Battery Park, New York
1st May 1999
7:25 a.m.
Dear Mum,
I made it! I made it through the night outside, all by myself! I didn’t think I was going to sleep here, I hadn’t planned it, I’d planned on getting up and finding a stick in the park and making it sharp and staying awake all night just in case, but I kept nodding off before I could do any of that. All night I kept nodding off and waking up, and nodding off and waking up, and the last time I woke up, it was morning.
And even though my neck and shoulder are killing me, I feel so fucking happy, so fucking proud of myself, because it turns out I don’t need Sergei to survive in this city, no matter what he thinks.
I don’t need anyone.
I have a plan this morning, Mum. Once I find somewhere to pee, I’m going to go to Duane Reade and I’m going to buy soap and shampoo and deodorant, and I’m going to go and wash up. Even though there’s only a tiny bit of toothpaste left in the tube, I’m not going to buy any more because it’s expensive, so I’ll wait until I get a job. I’m going to look for a job today, that’s the rest of the plan. I don’t know why I’ve given up, this is New York, people are given a chance in New York, everyone is. I just haven’t been looking for my chance hard enough, that’s all. I got distracted by Sergei and by looking for you and finding Nana Davis and finding the photos and everything. I will look at the photos, I haven’t forgotten about the photos, I plan on looking at them, but I want to be able to look at them properly and lay them out somewhere they won’t get wet or blown away and there’s things I need to do first, that’s all. I’m going to be eighteen in eleven days and I have to prioritise, that’s part of being an adult, isn’t it?
So, this morning, my priorities are getting clean and getting a job. After I pee. And eat. I’m starving. I know a place on Eighth Avenue that does an egg and cheese on a roll with a coffee for only one dollar—the others all charge $1.25 or even $1.50—so I can walk there, unless I find somewhere as cheap along the way. And when I buy my soap and stuff, I’m going to go to a Starbucks and wash in there, because even though the bathrooms in Grand Central are good, you can’t wash yourself properly and in Starbucks it’s a private cubicle so I can stick my whole head in the sink and everything and even change my T-shirt.
It feels so much better to have a plan, you know? A game plan, I mean, to be in control of what I’m doing and not to have to rely on Sergei. I think it’s best, what happened, you know? I think it’s better. I’m better off on my own.
Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.
It’s such bullshit, you know? I can’t believe these people. They’re so fucking obvious when they say no, the way they all look at where my arm should be, instead of my face. Even that kip of a diner with the “Help Wanted” sign in the window for a dishwasher said no. And every time someone else says no I can hear Aunt Ruth’s voice in my head, during one of our arguments about the prosthetic, saying how the only people who go without them in this country are street people and I don’t want everyone to think I’m one of them.
And now I am one of them and everyone knows it, and that’s the real reason none of these people will even give me a chance when I say I’ll work twice as hard as anyone else, work for free even, so they can see how quick I am at bussing tables and setting them up again or doing dishes or mopping floors or cleaning toilets or anything that will mean I’ll be able to eat.
The absolute worst is that guy in the Irish pub, the one from Galway, who keeps me talking for twenty minutes, but when I ask about a job he just shakes his head and goes, “Ah no, love, we’re grand at the moment.”
Fuck him. Fuck them. Fuck this. Fuck you.
I’m sorry for all the cursing. I am. It’s just, I don’t know, this stuff is hard and the rain makes it so much harder. Earlier, I was thinking it must be miserable to be homeless in Ireland, with all the rain, but I never really saw too many homeless people at home, none in Rush anyway, maybe the odd person on O’Connell Street. New York rain is worse than Irish rain anyway, it’s so heavy, you end up sloshing through water up to your shins when you cross the street. My Champion hoody is drenched, even through my jacket, and it feels like it’ll never dry. I wish I had a raincoat with me, an umbrella. You see loads of people using black plastic bags to cover themselves and their trolleys, I even saw a guy with Duane Reade shopping bags tied around his feet. My Docs don’t let in the rain much but even if they did, there’s no way I’d do that, just like I wouldn’t put a black plastic bag over myself because if you do that, everyone knows you’re homeless.
I keep obsessing about how much money I have left, how many pizza slices it is, if I can afford to do laundry. The soap and stuff cost more than I thought—with tax it came to $7.11 for a bar of Irish Spring soap, a plastic soap container, and a roll-on deodorant. The cheapest shampoo was $2.99 and I decided that the soap was better because it can do both because I only have fuzz anyway. I took ages deciding between the bar soap and the liquid soap. Liquid soap was $1.99, which was cheaper than the bar soap and plastic container put together, and it’d be nicer for my head. But it was only fourteen fluid ounces and I think the most it would last is two weeks, whereas the bar soap will last longer and the plastic container is an investment because next time I’ll only have to buy the bar soap which is 79 cents. Working it all out in my head makes me think about Cooper, because he was always going on about investments and financial planning—it was the only time he was really happy, I think, when he talked about money.
Apart from the time when he was planning our trip to Montana.
He drove Laurie mad then, going around the house all the time in his Stetson. She always walked out of the room when he came in wearing it, but I thought it was kind of funny. Other than Cooper, I was the only one who was excited that we were going to Montana—Aunt Ruth wanted to go to Paris and Laurie wanted to go to Hawaii. I wanted to go to New York but I didn’t mind Montana either and, anyway, apart from the time I went to Sligo with Lisa’s family when her brother got sick in the car, I’d never been on holiday. Dad always said with the shop it was impossible to get away.
For weeks, every night over dinner, Cooper talks about Montana and our forefathers on the frontiers and how it’ll be great to get away from urban sprawl and back to nature. Aunt Ruth asks about the bears and whether there’s a phone that works. Laurie mostly ignores him, but when she does say anything it’s about learning to surf properly and that she can’t do that in Montana.
By then, we don’t hate each other anymore, Laurie and me. It’s the middle part, in between not hating each other but not being friends yet either. At home, we talk sometimes, even laugh sometimes, but in school and at soccer, we ignore each other unless we’re forced to talk. She’s mad at me because I don’t take her side about the Hawaii thing. She’s convinced that Cooper’s bringing us to some bumfuck town in the middle of nowhere to keep her away from boys, and I think maybe she’s right.
To get to Montana we fly from Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta, Atlanta to Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake City to a town called Billings. Laurie says we could have flown to Hawaii in half the time and Aunt Ruth is scared on the last plane because it is so small. After all that flying, we’re still not there and a man comes to collect us in a van to take us on a three-hour drive to the ranch. We stop at a Walmart in case we need anything because the closest store is ninety minutes away.
“Back to nature!” Cooper says, and heads towards the wine section.
Looking back, it’s obvious that Laurie and me would be sharing a room, but I don’t think either of us had thought about that, I know I hadn’t. It’s only when we’re at the lodge and the lady opens the door to one room and hands the key to me and goes “that’s for you girls” and heads to the end of the balcony to show Aunt Ruth and Cooper their room, that I realise. Inside the room, everything is made of logs—the wardrobe and the desk and even the two single beds—and when I turn to Laurie she’s standing in the doorway sucking on a strand of her hair.
“There’s no TV?” she goes. “Is he fucking kidding? What do people do around here without a TV?”
We find out that night over dinner that what people do is go horse riding, and there’s this whole argument then about me not being covered by the ranch’s insurance and that they should have known in advance that there was someone with a disability in our group. They say that word seven times—“disability”—Cooper says it three times and the ranch owner says it four. I try and tell them about the horses I rode before on the beach in Rush but no one listens. Dinner is homemade lasagne and salad and mashed garlic potatoes and you can go up for more and I go up three times while the conversation about insurance is going on. The lady tells me to save some room for their desserts, but she says it nicely, not in a mean way. Outside the window, you can see the tops of pine trees, all the way into the valley, and I listen to the ranch owner’s wife at the next table telling an old couple about the bear cubs she saw earlier in the year.
The next morning, I get up at six a.m. when it’s still really cold and there’s pink in the sky over the mountain. There’s only one horse in the paddock, a light brown one with a white stripe along her nose. She’s friendly, she lets me pet her and stays near the fence so I can use it to climb up onto her back. I walk around the paddock on her a few times and that’s what I’m doing when Bill, the wrangler, comes out of the stables and sees me. At first he looks mad, but then he smiles and calls the rest of the wranglers out to see. I’ve left my prosthetic in the room—I don’t know how to do it with that, only the way I learned at home, slightly tilting over to one side, holding onto the mane with my hand—and they’ve probably never seen someone with only one arm riding a horse before because they all start to clap.
My horse’s name is Heather and they say it’s okay if I ride her, so long as Cooper signs a waiver and I use a saddle, stirrups, and reins. Laurie’s horse is a girl too, called Snowdrop, and Cooper is on a big black horse called Jackson. Aunt Ruth had made this whole big deal about keeping me company and I don’t think she’s pleased that they’ll let me ride after all, because even as Bill and Jamie are helping her onto a piebald called Apache she’s still asking questions about insurance. She looks scared in the beginning, every time Apache moves, but they keep her up front, in between Bill and me, and she’s getting the hang of it by the time we turn around to come home, so it’s a pity that she drops out the next day to look after Cooper, who hurt his back.
I’m not going to go through every little detail about the holiday, Mum, even though I want to tell you about the bear-claw marks we find on the bark of the tree, and the picnic at the very top of the mountain the day we go hiking, and about the water of the Boulder River that’s cold as liquid ice the morning I dip myself into it.
What I want to tell you about is the last night.
They always have a camp fire on the last night. You can probably picture it. You know in the country how it gets so dark that everything is just shades of black and lighter black? Well, it’s like that—the lighter black is the sky and the darker black is the mountain and the trunks of the trees. You can only see parts of people’s faces, lit up by the fire, the other parts are in shadow. Every time someone throws on wood and the flames jump up, you can see more people and the trees behind and sometimes there’s sparks of fire in the air that float until they burn out. After the food, Bill takes out a harmonica and the singing starts and that’s when Jamie comes over and hands a flask of something to Laurie.
Jamie’s the youngest wrangler and he’s kind of cute in his cowboy outfit, like a kid dressing up, except he’s not dressing up because he’s from Idaho and that’s how they dress there. I knew from the beginning that he liked Laurie. She passes me the flask and I drink some and it’s not as bad as I think it’s going to be. It burns a bit but there’s something sweet in there too—an orange taste. It’s easy to drink in the dark and we pass it back and forth, smiling a bit at our secret, and every now and then Cooper tips his Stetson at us.
I don’t know what time it is when the singing is over and we all walk back through the woods with only a few beams of torch lighting the way, but I remember me and Laurie bursting out laughing every time Aunt Ruth gets jumpy when she hears a noise in case it’s a bear or a mountain lion. And back in the room, we’re still laughing, but it’s more awkward then, with the bright light and only the two of us, so we don’t talk properly until it’s dark again with me in my log bed next to the window and Laurie in hers next to the door.
“Oh my God, I can’t wait for Dad to get rid of that hat,” she goes. “He’ll have to tomorrow, when we leave.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“He’s super embarrassing. I swear I wanted this mountain to open up and swallow me up when he started singing tonight.”
“ ‘Home, home on the range … ’ ” I sing, making myself sound like Cooper.
“Stop it! Please! I’m sure Bill and Jamie think he’s such an asshole.”
“I doubt it.”
“I’m sure they do. It’s okay, by the way, I know you think he’s an asshole too.”
I don’t know how to answer that, so I roll over. The curtains are open, like we agreed to leave them on the first night because the only thing out there is mountain and trees and stars. But tonight the stars are hiding behind the clouds.
From the bed across the room, Laurie starts to giggle.
“What’s so funny?” I go. She tries to answer me but she’s laughing too hard, really cracking up. Finally, she gets some words out. “I was just thinking of Dad shaking Jamie’s hand, saying what an upright young man he is.” She giggles again. “Not like the young people in the city who only care about going out and partying.”
I start to laugh too, roll back to face her. “Imagine if he knew. What was in that flask anyway?”
“I don’t know, but it was super strong,” Laurie says. “I think he had a whole plan worked out to get me drunk. He asked me on the way back which room was ours.”
“Did he?” I don’t know why it shocks me so much to hear that, but it does. “Did you tell him?”
“No,” Laurie goes, “I told him about Mike—that I have a boyfriend. Don’t worry, we won’t be getting any company.”
There’s silence for a second and I wonder if she’d have asked me first. What I would have done if Jamie did show up at the door.
“If it hadn’t been for Mike, would you have? I mean, do you like him?”
I’ve never asked her anything like that before, we don’t talk about that kind of stuff. She makes me wait before she answers.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” she says. “He’s cute, don’t you think?”
“I suppose.”
“I mean, here, he’s cute. If you took him home, like brought him to school, he’d just look weird.”
“Yeah,” I go. “Imagine him getting on the school bus in his cowboy outfit.”
I think she’s going to laugh again, but instead she says something else. “Maybe I should’ve said he could come over. Mike’s not here. He’d never know. Anyway, I’d only make out with Jamie or whatever, I wouldn’t do anything else.”
I want to ask her about the “anything else.” She’s a year younger than me but I bet she’s done more than I have.
“Mmmmm,” I say instead.
There’s silence for a bit then but I know she’s not asleep yet, her breathing hasn’t changed.
“So, have you slept with Mike?”
I launch the words out, like a missile into the dark. I don’t know why I want to know, but I do. I’m glad that she can’t see me. I hear her breathe in before she answers.
“No,” she goes. “But I might, later in the summer. I’ve let him get to third base.”
I don’t know what these American bases mean, but I can probably work it out. I’m afraid she’ll ask me something next but she keeps talking.
“Tanya let Chris Trifiro go all the way and she said it was overrated. That it hurt more than anything else.”
“Yeah,” I go. “I’d say it would.”
I say that on purpose, to let her know I haven’t done it without her having to ask, but she asks anyway.
“You’ve never done it with anyone?”
“No.”
“No one back in Ireland?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I shrug, even though she can’t see me. “I don’t know, I think you’ve got to like someone a lot to do it, you know, love them a bit.”
“Was there anyone you wanted to do it with in Ireland?”
“No.”
“So, you’ve never loved anyone? Like, been in love, I mean?”
The question catches me off guard and I take too long to answer. Laurie hears the pause.
“There was someone! Who? Tell me!”
“There’s no one.”
“Rae, I can tell when you’re lying. Come on, I was honest with you, it’s not fair if you don’t tell me.”
I lie there, breathing.
“I thought we were starting to be friends, Rae, but we can’t be friends if you don’t trust me.”
“I do trust you!” I don’t know if I do or not but right then it seems like the right thing to say.
“Well, then? Who is he?”
“No one. There is no ‘he,’ Laurie, I’m telling you.”
That’s the end of it, I think it is, but I don’t count on what she’s going to say next.
“Is there a ‘she’?”
In the dark, I’m wondering if I heard her right, if she really said what I think she did. I’m trying to figure out how to answer, but she speaks next.
“It is a girl, isn’t it? I knew it! I don’t care, it’s no big deal, loads of people have girl crushes.”
Girl crushes. I’ve never heard that before. I want to ask her how she knew, but saying that, saying anything, would let her know she’s right.
“Come on, Rae, tell me something about her. What’s her name?”
And I don’t know if I want to tell her then, but it’s more like I need to tell her. I need to tell someone.
“Nicole.”
I can barely hear my voice over the bam bam of my heart.
“Nicole? Nicole what?”
“Gleeson.”
“Nicole Gleeson.”
Laurie says it slowly, like it’s the name of a film star. I’m in Montana, thousands of miles away from Rush, but I’m on the 33 as well, with Nicole’s leg pushed up against mine.
“What does she look like?” Laurie goes.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Is she gorgeous? I bet she’s gorgeous.”
It feels weird, the question, and I don’t know how to answer, so I don’t.
“Is she dark? Like you?”
I’m about to tell Laurie that Nicole has blonde hair, but something stops me, makes me lie.
“Yeah, she’s dark.”
“Do you have a photo of her? Back at home? You can show me, if you want.”
My school annual is under my bed with a class photo where Nicole is a blur of black and white, but the real photos are in my head.
“No,” I go. “I don’t have any.”
She doesn’t say anything after that and I don’t either. I’m lying there thinking about Nicole. After ages, Laurie talks again.
“In case you’re worried about me telling anyone you’re a lesbian, I won’t, okay?”
The matter-of-fact way she says it sends a jolt through me.
“Shut up, I’m not a lesbian!”
“Rae, you just told me—”
I can’t let her finish her sentence, can’t let her say that word again.
“Don’t ever say that, Laurie, I’m serious.”
“Okay,” she goes. “Okay.”
“You were the one who said loads of people had girl crushes, it doesn’t make them all, all—lesbians.”
I say it low, in case the family next door can hear through the log wall, in case Aunt Ruth and Cooper can, all the way from the end of the hallway.
“Whatever,” Laurie goes. “Whatever, Rae. Whatever you say.”
She doesn’t say anything else about it, not that night, even though we both lie awake for what seems like hours, and she doesn’t say anything in the morning when we’re packing or on the journey back to Florida. And I wonder if maybe she forgot because of the drink Jamie gave us, the way Dad used to forget things sometimes.
And after ages of her not saying anything, weeks and then a month, I think that must be what happened, that she has forgotten, even though deep down I’m afraid she hasn’t.
Deep down, I’m waiting for her to bring it up again.
Rhea
King Street, New York
2nd May 1999
2:33 a.m.
Dear Mum,
I’ve been doing this all wrong. I don’t know why I didn’t work it out before, that it’s better to sleep during the day, that it’s safer, way safer than doing it at night. The thing to do at night is keep moving, keep walking, look like you’re going somewhere. So that’s what I’ve been doing tonight, because I don’t want to spend money on the subway and I’m a dumbass for not sleeping today.
It’s not until Seventh turns into Varick that I realise I’m walking to Michael’s apartment. I don’t know why I am, it doesn’t make sense. I don’t go to Grand Central or Penn Station because I don’t want to see Sergei, but I come here, to a place that reminds me of him.
So that’s where I am now, sitting on my step across the street, like the night I waited for Sergei, only I’m not waiting for Sergei now. I’m only sitting here because I’m tired and I need a break from walking. The light in Michael’s apartment is off, so he’s probably asleep, which is a good thing because if he sees me, he could call the police because he probably thinks I stole his money. In the apartment next door, the light is still on and I wonder if that means the neighbours are fighting or fucking tonight.
Sex changes everything, doesn’t it? Did you ever think it might be easier if there was no such thing as sex? If people were just friends and that was it? Like Sergei and Michael—if they hadn’t been having sex, if they’d just been friends, I bet they’d never have fought. I bet we’d still be there.
Sex was what got me and Laurie grounded last summer, a few weeks after the Montana holiday. After we got back, Laurie started inviting me to parties with her and I’d been going. Cooper and Aunt Ruth thought we were going to the movies or to people’s houses where their parents were supervising us. They were happy we were hanging out together, you could see it in the smiles they gave each other at the dinner table when we were telling them our weekend plans. They thought the smiles were secret, that we didn’t notice, but I noticed and I bet Laurie did too.
I didn’t enjoy the parties much. They were just kids getting drunk or stoned and falling in people’s pools. They reminded me of the “Freers at Rhea’s” the winter before Dad died when girls I was never even friendly with at school started to call in on Friday nights and pretend they wanted to hang around with me, but really it was because they knew I’d have a freer. The first weekend, it was Therese Roberts and Nikki Hartnett, and then Ronan Barry and John Duffy and Dominic Kelly called in with some cans. They came the weekend after too, and so did Tracey Dorgan and Alan Roche, and the next weekend Susan Mulligan called in and smiled and said “Hi, Rhea” as if she always called for me, and I let her in too. And even though Lisa said they were all only using me—even though I knew they were—it was kind of fun all the same. It wasn’t anything to do with Nicole either—she was always at her dad’s at weekends—it was just that I liked having the house full of people, playing Dad’s Hendrix records for them and making batch toast for everyone.
It was fun, that’s all. It’s fun until the night I come in and I find Susan Mulligan and Therese Roberts in my room, and Susan Mulligan is ripping the fold in the subway map with her nail and Therese is on her hunkers, looking into the bedside locker where I keep your photos and the Carver book and saying something about you that’s really horrible and that’s not true. And that’s when I kick her in the back, hard; I didn’t know she was going to fall over, that she’d cut her face on the corner of the locker door. I didn’t know she’d freak out when she saw the blood.
That’s the last of the “Freer at Rhea’s” weekends. Susan Mulligan’s face is all mean as she walks out with her arm around Therese and she tells me I’ll be sorry. At school she calls me Diarrhoea, which she hasn’t done since about fifth class, but it sounds even more stupid now and she stops after a few days.
The parties me and Laurie go to are mostly in Shannon’s house, because her father and mother are in Europe and Shannon’s older brother is supposed to look after things but he’s never there.
They’re younger than me, most of the kids at the parties, because they’re in Laurie’s grade, and even though I recognise them from school, I don’t know most of them. I make friends with Spencer at the first party, when he asks me to play euchre with him and I do. That’s what we do all the time after that, me and Spencer, play euchre while he drinks neat vodka and I drink Coke. That night, we’re playing by the pool and I’m winning for once. Nearly all the other kids are getting off with each other by then, on the loungers around the pool or upstairs. I don’t want to get off with anyone and Spencer only wants to get off with Erica Simons, who’s getting off with Jason Tomback. I’m keeping an eye on the time, because my job is to get Laurie from where she is upstairs with Mike when it’s getting close to our curfew. I know she’s using me, Mum, just like Susan Mulligan and Therese Roberts, but I’m kind of using her too. Glenda’s away with her family for a whole month, and Cooper won’t give me all the shifts I want in the restaurant, and playing euchre with Spencer is better than sitting at home with Aunt Ruth.
I never did find out how Cooper knew we were there, at Shannon’s. It’s before our curfew when he shows up—he should have still been at the restaurant—but he’s in the kitchen, coming through the double doors onto the patio, waving my prosthetic in one hand.
He comes right over and I don’t remember what I say, or if I say anything, but he’s shouting about how much the prosthetic cost and that he didn’t pay all that money so some dipshit could use it to fondle himself. Spencer is cracking up laughing but I can’t look at him, because I’ll start laughing too and that’ll make it worse.
Cooper throws the prosthetic into my lap. “Put it on. We’re going.”
He’s looking around the pool, his eyes squinting trying to make out who’s who. I’m fiddling with the straps and they’re even more awkward than usual.
“Where’s Laurie?” he goes then, when he realises she’s none of the people by the pool. “Where the fuck is Laurie?”
Shannon is coming over and he grabs her arm, spilling her drink. She giggles and gestures inside. “She’s upstairs, Mr. Wilson. You want me to get her?”
I should have done something then, I should have acted quicker, but Cooper’s already dropped Shannon’s arm and pushed past her, through the double doors, back into the kitchen. I’m behind him and Spencer is behind me, all of us running around the kitchen counter, up the stairs. On the landing, the doors are open, all of them are, except for one at the end, and that’s the one Cooper charges towards.
Me and Spencer get there in time to see what Cooper sees, Laurie with no top on, Mike grabbing a sheet from the bed to cover himself up as he runs to the corner. Cooper doesn’t pause, if anything he speeds up as he strides into the room, his legs and his arms all one motion as he picks Mike up and holds him against the wall before punching him straight in the face, twice, three times.
Laurie’s screaming and there’s blood and then Mike’s on the ground, his hands over his head, and Spencer is trying to grab Cooper’s arms and someone on the landing is yelling about calling 911.
And then there’s blood everywhere, on the sheet and the floor, and Cooper is throwing Laurie’s shirt at her and Spencer’s bent down over Mike and when I turn around, Shannon has a cordless phone in her hand and she’s saying, “Hello, hello?” over and over, but I don’t know if there’s anyone at the other end.
Laurie cries the whole way home. Cooper doesn’t say anything, only jerks the car around corners and stops too late at the stop signs. When we get to the house, Laurie jumps out before he’s even turned the engine off and runs past Aunt Ruth, who’s just opened the front door.
After that, there’s no trips to the movies or the mall, no pocket money, no TV, no working in the restaurant, no leaving the house at all except when it’s with one of them. Cooper even takes Laurie’s phone from her room, as well as her TV. I don’t have a TV so he takes my CDs and my CD player and my art stuff and my books. There’s new rules in the house as well—no eating between meals for any reason and I have to wear the prosthetic all the time, except when I’m in the shower or in bed.
I didn’t think it would be that bad, being bored, but it’s really bad. The worst thing is my head, the way it keeps thinking of things I don’t want to think about all the time, about Lisa and Rush and Dad and Nicole and even you sometimes. And sometimes I get this weird feeling, kind of like a stomach ache but not a stomach ache, in this place under my ribs which doesn’t feel sore exactly, more like kind of empty, like a hole or something, and the only thing that will make it go away is sitting spinning in my desk chair and listing all the subway stops in my head, each line over and over, till I go back to the start again.
That’s what I’m doing the night Laurie comes into my room after dinner. “I’m so fucking bored!” she goes, flopping down on the bed. “People can die from boredom, you know? I saw it on the Discovery channel once. I don’t think I’m going to live long enough to go back to school.”
“ ‘Boring people get bored,’ ” I go. “My friend’s mum used to always say that.”
Laurie sighs. “So, I’m boring, then. So are you. All you ever do is spin in that stupid chair or do your PT exercises.”
“You should tell your dad that. He’d be pleased to know I was putting effort into getting used to my prosthetic.”
Laurie sits up, cross-legged, turns her feet so they are facing sole-up on her thighs. “I won’t get a chance because he’s never going to talk to me again. I swept up all the leaves on the patio tonight and he didn’t even say thank you.”
“Maybe he didn’t notice.”
“He was sitting right by the window, pretending to read the paper. He hates me. I don’t care, I hate him too after what he did to Mike. It’s driving me crazy that I can’t call him, see how he is. What if he’s really badly hurt, Rae? What if he’s brain damaged or something?”
“Laurie, we’ve had this conversation fifty times. When you managed to call Tanya that time she said she’d seen him at the beach. He wouldn’t have been at the beach if he was brain damaged.”
She pulls a stray hair from her ponytail, rolls her neck. “He must hate me so bad. As soon as I see him again, he’s going to dump me.”
“Want to play a game?” I suggest.
“A game?”
“You know—Monopoly? Or cards? Do you have Scrabble? I’ve never played Scrabble.”
“They’re kids’ games.” She makes a face, then smiles. “I know, how about Truth or Dare?”
I spin in my chair. “Now, that’s a kids’ game,” I go. “Me and Lisa used to play it when we were twelve.”
“Come on,” she says, “one round. Three goes each, I’ll go first. Truth or Dare?”
I spin so I’m facing her. “All right then, truth.”
Laurie smiles, raises her eyebrows. “When did you first know you were a lesbian?” In the silence of my room, the word is like a bomb going off.
“Laurie, keep your voice down! They’re only down the hall!”
“They’re never going to hear us over the TV.”
“I’m not a lesbian,” I whisper. “You said you wouldn’t say that again.”
“Rae, you have to tell me the truth,” Laurie goes. “It’s Truth or Dare.”
I swing a little on the chair, hold my prosthetic with my hand. I want to tell her the truth, but I’m not sure what it is. “I don’t know.”
