Rhea
Dear Mum,
I hate Jean, you know that? I fucking hate her. She has it in for me—she’s had it in for me since I got here. It’s not my fault. Aunt Ruth would say I’m being paranoid, but ever since that first day, that first meeting, she hasn’t liked me.
It’s typical that she’d be the one who found us. I didn’t see her in the dark, almost walked right into her coming up the beach path. Robin’s really sleepy by then and she wants me to carry her again, but she’s heavy and my arm is sore from carrying her earlier. She’s only just started crying when we run into Jean, she’s only just told me that she’s scared of the dark.
It doesn’t help that I scream; it’s not that I’m scared, I get a shock, that’s all—the way she’s suddenly there, out of nowhere. It takes me a second to see who it is and once I know it’s her, I feel sick, like I might throw up right there on the sand. I think she’s going to interrogate me, start shouting, give me a lecture, but she doesn’t do any of those things, just scoops Robin into her arms and hurries up the path with her. I follow them, into the house, up the stairs. On Robin’s floor, Jean turns and tells me to go to bed and that we’ll talk later.
That’s all she says, but her eyes say more than that. All day, it’s hanging over me, this talk, and I don’t eat anything at breakfast or at lunch either. The first time in the whole day I’ve forgotten about it for a split second is when I’m on the deck with Zac and Amanda, and Zac is kidding around, imitating the way Erin looks at David and saying she totally has the hots for him.
Jean comes up from behind me and I see Zac’s face change before I hear her voice. “Zac, the wind is coming up, can you go and tidy up the cones on the beach and wrap up the volleyball net?”
He jumps down from where he’s sitting on the railing. “Sure, yeah. I’ll do it now.”
Amanda stands up too. “I’ll go help. Unless you have something else for me to do, Jean?”
It’s Amanda’s break time, so she totally just wants to hang out with Zac. Jean ignores her and turns to me. She has her Oakleys on so I can’t see her eyes and that makes it worse.
“Rhea, come upstairs with me, please.”
I’m supposed to be doing Arts and Crafts with Winnie in a few minutes, but I don’t say anything because I know she knows that too. And I bet she knows it’s my favourite part of the day, that’s what I’m thinking as I follow her up the stairs for the second time in twelve hours.
She stands by the door of her office, closes it after me. Even though there is no air conditioner it’s fresh in the room because of the cross wind from the open windows and the fan. There’s a desk with books and papers all over it, and the papers are flicking in the breeze.
“Sit down,” she says.
There’s three places to sit—a basket swing chair that hangs from its own frame in the corner, a long, low, battered black leather couch, and a brown corduroy chair opposite it. I’d love to sit in the basket chair, but instead I pick the couch. It’s one of those weird ones, with the back too far back to be properly comfortable so I have to lean forward. I’m dying to pee.
She takes the corduroy armchair, puts her Oakleys on the glass coffee table between us. Her eyes look bigger than ever and I look down at my Docs.
“So, you know what this is about.”
Behind her, there are shelves, packed tight with books but messy. They’re not in the right order, tall skinny ones towering over short thick ones. There’s even some lying flat on top of other books.
“What do you think you were doing, taking Robin down to the beach in the middle of the night?”
On top of the shelves, there’s a photo, a black and white one of a black woman. She’s wearing glasses and looking to the side, towards the edge of the photo frame. From her mouth, she’s blowing a line of smoke, only I can’t see a cigarette.
“Rhea—look at me. What the hell were you thinking? You know the rules. What would make you take Robin out of bed, in the middle of the night, and bring her to the beach?”
Jean leans forward in her chair, puts her elbows on her knees. Sitting like this, you can see she’s chubby, nearly fat. “This is a fireable offence, Rhea. If you don’t want that to happen, you’d better start telling me what’s going on.”
