He gets up really slowly, he’s almost graceful the way he does it, he doesn’t have to push himself up with his hands or anything. I watch him as he walks away, towards where the voices were, and I notice he has a wonky foot, his left one. I’m watching how it moves, sloping out to one side and kind of dragging along the floor, when he turns around and tips his baseball cap at me and smiles.
That was last night—I think it was last night, not the night before—but it’s hard to tell anymore. I’m not going to tell you how much of the $5.83 I have left. I haven’t eaten since I’ve been down here on my bench by the water. It’s kind of handy, not needing to eat, because I don’t need to move, even to find a toilet, all I have to do is sit here and listen to the river lapping and watch the boats. In an hour or so, it’ll get dark, the water will be black and in the blackness you wouldn’t be able to see someone lowering themselves into the water, someone holding on to the bars of the railing, someone letting go.
It’d be cold, I know that. It would seep through my clothes, make them ice, make them heavy. Like a stone. “Stone Free.” It’s calm, though, flat, like in Rush. That day—you know the day I’m talking about—it was flat as a pancake, that’s what they said. If someone who swims every day, someone who’s such a good swimmer, can drown in calm water like that, it must be easier for someone who can’t swim, someone who’s never learned. It must be faster.
There’s a payphone behind this bench. I can’t see it because I’m looking at the water but I know it’s there, five or six feet from where I’m sitting now. I could call Aunt Ruth’s cell number, the one on the poster, I wouldn’t have to talk to Cooper. I can imagine myself making the call, feel my neck holding the receiver, my finger punching the keys, hear the phone ringing, stretching out. You know how in films when someone is missing, the person answers the phone straightaway, all breathless and hopeful? I keep wondering if Aunt Ruth would answer like that.
This is how I imagine the call:
The phone would ring once, maybe twice, and then I’d hear Aunt Ruth at the other end.
Aunt Ruth: Hello?
Me: Breathing.
Aunt Ruth: Hello? Hello? Rhea? Is that you?
Me: Breathing.
Aunt Ruth: Rhea, please come home! I’m sorry, honey. You know I didn’t mean it! I lied, what I said, I was only trying to hurt you—
And then I hang up.
I’m not going to call, though. No matter what happens, Mum, I’m not going to call. Even if Jay shows up at this bench, even if all the rats in New York come teeming out of the water.
The only possible reason in the world that I’d call would be if I was scared of dying. But people die, Mum. I mean you died, that’s just what happens.
And I’m not scared of anything. I need to remember that, to keep remembering that, that I’ve never been scared of anything, of anything at all.
Rae
Grand Central Station, New York
9th May 1999
4:12 p.m.
Dear Mum,
I went to Michael’s to give him his Discman back. Everything bad that started to happen, happened since I took that Discman, as if taking it was bad karma or something, and the only way to undo it is by giving it back. That’s what I tell myself the reason is, but on the way I think there might be another reason, like that I’ve no CDs or batteries. That maybe I’m going there to remember that only two weeks ago Sergei and I were in his apartment, eating dumplings and Pop-Tarts and watching a Law & Order marathon. I don’t get time at all. Nothing interesting happens for months and months, sometimes even years, and then your whole world can change in only two weeks.
I don’t expect to actually see him, he’s upstate on the weekends, and I haven’t figured out how to give him the Discman back, except maybe to wait until one of the neighbours is going in and ask them to leave it outside his door. That’s what I’m thinking, but when I get there, there’s a big people carrier outside his building, almost exactly like the car Cooper had except this one is black. The door of the building is propped open with a box and the lid doesn’t shut properly and I can see there are CDs inside.
I have to be honest, Mum, I think about lifting the lid and taking one, which I know goes against the whole karma thing, but right then the idea of closing my eyes and listening to music, any music, is worth all the bad karma in the world. But before I have a chance, I hear voices coming down the stairs and that’s when I hide in the doorway of the apartment building next door. Michael walks right past me, but he doesn’t see me, and then a woman walks past, behind him. He’s wearing a grey T-shirt with a line of sweat down the back and he’s carrying a box. The woman is wearing a pink tracksuit and she’s not carrying anything.
