How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? (4 page)

He's still on his knees, he has the money in his hands. When he looks up at me there are red spots on his cheeks.

“So, if it's not that you're afraid, why not? Why not just take it?”

“Because it'll be gone by the end of the week. We'll blow it all on some hotel room half the size of this apartment. A thousand dollars doesn't last long in New York City, dumbass.”

Dumbass
. Laurie used to call me that. I've never called anyone else it before. He stands up slowly, blows his fringe from his eyes. He's still angry but he's listening to me as well.

“If we play our cards right, we can stay here in this apartment every weekend, maybe even during the week too. That's worth way more than the money. You know that.”

What I'm saying is true and Sergei hears it. I don't say anything about the photograph, I can't let him know I saw the shine in his eyes. He takes out two fifties from his back pocket, lines them up properly against each other.

“Maybe you're right, Irish bullhead,” he says. “Maybe you have a point.”

He puts all the notes back, one by one. Smoothes them, lines them up, and folds them inside the clip and puts the clip back inside the hood of the Florida State sweatshirt.

“You're the smart one, Irish bullhead. You're the brains, I'm only the pretty face.”

He sticks his tongue out and I stick my tongue out and that means things are back to normal, nearly normal. We get into bed again, leave the last drawer unchecked. He rolls over so I can't see his face but I can hear what he says.

“You know I was only joking about you being a coward. You know I didn't mean it.”

“I know. I'm sorry if I hurt your arm.”

He fell asleep straightaway. Sergei can sleep anywhere, we joke that he can sleep standing up. But I lie here and I can't sleep. I'm back on the beach in Rush, the sand squishy cold under my toes at the edge of the water. It doesn't get deep for ages and I walk out really far before I have to stop because the bottom of my shorts gets wet. The others are way out. Susan Mulligan and Paula O'Brien are the furthest, specs above the sparkle on the waves. Lisa is closer in, with Aisling Begley and her sister, and their voices carry over the water, their laughter does.

I want to be with them, but I don't want to be with them. I know I can't. I don't know why except Dad always says it's the most important rule. And I know that the rule has something to do with you.

Rhea

Central Park, New York
26th April 1999
2:25 p.m.

Dear Mum,

When I was a little kid and New York came on the telly, I'd sit up extra close to the screen so I wouldn't miss anything. I wanted to see everything, to hear all the sounds. I wanted to climb inside the TV so I could smell it. Today, New York smells like sugar and grease and some kind of car-fumy smell all mixed up together. Sometimes Florida smelled like car fumes too, and parts of it smelled like the sea, but different from the sea in Rush.

Did you like it, living in Rush? If there was a scale and New York was at one end, Rush would be at the opposite one. You couldn't find places more different. I don't just mean because it's quiet and a village, it's the flatness too. Rush is as flat as New York is tall. Rush is the flattest place in the world compared to New York.

I bet you wouldn't have stayed if you hadn't got pregnant with me. I did the maths, Mum, you got married in November and I was born in May. Would you still have married Dad if it wasn't because of me?

Since I've been here, I can't stop thinking of all these questions I want to ask you—it feels like a million questions every hour, but that can't be true because I read somewhere that humans only have 70,000 thoughts a day and something like half of them are the same thought, over and over. But it feels like a million, all questions, questions I want to ask you.

What is it like to drown?

Shit.

The first Sunday in Coral Springs, me and Laurie are sitting watching
Baywatch
, waiting to go for lunch and I'm thinking that I've never once seen an episode where someone actually drowned. I'm about to say this to Laurie, but she speaks first.

“How do you say your name again?” She's on the cream couch, her bare feet pulled up under her. I'm on the brown leather chair, my feet are on the floor in my Docs. Aunt Ruth has already been going on about sandals. Laurie doesn't look at me, her blue eyes are still on the screen even though the ads are on now. If there'd been anyone else in the room, I'd think she must be talking to them, but there's only me.

“Rhea,” I go. I say it again. “Rhea. When I was a kid I used to get slagged about it.”

“Slagged?” Her eyes flick over.

