, it’ll never be my carriage. We’ll always be on different trains, Mum. They might run parallel for a bit but the express always pulls away in the end.
Shit. I’m crying. I didn’t know I was going to. Since I’ve started crying it seems like I can never tell when it’s going to happen again, there’s always more there. It’s stupid to cry because of the trains and I don’t think it is because of the trains, not really. I think I’m crying because I think this is going to be my last letter and after all this time, all these letters, I still don’t know how to say goodbye.
You want to hear something nuts, Mum? This is going to make me sound fifty kinds of crazy but there’s still times, after everything, all my letters, all of yours, all these talks with Jean, that I can imagine you’re not dead at all, that you swam somewhere else that morning, that one day the phone will ring and it will be you, living in London or France or Florida or Acapulco. And that’s fifty thousand kinds of crazy because I know you are dead, I know it, I know it, I know it, but because you don’t have a gravestone, like Dad does, with a start date and an end date and a dash in between, it’s like I can still forget.
Aunt Ruth checked and there’s no bench for you in Central Park, Mum. I don’t know where Dad got that from or if he made it up, but he was wrong. At first I felt mad when I heard that, after
all my looking, and then I felt better, that it meant I hadn’t missed it. We’re going to get one, Aunt Ruth looked into it and she promised we could and I trust her, I believe she’ll keep this promise. She said to start thinking about what I’d like on the plaque but I told her I don’t want it just to be from me, I want it to be something we do together.
I’ll be able to visit the bench a lot, Mum, over the next few years, because I’m going to Columbia next year, in January, that’s what I’ve decided. It means I have to go back to high school to get enough credits so I can graduate, but Aunt Ruth has found a school in New York that’ll take me, so I don’t have to go back to Florida. It’s on the East Side, a private school, and Winnie says the East Side is really snobby so I hope it’s not horrible but it’ll only be for a few months. Aunt Ruth’s new office is near there, and she says it makes sense to get an apartment near the school and her office and even though she’s right, part of me wonders if that’s the real reason, or if she wants to live near where she lived with you.
She won’t be in New York all the time, Aunt Ruth, she has to work in Florida too and she was worried about me being lonely, but Winnie says she’ll come up and see me on the bus and I can stay with her sometimes. When I talked to Jean about it, she said we can still meet if I want, in her office on Riverside and 90th Street, and even though I don’t need to decide yet, I think I will. And I was thinking I might ask Winnie if I can volunteer with her sometimes in the soup kitchen, because I’d like to see Pat and thank her for helping me that day and give her some batteries for her Walkman and I’d like to see the man with the shopping cart who always smiled at me and the young guy who gave me his apple. I want to remember them, all of them, the people in Grand Central and Penn Station, even Jay with his wonky ankle, even him. And maybe one day when I’m volunteering, I’ll look up and Sergei will be there and I’ll give him double helpings on his tray.
The worst thing about the summer ending will be leaving Amanda, Mum. I keep thinking about that already even though it’s still ages away. But Connecticut’s only an hour from New York on the train, so we can see each other every weekend. She’s told her mum and dad about me already and Aunt Ruth says she can stay in our apartment. She likes her, Mum, and I think you would too. It’s different than with Laurie, slower in some ways and faster in others. I feel like I know her way better already than I ever knew Laurie at all. I love that people know about us, that we can sit on the beach and kiss, and writing about kissing her makes my lips tingle and I want to kiss her now! We’re both going to come back and work here next summer and she’s going to apply to colleges in New York so we can be together—that’s one of the things we decided.
How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? Page 42