She sucks her hair. “How can you not know?”
“Laurie, I liked one girl, once. Nothing ever happened, we never even kissed, so I don’t know if I am. That’s the truth.” She’s still sucking and I know she’s about to ask another question, but I get in first. “My turn. Truth or Dare?”
“Truth.”
I know what I’m going to ask, but I pretend to think about it. I keep my voice low so she’ll answer me. “So, what was it like? Going all the way with Mike?”
She glances at the door, as if Cooper might come in at any minute, pulls her feet higher on her thighs, looks down at the bed, shrugs. “It was okay.”
“Okay, that’s all I get?”
Her eyes flick up to me, to the door, and back to the bed. “The first time, I thought it was just because it was sore, that it didn’t work, and then after that, it was … I don’t know … okay. Tanya was right, it’s kind of overrated.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” She smiles a proper smile. “Kind of like The Big Lebowski.” We both laugh then because out of all the people we know who went to see The Big Lebowski, we’re the only ones who didn’t love it.
“Sex is like The Big Lebowski?” I go. “How disappointing.”
“Maybe not all sex,” Laurie goes, “maybe just sex with Mike. Anyway, my go. Truth or dare?”
I spin a full circle in the chair. There’s nothing she can ask that’s worse than what she did already. “Truth.”
“Okay, so you say you don’t know if you’re a lesbian because you never even kissed this Nicole girl. So let me ask you, are there other girls you’ve wanted to kiss?”
There’s triumph in her voice at how she’s crafted the question. I answer too quickly. “No.”
I don’t look at her. We both hear the lie. Laurie slaps her hands on her thighs.
“Truth, Rae, come on! Who is she?”
My mind does this thing then, a thing I don’t want it to do, more than anything I don’t want it to do. It skips back to a few days before, by the pool, when she was wearing that silver bikini that Cooper hates her wearing. “There’s no one.”
“Rae, come on, I can tell when you’re lying.”
I don’t know how she can tell, but she can. But she didn’t know what I was thinking that day by the pool, because if she had she wouldn’t have taken off her bikini top and started putting sun cream on her breasts, right there, right in front of me. Not that I looked, I made myself not look and I got up, really casually, and went to get a glass of water as if it had nothing to do with her at all.
Laurie’s watching me, waiting for an answer. I need to give her something.
“Okay then,” I go. “Yes.” I look at her when I say it, hold her eyes with mine, those blue eyes I noticed that first day.
She’s clapping her hands. “I knew it, I knew it! Who is she? Tell me!”
“That’s another question.” I hold my hand up. “My turn. Truth or dare?”
“Okay.” She’s shifted positions so her legs are hanging over the edge of the bed and she bounces up and down. “Truth. Ask me anything.”
I want to ask her a million things but my mind goes blank. And then a question comes. “Why did you hate me so much when I first got here?”
She stops bouncing. “I didn’t hate you—”
“Truth!”
She pulls her legs back up under her, studies her toes. On her middle one there’s a toe ring like a mini belt and she twists it around. “I didn’t hate you,” she says again.
“Laurie … ”
“No, wait.” She looks up and I see her face is real, not pretending. “I know I was mean, but I didn’t hate you. I was mad, I guess, with Dad for his whole fake happy family act. It was bad enough this shit about me having a ‘new Mom’ without having an ‘Irish sister’ as well.”
She imitates Cooper perfectly, I can hear him saying it. “He really said that?”
“Yup,” she nods. “I was fifteen, I didn’t want a sister. I still don’t.”
“Me neither.”
We smile. Laurie looks down at her toes again. “Plus there was something about you—you were so … I don’t know, sure of yourself or something. Like you knew who you were. I don’t know, maybe I was jealous or something.” She takes the toe ring on and off, on and off.
“Me?” I go. “Sure of myself?”
She looks up, her hair half covering one eye. “You do your own thing, Rae, you’re different. You don’t care what anyone thinks.”
I roll the chair a little closer to the bed so I can prop my feet up on it. The prosthetic is hurting me and I unstrap it, let it roll onto the floor. I rub my stump where it’s been.
“That looks sore,” Laurie goes.
“It is. They say you get used to it, but I don’t think I ever will.”
“What’s it like?” she asks. “Only having one arm?”
“Is that your last question?”
“No!” She hits the bed. “That’s not a real question! You know that’s not a real question! The question I want to ask you is who this girl is you want to kiss?”
I smile. I have it figured out already, my plan. Checkmate. “Well, you can’t ask me that because I don’t choose ‘truth,’ I choose ‘dare.’ ”
I lean back into the chair. I rub my stump again. There’s only three questions, so she can’t ask any more unless I agree to play again. And I’m never playing this game with her again.
She pulls her ponytail out from its scrunchie, flattening it between her hands. She’s frowning, until she smiles a slow smile.
“Come on,” I go, “you can’t take a hundred thousand years. What’s the dare?”
“I got it. I got one!”
“Okay then, what is it? Tell me, so I can get it over with.”
There’s something about the way she’s smiling that’s making my heart go fast and I’m afraid then it’s going to be something really bad, maybe even worse than if I’d said ‘truth.’ ”
“Okay.” She smiles again. “You sure you’re ready?”
“I’m ready.”
She closes her eyes, straightens her spine, and puts her hands on her thighs.
“All right then, here it is. I dare you to kiss me.”
I don’t say anything. I sit there, frozen, for five seconds or five minutes or five hours. She opens her eyes. Smiles.
“Come on, Rae, don’t be a coward. That’s the dare—kiss me.”
And then she closes her eyes again and puckers her lips a bit and I get up from the chair and sit next to her on the bed. And I lean over, really slowly, almost like I’m not moving at all, and then my lips are millimetres away from her lips and then they’re on her lips and it’s happening. Before I can think too much about it, we’re kissing, me and Laurie are kissing.
And I don’t know how long I have to kiss her for, for the dare, because she didn’t say, but I don’t stop and she doesn’t either, and of all our kisses, that first one seems to go on and on forever. And sometimes it feels like it’s still going on; if I close my eyes right now, I can still feel it—that kiss—still taste it. It might sound crazy, Mum, but if I close my eyes and picture that moment, it’s as if I’m kissing her still.
Rhea
Central Park, New York
2nd May 1999
10:11 a.m.
Dear Mum,
Central Park is busy today, loads of tourists because of the sun. They never make it up this far though, to the reservoir, and it’s nice and quiet here. Mostly, you don’t see many tourists after you go past the lake. Most of them make it as far as the Bethesda Fountain or Strawberry Fields and think they’ve seen Central Park, which is like going to Florida and thinking you’ve seen America.
I’ve looked all over for your bench, checked hundreds of them between the 59th Street entrance and here, but I still can’t find it. I’m not even sure if you have a bench here. Even as Dad was telling me, he said he might have been wrong, and Aunt Ruth never mentioned anything about a bench.
The night Dad tells me about the bench, Central Park is on the news. The funny thing is I don’t even notice because I’m at the table, doing a still life of two empty bottles for my art homework. At first I don’t know what Dad is talking about at all.
“There’s a bench there somewhere with her name on it.”
When I look up, there’s New York on the screen, Central Park trees up to their waists in snow. A voice talking about a blizzard.
“Whose name?”
I ask even though I know he means you. I hope he does. He doesn’t take his eyes off the telly.
“Your mother.”
He has a can in his hand but it’s only his third. He’s not drunk yet.
“In Central Park? How come?”
He takes a sup from the can. “Her father. He put it there for her. You know, after.”
After she died. After she drowned. I want to finish the sentence for him but then I know he won’t say anything at all. I make my voice light.
“Whereabouts?”
He glances over, then back to the screen. Shrugs. “How should I know? It’s the biggest park in the world, isn’t it? Must be a fair rake of benches.”
The news has moved on to the ad break. He tips his head back, empties his can. He’s about to shake it and say he has time for just one more. After that, he’ll leave the room and forget what we were talking about and I’ll never find out. The trick is to pretend it’s not important, that I don’t really care. I keep my voice casual. “You never told me that before—I don’t think you did.”
He keeps looking at the telly. “Did I not?”
“No, I’d have remembered something like that. Definitely. You never said.”
The ads are still on, he shakes his can, stands up. And that’s when I blow it. “You should have told me, Dad.”
He rolls his eyes. “Jesus, Rhea. I’m sorry I said anything.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“It’s only a bloody bench! It’s not like it’s something important.”
It comes on really quick, the anger, like it was there all along, just waiting. I’m standing up, balancing myself against the table with my hand.
“It’s important to me! Do you ever think about what might be important to me?”
I’m shouting, but he doesn’t shout back, only stands there holding his empty can. He looks tired.
“I shouldn’t have said anything, it’s only upsetting you.”
“I’m not upset!” I shout louder, and I hate that I sound upset. “I just want to know, that’s all!”
He looks back to the telly, there’s a happy family getting into a new car. He shakes his can again. “I’ve told you everything I know, love. The mother told me that the father was going to put a bench there, but I don’t even know if he ever did.”
I stand there, looking at him, waiting for more. He checks his watch as if he has somewhere to be, as if people are waiting on him. “Just time for one more.”
I don’t know if I ever hated him as much as I do right then, watching his back as he walks into the kitchen, the sag in the arse of his jeans; the bald patch through his grey hair looks bigger than before. I circle my hand over the end of my stump. I don’t get it—how he doesn’t seem to care, how he never asks, how he never says anything. I know he loves you, like I do, it doesn’t make any sense at all.
The bench I’m sitting on now is not your bench, the plaque says: “For Rosie, my one true love.” I checked all the ones I passed by today on the way up here, all the ones without people sitting on them. Thinking about it, if there was a bench, it would probably be on the east side, over near 76th Street, near your old apartment, and I don’t know why I’m only thinking about that now. Dumbass. That’s what Laurie would say and then she’d laugh so it didn’t sound mean. She’s always telling me that I’m so busy looking at little things that I miss the big picture. I have a system, I’m trying to check the benches in order, but she wouldn’t think that was important. She’d just start looking at benches near East 76th Street.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe it’s not important. Maybe I’ll check over there later, after I sleep. I’m so tired, Mum. I keep dozing off, writing this letter. I need some proper sleep. Maybe I’ll walk over there when I wake up and I’ll let you know if I find your bench. Maybe I will.
It’s his fault—that disgusting guy—it’s his fault I forget about the best place to find your bench. When I wake up, it takes me a minute to notice him, sitting on the bench opposite mine. He’s smiling, a weird smile I don’t like. I notice that first and the fact that he’s looking right into my eyes, before I notice his belt buckle and that his trousers are open. I don’t need to tell you where his hand is.
Cooper said I was a pervert, but that guy is a pervert, people like him. Like the guy who stood outside our school and flashed through the railings—the nuns made us all stay in the gym hall until he was gone. If the word “pervert” exists for anyone, it should be for people like him.
I sit up, grab my backpack from where it was under my head. He’s wearing a suit and a shirt and tie. I tell him that he’s disgusting, a filthy perv, but his smile doesn’t change and his hand only moves faster.
He’s the reason I forget the whole thing about 76th Street and run to the nearest way out. It’s not that I’m scared or anything, I just want to get out of the park, just get away. I don’t think about where I’m going, I just keep walking west on 91st until I get to Amsterdam and I turn left, downtown. I’m only telling you all these details because I want you to be able to picture it—me starting to walk more slowly now, the backpack on my back, the sun in my eyes. That was when I first saw the poster taped to the lamppost, the poster with my face on it.
The photo is one that Laurie took, that summer we were grounded, one day by the pool. I’m sitting at the end of the sun lounger in my black jeans and my Docs and my Zeppelin T-shirt. My hair is pulled back, so even though it’s long in the front you can see it’s shaved underneath. My smile is a real smile. At the top it says “MISSING!” in red letters, all in capitals. I don’t like the exclamation mark at the end, like it’s a joke that someone is missing.
Underneath there are a few lines of words in black. Here’s what they say:
Rhea (Rae) Farrell (Irish).
Age: 17.
5 feet, 3 inches, 164 pounds. Right arm missing from elbow.
Rhea has been missing since Sunday, March 12.
Last seen Broward Central Bus Terminal, Fort Lauderdale, believed to be heading to New York City.
Loving family, very concerned. Reward offered.
Call Ruth: 407-555-0183.
I stand there reading and rereading. There are a gazillion questions in my brain: Has anyone called? How much is the reward? Is Aunt Ruth here, in New York, putting these posters up? Who’d seen me in Broward Central? Does Cooper know she’s offering a reward? Does Laurie? “Loving family, very concerned.” That’s a joke. I want to cross that out. Cooper’s voice is in my head: “We treated you like family.” Fuck him. The number on the poster isn’t their home number, though, it’s Aunt Ruth’s work cell phone. I bet he doesn’t even know about these posters. I bet she didn’t even tell him.
I can’t believe she wrote that about my arm. As if it’s not enough to see it in the stupid photo. I bet that’s why she used that picture, it’s probably one of the only ones without the prosthetic. I can’t believe she put my weight. How did she even know my weight? Not that it’s my weight anymore.
It’s only when I see a Chinese lady looking at me looking at the poster that I realise how stupid I am to stand there staring at it. I want to tear it down, but she’s still watching, so instead I walk down Amsterdam as if nothing is the matter. There’s loads more lampposts, but not all of them have posters and I see four more between there and 59th Street and one lamppost with tape on where something had been ripped off. After 59th, Amsterdam becomes Tenth Avenue and there’s only garages and storage units where no one’s going to see any posters, so I turn back and walk up Broadway.
I’ve been walking for hours, Mum, back up Broadway and down the other side, but I haven’t seen any more, even though I walked loads of Columbus too. Why are there only five? Why only on Amsterdam? I’m afraid to go further uptown, near Columbia, in case she put any there. But what am I going to do if I find them? I can’t take them down, not during the day anyway. For the first time in ages, I wish Sergei was here—he’d know what to do. He’d make it a game, coming out at night to find the posters, he’d say we should wallpaper our apartment with them after we take them down. When we find an apartment.
I’m back in Central Park now, Mum, the touristy part. After this, I’m going to go to the pizza place by Port Authority and if I run into Sergei, I’m going to tell him that he doesn’t have to bring back the money. I still have the Discman, I could have brought it back. I’m no better than he is really. I’ll say it doesn’t matter, that we can be friends again. I’ll forgive him. I might even tell him I’m sorry.
Can they arrest me, Mum? The police? Can they make me go back? I’m eighteen in ten days. Once I hold out till I’m eighteen, they can’t make me go back, can they? Can they make me live with her until I’m twenty-one? I can’t go back for three more years, for three more months, for three more weeks, for three more days, for three more minutes, even.
I’m all over the place, Mum. I’m here in Central Park but I’m back in Florida too and down in Port Authority making up with Sergei. I had this art teacher in Coral Springs called Miss Chen. She was way better than Ms. Ryan in Rush. Miss Chen used to say you couldn’t do art if your body was in one place and your head was somewhere else, that you had to bring your head to the same place your feet were before you started.
She made us do this thing once, when we were drawing outside, to slow us down. We had to list five things we could see, five things we could hear, five things we could feel. And then we had to do four things we could see, hear, feel, and then three and then two and then one. We had to do it in our heads, not write it down, and we weren’t allowed start drawing till we’d gone all the way through to number one. Right now, in Central Park, I can see the swings and slides. That’s two things. Three—trees, four—the baseball field. Five—rocks coming out of grass. I can hear the sound of the swings swinging—they’re creaking because they need oil—traffic, a helicopter. I can hear two little girls shrieking on the swings as their parents push them. Is that one or two things? The dad is pushing the bigger girl and the mum is pushing the smaller one. She wants to get off, the smaller one does, you can tell by the sounds she’s making and because she keeps turning around, but the mum doesn’t notice, keeps pushing her higher.
I feel my feet on the ground, my hand in my jacket pocket, the weight of the backpack on my back. I feel my breath, coming in and out. That little girl’s shrieks are piercing, more like crying now, and I wish she’d stop even though I know it’s not her fault, it’s her stupid mother who keeps pushing her. I still wish she’d stop. It’s hard to keep breathing with her crying like that.
I can’t think of a fifth feeling thing. Feeling is always the hardest, seeing is the easiest. I cheat, make my hand a fist. Five—I feel myself making my hand a fist. The mother has stopped swinging the little girl, she’s picked her up and is carrying her over to the benches. Their swing is still swinging, on its own. There’s something I need to ask you. Do you remember the swings near the car park that faced the beach? Did you take me there? Lisa and I sometimes went there. I could be wrong but I think I remember being on those swings before then, way, way, way before then. I think I remember being there with you.
I wish I had a photo but that’s stupid, because I haven’t even looked at the photos I found in Nana Davis’ room yet. If I had a photo though, I could trust the memory, but I can feel it, I think I can. Here’s what I think I remember feeling:
That’s it. That happened. I know it happened. I think it did. I feel like I can see you, standing behind me, pushing. You’re wearing a denim skirt, a long one, and a jumper that’s brown and white. You have red sandals on too—we both have red sandals—and your hair is longer than in the Columbia photo and it swings in front of your face with every push. I can’t see if you’re smiling, but I know you are.
I couldn’t be on the swing and see you pushing me at the same time—I know that. I’m making that part up, I must be, but I don’t think I’m making up the rest, the lines of colour and my sandals out in front of me and my hands around the chain. I can feel the rust, flaking away on my fingers, all ten of them.
Thousands of days after that happened, thousands of miles away from Rush, it feels like I still can.
YMCA, West 63rd Street, New York
4th May 1999
4:29 p.m.
Dear Mum,
Do you believe in God? Did you, I mean? I suppose you know for sure now.
There’s a guy in Central Park who does. All day long, he’s there, talking into a microphone about turning our lives over to God’s will, that it’s the only way to have the lives we want, the only way to be free.
I must have heard him repeat that fifty thousand times this afternoon. He was wrecking my head and I wanted to move, but every time I tried, I fell asleep. And then he was there in my dreams, the man talking about God and how I needed to ask Him for help. When I woke up properly, it felt like maybe it was a sign.
Dad didn’t believe in signs. He didn’t believe in God and we never went to mass, except when I made my Communion and my Confirmation. When I stayed at Lisa’s on Saturday nights, I had to go with them on Sunday mornings, but, when we got older, Lisa stayed at our house on Saturdays so she wouldn’t have to go either.
I still don’t know what religion he was, the man with the microphone, even after hours of listening to him. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe religion and God are totally separate things anyway. When I got up to leave the park, he was talking about the power of prayer. According to him, we just needed to tell God what we wanted and have faith that He would provide.
I used to say my prayers every night and every morning. I don’t know what age I was when I stopped, but I can remember what I prayed for. It sounds silly now, stupid, but I’ll tell you anyway. I prayed for you to come back and for you and Dad to have another baby, so I’d have a little sister or brother. Thinking about it, I think that’s when I stopped praying—when that didn’t happen. I suppose you have to give God a chance and pray for something that’s actually possible. Which is why I thought I’d give it another try.
Do you want to know what I prayed for today, Mum? I prayed for somewhere safe to sleep, somewhere to lie down and rest. That’s it. That’s all.
And when I leave the park, that’s when I find this Y. I didn’t even know there was one around here, I would’ve walked by without noticing, except someone comes down the steps with the Y logo on the back of their tracksuit top, right as I’m walking by.
And I nearly don’t bother coming in because I’m thinking that they probably don’t have rooms, because not all Ys have rooms, and that, even if they do, they’ll be booked up because they always get booked up way in advance.
But I come in anyway. And they do have rooms. And the girl behind the desk smiles at me and, for a second, I think it’s because she’s seen the posters, but it’s because someone just called and cancelled so they have one room available, just for tonight, and she says it must be my lucky day.
Sergei would say that I’m taking the easy way out, giving in, that it’s stupid to spend nearly every last dollar I have on some room at the Y when there’s rooms for free all over New York if you only know where to look. He’d say it was bullshit thinking that God had provided, that it was just a coincidence. But Sergei’s not here and I’ve a good feeling, Mum, the first I’ve had in a long time and I don’t care what anyone else thinks.
I don’t have to check out till eleven a.m. tomorrow and that gives me eighteen hours here. Time to sleep and shower and get properly clean, so I can look for a job and leave my backpack here so no one will know I’m homeless. And I’ve time to look at Nana Davis’ photos, to lay them all out on the floor so I can see each one properly, and I might do that first, before I do anything else.
Mum, I’m scared. I’m sick. I feel … I don’t know how I feel. Angry. I feel fucking angry. Dumbass, Rhea.
Shut up, I’m not a dumbass.
Dumbass.
Shut up. Shut the fuck up. I’m so tired. I shouldn’t be tired, I slept for almost twelve hours. What time is it? 4:35 a.m. What time was it when I started looking at the photos?
I can see them from here, sixteen photos, four rows of four. There’s loads of us, just you and me, Dad isn’t in any of them. Some of them are blurry but there’s a really good one with me on your knee with your hands around my waist, and one where we’re both making faces, sticking our tongues out. And there’s some of Aunt Ruth, the two of us with her, on the beach in Rush, the wind blowing our hair, and then the same photo with you replaced by another woman, who looks a bit like you without your smile. Your handwriting on the back says the woman is Nana Davis. At first I think it’s a mistake because there’s no way the woman in the photo and the woman in the bed in Clover Hills can be the same person, but your handwriting on the back says she can.
I need Ziploc bags to put them in, the photos, to protect your writing. I don’t have any Ziploc bags.
There’s one photo of you on your own, standing in the kitchen, holding the red Nescafé mug and you’re wearing a long denim skirt, a brown and white jumper, red sandals.
I threw that mug away, I’m sure I did, when we cleaned out the house. I didn’t know. I would have kept it. How was I supposed to know? But I knew about your clothes. I remembered your clothes. I knew I remembered, that I didn’t make it up.
How did I know?
I just knew.
It’s 5:55 a.m. Have I been awake or asleep? I don’t know. I don’t know what’s a memory and what’s a dream. Laurie, kissing Laurie, her voice whispering that there’s only ever been me, that’s a memory, but Laurie turning into Nicole Gleeson is a dream. And then I’m driving. In real life I can’t drive, but in the dream I can. There’s no other cars on the road, only me, and when you walk out in front of me, I know I’m going to hit you, that I don’t know how to stop, that I can’t drive after all.
I never dream about you; I’ve always wanted to, but I never do. After that dream, there’s a continuation dream. I’m still in the car and the doors are locked and I can’t get out. I’m banging on the glass calling “Mum, Mum!” but even though you turn around and see me, you can’t hear what I’m saying and you don’t know who I am. You turn, really slowly, away from me, around a corner, out of sight.
There was a newspaper clipping in the photos. Your family like to do that. It’s an obituary and I think it’s going to be of your father, but it’s not, it’s of that man again, Cal Owens. I didn’t read it all, only the beginning. He died the year after you did. Why did Nana Davis keep his obituary? Why would she have that and not her own husband’s one? Was she having an affair with him? Is that why Aunt Ruth got all weird when I mentioned him? I bet that’s why. I bet that’s what the big lie is.
I dreamed about rats crawling under the bed, teeming rats. I fucking hate rats. It was only a dream, only a dream, only a dream. The rat in the front garden wasn’t a dream the time Dad cleared out everything from the attic and the back bedroom and the presses in the dining room where Nana Farrell’s stuff was and left it all in the corner of the garden—paint cans and a mattress and bike tires and old-fashioned ladies’ shoes that he could have given to the charity shop. I’m at the beach with Lisa when he’s doing it. When I come back, the speakers from the record player are up on the window sill, blaring “Voodoo Child,” and the front door is open. When Dad comes out, his face is red and he’s dragging a roll of carpet and he makes me take the other end, even though it’s really heavy and filthy from being in the attic.
That night it rains and the next day I say he should get a skip like the Walshes up the road got but he says he has a friend in the Drop Inn with a van who’s going to help him take it to the dump.
I don’t know why I’m remembering that now, the pile of filthy stuff that smelled and got wet and never properly dried. Some mornings it would have other people’s things in it, like a sewing machine, a broken deck chair. I hate it, every time I see it, from my window in the morning, having to pass it on the way to school, but if I say anything to Dad he only gets annoyed and says his friend is coming—but I know his friend isn’t coming. And then, after forty-two days of it being there, I’m walking up the drive on my way home from school when I see the rat, pushing its way into the middle of the pile, under the mattress. And I run to Lisa’s house and I hate that I’m crying, but I can’t help it because I know there’s a whole nest of rats in there, underneath everything, and I don’t want to go home.
It’s a Monday night, and they’re supposed to be having liver, but that Monday Lisa’s mum makes fish fingers and that’s a nice coincidence because I love fish fingers. I stay overnight, even though I don’t usually during the week. And someone calls the council to report the pile in the garden and they take it away the next day. When I come home everything is gone, except for one paint can lid that’s mushed into the yellow grass. I’m glad it’s gone, but I’m still scared about the rats. I know the council didn’t take them too, that they must be living somewhere.
A different dream. I never remember my dreams but now I can’t stop. I am teeming with dreams. There are missing posters all over Manhattan, blocking up every window of every building. “Missing!” written in red with a photo underneath. Except it’s not my photo, Mum. It’s yours.
9:42 a.m.
There are seventy-eight minutes to go until checkout and I haven’t even showered yet. I haven’t showered and I didn’t look for jobs and now I only have $12.64 left. $12.64 between me and what? Starvation? Death? Famines don’t happen in New York, they happen in Africa where babies lie there in their mothers’ arms with flies at the corner of their eyes, waiting to die, but maybe there’s a famine here as well, a secret one at night that no one sees and maybe it’s possible to starve here too, to die here too, right when other people are stuffing their fat faces all around you.
Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it. I can’t believe I spent so much on this room. For what I paid for this room I could have had:
Dumbass.
And now the money’s all gone and even if I live on the $1 breakfast special and two pizza slices a day, that’s only enough for three more days, only until Saturday. Then that’s it.
10:36 a.m.
Twenty-four minutes until checkout. I have to get up, have a shower, I’m not letting myself leave without a shower. Why am I so tired? I’ve had so much sleep and it’s worse than if I’d never slept at all.
I want to leave the photos here, part of me does, but I’m not thinking straight. It would be fifty kinds of crazy to throw the photos away when I risked so much to get them, when more photos of you, of us together, is the only thing I’ve ever wanted.
If I still don’t want them by the time it’s my birthday, I’ll get rid of them in Central Park. I’ll dig a hole where I can bury them, or set them on fire or throw them into the lake, one by one. I’ll stand on Bow Bridge and watch the water blur the colours of each photo together, watch the corners and the edges curl up, until they sink, down to the bottom, down to where the mud and the reeds are.
10:43 a.m.
Seventeen minutes. I’m getting up, I’m going. I need to say a prayer, like that man said, a morning prayer.
I don’t know how to pray.
Write it down:
God. Help.
Mum, if for any reason God can’t, will you?
Battery Park, New York
7th May 1999
6:25 p.m.
Dear Mum,
It’s been two days since I last wrote. But one day, two days … who cares really? I mean what’s the point? I don’t just mean the letters. What’s the point of anything? Writing to you, looking for you?
You’re dead.
Dead.
DEAD.
