How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? (8 page)

Laurie makes it pretty obvious that she didn't want me on the team, even to try out. She ignores me in the changing room, gets dressed and out of there as soon as she can. I don't care. I'm only doing it to get Aunt Ruth off my back. I think my shite play will be enough to keep me off the team, but I didn't count on the whole team being shite.

The heat is a killer and I think my lungs are going to explode every time I chase the ball, but I keep chasing, keep tackling. At home, the boys on the road called anyone who couldn't tackle a chicken—just like you were a chicken if you couldn't do a wheelie or climb up the O'Neills' wall and jump from the end of it onto the roof of the McEvoys' shed. So what if you fell? Bruises, stitches, even the time I fractured my collarbone, all of that was better than being chicken.

So I tackle everyone that day, even the tall, fast ones with bouncing ponytails—especially them. I can't keep up with them, but I stand in their way. I kick for the ball and I don't care if I kick their legs, if we get tangled up together and we both fall. After Jane Friedman goes off with her knee bleeding, the coach calls me aside and says I need to tone it down, that sliding tackles aren't allowed. I tell her I don't know what a sliding tackle is, that I'm only playing the way I used to play back home. She hides her smile. She likes me, I can tell, and I know I'm going to make the team.

Afterwards, me and Laurie are the last ones waiting in the car park because Cooper's late.

“Dad, where are you?” she says for the billionth time. “God, I can't wait to get my driver's licence.”

“We could walk,” I say. “It's not that far.”

“Walk?” She makes a face. “You're kidding, right?”

She sits down on the kerb, stretches her legs out in front of her. After a minute, I sit down next to her.

“Who are this team we're playing on Saturday?” I go. “Do we have a good chance?”

She pulls a strand of her hair into her mouth, sucks it. “You're not seriously going to play on the team, are you?”

At first I think she's joking, but there is no laugh, no smile. Before, I wasn't sure if I wanted to play. Now I am.

“Why wouldn't I play?”

She turns away to face the gate, rests her chin on her arms.

“Um, maybe because you can't run three feet without almost having a heart attack.”

It makes it worse somehow, that all I can see is the back of her
head when she says that, and it takes me a second to reply.

“It's fucking hot, Laurie! It takes a while to get used to the heat—”

She whips her head back around. She looks angry, she is angry.

“Does it take a while to get used to the altitude too? Is that why you kept falling over?”

“Just because I wasn't afraid to make tackles—”

“You call those tackles? You spent more time on the ground than on your feet! You've no technique, you—”

I pull my legs in to my chest, wrap my arm around my knees. “Technique? Like you'd know technique if it hit you in the face! I saw you out there—you're not exactly Ray Houghton yourself.”

I know she doesn't know who Ray Houghton is and that she won't ask. She taps one runner off the other.

“You know Coach only put you on the team because she feels sorry for you?”

She's looking right at me to see my reaction. My insides react before my outsides. I feel something boiling, gushing up. I want to grab a fist of her hair, I want to smash her head against the concrete, over and over until there is blood. I shouldn't say that, I know I shouldn't think it, never mind write it down, but that's how I'm feeling when I see Cooper's car nosing through the gate.

She stands up, smiles at me.

I grab my bag. I can't pretend I didn't hear her, I can't say nothing. My heart is pounding and I hope she can't hear the echo of it in my voice.

“Why do you hate me so much, Laurie? What have I ever done to you?”

Cooper pulls up in front of us. Laurie's still smiling.

“I don't hate you, Rae—or Rhea or whatever you're calling yourself today. If you want to know the truth, I don't really think anything about you. I don't have an opinion at all.”

She gets into the front seat, next to Cooper. He's too preoccupied with some late delivery at the restaurant to notice that we're fighting or that my cheeks are flaming red. But later, when Aunt Ruth comes in to tell me my music is too loud, I think she knows.

“Rae, can you lower that? We can't hear the TV.”

I turn it down.

“Don't you have any other music? You must have played that song ten times in a row.”

