I hadn’t told him, yet, that you were dead. How did he know? The girl looks from Sergei to me.
“I’d need some proof of your relationship with her and that she’s dead. But anyway, I can’t find her.”
“What if we give you her date of birth? Rhea, what was her date of birth?”
“23rd November 1959.”
I must have said that, because I heard it, my voice. But somehow I don’t remember saying it, making the decision to say it.
The girl is hesitating. Sergei is still smiling. “It would mean so much to us, any information at all.”
She types the numbers in. Slowly. Each key sounds like a bullet. We wait. Sergei blows his curls out of his eyes. My Columbia application is in that computer too. That white plastic box has the power to ruin my life, change my life, make my life. Something happens on the screen. She shakes her head.
“What is it?” Sergei says.
“I’m sorry. There’s nothing here that would help you.”
“Anything at all would help us,” Sergei says. “Rhea’s mom is dead. She’s come all the way to New York from Ireland to find out more about her.”
The girl looks up.
“You’re from Ireland?”
I nod. She’s waiting for more. “I’m from Dublin.” I make sure to speak with my normal voice, to keep the American sounds out of my words.
“My mom was from Ireland,” she goes. “Meath.” She says “Meath” so it rhymes with “teeth.”
“Meath’s nice.” I say it the proper way. This is a lie. I don’t know anything about Meath.
“It sounds like your mom told you about your heritage,” Sergei goes, “but Rhea’s mom never got the chance. Please, if you have anything there on your screen, anything at all, please tell us.”
She glances over her shoulder, as if there might be someone there, but there is no one there. When she talks her voice is low, nearly a whisper. “All it says here is that she enrolled in 1977 and went on a student exchange programme in her sophomore year. It looks like she didn’t come back. She never graduated, that’s it. That’s all there is.”
She’s talking about you. It’s definitely you. 1977 you enrolled. I’d always thought it was 1978 but I was wrong. It was 1977.
“That’s her!” Sergei goes. “She went to Ireland on her exchange. Do you have contact information? An address? Phone number?”
The girl clicks something else. “There’s an address, but it’s twenty years out of date. I’m sure whoever was there has moved by now.”
“Can you tell us what it is, so we can check it against the one we have?”
Sergei has a pen and paper out—I don’t know where he got it from. The girl hesitates before quickly reading out an address on Park Avenue. You lived on Park Avenue.
“Thank you,” Sergei says as he shoves the note in his back pocket. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” He drums his fingers on the counter, turns around to leave.
“When do you go back to Ireland?”
The question catches me, pulls me back. It’s like a trick question.
“I don’t know,” I go. “I don’t know if I’m going back.”
“Oh.”
She looks disappointed, like she wanted me to say something else, but it’s the truth. Sergei is already holding the door open for me, so I pick up my backpack and thank her again. When we’re outside, he puts his arm around me, spins me to face him.
“That was awesome, Rhea,” he goes. “Awesome! What a team! With your sad Irish charm and my quick wit, we don’t need a private eye.”
He is too close, his face inches away from my face. I can smell the drink from last night. The light is bright, reflecting off the glass of one of the buildings, and I don’t know if that’s making me dizzy or if it was the way he spun me around or both. I take his hand off my shoulder, make a space between us. “Come on, let’s not talk right outside, she’s probably watching us.”
He pulls the piece of paper from his pocket. “830 Park Avenue, Apartment 78A. That’s the Upper East Side, Rhea! Park Avenue! You’re rich, Irish bullhead!”
I need to breathe, find my voice. “Serg—”
“Let’s walk over there now, check it out.”
“Serg, it’s all the way on the other side of the park. It’s going to take us an hour to get there, more.”
“Okay, so come on, let’s go!” He’s walking backwards, facing me, his arms outstretched. “The longer we hang around here, the longer it’ll take.”
My feet won’t move. I want to get away from this building, from the girl and her computer, but it’s like the day they wouldn’t move to take me inside the gate—now they won’t move to let me out.
“We don’t have time,” I go. “You’ve to meet Michael at six? Remember?”
Sergei frowns. “So, I’ll be late. He’ll wait.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Serg, you told me he had somewhere specific he wanted to take you. He’s already pissed off after last night.”
He makes a face, blows his curls from his forehead. “So what?”
“So, Michael’s is the only security we have right now. Don’t blow it, Serg, please.”
He kicks his runner out to swipe the edge of the grass border, his face a frown. I’m pretending this conversation is about Michael, but it’s not, it’s about something else. I just don’t know what yet.
“Okay, then.” Sergei sighs, folds his arms. “I’ll be a good little boy and be on time for Michael. So we can sleep at the apartment tonight and go there tomorrow. Early, though, okay? I don’t want to hang out for hours watching dumb American TV.”
“Okay.”
I smile, relief floods in. He gives me a high five and I high five him back. We’d started doing it the week we met, taking the piss out of some people we saw at the Y doing it for real, but now I think we both like it.
We take the subway back together. It’s too crowded to talk, and I’m glad we don’t have to. My stop is before his, 42nd Street.
“You going for pizza to the usual spot?” Serg goes.