I know you’re not reading these letters, that no one will. Yesterday, I decided not to write anymore, and now I’m writing again. I don’t know why, except that I have paper and a pen and if there’s no letter, then there’s nothing. Really, nothing.
You know what I hate most out of everything that’s happened in the past two days? That I found out the hour changed and I didn’t know. On 4th April, the hour went forward—thirty-three days ago. Last night, this guy Jay told me about the hour, and I hate that for over a month, I’ve been totally out of sync with everyone else.
It was my own fault. I know it was stupid being in that part of Penn Station. I hate those back corridors, down near the tracks, but it was fucking raining and I didn’t want to get soaked and if I stayed in the main part, someone might have seen me. Someone who wanted Aunt Ruth’s reward.
So, that’s the first stupid thing I did, heading down to that deserted corridor on my own. The second stupid thing was that I fell asleep. I wasn’t planning to, I know it’s dangerous. I was just so tired and I didn’t even know I was asleep, until he’s waking me up.
He’s sitting right in front of me, too close, and his hand is tight on my elbow. He is a young black guy with a green and gold baseball cap with the letter “A” on it. He has a black tracksuit top on over a dirty white T-shirt. He’s smiling, as if we are friends, and even though he’s missing loads of teeth, he has a nice smile.
“Wakey wakey,” he says.
His voice is friendly, like we know each other, and for a split second I wonder if we do.
“You’ve been sleeping a long time. Couple of hours. You don’t usually sleep so long.”
His fingers are gripping me, really hard, it’s sore. His face is so close I can see white stuff at the corner of his mouth. But he’s still smiling, so I make myself smile too.
“I don’t normally come here, I missed my train. You must be thinking of someone else.”
His eyes crinkle when he smiles wider. “I’m thinking of you.”
My legs hurt from where they are scrunched up under me and I try and shift to one side so I can slide them out straight, but he’s too close and he won’t move.
“Thing is, I’ve seen you around. Been meaning to say hi.”
His voice is deep, nearly like music. Every word, every pause, like it’s timed. It’s the kind of voice that slows you down, makes you feel sleepy, but I can’t afford to feel sleepy, not now. I sit up straighter, push my bum into the tiles.
“Hey,” he goes, “what’s your favourite newspaper?”
“Newspaper?”
He loosens his grip on my elbow a little bit.
“Yeah, what do you like to read? You know, to keep up with things in the world?”
I say the first newspaper that comes to mind. “The New York Times.”
He shakes his head and his hand tightens again, higher up this time, around my biceps. “New York fuckin’ Times ! No one reads The New York Times outside New York.”
In Florida, Aunt Ruth got The New York Times delivered every Sunday and it was so thick there were always sections of the previous week’s still around when the next Sunday came.
He’s talking again, to himself as much as to me. “The Wall Street Journal, now that’s a paper. The Wall Street Journal is read and respected all over the world.”
The corridor is empty, not one other person in it. He could do anything to me here, no one would hear, no one would ever find me. His eyes are on mine, waiting for me to say something, to answer him.
“I’m not really into business stuff, finance and that.”
He nods, keeps nodding. “I get you. Me, I’m a businessman.”
“Really?”
My arm is hurting a lot, not only his grip but the angle he’s holding it at. If I could get my legs out from under me, I could try and kick him in the balls, run for it. If I could get my legs out from under me, I might have a chance.
“They had this story last month, at the start of April—when the clocks changed. You know how much it costs this country every year? This daylight savings bullshit? Millions. That’s what. Millions of dollars.”
He makes his eyes bigger and that’s when I notice how bloodshot they are.
“Wow,” I go. “That’s crazy.”
“Crazy?” he goes, “it’s fucking bullshit, that’s what it is. It’s fucked up.”
He’s silent then, for thirty seconds, or a minute, and he’s looking at the wall behind my shoulder instead of at my face, and it’s like he’s forgotten I’m there. But then his eyes snap back to mine and his grip is tight again.
“How much rent you got for me?”
“What do you mean, rent?”
I know what he means. Sergei said it before, right at the beginning, that people had patches, territories we might not even be aware of. Fuck Sergei.
“Come on,” he goes. His voice is gentle now, as if he’s talking to a little kid even though he’s probably not that much older than me. “Don’t worry, show me what you got. I get some, you get some. That’s how it works.”
I have $6.83. That’s all I have. $5 of it is in my sock.
“I don’t have anything.”
He pushes and twists my arm at the same time.
“Ow!”
“Come on now, we both know that’s not true.”
It hurts like a bitch, my elbow and my shoulder socket, all of it.
“Okay, so I have a couple of dollars. You’ll have to let go of me, so I can get it.”
He lets go, slowly, and I take the dollar bill from my back pocket, and eighty-three cents from my front one, put it in his cupped palms. He’s not getting the $5 in my sock. “That’s everything, that’s all I have.”
He puts it on the floor next to him and lets go of me to count it out, real slow. His fingers are long. Piano-playing fingers. He slides each coin along the tiles before he picks it up, stacks the dimes on top of the quarter, the pennies in a tower of their own. “That’s it?”
“I told you, that’s all I have.”
He puts the dollar in his pocket, then the change. “That’s a real shame.”
“You can’t take it, please! You can’t leave me with nothing! What am I supposed to do with nothing?”
He takes off his cap, turns it in his hands. His hair is only bristles, shaved tighter than mine.
“Don’t worry, I’ll hook you up. Good money. You want to earn, right?”
I squirm to one side, wiggle my legs out a little.
“I don’t beg, if that’s what you mean.”
He shakes his head, puts his cap back on. “No begging. Earning. Cute one like you—your accent, the he/she thing. People like that.”
He’s not holding on to me anymore, but my legs feel numb. Even if I managed to kick him, I don’t know if they’d hold my weight when I stand up, if they’d be able to move fast enough to take me down the corridor.
He keeps talking, his voice slow, mesmerising. “You might not think it, but your arm—people are into that shit. People pay for that shit.”
I cup my stump, I can’t help it. “I’m not a prostitute. I’m getting a job. I’m not even homeless, I’m just in between places.”
He laughs, tipping his head back. The laugh goes on for ages. When he stops, he wipes his mouth. “Honey, we’re all just in between places.”
There’s a sound then, voices, two guys’ voices. I can’t see them but I can hear them, talking about the Knicks game. If I screamed, they’d hear me, they’d definitely hear me. I want to scream, but somehow I can’t.
Their voices fade away and he keeps looking in the direction that they went, long after it is silent. When he turns to me again, his eyes are different, as if they are seeing me for the first time.
“What’s your name?” he goes.
My brain can’t think of another name. “Rhea.”
“Rhea.” He smiles. “That’s cute. I’m Jay.”
He holds out his hand and I take it. He lets go and reaches into his pocket, takes out the eighty-three cents. “Here,” he goes. “When that runs out, come back and see me, okay?”
“Okay.”
I take the change from him, hold it tight. I nearly thank him, but I don’t.
“And don’t be reading the Times. You pick up the Journal, remember?”
“Okay, I’ll remember.”
He gets up really slowly, he’s almost graceful the way he does it, he doesn’t have to push himself up with his hands or anything. I watch him as he walks away, towards where the voices were, and I notice he has a wonky foot, his left one. I’m watching how it moves, sloping out to one side and kind of dragging along the floor, when he turns around and tips his baseball cap at me and smiles.
That was last night—I think it was last night, not the night before—but it’s hard to tell anymore. I’m not going to tell you how much of the $5.83 I have left. I haven’t eaten since I’ve been down here on my bench by the water. It’s kind of handy, not needing to eat, because I don’t need to move, even to find a toilet, all I have to do is sit here and listen to the river lapping and watch the boats. In an hour or so, it’ll get dark, the water will be black and in the blackness you wouldn’t be able to see someone lowering themselves into the water, someone holding on to the bars of the railing, someone letting go.
It’d be cold, I know that. It would seep through my clothes, make them ice, make them heavy. Like a stone. “Stone Free.” It’s calm, though, flat, like in Rush. That day—you know the day I’m talking about—it was flat as a pancake, that’s what they said. If someone who swims every day, someone who’s such a good swimmer, can drown in calm water like that, it must be easier for someone who can’t swim, someone who’s never learned. It must be faster.
There’s a payphone behind this bench. I can’t see it because I’m looking at the water but I know it’s there, five or six feet from where I’m sitting now. I could call Aunt Ruth’s cell number, the one on the poster, I wouldn’t have to talk to Cooper. I can imagine myself making the call, feel my neck holding the receiver, my finger punching the keys, hear the phone ringing, stretching out. You know how in films when someone is missing, the person answers the phone straightaway, all breathless and hopeful? I keep wondering if Aunt Ruth would answer like that.
This is how I imagine the call:
The phone would ring once, maybe twice, and then I’d hear Aunt Ruth at the other end.
Aunt Ruth: Hello?
Me: Breathing.
Aunt Ruth: Hello? Hello? Rhea? Is that you?
Me: Breathing.
Aunt Ruth: Rhea, please come home! I’m sorry, honey. You know I didn’t mean it! I lied, what I said, I was only trying to hurt you—
And then I hang up.
I’m not going to call, though. No matter what happens, Mum, I’m not going to call. Even if Jay shows up at this bench, even if all the rats in New York come teeming out of the water.
The only possible reason in the world that I’d call would be if I was scared of dying. But people die, Mum. I mean you died, that’s just what happens.
And I’m not scared of anything. I need to remember that, to keep remembering that, that I’ve never been scared of anything, of anything at all.
Rae
Grand Central Station, New York
9th May 1999
4:12 p.m.
Dear Mum,
I went to Michael’s to give him his Discman back. Everything bad that started to happen, happened since I took that Discman, as if taking it was bad karma or something, and the only way to undo it is by giving it back. That’s what I tell myself the reason is, but on the way I think there might be another reason, like that I’ve no CDs or batteries. That maybe I’m going there to remember that only two weeks ago Sergei and I were in his apartment, eating dumplings and Pop-Tarts and watching a Law & Order marathon. I don’t get time at all. Nothing interesting happens for months and months, sometimes even years, and then your whole world can change in only two weeks.
I don’t expect to actually see him, he’s upstate on the weekends, and I haven’t figured out how to give him the Discman back, except maybe to wait until one of the neighbours is going in and ask them to leave it outside his door. That’s what I’m thinking, but when I get there, there’s a big people carrier outside his building, almost exactly like the car Cooper had except this one is black. The door of the building is propped open with a box and the lid doesn’t shut properly and I can see there are CDs inside.
I have to be honest, Mum, I think about lifting the lid and taking one, which I know goes against the whole karma thing, but right then the idea of closing my eyes and listening to music, any music, is worth all the bad karma in the world. But before I have a chance, I hear voices coming down the stairs and that’s when I hide in the doorway of the apartment building next door. Michael walks right past me, but he doesn’t see me, and then a woman walks past, behind him. He’s wearing a grey T-shirt with a line of sweat down the back and he’s carrying a box. The woman is wearing a pink tracksuit and she’s not carrying anything.
They put the box in the car and when they go back into the building, I run across the street, to where the lane is, so I can get a better view. It takes ages for them to come out again but when they do I get a proper look at the woman. She has sunglasses on, pink ones, and her blonde hair is in a ponytail, scraped back really tight so it pulls at the skin on the side of her face. It must be the woman from the photo, it has to be, but she doesn’t look the same. She doesn’t look the same at all.
They make twelve trips up and down to the car. Each time, Michael is carrying a big box that he loads into the boot and then when that’s full he starts to load things into the back seat. The woman never carries anything except once when she carries a lamp. She could have just sat in the car and waited, but she follows him, a step behind his step, and it looks like she’s talking all the time, even though he’s not saying anything at all.
I don’t know why watching them makes me sad, except that since that night at the Y, everything makes me sad. It’s not like I even know Michael, not really, so it doesn’t make sense why I don’t want him to go. But I don’t want him to go.
The last time they come out, he’s carrying a backpack and a denim jacket, she has a white plastic bag. She says something and goes back into the building. I lean down and see her runners climbing the stairs. My brain is still deciding what to do when my feet decide first and run across the street. Michael is in the passenger seat with the window rolled down. At first he doesn’t see me because he’s looking in the mirror, doing something with his hair. I’m about to say his name when he glances over, sees me, does a double take. He jerks his head around to look over his shoulder, as if she’s going to be right behind him, but she’s not.
“Holy shit! What are you doing here? You got to get out of here.”
“I came to give you this.”
He looks confused at the Discman I’m holding up to the window. He twists around in his seat to check the door of the apartment building, but she’s still not coming.
“I shouldn’t have taken it, I’m sorry. I haven’t even used it, it still works.”
“What the fuck? You scam me for over a thousand bucks and you come to bring this back?”
My stump hurts and I want to cup it but my hand still has the Discman.
“I didn’t know about the money.”
“Yeah, yeah, you probably put him up to it.”
“I swear, I didn’t know. He only told me after.”
He’s shaking his head, he doesn’t believe me. He lowers his voice.
“You know what’s fucked up? I can almost get the money thing, you know. I nearly can. But calling Melanie? What the fuck did you guys get out of that?”
“Melanie?”
“She’s pregnant, you know. Did he tell you that? She could have lost the baby because of you.”
His eyes are shiny and his hand is in a fist. I scrunch my toes up in my Docs. I hold out the Discman, but it’s like he doesn’t even see it. He glances over his shoulder again, his voice a whisper. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t seen him.”
He looks at me then, his eyes properly look at me, take me in.
“You really haven’t seen him?”
I shake my head.
“You have anyone else in the city you can go to? Any family?”
I bite down hard, clench. Inside my cheeks, I’ve all these sores, mouth ulcers, even though I keep brushing my teeth. Eating pizza hurts and so does eating bagels. He reaches into his pocket, takes out two twenties, holds them out the window in between his index and his middle fingers, like forty dollars is nothing at all.
“That’s all I have on me, just take it.”
I shake my head; that’s not why I’m here. And then the fucking tears start leaking out, they’re on my cheeks and I can’t wipe them away without dropping the Discman and now he feels sorry for me, now he is pitying me.
“I don’t want your charity.”
“Fine,” he says. “Give it to someone else who needs it.”
He lets go of the notes and they flutter onto the road. One lands near my Doc, the other is next to the tyre.
“You have to go,” he says. “Just take the fucking money and go.”
I shove the Discman through the window at him, scrunch down and grab the notes. When I stand back up, he’s looking at me differently, frowning this time.
“Hey,” he goes, “did I see a poster with your face on it in the subway? Some girl missing from Florida. Is that you?”
My heart is kicking. I hoist my backpack higher on my back.
“Where?” I go. “Which subway station?”
We both hear it then, the noise, the sound of the apartment building door closing. There’s panic in his face, but I know what to do. I cross the street, real slow, casual, like I was just walking by. I don’t run. When I’m on the other side, I see the blonde woman. She hasn’t even noticed me.
Melanie, her name is Melanie. Her hand is on her stomach, a little bump under her pink tracksuit top, a little bump that’s a baby.
She gets into the car and as she puts on her seat belt, Michael glances over at me. She puts on the indicator, pulls away from the kerb, and they drive away.
I go to the diner, the diner where me and Sergei had breakfast that morning—not even three weeks ago. The hostess looks as if she mightn’t seat me, then she does, at a table in the corner near the back. I’m looking for the waitress, the one who served us the day we had the row, but she’s not there and that nearly makes the tears come again. I nearly order the pancakes, like Sergei had, but they’re too expensive so I look through six pages of the menu before deciding on eggs and sausage because they come with hash browns and toast and coffee, and you get free refills on the coffee and at $4.75 before tax it’s the best deal, plus it’s soft so it won’t hurt my mouth.
And now the food is all gone, like all food goes, and the thing about eating is as soon as I eat anything I always want more, like instead of making me full it just makes me more hungry. I want the curly fries, and the spaghetti and meatballs, and the waffles with cream and chocolate sauce. I want the loaded potato skins.
And I can’t stop thinking about the look on Michael’s face when he talked about Sergei calling his wife. Sergei must have been really mad to do that, or really hurt, but Michael was hurt too, I saw that, he let me see it. And in the movies there’s always someone who hurts and someone who gets hurt, but maybe it’s not always like that, maybe two people can hurt each other at the very same time?
Nicole Gleeson hurt me, Mum, but she didn’t know she was doing it and maybe I hurt her a little bit too, by ignoring her after. With Laurie, it was different. She knew all along that I liked her and she hurt me anyway. You know what the funny thing was? In a way, I wasn’t even surprised, like part of me knew she was going to do it, some part of me knew what was going to happen all along.
Rhea
West 46th Street, New York
11th May 1999
1:31 a.m.
Dear Mum,
Tonight, I did something different. I’m on 46th Street, just off Times Square. Usually I hate Times Square, but it’s raining and I found a good spot, on a step under an awning, and I don’t want to give it up. Nobody bothers me for ages, so I’m able to sleep on and off until, coming up to half ten, all these people start to arrive, one by one, to go in through the door behind me. It’s a pain to have to keep getting up but I keep sitting back down on my step because it’s the best spot. And one of those times, just as I’m about to sit back down, I see an old woman coming up the steps and something makes me stand back up and hold the door open for her.
“Thank you,” she goes. When she pulls down her hood, I see she has really long, grey hair. “Are you here for the meeting?”
“The meeting?”
“It’s a good one. I wouldn’t come out on a night like tonight for any meeting.”
She walks through the door and into a hallway, then she turns back to me. “Don’t worry, you won’t be the only new face. We get a lot of newcomers.”
I’m still holding the door open and I don’t know what makes me walk through it, what makes me follow her to the end of the hallway and up the stairs, except that maybe it seems like such a long time since anyone’s invited me anywhere and it’s nice to be somewhere dry and warm.
Halfway up the stairs, though, I start to get nervous in case it’s a trap, some kind of cult, but there’s a young guy behind me on the stairs and he looks okay and if I need to get out I know I could push past him easily. When we go into the room at the top, there’s folding chairs all laid out in a semicircle and two people behind a heavy table in the middle. The old lady hugs someone and they go and sit at the other side of the room. I take the seat closest to the door. And that’s when I see the poster on the wall—the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I nearly laugh when I see that, because Alcoholics Anonymous is where Michael took Sergei one night, and Sergei said it was the lamest thing ever and the only good thing was that they had free coffee. This meeting doesn’t have any coffee, I don’t see any, but I’m glad Sergei told me about it, because he also said that you didn’t have to say anything if you didn’t want to, you could just listen. The man behind the table starts reading stuff from a folder, going on and on. It’s warm and I know I’m never going to be able to stay awake. I’m taking off my Champion sweatshirt when he stops talking and introduces the girl next to him and everyone starts to clap.
She says her name is Tierney and that she’s an alcoholic. I don’t know why I’m calling her a girl because she’s got to be in her thirties, but she seems like a kid in a way, especially when she laughs this really giggly laugh. She laughs a lot, right the way through, especially when she’s telling us how she started to drink white wine because she thought if she drank it all there wouldn’t be enough left for her Mom to get drunk. Everyone laughs at that part, only I don’t, because I’m thinking it kind of makes sense and it reminds me of the time I poured Dad’s Guinness down the drain. According to this girl, it didn’t make sense though, because it didn’t stop her mother drinking, the only thing it did was make her an alcoholic too.
I’m trying to get my head around all that and I almost miss the part where she says something about being a lesbian and I want her to back up and say that again, but she’s moved on to talking about her work. I wonder if I’m imagining what she said, because she has long dark hair and she’s wearing a skirt and red shoes with a little heel and she doesn’t look like a lesbian any more than she looks like an alcoholic. And just when I think I must have heard her wrong, she starts talking about a date she was on earlier in the night with a girl called Susan and that she was glad to have had an excuse to finish up, she was glad she was coming to the meeting.
She looks at the clock and says she’ll leave it there and everyone claps again. I hope there’s going to be questions but there aren’t, instead it starts at the other side of the circle with each person taking turns to talk about themselves and none of them are as interesting as Tierney. Some people go on and on and others don’t say much. Hardly anyone talks about drink. The young guy from the stairs tells us all about his dental work and how much it costs and the man next to him is from Denver and he’s in New York for a wedding and I feel sorry for him that he has to spend part of his trip in a meeting like this. When it comes to the old lady, she says her name is Winnie. She tells Tierney that she reminds her of herself when she was younger, but I don’t think she means the gay part, because then she goes on about her pregnant daughter and how she really wants to help her, but she has to respect her daughter’s wishes when she says she doesn’t want her help.
It goes around the circle and then I’m going to be next. I’m not going to say anything, I don’t have to, Sergei said you don’t have to—but then the person next to me finishes and they all look at me.
I shrug. “I don’t know what to say.”
“What’s your name?” the guy with the folder says.
I picture Aunt Ruth’s posters, hiding, lying in wait all over the city.
“Lisa.”
My voice sounds funny, not like my voice. I think maybe that’s why I want to talk to them, that maybe I want to say something more than “I was wondering if you are hiring at the moment?” Maybe I want to use my voice so I know I still have it.
The room has a rug in it, an attempt to make it homey, only it doesn’t work. The rug is purple and there’s a red cross but it’s kind of off centre and that bothers me and that’s what I start talking about, the off-centre cross. And next thing I know, I’m talking and talking and talking, words spilling out of my mouth like I couldn’t stop them even if I wanted to.
I tell them about all the places I looked for a job today, how I went into every single shop, restaurant, deli, fast food joint along Broadway from 23rd all the way up to 50th and not one place said yes, or even maybe. I tell them about the two girls talking at the counter in the shoe shop who ignore me even though I’m standing right in front of them and they crack up laughing when I walk away and say something I can’t hear but I know it’s about me. I tell them about the guy in the diner who says that they don’t let homeless people in, even before I get a chance to ask about a job. I keep looking down at the rug as I tell them everything, I don’t look at any of their faces. And then I get to the part about the nice woman in the bakery, who isn’t hiring either but she tells me that in a nice way, and gives me a bag of cookies that she says are broken and when I open them later, they’re still warm and all in one piece and not broken at all.
It makes zero sense that I start to blubber about the nice bakery lady when I didn’t cry about the two bitches in the shoe shop but that’s what happens. And before I can stop myself, I blubber that I miss Laurie, that I wish she was here, that I wish I had her to share the cookies with.
It’s awful then, only silence and the sound of my crying. I want to get up, to run down the stairs, to pick up one of the chairs and hit the girl who walks over to give me a tissue, but instead I take it and blow my nose. Someone says, “Keep coming back,” and then it moves on to the lady next to me. And it’s only then that I realise I forgot to pretend to be an alcoholic, and I hope they won’t kick me out.
At half eleven, it ends and everyone holds hands in a circle, which is weird and like a cult and kind of awkward too, but the man to my right puts his hand on my shoulder and kind of squeezes it, which feels nice in a way. I’m getting ready to leave and when I look up the old lady is in front of me, the one called Winnie who was talking about her daughter being pregnant.
“It was nice to hear you, Lisa,” she says.
For a second I forget my name is Lisa, then I remember.
“Okay,” I go. “You too.”
“A few of us go for fellowship,” she says. “Would you like to come?”
“For what?”
She smiles, slides her glasses further up her nose.
“We go to the diner, for something to eat, coffee.”
I swing my backpack over my shoulder. “No, thanks, I can’t.”
“They do the best burgers in Midtown.” She raises an eyebrow. “My treat?”
“No, thank you. I have to be somewhere.”
She looks at me, her eyes steady behind her glasses. We both know it’s a lie. Right then, Tierney comes up behind her, puts her hands on both our shoulders.
“You coming to the diner, Winnie?”
“Sure am. I was just seeing if Lisa would come too.”
Tierney turns to me. “Oh, hi. Nice to meet you. You’ll come, right?”
I start to shake my head. “I was just saying I can’t, I—”
“Oh come on, we don’t bite. Get to know us, it’ll be fun.”
She giggles, like she did when she was speaking. She looks like someone who is fun. I look at Winnie and back to her. “Okay.”
On the way to the diner, Tierney tells me that she’s Irish too, that Tierney was her mum’s maiden name and she wanted to keep it, even though it was a last name.
We’re stopped at a light, waiting to cross.
“Did you get teased at school?” I ask.
She looks at me, makes a face. “Did I? You wouldn’t believe it. Kids can be cruel.”
“I believe it,” I go. “I used to get hassled about my name too.”
“Really?” I hear the surprise in her voice and realise my mistake before she says it. “Lisa’s not a common name in Ireland?”
“I meant, for my last name,” I go. “I got teased for my last name.”
If she asks what my last name is, I’m going to pretend that it’s Ass or Penis or something, but she doesn’t ask. By then, we’re at the diner and Winnie is in front, holding the door open for us. I’m scared they might say they don’t want me in there, but walking in between Winnie and Tierney, no one says a thing and we all go to a big table at the back.
There’s eight people altogether, two other women apart from the three of us and three men. I’m on the end, next to Tierney and opposite Winnie. Winnie’s talking to the dental work guy next to her and Tierney’s talking to the girl on her other side. I read the menu and pretend it doesn’t matter.
I’m on the third page when Winnie leans across the table. “Don’t forget to check out the burger section.”
Michael’s $40 is only $23.78 now.
“I’m not too hungry, I’m just going to get a bagel,” I say, closing the menu.
“Suit yourself,” Winnie goes. “But it’s my treat, remember?”
Tierney’s head is down, looking at the menu, and when she hears that, she turns to me. “Get a burger, I’m getting a burger. And curly fries.”
Before I can decide properly the waitress is there and I order a burger because Winnie said twice she’ll pay for it, and Tierney heard her too, so she can’t back out.
When the waitress leaves, Tierney turns to me. “You sounded pretty cut up in there, about that girl. What’s her name?”
“Laurie,” I go. It feels like the first time I’ve said her name in years, so I say it again. “Her name is Laurie.”
“Yeah, Laurie. Were you guys just friends or were you together?”
She says it real casual, just like that—“together”—and right then the waitress arrives with Cokes for me and Tierney and a cup of tea for Winnie. She spills some Coke and Tierney wipes it up and needs more napkins. With all the commotion, I don’t want her to forget what we were talking about so as soon as the waitress is gone I answer her.
“I don’t know if you’d say we were together, but—”
She nods, stirs her Coke with her straw.
“Let me guess—she blows hot and cold? One minute she’s sure she’s gay. But then it turns out she’s just experimenting, having fun?”
She puts on this funny high voice then that makes her giggle, and I start to laugh too. “How did you know?”
She drinks some Coke. “God, that teen stage sucks. My first was exactly the same. Emily. At least now, horrible though the New York dating scene is, by my age most women accept the fact that they prefer to have sex with other women and not men.”
She says that just as the waitress is coming over again—with the bread this time—and my face burns because I know she’s heard, but it doesn’t seem to bother her and Tierney moves the glasses to make room, as if she’s talking about the weather.
I want to ask Tierney about Emily, to talk more about Laurie, but Tierney’s talking to Winnie now, asking about her daughter’s pregnancy. That conversation goes on for ages and I eat two rolls and a breadstick. When they bring out a plate of pickles and coleslaw, I take one of each, just like Tierney and Winnie do, but I eat mine straightaway instead of waiting for my burger. When my burger arrives it’s giant, too big for the bun, and once I take a bite I am starving, hungrier than I’ve ever been before. I take another bite before I’ve properly finished chewing the first. Bite after bite. I eat my way through the burger as if I’m a machine, as if I’m in a race. As if finishing it quicker will make Tierney turn back to me and start to talk about sex again.