It's 4 Non Blondes' “What's Up.” I've played it eight times.

“Sorry,” I go.

She's nearly out of the room when she turns back. “Is everything okay?”

There's a second, a split second, where I could have told her. I think about telling her, but tell her what? Anyway, she doesn't want to know, not really. She wants to get back to watching her show.

“Everything's fine.”

After that, I put on my headphones and play the song nine more times, seventeen altogether. But even after playing it over and over and over, I still can't figure it out: why Laurie having no opinion of me is worse than her hating me. Why her not even thinking about me is the worst, the absolute worst thing of all.

Your daughter,
Rhea

830 Park Avenue, New York
28th April 1999
9:12 a.m.

Dear Mum,

I got excited writing the address at the top of the letter because you'd have written letters with that address at the top too! Not that I'm inside, I'm at the corner writing this, sitting on a little railing, but I still have a great view of the entrance and of everyone coming up and down the road, so I can see Sergei when he comes. Although I don't know why I think he's going to come, since he never showed up at Michael's last night.

Your entrance is the nicest one on the block, I think it is, with the awning set back so much further than all the other awnings and the little trees in pots lined up at either side. I walked up as close to the door as I could, but there were two doormen on the other side of the glass and I turned back again as soon as I saw them. One of them has come out four times, to get taxis for people, and he has a fancy uniform with gold buttons. Seven other people have left the building, apart from the taxi people, but three of them had dogs with them and they went back in again.

I still can't believe Michael wouldn't let me in last night. I knew they were home, because the light was on, but no one answered until I held down the buzzer with my thumb for ages. When Michael finally picked up, he sounded like some whimpering kid, telling me to leave him alone and that Sergei wasn't there. He wouldn't pick up again, wouldn't tell me where Sergei was. It was raining and I got soaked through, sitting on that step across the road. He's an asshole, Michael. I'm still wet and my throat feels like I swallowed razor blades. Maybe Sergei was right, maybe we should have taken his money.

Twenty minutes ago, this old lady on a cane comes out of your building with the doorman and I imagine it's Nana Davis, let myself believe it's her. I only ever met her once, the time she came over with Aunt Ruth and had the fight with Dad because he ruined the teddy bear she brought me by accidentally burning a hole in it with his cigarette. I can't remember what she looked like, all I can remember is the black charred circle in the teddy's ear and the smell of burning fur. This woman could be her, I'm able to pretend it's her until the doorman hails her a cab and says “Have a good day, Mrs. Silverman” as she gets into it. Then I can't pretend anymore.

Aunt Ruth has no photos of Nana Davis in her house, or of you, or of Granddad Davis. Is that weird? I think it's weird, especially with all those photos of Laurie, but maybe it's only because Cooper's the snap-happy one. She never talked about Nana Davis either, except when I asked her, and even then she hardly said anything, only that she was in a nursing home. That might have been a lie, about the nursing home. People tell lies more than they tell the truth. That's one of the things I've learned in my seventeen years and 351 days on this planet. If you were to ask me what it means to grow up, I'd say it was learning to spot the lies.

This is a list of things that people do when they are lying:

1. They buy themselves time before they answer the
   question you asked them.
   
2. They say too much or they say too little.
   
3. They laugh at things that aren't funny.
   
4. They don't look you in the eyes.
   
5. They change the subject really quickly to something else.
   

I don't know if this list should be longer, there might be other things, but these are the things I know so far. I also know that lies can be things you don't say, things that you leave out on purpose to make the person think something different. That's the way Aunt Ruth usually lies, but she tells real lies too, like the time she told me about your favourite ice cream flavour.

We're in Jaxson's after one of my prosthetic fittings. That's Aunt Ruth's way of pretending me getting fitted for a prosthetic is fun, by letting me choose where we go for lunch afterwards. It drives her crazy that I always pick Jaxson's instead of some fancy restaurant along Las Olas. Every time she asks me, “Where would you like to go for lunch, Rae?” all smiley, I smile too and say “Jaxson's!” and she tries not to let her smile go wonky. I pick Jaxson's because I love the ice cream sundaes and the monkey outside and the piano that plays itself. I also pick it because she hates it.

