How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? (23 page)

“I'm not wearing this.”

“It's not a fashion parade, Rhea.”

“I look stupid.”

“You could never look stupid, you're much too lovely looking. Don't you know you're getting to be the spit of your mother?”

He's never said that before, anything like that, and I can't see his face because he's looking down, rolling the sleeve up over my stump. And after that he walks a bit ahead of me, over to the dirt path, where there's only a tiny fence between us and the cliff edge with the sea crashing against the rocks below.

He stops, looks out at the sea. “It'd take your breath away, wouldn't it?”

“Yeah,” I go. “It's gorgeous.”

It's a view but it's more than that—the wind, the salt in the air, the colours of the sky. It's a view but it's a feeling too.

He turns to look at me. “I knew you'd love it. When I woke up this morning, I wanted to give you something special
…
something beautiful for your birthday
…
” He stops, folds his arms. “Something you'd always remember.”

His face is wet and I don't know if the tears are real ones or from the wind. It hits me then, there's no runners, no card. He'd forgotten again, he only remembered this morning.

“I'd love to have money to be able to buy you nice things, love, beautiful things. But this, this is something I can give you. This is something I can afford.”

He holds his arms out, to the sea, to the cliffs, to the whole of the misty horizon as if it is mine now. And I know I shouldn't care about the runners, that this is more important. I tell myself that I'll grow out of runners, that by Christmas I'll want different ones, but this, this will always be here.

“Thanks, Dad, it's the best birthday present ever.” I want to mean it.

He puts his arm around my shoulder and we stand like that, the two of us, with the wind blowing our hair, my skirt, the waves beating the rocks so far down below us we can hardly hear the crash.

His hand around my shoulder tightens.

“Your mother loved it here too. I took her here once. We hadn't planned it. We did the same as we did today—just took off one morning, drove and drove until we got here.”

I time my breaths to the sea, in and out, and every time I breathe out, the waves hit the rocks. I want him to tell me more, I know there is more, but it's too easy to stop him, to break it without meaning to.

I ask the question on an out breath. “Was that before you were married?”

He shakes his head, stares at the sea. He's here but not here, he's seeing the sea but something else too, he's seeing you.

“After. She was expecting you at the time.” He doesn't look at me. “She'd had a bad night—hormones and that, you know. I thought coming here might help lift her.”

He swallows, his Adam's apple bobs above his shirt.

“Did it?”

The wind finds my uniform skirt and slaps it around my knees. I think he pulls me closer to him then, or maybe I just want him to.

“We parked where we parked, walked just where we're walking now. It was colder that day, an icy wind, no one in their right mind would come here on a day like that and I thought I'd made a mistake, because she was shivering so badly, but then she turned to me and she smiled, that smile. She'd such a gorgeous smile. And she thanked me. I remember that, she thanked me.”

It's the most I've heard him say about you in years. I wait for more.

“I'll never forget what she said. ‘Thank you, Dermot,' she said, ‘thank you for showing me beauty today. For reminding me.' ”

The tears are definitely real now, not from the wind. The one from his left eye rolls faster, over the redness of his cheek, reaching the grey-brown stubble, while the other tear is blown along the side of his nose. Maybe I should be crying too, but I'm not. Because even though I want to know, even though I'm always asking about you, right then in that one moment I want it to be just the two of us, not with you in between. And I want him to be happy again, without either of us making him sad.

He laughs then, a loud, sudden laugh. “I told her that if she needed to be reminded of beauty all she had to do was to look in the mirror, but she gave me a dig in the ribs and told me the reason she'd married an Irishman was so she wouldn't have to hear lines like that.”

His face is crinkled, smiling, and I try to picture how he would have looked thirteen years ago, more. In my mind, I make his wrinkles go away, his hair grow back, thicker, make it all brown instead of faded and grey.

“Want to lie on our bellies and look over the edge?” he goes suddenly.

