How Many Letters Are In Goodbye?

by Yvonne Cassidy

  I keep walking, block after block, past Grand Central and Union Square and my backpack feels so heavy, heavier after each block, and I’m dying to sit down but there’s nowhere to sit down so I keep walking, through SoHo and Chinatown, until I get here, to the water at the end of Manhattan, the end of the island. The end of the world.

  It’s nice here. It’d be nicer if it was a bit warmer. The wind off the water is cold and after being so hot on the walk I put everything back on again—my denim shirt and my Champion hoody and my jacket. And I like hearing the water lapping against the dock, like watching the green and orange ferry that goes to Staten Island and back and then over to Staten Island again.

  I should be hungry, I haven’t eaten today, but I feel kind of sick instead. Dizzy. I wish I’d had the shepherd’s pie, or taken it with me, because I know without having to count it I have $74.15 in my pocket, which is less than fifty pizza slices or subway rides or two nights at the Y.

  And I still don’t know if I did the right thing or not. If it’s bad news that I walked out of there and left him or if it’s good news that I just don’t see yet.

  But I do know that I do okay on my own, that I know how to do it. And that being on my own is better than being with someone I can’t trust, someone who steals, someone who lies to me. I might not know much, Mum, but I know that.

  At least, I think I do.

  Rhea

  Battery Park, New York

  30th April 1999

  8:30 p.m.

  Dear Mum,

  I’m still sitting here. I’m still sitting on this bench, next to the water. I’m freezing now. My hand is stiff and sore but I thought writing might help keep it warm. I don’t know where to go next. I’ve been sitting here trying to figure it out, trying to come up with a list of things to do next in my head, but the only thing my head wants to do is to have imaginary conversations with Sergei.

  What if he’s sorry? What if he’s changed his mind and taken the money back? People change their minds. They apologise. If I don’t go to any of the places that I usually go, then he won’t be able to apologise, will he? He’ll never find me here. Laurie apologised. That was what changed things, I think, what started to change things. I’d been there seven months by then, it was winter time, not that you’d know it in Florida, but I remember it was November because the conversation over dinner started about Thanksgiving.

  Aunt Ruth brings it up, how they need to get back to Cheryl about the plans for the day. Cooper doesn’t look up from his food.

  “I’ll get back to her, Ruth.”

  “When, Coop? Thanksgiving is next week.”

  “Tonight, I’ll call her and tell her it’s not going to work out, we have plans.”

  Laurie is playing with her pasta while they are talking. It’s fusilli, my favourite, and she’s trying to twirl it, only you can’t twirl fusilli so it keeps falling off her fork.

  “Who’s Cheryl?” I go.

  I don’t know why I ask, I don’t think I care really, it’s only something to say. I’m not expecting Aunt Ruth to say what she says next.

  “Cheryl is Laurie’s mom. She’s an actress. She’s in a show down in Miami.”

  “Cool!” I say it straight out, forget to pretend I’m not interested. I look at Laurie but she’s still twirling. “Has she been in any films? Would I know her?” I’m asking Laurie but Aunt Ruth’s the one who answers me.

  “You might know her from this TV show she was in—”

  Cooper bangs his hand down on the table, so the glasses rattle. “Jesus, Ruth, we don’t need to go through Cheryl’s resumé!”

  Laurie pushes her plate away. “May I be excused?”

  “Rhea’s part of this family too,” Aunt Ruth says, taking a mouthful of salad. “She has a right to know who we’re talking about.”

  I’d wondered about Laurie’s mum, why she’d never come to visit, why I’d never heard her on the phone. Somehow over the time I’d been there, I think I’d decided she must be dead too, but I’d never asked.

  I’ve finished my pasta and there’s no more left. Laurie looks like she’s not going to finish hers but I need to wait until she leaves the table to take it.

  Aunt Ruth takes a sip of her wine. “I know it’s none of my business, but since she’s only in Miami, maybe you should consider it, Coop—”

  “Only in Miami? It’s not the end of the block, Ruth. Do you want to drive down to Miami on Thanksgiving?”

