How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? (5 page)

Sergei is looking at me, chewing.

“We're supposed to be friends, Irish bullhead. We're supposed to be friends and you never tell me anything. I don't know anything about you.”

He emphasises the “anything,” twice he does. It's not a fight yet, but it's the cusp of one.

“Don't be stupid, Serg, you know all about me. What do you want to know?”

He shrugs. “I don't know. Anything. Everything. How did you get here?”

I cut up a bit of omelette and put it on my toast. “I got the bus. It took, like, twenty-four hours.”

He shakes his head. “I don't mean that, not just that. I mean, what happened to you? What happened to your arm?”

He gestures across the table, nearly touches my stump. I twitch away from him, I can't help it. To cover up, I sit back like I'm about to tell him the story but I know he has seen it, the twitch.

“Okay then, if you must know, it was a shark attack—there's not too many of them in Dublin, but—”

He curses in Polish and smacks his hand off the table. The waitress has just filled up the coffees and some of his slops into the saucer.

“Sergei—”

“No! No, no.” He holds up his palm. “Don't tell me anything else unless it's the truth. I'm sick of these bullshit stories. You think they're cute, but they're not. They're just bullshit. We're supposed to be friends, Rhea.”

“We are.”

“No.” When he shakes his head the curl at the front bounces a bit; he needs a haircut. “Friends are honest with each other. The other day you tell me your mother was from here and you want a private eye to find her. Yesterday, I ask where she lives now and you clam up, won't say a single word—”

“Sergei, come on—”

“I don't even know if it's true that she's from here or where you're from—this Florida story, this Cooper—it could all be bullshit, like this shark story—”

I get mad then, Mum. I can't help it.

“Like you always tell the truth? You're really twenty-one, Serg? Your parents are really coming over to visit you? When are they coming over?”

“I go to touch your arm and you pull away, like I have a disease. We're supposed to be a team, remember?”

My legs are jiggling under the table and my heart is going really fast. Part of me wants to run out of the diner and down Seventh Avenue so I never have to see Sergei again, but there's all this food on the table and I'll be hungry again in an hour, and all my stuff is at Michael's house. I know I should shut up, stop, but somehow I can't.

“It doesn't feel like we're a team when I'm stuck in Penn Station and you're hours late, having fun with one of your guys in some bar—”

His face has a red spot on each cheek. “Take that back! You think I want to do it? You think I enjoy it? I do it for money, Rhea. For you, for us.”

“Don't lay that on me, Serg—you could earn money in other ways. You told me you had a job before. You choose—”

He holds both his hands up now.

“No, no, no. I'm not listening to this.”

“Why not? Because it's the truth? Isn't that what friends do? Tell each other the truth?”

I don't know when I started shouting but I know that I am by then because people are looking. Sergei shoves his plate across the table, so it bumps into mine and makes a kind of ringing sound.

“The truth? Ha! Rhea, you couldn't tell the truth if your life depended on it.”

He's putting on his jacket, he's about to leave, but he's kind of delaying. If I stop, take back what I said, he'll stay. But I can't stop, not right then.

“Just because we're friends doesn't give you the right to know everything about me, Sergei.”

“Fuck you!”

He pushes himself out of the booth. The waitress has already left the check and he pulls Michael's fifty out of his pocket, throws it on the table.

“Sergei, what about your change? Wait for your change.”

“Keep it, you're going to need it.”

They nearly come then, stupid tears, pinpricks behind my eyes. He's not going to see me cry.

“What? This is it? The end of everything, because I won't tell you what happened to my arm?”

He shakes his head. “It's not about your fucking arm. You're so fucking stupid sometimes. It's about letting someone get to know you. About trusting.”

That's the last thing he says before he storms out the door of the diner. They're all looking at me, the waitress and the customers. They're looking at me like it's my fault and all I did was talk about the stupid photograph. He's the one that was in a bad mood before we even got here. He's the one that was probing and prying.