“What about the fence?”

“There's a gap up ahead, I can see it.”

He lets go of me and the wind catches underneath his long jacket and my skirt, blowing them up and out in front of me. He's bounded ahead along the path, has found the space where the gap is.

“Come on, Rhea, don't stand around being Marilyn Monroe!”

I don't get it at first and then I do and I laugh and run after him. He's waiting for me at the gap and he's right, it is wide enough for us both to get to the edge. He gets down on his knees and then his tummy, pushing himself over the grass and bits of rock. I do the same, but the stupid jacket holds me back, getting caught underneath me. Near the edge the grass is thicker and I grab on to a bit of it to help pull me forward.

“Look it,” he goes. “Long way down.”

I shuffle forward over the last bit, right up to the edge. The grass is in my face, but I hold it down with my hand. At first my eyes look out, towards the outcrop of rock where the gulls are flying in a circle, but then I look down, all the way down the cliff face, over the lumps and bumps and seams of rock where the birds are nesting and down and down again to the swish of blue and white that's the sea below.

“I can't see the waves crashing properly,” I say.

“It's because we're not far away enough to get perspective. We're almost on top of them here. Sometimes, you've to be far away to get a good view.”

“Did she like the view?” I go. “Mum, I mean.”

“Ah, yeah. She said she loved seeing the Atlantic from the other side. She said it was the most beautiful place she'd ever been.”

“She said that?”

“She did. And she'd travelled, your mam had, all over the place. I never knew what she saw in a fella like me, years older than her who hadn't moved an inch from the place he was born and reared.”

He laughs a bit, like it's a joke, but something in the way he says it makes me think that maybe it's not a joke, that maybe it's something he's been trying to figure out for a long time.

“When you were here with Mum, did you do this?”

He looks at me and I can tell he's really seeing me, not seeing some version of you.

“Were you listening to the story at all? She was pregnant with you, remember? Do you really think I'd have let her anywhere near the edge?” He laughs a proper laugh this time and I laugh too, because it was silly to ask that and because even though I wasn't the first one to come here with him, this was something we were doing together for the first time, something he'd never done with you. And he reaches out and puts his hand on my back and I can feel the warmth of it, the heaviness, seeping through the quilt of the jacket and through my school jumper and my shirt underneath it, all the way into my skin.

And it doesn't matter then that there's no runners, no card, that I'm in my school uniform and his big jacket. It doesn't even matter that I mightn't be home in time for Lisa's mum's dinner or the video. None of that matters, because we have this moment, me and Dad. And lying there with the wind in our faces, and his hand on my back, that's enough.

Rhea

Dear Mum,

I'm not dating these letters anymore. I know that you're supposed to, so the reader can place you in time or whatever, but no one is reading these anyway and, living like this, time doesn't make sense. It's not like when I was in Rush, or Florida, when you have a day, then sleep, then there's another day. Now, it's like one big long lump of time when I'm asleep, then awake, then asleep again, awake again, and not much of anything happens in between.

Because I'm not counting time anymore, I don't know how long I've been sitting here, looking at this fountain. It feels like a long time, it feels like I can't move from here. I know that's not true—I can move, I just don't want to. Moving will cost me something—money or energy and I don't have much of either. In my pocket, there is $4.36—not enough to even bother putting any in my sock. The rest of Michael's money is gone—it doesn't matter how I spent it, only that it's gone.

Last night, I found more of Aunt Ruth's posters, six of them, on lampposts along Broadway. It was late and quiet, as quiet as New York is ever quiet, and I took them down, all of them, and now they are in my backpack, squashed in next to the Carver book and these letters and the photos in the blue packet and everything is getting crumpled and damp and I think of everything I hate. I might hate that most of all, that there's nowhere to put anything.

The posters started at 86th Street, she's targeting uptown, towards Columbia, and maybe it's risky being here at this fountain, because it's near Columbia, but it's not part of it, so I think I'm safe.