  “May I be excused?” Laurie says again.

  “I’m only saying that, comparatively speaking, she’s pretty close by—”

  Cooper bangs the table a second time. “So we’re supposed to be grateful that we don’t have to travel out of state so she can get some annual holiday fix with her daughter? What about the rest of the year, Ruth?”

  He’s forgotten Laurie is there, that I am. When he stops shouting, there’s only the sound of the fan swishing, and then he remembers.

  “Sweetheart—” he goes, reaching out to her, but she’s already pushing her chair back. It scrapes against the tiles.

  “Dad, it’s fine.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “May I be excused?”

  “Laurie, your dad didn’t mean it like that,” Aunt Ruth says. “He only meant—”

  Laurie never hears what Cooper only meant because she leaves the kitchen then, slamming the door behind her. Cooper stands up too, like he’s going to follow her, but instead he sits back down and turns to Aunt Ruth. “Now look what you’ve done.”

  The argument spins on, about whose fault it was, how Ruth should never have brought it up, how Cheryl is nothing but trouble. I hate arguments and I feel all jangly inside but I want to finish Laurie’s pasta because I know they won’t notice because of the fight.

  After I’m finished, I excuse myself too and head towards my room. That’s when I hear her crying.

  I’ve never heard Laurie crying before, Mum, and I probably would hear her if she cried because we’re in rooms next to each other. And it might sound really bad that I don’t go in straightaway to see if she’s okay, but we’ve perfected a rhythm of never having to speak at all by then. We ignore each other at soccer practice, on the bus to school; even at home both of us will only speak to Aunt Ruth or Cooper, never to each other. So I stand there, for ages, deciding what to do and while I’m deciding, the crying gets louder.

  When I knock on the door, the crying stops and I wish I could pretend I hadn’t knocked but it’s too late.

  “Laurie? It’s me, Rhea.”

  I forget to say Rae, because I’m nervous. I hate that I made a mistake and I think about correcting myself, but that would be worse.

  “What do you want?”

  “Can I come in?”

  There’s a pause.

  “Okay.”

  I’ve never been in her room before, only saw it on the fleeting tour of the house on my first day. She’s sitting cross-legged on her bed, shredding tissue onto the yellow and pink duvet. When she looks up at me, you can tell that she’s been crying.

  “Are you okay?”

  She sniffs. “I’m fine.”

  I stand there and when I look down I see that I’m cupping my stump, so I let it go.

  “Okay,” I go. “I just wanted to check.”

  I’m about to leave, have already turned around when she says my name. The new way. “Rae?”

  I hear the tears in her voice and when I turn around they’re spilling down her cheeks, faster than she can wipe them away with each hand. I close the door and sit down on the bed. There’s a box of tissues next to a pink phone on the nightstand. I put it between us. After a minute, she takes one. “Thanks.”

  While she’s blowing her nose, I take in the room. It’s way bigger than mine and she has a mini stereo on her shelves, way
better than the CD player and tape deck I brought from home. She has a TV too and, on the shelf above it, there’s a photo in a frame of a woman with blonde hair and a movie-star smile. She has blue eyes, Laurie’s eyes. She looks kind of familiar, only maybe I’m imagining that.

  “Is that your mum?” I go.

  She follows my eyes. Nods.

  “I don’t think Cooper meant what he said to come out the way it sounded.”

  She pulls her legs into her chest, hugs her arms around her knees. “Fuck it. It’s not like I care. It’s not like it’s a newsflash that she’s a selfish bitch. I should be used to it by now.”

  I don’t know whether to agree or disagree, so I don’t say anything.

  “Listen, don’t tell anyone at school who she is, will you? Okay? No one knows.”

  “No one? Not even Tanya?”