Eventually, the dental guy turns to Winnie, says something about pain meds he’s on, and she sits back in her seat to talk to him. My plate is empty, clean, and I take another breadstick. Tierney pushes her half-finished burger out in front of her.
“I’m not even hungry for this,” she goes. “I don’t know about you but I can never eat when I’m upset.”
“I don’t have that problem,” I go. “I wish I did.”
We both laugh and she lifts up my plate and swaps it with hers. “Here, finish it if you want.”
For a nano-second, I think about saying no but my hand decides for me and lifts it up to my mouth before I even say thank you.
Tierney flips her hair to one side and puts her chin on her hand and starts talking to me as if we’d never left off.
“The thing about Susan, the woman I was on the date with earlier,” she says, “is that she’s great on paper. Good job? Tick. Nice apartment? Tick. Right age? Tick. We like the same movies, the same restaurants, all of that.”
I nod, chewing.
She shakes her head. “But there’s just no—I hate to say it, there’s just no spark, you know? I know I’m thirty-eight, but you need spark, right? You still need passion?”
I nod again. Answer her with my mouth full. “Yeah, you need spark.”
“Right.” She sucks up some more Coke. “I mean it’s not that she’s not attractive. She is. But when we kiss—I don’t know—I don’t really feel anything. It’s like I’m going through the motions.”
I swallow a bite that I haven’t chewed properly and it hurts my throat as it goes down. “Laurie’s an amazing kisser.” I feel bold saying it, embarrassed but somehow proud too. I sneak a glance at Winnie across the table, but she’s still speaking to dental guy.
Tierney giggles. “You know, I had such a hard time figuring out if I was gay or straight, all this angst. Then I kissed Emily and I just knew. Isn’t it amazing, how different it feels?”
The burger is in my hand but I’ve nearly forgotten it. My face hurts from smiling. “Yes! Totally!” I go. “That’s totally it.”
She drains her Coke so it makes that sound at the bottom of the glass. “It’s a simple fact—girls are better kissers. I bet a good kiss would turn a lot of girls.”
I’m loving this conversation, and I want to tell her more about Laurie, to tell her everything, right from the start—how after the “Truth or Dare” kiss, we kissed again the next day and the day after and how we spent the whole time we were grounded lying on my bed or on hers, kissing each other and talking. It was so easy to talk, lying next to her, staring at the ceiling fan, and even when we weren’t talking it was enough to lie there just touching, and even when we weren’t touching sometimes breathing together was enough. I want to tell Tierney all that, I want to tell someone, but the waitress is clearing our plates and Tierney is pulling her wallet from her pocket.
“I’ve got to get going, early start tomorrow,” she goes, throwing a ten and a five on the table. “That’ll cover it.”
She says goodbye to everyone, one by one. Winnie gets up to hug her, but I don’t. She squeezes my shoulder as she passes by.
“Take it easy, Lisa,” she says, still smiling. “I hope I’ll see you around.”
The tears are in my eyes again. That’s the thing, Mum, the stupid thing about crying—after you do it once, it’s like the tears are there all the time, the whole fucking time, just waiting for an opportunity to show again. Dumbass. That’s what Laurie would say. I can hear her voice saying it. You’re such a dumbass, Rae. What did you think she was going to do, adopt you?
The waitress is writing out bills for everyone, plopping them in front of us, but Winnie scoops up mine. There’s still bread left in the basket but before I can take it, the bus boy clears it away.
“I can pay,” I say to Winnie. “I have money.”
My voice sounds angry but she doesn’t seem to notice.
“It’s my treat this time,” she says, “maybe you’ll treat me some other time.”
As she’s counting out the money, I notice her fingernails, all painted different colours—blue, green, sparkly purple, silver. It’s kind of funny looking but kind of cool too, especially on an old lady and I want to tell her—I would have told her if I knew the tears wouldn’t come again.
Out on the street it’s stopped raining, but it seems colder now than earlier. The others say goodbye and then it’s just Winnie and me in the light from the diner window.
“Thanks for the burger,” I go. “You were right, it was good.”
“You’re welcome. Where are you going now?”
I jerk my head downtown, towards Michael’s. “The Village. Me and a friend have a place there.”
She smiles. “That sounds nice.”
“Yeah,” I go, “yeah, it is.”
She points over her shoulder. “I live that way—Hell’s Kitchen, right on Ninth Avenue. If you hadn’t anywhere else to go, I was going to offer you my couch.”
I answer her before I’ve even thought about it. “No, thanks. I’m grand.”
“Okay.” She nods. “I’d give you my number, but I don’t have a phone. If you want to find me you could come back to the meeting.”
I want to go now, am already edging away.
“Or on Wednesdays and Fridays I volunteer at a soup kitchen on the corner of 28th and Ninth.”
“I don’t need a soup kitchen.”
She slides her glasses up her nose. “I only meant you could find me there. It’s a nice place, good food. I eat there after I volunteer and I’ve eaten there other times too. People fall on hard times, there’s no shame in it, you know.”
We stand there for another few seconds and I say I’ve got to get going. I leave before she can give me a hug. I’m glad she told me where she lives so I can walk the other direction. And walking away, I have a feeling that she’s watching me, so I don’t look back. I cross the street, head towards the subway as if I really am going to Michael’s and when I finally sneak a look behind me, she’s not there, she’s gone. Walking through the Times Square crowd, back to my step under the awning, with my belly full of burger and my head full of Laurie, I’m imagining what it would have been like if I’d said yes to Winnie’s offer, what her apartment would be like and if her couch would be comfy and if I’d tell her today was my last day being seventeen.
But there’s no point in writing about that, Mum, because I’m never going to see her again, her or Tierney. She must want something—even if I don’t know what it is yet—maybe she even recognised me from the posters, maybe she wanted the reward.
Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter, but I know she wanted something.
Everyone always does.
Rhea
Battery Park, New York
12th May 1999
5:34 p.m.
Dear Mum,
Today’s my birthday. You know this, of course, you’re my mother. I hope you know.
Now that I’m an adult, there’s all these things I can do today, that I couldn’t do yesterday:
I’m sure there’s more but they’re the ones I remember from when me and Laurie looked it up on the internet in the school library. One thing I can’t do in this crazy country is drink yet. I could marry someone, buy a gun, shoot them, be incarcerated for it, sue my lawyer for not representing me properly, but I can’t order a bottle of Bud Light.
Of these eleven things, ten are new and I don’t really want to do any of them, at least not today. And the first thing, the thing I’ve already done, I don’t want to do today either, I don’t know if I ever want to do it again. Sex gets people into trouble, Mum, I told you that already. I know that, but the thing is, since talking to Tierney in the diner the other night, Laurie is all over my mind again, worse than before.
Like today, I’m walking up Sixth Avenue and I see this blonde girl from behind and I think it’s her. She’s wearing a white T-shirt and jeans and her hair is Laurie’s length and it sways like Laurie’s hair sways and I have this whole story made up in my head about how Laurie’s here with Aunt Ruth, looking for me and putting up posters. I’m walking right behind the girl, really close, when she stops to look at something in a shop window and I nearly bump into her and she’s not Laurie, she’s nothing like Laurie at all. Last night, I rode the E train all night. It’s funny because I never liked the E that much on your map, but it’s the line I spend most time on now. If I had one wish to make, one birthday wish, it wouldn’t be to see Laurie, it’d be to have my Discman and all my CDs, and out of all of the music I could play I’d play “Comfortably Numb” on repeat, over and over and over again, riding that train. But that’s about Laurie too, that wish, because “Comfortably Numb” was what I was listening to the night she came into my room, the night of the day we’d had the big fight, the first fight we’d had in a long time.
I don’t hear the door, because of the music, but I see the light change, her shape in the dark. I remember sitting up, pushing myself back against the pillows. “Laurie?”
I think I’m being quiet, but I’m not, because of the music, and I see her put her finger on her lips. She takes my headphones off, gently. Her hand on my face is cold.
“What are you doing here?”
“Move over.”
She pushes me gently back in bed so I’m against the wall, she’s on the edge. I’m wearing my Zeppelin T-shirt and knickers, no bottoms, and I can feel her leg against mine, skin against skin where her pyjama leg is riding up. I push back further into the wall.
“Laurie, what are you doing?”
She doesn’t answer, just reaches over and kisses me. Her mouth is warm, familiar, exciting. I can taste cigarettes, a trace of beer from the party. That was what part of the fight was about, why I won’t go to parties with her anymore, why I spend every Saturday night at Glenda’s. It’s been five weeks since I’ve kissed her, but kissing her again, it’s like I’m missing it and enjoying it and hungry for it all at the same time. I pull away for a second and then we both close the gap and we kiss and kiss and kiss.
It’s me who pulls away again.
“What?” she whispers.
I gesture towards the wall, make a face. “What do you think?”
“They’re out cold,” she goes. “They were loaded when they came in.”
“Were they?”
“Yeah. I could hear him snoring when I was in the hall.”
She moves in again and I move a little out of her way.
“What if they wake up?”
Her voice is impatient. “They won’t.”
The kiss begins where the other one ended and I am in it and not in it because my head is catching up with my body. I break away again.
“Rae, what’s the problem? I’m telling you, they’re sleeping! Nothing wakes Dad when he snores like that. Trust me.”
My lip is a little wet where hers has been. Her hand is on my hip, the skin above my knickers, under my T-shirt. It’s hard to speak.
“It’s not that.”
“What then?”
My arm is trapped under me and I shift a bit to free it.
“What, Rae?”
I don’t know how to tell her. How I was getting to be okay about it, the fact that we’d stopped kissing, that signing up to art club on weekends and taking extra shifts at the restaurant and hanging out with Glenda kept me from thinking about it every second of every day, kept me from wondering how she could be dating Ryan Matthews after everything that happened between us. But if we did it again, if we did any more than kiss, I mightn’t be able to forget. And I mightn’t be able to stop.
“We’ve never done this, Laurie.”
“We’ve kissed.”
“Not like this.”
Her fingers are on my stomach now, tracing a line of fire, everywhere is on fire.
“Don’t you want to?” she goes.
My breath is hard, my headphones are choking me. “Comfortably Numb” is still playing, how can it be still playing? I rip the headphones off, throw them towards the end of the bed. “Do you?”
This is where she will say that she’s doing it for me, to give me practice being with a girl, that it doesn’t matter to her either way. For a minute, there is silence, her breath in the dark. I can see her eyes now, wide open.
“Yes.”
“I don’t mean just because you think I want to,” I go. “I mean what do you want? Do you want to? For you?”
“Rae, come on. Please.”
It’s that that gets me, the “please,” the way she says it. I’m not breathing then and neither is she but we must be breathing because we’re kissing again and her hand is making a circle of flames and my hand is reaching out too, to feel the hem of her T-shirt.
What do you think would have happened, Mum, if I’d done something different? If I’d told her that I didn’t want to, if I’d made her go back to her own room? Would I be having the perfect eighteenth birthday today? Waking up to one of Aunt Ruth’s special breakfasts where she cooks the Irish sausages she makes Cooper source for me through the restaurant? Would we be going to Jaxson’s later? Or to the Everglades again to see the crocodiles like we did last year on my birthday? Do you think Aunt Ruth’s thinking about the day we could have had today?
Or Laurie? Do they all know what’s in the envelope from Columbia? Would we be celebrating that as well, if I was still at home?
This is bullshit—BULLSHIT. Home? That’s not home, it never was home. Here is my home, New York is my home now, this bench by the water is my home because at least here I can be me, I can be who I want, who I really am, without having to play “let’s pretend” and be someone else. Isn’t that what being an adult is supposed to be about, anyway? Isn’t that the whole point?
Only a kid would be sitting here, imagining some perfect birthday that’s never going to happen, that never would have been perfect anyway. An adult would get that maybe this is the perfect birthday, maybe in some way I don’t get yet, this is the exact eighteenth birthday I’m supposed to have, even if it feels totally fucked up right now.
It’s not like Laurie was ever any good at birthdays anyway—except her own—and my best birthday was years before I met her, the year I was thirteen.
My birthday was on a Thursday that year. Thursdays meant maths first thing, but it wasn’t too bad because we had art after. When Dad comes into my room that morning I’m checking everything is in my geometry set, even though everything is always in my geometry set.
He holds his arms out, for a hug. “So it’s official, I have a teenage daughter. Happy Birthday!”
His cardigan and shirt are the same as he was wearing last night and I wonder if he thinks I might not remember what he was wearing before he went out.
“Aren’t you going to give your old dad a hug?”
I close the gap between us. “Thanks, Dad.”
He smells like smoke, like the pub and something else that smells horrible but I hug him tighter so he won’t know I’ve noticed. And I mean the hug, too, because I’m glad he remembered. I’d been dropping hints about runners I wanted for a couple of weeks. I wanted the runners but that wasn’t the only reason for the hints—ever since he’d forgotten the year when I turned ten I’ve been scared that he’ll forget again.
“I’m making a special birthday breakfast,” he goes. “Hurry up, because we’ve got to get going soon.”
I want to ask him what he means, but he’s gone then and already bounding down the stairs. I check my geometry set again, zip up my bag. I haven’t told him that Lisa’s mum is making me a birthday dinner, that we’re watching Indecent Proposal on video after, even though it’s a school night, and I remember thinking then that I should tell him, in case he wants to do something.
The post comes just as I’m on the stairs and there’s a yellow envelope on top of the bills. It has an American stamp, Aunt Ruth’s scrunched-up writing. I put it in my school bag, in case Dad sees it. In the kitchen, Dad has our places set, two sausage sandwiches each. I can tell the white bread is fresh because it’s taken on the shape of his fingers where he leaned down to cut it in half and the ketchup is starting to leak through.
He pours tea into the cups, sloshing some on the counter. I sit down and he plonks a mug in front of me, sits down opposite. There’s no milk so he must have forgotten to pay the bill again but tea tastes the same with only water to cool it down anyway.
He takes a big bite from his sandwich. “Get that down you quick, we don’t have much time.”
The clock on the wall says it is twenty past eight.
“I’ve loads of time. I never leave till twenty to.”
The sausage sandwich is nice, hot and greasy, ketchup sliding against butter against bread. I count my chews.
“No school today, we’re going on a trip.”
He’s into the second sandwich already, even though I’m not even a quarter way through my first. I wait to swallow before I ask.
“What do you mean? It’s Thursday, I have to go to school!”
“Or what? You think that old bitch MacNamara will call the guards on us?”
He jerks his head around, looking over each shoulder as if the police are about to arrive in.
I laugh. “No, but—”
“You won’t miss anything in one day.”
“I’ve got art.”
“Sure, you’re always drawing something, even da Vinci took the odd break.”
Somehow he’s finished his sandwiches already and he’s up from his seat and brushing the crumbs into the sink. “Here!” He throws me a roll of kitchen paper that bounces off the edge of the table and onto the floor. “Wrap the rest of your breakfast up in that and take it with you so we can get on the road.”
“Where are we going?” I go, reaching down to pick up the kitchen roll.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he says, smiling before he disappears into the hall. “We’re going out west.”
Driving up main street, I see Angela Clancy and Sinead Hoey on their way to school and I wish I’d had a chance to tell Lisa, so she’d know why I wasn’t calling. I hope she’s not going to be late, waiting for me, that she’s not worried. I want to ask Dad what time we’ll be back, if I’ll be back in time for her mum’s dinner and Indecent Proposal, but asking him that would make it seem like I’d rather spend my birthday with Lisa instead of him.
His driving makes me scared, the way he keeps fiddling with the tape deck instead of looking at the road, but after a bit we hit traffic and he manages to get it working. “Beautiful Boy” fills the car and I like when he puts Lennon on but it’s when he’s singing the chorus that I remember about the shop.
“Is someone else opening up for you today, Dad?”
He lights his cigarette with the car lighter, so it makes a hiss. A little bit of ash flicks out and joins the rest of the ash that’s like dust over everything, only thicker.
“What?”
“The shop—is someone else looking after it?”
He winds down the window to flick ash out, but it blows back inside. He laughs, looks at me. “Are you codding me? Do you think I’d let anyone else take charge? Place would probably be burned down when I got back.”
“So, what? Is it closed, then?”
The car in front of us moves and he clamps his cigarette between his lips.
“Sure is. All the old biddies will have to wait till tomorrow for their housekeepers’ cut and their chops and their feckin’ sausages.”
“Did you tell them?” I go. “Did you tell anyone?”
“Isn’t that what the closed sign is for?” Dad goes. “Feck the lot of them! It’s not every day your daughter turns thirteen.”
Mrs. Lawrence always has a big order on a Thursday and Mrs. Gaffney does too. I imagine all his customers coming to the shop, one by one, and pushing their faces up against the glass, knocking for a while, before they go away again shaking their heads. I worry about that the whole way through town stuck in traffic and even the rest of the sausage sandwich doesn’t make it go away. But after a while, we’re on the motorway and Dad’s changed the Lennon tape for his Hendrix one and he’s doing his “Stone Free” dance as we’re driving along really fast past bushes and fields and trees and cottages and pubs and I imagine Mrs. Lawrence and Lisa and maths class all being left behind, one by one on the road, and everything feels much better.
When we get to Athlone, Dad stops for petrol. I open Aunt Ruth’s birthday card while he’s inside paying. The card is yellow and pink and outside it says “Now you’re a teenager” and the inside has a rhyme about being young and bright and on the cusp of life. Usually there’s fifty dollars but this time there’s a hundred, five twenties that all look brand new. I fold them up and put them in my sock.
“Lunch?” Dad says as he jumps back into the car.
“Is it not too early?”
“It’s never too early for lunch, Rhea. Now that you’re growing up you’ll learn that adults lie to children all the time.” He spins the steering wheel as we pull back onto the main road. “Truth is, it’s never too early or late for anything—especially chips.”
He drives into town and pulls over in front of a café, even though there’s double yellow lines. It’s nearly empty except for two old women having cups of tea and a man eating a burger. “Looks like what the doctor ordered,” Dad says. “Cheeseburger and chips?”
“Maybe just chips.”
He looks disappointed. “But it’s your birthday! And you love cheeseburgers!”
I hesitate, smile. “Okay.”
The woman behind the counter is friendlier than if it was a café in Dublin. She laughs when Dad searches his pockets for his wallet before he realises he’s left it in the car and she doesn’t seem to mind me taking the tray with drinks to the table while he runs out to get his money.
They give us a basket of white bread and I make a chip sandwich. Dad’s finished before I even start eating it, his leg jerking up and down under the table.
“You can bring the burger in the car if you want,” he goes. “I’ll ask for something to wrap it up in.”
“Are we late for something?”
“I just want to get on the road—make good time.”
“It’s not even a quarter past eleven. How much further?”
“All the way west, you’ll see.”
“But where?”
“It’s a surprise. A birthday surprise.”
In the car, I fall asleep, which I suppose makes sense because it’s around the time I always fall asleep in school. Lisa gives out to me for that, says I shouldn’t stay up so late watching telly, but it’s not the telly that keeps me up, not really. I learned to fall asleep on my own, learned not to be freaked out by the weird noises the house makes, but since the time I found Dad at the bottom of the stairs one morning with the front door wide open, I try to wait up until he gets in. I don’t tell Lisa that, and usually she prods me awake when any of the teachers are looking—except for the time she was doing sums at the board and Bean Uí Cheallaigh shouted, “Rhea Farrell!” really loud and when I woke up there was drool on my face and my copy.
This time when I wake up, we are off the main road and on a windy one with hedges close on both sides. The car is full of smoke and Dad’s voice, singing along with Hendrix to “Foxy Lady.” In the side panel on the door the cheeseburger is still there, squashed and cold. I take it out and begin to eat it.
“Are you going to tell me now where we’re going?”
The window is open, blowing Dad’s hair to the side so you can see the bald bits. He turns to me and smiles. The road goes uphill and around a bend at the same time. A white van lurches, really close, but it doesn’t seem to faze him.
“Guess,” he goes.
Outside the car, the fields are smaller than before, behind walls made of rocks. The colours are different from Dublin, from Rush. The green is greener, deeper, and there’s loads of different blues in the sky.
“Connemara?”
I’ve never been to Connemara but I read somewhere that the landscape looks alive there and that’s how it looks out the window with all the colours and everything moving—the hedges and the leaves and the grass all being blown by a wind coming off a sea we can’t see yet.
“Close,” he goes. “Guess again.”
“Donegal?”
“No,” he laughs. “Jesus, who’s your geography teacher? You don’t go through Athlone to get to Donegal!”
“Mrs. Dillon,” I go. “We’ve been doing Europe, not Ireland.”
He takes the last drag of his cigarette, lets the butt fly from his fingers and somehow the wind catches it so it bounces in front of the windscreen. And that’s when I guess again.
“Are we going to the Cliffs of Moher?”
He doesn’t answer straightaway but the look on his face tells me I’m right. He’s calmer than he has been the whole way, even the car seems calmer, less jerky, the tyres more sure on the road. And I don’t know why I guessed that, or how I knew, but I know then that this journey has something to do with you.
There’s only one sign, hidden behind an overgrown hedge, but he doesn’t seem to need signs, he knows exactly when to slow the car down, when to turn through the gap in the fence where there’s a man in a wooden hut collecting the money. Dad pays him in coins and we drive across a bumpy field towards a low, white building and beyond that building is a strip of grass and then the sea, navy blue like my uniform, and a million white caps of wave.
A sudden gust of wind yanks the door back when Dad opens it.
“Jesus, it’s freezing!” Dad shouts at me across the roof. “Did you bring a coat?”
The wind is whipping up my skirt and I wish he’d told me we were coming so I wasn’t wearing my stupid school uniform, so I could have taken the hoody that Aunt Ruth sent over at Christmas.
“No.”
“Shit! Here, let’s have a look in the boot—see what’s there.”
I know there won’t be anything of mine in the boot, and there isn’t. All there is is Dad’s old brown quilted jacket that he used to wear when we went for walks.
“Here, put this on.”
“It’s miles too big!”
“Put it on—I don’t want you getting pneumonia, not on your birthday.”
He holds it out and I put my arm in first, then my stump. Even on my arm the sleeve hangs seven miles long. The jacket itself is nearly as long as my skirt.
“I’m not wearing this.”
“It’s not a fashion parade, Rhea.”
“I look stupid.”
“You could never look stupid, you’re much too lovely looking. Don’t you know you’re getting to be the spit of your mother?”
He’s never said that before, anything like that, and I can’t see his face because he’s looking down, rolling the sleeve up over my stump. And after that he walks a bit ahead of me, over to the dirt path, where there’s only a tiny fence between us and the cliff edge with the sea crashing against the rocks below.
He stops, looks out at the sea. “It’d take your breath away, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I go. “It’s gorgeous.”
It’s a view but it’s more than that—the wind, the salt in the air, the colours of the sky. It’s a view but it’s a feeling too.
He turns to look at me. “I knew you’d love it. When I woke up this morning, I wanted to give you something special … something beautiful for your birthday … ” He stops, folds his arms. “Something you’d always remember.”
His face is wet and I don’t know if the tears are real ones or from the wind. It hits me then, there’s no runners, no card. He’d forgotten again, he only remembered this morning.
“I’d love to have money to be able to buy you nice things, love, beautiful things. But this, this is something I can give you. This is something I can afford.”
He holds his arms out, to the sea, to the cliffs, to the whole of the misty horizon as if it is mine now. And I know I shouldn’t care about the runners, that this is more important. I tell myself that I’ll grow out of runners, that by Christmas I’ll want different ones, but this, this will always be here.
“Thanks, Dad, it’s the best birthday present ever.” I want to mean it.
He puts his arm around my shoulder and we stand like that, the two of us, with the wind blowing our hair, my skirt, the waves beating the rocks so far down below us we can hardly hear the crash.
His hand around my shoulder tightens.
“Your mother loved it here too. I took her here once. We hadn’t planned it. We did the same as we did today—just took off one morning, drove and drove until we got here.”
I time my breaths to the sea, in and out, and every time I breathe out, the waves hit the rocks. I want him to tell me more, I know there is more, but it’s too easy to stop him, to break it without meaning to.
I ask the question on an out breath. “Was that before you were married?”
He shakes his head, stares at the sea. He’s here but not here, he’s seeing the sea but something else too, he’s seeing you.
“After. She was expecting you at the time.” He doesn’t look at me. “She’d had a bad night—hormones and that, you know. I thought coming here might help lift her.”
He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobs above his shirt.
“Did it?”
The wind finds my uniform skirt and slaps it around my knees. I think he pulls me closer to him then, or maybe I just want him to.
“We parked where we parked, walked just where we’re walking now. It was colder that day, an icy wind, no one in their right mind would come here on a day like that and I thought I’d made a mistake, because she was shivering so badly, but then she turned to me and she smiled, that smile. She’d such a gorgeous smile. And she thanked me. I remember that, she thanked me.”
It’s the most I’ve heard him say about you in years. I wait for more.
“I’ll never forget what she said. ‘Thank you, Dermot,’ she said, ‘thank you for showing me beauty today. For reminding me.’ ”
The tears are definitely real now, not from the wind. The one from his left eye rolls faster, over the redness of his cheek, reaching the grey-brown stubble, while the other tear is blown along the side of his nose. Maybe I should be crying too, but I’m not. Because even though I want to know, even though I’m always asking about you, right then in that one moment I want it to be just the two of us, not with you in between. And I want him to be happy again, without either of us making him sad.
He laughs then, a loud, sudden laugh. “I told her that if she needed to be reminded of beauty all she had to do was to look in the mirror, but she gave me a dig in the ribs and told me the reason she’d married an Irishman was so she wouldn’t have to hear lines like that.”
His face is crinkled, smiling, and I try to picture how he would have looked thirteen years ago, more. In my mind, I make his wrinkles go away, his hair grow back, thicker, make it all brown instead of faded and grey.
“Want to lie on our bellies and look over the edge?” he goes suddenly.
“What about the fence?”
“There’s a gap up ahead, I can see it.”
He lets go of me and the wind catches underneath his long jacket and my skirt, blowing them up and out in front of me. He’s bounded ahead along the path, has found the space where the gap is.
“Come on, Rhea, don’t stand around being Marilyn Monroe!”
I don’t get it at first and then I do and I laugh and run after him. He’s waiting for me at the gap and he’s right, it is wide enough for us both to get to the edge. He gets down on his knees and then his tummy, pushing himself over the grass and bits of rock. I do the same, but the stupid jacket holds me back, getting caught underneath me. Near the edge the grass is thicker and I grab on to a bit of it to help pull me forward.
“Look it,” he goes. “Long way down.”
I shuffle forward over the last bit, right up to the edge. The grass is in my face, but I hold it down with my hand. At first my eyes look out, towards the outcrop of rock where the gulls are flying in a circle, but then I look down, all the way down the cliff face, over the lumps and bumps and seams of rock where the birds are nesting and down and down again to the swish of blue and white that’s the sea below.
“I can’t see the waves crashing properly,” I say.
“It’s because we’re not far away enough to get perspective. We’re almost on top of them here. Sometimes, you’ve to be far away to get a good view.”
“Did she like the view?” I go. “Mum, I mean.”
