How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? (25 page)

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.

At the gate, we're handed a ticket and we have to wait until other people come out before we can go in. And standing there, waiting, I think about the poster with my face on it, about how this is just the kind of place Aunt Ruth might put up a poster like that.

People come out and it's our turn to go in, but my feet won't take me through the gate. I'm imagining it inside, a poster of me on a notice board, Aunt Ruth standing next to it. I'm holding up the queue and someone behind shouts out to move it. I don't know what to do, but I have to do something, I'm hungry and I have to eat and there's food in there, you can smell the food every time the door opens. I put my head down, follow the others towards the door where there's another guy collecting tickets. I'm getting close to him, I see his shoes, Caterpillar boots.

“Hey,” he goes, when I hand him my ticket. “Is that what I think it is?”

I don't know what he means, but I'm ready to run.

“You think we allow Red Sox fans in here?”

When I look up he is smiling, he has nice eyes. He points to his baseball cap—a Yankee one like I used to have—and I realise that's what he's talking about, my cap. I try and smile back.

“Enjoy your lunch,” he goes.

Inside there's another queue, this time in a tiny corridor. It's hot and we're closer to the smell of food. My mouth fills up with saliva and I don't know if that's because I'm hungry or if I'm going to be sick. A woman is coming the other way with a walkie-talkie. She says hello to people as she passes. She stops right at me and my heart starts beating, really fast.

“Excuse me,” she goes.

“I have a ticket!”

She smiles. “I know, I just need to get into the office there.”

She gestures at a door that I hadn't seen, next to where I'm standing.

“Sorry.”

She jangles keys in the lock, turns back to me. “Is that a Scottish accent I hear?”

“Irish.”

“Irish, yes, now I hear it,” she says. The walkie-talkie crackles. “Enjoy your lunch—it's meatballs and spaghetti today, it's really good.”

Ahead of me, people are starting to move, the man with the wispy hair is already a few tiles in front of me

“Thanks.”

I don't know what I'm expecting, Mum, but after all the queues and corridors I was not expecting the space to open up as big as it did, for the whole inside of the church to be taken up with round tables and chairs like the parties that Cooper sometimes catered. There's people on one side, handing out trays of food and a drink, everyone smiling, everyone saying to enjoy our lunch. I've lost the wispy-haired man in front of me and I feel lonely all of a sudden, like I wanted to sit next to him. I don't know where to sit, so I walk over towards the huge organ, towards a table where there are two free seats. There's one other woman at the table, an old lady, eating slowly. She's wearing a cardigan, a nice watch. She's not someone I thought would eat somewhere like this. A young guy sits down in the other empty seat straightaway.

I barely even notice all the different things on the tray, just start eating it all, the meatballs and the spaghetti and broccoli and bread. I want to slow down, but I'm too hungry to eat slowly so I just keep eating and eating until it's gone. And it's only then I remember to check for any posters of me, but there aren't any—there aren't any posters of anyone.

The young guy next to me has already finished and is getting up to leave. He hasn't eaten his apple and he sees me looking at it. “You want it?”

“Okay, thanks.”

It's on my way out that I see her, the woman from the meeting, at the table by the door in a white hat and apron, her grey hair tied back in a ponytail. I'm going to walk by, I'm pretending not to see her, but she sees me and starts waving.