How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? (44 page)

One of the things that amazed me early on about you, Rhea, was how you liked music, responded to it, right from the time you were a baby. I remember your dad saying to me that he thought you liked this John Lennon song, “Beautiful Boy,” and you were only a few months old. And I said to him that you weren't old enough yet to recognize one song from another song, but when he put it on, your little head started to bobble and you smiled and made that spitting face you always do when you're happy. And it was amazing, but it turned out that you did recognize it, that he was right.

I don't know why I'm writing to you about music, it's not what I had in my head when I sat down, but sometimes it feels like my hands take over and that's OK. Things are always better with music, you know? I want you to know that. Some days, when your dad comes in from work, I time it so his favorite Jimi Hendrix song, “Stone Free,” is playing, the first beats of it, just as he opens the door. I have to watch him coming in the gate, and start the record just when he turns the corner to the porch. In the silence before the song, I can hear him take out his keys and unless he fumbles with them too long, the first note starts just as he opens the door and he smiles at us both, waiting for him. You get all giddy when he swings you up and starts to dance with you and he'll grab me with his other arm and it doesn't matter that he hasn't had time yet to wash up properly from the store because he's there, and you're there, and I'm there, and that's all there is—us and the music—and just for that few minutes, until the song ends and sometimes the album does, that's enough. What we have is enough.

On the good days, I feel that. On the good days I see you, the changes in your face, your eyes, your smile, and I can feel it grounding me, keeping me here, keeping everything here. That's why I called you Rhea, because my friend Denise in college told me the story of Rhea the Greek goddess who was married to a god who ate their children and Rhea protected them by making him swallow a rock. It might sound dumb to you, but I loved that story, the idea of you protecting, being protected, and there are days when I'm with you I feel like we're protecting each other. But then there are the other days, the days when—I don't know how to say it—it's not that it's not enough, this life, your dad, it's more like I'm not, like I'm not even there at all.

Yesterday was a day like that, yesterday morning—the mornings are always worse. We'd been out late on Saturday night—you'd even slept on the row of seats at the back of Ryan's and you'd barely woken up when your dad lifted you up to take you home. He let me sleep late, that's all it was. I know he was being kind, I told myself that, I know he didn't mean to leave me out. When I woke up the bed was empty, cold, he'd been up for ages. And coming down the stairs I could hear the two of you in the kitchen, your chatter and his voice, explaining something. He's always good at explaining things. The door was open a bit and neither of you heard me when I pushed it open more. The light was so beautiful—the way it fell across the table and caught a bit of your chair. And your dad looked so handsome in his white rib-knit pyjama shirt, the sun making the lines on his face deeper than usual. He'd made sausages and cut them up with soft pieces of white bread the way you like it, and the whole kitchen was a mess. You had your back to me but I could see your hand, holding the sandwich on your own, the way you've learned to do, could tell from the back of your head that you were smiling.

Can you see that scene, Rhea? You and your dad, me standing, frozen in the doorway? I can. I can see it more clearly than my feet on the patterned carpet in front of me. I want to go back to it and put me in it. I want to rewrite it, as if it's a play, and I want to make my character walk into the light and take a seat by the handsome man in the white rib-knit top. I'll hold his arm with my hand and he'll feed me a bite of sausage with the other. I want to let him push my hair behind my ear the way he likes to, and I want him to kiss me and for me to kiss him back, the way I always used to like kissing him back, and you might squeal the way you used to when we kissed. I want the scene to look like that, instead of the real one where I am already gone and all that's left of me is the sound of a door closing.

You're too young, Rhea, to understand any of this. I don't know what age you'll be when you read this but you'll always be too young to get it, even if you live to be a hundred. No one should have to get it, you know that? No one is ever old enough to get some things. And the more I write this letter, I'm not sure anymore why I'm writing it, if it's for you at all, or if it's for me, or if it's only by making these marks on the paper I can be sure I exist at all.

I love you, Rhea. Did I say that already? How could I have written this much and not said that? It's important that you know that. I want you to grow up knowing that. I want you to grow up here, in this place that's safe, where the air is clean, and the only sounds you hear when you go to sleep at night are the sound of the sea and your dad's snoring. I want you to always have sweet sleep, dreams that make you smile, and wake up knowing that you are happy and loved and safe. I want you to have breakfast on Sunday mornings in a sunny kitchen with your dad while he plays you his Hendrix records and teaches you the words. And if I can't walk into that scene, if I can't be part of it, I want someone else to be part of it, someone who can be your mother even if she didn't give birth to you. Just because you give birth to a baby doesn't make you a mother—that's something you should know, Rhea, that's something I learned.

