How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? (39 page)

“Nothing.”

I look at her drawing, she's not covering it. There's a forest it looks like, two people, hand in hand, one big, one small, walking into it.

“Would you like to see my picture?”

“No.”

I push myself back against the couch. She leans forward, close to my drawing but not touching it.

“You have a lot of black in yours—what does it represent?”

“Jesus!” I kick my heel off the floor. “It's only a drawing, Jean. It's not like it means anything.”

Even as I say it, I know that's not true. It means something, I've always known that. I just don't know what.

She sits back, uncrosses and re-crosses her legs. “If you could find a word, just one word, to put on it—a title—what would it be?”

A word comes into my head really fast. “Lost”—that's the word. It's not a feeling, it is not one of her five, and I replace it with another word.

“Glad.” I smile. I make myself look glad.

Her hair is getting long, the bits of grey are curling down over the top of her ears now and she pulls one down, lets it spring back up.

“Glad? Why glad?”

I look at the picture and back up at her. “There's a boat under there. I'm glad I wasn't on it.”

“That sounds scary, being on that boat.”

“I guess.”

I think she's going to look at the drawing again, to see the boat, but her eyes stay on me. Dark brown eyes, different than your eyes, a different shape, too much white.

“What are you afraid of, Rhea?”

Rats. The answer is in my head and I feel my body tighten so I know it's the right one but I don't tell her, there's no point in telling her. Everyone's scared of rats.

“Here we go, I should have known it would come back to this.”

“To what?”

“Being scared. You're always going on about being scared—right from when I first met you. You thought I was scared of the water, but I'm not.”

“You're not scared of the water.”

It's a statement, not a question. I think it's a statement. “No. I'm not scared of the water. I'm not scared of being in the fucking boat. I'm not scared of you or of being fired or going back on the streets. I'm not scared of anything.”

“Okay. I get it. I hear you.” She's nodding. “You don't do fear.”

“That's right.” I nod too, she's finally got it. “I don't do fear.”

And we're out of time then, and I know she probably wants to keep the drawing so I take it with me, and after I've cleaned up after Arts and Crafts downstairs I rip it into tiny strips that I put in David's big stainless steel bin in the kitchen.

That's what happened today and I'm glad I'm writing it all down because I can see now that it's not you I'm mad at, it's her and her stupid tricks to try and get me to cry like some stupid baby. Just because she saw that stupid tear the first day she thinks she can do it again.

It would make no sense to be mad at you, it's not like anything's changed, it's not like anything between us can change. The reason you're gone doesn't even matter—whether you drowned or had cancer or got hit by a train or abducted by aliens or shot yourself in the head, the end result is just the same, the outcome, the consequences. You're dead. You weren't there, you're not here. The past is the past is the past is the past. It's over. I can't change it, no one can.

Jean would probably say it does matter. That's one of the most annoying things about her, that she'll hook on to anything you say and dissect it and peel it open until it becomes something else. Even that thing she said about fear—about me “not doing fear”—that's not what I said. I said I wasn't afraid and thinking about it now, “not doing fear” and “not being afraid”—they're different things, they're not the same thing at all.

Feelings, feelings, feelings, that's all Jean wants to talk about, she doesn't like it when I want to talk about facts, never asks me more about that. Sometimes I think being in Jean's office is the complete opposite of being anywhere else in the whole world. At school, the facts are what you need to pass exams, get into college, get a job. On TV—quiz shows, documentaries, even on
Law & Order—
it's all about facts, evidence, the facts are what gets the conviction and if there's not enough facts, the guy gets off.

Jean's full of it with all this feelings shit. Facts are more important, everyone knows that. Everyone knows that facts are what things all boil down to, that facts are what matter in the end.

Rhea

Dear Mum,

Amanda asks me to go to the beach with her after dinner. The movie tonight is
Free Willy
and I'd planned to watch it, but she's never asked me to do anything with her before, so I go, even though I'm not sure I want to.

The sand is wet, from the rain this afternoon.

“Want to sit there?” Amanda goes, pointing at the rocks.

“Do you want to go for a walk instead?”

She scrunches her nose. “We don't have too much time before it gets dark—we wouldn't get very far before we'd need to turn back, is all.”

I don't care about that, but I know she does and I don't want to get her into trouble. “Okay, we can sit on the rocks.”

We find a flat one, wide enough for both of us to sit on without touching. The sea is dark tonight, grey, not blue, with flecks of white for waves.

“I needed to get away from that house,” Amanda goes. “Sometimes, being around those kids all the time is too much, they make me crazy.”

“Me too. I thought I was going to strangle Maleika over dinner. The way she wouldn't stop snivelling about there being no cookies left.”

Amanda rolls her eyes. “I know, thank God Erin gave her hers, otherwise she'd probably still be crying about it.”

“She's really good with them,” I go. “I don't know how she's so calm all the time.”

“Well, she does smoke a joint in our room every night.”

Amanda keeps her voice serious and, for a split second, she has me, until I see her head dip into her breathy laugh.

“Shut up!”

“I had you there.”

“No you did not.”

“For a second, I did. I had you for a second.”

I sit back on the rock. It's hard to get comfortable. Amanda pulls her feet up, hooks her arms around her knees. “She was asking me the other night about boyfriends back home and stuff, and I nearly told her. But then I didn't because I didn't want to make her feel weird about sharing a room with me.”

I dig my heels into the sand, make imprints with my Docs. “You could have just been really casual about it, said you had a girlfriend, to see what she'd say.”

“I could, but that would be a lie, because I don't.” She rests her chin on her knees. “Do you?”

I shake my head. “Not now. I did.”

