How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? (35 page)

She doesn't say anything for a second and it's kind of nice with just the sound of the sea, the wind. And then she goes and spoils it.

“You don't have to wear Docs and shave your head to be a lesbian, Rhea.”

She sounds like Jean, the way she says that, like I'm some stupid dumbass child. I think about Tierney from the AA meeting and her red shoes.

“I know that, Amanda. I'm not stupid.”

“Okay,” she goes. “I know. I'm only saying, is all.”

The awkwardness is back and she must feel it too because she checks her watch, beeps something. “I'd better get on, it's getting late.”

She runs off before I can say anything else and I don't know why, but it's like she's mad at me. I can see it in the shape of her body, the way she tilts slightly from side to side as she bounces along the sand. And I don't want to watch her this time so I look out at the kite surfers instead.

She must be running faster than the other day, because by the time I look back, she's around the bend already. And it's confusing, Mum, because I thought we were at the start of becoming friends and now it's like we're fighting and I don't know why.

I wish things didn't change so fast, Mum, people I mean. I wish things stayed the same sometimes, even for a while, but they never do. Laurie, Sergei, Winnie, now Amanda, just when you think you know where you are with someone, it all turns upside down a second later and there's nothing you can ever do about it.

Not one single thing at all.

Rhea

Dear Mum,

Jean is out of her mind if she thinks I'm going to be able to do this every day all summer—sit and talk to her for an hour. A whole hour. You'd think it'd be easy just to talk about any old shit but she does this thing where she looks at me, like she can penetrate inside my head and excavate my fucking thoughts or something. I can't believe people pay money, hundreds of dollars, for this crap. Imagine if instead of everyone spending money on therapy, they gave their money to homeless people? They'd probably feel way better than they do talking about their problems for hours and there'd be no one sleeping in Penn Station. Unless the therapists all went broke and they ended up homeless. Which would be kind of ironic, if you think about it.

Today, I sit on the couch again, even though I want to sit in the hanging basket chair.

“You can sit in the swing chair if you want.”

I haven't even looked at the chair—I hate how she knows what I was thinking.

“What?”

“The swing chair—sit in it if you want. The kids love it.”

It's easy to see why. Apart from the fact that it swings, the seat part is shaped like a cave, a cave made of wicker. You could hide in that cave, burrow back into it. And right when you didn't want to answer her questions, you could swing it around the other way.

“No, I'm grand, thanks.”

She's poured us both a glass of water, and she picks up hers, drinks some. “That expression has always confused me.”

“Grand?”

“Yes—what does it mean, ‘grand'? I don't think we use it the same way.”

I shift on the couch.

“It's just another word for ‘fine.' ”

She smiles. “In therapy, we try and get to feelings. ‘Fine' isn't a feeling. My supervisor taught me that if a client tells you they're fine, you ask them if they're fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.”

She takes her Oakleys from where they're holding her hair back, puts them on the table next to the water. She thinks she's so cool wearing those and her Quiksilver T-shirt, just like she thinks she's cool using words like “fuck.”

“Great, robust, adept, natural, dynamic,” I say. “That's what I mean by ‘grand.' ”

She's wearing dangly shell earrings that match her bracelet. She pulls on her left one.

“It could also stand for: grieving, raw, anxious, numb, and depressed.”

“Or grounded, real, assertive, nimble, and dexterous.”

She's quicker this time. She must've been working it out in her head. “Not glib, reluctant, arrogant, narcissistic, and despairing?”

Before she's even finished I jump in. “Glad, resilient, adaptable, noble, and determined.” I watch her watching me and I think she might go again, so I line up another one in my head: gracious, regal, appreciative, dashing. The N is hardest but then I think of nice, neat. This is fun. I can easily fill up an hour like this.

“You're a very smart girl, Rhea. You know that, don't you?”

I make a face.

“You don't think so?”

“At home, if you agreed with someone saying something like that, people would think you were a spa.”

“A spa?”

“You know, an asshole. A dickhead.”

She nods. “I get it. Where I'm from people don't toot their own horns too much either.”

“Where are you from?”

It's the first question I've asked, and she doesn't like it. I can tell by the way she leans forward to take a drink of water before she answers. “New York. Harlem. It's the upper part of Manhattan.”

“I know where it is. Harlem runs from 110th Street to 155th Street,” I go. “The most famous street is 125th Street, where the Apollo Theatre is.”

“You know a lot about Harlem.”

“I know a lot about New York.”

As soon as I say that, I wish I hadn't, because I think she's going to ask more about that but she's a dumbass because she doesn't notice and asks about Ireland instead.

“You said ‘at home' earlier—you meant Ireland?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me a bit about Ireland—where you're from. Is it very different from the U.S.?”

I shrug. “No, not really. I mean it is in some ways, in other ways it's the same.”

“Tell me some of the ways it's different.”

I look at the clock on the wall, we're not even halfway through the time yet, but I can fill up the rest talking about America and Ireland. I take a breath, start talking as if it's a list.

“Americans wear the American flag on their clothes all the time; in Ireland you wouldn't be caught dead doing that unless it was the World Cup. The World Cup is football by the way, only you'd call it soccer.”

She drinks a bit more of her water and puts it back on the table.

Every time she does, it makes rings on the glass. My glass stays where it is.

“America's got people of all different races, but in Ireland everyone's white, nearly everyone is. The only time you ever see people who aren't white are when you order Chinese or something. That's another difference—in Ireland the only takeout food is Chinese and pizza, and fish and chips, but here you can get Korean or Thai or Mexican or Indian. And when you get pizza in Ireland, you have to order a whole pizza, not a slice. And we call pizza a “pizza,” not a “pie.” And we say “take away” not “take out.” Oh and the portions are way bigger here, which is why everyone is fatter.”