Your dad's stopped snoring. There's silence now in the house.

Maybe he's awake. Maybe he'll get up and find me here, writing this letter. But no, it was only a pause, the way he pauses sometimes and he's back to snoring again now and I feel like I might cry, even though I don't know why. I just thought that maybe somehow, knowing I was out here, knowing how I was feeling, might have been enough to wake him. I know it's stupid, but somehow I thought he might come out here and find me. And that this time he'd make me show him the letter and I'd give him the crumpled sheets and he'd read them and I wouldn't watch him reading, I'd only hold my knees and close my eyes and listen and when he was finished, he'd pick me up and carry me back to our bed and fold me up in his strong body and I'd tell him about all the things that happened and all the bad dreams and he'd tell me he believed me and that he loved me and that no one was going to hurt me again, not ever, not me or you either. That he'd protect us both from everything.

Only he's not coming. He's snoring louder than ever. And I feel so mad now, so mad at him, I want to run in and shake him and punch him awake, but I don't, not really, it's not his fault. Even if he was awake, he couldn't do what I want him to do. He can't protect me from what's already happened. He can't protect me from my memories, from the place the darkness is and the feelings that are still in my body, that live here, that'll never leave, like a country that was taken over, occupied, and even though the natives can take it back and build stronger borders, the land can never feel the way it did before the invasion, never, ever, again.

Your dad can't give back the things that were taken from me so long before I knew him, but he can protect you. He can look after you.

I am the link, don't you see that, Rhea? It's me. I am the one who is broken. Ruth says I kept her safe and I tried to, even when she got so mad because I wouldn't let her come upstairs and draw with us, but sometimes I wonder if I kept her safe at all. But I can keep you safe, my love, my darling, darling girl, my anchor, my heart, my breath, my blood, my veins, my cells, my body. I want to give you it all. I want to give you everything. Everything.

I want to give you freedom.

Don't ever believe anyone who tells you I didn't love you enough, because I love you more than anyone will ever know. My love for you goes deep, so deep, into that part of me, into the pain, into the part where I can never go again.

I've loved you, Rhea, and I will love you. Know that wherever I am, wherever I go, I'll love you more than any mother ever loved any daughter, that you'll always be part of me and that the best part of me will always be part of you and you'll carry me in your heart and together we'll make your life better, better than it could have been any other way.

I love you, my darling girl.

Mom xoxo

Jean thinks I should write to you again. She didn't say “should”—she made a “suggestion.” According to her, a lot of people write letters to people who are dead or even to people who are alive that they're never going to send. People write so many of them, they even have a name—“DNS” letters, like DNA, except it stands for “Do Not Send.” Jean says that some of her clients have sent their “DNS” letters by mistake, so the people end up reading stuff they were never meant to read.

This is not a problem I have.

She read everything, my letters, your letters. She found them all in my backpack in the dunes. She asked me before she read them and I said she could, I remember saying she could, but I think it was only because of that stuff the doctor gave me.

I wish I hadn't let her read them.

I wish I'd brought them into the sea with me, all of them.

I wish I'd let the water wash the words away.

Jean is coming to my room three times a day. I have to let her in, I've no choice. Maybe I do have a choice, but I let her in anyway. All she wants to talk about is your letters—how I felt after reading them, what was going through my mind that day on the beach.

I don't know how I felt then or what was in my mind—if anything was in my mind. When I tell her that, she crosses and uncrosses her legs, switches tack.

“How are you feeling now, Rhea? Mad, glad, sad, lonely, or scared?”

“Nothing. I'm not feeling anything.”

She's silent for a minute and I think she's given up. “If you had to guess at a feeling, what would it be?”

I lie back on the floor, face the wall. “Tired.”

“Tired?”

“I know it's not a feeling, but I'm just so fucking exhausted.”

“You need to eat, Rhea. David will make you anything you want, you know that.”

“I'm too tired to eat.”

I'm not lying or being dramatic. I don't have the energy to bite or chew or swallow, it feels like the food would sit in my mouth and clog up my throat. My body feels like it did that night when the water filled up my clothes, turned them into weights.

Jean says I need to come outside, get some fresh air, another “suggestion.” She waits for ages after she says that, only I don't turn around and I don't answer her so eventually she leaves. She might fire me if I don't go outside, she might want me to go back to work, to see the kids, but I can't, I fucking can't and I don't care if she fires me.