  “No! Especially not Tanya. Or Becky or any of them. I’d enough of that at my last school—all the kids wanting autographs, asking me about her stupid show.” She wipes a stray tear away with her hand. “She loves that shit, giving me photos for my friends. As if that makes up for everything.”

  I’ve never seen Laurie this angry before, never seen her care this much about anything.

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Thanks.” She stands and walks over to the window. “The last time she asked me if any of my friends wanted autographed photos, I told her that none of them have ever heard of her.”

  She laughs and I smile. I want to ask more about her mum, what’s it like to have someone famous as a mother, but I think I already know the answer, so I ask something else instead.

  “What age were you when your mum and dad split up?”

  “Four.” She twists the blinds open and closed again. “She left a week after my fourth birthday.”

  She should be in the photos of little Laurie, the baby ones, but she isn’t.

  “My mum died when I was three.”

  She leaves the blinds closed, turns around and pulls a strand of hair into her mouth, starts to suck it.

  “How did she die?”

  I take a breath before I say it. “She drowned.” Laurie is still looking at me, wants me to say more, so I tell her the story the way Dad told me. “She went swimming in the sea every morning and that morning she got into trouble and there was no lifeguard on duty.”

  “Do you remember her?”

  No one’s ever asked me that before, I don’t think they have. I close my eyes to remember.

  “Sort of. Not so much actual memories of stuff that happened but more like a feeling, a feeling of before and after or something.” She’s looking at me, her blue eyes are, and suddenly I feel embarrassed. “That probably makes no sense.”

  Her head moves a fraction. “No, it does. I used to think I didn’t remember Mum ever living with us at all, that my memories only started when we moved to Florida, but I don’t know if that’s true anymore.”

  “Where did you live before?”

  “New York.”

  “Wow,” I go. “You lucky thing. I’d love to live in New York.”

  She comes back over and sits on the end of the bed. “I think you’re lucky, you know.”

  “Lucky? How come?”

  She picks up the remote control, opens the back part where the battery goes in, and clicks it closed again.

  “You’re lucky yours is dead. At least you know she’s gone, why she’s not here. You don’t have this crap every time she takes time out of her busy schedule to come see you.”

  Her voice is level, like there’s not fifty thousand reasons why what she’s saying is bullshit.

  “That’s total crap, Laurie.”

  “Why?” She looks up. “We’re kind of in the same boat, right? But you get to make up the kind of mom you have, this mom who would have always been there for you and never let you down—”

  “Laurie, it’s totally different. You get to see your mum, get to know her. You know what I’d give to know mine?”

  “That’s what you think now, but what if you wouldn’t? You might not even like her, you don’t know what she was like—”

  “I’m not listening to this crap.” I’m standing up at that point and kind of shouting, but I don’t care. “I came in here to see if you were okay, because I felt sorry for you because your mum seems like she’s some selfish bitch—”

  When she shouts back, her face is mean, the tears all gone now.

  “How do you know yours wasn’t a selfish bitch too? Just because she’s dead doesn’t mean she was perfect!”

  I turn to leave, I come back, I want to punch her, hit her, hurt her—but I don’t. I kick the bed instead. It hurts my foot. “Fuck you, Laurie!” I kick it harder. “Fuck you!” I half expect Aunt Ruth to come in, I nearly want her to, but she’s too busy having her own fight with Cooper. They’re in the living room by then, using the TV to try and drown out their voices but you can still hear them.

  After the fight I put on Are you Experienced? really loud, but I put on my headphones so Aunt Ruth won’t tell me to turn it down. I try and do my maths homework, but I can’t concentrate. My eyes won’t stay on the page, instead they keep going to your subway map on the wall, in between the two windows. And I go through the lines one by one, starting with the blue one, the AA, and I wish the folds hadn’t made a tear in the paper, but it doesn’t really matter because I still know all the stops off by heart, can still say them without looking.