I wait to see him pass the window, but he must have gone the other way. My tummy feels all jangly, but I'm not wasting the food, so I cut up the rest of my omelette and put it on the toast and chew it and swallow it. And when I'm done, I eat the rest of his pancakes, his bacon. I even drink his coffee, which makes no sense because I can get a free refill on my own. That was hours ago, Mum. That was this morning and now it's 10:18 p.m. and I'm sitting opposite Michael's apartment, thinking Sergei's going to show up, only what if he doesn't? I haven't touched his $31 change, it's in the back pocket of my jeans and earlier when I bought a pizza slice I made sure to keep my own money separate.

My stuff is in there, Mum, I was so stupid. I left my backpack in there for the first time—the Carver book, your photos. Fuck Sergei, talking about trust—that was the first time I trusted we'd be going back there. All day the fight has been rolling around in my head, Mum. I don't know where I was right and where I was a bit wrong. Why does being friends with someone mean you have to tell them every single fucking thing about you? Why can't it be like with Lisa, when we were best friends because we were in the same class and she lived two doors down so I could call into her house whenever I wanted and eat the dinner her mum made? Tonight is Monday, they'll be having liver tonight and Lisa will be bitching and saying things like, “It's barbaric to make people eat things that make them want to be physically sick.” I didn't like liver either, but with enough ketchup it wasn't too bad, so I'd eat it first to get it out of the way and then enjoy the peas and mashed potato. Tuesdays were my second favourite day because we had homemade burgers. Wednesdays were okay, with pork chops, but Thursday was my absolute favourite because on Thursdays her mum made lasagne and garlic bread. Lisa preferred Fridays, when they had chipper chips from Joe's, but Dad got chipper chips loads of days, so they'd stopped being a treat.

I should have written to Lisa more, Mum. Aunt Ruth kept saying I could use the phone whenever I wanted to call her, and I don't know why I didn't. She stopped writing to me after a bit. In her last letter, she said she didn't think I was missing her at all, that I must have forgotten about her with my new life in Florida, but that wasn't true, Mum. It doesn't make any sense but writing to her, ringing her, made me miss her more and if I didn't do that it was easier not to miss her at all.

Sergei doesn't know what it's like, Mum, having everyone look at you and want to know what happened. It was different in Rush, I didn't have to tell anyone because everyone already knew—everyone always knew everything about you. So it wasn't until Coral Springs, until that night when me and Laurie were hanging out in my room and she asked me, that I ever told anyone.

I remember her eyes wide, having her full attention in a way I'd never had her full attention before as I told her about that day, how I was messing around, showing off to Lisa. How Dad had always told me not to play with the machine, but that I did anyway, that day. I didn't tell her why.

She asked me loads of questions—if it hurt and if I was scared. She asked me if there was a moment, right before it happened, when I knew it was going to happen.

I told her the truth, that night, most of it, nearly all of it. I went through the memory, frame by frame. There was no moment before it happened, I didn't think there was—it wasn't happening and then it was happening. One second I was reaching into the machine and I could hear Lisa saying not to, and the next the sound was so loud, way louder than when Dad did it. A sound that filled the shop, filled my head. I don't remember pain, not really, more like a pulling, something heavy, heavy pulling, pulling, pulling, pulling. And my head against the cold metal of the machine and Lisa's mouth was open, like she was screaming, only I couldn't hear her. I couldn't hear anything until Dad was there and then everything stopped.

When I was telling Laurie, I forgot she was even there, it was like I was telling the story to myself. I could see it all again, feel Dad's arms under me, so strong, see his foot kick the door of the shop open, hear his voice shouting, feel myself bumping against his chest as he ran out onto the street, first towards the harbour, before he turned around and ran the other way again.

Why do I have to tell Sergei that, Mum? Why do I have to tell anyone? He says it's about trust but why should I trust him? You can't always know if you can trust people, can you? I mean look at what happened with Laurie.

In the end, there's only one person I know for sure I can trust, Mum, and it's not Sergei—it's me.

Rhea

King Street, New York
27th April 1999
12:35 a.m.

