Behind both of them, Laurie’s head is in her arms, her shoulders trembling. I can hear the words she’s not saying, the words she said earlier. I’m not as strong as you. I can leave, I’m going to leave, go to Columbia, but Laurie has to stay. And that’s what makes me say it.
“What Laurie said was the truth,” I go. “It was all me.”
I don’t look at Aunt Ruth. I focus on the broken juicer lid under the chair, a spring from the mechanism is rolling across the tiles.
Cooper throws his arms in the air, like a victory. “Yes! Now, we’re getting somewhere—now, Ruth, do you see? I mean it’s hardly a surprise she has problems, with that drunk of a father and your fuck-up of a sister for a mother.”
“Cooper!” Aunt Ruth’s shout is louder than his right then. “I know you’re upset but don’t—”
“Don’t what, Ruth?” He stands with his hands on his hips, almost as if he’s enjoying himself now. “Don’t tell the truth? Don’t talk about what happened?”
“Cooper, stop.” Aunt Ruth is back on her feet, her voice sounds like it’s begging. “Please, just stop.”
“We’re supposed to pretend it didn’t happen?”
“Cooper—” Aunt Ruth is grabbing his arm and he shakes her off again.
“We’re supposed to pretend your sister didn’t kill herself?”
There’s silence then, as if what Cooper said has taken up all the oxygen, that there’s no air for any more sound. Even Laurie’s stopped crying. My chair scrapes when I push it back against the tiles and when I stand up, I stand up slowly. They’re all looking at me, but Cooper’s the one I look at when I say what I say next. He’s the one I want to hear it.
“My mother didn’t kill herself. You’re full of shit.”
I think he might start shouting again, but he doesn’t say anything. I leave them there, the three of them and the broken juicer. When I go to my room and shut the door, I see the dent the handle made in the plaster when Cooper smashed it open. I get under the covers and the pillow still smells of Laurie and I let myself smell her but I don’t cry.
And I’m not crying now, Mum, those blotches on the page are from the rain that’s just started. It’s coming down heavier and it looks like tears all over the page, but it’s not my tears.
If they were my tears, they’d have my DNA in them, and they don’t. They’re only water. Only rain.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
I don’t want to write anymore, I don’t want to write this shit down. I thought when I moved inside here, to the cathedral, that it would break it, all this stuff in my head, but it’s still there, going round and around and so I’m back to writing it all down because maybe if I write it in a letter, it will stop.
I wish I’d found this place before now. There’s a desk at the front where they ask for money but you don’t have to pay anything and there’s loads of little side chapels off the main cathedral part and I have one all to myself. And there’s a long bench with a blue velvet cushion and I’ve lined everything up along there—all the evidence, all the clues—the two photos of you from Dad and the ones from Nana Davis and the newspaper clippings of your dad and his boss and his boss’s obituary and the Carver book. And that’s everything—apart from the subway map on my wall in Coral Springs—that’s all there is.
And looking at all the photos lined up, even though I love the ones of us together, the one of you in Columbia is still my favourite because looking at this photo I know, I can be fully and completely sure, that what Aunt Ruth said was a lie.
I know she’s going to come into my room that night, that she’s not just going to leave me alone. I’ve been listening to all the sounds in the house, Cooper slamming the front door, his car starting, the squeak Laurie’s bed makes when she gets into it, the sound of her crying until she stops. Aunt Ruth’s been in the kitchen the whole time and I bet she’s cleaning up the juicer, throwing it away. I bet by tomorrow, there’ll be a brand new one on the granite counter in its place.
I hear her footsteps in the hall, my door opening.
“Rae?” she whispers from the doorway, “Rae, are you awake?”
I’m not asleep but I pretend I am.
“Rae?” Closer now. “I know you’re awake. I brought an ice pack, for your face.”
She turns on my bedside lamp and she sees my eyes are open. “Can I sit here?”
She gestures at the bed but I don’t scoot over to make room so she almost sits on my leg. Her eyes look tiny in her face and I’d forgotten that’s how she looks when she’s been crying, because I don’t think I’ve seen her crying since the night of the Viscount biscuits back in Rush.
She reaches out to my face with the ice pack and it stings. I push my head back into the pillow.
“Sorry, I know it hurts, but this will bring the swelling down.”
I let her hold the ice pack there, and, after a second, everything feels numb. She’s wearing a hoody, one of Cooper’s, it’s much too big for her. I’ve never seen her in a hoody before.
“I’m so sorry Cooper acted the way he did. He was very upset—but that’s no excuse. I want you to know that this isn’t the end of it.”
Now that my face is numb, I’m feeling the other pains, a throbbing in my stump, a deep ache in my back.
“It’s been a long night, and I know we need to figure out this situation with you and Laurie. I don’t believe it was all your fault, honey. We can talk more about it tomorrow.”
I look at her. I’m too tired to argue. “Okay.”
“And we need to talk about what Cooper said, about your mom.”
The pain is back in my jaw, through the ice, pulsing with my heartbeat. I clench my toes, all ten together, hold them.
“She didn’t kill herself.”
“Rae—”
“She didn’t.”