I can't explain it to her, this tiredness, how anything is just too much, how even when I needed the loo I waited so long a little bit of pee came out before I was able to move.

So what if she fires me? So fucking what? What difference does it make?

No difference, that's what. No difference at all. Amanda tried to talk to me through the door today, but I just lay on the floor, breathing. I prefer the floor to the bed. I don't know how much she knows, how much Jean told her, how much she's told anyone. Amanda tells me she made me a mix tape, that she's going to leave it on the tray of food with a new packet of Walkman batteries and I know I should thank her but I don't want to thank her. I didn't ask her for food or her stupid tape. I didn't ask her to swim out and get me.

I wait for ages after I hear her feet on the stairs and the tray is on the floor, the tape next to a tuna salad sandwich and two banana walnut muffins and a bottle of water. I still don't think I'm hungry but when I pick up the muffin, I smell it and suddenly, I'm eating like a savage, like I've never seen food before. I don't even sit down before I smash it into my mouth, so crumbs go everywhere. And I've barely swallowed it before I start on the sandwich, so the taste in my mouth is a mix of sweet muffin and tuna and things that shouldn't go together.

After I eat, I lie back down on the floor again. I don't listen to the tape, I don't read the track list in Amanda's neat writing in black felt-tip pen. I'm remembering her face, above the waves, her hands under my head, my shoulders, and then the next memory on the beach, puking salt water and phlegm up all over her feet.

I didn't ask her to do that, any of that. I didn't want her to.

And I definitely don't have to thank her.

Jean has a new rule. It's a rule, not a suggestion. I have to shower and change my clothes and I have to come to her office to talk to her once a day.

“What happens if I don't want to do it?” I go.

She's sitting on Winnie's bed, her foot crossed over her knee. “It's for your own good, Rhea.”

“What happens if I won't do it?”

She pulls her hair, above her ear, the grey part. “You'll feel better, trust me.”

She's not answering me, she always answers me. I ask another way. “Do I have a choice?”

She looks out the window, back to me. “You always have a choice, Rhea. I hope you choose to stay.”

I sit in the swing chair, far back in the basket part. You know what I keep thinking? Who else knew? Aunt Ruth and Cooper knew. Did Laurie? Dad must have known but if he knew then why didn't he tell me? He would have told me.

I can't see Jean but I can hear her. “Where are you, Rhea?” she goes.

“I'm here, I'm in the chair.” Only I'm not in the chair, I'm back in Rush, going through lists of people I haven't thought about in years—Mrs. McLean from the shop, Ms. Bennett in school who was always extra nice to me, who once left a pound note in my copy when she handed it back to me. Did she know? Did she feel sorry for me?

Did Lisa? Her mum? Susan Mulligan? Nicole Gleeson?

Did Nicole fucking Gleeson know?

STOP. JUST FUCKING STOP IT.

Can you know something and not know it at the very same time?

Jean wants me to write to you and tell you what happened that day on the beach. She says if I can't tell you the feelings, I can describe what it felt like to walk into the water, to feel it lapping up over my Docs, my legs, up over my shorts.

Fuck that. Fuck her, with her suggestions. Fuck you and your letters. Why should I tell you anything more about me? I've told you everything, you know all there is, but I still don't know anything. I've more fucking questions now, more questions than answers.

What questions, Rhea?

Jean's not here, but that's her voice in my head, as if she is.

I want to make a list, you can't get lost in a list, but I don't know where the beginning is, what the first question is. Maybe I do know. Maybe this is the first question:

Did you always know? Did you always know you were going to do that?

You sounded happy, really happy, in the letter before, the August letter. Ten months. If even. When did you even write the last letter? How long before? What happened? What the fuck could have happened? Why didn't you write to Aunt Ruth again? Or talk to Dad? Talk to someone?

What did it feel like? The water, that day, swallowing those pills? Was it hard to push yourself out through the waves? The waves here would knock you down—they knocked me down, that was scary, I don't mind saying it. I was afraid of the way they pushed me over and twisted me under the water until I didn't know which way was up and which way was down. I wasn't expecting to find the air again, I didn't want to, but even though I didn't want to, even though my clothes were pulling me under, I tipped my head back, I opened my mouth and I breathed in air because I wanted to live.

I don't know why, but I wanted to live.

WHY DIDN'T YOU?

Why didn't you?