She has scars on her cheeks, faint but you can still see them, acne scars like David Flood back in Rush. They make her look young. I can’t tell what age she is but I can tell she’s getting madder by the way her jaw clenches. “Okay, have it your way. There’s a train at five. David can drive you to the station—it gets into Penn just after eight.” Her eyes hold my eyes. She said that on purpose, Penn Station, to make me picture it, those corridors, that night with Jay. She nods to herself, even though neither of us has said anything. “Okay then. I’ll go tell David.”
She stands up, heads towards the door. It’s only when she has her back to me that I say anything.
“I couldn’t sleep, that’s all. I hadn’t planned on getting Robin, but I heard her crying from the landing.”
She turns around but she doesn’t sit down, stands behind her chair. “First of all, you’re not allowed on the beach by yourself after it gets dark. Second, you never, ever, take the kids anywhere on your own—anywhere—for any reason. Especially not at night, especially not the beach.”
She counts her points on her fingers and she’s on her third finger even though she’s only made two points.
“Did you read the handbook? It says clearly that no counsellor is to remove a child from the house without authorisation. Do you remember how much I talked about that?”
She waves her arm in the direction of the desk, where there must be a copy of the handbook, under all her mess. Every question makes the white part of her eyes even bigger. She’s firing me, she’s decided already, it doesn’t matter what I say.
“Do you know how many people drown on these beaches every summer, Rhea? Do you know how quickly it can happen?”
I don’t know if she’s expecting me to answer all her questions, but I don’t say anything. In my head, I’m planning what to take, packing my backpack. I’ll leave Winnie’s Converse behind, to show I don’t care, but I’m going to take the Walkman.
“Robin could have drowned, Rhea. Did you think about that? If you’d fallen asleep and she’d wandered into the sea. You can’t swim. You wouldn’t have been able to save her.”
She walks around the chair, sits down again. Over her shoulder, there’s a piece of bare wall, just the right size for your subway map, and I look at that instead of at her. I can picture the lines, don’t need the paper they are printed on, can remember all the stops, the layout. I start with the A, at Inwood, 207th Street, and I’m at 59th Street, Columbus Circle, when Jean stops talking. I see her looking at my fingers, and that’s when I notice they’re moving against my thigh, drawing a line along the ridge of my shorts. I stop. She sits back in her chair, pulls her feet up underneath her. When she talks next, her voice is softer. “Rhea, where did you go just then?”
I put my arm across my chest, my hand under my stump. “What do you mean?”
“What’s going on? Why were you up in the middle of the night?”
She’s looking at me, like her eyes can see everything inside my head.
“If you’re going to fire me, just get on with it. Just fucking fire me.”
She looks at me but she doesn’t say anything and I clench my toes inside my Docs. “Rhea, what are you scared of?”
It’s a stupid dumbass question and I laugh, sit back on the stupid low-backed couch and cross my leg, so my Doc is on my knee.
“You think it’s funny?”
“I’m not scared of you, if that’s what you think. I’m not scared of you firing me and being back on the streets. I’ll be okay, I was okay before.”
An image comes into my mind, before I can push it away. The night I was
peeing opposite Michael’s apartment and that rat was there, the horrible rat that shuffled out from behind the bin and made me pee down my leg.
She keeps looking at me, like she can see the rat in my head too, like she can see Aunt Ruth’s letter in my back pocket, the paper getting hot and damp in between the denim. It’s like she knows, but she couldn’t know, she’s only pretending.
She threads her fingers through her toes. The soles of her feet are light underneath, like Robin’s feet. Last night, we measured our feet up against each other, heel to heel on the beach.
“I don’t want to fire you, Rhea, but the safety of every child depends on us all following the rules.” Her voice has changed again, into her preachy one from the meeting. “Robin was in danger last night.”
I slam my foot back down on the floor. “She was fine. I’d never let anything happen to her.”
“I see that you care about her, but you can’t make up your own rules. She’s been through a lot, she needs consistency to feel safe.”