Her hand stops moving. Nothing moves. Only that’s not true because breath must have been moving in and out of us both, blood carrying oxygen around our bodies. But it feels like even that’s stopped too.
“Honey,” she goes, “please—”
“It was an accident. Dad told me all about it one Friday night, when we were eating raspberry ripple ice cream. He said that the sea was very dangerous, even if you were a good swimmer, and that’s why he’d never let me learn to swim.”
She’s sucking in her lips, like she’s holding her words back. I want to keep talking, because if I keep talking, she won’t be able to say anything.
“He explained about currents and I got confused because I thought they were the same as currants in scones, but he told me these currents were different. And I even asked Lisa’s mum about it, and she said currents could be dangerous, even for a good swimmer. She said Mum was in Heaven, with God. Looking down on me, keeping me safe.”
My voice isn’t my voice, it’s some kid’s voice. Aunt Ruth’s lips have nearly disappeared and she’s starting to cry.
I push her hand with the ice pack away. “Stop crying, there’s no point in crying.”
But she doesn’t stop crying. Her tears make shiny tracks on her cheeks and drip off her chin and onto the duvet and make circles of dark green on lighter green. There are four dark circles, five, seven.
“Aunt Ruth, there’s no need to cry.”
She shakes her head, wipes her cheek with her hand. “This is hard, honey, very hard—but I have to be honest with you, you have to know the truth. Your mom, she was a strong swimmer, she went swimming every day.”
I sit up in bed, as far away from her as I can. “I know, I know that—but you’re not listening, there were currents. And Dad said she was tired, she hadn’t slept.”
She folds her arms across her chest, pulls the extra sweatshirt material around her. “Did your dad tell you about the sleeping pills?”
The way she says it, she knows he didn’t tell me,
that I’ve never heard anything about sleeping pills. I want to swing my legs out of bed, to get up, to get out of the room, but she’s got me in a trap, the way she’s sitting, I can’t escape.
“They found the bottle on the beach, sweetheart, two days later, or the next day, I can’t remember. Her name was on it, it was empty.”
I know her faces, all of them—I think I do—but I haven’t seen her eyes like this, the black circles so big they nearly take up all the brown.
“So what?” I go. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
She reaches out to touch me again, but I push back into the corner.
“The bottle was empty, it means she took them. She took them, honey, before she went swimming that day.”
“No!”
I pull my legs up from under the covers, scramble up into a stand on the bed, towering over her.
“Honey, please.”
I step around her, jump down onto the floor. “That doesn’t mean anything. The bottle could have been empty already. You don’t know she took them.”
“Why would she have had them on the beach?”
“Maybe they were in her pocket. Maybe they’d been in the bin and they fell out when the binmen were collecting the rubbish and they ended up on the beach somehow.”
“Rhea, come on, that’s ridiculous—”
“No—it’s not! There’s a million reasons why the pill bottle could have been on the beach.”
As I’m talking, I’m trying to get away from her, as far away as I can, but the room is too small and I hit into the desk and knock over the penholder so the pens and pencils scatter on the desk, roll onto the floor.
“Rhea, slow down—”
“They never found her body, so they couldn’t do an autopsy. No one will ever know if she took the pills. There’s no proof. There’ll never be any proof.”
I’m trying to pick up the pens but my hand is shaking and I let them drop, leave them there on the floor. She’s crying again, I can’t watch her crying. I turn my back to her, so I’m facing your subway map, on the wall.
“Rhea, I know this is hard. God knows, but you have to listen to me, the truth is the only way to heal.”
The map is even more faded than it was in Rush. You can still see the crayon where I coloured in between the lines of the map when I was little and I hate that I did that, that I destroyed something you gave me.
“We have to talk about this, Rhea. You’ve got to trust me that I only want what’s best for you.”
I can see her reflection in the window, that she’s standing up from the bed.
“Why do we need to talk about it now when you weren’t bothered before?”
“It’s not that I wasn’t bothered, it wasn’t like that.”
I turn around, I want her to see my anger. “What was it like then? Tell me! Tell me why I should trust you when all you’ve ever done is let me down, lie to me.”
She’s crying more, I’m making her cry. Laurie will be able to hear all of this from her room, but I don’t care.
“I’ve tried my best, Rhea, I really have. I’ve never lied to you, I’ve always been honest.”
I make my voice high, mimic hers. “You’re welcome here, Rhea, I want you here. This is your home, we’re family.”
She’s taking baby steps towards me, her hands outstretched. “I meant that, I meant that when I said it, I mean it now.”
“Really? Is that why I heard you on the phone to Cooper one night in Rush, practically begging him to let me stay, telling him I’d end up in foster care if he didn’t agree?”
She pulls down her fringe, folds her arms. “I was just explaining the situation, Rhea. You weren’t meant to overhear that.”
I make myself laugh, like I don’t care. “I bet I wasn’t. I should have stayed in Ireland, in foster care. It’s got to be better than this.”
She’s shaking her head. “You don’t mean that.”
“Don’t I?” I point at my face, the part where the pulse of pain is. “I bet this wouldn’t happen in foster care.”