She raises her eyebrows. “A lot of differences—you talked about food a lot.”

“No, I didn't.”

“Yes, you said that Ireland has no Mexican or Korean food, and that the portions are bigger here and about the pizza.” She leans on her hand and tilts her head, keeping her eyes on me.

She's no idea what a cliché she is with her thoughtful expression and her bullshit questions, how easy it is to tell her everything and nothing at the same time. “Is food something you think about a lot?”

“No more than most people.”

She lets the words hang there. We both know that there is no way I can know how often most people think about food.

“When we talked about Robin, you said you got up to get a muffin—”

“She was hungry!”

“—and now food comes up again.”

“I thought we'd been through this stuff with Robin—why are you bringing it up now?”

“It just seemed interesting, this theme of food. It made me wonder if you always had enough to eat at home when you were a little girl.”

Her voice is soft, silky. This is where she wants to lure me in, to make me lose my cool.

“Of course there was enough food—the Famine was nearly two hundred years ago.”

“Did you always have your meals at the same time?”

It flashes into my head then, a picture of me standing on the chair taking the Jacob's cream crackers from the back of the cupboard, two triangles of cheese, a jar of jam.

I blow my breath like I used to do to get my fringe out of my eyes, even though I don't have a fringe anymore. “I can't remember.”

I don't know when that was—I've never even liked jam—but I remember putting it under my bed, along with the crackers and the cheese, sliding over to the part where the dust was thickest against the wall. It was good to know it was there, just in case. In case of what?

“Did you ever get up in the night to eat? The way you and Robin got up to eat the muffins?”

I'm standing up before I know I'm going to stand. “You keep saying it's not about Robin, but you keep bringing her into it! It was only two stupid muffins!”

She stays sitting down, looking up at me.

“If you're going to fire me over it, I wish you'd just fire me.”

“No one's getting fired. We're only talking.” Her voice sounds softer than before. “Rhea, take a breath.” She breathes in, really loud, and out again, Darth Vader breaths. “Sit down, Rhea. It's okay.”

Standing, I see a stereo in the corner, an old one with a tape deck. In front of it, a tape is open, Pink Floyd's
The Wall
, the tape David had lent me before he took it back. More than anything, I want to listen to Hendrix—to “Stone Free”—but I don't want to ask her if she has it, I don't want to tell her about Hendrix, because telling her about Hendrix would mean talking about Dad.

“Rhea, sit down. Drink some water.”

I look at her again. She hasn't moved. I sit, back on the couch where there's a dent from where I was sitting before. I reach out and drink some water.

“No one's getting fired, Rhea,” Jean says again.

When I speak, my voice sounds small, tiny. “Then why do you keep going on about Robin, about the muffins?”

“Sometimes, we can end up identifying with the kids. I thought that maybe Robin reminded you of you, when you were a little girl.”

Those words come out again—“little girl”—and it's like they're made of barbed wire or something, and I don't know that I'm holding my breath until I have to let it go. And that's when that feeling comes—the one at the top of my nose that happens right before the tears. I don't want to look at Jean, so I look at her bookshelf, just as messy as before, only someone has moved the photo of the black lady onto the shelf where one of the plants was. A tear slides from my left eye, all the way down my cheek. I don't touch it, don't wipe it. I don't know if she noticed it.

“My first year here, it happened to me. This little girl Chloe and I became really close and it was really triggering for me, because she used to cry for her mommy and daddy all the time.” Jean picks up her water, drinks some, puts it down. Seven rings now on the glass table. “When I was five, my father shot and killed my mother. I was raised by my grandmother. He died in prison when I was eight.”

I wish there was an air conditioner. My armpits are sweaty, even with the fan. Through the window I can hear the kids who aren't at Arts and Crafts playing by the pool—their voices laughing, squealing, a splash.

“I'd done a lot of work around that, in my own therapy. Thought I'd made peace with it, but this little girl
…
it all came back.”

Amanda's voice is calling out, yelling at one of the kids to stop. It's probably Marco pushing someone in. I'm glad Robin's downstairs in Arts and Crafts with Winnie.

“That's shit, really shit.” There's quiet between us, she's waiting for more. This is the part where I'm supposed to open up and cry on her shoulder and tell her some bullshit that she wants to hear. I take a breath and the feeling in my nose has gone. “My mum died too and I don't know what I'd have done without my dad. He was brilliant. The best dad in the world.”

“The best dad in the world,” she repeats.

“I mean, I can see how the kids here might remind you of growing up—but I grew up in a really normal house in a really normal town in Ireland by the sea. No one shot anyone, there were no guns—it wasn't like Harlem.”

Her eyes flinch, just enough so I know I've hit the right spot.

“What does ‘normal' mean to you, Rhea?”

“Normal—you know. Just normal. My dad had a butcher's shop. He worked hard, he was a good dad. Robin's mother was probably on drugs, that's what I think. No one took drugs where I come from. And Robin told me she hears gun shots at night. From my house, all you could hear was the fucking sea.”

Jean nods slowly. “You don't like the sea?”

“What are you talking about? Of course I do! Who doesn't like the sea?”

“You said the ‘fucking sea.' You sounded angry.”

I'm about to say that I never said that, but then I remember I did say it.

Jean keeps her eyes on my eyes, like one of those games in the schoolyard where the first one to blink or look away loses. I'm not going to be the one to look away but neither is she. I think a whole thirty seconds might pass with us looking at each other like that before there's a knock on the door and we both look away at the same time.

Erin pushes it open slowly. “Sorry to interrupt,” she says. She sounds breathless and I bet she ran up the stairs. “Winnie was wondering if you guys are nearly done? She needs Rhea's help to clean up after art.”

A look of irritation passes over Jean's face but she hides it. I wonder if Winnie really needs me or if she knows I need to be rescued.