They put the box in the car and when they go back into the building, I run across the street, to where the lane is, so I can get a better view. It takes ages for them to come out again but when they do I get a proper look at the woman. She has sunglasses on, pink ones, and her blonde hair is in a ponytail, scraped back really tight so it pulls at the skin on the side of her face. It must be the woman from the photo, it has to be, but she doesn’t look the same. She doesn’t look the same at all.
They make twelve trips up and down to the car. Each time, Michael is carrying a big box that he loads into the boot and then when that’s full he starts to load things into the back seat. The woman never carries anything except once when she carries a lamp. She could have just sat in the car and waited, but she follows him, a step behind his step, and it looks like she’s talking all the time, even though he’s not saying anything at all.
I don’t know why watching them makes me sad, except that since that night at the Y, everything makes me sad. It’s not like I even know Michael, not really, so it doesn’t make sense why I don’t want him to go. But I don’t want him to go.
The last time they come out, he’s carrying a backpack and a denim jacket, she has a white plastic bag. She says something and goes back into the building. I lean down and see her runners climbing the stairs. My brain is still deciding what to do when my feet decide first and run across the street. Michael is in the passenger seat with the window rolled down. At first he doesn’t see me because he’s looking in the mirror, doing something with his hair. I’m about to say his name when he glances over, sees me, does a double take. He jerks his head around to look over his shoulder, as if she’s going to be right behind him, but she’s not.
“Holy shit! What are you doing here? You got to get out of here.”
“I came to give you this.”
He looks confused at the Discman I’m holding up to the window. He twists around in his seat to check the door of the apartment building, but she’s still not coming.
“I shouldn’t have taken it, I’m sorry. I haven’t even used it, it still works.”
“What the fuck? You scam me for over a thousand bucks and you come to bring this back?”
My stump hurts and I want to cup it but my hand still has the Discman.
“I didn’t know about the money.”
“Yeah, yeah, you probably put him up to it.”
“I swear, I didn’t know. He only told me after.”
He’s shaking his head, he doesn’t believe me. He lowers his voice.
“You know what’s fucked up? I can almost get the money thing, you know. I nearly can. But calling Melanie? What the fuck did you guys get out of that?”
“Melanie?”
“She’s pregnant, you know. Did he tell you that? She could have lost the baby because of you.”
His eyes are shiny and his hand is in a fist. I scrunch my toes up in my Docs. I hold out the Discman, but it’s like he doesn’t even see it. He glances over his shoulder again, his voice a whisper. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t seen him.”
He looks at me then, his eyes properly look at me, take me in.<
br />
“You really haven’t seen him?”
I shake my head.
“You have anyone else in the city you can go to? Any family?”
I bite down hard, clench. Inside my cheeks, I’ve all these sores, mouth ulcers, even though I keep brushing my teeth. Eating pizza hurts and so does eating bagels. He reaches into his pocket, takes out two twenties, holds them out the window in between his index and his middle fingers, like forty dollars is nothing at all.
“That’s all I have on me, just take it.”
I shake my head; that’s not why I’m here. And then the fucking tears start leaking out, they’re on my cheeks and I can’t wipe them away without dropping the Discman and now he feels sorry for me, now he is pitying me.
“I don’t want your charity.”
“Fine,” he says. “Give it to someone else who needs it.”
He lets go of the notes and they flutter onto the road. One lands near my Doc, the other is next to the tyre.
“You have to go,” he says. “Just take the fucking money and go.”
I shove the Discman through the window at him, scrunch down and grab the notes. When I stand back up, he’s looking at me differently, frowning this time.
“Hey,” he goes, “did I see a poster with your face on it in the subway? Some girl missing from Florida. Is that you?”