Robin felt safe last night on the beach with me, I know she did. If I leave now, who’s she going to show her drawings to? Who’s going to make sure Marco or Isaac doesn’t take her muffin from her at breakfast, like they had on that first day?
“I’m sorry, Jean.” I say it low, don’t look at her. She’s watching me, waiting for more. She has all the power, she’s always had all the power. “I know what I did was stupid. If you let me stay, I won’t do it again. I swear.”
She stays really still, watching me; the only thing that moves is the paper, blowing from the fan.
“You say that, but they’re only words, Rhea. How do I know I can trust you?”
It’s not enough, my apology, whatever I say to her will never be enough. I can stand up now and never have to see her again, never have to try and sleep in that stuffy room that smells of Winnie’s feet. I feel my legs flexing, but then I think about Robin, can feel her leaning back into me, both of us looking up, counting the stars. I take a breath.
“I know I made a bad call. I won’t do it again. I find it hard to sleep sometimes and I was just getting up to have a banana muffin, I swear. And then when I heard her, I thought she might like some too. I planned to put her back in bed before I went down to the beach but she kept crying every time I tried to leave her. The only way she stopped was when I said she could come with me.”
“She was crying when I found you.”
“She’d only just started, I swear. She was fine up until then.”
There is a plant on the third shelf, with green tendrils that go down low and out of sight. It’s a fern, some kind of fern, but it reminds me of the spider plants Lisa’s mum used to have all over the house that would grow as far as the floor and grow little spider plants.
“So what would you do differently, if it happened again?”
She’s not going to send me home, maybe she’s not. If I say what she wants to hear, parrot the handbook, word for word, maybe she’ll let me stay.
“I’d check in to see if I could comfort her and get her back to sleep. If I couldn’t, I’d wake Erin. Or if for some reason Erin wasn’t there, I’d wake Gemma or you.”
“Okay,” she goes, nodding. “Okay.” She stands up, walks around behind her seat. I stand up too. “But this is your last chance, Rhea. One more thing like this and you’re out. Got it?”
“Yep. Definitely. Thank you, Jean.”
She’s in between me and the door. I look at the clock on the table, like I only just saw the time. “I should go and help Winnie with the end of Arts and Crafts. She’ll be wondering where I am.”
She steps out of the way and I walk past her. I think about saying sorry again, but that would be overkill. I have the door open onto the landing when she catches me. Her last sentence is like a line of tripwire. “You can tell Winnie you won’t be helping her with Arts and Crafts anymore, from tomorrow.”
When I turn around, she isn’t looking at me. Instead, she’s picked up a little jug and she’s watering the fern.
“Why not?”
She walks over to another plant I hadn’t seen, on the window ledge behind where I was sitting. She plucks off a leaf tinged with brown. “You can do the set-up and the clean-up, but in between you’re going to spend some time up here with me.”
Arts and Crafts is my favourite part of the whole day. She knows it is and this is how she’s going to punish me.
“What about Winnie? She can’t do it on her own.”
She laughs, pulls off another dead leaf. “Winnie’s been doing it on her own for years. She’ll be fine.”
I should have just said “okay, no problem” and walked out of there. I know I shouldn’t ask her why she wants to see me, what she wants to talk about, but I do anyway. “Why?”
“Because I want to get to know you better. I want to make sure I know what’s going on with you, so we can avoid anything else like this happening again.”
“I already told you—”
“Rhea, you told me before that you understood the rules, you even signed a contract saying that you’d abide by the rules here, remember? I’m going out on a limb for you here and I need to keep an eye on things. I need to know that you won’t let me down.”
I should have let her fire me. I’d be packed by now, David would be driving me to the train. Maybe I could have taken Robin with me.
“Do I have a choice?”
She waits a moment before she answers. “We always have choices, Rhea. You can see me in the afternoons and stay here, or you can go home.”
She says that on purpose, the word “home.” She knows as well as I do that I don’t have one. She might think she’s the queen of manipulation, that she has it all figured out, but I can play at that game too.