That’s when she sits down on my desk chair and covers her face with her hands, long fingers, nails shiny pink with a white rim that they call a French manicure. Her hair falls in front, like a curtain, still in shape even after everything that night and I’m remembering last week when she came home from her new hairdresser, how she admired it in the mirror in the hall and I’m wishing it was then, Mum, more than anything I’m wishing it was then.
When she takes her hands away, she looks at her fingernails, she doesn’t look at me. “Your mom was an amazing woman, Rhea. She was beautiful and funny and smart. She was my big sister.”
I’m not going to interrupt her, that’s one of the decisions I make. The sooner she tells me whatever lie she’s going to tell me, the sooner it’ll be over. I turn back to the subway map, so I won’t have to look at her.
“But she had—there was … a lot of darkness, Rhea. Stuff that happened in our family, stuff no one talked about.”
Usually red was my favourite colour, but on the map, yellow was my favourite, because it was the RR line. R for Rhea and R for Ruth. I remembered telling her that, showing it to her, on the wall of my bedroom in Rush, saying we could share it.
“I thought they’d made a big mistake at first, that maybe she hadn’t even gone swimming, that maybe she’d run off or something. But then they found her little pile of clothes, so neat, on the beach and that woman, walking her dog—Josephine Brady—she saw her, going in.”
I turn around before I can stop myself. “Miss Brady? Who lives by the school?”
Aunt Ruth glances up at me. “I don’t remember. She had a gorgeous Labrador puppy.”
Miss Brady has an old Labrador on a red lead called Sandy, she gets a bone for him every Saturday, along with her leg of lamb. I think this, but I don’t tell Aunt Ruth.
“There were so many people out looking for her, people in canoes and fishing boats as well as the coast guard. It felt like the whole of Dublin was looking for her. And when the police called around to your dad’s house, we thought they’d found her, that they had news, but they’d only found the pill bottle.”
I cup my stump. “That doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t make it definite.”
Aunt Ruth takes a breath, sighs. “There were other factors, Rhea, other things … ”
I don’t need to look at your map to see it in my head. I start with the A, at 207th Street, Dyckman Street next, then 190th.
“Without her body, nothing can ever be definite.”
181st Street, 175th, 168th Street—Washington Heights.
I bend down, pick up the pens, this time my hand isn’t shaking. I fix them in their holder, in front of Aunt Ruth. She stands up, pushes the chair back under the desk.
“It’s been a big night, a lot to take in. I’m sure we could all use some sleep.”
“Yeah,” I go, “I’m knackered.”
I walk past her, get into bed. I just want her to leave.
She stands over me, pulls the duvet up around my neck. “In a way, I’m glad things are out in the open; in a way, it’s a relief.”
She’s so close the strings of the hoody dangle down into my face. She strokes my jaw, really gently, and kisses me on the forehead.
“You’re probably exhausted,” she says. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow, properly. Just you and me. We’ll go out, maybe to Jaxson’s if you want? Talk about everything, okay?”
“Okay.”
She turns off the lamp and walks to the doorway, and she’s nearly gone when she stops, turns back. “Suicide is hard to accept, honey, no one wants to believe it. I didn’t want to either.”
She says that word like it’s any other word, like “strawberry” or “theorem” or “spaghetti.”
“Good night, Aunt Ruth,” I go.
She closes the door then, and I’m remembering the first time I heard that word, I think it was the first time, in the sitting room in Rush, on The Late Late Show. And Dad, jumping up, switching the telly off so hard it nearly fell off its stand. Bloody television’s gone to the dogs.
I lie awake, listening for ages to the silence of the house. There’s no noise in the darkness, everything is silent, silence from Laurie’s room, silence outside. I try and hear my heart but that’s silent too and I can’t hear my breath either and I wonder if I’m dead. And when I get up, I pack in silence, even the sound of my footsteps, past Laurie’s bedroom, past Aunt Ruth’s, they sound like nothing, they’re only shapes made out of silence, barely any sound at all.
R
Dear Mum,
I didn’t go there to see her—I’d forgotten what days she said she volunteered—I went there because I was hungry, because I don’t care what Sergei said about soup kitchens being full of down-and-outs and drug addicts, I’m just hungry. This hunger is different than before, it’s not only my body, it’s my mind. I’m thinking about food all the time—like all the time—going through what I can eat next, where I will get it. Even when I’ve just eaten, I’m thinking about eating again, even as I’m eating sometimes, I’m not even tasting the food, I’m wondering when I’ll have something to eat next.
It’s not until I get there that I realise it’s a church, she never said it was a church. There’s a queue, all the way around the corner and onto 28th Street, and I watch it for a bit from the little park across the road before I join. There’s a lot of men but some women too, girls, kids even. I imagine I might see Sergei, even though I know he’d starve to death before he’d admit defeat and come somewhere like this.
I’m waiting for the queue to die down but it doesn’t die down, only gets longer, so, after ages, I take my place at the end, behind a tall white guy with wispy hair that goes down over the collar of his suit jacket. An old man joins the queue behind me with his cart, pushes it into my heels by mistake and apologises. I’ve seen him before, in Grand Central. He smiles, looks like he might want to talk, so I look the other way.
How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? Page 20