My heart is kicking. I hoist my backpack higher on my back.
“Where?” I go. “Which subway station?”
We both hear it then, the noise, the sound of the apartment building door closing. There’s panic in his face, but I know what to do. I cross the street, real slow, casual, like I was just walking by. I don’t run. When I’m on the other side, I see the blonde woman. She hasn’t even noticed me.
Melanie, her name is Melanie. Her hand is on her stomach, a little bump under her pink tracksuit top, a little bump that’s a baby.
She gets into the car and as she puts on her seat belt, Michael glances over at me. She puts on the indicator, pulls away from the kerb, and they drive away.
I go to the diner, the diner where me and Sergei had breakfast that morning—not even three weeks ago. The hostess looks as if she mightn’t seat me, then she does, at a table in the corner near the back. I’m looking for the waitress, the one who served us the day we had the row, but she’s not there and that nearly makes the tears come again. I nearly order the pancakes, like Sergei had, but they’re too expensive so I look through six pages of the menu before deciding on eggs and sausage because they come with hash browns and toast and coffee, and you get free refills on the coffee and at $4.75 before tax it’s the best deal, plus it’s soft so it won’t hurt my mouth.
And now the food is all gone, like all food goes, and the thing about eating is as soon as I eat anything I always want more, like instead of making me full it just makes me more hungry. I want the curly fries, and the spaghetti and meatballs, and the waffles with cream and chocolate sauce. I want the loaded potato skins.
And I can’t stop thinking about the look on Michael’s face when he talked about Sergei calling his wife. Sergei must have been really mad to do that, or really hurt, but Michael was hurt too, I saw that, he let me see it. And in the movies there’s always someone who hurts and someone who gets hurt, but maybe it’s not always like that, maybe two people can hurt each other at the very same time?
Nicole Gleeson hurt me, Mum, but she didn’t know she was doing it and maybe I hurt her a little bit too, by ignoring her after. With Laurie, it was different. She knew all along that I liked her and she hurt me anyway. You know what the funny thing was? In a way, I wasn’t even surprised, like part of me knew she was going to do it, some part of me knew what was going to happen all along.
Rhea
West 46th Street, New York
11th May 1999
1:31 a.m.
Dear Mum,
Tonight, I did something different. I’m on 46th Street, just off Times Square. Usually I hate Times Square, but it’s raining and I found a good spot, on a step under an awning, and I don’t want to give it up. Nobody bothers me for ages, so I’m able to sleep on and off until, coming up to half ten, all these people start to arrive, one by one, to go in through the door behind me. It’s a pain to have to keep getting up but I keep sitting back down on my step because it’s the best spot. And one of those times, just as I’m about to sit back down, I see an old woman coming up the steps and something makes me stand back up and hold the door open for her.
“Thank you,” she goes. When she pulls down her hood, I see she has really long, grey hair. “Are you here for the meeting?”
“The meeting?”
“It’s a good one. I wouldn’t come out on a night like tonight for any meeting.”
She walks through the door and into a hallway, then she turns back to me. “Don’t worry, you won’t be the only new face. We get a lot of newcomers.”
I’m still holding the door open and I don’t know what makes me walk through it, what makes me follow her to the end of the hallway and up the stairs, except that maybe it seems like such a long time since anyone’s invited me anywhere and it’s nice to be somewhere dry and warm.
Halfway up the stairs, though, I start to get nervous in case it’s a trap, some kind of cult, but there’s a young guy behind me on the stairs and he looks okay and if I need to get out I know I could push past him easily. When we go into the room at the top, there’s folding chairs all laid out in a semicircle and two people behind a heavy table in the middle. The old lady hugs someone and they go and sit at the other side of the room. I take the seat closest to the door. And that’s when I see the poster on the wall—the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I nearly laugh when I see that, because Alcoholics Anonymous is where Michael took Sergei one night, and Sergei said it was the lamest thing ever and the only good thing was that they had free coffee. This meeting doesn’t have any coffee, I don’t see any, but I’m glad Sergei told me about it, because he also said that you didn’t have to say anything if you didn’t want to, you could just listen. The man behind the table starts reading stuff from a folder, going on and on. It’s warm and I know I’m never going to be able to stay awake. I’m taking off my Champion sweatshirt when he stops talking and introduces the girl next to him and everyone starts to clap.