Dear Mum,

I need to pee again. Jesus. I just peed half an hour ago, I couldn't need to go again. The worst thing about being on the street isn't the hunger or the cold or even the boredom. It's never having a toilet around, having to pee outside sometimes. I did it in Rush before, with Lisa, down by the beach the night we'd been drinking some of Dad's beers, but it was funny that night. It's different here, on your own, in an alley where anyone could come in and when you know there's rats hiding behind the bins.

Thank God I got my period when I was in the Y, that will be a nightmare when it comes. I should have another two weeks before I need to worry about it, although you never know. You could time your watch by Lisa's period but mine's never been like that. Mine comes when it feels like it.

I'm going to hold my pee longer, until they come. I don't want to see those fucking rats again. I keep trying to remind myself that rats are only animals and I love animals, but it doesn't work. I still fucking hate them.

One time on the way home from school, around the time Lisa got her period, she starts this whole conversation, bitching about her mum and what a control freak she is and how nosy she is and what a bitch she is. And then she says something else: “I wish my mum was dead sometimes.” She says that part all casual, scuffing her shoe along the side of the path, like she's just thought of it.

“Don't say that,” I go.

“Why not?”

“You know why not, it's not true. You'd miss her.”

She turns to me, her hands in her pockets. “You don't ever seem to miss yours, though. You've always just had your dad and that's that. And he doesn't nose around in your business.”

She's right, but she's not right too. I shrug. “He can't cook, though.”

“Mine can't either, but we could get chips. And pizza. Have sandwiches. It drives me mad, having those same dinners every night of the week. You and your dad get on just fine.” My dad is way more fun than Lisa's dad, and we both know it. Lisa's been there when Dad puts on his Hendrix records, his “happy music.” She's even seen the dance he does to “Stone Free.” “Stone Free” is his favourite Hendrix song ever, the first song that he ever wrote. It was a B-side to a song called “Hey Joe” in 1966, but it was released as its own single in 1969. Dad tells me this every time he's taking the record out of its sleeve. I watch him carefully drop the needle onto just the right place and try and imagine 1966, 1969—Dad being my age.

When I look at Lisa, she has that face on, the one she always has before she wants to ask a question.

“If you had a choice, that you could have your mum back, but it meant your dad had to be dead, what would you choose?”

I laugh. “That's a stupid question.”

“If I could only choose one of mine, I'd choose my dad, I totally would.”

I don't like Lisa's question, but it's like a hook inside my head. It makes me think about the night me and Dad played “Stone Free” seventeen times in a row when the O'Loughlins were banging on the wall and Dad bangs back, in time with the music, and tells them to “go fuck themselves” and I'm scared but then I'm laughing too, and afterwards he finds some vanilla ice cream in the back of the freezer under all the ice and makes a Coke float for me and a Harp float for him.

When I think of happiness then, I think of that night, Dad's face streaming with sweat, his smile. But thinking about that night makes me think about the next morning, when I want to do it all over again, but he won't—he won't get up or open the curtains or do anything all day nearly, and I don't know what I've done to make him so sad.

Lisa nudges me with her elbow. “Come on, it's only hypothetical, it's not like it matters.” We're almost at Billie's shop, where Aisling Begley and Alison Ryan are standing outside eating Mr. Freezes. She wants me to answer before I get there.

“It's a stupid question, Lisa. Of course I'd choose my dad.” That's what I tell Lisa but, in my head, I say something else, Mum, something she doesn't hear, something no one does except maybe God, if there is a God.

If you want to know the truth, in my head I chose you, not Dad. Are you happy now? I made a big mistake and chose you. And I got what I deserved—fucking no one.

Rhea

King Street, New York
27th April 1999
2:12 a.m.

Dear Mum,

How many letters can I write in one night? I'm sorry about earlier, that was stupid. I know Dad's car accident on the way home from the Drop Inn was nothing to do with that thought in my head and everything to do with the pints he had before turning on the ignition, but I feel like I'm going crazy sitting here, waiting outside this apartment. I thought maybe I missed them earlier, when I went to pee again or when I fell asleep for a second, but there are no lights on upstairs or anything, so I don't think they're back.