After ages of looking at it, I can't decide if I like it or not—it's kind of ugly with a scary-looking moon and a giraffe and the devil but there's something I like about it too. And I'm sitting here, wondering if you liked it or not. I'd been thinking about that for a while, but when I walk around it there's the little plaque that says it's here since 1985 and after all that wondering I know you never even saw it—that you never will see it—and something about that makes me want to fucking cry again. Laurie would say that's dumb, getting sad over some fountain that I can't even decide if I like and she's right, it is dumb, but it makes me sad and who cares what Laurie thinks because sometimes I'm allowed to be sad, amn't I? People are allowed to be fucking sad. The plaque says that the pedestal is shaped like a double helix of DNA and I think my brain is on a go-slow because I hadn't even noticed that and I should have because we just finished doing DNA in biology. I liked learning about DNA, because they always use DNA to catch criminals in
Law & Order
. And DNA explains how things are carried through your genes; eye colour and hair and whether you can roll your tongue or have an ear for music. DNA is about family.

Around the side of the fountain, there's another plaque, one I wish I didn't see because it has the words of the song “Imagine” on it and “Imagine” makes me think about John Lennon and John Lennon makes me think about Dad. And right when I was trying not to think about Dad, these English guys are by the fountain taking pictures and they're talking about Spurs and that reminds me of Dad too, and right then, just as they are talking, the cathedral bells start, really loud, and you're not going to believe this but they are the same tune as our doorbell in Rush, only slower and louder.

Three Dad things, just like that. Bam—bam—bam. Memory bullets. Only they must have missed my heart, because I'm not the one who's dead.

Those cathedral bells are still going off. Four chimes down, then four back up, like walking down stairs and climbing them again. If everyone decided not to bother with time, we wouldn't need bells like that, or alarm clock buzzers or anything. The world would be quiet, no sound at all.

The chimes sound exactly the same as the night the doorbell rang when the guards were at the door.

The first time they ring, I'm asleep, but it wakes me and I'm not sure if I imagined it. My clock says 5:13 a.m. and it's nearly bright outside because it's the end of May. I don't know how I know that Dad's not home yet, but I know. The second time, I'm looking out my bedroom curtain and I see the police car, right outside the gate. The third ring is when I am getting dressed, the buttons on my Levi's take me longer but I want to be wearing them and my Hendrix T-shirt, I don't want to answer the door in my pyjamas. I don't have time for my Docs and the fourth ring is when I'm on the stairs and I must have been walking really slowly because I remember the carpet at the edge of each step being kind of burny against my foot. There are two of them, on the other side of the glass, in the porch. One has his face squished up close, his hands on either side, peering in, and he must see me because they don't ring the doorbell again.

The other thing we learned about DNA is that it can replicate itself. Each strand of it is like a blueprint, to make new cells, and that's what gives us new layers of skin when we peel in the sun and why our cuts heal and our hair grows. I bet it won't be long before scientists will be able to replicate people using DNA. It might take ten years, Mum, maybe twenty, but it won't be long before that happens. Sometimes I think it's scary and I hope it never happens and sometimes I wish it happened before so someone could have replicated you and you'd still be here instead of just in these letters that you never answer.

You never answer these fucking letters.

She's dead, dumbass.

They're nice, the guards, I feel sorry for them, especially the younger one who can't really look at me and just holds the back of his neck with one hand the whole time. The older one does all the talking. He sounds like something off RTÉ news. He says that there were no other cars involved, that Dad was fatally wounded and for a minute, I think that that means he's not dead, but he is dead. I offer them a cup of tea because that's what people on the telly do. They won't take it, and they ask how old I am and when I tell them I'm sixteen since last week, they say they've to stay with me until someone else can come and is there anyone I can ring. I hate ringing Lisa's house in the middle of the night, but I ring anyway. It doesn't even cross my mind to ring Aunt Ruth.