She sighs. “You're a step ahead of me. I've had drunken kisses and crushes—one huge crush on a girl called MacKenzie who I worked with in a record store. That's it.”

I picture MacKenzie in my head. She has tattoos and a pierced tongue. People call her Mac.

“Were the drunken kisses with MacKenzie?”

“Mostly they were with my friend Ellen, from middle school, but, yeah, once with MacKenzie. We went to some party after work once at one of her friends' houses. We drank ouzo.”

“Ouzo?”

She wrinkles her nose. “I know, gross. It was the only thing they had—I think the kid's parents had just come back from Greece. I don't remember too much after I drank it, except for this part where I was in the backyard by the garage and MacKenzie was kissing me, up against a wall.”

“She was kissing you or you were kissing her?”

She smiles one of those smiles that changes her whole face. “We're both doing the kissing but I'm the one against the wall. I was so mad at myself after, because I was so wasted I could barely remember the details, after wanting it to happen for so long.”

“Did it happen again?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“Did you ever talk about it afterwards?”

“Are you kidding? I don't know if she even remembered and I wasn't going to bring it up. We worked with each other for a few months after that, but she never asked me out with her friends again.”

When she says that, I know MacKenzie did remember, and I think Amanda knows it too. There's silence between us then, only the sound of the waves. She's the one who breaks it. “Tell me about your girlfriend, I mean, your ex-girlfriend.” It sounds weird, calling Laurie that. She was always Mike's girlfriend or Ryan's or Ben's, never mine.

“I don't know if she was technically my girlfriend,” I go. “I mean we had this thing for nearly a year, but she was dating guys too. She always dated guys.”

“How did you get together? Did you know her from school?”

I take a breath of the sea air, it feels fresh in my lungs.

“Laurie was my aunt's boyfriend's daughter. We lived in the same house.”

Dad used to say this thing about people's eyes being out “on stalks,” and when I turn to look at Amanda, that's what she looks like, her eyes big in her face. They change colour sometimes, I've noticed that, and today they look more grey than blue.

“Oh my God, are you serious?”

“Yep.”

She starts to laugh, dipping her head down, breath and the squeak. The story is almost worth it, to hear that laugh again.

“Holy shit,” she goes. “Did they find out?”

“Yep.”

“Holy shit.” She's still laughing and I am too and I think she's going to ask me about Cooper and Aunt Ruth finding out and I'm ready to tell her, only she asks me something else instead, something simple that I wasn't expecting.

“What was she like?”

It's getting colder now and the clouds are low against the horizon. It's getting towards dark, time to go in. I can end the conversation here, but instead I push my feet harder into the sand and think of words to describe Laurie.

“Pretty. She was really pretty. And smart. She could be very funny sometimes too.” I look down and I see I'm cupping my stump and I let go. “And she was manipulative and selfish and two-faced.”

“Whoa,” Amanda goes. “She was sounding perfect, up until that.”

I laugh. “I only found all that out after—although maybe I didn't, maybe I knew all along. She was one of these cheerleader girls, all the guys loved her. She was used to all that, you know?”

“The attention?”

“Getting her own way.”

The wind is getting stronger, blowing more of Amanda's curls out of her ponytail so they whip around her face. I have goose bumps on my legs, but neither of us move. I know what she's going to ask me next, before she asks.

“Did you love her?”

Of all the images in my mind of Laurie, the one that comes then is that first one, the time I saw her leaning at the front door, sucking the ends of her hair, one foot on top of the other. I want to be honest, I want to tell the truth.

“No. Maybe. I don't know. I thought I did, but it was all fucked up. The whole situation was fucked up.”

I think that Amanda is going to push me on it, to say it has to be one answer and not the other, but she doesn't, she only listens.

“If I did love her, I don't love her now,” I go. “I fucking hate her now.”

Amanda has a look on her face that I haven't seen before, one I don't know yet.

“Well, they say that hate is the other side of love.” She lets her feet slide down the rock, onto the sand, folds her arms across her body. “We should probably be getting back.”

We don't say much on the way back up the beach path and I'm thinking about Laurie, how weird it is that she's still sleeping in her white wooden bed and talking on the pink phone next to it and going to the mall. How it's fifty kinds of crazy that we can be so far apart and still breathing and existing and living. How you can go from being almost part of someone to just being nothing to each other at all.

Amanda's walking in front and I think about saying it to her, trying to explain what I mean, but it's not even making sense in my own head and I don't want to sound all show-offy about it, going on about Laurie when she's never even had a girlfriend.

We're almost back at the house when we see David coming down the steps.

“Hey, girls, enjoy your walk on the beach?” He checks his watch. “Good thing you're back before the witching hour.”

“Shut up!” I turn to Amanda. “Don't worry, he's only messing, he's not going to say anything.”

She smiles. “I know.”

“Listen, Rhea, hold on a minute, will you?” David goes. “I have some mail for you. I meant to give it to you earlier, but I forgot. It's a big old parcel, had to wait in line to get it, took me forever.”

Something happens then, to my heart and to my breath at the same time.

He smiles a cheeky smile through his beard. “What's up? You look like you've seen a ghost. Worried you can't keep up with all the fan mail?”

I clench my toes, unclench, smile. “I'm just shocked you bothered queuing, that's all—you're usually such a lazy bastard.”

He winks. “Ah, you know, I thought there might be something valuable in it, but there isn't, I already checked.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Hold on, I'll just get it from the van. Be right back.”

He jogs off, before I can tell him not to worry about it, that I'll get it tomorrow. Listening to his feet crunch over the gravel and around the corner, I remember Amanda is there, as if I'd somehow forgotten.

“You go on inside,” I go. “I'll wait for him.”

She has her hands in her back pockets. “It's okay, I don't mind.”