I shake my head. “I’m going to change it up tonight. I’m going to Grand Central.”
“See you back at Michael’s, come over early. We won’t be late tonight.”
That’s the last thing he says before the doors close and I wave at him through the glass even though he’s already turned away. I let myself be carried by the flood of people over to the S line. I like the S, because it only has two stops and because there’s always a train there and because it only takes a minute.
When I get to Grand Central, there are signs to the 4, 5, and 6 trains, the green ones that go up the east side of the park. I could take one of those trains—I’m in the station already, I wouldn’t need another token. I’d get out at 68th or maybe 77th and I could walk over to Park Avenue and walk right up to number 830, the building where you used to live.
And after all this time, after all this waiting, I don’t know why I don’t. Except I want to stay here in the station and sit down, and eat a black and white cookie, one of the big ones, even though the prices are a rip-off, even though it won’t fill me up like the pizza would. And after all this waiting, what does waiting another day matter anyway? I don’t think it matters at all.
Rhea
Grand Central Station, New York
27th April 1999
10:12 p.m.
Dear Mum,
These are the things I like about being in Grand Central Station:
You never have to queue too long for the toilet because there are loads of them.
It doesn’t feel weird to have a backpack with me because everyone has backpacks and bags with them.
You can sleep and no one will bother you.
The ceiling.
The tables with the pretend tickets and maps on them.
The thing I don’t like about Grand Central is that the only real place to sit—the place where the cool tables with the pretend tickets and maps are—is in the food court, so you have to deal with all the smells of Chinese food and chips and walk past loads of glass counters with cookies and shiny cakes and giant sandwiches, and they’re all too expensive to buy.
I’m starving tonight. I’m craving everything, all of it, only it’s my own fault for spending my dinner money on the stupid black and white cookie that didn’t fill me up, just like I knew it wouldn’t. I’m not spending any more money tonight. The guy and girl next to me are eating this giant piece of cheesecake and I’m watching them, each time they dig their forks in. I’m watching them chew and swallow, even though I don’t even like cheesecake.
These are the names on the fake tickets on the table I’m sitting at:
South Norwalk
Harrison
Chappaqua
Hartsdale
Mount Vernon
The maps are of the Hudson Line and the Harlem Line. I want to go on both. I want to buy a ticket and get on a train and sit in a seat by the window and watch everything passing by outside until we leave the lights of New York behind and all I’ll be able to see in the glass is the reflection of my face in the dark.
They didn’t finish the cheesecake. They left a lot of it behind on the paper plate and if they hadn’t thrown it in the bin, I might have finished it. I might have cut the parts off that their forks had touched and eaten the rest. I hope you don’t think that’s gross, Mum. I mean, they looked clean, and it’s not any different really from eating from the plate of someone you know, is it? I don’t think it is.
Laurie caught me one time, eating off one of the plates I’d just bussed at Cooper’s restaurant and she was grossed out. You’d swear I’d been eating off the floor or something. It was only a mozzarella stick. It wasn’t like they’d taken a bite out of it or anything.
I’m thinking a lot about Laurie tonight. I’m trying not to, but I can’t help it. I’m wearing my baseball cap, the one that used to be hers, the Boston Red Sox one. The one I used to wear was a navy one with a white NY, a New York Yankees one, but Cooper took that away the night I sat down to dinner with it on. I’d got my head shaved that day, only the underneath part, so at school it looked like I had long hair but when I put my hair up under the cap, it looked like my head was shaved. Aunt Ruth didn’t like it either, but she was ignoring it, pretending she hadn’t noticed. When Cooper made me give him my cap, I thought she’d say something, but she didn’t, she just kept on eating her salad. He said it was because it wasn’t right to wear a hat at the dinner table but we all knew that wasn’t the reason. Later when Laurie knocked on my bedroom door and handed me her Boston Red Sox one, she said she thought that Cooper was a control freak and that he’d had no right to tell me how to look or dress or anything else.
If I’m going to write to you about Laurie, then I need to write about the times she was nasty, the times she was horrible, not when she was nice. And I need to keep it in order. That was probably six months or so after I got there, the cap thing, but loads had already happened by then. Like the soccer tryouts. I haven’t told you about the soccer tryouts.
Laurie makes it pretty obvious that she didn’t want me on the team, even to try out. She ignores me in the changing room, gets dressed and out of there as soon as she can. I don’t care. I’m only doing it to get Aunt Ruth off my back. I think my shite play will be enough to keep me off the team, but I didn’t count on the whole team being shite.
The heat is a killer and I think my lungs are going to explode every time I chase the ball, but I keep chasing, keep tackling. At home, the boys on the road called anyone who couldn’t tackle a chicken—just like you were a chicken if you couldn’t do a wheelie or climb up the O’Neills’ wall and jump from the end of it onto the roof of the McEvoys’ shed. So what if you fell? Bruises, stitches, even the time I fractured my collarbone, all of that was better than being chicken.