I smile a big smile. “Okay then, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I leave then and I run down the stairs and I don’t give her a chance to answer me or say anything. And over dinner and afterwards, it’s like I’m there and I’m not there, because some part of me is going over it all again, wondering if I did the right thing, as if I’m two people and one of me is already back in New York, switching subway lines, going one direction and then another, playing my game.
And when we’re sitting down for the movie and Amanda’s next to me, she makes a joke about “schmozzle” and she has to say it twice before I get it.
“Oh yeah,” I go, and then I laugh, but any dumbass can tell it’s a fake laugh.
“Is everything okay?”
When I turn around, she’s frowning.
I nod, clear my throat. “Yeah, everything’s fine. Why?”
She pulls her necklace back and forth. “I don’t know. I guess you just seemed miles away, is all.”
And right then, right when she says that, I wish I was.
R
Dear Mum,
There are loads of things I want to write to you about, but there’s hardly any time to write here. The big thing I want to tell you is that me and Winnie have made up. We didn’t make up in the way they do on television, with everyone sitting down and talking and listening to each other and hugging at the end, but I’d call it making up because we’re talking again. Normal talking, not fake.
It happened last night, when I came into the bedroom after putting the kids to bed and she’s there already, crying. I want to walk out, pretend I didn’t see her, but it’s too late because she looks around and sees me. She takes her glasses off, wipes her tears with her thumbs. I sit down on my bed, opposite her.
“Is everything okay?” I go.
It’s a dumbass question, I know it is, but I don’t know what else to say.
She nods her head. “It’s fine, I’m fine, everything’s fine.”
“Okay.” I smile but she can’t see me because her eyes are closed.
“It’s just that … Melissa’
s due today, that’s all.”
She opens her eyes and starts to cry again. There’s tissues in a box on the window ledge and I hold them out for her and she takes one. I take a breath, ask her what I know I need to ask her. “Is everything okay with the baby?”
Winnie sniffs. “I don’t know. When I called, there was no answer and she hasn’t called back. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Inside my Docs, I unclench my toes, even though I don’t remember clenching them. “I’m sure she’s grand, Winnie. I’m sure it’ll all be grand.”
I have no idea if she’ll be grand or not, I don’t know anything about Melissa or about childbirth and I’m not clairvoyant, but hearing me say that seems to make Winnie feel better and she smiles at me, her first proper smile in ages.
She nods again. “Thanks, Rhea, I’m sure she will be too. It’s just very painful for me not to be able to be there, for her to be keeping me at arm’s length. I just want to be with my daughter, that’s all.”
As she’s talking, I take Aunt Ruth’s letter from my pocket, smooth the envelope out on the bed. I’m getting ready to show it to her, part of it. I want her to see the bit about Columbia.
“But you wouldn’t be able to anyway,” I go. “Even if she wanted you to, so maybe it’s just as well.”
Winnie blows her nose. “If my daughter wanted me there, Rhea, if she called me, I’d be there, no matter what.”
She keeps blowing for ages, doesn’t notice me fold the letter back up, put it into my pocket again. And after that, she stops crying and she’s asking me about my day and telling me she misses me in art class, but even though it sounds fine on the outside, inside it feels different and I’m all jangly, like I’m waiting for her to say something else. After we turn the lights out, I can’t sleep, and all I can think about is what I’m going to do if Winnie leaves. All night, I’m lying there, thinking about that, and sometimes I feel like I’m going to cry and sometimes I feel like I’m going to jump out of bed and shake her awake and shout at her and maybe even hit her and sometimes I feel nothing at all.
I must have fallen asleep because when I wake up at 5:07 it’s bright out already and I get dressed and go down onto the beach. The sea is different than the other morning—big rolls of wave instead of flat glassy water. The wind blows against the back of my head and my hair feels longer than I like it to feel and I wonder who’s going to shave it for me if Winnie leaves.
How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? Page 27