This day isn't the first fitting but it's not the last either because I don't have the stupid hulk of plastic strapped to me yet. I order a cheeseburger and fries and a hot fudge sundae and a Coke just like I always do. Aunt Ruth always orders the Cobb salad and this day, just as the waitress walks away, Aunt Ruth calls her back and orders a waffle for after, with peanut butter ice cream and whipped cream.

“You never order dessert,” I go.

She shrugs. “Sometimes I do.”

“I don't think I've ever seen you eat peanut butter ice cream. I didn't think you knew peanut butter ice cream existed!”

She laughs, picks up a knife, cleans it with her napkin. “It used to be my favourite. Every summer on vacation, we used to go to this old-fashioned ice cream parlour called the Candy Kitchen. I'd always get peanut butter.”

“Where?”

She puts her knife down, straightens it.

“Long Island.”

The waitress brings my Coke and Aunt Ruth's seltzer with lime. I hold the straw in my hand and pull the paper off with my mouth, the way I always do.

“Where in Long Island?”

Aunt Ruth takes a second too long to answer. “Bridgehampton.”

“Did you always go to the same place?”

She takes a sip of seltzer, squeezes the lime into it. “Yes, we stayed in a house there.”

“Was it your mum and dad's?”

“No. We stayed with Daddy's boss and his wife. It was their house.”

She stirs her seltzer with her straw, is about to say something else, but I talk next.

“Was that Cal Owens?”

She can't keep the shock out of her voice. “Who told you that?”

I think of the man with the smile in the wheelchair and I think about lying, but I don't. “My mum had a newspaper article about him and your dad in her things.”

The waitress is at the table again. She places the burger down in front of me with a red basket of fries. Aunt Ruth's Cobb salad is giant.

“I'm looking forward to this,” she says.

I've never heard her say she's looking forward to it, and it's something about her saying it that makes me ask what I ask next.

“Did they have kids?”

She's putting the dressing on the salad. She doesn't look up but her hand pauses.

“Who?”

“Cal Owens and his wife?”

She laughs, dumps on the rest of the dressing. She never uses all the dressing. “No. They didn't. This salad looks really great today.”

“Did you like going on holidays with them?”

She puts down her knife, fixes her fringe. She smiles. “Yes, of course. Daddy always said Uncle Cal and Aunt Annabel were more like family than his boss and his wife. They lived in the apartment upstairs from us. The penthouse.”

I don't know why she's lying, Mum, but I know she is. And then I ask something else, a question that needs a sudden and immediate answer.

“What ice cream did my mum get? In the ice cream parlour—what was her favourite?”

“Her favourite?”

She scrunches up her face like she's trying to remember, looking up at the glass lightshade as if it's written there. I hold my burger but I don't bite it yet. She looks back down into her salad, cuts it with a knife and fork.

“Strawberry,” she says to the salad.

Strawberry is my favourite flavour, on its own I mean, not in a sundae. If I'm going to have a scoop of ice cream on a cone or in a cup, I'll always pick strawberry. Aunt Ruth knows it's my favourite, has started to stock the freezer with low-fat strawberry frozen yoghurt to stop me buying the proper ice cream at the mall. I want strawberry to be your favourite too, I really do, but I don't want it to be a lie.

So I decide to tell my own lie, just to check.

“That's funny. Dad always said chocolate was her favourite. He used to tell me that she always went for that, that she'd never get anything else.”

She blinks, smiles, blinks again.

“You know what? Now that you mention it, I think he might have been right. I think she went through a phase of strawberry, but, yes, chocolate, chocolate was her thing. She always loved chocolate.”

I take a bite of my burger. I chew it slowly. She cuts up her salad and starts to talk about the barbecue her work is planning and how she's hoping that Cooper can leave the restaurant early to be there and that Laurie and I don't have a soccer game.