“Take the piss—you know, make jokes.” I pause. “They used to call me Diarrhoea.”

She makes a face. “Gross.”

I don't know why I tell her that, except that I wanted to say something, maybe I think she might even laugh, but she doesn't laugh. Maybe I want to say it first, before she can. I look down and I'm kneading my stump. I let go. Her eyes are back on the telly, I don't think she noticed.

“No one seems to know why my mum called me Rhea. It wasn't a name in the family or anything. She must have liked it, but I always wished she'd called me something else.”

She pulls a strand of her hair, starts to chew it.

“So change it.”

The show is back on. David Hasselhoff is grabbing that orange plastic thing and running towards the sea. I'm watching him but remembering being little, saying my prayers at night, praying I'd wake up with a new name like Sinead or Emma or Amy. But in the morning, I was always Rhea.

“What? Just change my name? Just like that?”

She shrugs. “A girl in my grade changed her name from Victoria to Tori.”

“That's shortening a name—not changing it.” I laugh a bit, so it doesn't sound like I'm disagreeing with her.

“Shortening it would be Vic or Vicki. Tori sounds different, it just uses some of the same letters.”

“But I only have four letters in my name. There's not enough to shorten it, never mind make up a new name.”

She doesn't answer and I think that's the end of the conversation. She adjusts her legs so she's sitting cross-legged, her feet turned upwards on the back of each thigh.

On TV, another lifeguard has joined David in the sea. A girl is screaming for help, going under the waves. As I watch her, I am scanning through possible variants of my name but none of them make any sense.

At the ad break, Laurie stands up. “I've seen this one before.”

She throws the remote control at me without any warning so it bounces off my thigh and hits the cabinet next to me, making a crash before it falls on the floor.

“What about Rae?”

I've bent down to pick up the remote so I can't see her face as she says it. When I turn to look at her, she's already on her way out the door.

“Ray? That's a boy's name. Anyway, I don't have a ‘y' in my name.”

“R-a-e, dumbass. The girl's version.”

She doesn't look back, so I can't see her face, but writing this now, I bet she was rolling her eyes.

I think about it all day, the new name, say it over and over in my head. Rae Farrell. Rae. It sounds kind of cool, different. Rae doesn't rhyme with diarrhoea. I like the short, crisp sound of one syllable. Rae. As we sit having lunch, I tune out of Cooper's story about the famous actor who came into the restaurant because I am imagining what Rae Farrell would order, what she would say. I never get to that part though because when I look up they're all looking at me, and I realise I forgot to laugh at Cooper's punchline.

Later, I want to ask Aunt Ruth what she thinks while she's emptying the dishwasher. I offer to help but she says no, even though I offer twice. I stand by the patio door looking at the garden, the darkness of the grass, the pool an oblong of blue light.

“Did you ever think about changing your name?”

Her back bends and straightens as she unloads, piling white plates on the black marble counter.

“No,” she says, without skipping a beat. I wait for her to ask why I am asking, but she doesn't, she just carries on stacking plates into the open cupboard and then bends over again.

“A lot of people do.”

“I wouldn't.”

She wipes the inside of the casserole dish with a tea towel and bends down again for the knives and forks, looks up at me through her fringe. “Why?”

“Nothing,” I go. “No reason.”

The next day is the first day at school and I know what to do, have thought about little else all night. The school bus stops at the end of the road and two other girls get on ahead of me and Laurie. I let her go first and I keep my eyes on her ponytail swinging down her back, so I don't have to see everyone looking at me. Halfway down the bus, one guy says something to his friend and they both laugh. I've already passed them but I walk back to their seat, stare at them. The one who made the comment has fifty thousand freckles that leak into each other like a big tea stain. The other one is smaller, afraid looking. They snigger for a second, then stop. I want to get my stump and shove it in their faces. I want to ask them what their fucking problem is and if they've never seen someone with only one arm before—only they probably never have seen someone with only one arm before.