Today, Jean talked about secrets. She talked about her mother being a singer and that she only found out when she saw a record with her mother's picture on it in a second-hand store on Broadway. She bought the record and took it home and on the back it said that one of the songs was dedicated to her daughter, “Lady.” I spin around while Jean is telling me this and it's nice, listening to her for once.

“I asked my grandmother who ‘Lady' was, why she never told me I had a sister.” I keep spinning.

“And she told me that my mother had named me Lady, after Billie Holiday, but that she decided to change my name to Jean after my mother died. My grandmother thought she was doing the right thing, that I'd have a better life with a name that meant ‘God is gracious' rather than being named after a prostitute who died of a drug overdose.”

The chair stops and I spin it back, the other way. I ask her about Billie Holiday dying from drugs and then we talk about Hendrix and I tell her about it being Dad's happy music and about Cash being his crying music, but that sometimes Lennon made him cry as well, even “Beautiful Boy” sometimes.

And she just listens, while I spin, she doesn't ask any questions and I tell her about the nights he came into my room crying and saying it's all his fault, how he never should have stopped playing music for you, how he loved playing you music.

Jean says it's good to talk about Dad's feelings, but she's wondering how I felt when all this was happening, what were my feelings?

I spin. I try and find them. I tell her it was my job to hold his hand and pat his hair, to memorise all the stops on the subway map hanging on the wall. To listen.

It wasn't my job to have feelings.

Jean's changed the rules again. If I'm going to sit in the swinging chair I have to help David in the kitchen for two hours and eat a meal that's not in my room. It doesn't have to be with the kids.

I nearly say no, but then I think about it and decide to eat breakfast with David, really early, so no one will be up and the muffins will still be hot.

I don't always hate her anymore but sometimes I do, like yesterday when she asked me what I would say to a friend whose mother had committed suicide. I hate that fucking word and I'm glad I'm in the swinging chair because if I'd been on the couch I'd have smashed my Doc through the glass table, I know I would. That's if I'd been bothered to put on my Docs.

“Stop saying that word.”

“What word? Suicide?”

“Stop! Anyway, we don't know if that's what happened. We can't know for sure without a body.”

“That's true. All we know for sure from the letters is that it appears she was suffering from depression, maybe some form of posttraumatic stress disorder.”

I like when she uses words like that, proper words, medical words, words that make sense.

“What do you think he did to her?” I go. “Why do you think she had nightmares?”

I've been wanting to ask that for a while, and even though I
think I know the answer, I want to hear her say it. When she answers, her voice sounds the same as it always does. “I think he sexually abused her.”

The chair keeps swinging. I look at her through the basket part. I know she can see me looking but I pretend she can't.

“Child sexual abuse leaves very deep scars on a person, Rhea, particularly if it was an ongoing situation, particularly if it was denied in the home, as it sounds like your mother's was.” Her voice is still a normal voice. I want to hit her. I want to cry. I want her to hug me. I want to run. “She needed help and she didn't get it. I'm here to help you.”

I used to tell her to fuck off when she said things like that, but now I'm too tired. Now when she asks about something I wrote to you in my letters I just answer her. Why not? It's all fucking stupid. The letters are nothing. Worthless, useless pieces of paper filled up with nothing.

They're nothing.

Nothing.

They're all I have.

Today, Jean takes out the paper and crayons, but I know better.

“I'm not drawing. I don't want to draw.”

She's rolling out the paper on the table. “Oh really? I thought maybe you might miss it?”

It's like she knows that I'd thought about going down to the rec room to look for drawing stuff last night when I couldn't sleep, but she couldn't know. She leaves the paper on the table, sits back in her chair. “So if you don't want to draw, what do you want to do today?”

I spin away from her, shrug, even though she can't see me.

“Do you want to read me out what you wrote to your mom last night?”

“No.”

“How about I read you the letter she wrote you?”

“Whatever, knock yourself out.”

That was stupid, I know now that it was stupid, but I've read it so many times, your letter, I don't expect it to be different out loud, hearing it in her voice. And the whole way through I spin and spin and spin and I don't fucking cry and you know what part gets me? You know the stupid retarded part that gets me? The way you sign it off with “Mom.”

I feel sick then, from the spinning, and I need to sit on the floor against the wall under the window. And I know already that I'm going to cry, but when it comes, it's not like normal crying, it's like it's coming from somewhere else, not only my eyes but my whole body. And it's not just the tears and the snot, it's the sounds as well, noises that sound like they are coming from someone else, only they're coming from me, from
my stomach, deeper than my stomach, like they could be coming from my soul.