“Ah, yeah. She said she loved seeing the Atlantic from the other side. She said it was the most beautiful place she’d ever been.”
“She said that?”
“She did. And she’d travelled, your mam had, all over the place. I never knew what she saw in a fella like me, years older than her who hadn’t moved an inch from the place he was born and reared.”
He laughs a bit, like it’s a joke, but something in the way he says it makes me think that maybe it’s not a joke, that maybe it’s something he’s been trying to figure out for a long time.
“When you were here with Mum, did you do this?”
He looks at me and I can tell he’s really seeing me, not seeing some version of you.
“Were you listening to the story at all? She was pregnant with you, remember? Do you really think I’d have let her anywhere near the edge?” He laughs a proper laugh this time and I laugh too, because it was silly to ask that and because even though I wasn’t the first one to come here with him, this was something we were doing together for the first time, something he’d never done with you. And he reaches out and puts his hand on my back and I can feel the warmth of it, the heaviness, seeping through the quilt of the jacket and through my school jumper and my shirt underneath it, all the way into my skin.
And it doesn’t matter then that there’s no runners, no card, that I’m in my school uniform and his big jacket. It doesn’t even matter that I mightn’t be home in time for Lisa’s mum’s dinner or the video. None of that matters, because we have this moment, me and Dad. And lying there with the wind in our faces, and his hand on my back, that’s enough.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
I’m not dating these letters anymore. I know that you’re supposed to, so the reader can place you in time or whatever, but no one is reading these anyway and, living like this, time doesn’t make sense. It’s not like when I was in Rush, or Florida, when you have a day, then sleep, then there’s another day. Now, it’s like one big long lump of time when I’m asleep, then awake, then asleep again, awake again, and not much of anything happens in between.
Because I’m not counting time anymore, I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here, looking at this fountain. It feels like a long time, it feels like I can’t move from here. I know that’s not true—I can move, I just don’t want to. Moving will cost me something—money or energy and I don’t have much of either. In my pocket, there is $4.36—not enough to even bother putting any in my sock. The rest of Michael’s money is gone—it doesn’t matter how I spent it, only that it’s gone.
Last night, I found more of Aunt Ruth’s posters, six of them, on lampposts along Broadway. It was late and quiet, as quiet as New York is ever quiet, and I took them down, all of them, and now they are in my backpack, squashed in next to the Carver book and these letters and the photos in the blue packet and everything is getting crumpled and damp and I think of everything I hate. I might hate that most of all, that there’s nowhere to put anything.
The posters started at 86th Street, she’s targeting uptown, towards Columbia, and maybe it’s risky being here at this fountain, because it’s near Columbia, but it’s not part of it, so I think I’m safe.
After ages of looking at it, I can’t decide if I like it or not—it’s kind of ugly with a scary-looking moon and a giraffe and the devil but there’s something I like about it too. And I’m sitting here, wondering if you liked it or not. I’d been thinking about that for a while, but when I walk around it there’s the little plaque that says it’s here since 1985 and after all that wondering I know you never even saw it—that you never will see it—and something about that makes me want to fucking cry again. Laurie would say that’s dumb, getting sad over some fountain that I can’t even decide if I like and she’s right, it is dumb, but it makes me sad and who cares what Laurie thinks because sometimes I’m allowed to be sad, amn’t I? People are allowed to be fucking sad. The plaque says that the pedestal is shaped like a double helix of DNA and I think my brain is on a go-slow because I hadn’t even noticed that and I should have because we just finished doing DNA in biology. I liked learning about DNA, because they always use DNA to catch criminals in Law & Order. And DNA explains how things are carried through your genes; eye colour and hair and whether you can roll your tongue or have an ear for music. DNA is about family.
Around the side of the fountain, there’s another plaque, one I wish I didn’t see because it has the words of the song “Imagine” on it and “Imagine” makes me think about John Lennon and John Lennon makes me think about Dad. And right when I was trying not to think about Dad, these English guys are by the fountain taking pictures and they’re talking about Spurs and that reminds me of Dad too, and right then, just as they are talking, the cathedral bells start, really loud, and you’re not going to believe this but they are the same tune as our doorbell in Rush, only slower and louder.
Three Dad things, just like that. Bam—bam—bam. Memory bullets. Only they must have missed my heart, because I’m not the one who’s dead.
Those cathedral bells are still going off. Four chimes down, then four back up, like walking down stairs and climbing them again. If everyone decided not to bother with time, we wouldn’t need bells like that, or alarm clock buzzers or anything. The world would be quiet, no sound at all.
The chimes sound exactly the same as the night the doorbell rang when the guards were at the door.
The first time they ring, I’m asleep, but it wakes me and I’m not sure if I imagined it. My clock says 5:13 a.m. and it’s nearly bright outside because it’s the end of May. I don’t know how I know that Dad’s not home yet, but I know. The second time, I’m looking out my bedroom curtain and I see the police car, right outside the gate. The third ring is when I am getting dressed, the buttons on my Levi’s take me longer but I want to be wearing them and my Hendrix T-shirt, I don’t want to answer the door in my pyjamas. I don’t have time for my Docs and the fourth ring is when I’m on the stairs and I must have been walking really slowly because I remember the carpet at the edge of each step being kind of burny against my foot. There are two of them, on the other side of the glass, in the porch. One has his face squished up close, his hands on either side, peering in, and he must see me because they don’t ring the doorbell again.
The other thing we learned about DNA is that it can replicate itself. Each strand of it is like a blueprint, to make new cells, and that’s what gives us new layers of skin when we peel in the sun and why our cuts heal and our hair grows. I bet it won’t be long before scientists will be able to replicate people using DNA. It might take ten years, Mum, maybe twenty, but it won’t be long before that happens. Sometimes I think it’s scary and I hope it never happens and sometimes I wish it happened before so someone could have replicated you and you’d still be here instead of just in these letters that you never answer.
You never answer these fucking letters.
She’s dead, dumbass.
They’re nice, the guards, I feel sorry for them, especially the younger one who can’t really look at me and just holds the back of his neck with one hand the whole time. The older one does all the talking. He sounds like something off RTÉ news. He says that there were no other cars involved, that Dad was fatally wounded and for a minute, I think that that means he’s not dead, but he is dead. I offer them a cup of tea because that’s what people on the telly do. They won’t take it, and they ask how old I am and when I tell them I’m sixteen since last week, they say they’ve to stay with me until someone else can come and is there anyone I can ring. I hate ringing Lisa’s house in the middle of the night, but I ring anyway. It doesn’t even cross my mind to ring Aunt Ruth.
If Lisa’s mum had said I could stay, would I have? Would I have stayed with them, lived in their house instead of going to Florida? At school, the nuns were always saying “Tell the truth and shame the devil,” and I’m trying, just sometimes I don’t know. Part of me wanted to go and part of me wanted to stay, that’s the truth, and Lisa’s mum and dad weren’t able to take me in anyway, even if I’d wanted them to. At least her mum told me out straight, didn’t pretend, she looked me in the eyes and told me she thought the world of me and she’d love to be able to, but they just couldn’t. She never lied, Lisa’s mum, she always told the truth. Not like Aunt Ruth. Not like Laurie.
The night I found out what a liar Laurie is, I didn’t even want her to come into my room, that’s the truth. It was getting risky. Aunt Ruth knew something was going on. She was looking at us in a way she hadn’t done before and she’d started asking me about boys all the time, boys in my class and in art club and some loser at Cooper’s restaurant who apparently wanted to go on a date.
I keep telling Laurie to be careful but she doesn’t want to hear it and that night she especially doesn’t want to hear it because she’s upset, crying when she comes into my room. She’s talking too loud, all about my Columbia application, how she can’t believe I’m going to leave her and go to New York.
I tell her to keep her voice down, that I mightn’t get in anyway, but she says if I loved her I’d go to a community college in Florida and I wouldn’t apply to Columbia at all. I try and explain to her, about Columbia, but she doesn’t understand. I tell her she can apply too, that in a year we can be together in New York, but that only makes her cry harder.
“I can’t be on my own, Rae. I’m not as strong as you.”
I remember all our kisses, it feels like I do, but I especially remember those ones—the last ones. I kiss her cheeks and the side of her face that her tears have made wet. I kiss the line where her hair meets her forehead and I smooth it down under my hand. I kiss her mouth then, a soft kiss, and she pulls me kind of on top of her the way she always does and we are like that, kissing, when the door slams open, a crash against the wall.
I feel Cooper before I see him, his hand on my stump, grabbing it so hard I think he’s going to rip it off. In one motion, he yanks me out of bed and onto the floor. My head hits the corner of the bedside locker on the way down.
Aunt Ruth is behind Cooper, screaming at him to stop. His face is closer, his anger, her face is over his shoulder, her hand at her mouth. When he hits me the pain in my jaw is an explosion. She pulls him off me, I don’t know how she does, but she does and I roll away. Laurie is crying and Aunt Ruth is yelling at Cooper to calm down and he picks up my prosthetic from where it is on the desk and throws it at me, but he misses.
It happens really fast, Mum, all of that, in a nano-second. Aunt Ruth is pushing Cooper out of the room, towards the kitchen, and shouting back at me and Laurie to get dressed. Laurie runs into her room and I’m lying there on the floor and I’m not moving but it feels like the room is. When I get up, I think I’m going to be sick, but there’s no time to be sick because in the kitchen Cooper’s shouting at Laurie. My white T-shirt has blood on it and I want to find my Hendrix one but I don’t know where it is. I want to wear my Docs, but there’s a crash from the kitchen so I shove on tracksuit bottoms and run down the hall.
When I get to the kitchen, Laurie’s already lied, Mum. She’s already told them that I forced her, that she was scared of me, that’s why she went along with it. The crash was the electric juicer. It’s lying on the floor tiles, Cooper must have smashed it. He’s pacing, listening to Laurie, and Aunt Ruth is begging him to calm down and he roars that he is calm.
I sit down in the chair nearest Laurie, but she doesn’t look at me. Her knees are pulled up against her and she’s sucking her hair and crying and saying she’s sorry, that once we’d done it once, I made her do it over and over, and that I’d threatened to tell if she wouldn’t. Her body is shaking and despite all the lies she’s telling, part of me doesn’t blame her for lying, part of me wants to get up and put my arms around her and tell her it’s going to be okay.
Cooper walks around the table, towards me, face red. His hair isn’t slicked back for once, but hanging down on either side of his face. When he shouts, his voice fills the whole room. “We take you into our home—we feed you, put clothes on your back, pay for school—”
Aunt Ruth is right behind him, trying to get between us.
“Cooper,” she says, “take a breath, calm down.”
He smashes his hand down on the table, right in front of where I’m sitting. “How am I expected to be calm when there’s some pervert under our roof taking advantage of my daughter?”
“Cooper, please!” Aunt Ruth tries to grab his arm. “Don’t use language like that—”
He swings around to her, jerks his arm out of her grip. “The hell I won’t—I knew there was something wrong with her, I told you.”
“Cooper, stop it. Please. Let her speak. We’ve only heard Laurie’s side.”
“What side? Laurie was fine before she came along. You heard what Laurie said, she was pressured into doing it by her!” He jabs a finger at me. “If it’s not true, why isn’t she denying it?” Aunt Ruth has somehow managed to get in front of Cooper. She’s down on her hunkers, close to me, leaning against the table. Without makeup she looks way older.
“Rhea,” she says. “Rhea, tell the truth, tell us what happened. Don’t be afraid. It’s important.”
Her eyes are brown, like yours—mine are blue, like Dad’s, because I have his DNA as well. My stump is throbbing, my face, my head. Cooper slams both hands down on the table.
“Say something, dammit!” he yells. “Fucking say something!”
Laurie cries harder.
“Coop, honey, please try and be calm.” Aunt Ruth turns to him. “We can get through this, families get through things like this.”
“Oh, really?” He stands straight and buries his hands in his armpits. “This isn’t the fucking Jerry Springer Show, Ruth! This is my daughter we’re talking about.”
Behind both of them, Laurie’s head is in her arms, her shoulders trembling. I can hear the words she’s not saying, the words she said earlier. I’m not as strong as you. I can leave, I’m going to leave, go to Columbia, but Laurie has to stay. And that’s what makes me say it.
“What Laurie said was the truth,” I go. “It was all me.”
I don’t look at Aunt Ruth. I focus on the broken juicer lid under the chair, a spring from the mechanism is rolling across the tiles.
Cooper throws his arms in the air, like a victory. “Yes! Now, we’re getting somewhere—now, Ruth, do you see? I mean it’s hardly a surprise she has problems, with that drunk of a father and your fuck-up of a sister for a mother.”
“Cooper!” Aunt Ruth’s shout is louder than his right then. “I know you’re upset but don’t—”
“Don’t what, Ruth?” He stands with his hands on his hips, almost as if he’s enjoying himself now. “Don’t tell the truth? Don’t talk about what happened?”
“Cooper, stop.” Aunt Ruth is back on her feet, her voice sounds like it’s begging. “Please, just stop.”
“We’re supposed to pretend it didn’t happen?”
“Cooper—” Aunt Ruth is grabbing his arm and he shakes her off again.
“We’re supposed to pretend your sister didn’t kill herself?”
There’s silence then, as if what Cooper said has taken up all the oxygen, that there’s no air for any more sound. Even Laurie’s stopped crying. My chair scrapes when I push it back against the tiles and when I stand up, I stand up slowly. They’re all looking at me, but Cooper’s the one I look at when I say what I say next. He’s the one I want to hear it.
“My mother didn’t kill herself. You’re full of shit.”
I think he might start shouting again, but he doesn’t say anything. I leave them there, the three of them and the broken juicer. When I go to my room and shut the door, I see the dent the handle made in the plaster when Cooper smashed it open. I get under the covers and the pillow still smells of Laurie and I let myself smell her but I don’t cry.
And I’m not crying now, Mum, those blotches on the page are from the rain that’s just started. It’s coming down heavier and it looks like tears all over the page, but it’s not my tears.
If they were my tears, they’d have my DNA in them, and they don’t. They’re only water. Only rain.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
I don’t want to write anymore, I don’t want to write this shit down. I thought when I moved inside here, to the cathedral, that it would break it, all this stuff in my head, but it’s still there, going round and around and so I’m back to writing it all down because maybe if I write it in a letter, it will stop.
I wish I’d found this place before now. There’s a desk at the front where they ask for money but you don’t have to pay anything and there’s loads of little side chapels off the main cathedral part and I have one all to myself. And there’s a long bench with a blue velvet cushion and I’ve lined everything up along there—all the evidence, all the clues—the two photos of you from Dad and the ones from Nana Davis and the newspaper clippings of your dad and his boss and his boss’s obituary and the Carver book. And that’s everything—apart from the subway map on my wall in Coral Springs—that’s all there is.
And looking at all the photos lined up, even though I love the ones of us together, the one of you in Columbia is still my favourite because looking at this photo I know, I can be fully and completely sure, that what Aunt Ruth said was a lie.
I know she’s going to come into my room that night, that she’s not just going to leave me alone. I’ve been listening to all the sounds in the house, Cooper slamming the front door, his car starting, the squeak Laurie’s bed makes when she gets into it, the sound of her crying until she stops. Aunt Ruth’s been in the kitchen the whole time and I bet she’s cleaning up the juicer, throwing it away. I bet by tomorrow, there’ll be a brand new one on the granite counter in its place.
I hear her footsteps in the hall, my door opening.
“Rae?” she whispers from the doorway, “Rae, are you awake?”
I’m not asleep but I pretend I am.
“Rae?” Closer now. “I know you’re awake. I brought an ice pack, for your face.”
She turns on my bedside lamp and she sees my eyes are open. “Can I sit here?”
She gestures at the bed but I don’t scoot over to make room so she almost sits on my leg. Her eyes look tiny in her face and I’d forgotten that’s how she looks when she’s been crying, because I don’t think I’ve seen her crying since the night of the Viscount biscuits back in Rush.
She reaches out to my face with the ice pack and it stings. I push my head back into the pillow.
“Sorry, I know it hurts, but this will bring the swelling down.”
I let her hold the ice pack there, and, after a second, everything feels numb. She’s wearing a hoody, one of Cooper’s, it’s much too big for her. I’ve never seen her in a hoody before.
“I’m so sorry Cooper acted the way he did. He was very upset—but that’s no excuse. I want you to know that this isn’t the end of it.”
Now that my face is numb, I’m feeling the other pains, a throbbing in my stump, a deep ache in my back.
“It’s been a long night, and I know we need to figure out this situation with you and Laurie. I don’t believe it was all your fault, honey. We can talk more about it tomorrow.”
I look at her. I’m too tired to argue. “Okay.”
“And we need to talk about what Cooper said, about your mom.”
The pain is back in my jaw, through the ice, pulsing with my heartbeat. I clench my toes, all ten together, hold them.
“She didn’t kill herself.”
“Rae—”
“She didn’t.”
Her hand stops moving. Nothing moves. Only that’s not true because breath must have been moving in and out of us both, blood carrying oxygen around our bodies. But it feels like even that’s stopped too.
“Honey,” she goes, “please—”
“It was an accident. Dad told me all about it one Friday night, when we were eating raspberry ripple ice cream. He said that the sea was very dangerous, even if you were a good swimmer, and that’s why he’d never let me learn to swim.”
She’s sucking in her lips, like she’s holding her words back. I want to keep talking, because if I keep talking, she won’t be able to say anything.
“He explained about currents and I got confused because I thought they were the same as currants in scones, but he told me these currents were different. And I even asked Lisa’s mum about it, and she said currents could be dangerous, even for a good swimmer. She said Mum was in Heaven, with God. Looking down on me, keeping me safe.”
My voice isn’t my voice, it’s some kid’s voice. Aunt Ruth’s lips have nearly disappeared and she’s starting to cry.
I push her hand with the ice pack away. “Stop crying, there’s no point in crying.”
But she doesn’t stop crying. Her tears make shiny tracks on her cheeks and drip off her chin and onto the duvet and make circles of dark green on lighter green. There are four dark circles, five, seven.
“Aunt Ruth, there’s no need to cry.”
She shakes her head, wipes her cheek with her hand. “This is hard, honey, very hard—but I have to be honest with you, you have to know the truth. Your mom, she was a strong swimmer, she went swimming every day.”
I sit up in bed, as far away from her as I can. “I know, I know that—but you’re not listening, there were currents. And Dad said she was tired, she hadn’t slept.”
She folds her arms across her chest, pulls the extra sweatshirt material around her. “Did your dad tell you about the sleeping pills?”
The way she says it, she knows he didn’t tell me, that I’ve never heard anything about sleeping pills. I want to swing my legs out of bed, to get up, to get out of the room, but she’s got me in a trap, the way she’s sitting, I can’t escape.
“They found the bottle on the beach, sweetheart, two days later, or the next day, I can’t remember. Her name was on it, it was empty.”
I know her faces, all of them—I think I do—but I haven’t seen her eyes like this, the black circles so big they nearly take up all the brown.
“So what?” I go. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
She reaches out to touch me again, but I push back into the corner.
“The bottle was empty, it means she took them. She took them, honey, before she went swimming that day.”
“No!”
I pull my legs up from under the covers, scramble up into a stand on the bed, towering over her.
“Honey, please.”
I step around her, jump down onto the floor. “That doesn’t mean anything. The bottle could have been empty already. You don’t know she took them.”
“Why would she have had them on the beach?”
“Maybe they were in her pocket. Maybe they’d been in the bin and they fell out when the binmen were collecting the rubbish and they ended up on the beach somehow.”
“Rhea, come on, that’s ridiculous—”
“No—it’s not! There’s a million reasons why the pill bottle could have been on the beach.”
As I’m talking, I’m trying to get away from her, as far away as I can, but the room is too small and I hit into the desk and knock over the penholder so the pens and pencils scatter on the desk, roll onto the floor.
“Rhea, slow down—”
“They never found her body, so they couldn’t do an autopsy. No one will ever know if she took the pills. There’s no proof. There’ll never be any proof.”
I’m trying to pick up the pens but my hand is shaking and I let them drop, leave them there on the floor. She’s crying again, I can’t watch her crying. I turn my back to her, so I’m facing your subway map, on the wall.
“Rhea, I know this is hard. God knows, but you have to listen to me, the truth is the only way to heal.”
The map is even more faded than it was in Rush. You can still see the crayon where I coloured in between the lines of the map when I was little and I hate that I did that, that I destroyed something you gave me.
“We have to talk about this, Rhea. You’ve got to trust me that I only want what’s best for you.”
I can see her reflection in the window, that she’s standing up from the bed.
“Why do we need to talk about it now when you weren’t bothered before?”
“It’s not that I wasn’t bothered, it wasn’t like that.”
I turn around, I want her to see my anger. “What was it like then? Tell me! Tell me why I should trust you when all you’ve ever done is let me down, lie to me.”
She’s crying more, I’m making her cry. Laurie will be able to hear all of this from her room, but I don’t care.
“I’ve tried my best, Rhea, I really have. I’ve never lied to you, I’ve always been honest.”
I make my voice high, mimic hers. “You’re welcome here, Rhea, I want you here. This is your home, we’re family.”
She’s taking baby steps towards me, her hands outstretched. “I meant that, I meant that when I said it, I mean it now.”
“Really? Is that why I heard you on the phone to Cooper one night in Rush, practically begging him to let me stay, telling him I’d end up in foster care if he didn’t agree?”
She pulls down her fringe, folds her arms. “I was just explaining the situation, Rhea. You weren’t meant to overhear that.”
I make myself laugh, like I don’t care. “I bet I wasn’t. I should have stayed in Ireland, in foster care. It’s got to be better than this.”
She’s shaking her head. “You don’t mean that.”
“Don’t I?” I point at my face, the part where the pulse of pain is. “I bet this wouldn’t happen in foster care.”
That’s when she sits down on my desk chair and covers her face with her hands, long fingers, nails shiny pink with a white rim that they call a French manicure. Her hair falls in front, like a curtain, still in shape even after everything that night and I’m remembering last week when she came home from her new hairdresser, how she admired it in the mirror in the hall and I’m wishing it was then, Mum, more than anything I’m wishing it was then.
When she takes her hands away, she looks at her fingernails, she doesn’t look at me. “Your mom was an amazing woman, Rhea. She was beautiful and funny and smart. She was my big sister.”
I’m not going to interrupt her, that’s one of the decisions I make. The sooner she tells me whatever lie she’s going to tell me, the sooner it’ll be over. I turn back to the subway map, so I won’t have to look at her.
“But she had—there was … a lot of darkness, Rhea. Stuff that happened in our family, stuff no one talked about.”
Usually red was my favourite colour, but on the map, yellow was my favourite, because it was the RR line. R for Rhea and R for Ruth. I remembered telling her that, showing it to her, on the wall of my bedroom in Rush, saying we could share it.
“I thought they’d made a big mistake at first, that maybe she hadn’t even gone swimming, that maybe she’d run off or something. But then they found her little pile of clothes, so neat, on the beach and that woman, walking her dog—Josephine Brady—she saw her, going in.”
I turn around before I can stop myself. “Miss Brady? Who lives by the school?”
Aunt Ruth glances up at me. “I don’t remember. She had a gorgeous Labrador puppy.”
Miss Brady has an old Labrador on a red lead called Sandy, she gets a bone for him every Saturday, along with her leg of lamb. I think this, but I don’t tell Aunt Ruth.
“There were so many people out looking for her, people in canoes and fishing boats as well as the coast guard. It felt like the whole of Dublin was looking for her. And when the police called around to your dad’s house, we thought they’d found her, that they had news, but they’d only found the pill bottle.”
I cup my stump. “That doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t make it definite.”
Aunt Ruth takes a breath, sighs. “There were other factors, Rhea, other things … ”
I don’t need to look at your map to see it in my head. I start with the A, at 207th Street, Dyckman Street next, then 190th.
“Without her body, nothing can ever be definite.”
181st Street, 175th, 168th Street—Washington Heights.
I bend down, pick up the pens, this time my hand isn’t shaking. I fix them in their holder, in front of Aunt Ruth. She stands up, pushes the chair back under the desk.
“It’s been a big night, a lot to take in. I’m sure we could all use some sleep.”
“Yeah,” I go, “I’m knackered.”
I walk past her, get into bed. I just want her to leave.
She stands over me, pulls the duvet up around my neck. “In a way, I’m glad things are out in the open; in a way, it’s a relief.”
She’s so close the strings of the hoody dangle down into my face. She strokes my jaw, really gently, and kisses me on the forehead.
“You’re probably exhausted,” she says. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow, properly. Just you and me. We’ll go out, maybe to Jaxson’s if you want? Talk about everything, okay?”
“Okay.”
She turns off the lamp and walks to the doorway, and she’s nearly gone when she stops, turns back. “Suicide is hard to accept, honey, no one wants to believe it. I didn’t want to either.”
She says that word like it’s any other word, like “strawberry” or “theorem” or “spaghetti.”
“Good night, Aunt Ruth,” I go.
She closes the door then, and I’m remembering the first time I heard that word, I think it was the first time, in the sitting room in Rush, on The Late Late Show. And Dad, jumping up, switching the telly off so hard it nearly fell off its stand. Bloody television’s gone to the dogs.
I lie awake, listening for ages to the silence of the house. There’s no noise in the darkness, everything is silent, silence from Laurie’s room, silence outside. I try and hear my heart but that’s silent too and I can’t hear my breath either and I wonder if I’m dead. And when I get up, I pack in silence, even the sound of my footsteps, past Laurie’s bedroom, past Aunt Ruth’s, they sound like nothing, they’re only shapes made out of silence, barely any sound at all.
R
Dear Mum,
I didn’t go there to see her—I’d forgotten what days she said she volunteered—I went there because I was hungry, because I don’t care what Sergei said about soup kitchens being full of down-and-outs and drug addicts, I’m just hungry. This hunger is different than before, it’s not only my body, it’s my mind. I’m thinking about food all the time—like all the time—going through what I can eat next, where I will get it. Even when I’ve just eaten, I’m thinking about eating again, even as I’m eating sometimes, I’m not even tasting the food, I’m wondering when I’ll have something to eat next.
It’s not until I get there that I realise it’s a church, she never said it was a church. There’s a queue, all the way around the corner and onto 28th Street, and I watch it for a bit from the little park across the road before I join. There’s a lot of men but some women too, girls, kids even. I imagine I might see Sergei, even though I know he’d starve to death before he’d admit defeat and come somewhere like this.
I’m waiting for the queue to die down but it doesn’t die down, only gets longer, so, after ages, I take my place at the end, behind a tall white guy with wispy hair that goes down over the collar of his suit jacket. An old man joins the queue behind me with his cart, pushes it into my heels by mistake and apologises. I’ve seen him before, in Grand Central. He smiles, looks like he might want to talk, so I look the other way.
At the gate, we’re handed a ticket and we have to wait until other people come out before we can go in. And standing there, waiting, I think about the poster with my face on it, about how this is just the kind of place Aunt Ruth might put up a poster like that.
People come out and it’s our turn to go in, but my feet won’t take me through the gate. I’m imagining it inside, a poster of me on a notice board, Aunt Ruth standing next to it. I’m holding up the queue and someone behind shouts out to move it. I don’t know what to do, but I have to do something, I’m hungry and I have to eat and there’s food in there, you can smell the food every time the door opens. I put my head down, follow the others towards the door where there’s another guy collecting tickets. I’m getting close to him, I see his shoes, Caterpillar boots.