She says her name is Tierney and that she’s an alcoholic. I don’t know why I’m calling her a girl because she’s got to be in her thirties, but she seems like a kid in a way, especially when she laughs this really giggly laugh. She laughs a lot, right the way through, especially when she’s telling us how she started to drink white wine because she thought if she drank it all there wouldn’t be enough left for her Mom to get drunk. Everyone laughs at that part, only I don’t, because I’m thinking it kind of makes sense and it reminds me of the time I poured Dad’s Guinness down the drain. According to this girl, it didn’t make sense though, because it didn’t stop her mother drinking, the only thing it did was make her an alcoholic too.
I’m trying to get my head around all that and I almost miss the part where she says something about being a lesbian and I want her to back up and say that again, but she’s moved on to talking about her work. I wonder if I’m imagining what she said, because she has long dark hair and she’s wearing a skirt and red shoes with a little heel and she doesn’t look like a lesbian any more than she looks like an alcoholic. And just when I think I must have heard her wrong, she starts talking about a date she was on earlier in the night with a girl called Susan and that she was glad to have had an excuse to finish up, she was glad she was coming to the meeting.
She looks at the clock and says she’ll leave it there and everyone claps again. I hope there’s going to be questions but there aren’t, instead it starts at the other side of the circle with each person taking turns to talk about themselves and none of them are as interesting as Tierney
. Some people go on and on and others don’t say much. Hardly anyone talks about drink. The young guy from the stairs tells us all about his dental work and how much it costs and the man next to him is from Denver and he’s in New York for a wedding and I feel sorry for him that he has to spend part of his trip in a meeting like this. When it comes to the old lady, she says her name is Winnie. She tells Tierney that she reminds her of herself when she was younger, but I don’t think she means the gay part, because then she goes on about her pregnant daughter and how she really wants to help her, but she has to respect her daughter’s wishes when she says she doesn’t want her help.
It goes around the circle and then I’m going to be next. I’m not going to say anything, I don’t have to, Sergei said you don’t have to—but then the person next to me finishes and they all look at me.
I shrug. “I don’t know what to say.”
“What’s your name?” the guy with the folder says.
I picture Aunt Ruth’s posters, hiding, lying in wait all over the city.
“Lisa.”
My voice sounds funny, not like my voice. I think maybe that’s why I want to talk to them, that maybe I want to say something more than “I was wondering if you are hiring at the moment?” Maybe I want to use my voice so I know I still have it.
The room has a rug in it, an attempt to make it homey, only it doesn’t work. The rug is purple and there’s a red cross but it’s kind of off centre and that bothers me and that’s what I start talking about, the off-centre cross. And next thing I know, I’m talking and talking and talking, words spilling out of my mouth like I couldn’t stop them even if I wanted to.
I tell them about all the places I looked for a job today, how I went into every single shop, restaurant, deli, fast food joint along Broadway from 23rd all the way up to 50th and not one place said yes, or even maybe. I tell them about the two girls talking at the counter in the shoe shop who ignore me even though I’m standing right in front of them and they crack up laughing when I walk away and say something I can’t hear but I know it’s about me. I tell them about the guy in the diner who says that they don’t let homeless people in, even before I get a chance to ask about a job. I keep looking down at the rug as I tell them everything, I don’t look at any of their faces. And then I get to the part about the nice woman in the bakery, who isn’t hiring either but she tells me that in a nice way, and gives me a bag of cookies that she says are broken and when I open them later, they’re still warm and all in one piece and not broken at all.
How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? Page 16