I assume that Laurie and me will sit together, but there is a girl with dark shiny hair under a white baseball cap who waves and slides her bag from the seat and Laurie sits down without a backward glance.

I walk on. I don't care. This shouldn't hurt more than the sniggers, but it does. What did I expect? It's not like she's my sister, and even if she was, we wouldn't sit together. Most sisters hated each other, didn't they? Lisa always said her sister was a moody cow. It wasn't a good time to start thinking about Lisa. Four rows behind Laurie, there is an empty seat next to a girl with long red curls. I sit down. She turns around and I wait for her to tell me it is taken, but instead she smiles to show a mouthful of braces.

“Hi, I'm Glenda,” she says. “What's your name?”

“Rae,” I say. “Rae Farrell.”

And that's how it starts—how I start—in Florida. I'm Rae Farrell. No one cares, no one asks, no one knows any different. I'm embarrassed that night, saying it at home, in case Laurie thinks I changed it because of what she'd said, but she barely looks up from her meatloaf and Cooper smiles wide and says he thinks it sounds great. Only Aunt Ruth frowns and says she preferred it the old way, but after a while even she calls me Rae most of the time too.

So for nearly two years now, I've been Rae, Mum, but—and I don't know why—ever since I got to New York, I feel like I want to be Rhea again.

I told Sergei my name was Rhea, from the start, and that's how I've been signing these letters. For some reason I can't explain, I feel like maybe I made a mistake. That maybe I should have been Rhea all along.

Rhea

King Street, New York
26th April 1999
9:12 p.m.

Dear Mum,

Even if I don't get the photos of you back, I can still see them. They live in my head, those photos, they are etched onto the backs of my eyelids. I can still see you in Columbia, smiling, on Rush beach in your sunglasses. I know every speck of those photographs from looking at them so much. I don't know why I spent so much time looking at them. It's not as if I don't know that photographs are lies most of the time, fake snapshots of a moment when everyone smiles and pretends they're happy before they go back to not smiling or not talking or snapping at each other, or whatever they were doing before.

That's what I said to Sergei over breakfast this morning, that's what starts everything.

“Photos are lies, most of the time. You know that, don't you?”

He's just taken a bite and he chews for a minute before he answers.

“What are you talking about?” he says. A bit of food lands on the table between us. It looks like egg.

He's in a bad mood—I can tell by the way he hacks his pancakes up into any old shape, instead of slicing them longways like he usually does. He didn't smile at the waitress or move his menu out of the way when she went to put down the water. Earlier when Michael offered him money for breakfast, he snatched it out of his hand and didn't even say thanks.

I know it's about the photograph, the one of Michael and his family. I think it is, but if I say that he'll get in a worse mood. I want to tell him that Michael sleeping with him means he's gay, no matter what the photo says. But I can't talk about the photo, so I talk about another one instead.

“I was just thinking about the day after I arrived in my aunt's house and we all went out for this stupid welcome lunch for me. It was so awkward, we had nothing to say to each other. And just at the end, Cooper got the waiter to take a photo of us. And we're all smiling like we're so happy, like we're not all dying for it to be over.”

Sergei rips a bite from his bagel. “Who's Cooper?”

“My aunt's boyfriend.”

“This was in Ireland?”

I shake my head. “Florida.”

“Florida? When were you there?”

“I lived there, with my aunt. For two years nearly.”

“I thought you came from Ireland.”

“I do come from Ireland. I lived there my whole life before Florida.”

I focus on my omelette, trying to swirl the runny cheese around my fork. Telling Sergei about the stupid photo makes me picture it—the frame on the low white sideboard in the living room, my stupid smile, my hair still long, my black-check shirt in between Laurie's yellow top and Ruth's pink dress. The photos around it were all of Laurie: Laurie in the pool in a rubber ring, waving at the camera; Laurie and Cooper and Minnie Mouse at Disney World. I didn't know anything about Laurie's mum then or why she wasn't in the photos. But even then, I knew I wanted to line up all the photos of Laurie and chart her childhood, to see when it was her hair changed from white to blonde, when her smile went from being her whole face, to only part of it.