“Hey,” he goes, when I hand him my ticket. “Is that what I think it is?”
I don’t know what he means, but I’m ready to run.
“You think we allow Red Sox fans in here?”
When I look up he is smiling, he has nice eyes. He points to his baseball cap—a Yankee one like I used to have—and I realise that’s what he’s talking about, my cap. I try and smile back.
“Enjoy your lunch,” he goes.
Inside there’s another queue, this time in a tiny corridor. It’s hot and we’re closer to the smell of food. My mouth fills up with saliva and I don’t know if that’s because I’m hungry or if I’m going to be sick. A woman is coming the other way with a walkie-talkie. She says hello to people as she passes. She stops right at me and my heart starts beating, really fast.
“Excuse me,” she goes.
“I have a ticket!”
She smiles. “I know, I just need to get into the office there.”
She gestures at a door that I hadn’t seen, next to where I’m standing.
“Sorry.”
She jangles keys in the lock, turns back to me. “Is that a Scottish accent I hear?”
“Irish.”
“Irish, yes, now I hear it,” she says. The walkie-talkie crackles. “Enjoy your lunch—it’s meatballs and spaghetti today, it’s really good.”
Ahead of me, people are starting to move, the man with the wispy hair is already a few tiles in front of me
“Thanks.”
I don’t know what I’m expecting, Mum, but after all the queues and corridors I was not expecting the space to open up as big as it did, for the whole inside of the church to be taken up with round tables and chairs like the parties that Cooper sometimes catered. There’s people on one side, handing out trays of food and a drink, everyone smiling, everyone saying to enjoy our lunch. I’ve lost the wispy-haired man in front of me and I feel lonely all of a sudden, like I wanted to sit next to him. I don’t know where to sit, so I walk over towards the huge organ, towards a table where there are two free seats. There’s one other woman at the table, an old lady, eating slowly. She’s wearing a cardigan, a nice watch. She’s not someone I thought would eat somewhere like this. A young guy sits down in the other empty seat straightaway.
I barely even notice all the different things on the tray, just start eating it all, the meatballs and the spaghetti and broccoli and bread. I want to slow down, but I’m too hungry to eat slowly so I just keep eating and eating until it’s gone. And it’s only then I remember to check for any posters of me, but there aren’t any—there aren’t any posters of anyone.
The young guy next to me has already finished and is getting up to leave. He hasn’t eaten his apple and he sees me looking at it. “You want it?”
“Okay, thanks.”
It’s on my way out that I see her, the woman from the meeting, at the table by the door in a white hat and apron, her grey hair tied back in a ponytail. I’m going to walk by, I’m pretending not to see her, but she sees me and starts waving.
“Lisa!” she calls, “Lisa!”
For a second, I forget that’s my name and then I remember, smile.
“Hi,” I go.
“Hello,” she says, “you remember me, don’t you? Winnie? From the diner?”
“Yeah, I remember. Nice to see you.”
“I haven’t seen you,” she says. “Are you still coming?”
“No,” I go. “I kind of forgot.”
That part is true, I had kind of forgotten, can’t even remember how long it was since I was there.
“Do you want some bread to take with you? We got really nice stuff today.”
The bread does look nice all laid out, Kaiser rolls and bagels and sourdough.
“I can take some of this?”
“Sure,” she says, “whatever you want. You know you can go in for seconds too?”
I didn’t know. “Can you?”
She smiles. “Sure, just join the end of the line outside, get another ticket.”
Another meal would fill me up, another meal would last me until tomorrow, especially with the bread.
“And I can take the bread then, on my way out? Will you still have some, do you think?”
She slides her glasses up her nose. “I’ll still have some, don’t worry. If we’re running low, I’ll keep you some.”
That’s the mistake I make, Mum, going around a second time. If I’d left then and taken the bread and the apple, I’d have been okay. If I’d left then, I don’t know where I’d be writing from now, maybe Battery Park or the new little playground I found near Varick with the benches where you can stretch out properly. But I didn’t leave then, I joined the queue and took another ticket.
The second time, my table by the organ is full, so I sit at the one next to it, just me and all men, until two guys get up and a girl takes the place next to me. When she sits down, she takes time arranging herself, takes off her cap and her headphones. I watch her as I try to slow down my eating this time around.
“Hey,” she says. “I’m Pat.”
“Lisa.”
She doesn’t use the spoon, she picks up the broccoli, dangles it by the stalk into her mouth.
“Every damn day they have vegetables as part of the menu. I always eat it first, so I can get it out of the way, enjoy the rest.”
I laugh. “You come here a lot?”
She nods. “Most days. It’s a good place. Usually, I listen to my music if they don’t have any playing, but you looked like you might want to chat.”
“You’re lucky,” I go, nodding towards her Walkman. “I’d kill to have my music with me.”
She puts the broccoli down, lifts her headphones from around her neck. “Here, listen to mine.”
“No, it’s okay, I don’t want to use up your batteries—”
“They won’t last forever, but you can listen to one song.”
I take the headphones from her, put them on. They’re the old-fashioned kind where the spongy bit sits on top of your ear. She reaches into her pocket, hits play, and I can hear the tape whirring, a bit of silence and then the twang of a guitar, real slow at first. I recognise the song even before Bono’s voice starts, “Running to Stand Still,” Lisa’s favourite song from The Joshua Tree. Listening to the song it’s as if I’m back in Lisa’s house lying on the floor of the bedroom she shares with her sister. It’s like I’m there but I’m in this church too, watching the people with empty trays and full trays all moving in time with Bono’s voice. And just as he gets to my favourite part, the part about running through the streets, I see the woman with the walkie-talkie coming down the steps where the food line is, and she stops, right where the man is handing out drinks, and it looks like she’s scanning the room for someone, she’s definitely scanning the room for someone, and then I see the person behind her.
It’s Aunt Ruth.
The music is still going, Bono’s voice too loud now, and I rip the headphones from around my neck, shove them in a bundle at Pat.
In one movement, I twist around in my chair, slide under the table. I forget about my backpack and without my weight to balance the chair, it pulls it over with a crash.
Something kicks me in the back and I realise I was leaning into someone’s legs, so I scrunch myself up, as small as I can. Hands are picking up my backpack, the chair. Pat’s face appears in the space where I should be.
“What the fuck? You okay?”
“Did she see me? Is she coming over?”
“Who, Chrissie?” She says it loud, starts to look around.
“I don’t know her name—the one with the walkie-talkie. Is she coming over?”
I wait for her to ask me why, but she doesn’t.
“Sit tight,” she goes. “Stay down.”
A chair pushes back at the table and jeans and white runners are replaced by black trousers and black shoes. Pat takes my backpack and puts it under her chair and I hear a scraping noise on the table over my head and I know she’s pushing my tray under hers.
Another pair of feet, legs are coming over to where my chair was. I hear Pat tell them the spot is taken. I hold my breath, the feet move away.
Pat’s face is there again. “Chrissie’s gone. She went outside with that other woman.” I shuffle over to my empty chair. “They might wait at the gate though, until you come out. I’ve seen that before.”
My heart is going too fast, my breath. “Is there another way out?”
“No. Best thing to do is hide out until they leave.”
I knew this was a bad idea, coming in here, that it was a trap. “Where? Where is there to hide?”
“The bathroom is over there, by where you came in. Only place in the city where there’s never a line for the women.”
A young girl refilling the milk on the table sees me half sticking out from under the table. She looks scared, like she might call someone over, so I pull myself all the way out, sit on the chair.
I glance around but I can’t see Chrissie, I can’t see either of them. The door at the back of the church opens and closes as people leave. For a second I think I’m going to be sick.
“Here, swap.” Pat is handing me her baseball cap. “If Chrissie’s seen you already, it might throw her off.”
Her baseball cap is purple, the inside has a line of sweat. She plucks mine from my head and it’s stupid but, in the middle of everything else, I think about the day Laurie gave it to me and I nearly want to snatch it back. When I put Pat’s on, it’s big, falling down almost into my eyes, but I tip it up.
“Don’t worry about your tray, I got it.”
“Thanks, thank you so much.”
I grab my backpack, take a breath, and start to walk towards the food line, where people are still streaming in, trays and trays still being handed out. A woman on a walker has someone carry her tray for her and I step around them both. Two of the volunteers are joking with a little boy, who is holding onto the handle of the buggy his mother is pushing. I put my head down. I am waiting for someone to stop me, for a hand to grab me, for someone to call out my name. There are steps up to the bathroom and I take each one without looking up. Outside the men’s, someone is waiting. The women’s is right next to me, I try the handle. Pat was right, it opens, I’m inside, I lock the door.
I take a deep breath, another one, like I haven’t been breathing at all. I take off my backpack, lean against the door, and slide all the way down to the floor.
There’s no window, no way out.
I don’t know how long I’m sitting like that before the knocking starts. It stops and then I hold my breath and then it starts again. A voice comes through the door. “Hurry up in there, there’s other people waiting. Other people need to go.”
Maybe I should have said something back—that I’m sick or for them to go away—but I don’t, I only sit there, gripping on to my backpack. The knocking stops and more time passes. If I’d still had my G-Shock, if I hadn’t sold it, I’d know exactly how much time, but I don’t have it and it could be minutes or hours or only seconds before I hear footsteps outside and the knocking starts again. This time, it is a different voice.
“Hello? Hello in there? Are you okay?”
I don’t say anything.
“You need to open the door. There are other people waiting who need to use the bathroom.”
I open my eyes. I recognise the voice, I think I do. It’s Winnie. I’m almost sure it’s her.
“If you don’t open up I’m going to have to get someone to open it. We have a master key.”
I push my ear up against the wood, to hear better. Outside, there is noise of people moving, other voices. The knock, when it comes again, is louder.
“Okay then, suit yourself, one of the guys will be coming back to open up.”
“Wait!”
I push myself into a stand, grab the lock. It sticks a bit but then it moves and when I open the door, I hold it open a crack, to see if I’m right. On the other side of the door, I see grey hair, glasses. I’m right, it’s her.
“Lisa?” She frowns and smiles at the same time. “What has you in there for so long, I was just about to get someone to—”
“Please, Winnie, you have to help me.”
Behind her, the queue of people waiting for trays has stopped. One of the men is looking at me and I pull my cap down lower.
“What’s happened? Are you sick?” Winnie’s voice sounds concerned.
“I need to find a way out. Is there another way out of here?”
“Why? What’s going on?”
A woman next to her grabs the door, pushes it properly open. “You coming out or what? You’re not the only one who needs the bathroom you know!”
I step out of the bathroom so she can go in. I am totally exposed now.
“Winnie, you have to help me. People are here—looking for me. I can’t go back. I can’t go back.”
Everyone in the queue can hear me, but I don’t care.
“Who? Who’s looking for you?”
“Please, Winnie. I thought it was safe here. You have to help me.”
Winnie’s eyes are on mine, as if she’s trying to see into my head. She’s on the cusp of helping me, I know she is.
“Please.”
“Come on.”
She doesn’t wait to see if I’m following her, just starts walking back against the crowd of people flowing in. We pass by a man at the top of the queue and I hear his walkie-talkie crackling too and it sounds like Chrissie’s voice and I know she’s asking him about me. Winnie is leading me back the way I came in, right to where Chrissie’s office was. And just when I think it’s a trap, she keeps going, past the office and around the corner to a flight of stairs I hadn’t seen.
“Careful going down here,” she says.
For an old lady, she is very quick on the stairs and I am quick behind her. We are in a little kitchen where there are two women in white coats cutting up chickens, behind them there are basins and basins of it, still to go. Winnie nods at them and we hurry past, make a left around a corner, and another down a corridor that gets darker and darker until you can hardly see the light from the kitchen at all.
There’s a door to the left and Winnie opens it. There’s no light in here, but I can see bulky shapes in the dark, boxes.
“No one should come in here, but hide in the back just in case. Wait until I come and get you.”
She doesn’t wait for me to answer her, just closes the door and it is pitch black inside. I can hear her runners squeaking on the tiles as she goes back towards the kitchen and after all that, I nearly run after her. It feels like I can’t breathe in the darkness, but I can breathe, there is air, there is enough air. I reach out and feel the shape of something in front of me, cardboard, then a gap, then splintery wood. I can smell apples, I focus on the apple smell. I remember what she said about getting to the back and I let my hand go that way first, leading me, then one foot, then the next. There’s sounds in the room, a rummaging sound, something alive. My heart stops because I know it’s a rat but I force a breath, force myself to move forward, to do what she said, to trust her.
Your subway map is what saves me, Mum, in that basement, waiting for Winnie. And even though it’s pitch black, I close my eyes to picture it. I use my finger on the box in front of me to trace each line, each stop. I start on a really hard line, the pink one, the 7, and I hardly ever do that so I really have to concentrate on the stops and when I’m finished that I do the M and that’s a funny one too because it starts and ends in Queens. And after those I do the J and then the GG and your line, the AA, and Dad’s line, the D, but I don’t do the RR. And every time I hear the rats, every time I think there’s one of them at my foot, every time I forget to breathe, I scrunch my toes up inside my Docs and go back to the start of the line I’m on and I begin again.
And that’s what I’m doing when finally there’s a noise outside the door and it opens and I can see the insides of the room and Winnie, outside, peering in, her white apron and hat gone now. After the blackness of the room, the corridor feels light this time and the kitchen is so bright it’s like my eyes are going to bleed. And when we get outside, my eyes are streaming and there’s too much to see all at once, even though everyone is gone, and it’s quiet now and the only evidence of all the people is one guy hosing down outside.
Winnie puts her hand on my shoulder, but lightly. “You okay?”
I nod, I don’t know if I am or not, but I know I will be.
“Good, come on.” She walks towards the gate, turns around when she sees I’m not behind her. “Are you coming?”
The guy is about to hose where I’m standing, I need to move.
“Where?”
And she says it like it’s so simple, as if there’s no other possible answer.
“Home, with me.”
Rhea
Dear Mum,
When I wake up, the clock on the mantelpiece says it’s a quarter past ten and I’m confused, because it’s bright still, but then I realise that it’s a quarter past ten in the morning—that I’d slept all afternoon, all evening and all night.
Yesterday, the whole way up Ninth Avenue, I wasn’t sure I was going to go with Winnie, I just kept saying I’d go another block and then another one and the only reason I went up the stairs to her apartment was because I really needed the loo by the time we got here and when I came out, she had the air conditioner on and the curtains pulled and it was nice and cool and shaded and she gave me a pillow and said that I might as well have a little rest before I get going again.
The apartment has no proper doors, I remember noticing that last night, only curtains to separate the main sections. This morning, the curtain into the bedroom section is open and the bed is made.
Upstairs someone is practising a violin and outside there’s the hissing noise of a bus stopping. Inside the apartment it’s quiet and I know already that I’m the only one here but I call out anyway.
“Winnie?”
When she doesn’t answer I get up, fold the blankets into a square, and bring them both over to put on the bed and that’s when I see the grey cat, curled up in a circle, fast asleep. It opens one of its eyes and stretches a paw out, so I can see its claws, but it doesn’t move and I don’t touch it. Next to the bed, there’s a stack of books on her locker, lined up in size order with a notebook on the top. For a second I think about opening it, to see if she’s written anything about me, but I walk away before I can.
The kitchen is a separate room, and I remember as I walk into it that that’s where the bath is too, how she told me loads of the old tenement apartments in Hell’s Kitchen were like that. There’s a piece of wood on top of the bath to make it into a counter and she’s left me a long note, next to a pair of khaki shorts and a blue and white stripy T-shirt. I pick them up and there is a pair of old lady knickers underneath. The note says I can have a bath, to use the clothes, that there’s English muffins and cream cheese in the fridge that I can eat. I hate that it starts “Dear Lisa.”
While the bath is filling, I look at the posters on her walls. They are on every wall, even the kitchen, and where there’s a gap between posters there are post cards and photographs and sometimes ticket stubs as well. It should look messy, because there’s no order, but it doesn’t, it looks like there’s an order only I can’t see what it is yet.
It’s ages since I’ve had a bath and even though the water is too hot, I take a deep breath and pull my whole head under, feel the water lift my hair from my skull. It’s longer than I like and I wonder if Winnie would shave it for me, if she has a razor. I hold myself there for as long as I can before I burst back to the top and water gets on the floor, so I have to dry it off with the towel after I’ve dried myself. I’m not going to put her clothes on, except when I sniff the armpits of my T-shirts, they all smell bad and there’s some weird black marks all down the back of my jeans, so I put on her clothes, all except the old lady knickers—I wear the cleanest dirty pair of mine.
Afterwards, I eat the muffin but it’s small and I’m still hungry, but there’s only one other one left and I don’t want to finish it. I’ve just washed up and I’m thinking about what to do about my clothes, if maybe I could wash them in the sink, and that’s when I hear the lock in the door behind me. Everything is all over the place—the Carver book and photos on the coffee table and my T-shirts all over the couch, and I try to clean it up a bit before she comes in, but it’s too late.
“Hi there!”
Her voice sounds happy, light, but I don’t turn around, focus on stuffing my clothes back in the bag.
“Sorry it’s such a mess,” I go, “I’m just tidying up.”
She laughs. “Believe me, this isn’t a mess. I’ve seen this place messy and you need to work a lot harder than that.”
She sits down in the armchair by the window, kicks her sandals off and puts her feet on the table, so her toes curl over the edge. Her nails are painted silver but the polish is peeling. I can smell her feet.
“Thank you for the muffin,” I go, “and the cream cheese.”
“You’re welcome, I hope you ate both muffins, they’re very small.”
“And for the lend of the clothes. I was going to put mine on but they’re dirty, so—”
“We’ll have to do laundry,” she says. “There’s a laundromat on the next block.”
I hear it, the “we,” but I pretend I don’t. I push the Duane Reade bag of dirty clothes down further in my backpack.
“Are you feeling any better? I was worried, yesterday, when you slept so much. I called my friend Alistair, who’s a doctor, and he said you probably just had chronic fatigue, to let you sleep.”
“I feel fine,” I go, “much better.”
There are some things on the coffee table in between us and I wish I’d been smarter and packed them away first. Not your letters, Mum, they’re safely in the front pocket of the backpack, but I left my sketch pad out and the packet of photos and the Carver book. When I turn around, that’s what she has in her hand, and I can’t believe she’s just done that, reached over and picked up my book without even asking.
“Raymond Carver,” she goes. “It’s a long time since I read Carver. I prefer his poetry. You’re a fan?”
“He’s okay.”
She turns the book over and I know your photo is going to fall out. I want to snatch the book back off her, but if I do that, she’ll know it’s important, so, instead, I roll up my Champion hoody. She pulls her glasses down from her hair and starts to read the back.
“He was one of us,” she says, looking at me through her glasses.
“One of us?”
“You know, a friend of Bill’s.”
She slides her glasses up her nose; she’s looking at me, waiting for me to say something.
“You’re not an alcoholic, Lisa, are you?”
I want to tell her the truth. “No, sorry. I don’t really like drinking, to tell you the truth.”
I’m holding my breath, waiting for her response. She might be really mad, she might throw me out. That’s what I’m thinking, in the pause between me saying it and her reacting. I’m not expecting her to tip her head back and let out a loud, long laugh.
Sometimes people laugh even when they’re annoyed. Sometimes, Dad laughed and seconds later he could be shouting or even crying. You can’t take it for granted that just because someone is laughing that they’re happy.
“I’m sorry I lied, I had nowhere to go that night. It was raining. I thought there’d be coffee.”
I’m trying to make an effort, to be honest, but it only makes her laugh more. She takes off her glasses, wipes her eyes.
“I’m sorry, it’s just too funny. There are so many people in this city who need to get to a meeting and don’t, it’s just funny to think of someone being there who doesn’t even like to drink. And as I remember it, I was the one who invited you in.”
The cat has come in from the bedroom, is standing in front of Winnie, sniffing the air. “There you are, I was wondering where you were, Olivia. This is Lisa. Lisa, this is Olivia.”
It’s grating on me, the sound of the lie, every time she calls me Lisa, but I don’t want to say anything, not yet, not this soon after apologising for the other one. I don’t want her to think I’m a liar.
The cat ignores Winnie, so she goes back to the Carver book, opens it. She looks at the back again. “Columbia University Library? Are you a student there?”
“My mother was,” I go. “I might be going in the autumn. I mean, I’ve applied.”
I didn’t think I was going to tell her that and as soon I do I wish that I hadn’t.
“Good for you. When do you find out if you got in?”
Olivia jumps up on the couch, then walks onto Winnie’s knee, standing so her tail is in her face. Winnie brushes it away.
“I don’t know, I mean, they might have accepted me but I won’t be able to go anyway, even if they did.”
Her face scrunches up. “Why not?”
She’s asking too many questions but it’s my fault for bringing it up in the first place. “I’ve just missed a lot of school, that’s all. Even if my GPA is okay, I’ve missed too much to graduate.”
Olivia sits down, gets up, turns, sits down again. Winnie winces, but she doesn’t make her move. I’m waiting for Winnie to say something about missing school, to talk about the importance of an education, but she doesn’t say anything. Instead she puts the Carver book back on the coffee table and reaches over to touch the edge of my sketch pad.
“Can I take a look?”
“Sure.”
Olivia jumps down from her knee when she leans forward. Winnie flicks through the pages slowly, sometimes turning one to the side and back the right way around again. She stops, looks up at me. “These are good.”
“Thanks.”
“I like this one here, of the tree. You capture such detail, the texture of the bark.”
I don’t need to look to know which one she means.
“You have talent, Lisa.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m sure being an artist you must spend so much time drawing the city—there’s so much to be inspired by.”
“I haven’t drawn anything since I got here.”
She looks at me, her glasses sliding down her nose. Sergei was always on about that, how I should use drawing to make money, go to Times Square with a sketchbook. He didn’t get it when I said I hadn’t been able to draw since I got here. Winnie doesn’t say anything, just turns over the next page.
“I’m an artist too, I like charcoal mostly, sketching.”
“I like sketching too and painting sometimes. I like oils, acrylics.”
“Maybe we can find you some stuff at the league,” she goes. “People are always leaving stuff behind.” There it is again, the “we.”
“What’s the league?”
“The Art Students’ League. I model there in return for some studio space.”
“Model? As in nude modelling?” My tone is horrible and she hears it too. “I’m sorry, I—”
“It’s okay,” she says, flattening down her blouse. “People are sometimes surprised, but you don’t have to have a young body to teach students how to draw.”
Olivia is on the arm of the couch. She puts a paw on my bare leg, then another one. Her nails scratch a bit, but I don’t mind.
“She likes you.” Winnie smiles. “She’s not normally that friendly.”
“What’s it like, modelling? Having everyone see you, like that?”
She tilts her head to one side, thinking before she answers. “It can be boring, definitely. But there’s something freeing about having people see you, exactly as you are. Not having to hide anything.”
She catches my eye and I look away because I think this is where she’s going to bring it up, what happened in the soup kitchen yesterday, but she doesn’t.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do it when I was younger. I’d have been getting into the heads of everyone else, wondering what they thought of me, but now, at my age, I couldn’t give a hoot.”
Upstairs the violin music has started again and I feel myself stroking Olivia in time with it.
“Is that your neighbour playing?”
“Yes, that’s Francis, he’s a dear. Used to play at the Met. He minds Olivia whenever I’m away.”
“Do you go away much?”
“Not too often. Only in the summers when I’ve worked at a camp or once when I went to see Melissa, my daughter. She lives in Connecticut.”
The pregnant daughter from the meeting. Now that I told her I lied about being an alcoholic it feels like I should pretend not to remember.
Winnie reaches up to a shelf and takes down a photo in a glass frame. “There she is.”
I think the photo is going to be of a woman, but it’s of a little girl on a bike, with a big smile and two missing front teeth. The bike has a basket and it’s full of sunflowers.
“That’s a nice picture.”
“I think so.” She looks at it. “It was a rare vacation we took, out of the city to Long Island, with my brother. He took the photo, I didn’t have a camera at the time.”
She’s tracing her fingers over the glass, and I feel my legs, jerky as if I’m impatient, even though we’re not going anywhere.
I say what I say next before I know I am going to. “Do you want to see a photo of my mum?”
She puts the frame back down, smiles. “Sure.”
Her eyes go to the packet on the table but the one I want to show her is in the Carver book. I open it to the right page, take out the Ziploc bag. I wish it had a frame too, but it doesn’t so I hold it by the edge and place it on the table in front of Winnie. “That’s my mum. When she was a student at Columbia.”
She looks at the photo and then at me. “You look alike.”
“We’ve different eyes.”
“Different colour, yes, but you have the same kind of look too. The chin … ” She touches her own. “You have the same chin.”
I move closer to her, lean in to see the photo. Your chin is turned to the side and it’s nice and slopey, nicer than mine.
“She looks happy, doesn’t she?” I go. “In this photo, doesn’t she look like she was happy?”
Winnie looks properly. Already I know she’s the kind of person who wants to look before she answers. She’s not just going to say it because I say it. Maybe that’s why I ask her. Maybe that’s why she’s the first person I show the photo to since I showed it to Laurie.
“It’s a special photo,” she says. “It captures something about your mother, the essence of her.”
I get up, move over to sit on the arm of her chair. Olivia rubs into my leg. “So you think she looks happy?”
“She does look happy, but she looks more than that. She looks very real, you know, very alive.”
I’m studying the picture, looking into your face, your eyes, examining the line of your hair along your jaw to see what Winnie sees.
“She looks a lot like the woman at the soup kitchen yesterday who was looking for you. They could be sisters.”
Dumbass. Laurie’s voice is in my head before mine. What was I thinking, showing her the photo of you? Did I think she wouldn’t see the resemblance? That she’d forget yesterday had happened?
I stand up quickly, nearly stepping on Olivia. I take the photo back from Winnie, put it back in the Ziploc bag, put the bag back inside the Carver book.
“Lisa?”
I pick up my backpack. I want to pack it properly, nicely, but there isn’t time.
“Lisa, what’s the matter?”
I shove my jeans in, my Hendrix T-shirt. “I thought I could trust you, that’s what’s the matter.”
She watches me packing, not smiling, but not mean-looking either.
“You can, I just don’t know if I can trust you. You lied to me about who you are. I know your name’s not Lisa.”
When she says that I stop packing, just for a second. She’s known my name was Rhea all along, since yesterday. Of course she knew.
“So why’d you go along with it? Keep calling me Lisa, write that stupid note?”
She shrugs. “I was waiting to see when you’d tell me the truth.”
My stuff is nearly all packed. I’m still wearing her clothes but I can go into the kitchen, take them off and be out of this apartment, back on Ninth Avenue, in five minutes, less.
“I had to lie, you wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.” Olivia is by my feet again, licking my big toe. Her tongue is rough and scratchy and kind of nice. Lisa had a cat but I never saw it lick anyone. “She seemed really upset, the woman who wanted to find you. Your aunt. She seemed concerned.”
I stand there looking at Winnie, I don’t sit down. “I’m not going back there—I don’t care what anyone says. I’m not going back, you can’t make me! No one can make me!”