So I tackle everyone that day, even the tall, fast ones with bouncing ponytails—especially them. I can’t keep up with them, but I stand in their way. I kick for the ball and I don’t care if I kick their legs, if we get tangled up together and we both fall. After Jane Friedman goes off with her knee bleeding, the coach calls me aside and says I need to tone it down, that sliding tackles aren’t allowed. I tell her I don’t know what a sliding tackle is, that I’m only playing the way I used to play back home. She hides her smile. She likes me, I can tell, and I know I’m going to make the team.
Afterwards, me and Laurie are the last ones waiting in the car park because Cooper’s late.
“Dad, where are you?” she says for the billionth time. “God, I can’t wait to get my driver’s licence.”
“We could walk,” I say. “It’s not that far.”
“Walk?” She makes a face. “You’re kidding, right?”
She sits down on the kerb, stretches her legs out in front of her. After a minute, I sit down next to her.
“Who are this team we’re playing on Saturday?” I go. “Do we have a good chance?”
She pulls a strand of her hair into her mouth, sucks it. “You’re not seriously going to play on the team, are you?”
At first I think she’s joking, but there is no laugh, no smile. Before, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play. Now I am.
“Why wouldn’t I play?”
She turns away to face the gate, rests her chin on her arms.
“Um, maybe because you can’t run three feet without almost having a heart attack.”
It makes it worse somehow, that all I can see is the back of her head when she says that, and it takes me a second to reply.
“It’s fucking hot, Laurie! It takes a while to get used to the heat—”
She whips her head back around. She looks angry, she is angry.
“Does it take a while to get used to the altitude too? Is that why you kept falling over?”
“Just because I wasn’t afraid to make tackles—”
“You call those tackles? You spent more time on the ground than on your feet! You’ve no technique, you—”
I pull my legs in to my chest, wrap my arm around my knees. “Technique? Like you’d know technique if it hit you in the face! I saw you out there—you’re not exactly Ray Houghton yourself.”
I know she doesn’t know who Ray Houghton is and that she won’t ask. She taps one runner off the other.
“You know Coach only put you on the team because she feels sorry for you?”
She’s looking right at me to see my reaction. My insides react before my outsides. I feel something boiling, gushing up. I want to grab a fist of her hair, I want to smash her head against the concrete, over and over until there is blood. I shouldn’t say that, I know I shouldn’t think it, never mind write it down, but that’s how I’m feeling when I see Cooper’s car nosing through the gate.
She stands up, smiles at me.
I grab my bag. I can’t pretend I didn’t hear her, I can’t say nothing. My heart is pounding and I hope she can’t hear the echo of it in my voice.
“Why do you hate me so much, Laurie? What have I ever done to you?”
Cooper pulls up in front of us. Laurie’s still smiling.
“I don’t hate you, Rae—or Rhea or whatever you’re calling yourself today. If you want to know the truth, I don’t really think anything about you. I don’t have an opinion at all.”
She gets into the front seat, next to Cooper. He’s too preoccupied with some late delivery at the restaurant to notice that we’re fighting or that my cheeks are flaming red. But later, when Aunt Ruth comes in to tell me my music is too loud, I think she knows.
“Rae, can you lower that? We can’t hear the TV.”
I turn it down.
“Don’t you have any o
ther music? You must have played that song ten times in a row.”
It’s 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up.” I’ve played it eight times.
“Sorry,” I go.
She’s nearly out of the room when she turns back. “Is everything okay?”
There’s a second, a split second, where I could have told her. I think about telling her, but tell her what? Anyway, she doesn’t want to know, not really. She wants to get back to watching her show.
“Everything’s fine.”
After that, I put on my headphones and play the song nine more times, seventeen altogether. But even after playing it over and over and over, I still can’t figure it out: why Laurie having no opinion of me is worse than her hating me. Why her not even thinking about me is the worst, the absolute worst thing of all.
Your daughter,
Rhea
830 Park Avenue, New York
28th April 1999
9:12 a.m.
Dear Mum,
I got excited writing the address at the top of the letter because you’d have written letters with that address at the top too! Not that I’m inside, I’m at the corner writing this, sitting on a little railing, but I still have a great view of the entrance and of everyone coming up and down the road, so I can see Sergei when he comes. Although I don’t know why I think he’s going to come, since he never showed up at Michael’s last night.
Your entrance is the nicest one on the block, I think it is, with the awning set back so much further than all the other awnings and the little trees in pots lined up at either side. I walked up as close to the door as I could, but there were two doormen on the other side of the glass and I turned back again as soon as I saw them. One of them has come out four times, to get taxis for people, and he has a fancy uniform with gold buttons. Seven other people have left the building, apart from the taxi people, but three of them had dogs with them and they went back in again.
I still can’t believe Michael wouldn’t let me in last night. I knew they were home, because the light was on, but no one answered until I held down the buzzer with my thumb for ages. When Michael finally picked up, he sounded like some whimpering kid, telling me to leave him alone and that Sergei wasn’t there. He wouldn’t pick up again, wouldn’t tell me where Sergei was. It was raining and I got soaked through, sitting on that step across the road. He’s an asshole, Michael. I’m still wet and my throat feels like I swallowed razor blades. Maybe Sergei was right, maybe we should have taken his money.
How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? Page 6