  And I’ve moved onto the RR next, and I’m at Borough Hall, then Hoyt Street and “Stone Free” is playing when I think I hear something and I turn the music down and I hear the knock on the door again. And when I open it, Laurie is there, sucking on a strand of her hair, looking at her feet, one on top of the other.

  I take my headphones off and she looks up.

  “I’m sorry, Rae, I’m sorry for what I said about your mom.”

  My foot still hurts from where I kicked the bed. I want to cup my stump, but I don’t.

  “That’s bullshit, what you said about her. You’d no right.”

  “I know.” She looks back down. “I know. I just felt so mad, you know, and I don’t know why, but I wanted you to feel mad too.”

  It sounds real, what she says, not like lies. When she looks up, she smiles a little smile, holds out her hand.

  “Truce?” she goes.

  It’s not just a truce for the fight but a truce for everything, I think it is. I take her hand.

  “Truce.”

  For the second time, we stand like that, holding hands, but not. This time it’s me that pulls away first.

  I don’t know why I wrote all that down, Mum, it’s not like it matters. It’s ancient history now, water under the bridge, like the water lapping here against the dock. Just because Laurie apologised and meant it once doesn’t mean she ever will again. It doesn’t mean Sergei will either.

  It’s late now and the sloshing sound of the water I liked earlier sounds different in the dark. It’s cold, even with my jacket and my Champion hoody. I bet there’s rats down here and I should probably move somewhere else, only I don’t know where else to move to. And I like looking at the lights out there, the lights from the buildings opposite, white on the black water. But I don’t know where those buildings are, whether they’re in New Jersey or Brooklyn or even Staten Island, and out of everything I hate tonight, Mum, I hate that I don’t know that.

  I hate that there is no one I can ask.

  Rhea

  Battery Park, New York

  1st May 1999

  7:25 a.m.

  Dear Mum,

  I made it! I made it through the night outside, all by myself! I didn’t think I was going to sleep here, I hadn’t planned it, I’d planned on getting up and finding a stick in the park and making it sharp and staying awake all night just in case, but I kept noddin
g off before I could do any of that. All night I kept nodding off and waking up, and nodding off and waking up, and the last time I woke up, it was morning.

  And even though my neck and shoulder are killing me, I feel so fucking happy, so fucking proud of myself, because it turns out I don’t need Sergei to survive in this city, no matter what he thinks.

  I don’t need anyone.

  I have a plan this morning, Mum. Once I find somewhere to pee, I’m going to go to Duane Reade and I’m going to buy soap and shampoo and deodorant, and I’m going to go and wash up. Even though there’s only a tiny bit of toothpaste left in the tube, I’m not going to buy any more because it’s expensive, so I’ll wait until I get a job. I’m going to look for a job today, that’s the rest of the plan. I don’t know why I’ve given up, this is New York, people are given a chance in New York, everyone is. I just haven’t been looking for my chance hard enough, that’s all. I got distracted by Sergei and by looking for you and finding Nana Davis and finding the photos and everything. I will look at the photos, I haven’t forgotten about the photos, I plan on looking at them, but I want to be able to look at them properly and lay them out somewhere they won’t get wet or blown away and there’s things I need to do first, that’s all. I’m going to be eighteen in eleven days and I have to prioritise, that’s part of being an adult, isn’t it?

  So, this morning, my priorities are getting clean and getting a job. After I pee. And eat. I’m starving. I know a place on Eighth Avenue that does an egg and cheese on a roll with a coffee for only one dollar—the others all charge $1.25 or even $1.50—so I can walk there, unless I find somewhere as cheap along the way. And when I buy my soap and stuff, I’m going to go to a Starbucks and wash in there, because even though the bathrooms in Grand Central are good, you can’t wash yourself properly and in Starbucks it’s a private cubicle so I can stick my whole head in the sink and everything and even change my T-shirt.

  It feels so much better to have a plan, you know? A game plan, I mean, to be in control of what I’m doing and not to have to rely on Sergei. I think it’s best, what happened, you know? I think it’s better. I’m better off on my own.