Winnie stays sitting down, looking up at me. She doesn’t interrupt me. She doesn’t tell me to keep my voice down.
“You’re right, I can’t make you go anywhere or do anything, no one can. But if you’re going to stay with me—that is, if you want to—you’re going to have to tell me the truth.”
We stay like that for ages, it feels like, me standing, her sitting, Olivia in between. She makes it sound really simple, and maybe it is simple. I think about what she said about your photo, the Columbia one. She’d understood that, without me having to tell her, so maybe, just maybe she’ll understand this too.
So I sit down on her couch and put my toes around the edge of the coffee table, just like her toes.
“I don’t know where to start,” I go. “I don’t know where the beginning is.”
She slides her glasses up her nose.
“Start where you are, start at the end.”
And I laugh, because it kind of makes sense, and she laughs too.
And that’s where I start.
I start at the end.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
This is going to be the shortest letter ever because there’s only another fifteen minutes until my clothes will be dry and then I’ve got to bring them home and collect the sandwiches Winnie made and our art stuff and meet her at the jewellery shop where she works. She’ll be finished with her shift then and we’re getting the subway to Brooklyn, the A train. I’m writing this from the coolest little garden in the world by the way, down the block from the Laundromat. You need a key to get in and Winnie has a key because she’s a volunteer and I’m going to volunteer too, that’s one of the things I’ve decided.
Today feels like a day for deciding things, it feels like the start of something. If I’d known it would feel like this, telling Winnie the truth, I wouldn’t have taken so long to get the whole story out, I wouldn’t have been so scared. Yesterday, sitting on her couch, it takes me ages to even get to the part about me and Laurie, and it’s nearly dark when I tell her about us kissing during Truth or Dare. Her face doesn’t change, even though she knows by then that Laurie is Cooper’s daughter, and it doesn’t even change when I tell her about us being in bed together. The only time in the whole story that her face changes is when I tell her about Cooper hitting me and the things he said. Her face gets really kind of hard then, like someone else’s face, and she shakes her head over and over and says she’s so sorry I’d had to go through that.
And the way she listens makes me want to tell her everything, Mum, and somehow we get onto this conversation about Dad, and I’m telling her about his music and how I’d read his mood by it, that usually Hendrix meant he was happy, unless he was listening to “Voodoo Child” because he only listened to “Voodoo Child” when he was angry about something. Lennon was his “loving music”—he always said that—and that could mean he was happy too, except for the times he was sad. She’s interested in the times he was sad, asks a lot about that and I end up telling her about the times he cried in my room when he got home from the pub, talking about you or Nana Farrell—and just then Winnie jumps up and puts on her shoes. I haven’t even gotten to the part where Dad found Nana Farrell on the floor and had to take her to the hospital but Winnie says she needs to run to the payphone because it’s after nine and she always calls Melissa at nine. And I never get to tell her about that part because when she comes back, she heats up some beef stew she’d brought home from the soup kitchen and she sends me to the Chinese on Tenth Avenue for a pint of brown rice to go with it. On the way back, I’m thinking that I’m glad I stopped there because I might have ended up telling her too much, like about what Aunt Ruth said on my last night in Coral Springs.
And I’m glad I didn’t tell her that, because I know that if I mentioned it, even if I told her it was a lie, it’d be in her head every time we talk about you, every time I showed her a photo, she’d be thinking about it, wondering. And I prefer the way it is now, like when she sees your Columbia photo and she says she sees your essence, and how alive you are, because that’s the real you, Mum.
I can see it and Winnie can see it, and just because Aunt Ruth can’t doesn’t mean we have to listen to her pack of lies.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
Dumbass. Dumbass. Dumbass, dumbass, dumbass.
That’s what Laurie would say, and she’d be right. I hate that she’s right.
You’re such a dumbass, Rae.
At first the afternoon started off nice, just like I thought it would, taking the A train under the water, getting out in Brooklyn. When we get out, it’s like being in another country—the houses and the streets and the sky, nothing like Manhattan at all. Winnie knows her way to the promenade and across the other side of the water, the whole of New York is there, a giant blocky puzzle, like Lego, like you could reach out and pick it up. And as if that’s not enough, there’s the Brooklyn Bridge too, stretching out to reach it, and the Statue of Liberty, floating out in the haze. Winnie says you have to get out of Manhattan to see it properly and that reminds me of what Dad said at the Cliffs of Moher, about having to be far away to see the waves.
While we eat our sandwiches I’m making a photo of it all in my head, the way I always do before I draw anything—the greeny black of the Statue of Liberty, the shapes the buildings cut out of the blue sky. Winnie’s talking about Brooklyn, the history and about famous people who live here, and even though I’m listening, I’m thinking about you at the same time, and I’m trying to understand how you could turn your back on all this. And I can’t figure out how you could trade it in—the statue, the city, this whole beautiful city—for a nothing village in Dublin. How you could have left it all behind for Dad, for me.
After we eat, she holds out two pieces of charcoal in her palm and I choose the long skinny bit. And then I make the mistake.
“Did you ever come here to draw with Melissa?”
Winnie is adjusting her paper against the board, holding the charcoal between two fingers like a cigarette. I’ve done mine already but I’m waiting for her before I start.
“No.”
“Did she not like drawing?”
The paper’s not totally straight so Winnie unclips it, lines it up again.
“Not really. It’s not really her thing.”
When it’s lined up perfectly, she sits next to me on the bench, starts to study the skyline.
“What is her thing?”
The wind has come up a little bit off the water and it ruffles our paper.
“To be honest, I’m not sure, Rhea. Farmers’ markets, wheatgrass drinks. I’m sure she likes other things too, but that’s as much as I know these days.”
Her hand is over the paper and I know she wants to start, that I should stop asking questions, but somehow I can’t seem to stop.
“Does she ever come to New York?”
“Not much.”
“Does she not like it here?”
“I guess not.”
“How can someone not love New York?”
Winnie hits her charcoal down against the page, hard so it leaves a mark.
“Probably because she doesn’t want to take a trip down memory lane by coming back here. She has a lot of painful memories I guess, with a drunk as a mother when she was growing up.”
I don’t know if she’s angry or sad because her voice and her face are switching between both.
“But that was years ago—isn’t she thirty or something?”
She looks at me, right into my eyes. “These scars run deep, Rhea. I only got sober when Melissa was eighteen. I took her childhood away. If I could give it back to her, I would, but I never can.”
There’s more pain in her face than it feels I should be seeing, so I look down at the paper, shiny white, waiting for my first mark. I want to make her feel better, to make the day clean again, like the paper.
“She looked happy in the picture you showed me. I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.”
Winnie’s hair blows across her face and she flicks it back behind her ears.
“I was an active alcoholic, Rhea. You know what that’s like, growing up in a house like that.”
It takes me a second to fully hear what she’s said.
“What do you mean?”
She glances at me. “You know, the stories you told me about your dad.”
At first I’m not angry, just shocked. I even laugh.
“What are you talking about? Dad wasn’t an alcoholic—”
She bites her lip. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought your dad into this. Come on, we should get started.”
She straightens her board, lines it up against the skyline.
“He liked a drink in the pub, but everyone’s dad did that. That was normal.”
She draws really fast, her hand skimming over the page, making quick shapes. She smudges some of the charcoal, but she doesn’t seem to care.
“Sure,” she goes. “Forget it.”
Her eyes flick from the skyline to the paper and back again. She doesn’t look at me, and I look at the skyline and try to let its shape replace the things she’d said. But it doesn’t work, because the shock turns into anger then, and I can’t stop it, thinking back on all the things I’d told her and how she wasn’t listening at all, only judging me.
I know then that I’m not going to be able to draw. Looking at the skyline, the gaps between the buildings turn into tiny streets. And I can picture the miniature yellow taxis, bumper to bumper on the miniature streets, tiny people teeming along the sidewalks. And it’s too alive to draw, with all this life, all these people—miniature versions of Sergei and Michael and even Pat with her headphones and my Red Sox cap, living their teeny lives right in the middle of it all. I wanted to pick the city up and shake it until they all fall out—Pat and Sergei and Michael and even Aunt Ruth, a miniature Aunt Ruth, scurrying along putting up microscopic pictures of me.
Winnie’s stopped drawing. She’s looking at me. “I’m sorry, Rhea, talking like that about your father … It’s none of my business.”
The charcoal feels slippy in my hand. There’s a mark on the white paper, kind of a circle, a smear, where I’ve been pushing it against the page.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” she goes.
“I’m not upset.”
She nods and starts drawing again, quick like before. She’ll probably want to talk about it again when we get back to her apartment. And thinking about her apartment makes me worry about the fridge, how it was nearly empty except for the cream cheese and a jar of mixed garlic and some salad dressing and I hope she has a plan to get some food on the way home, because even though it’s only half an hour since the sandwiches, I’m hungry again already.
“What do you think?”
Winnie holds up her picture to show me. It’s smudgy and a bit of a mess. The windows of the buildings are all done in dashes or L shapes but what’s strange is that even though it’s not exactly how the buildings look, it looks real.
“It’s good.”
“You don’t feel like drawing today?”
I shake my head, put my board down on the bench between us. She places hers down too, carefully, on top of mine.
“I was hoping you would. I was hoping you’d do something new so I could show my friend Jean.”
“Who’s Jean?”
She unwinds the pink and silver scarf from around her neck, holds one end in each hand. “She’s someone I know from years back, from a rehab I was in. She’s a counsellor and she runs a camp out in Long Island where we take kids from shelters for a few weeks every summer.”
“You’re going away?”
“I go every year.”
“When?”
“Next week. Thursday.”
Thursday is six days away, not even a whole week. I want to say that, but I don’t say anything. I want to ask her why she didn’t say anything before, but that’s a dumbass thing to even think because she doesn’t have to say anything, tell me anything. I’m just a dumbass for getting sucked in with all the “we’s.”
“Rhea, listen.” She’s pulling the scarf tight at each end. “I called Jean last night, told her about you, to see if I could persuade her to take on someone else to help me with the art classes. It’s a lot for me now, all the kids.”
She’s smiling, holding the edges of her scarf, like this is great news. The wind has picked up a little and it’s flapping her page. “I’m so excited, Rhea, because Jean said that we could sort something out. That if you can take on some of the other stuff—cleaning maybe, things like that—you can come out too.”
Over the city there’s grey clouds now, like smoke.
“We’ll have to share a room, there are no extra ones, but that’s fine with me.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
She looks confused. “Share a room?”
“What if I don’t want to go? What if I want to stay here?”
She shakes her head. “You’ll love it, Rhea. The money’s not great but the food is always amazing and it’s right on the beach, you can go swimming every day.”
“I can’t swim.”
Her eyes glance towards my stump and back to my face. She thinks that’s why I can’t; even after everything I told her last night, she thinks that’s why not.
“That’s okay, maybe you’ll learn. Say you’ll come.”
She moves closer to me on the bench, so her board falls onto the ground, banging off the concrete. She bends down to pick it up and she notices the daisy I’ve had in the lacehole of my Docs since the park. She points to it and smiles.
“So this woman—this Jean—she’s just going to offer me a job, just like that? Without even meeting me?”
“She wouldn’t be able to meet you anyway, she’s out there already, getting the place set up. But once the background checks are okay—”
“Background checks?”
“You know, just the usual stuff. We’re working with kids, they have to make sure—”
“No, no way. I’m not doing that.”
I stand up and my charcoal falls on the ground.
“Rhea—”
“Aunt Ruth has probably been to the police. She must have. If they run a check, she’ll probably find out. She’ll probably find me.”
Winnie’s standing up too, reaching for my hand, but I fold my arm across me, put it in my armpit.
“Rhea, you’re eighteen. She can’t make you go back.”
“No!” I stamp on the charcoal but it’s too thin to break.
“Come on, don’t mess this up. Even if it wasn’t for the background check, I’d be suggesting you contact your aunt, let her know you’re safe.”
A drop of rain falls on Winnie’s picture, then another one.
“Mess this up? I thought you got it, Winnie. I thought you understood.”
“I do understand—but you’re not listening to me, Rhea. You don’t have to go back there. No one’s going to make you go back. Just let her know you’re okay, that’s all.”
There’s more rain. The charcoal is starting to smudge. Winnie unclips her paper, rolls it up. I scrunch my toes tight inside my Docs. The daisy from earlier is turning to mush in the rain, it’s already dead.
Winnie’s got everything back in the bag, boards, paper, charcoal. She has her scarf over her head now. “Come on, we’re getting soaked.”
I hesitate, lean against the railing. As if I have another choice, as if there is somewhere else I can go.
“How do I know you’re not going to call my aunt, tell her where I am?”
She rolls her eyes. “Come on, Rhea. You know I’m not going to do that. You’re an adult. You’re the one who gets to decide what happens next. Not me.”
We don’t talk anymore after that, just hurry back to the subway station, both of us trying to stay dry walking close to the buildings. And we don’t talk on the train on the way home and I hate that things can change, from the way they were on the way here to being like this, with no warning at all.
She’s out now, at an AA meeting and she’s probably telling them all what an ungrateful bitch I am. And I thought about leaving while she’s out—about taking my clothes off the shelf she made for me and packing them in my backpack again, but it’s still raining and it’s nice in here, listening to it on the window with the violin music upstairs and Olivia scrunched in next to me.
And I’m looking at your photo, the Columbia one, and I’m wondering what you’d do, what you’d want me to do. She hasn’t said it, but I think she’ll let me stay, till Thursday, if I want to. That’s six days of food, six nights of sleep on this couch. Sometimes Dad would go on about principles, how they weren’t worth sacrificing, and I don’t know if I stay if I’m sacrificing mine because Winnie betrayed my trust by telling this Jean person about me. But I’ve nowhere else to go, no money even, not anymore. And it feels like I’m all out of options. That for six days of food and sleep, it might be worth the sacrifice, just this once.
Maybe, if I asked you, you might tell me that.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
I am copying out the letter I’m sending to Aunt Ruth because if she writes back I want to remember what I wrote. It’s way harder writing to her than writing to you. I hope I’m doing the right thing, sending the letter, going with Winnie—I hope I’m not making a mistake.
As soon as I tell Winnie what I’ve decided she hugs me and then she runs out to phone Jean to start the background check. And I nearly change my mind then, after everything, I nearly take the red Converse she’d bought me and the shorts with all the pockets and the second-hand Walkman and put them all in my backpack and run, before I can think about it. But I don’t run, I sit and stroke Olivia, and listen to her purring, and then Winnie’s back, smiling, telling me everything we need to do next.
I didn’t decide to go because she bought me that stuff, Mum, that wasn’t it. It was all from the Salvation Army and it only came to six dollars. I decided to go because she’s buying it for me anyway—the Converse and the shorts and the Walkman—whether I go with her or not. It’s not a bribe and that’s what makes me trust her.
The place we’re going is called Turning Tides and I like the name and that it’s on Long Island, in between a town called Amagansett and a town called Montauk. Winnie showed me where it is, on the map, and it’s near where Aunt Ruth told me you used to spend your summers, where the ice cream place is, and that’s another reason I decided to go, if you want to know the truth.
I don’t think Aunt Ruth must have liked going there, because she was weird the time we talked about it in Jaxson’s, but maybe that’s because of Nana Davis having an affair with Granddad Davis’ boss—at least I think they were. But I bet you liked it, Mum. Winnie told me about all the beaches on Long Island, some of the best in the country, she said. I bet you went swimming every day.
I’m not going to post the letter until Thursday morning, right before we leave. I know I don’t need to worry about her finding me—the letter has the soup kitchen’s return address on it because Chrissie is going to forward on anything that comes. And even if Aunt Ruth jumped on a plane straightaway, she wouldn’t get here before we left no matter when I send it. But posting it on Thursday feels better all the same.
Making decisions is hard sometimes, isn’t it? I wish I knew how to tell in advance if it was the right decision or a mistake, but they both feel the same, I think they do.
If you’ve figured it out up there, a way to tell the difference, do me a favour and let me know, will you?
It might be a handy thing to know.
R
16th June 1999
Dear Aunt Ruth,
How are you? I am writing to you because I want to let you know that there is no need for you to worry about me. I am fine. I have a job in a summer camp so I’ll have somewhere to live and I’ll be earning money. It’s not in New York, so don’t bother looking for me there.
I would like to know if Columbia responded to my application. I don’t expect you to pay my fees now, but I would still like to know if I was accepted.
You can write back and let me know using the address on the envelope and they will send the letter on to me. Please don’t come to the soup kitchen again to try and find out where I am. They won’t be able to tell you and by the time you get this, I won’t even be in New York and no matter what happens, I’m not going back to Florida.
I’m sorry for everything that happened and for causing trouble for you and your family.
Yours sincerely,
Rhea Farrell
Dear Mum,
It’s the first time I’ve had a chance to write to you and even now I should be in bed but I can’t sleep. We have to start work at 8:00 a.m. here—not get up, start work—and after the kids come on Monday, we’ll have to start at 7:30! It’s like a prison camp here, Mum, there’s so many rules.
I’m not even meant to be down here on my own, on the beach, after dark.
The best part so far was the train journey, with me and Winnie playing poker and the conductor walking through shouting out the name of each station. I’m winning—I would have won—if I hadn’t got distracted when he calls out Bridgehampton and I lay down the wrong card. I want to play another game, but Winnie insists on packing the cards away to get ready to get off, even though we don’t get to the Amagansett station for ages after.
Jean and David are waiting on the platform and it turns out Zac and Matt were on our train as well. Zac and Matt are twins who are a year younger than me but twice as tall. Both of them are starting at Brown University at the end of the summer and, so far, that’s all they’ve talked about. Laurie would love them, especially Zac, because he plays football and you can tell he’s the one who’s the leader of the two of them, because he speaks first and laughs more and Matt looks smaller, the way he rounds his shoulders, even though they’re the same height.
At first I don’t know who she is, the woman who’s hugging everyone—it takes me a minute to realise it’s Jean. For some reason, I don’t expect her to be black or to be wearing shorts and flip-flops and a neon pink T-shirt. She looks too young to be the boss, especially when she’s wearing her Oakley sunglasses, which she is most of the time. When she hugs Winnie, they kind of rock back and forth, hugging for so long it’s kind of embarrassing. I’m next and it’s weird but it’s like she somehow knows that I don’t want to hug her because she only squeezes my shoulder and says that I’ll be a great addition to the team.
David’s the cook and the van driver and he has a long ponytail and a beard. He gives me a big handshake with his left hand and says he likes my Hendrix T-shirt. He’s wearing a tie-dye one with someone called Jimmy Buffett on it and I pretend I’ve heard of him and I say I like his T-shirt too.
He drives really fast, David does, and we’re all thrown around in the back when he takes the sharp turn off the road in through a tiny gateway. It’s like a dirt track in Ireland—grass up the middle and trees and bushes scraping the sides of the van—but then it suddenly opens up and there’s the house, with the sea, crystal blue, right behind it. This house is nothing like beach houses in Florida—it’s old, white wood and four storeys and a big wooden deck that wraps all the way around.
Me and Winnie are staying on the top floor, in the attic room, up four flights of stairs with no air conditioner because apparently the window is too small for one. The only people who have their own rooms are Jean and Gemma, the other therapist who smiles a lot but hardly says a word. Zac and Matt are sharing, and Amanda is sharing with Erin, some kind of trainee therapist who’s not here yet.
Amanda’s the lifeguard, by the way, we meet her after Jean gives us the tour of the house. The pool is in the back, down the opposite set of steps than the sea, and when we get there it looks like it’s empty until we see the bubbles and then Amanda bursts through the surface of the water, her cheeks puffed out.
“Talk about a dramatic entrance,” Jean says, and everyone laughs. Jean laughs too, at her own joke, and her laugh is louder than everyone else’s, loud and annoying.
“Sorry,” Amanda goes, wiping her hair out of her eyes. “I was seeing how long I could sit on the bottom.”
Jean laughs again and gets down on her hunkers next to where Amanda has propped herself up on the edge.
“This is Amanda, our trusty lifeguard who keeps all the kids safe in the water. Amanda, meet the troops—Zac, Matt, Winnie and Rhea.”
We all say hi at the same time.
“Do you surf?” Zac goes. “I hear the surfing is awesome out here.”
Amanda’s wearing one of those lame necklaces with her name on it in loopy gold that’s supposed to be handwriting and it glints in the sun.
“No,” she goes, scrunching up her nose, “but I boogie board.”
“Good enough,” Zac goes. “David said he has a long board, I’ll show you how.”
Jean must have noticed the total flirting going on because she does this thing to bring the rest of us into the conversation.
“Maybe you can teach us all how to boogie board, Amanda,” she goes. “I’d like to learn too.”
“Sure, why not.” She fiddles with her necklace, sliding it back and forth on its chain.
Winnie puts her hand on my shoulder and I think she’s going to say something nice. “You can start with teaching Rhea how to swim. That can be your first challenge!”
She laughs, like it’s a joke, and I can’t believe she’s said that in front of everyone, and I hate how they are all looking at me and at my stump and feeling sorry for me, like I’m some kind of victim.
“You can’t swim, Rhea?” Jean goes.
“I hate the water, I’ve never wanted to learn.”
She nods. I can’t see her eyes behind her Oakleys. “I used to be scared of the water too, but I got over it, out here. No better place to learn.”
I don’t know if I already didn’t like Jean or if that’s when I decided fully.
“I didn’t say I was scared,” I go. “I just don’t like it.”
But she doesn’t answer me because she’s already leading the way back up to the house so she can take us down the other steps, to the beach. And I keep trying to catch Winnie’s eye but she’s not looking at me and I wish she wasn’t Jean’s friend because I want to say to her that Jean must be the biggest dumbass psychologist ever because she obviously doesn’t listen.
That was yesterday. Today, I hate Jean more because of the way she sits up on the upper deck with Gemma, reading through folders, while Matt and Winnie and me are dragging all the furniture up from the basement and wiping it down and sweeping the deck. Zac’s helping Amanda clean the pool, even though I think he should be helping us, and all you can hear is water splashing and their voices laughing—it sounds like there’s not much cleaning going on, and I bet they are boyfriend/girlfriend already.
Matt offers to finish off the carrying part but I don’t let him, even though my arm is killing me from all the lifting. And just when I think we’re finished it turns out the basement needs to be cleaned out too, because it’s the rec room where Winnie and me are going to be doing the art class, so we do that too.
After lunch, we have our meeting and just before it starts, Erin shows up, the trainee psychologist. And I wish that Laurie was here because she’d roll her eyes and laugh at how excited Erin gets when she hears my accent and how she goes around the table hugging everyone, just like Jean did. Laurie would hate Jean too, I know she would, and I know she’d think it was lame how the others all keep laughing at every one of her crappy jokes.
Jean hands out these sheets stapled together with each of our names at the top that have a printed schedule for each day with eight time slots. I scan the slots for my name, I’m in five of them, no, six. I count Winnie’s—she’s in four. Amanda’s in five, the same as Matt and Zac. I’m doing more work than anyone else, but when I glance over at Winnie to see if she’s noticed, if she’ll say anything, she’s writing down something Jean has just said. The talking goes on for ages—Jean first, then Gemma—about what it’s like for these kids to be homeless and in shelters, as if they know anything about it. They take ages going through the activities. It takes longer because of all the questions—everyone has questions and after nearly every one Jean says “great question!” before she answers. I’m the only one who doesn’t ask anything, just like I’m the only one not taking notes.
Jean is going on about something lame called “Be Myself Time” where kids sit around in the rec room and do anything they want. She’s all animated explaining it, how the time is unstructured so the kids can pick up an instrument and play it or draw or read, whatever they feel like. She says it three times, “Be Myself Time,” as if she’s just come up with the name, as if it’s the most amazing name in the world.
Matt is next to me and he’s not writing anything down. I lean closer to him. “I think I’d prefer ‘Be Someone Else Time.’ ” I whisper, but when he turns around his voice is too loud. “What?”
Jean stops talking and looks over and the silence is like school all over again. Across from me, Amanda’s next to Zac. Now that her hair is dry I can see it’s curly and blonde, even though it’s tied back. She dips her chin down to her chest and I realise she’s trying not to laugh.
“Did you have a question, Rhea?” Jean is smiling a pretend smile.
I look at my blank page and shake my head. “No.”
Her eyes hold mine, they’re big in her face, lots of white around her dark brown pupils.
“You’re comfortable with your role? Helping out on the beach and in the kitchen and afternoons with Winnie in Arts and Crafts?”
“Yep.”
They’re all looking at me, everyone is, except Amanda, who’s doodling on her page. Jean is still smiling, as if she is waiting for me to say something more.
“So, how do you feel about tomorrow?” she says. “Are you nervous? Excited?”
She hasn’t asked anyone else a question like that, not even with all their questions, and I know it’s a trick, that she’s picking on me because I haven’t asked her anything. And that’s when I think of a question.
“Do you think it makes any difference?”
She puts her chin in her hand. “Makes any difference?”
“I mean, you’ve told us all about the lives that these kids have. Do you think a few weeks at the beach making sandcastles actually changes anything?”
She sits back, straight up in her chair.
“It’s a lot more than building sandcastles, Rhea. I don’t know if you followed the whole programme but there are many components—”
“Art, music, physical activity, nutrition, play, community.” I list them off, exactly as she said them. “I know what they do, but I just wondered if it actually makes any kind of difference.”
It’s the first question that’s not a “great” question, or even a “good” question. She looks down at her page and back to me.
“We give these kids a place to be children, Rhea, a place to heal. You’ll see the difference for yourself.” Her voice is annoyed, she’s not able to hide it. “On the first day, they’ll be shoving sandwiches in their pockets, hardly able to talk to us, and when they leave they’ll be laughing and playing like children.”
“Yeah, but what happens after? After they go back home?”
Winnie is looking at me now, frowning behind her glasses, and I know she wants me to shut up. In the beginning, I was asking to annoy Jean, but now I’m asking because I really want to know. Jean is pulling at the curl over her ear, where a little bit of grey is. She opens her mouth to answer, but Gemma gets there first.
“There’s a lot of evidence to support the fact that helping children reclaim their childhoods can lead to a better ability to cope as adults.” Her voice is so soft and I can hardly hear her over the noise of the air conditioner. “This programme is only five years old, though, so it’s too early to track real outcomes.”
“So you can’t know for sure?” I go.
She shakes her head. “No, we can’t.”
Jean is the first one to get up from the table after that, and we have a break before dinner. When I go up to the room, Winnie’s there changing her T-shirt and I’m glad we’re sharing then, because we haven’t had a chance to talk since the train.
“Well?” she goes. “What do you think so far?”
I lie down on the bed, even though I still have my Docs on.
“It’s okay.”
“Only okay?”
I know I should have pretended to like it, to like Jean, but Winnie’s supposed to be my friend and I thought the whole point of having friends was to tell them the truth.
“I like the house, but it’d be nicer if we didn’t have to share it with this bunch of whackjobs.”
“Whackjobs? I haven’t heard that in a while. Why are they whackjobs?”
I roll over onto my back, look at the ceiling.
“I don’t know—they all are. Like, Erin. All she wants to talk about is some bumfuck part of Leitrim where her dad’s from. I’ve never been to Leitrim. I’d rather kill myself than go to Leitrim.”
Winnie laughs and that makes it okay to keep talking.
“And that other one, Gemma—what’s up with her? She hardly said a word all day and now she’s sitting on her own on the balcony upstairs with her eyes closed.”
“I think she’s meditating.”
I can hear a smile in Winnie’s voice, I think I can.
“And Jean, all that crap about healing these kids’ emotional scars. That’s total bullshit.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah, I do.”
I wait for her to say more but all I hear is the hiss of her perfume. When I look over, she’s dabbing it behind her ears. She’s wearing her white shirt, the one with the pink flowers on the collars.
“You’re getting dressed up for dinner?”
“I’m going to a meeting after, in Bridgehampton.”
“Again? You went last night.”
She folds her T-shirt, doesn’t answer me.
“David’s going to drop me in.”
“In New York you don’t go to AA every night.”
“Sometimes I do.”
“Not when I was staying with you.”
“No,” she smiles, “not when you were staying with me.”
She puts the T-shirt in the top drawer of the dresser, the drawer I said I didn’t mind her having. Sometimes I hate these conversations, when Winnie just repeats everything I say.
“Is your meeting anywhere near the ice cream place? The Candy Kitchen?”
“I don’t know—it’s probably not too far. Why? Did you want to come with me?”
“No.” I sit up on the bed. “No, I was just asking.”
“Okay.”
She slips her feet into her flip-flops. We have half an hour before dinner and I wonder is she going to walk on the beach and I’m thinking of asking her if she wants to do that, but then she says the most annoying thing ever.
“Just give the place a chance, Rhea. It’s going to be okay. When I get scared, I’m judgemental too.”
She leaves then, closing the door behind her, before I can say anything back, and that’s what annoys me most of all, that I don’t get to tell her that she obviously wasn’t listening to me and that I’m not fucking scared.
It pisses me off, Mum, that she can be so wrong about me, and I should have said something to her but there was no time at dinner and later, after she came back from her meeting, she seemed really happy so I didn’t want to then. But then I couldn’t sleep, and lying in that hot-ass room with her snoring, it’s all I can think about, and not even listening to David’s Pink Floyd tape on my Walkman can stop it.
Because I’m not scared of Jean, Mum, or of this stupid place. And I’m not scared of the water. If I was scared I wouldn’t be breaking the rules—I’d be in bed now, up in that stuffy attic, trying to sleep. If I was scared, I wouldn’t be down here on the beach, by myself in the dark. I wouldn’t be writing to you.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
I want to write a list of all the kids’ names but I don’t know what order to put them in and I can’t remember all their names because some of them are names I’ve never heard before and I have to know how to spell something before I can remember it.
Out of thirty-six, only three are white, the others are mostly black and Hispanic. It might sound fifty kinds of crazy, but I can’t understand half of what they’re saying—even the ones who speak English—and they can’t understand me either.
None of them are meant to be older than twelve but one of them claims he’s thirteen—Marco, one of the white kids who wears a T-shirt with an Italian flag on it all the time. Erin makes him the captain of one of the volleyball teams which anyone with half an eye could see is a bad idea. Shirley is the captain of the other team and she gets to go first. She picks Amanda, straightaway, so I’m the only counsellor left, with all the other kids. Marco spends ages choosing, his arms folded.
“Come on,” Erin goes after a while. “Pick someone!”
“Okay.” He walks towards me and, at the last minute, whirls around to point at Isaac. “You!”
Isaac runs over and they high five. It was Shirley’s turn again and her eyes hovered over me.
“Are we allowed to have two grown-ups on our team?”
She’s asking the question to Erin, but before she can answer, Marco does.
“She’s all yours. I don’t want no handicapped bitch on my team.”
I hate the way he looks at me when he says it, but I hate even more that I look away.
“Marco!” Erin goes. “Apologise, you can’t call people names like that.”
She doesn’t know, Mum, that that’s the worst thing to do, to make a big deal out of it, so I cut across her and laugh like what he said was a joke. “Fine by me. I’m going to enjoy kicking your skinny Italian ass!”
The kids laugh then and Shirley high fives me and they go on choosing until everyone is chosen and I pretend I don’t see the pity in Amanda’s face. And we do kick his ass, Mum. Even though it’s only a kids’ game, I run all over the beach like it’s the Olympics or something and we beat them 21–7. I scored twelve of our points.
I’m wrecked now, Mum—it never stops here—volleyball, art, helping David make the rice for dinner and cleaning up after, although that was worth it because I got to sample his banana walnut muffins, straight from the oven. Tonight was movie night—E.T.—and I thought I was going to be able to watch it all, but even then they don’t sit still. It was getting to the best part—the part where the plant comes back to life and then E.T. does—and then Natalie threw up all over her shoes and because I was sitting nearest I had to clean it up.
I’m not complaining, Mum, I’m not. It’s just that
Dear Mum,
I fell asleep last night, right in the middle of writing that sentence. It’s fifty kinds of crazy that I’m more tired now than when I was on the streets. When I say it to Winnie she says it’s the sea air, but I think it’s because Jean is working us like slaves and I have more work than anyone else.
Like this morning, I’m on breakfast, with Matt and Zac, even though I was on dinner last night. Breakfast is easier though because half of them are having “Be Myself Time” and eighteen kids between three of us isn’t too bad—even though Zac doesn’t do much and pretends he doesn’t see the milk Luis spilled all over the table. I like him, Luis, but he’s so scared all the time, you’d think I was going to hit him for knocking over a glass of milk. When I tell him it’s okay and bring him another one, he starts crying and I pretend not to see the box of Cheerios he has shoved in his pocket in case it makes him cry more.
I don’t know how to be with kids—what to do when they fight or cry or anything. It was Erin who stepped in when Maleika and Shirley were pulling each other’s hair on the beach over whose turn it was to go on the Swingball and I don’t know how she does it, because five minutes later, they were both jumping over the waves at the edge, each of them holding one of her hands.
They’ve all formed groups now, Mum, in only a couple of days—the girls in pairs mostly and the boys in mini gangs. The only one who always spends time on her own is Robin, a little black girl—one of the youngest. I tried to talk to her, but she won’t speak to anyone, she didn’t even say anything today when Isaac and Jeffrey kicked sand in her face on purpose, she didn’t cry or anything.
Jean came to check up on me this afternoon. I’m down in the rec room, washing the trays and brushes after art, and when I turn around she’s right behind me in a lime-green polo shirt. I’m holding four trays between my stump and my hand and I drop two of them on the tiles.
“Hi,” she goes, bending down to help me pick them up. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to give you a shock.”
“You didn’t,” I go. “You’re grand.”
She hands me two of the trays and it’s harder to carry them than if she’d just let me pick them up on my own.
“How are things going?”
“Fine.”
I put the trays on the table and water drips on the floor.
“I just came down to see how you were finding things. If you’re settling in okay. Some people find it a little intense at first.”
She’s holding her sunglasses between her fingers, swinging them back and forth.
“I like it,” I go.
“Good.” She swings her sunglasses, smiles. “You’re not too busy? The schedule works okay?”
I have that feeling again, like on the train platform, as if she can see right into my head, that she knows I’ve been bitching about it, but I’m not going to give her the satisfaction of saying it’s too much.
“I like to be busy.”
She smiles too. “Then you’re in the right place.”
I think it’s over and take the dirty brushes, lay them out one by one in the sink.
“Amanda mentioned that Marco said something nasty—on the beach?”
I don’t look up or turn around, just line up the bristles so they all make one line of bristle. So that’s why she’s here, stupid Amanda and her interfering. I don’t need her running to Jean any more than I need her pitying looks.
“It was nothing,” I go. “No big deal.”
“I can talk with him, explain that it’s not okay to say what he said. He might not have met someone with a disability before.”
She says it like it’s any old word, like it applies to me. I want to tell her that I don’t have a disability, that I can do anything she can do, but instead I turn on the tap full force so the water almost drowns out what she says next.
“He might have questions about it, be curious.”
She’s a bigger dumbass than I thought, if she thinks that. Marco is the Susan Mulligan of the group—he’s not curious, he’s a bully. I don’t tell her that, Mum, she’s the psychologist after all, so instead I just watch the water making clouds in the sink, pink, green, blue, until everything is a muddy brown.
I don’t know how long she stands there watching me, because I can’t hear over the water, but when the sink is about to overflow, I turn off the tap and she’s gone by then. All that’s left is the sound of her flip-flops slapping against her feet as she climbs the stairs.
R
Dear Mum,
David goes to the farmers’ market every Wednesday and today, when I’m helping him unload the corn and tomatoes and onions from the van, my heart nearly stops because I see all this post on the dashboard, next to a box of Marlboro Lights.
I’m looking at the envelopes, trying to see names on the top, when he comes around the side of the van and catches me.
“What are you looking at, nosy?”
“Nothing!” I turn around too fast, so I nearly drop the corn.
Walking into the house, my heart is beating really fast, Mum, as if one of those letters is definitely from Aunt Ruth, which is weird because, up until then, I’d kind of forgotten I even wrote to Aunt Ruth, as if my letter was something I sent into space, with no chance of her ever writing back at all. It takes ages to put everything away. When we do, David gives me a banana walnut muffin and I sit on the counter, watching him sort through the envelopes, laying them out on the table.
“Anything for me?”
I say it all casual, with my mouth full of muffin in case my voice sounds weird.
He stops and looks up. “Not so far. You expecting anything?”
“Uh huh.” I shake my head, take another bite.
“A ConEd bill, circulars, the usual shit.” He’s eating a muffin too and there’s a big crumb of it stuck in his beard. “But don’t worry, I’ll be back at the post office tomorrow. Jean’s a stickler for checking the mail—has me down there every day.”
“Why?”
David rolls his eyes but he smiles too. “You know what she’s like, never gives up on these kids. In five years, I think I’ve picked up two letters, maybe three, for them, but she’s always hoping that this year will be the year, that people will write.”
I wish I didn’t know that, Mum, about him going there every day. Because now I know that every single day there’s a chance the soup kitchen could forward a letter from Aunt Ruth, or maybe even from Laurie, and now that I know, my mind won’t let me unknow it. And it’s not like I want a letter from either of them—I didn’t even write to Laurie. But if nothing shows up at all, I can’t even tell myself that maybe it got lost with all the letters for the kids because there are no letters for the kids. And let’s face it, not much can get lost in the middle of a few circulars and a ConEd bill.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
One of the things Jean is obsessed with, that she went on and on about that first day, is counting the kids. Count the kids on the way to the beach, count the kids when you get back. Count kids at the start of art class, at the start of dinner, when they go to bed. She says it fifty thousand times, over and over, as if we’re going to forget.
Today someone forgot. It’s Saturday—“Cowboy and Cowgirl” night—so we were having franks and beans around the campfire with stories after. Winnie and Amanda had been doing the nature walk so it was one of them who forgot, one of them who should have counted before they came back from the beach.
I’m helping David lay out the food and I’m not really paying too much attention at first until I hear Winnie’s voice all out of breath, like she’s been running.
“You must have missed one,” she goes. “Count again.”
Amanda walks down the line, tipping each of the kids on the shoulder, her voice and Winnie’s voice counting out loud together. Marco pushes Luis out of the line and laughs but Amanda just walks past, counting. By the time she’s at number twenty, I’ve counted ahead and I know they were right first time—that one kid is missing. By the time Amanda’s at twenty-eight, I know the one missing is Robin.
I don’t know who tells Jean what’s happening, but she’s there by the time they are counting a third time, her hand on Winnie’s shoulder, scanning the line of kids. Matt and Zac come out with the soda coolers and she splits us all up into areas to search. Someone has to stay behind with the other kids to help David serve up the food and to make sure no one else gets lost. If anyone else was missing—even Genesis or Gabriel—I wouldn’t mind staying behind, but it isn’t any of them. It’s Robin. And I want to find her.
I get to check the house—the rec room and the storage rooms behind it. Zac is checking the first floor and Matt’s on the second. Winnie and Amanda are searching outside and the beach. We have twenty minutes to find her, after that we call 911.
Did you ever just know something was going to happen, before it happens? Going down the stairs, I know I’m going to be the one who finds Robin. I don’t know how I know, I just do.
The tables are all pushed up against the walls because last night was Friday and that’s the night Erin does the dance party. If I was a kid who wanted to hide, I’d probably hide under a table. That’s what I’m thinking when I get down on my knees, look under each one. And I think I’m wrong, that she’s not there, and then I see her, under the very last table, scrunched up in the corner.
I don’t stand up, instead I kind of slide over on my bum, my legs pulling me forward. She’s not looking up and I can’t make out what she’s doing at first until I see a page, her hand moving, and I see that she’s drawing.
“Hey, Robin.”
She doesn’t look up but the crayon stops for a split second before she starts colouring again, so I know she hears me.
“Are you okay? Everyone’s looking for you—we were worried.”
I’m about to tell her not to go anywhere, to wait right there while I go upstairs for Jean or Gemma, like we’re supposed to, but something makes me crawl under the table next to her. She stops drawing, puts her hands over her eyes. After a second, she opens her fingers to peer out, sees that I’m still there, and snaps them shut again.
“It’s nice under here,” I go. “Do you like hiding out?”
I sit cross-legged, the same way she is. My head touches the underside of the table and I scrunch my neck down a little. Over our heads, I can hear footsteps, a voice—Zac or Matt’s—calling Robin’s name.
“What are you drawing?”
I reach out to touch her paper and she pulls it away. Her dark eyes take me in, everything about me—my face, my Hendrix T-shirt, my stump. Next to her on the floor, there’s extra paper and crayons.
“Can I draw a picture too?”
She looks at me for a second, then she nods, pushes a piece of paper at me. I pick up a purple crayon and start to draw. And it’s really weird, Mum, because, right then, it’s like I forget about everything—about waiting for the letter from Aunt Ruth and about everyone searching the house and the beach and even about Robin sitting next to me. And halfway through I realise that it’s the first time I’ve been able to draw since that night I left Florida, but I don’t let myself think about it too much, just keep drawing, because if I think about it too much I might have to stop.
When I’m finished, Robin’s still drawing, but she stops once she sees I have. She looks over at my page.
I hold it out, so she can see it. “That’s my mom.”
She leans closer but she doesn’t touch it.
“I have a photo of her like that and I like to draw it. I don’t need to look at the photo, though, I can see it in my head.”
“My mom’s in Heaven,” she goes.
It’s the first thing she says to me—the first thing I think I’ve heard her say to anyone.
“So is mine,” I go. “My mom’s in Heaven too.”
She picks up a red crayon and goes back to her drawing. Her page is full of squares and circles and squiggles. She’s colouring in a red part of one of the circles.
“Is that a bird?” I go. “Is it a robin? Like your name?”
“Robin is a thin girl’s name.”
At first, I think she doesn’t understand that a robin is a bird, but when she starts to colour again I see the way her pudgy hand grabs the crayon, the dimples in her knuckles, and I know that what she’s just said aren’t her words.
“Who said that, Robin?”
She puts the red down, picks up my purple and starts to colour over her drawing, making circles of purple over and over on her page.
“Did someone tell you that, Robin?”
She moves her head a millimetre. A tiny fraction, a nod.
“Uncle Nat.”
“My daddy always said not to mind people who called me names. He had a rhyme that said, ‘Sticks and stones might break my bones but words can never harm me.’ ”
She starts to scribble harder, her crayon is going to rip through the paper.
“Uncle Nat says my mommy was stupid and fat too. But he doesn’t say it in front of Nanny.”
She says this like she’s talking about something else, something she’s seen on TV—maybe it is something she’s seen on TV.
“What does your nanny say?”
Robin shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Do you live with your nanny?”
The crayon picks up speed, making lines and zigzags so you can barely make out the shapes from the original picture.
“Nanny went to Heaven too.”
I know I should be getting up, running upstairs to tell the others I’ve found her, that this is something Jean can talk to Robin about during “Be Myself Time.” I know everything it says in the handbook but, right then, I don’t care what it says in the handbook—Robin’s not telling Jean this, she’s telling me.
I’m thinking of what to ask Robin next when she turns to me. Her little face is serious.
“Is your arm in Heaven?”
I start to laugh, I can’t help it, but I stop when I see that Robin’s not laughing, that she looks scared.
“I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you, it just sounded funny.” I let myself hold my stump in my hand. “I don’t know if arms go to Heaven.”
“Where did it go?”
I take a breath, make myself smile. “When I was a little girl I had an accident. There was a machine in my daddy’s shop and, because I wasn’t careful, my arm got stuck in there.”
I didn’t think her eyes could get any bigger, but they’re saucers now in her face. Now I have her full attention, whether I want it or not.
“In the machine?”
I nearly laugh again, but I hold it in. “I hurt it, really bad, and they had to take away the part that was hurt, so the rest of me would be okay.”
Her eyes are on my stump now. She’s turned a little bit towards me, the half-destroyed drawing forgotten on the floor.
“Does it hurt?”
I think about it. “Not usually. Sometimes.”
“I fell and I cut my chin before and I got stitches.”
She sticks her chin out, so I see the scar, a thin line, barely visible.
“Ouch,” I go. “That sounds sore.”
“Here,” she goes. “Feel it.”
I trace my finger gently along her chin. When I’m finished, I know she wants to touch my stump even before she reaches out her hand. I’ve never let anyone touch it before. I might have let Laurie if she’d asked, but she never did. I hold it out to her and she looks at it for a few seconds before she prods it with her index finger. She looks up at me. “Does that hurt?”
“No. It doesn’t hurt when you touch it.”
Slowly, she cups her hand around it, the way I was holding it. Her hand is much smaller than mine, so her palm just covers the end. It feels warm and kind of ticklish. I start to giggle and she does too and that’s what we’re doing when I hear footsteps.
“Rhea? Rhea? Are you down here?”
It’s Winnie.
“Over here,” I go, “in the corner.”
I can tell already, by the way she doesn’t answer me, that she’s annoyed. I can see it in the way her feet move in her sandals as she walks across the room towards us, in the way she crouches down on her hunkers.
“They’re sending a search party out for you, Robin,” she says. “We were all worried.”
Robin stops laughing. She lets go of my stump as if she’s been caught—as if we both have—doing something bad.
“It’s okay,” I go. “You’re not going to get in trouble. Sure she’s not, Winnie?”
“No,” Winnie says, “I just wanted to make sure you were up in time to get some franks and beans before they’re all gone.”
Robin shakes her head. “I’m not hungry.”
“That’s a shame,” Winnie says, “because after that there’s ice cream.”
Robin starts to crawl out from under the table, leaving the drawing and the crayons on the floor. When Winnie puts her hand out to her, she doesn’t take it and, instead, she looks back at me.
“You coming?” she goes.
“Rhea’s going to tidy up your drawing stuff here,” Winnie says. “We’ll see her outside.”
I don’t know why Winnie’s going to get to be the one to walk upstairs with Robin, to hold her little hand, when I was the one who’d found her, but I pretend it doesn’t matter. And for the rest of the night I pretend I don’t know she’s annoyed with me, pretend everything’s fine. But it’s horrible, all that pretending and knowing we have to share a room together later.
She’s in the bedroom already when I come up.
“Do you want the door open or closed?” I go.
It’s not a stupid question because we’ve had the door both ways, but the way Winnie yanks her cardigan off and throws it on the bed you’d think it was. “Do what you want, Rhea.”
I leave it open, sit down on the bed, and start to loosen the laces on my Converse.
“I mean, it’s not as if you ever listen to anyone anyway.”
I could ignore the first comment, pretend I thought she’d meant something else, but I can’t ignore that one. I push my right Converse off with my left foot.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means. If you’re going to do what you want all the time—never listen to anyone—what’s the point in asking?”
Winnie takes off her glasses, steps out of her flip-flops. She has all her bottles of nail polish lined up on the window sill and she opens the green one.
“Winnie, that stinks, do you have to do that now?”
I think she’s going to put it on anyway, ignore me, but she twists the polish closed, really fast, slams it back on the window ledge. “What would you have done tonight, if Jean had found you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Twenty minutes, Rhea. That’s all we had before she was supposed to call 911. You were down there more than half an hour.”
I rip the laces from my left Converse, kick it off. “It wasn’t half an hour—”
“Jean was about to dial—she had the phone in her hand, and something told me just to double check, to take a look down there.”
“I was on my way up.”
She has her back to me, is halfway through unzipping her dress. “Did you even think how worried we might be? How worried I was? I thought she’d drowned or something—”
“I’d only just found her, Winnie, I swear—”
She spins back to look at me and her dress is half down, so I can see her slip. “Don’t lie to me!”
“I’m not lying!”
“I saw your drawings—that one of your mother. You don’t draw something like that in a few minutes.”
“Winnie—”
“You’re so self-centred, Rhea. You probably got lost in that drawing, didn’t even think about me or anyone else.”
I’ve never seen her like this, her face so red, her eyes. I stand up.
“Winnie, come on, that’s not true.”
“Oh yes, it is. The only person you ever consider, ever think about, is yourself.” She’s nodding. “Except for your mother, of course, but it might do you good to spend more time thinking about people who are living, instead of the ones who are already dead.”
I hate her then, Mum, her face all red and mean looking, her bony shoulders and her stupid lacy slip and her smelly feet, and I wish I’d never shown her your photo, that she didn’t know the picture was of you.
“Fuck you, Winnie!” I thrash my hand around and it knocks my bedside lamp off my locker and onto the floor. “Don’t blame me just because you feel guilty! Don’t blame me for Robin going missing! Don’t blame me because you were probably so obsessed about getting to call Melissa that you forgot to count!”
I’m yelling and I want her to yell back, Mum, that’s the whole point. Ever since we got here, ever since we left Hell’s Kitchen, it’s been weird and tense and horrible, and I want to just shout and shout until it goes away.
But she doesn’t yell, she just pulls her dress back up and walks past me really slowly, out of the room and down the stairs, even though she’s got no shoes on.
And she’s still not back, Mum. And I don’t know where she is and I keep listening, so I can turn out the light and pretend to be asleep, but the house is quiet and the only sound is the sea outside.
It’s not fair. I didn’t do anything. Since we came here, I can’t do anything right—it’s like she hates me. And I bet she wishes she hadn’t asked Jean if I could come here.
I bet she wishes I never came at all.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
It came today, the letter. Actually, it came yesterday but David forgot to give it to me then so he gave it to me this morning, when I was sweeping the floor after breakfast, and I kept it in the side pocket of my shorts all day until tonight.
There’s two envelopes, the outside one with Chrissie’s writing in red sharpie and the inside with Aunt Ruth’s. When I open the second envelope, money falls out, five $100 bills, so flat and crisp they’re stuck together, so, at first, I think there are only three of them. Picking the money up off the floor, my brain remembers another time, one time or loads of times—American money falling out of birthday cards onto the hall carpet in Rush, picking up the notes from the hall carpet with the wine and pink swirls.
And it’s really weird then, especially when I read it, to think those cards and this letter all came from Aunt Ruth, because reading this letter, she sounds like a different Aunt Ruth and not the same person at all.
R
June 21, 1999
Dear Rhea,
Thank you for writing to me and letting me know that you are safe. That’s the most important thing. I’ve been very worried about you, I know you know that. Even before the sighting at the bus station, I knew that you would have gone to New York. I just knew.
It was terrible being there, seeing for myself how many kids there are on the streets. It’s such a big city, I thought I’d never find you and I started to wonder if I was wrong, if you’d gone somewhere else. So when I got your letter, I was so happy just to know that you are safe and that you have friends and somewhere to live.
I’d love to see you or talk with you on the phone but you set a boundary in your letter and I want to respect that. If you change your mind and you want to reach out, please call me anytime—you can call collect, even in the middle of the night. It’s okay if you don’t know what to say or if you only have a few minutes to talk—it would mean a lot to me to hear your voice.
You asked about Columbia and I have good news! You were accepted—isn’t that wonderful? I knew you would be, with your grades and all the effort you put into the application. Your mom and dad would both be so proud. I know I am. I’ve enclosed all the information they sent—I hope you don’t mind that I opened it, but I knew we would need to respond and I did, I accepted on your behalf. You might be mad to hear that, you might not even want to go anymore, but I wanted you to be able to. I know how much you wanted it. You might think it’s too late now, Rhea, but it’s not. I spoke to the school, and with your GPA you only need to do a couple of extra credits to graduate. Of course school is out now, but I spoke to the principal and we came to an arrangement and they are happy to facilitate everything so you can graduate and go to Columbia in August. It would need to happen fast, but if you still want to, we can make it work.
I know we need to talk about what happened but it’s hard in a letter. I want you to know that I know what happened with Laurie wasn’t only your fault and that it wasn’t fair that she blamed it all on you. I spoke to my therapist about it and she says it’s quite common for friendships with girls to get out of hand, that a lot of teenagers go through phases like that.
I’m sorry Cooper lashed out and hurt you. He was very angry and upset, and we both know what his temper can be like. I’m not making excuses about his behavior, but he was in real shock that night and I think his temper shocked him too. I’ve talked to him about family therapy, with Laurie and with you, if you come back. Laurie is seeing a therapist too and I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s helping.
I’m sorry too for the way things came out about your mom. I should have talked to you about her a long time ago, but I didn’t know what your dad had said and I guess I was just scared to bring it up. You don’t know how many times I went over the conversation in my head—I even practiced with my therapist. I know it probably doesn’t matter now, but I can’t help wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t been so scared, if I’d told you before.
What happened to your mom has been hard to cope with. I’m not going to lie to you, it’s been the hardest thing I’ve had to make peace with in my life. Some days, I still don’t think I have or that I ever will. Other days, with God’s help, I feel differently. I know you’re searching for answers right now and that’s natural, part of growing up. I’m sorry I didn’t talk about her more when you were here. I don’t know why I didn’t—in some ways you remind me so much of her and I think maybe that scared me. It never seemed like the right time to bring it up—I always thought we’d have more time—the perfect moment to talk about it and start to heal together.
My therapist says there are no perfect moments, and I know she’s right. She says there are only moments of vulnerability and courage and honesty and in each and every moment we need to choose, over and over, what kind of person we want to be.
I want to be a good aunt to you, Rhea. I want to be someone you can confide in and feel supported by. I want to be someone you can count on.
Please let me come and see you, please tell me where you are. I don’t care where it is, I’ll come anywhere.
I miss you so much since you’ve gone. I miss you as much as I missed your mom. You’ve lost a lot of people in your life, and so have I. We don’t have to lose each other too.
Love always,
Aunt Ruth xoxo
Dear Mum,
I’m so tired all the time. Every hour here, every minute, is packed with something, from the second the kids get up until they go to bed. And when I go to bed, even though I’m so tired, it’s fifty kinds of crazy that I can’t sleep.
It’s this shit with Winnie. We’re talking again, but we’re not talking properly and I hate that and I want it to stop but I don’t know what to do about it.
This morning, it’s five when I wake up and I lie there for a few minutes and then I get out of bed because with the heat and Winnie’s snoring I know I’m not going to sleep again. And at least I get to shower before anyone else and go down to the beach without worrying about breaking more of Jean’s stupid rules because it’s already bright.
I walk past the part of the beach where we always play with the kids, keep walking. The sea is calm this morning, it’s kind of pink, like the sky. I let the water wash around my feet and I’m glad then that I hadn’t bothered with my Docs or my Converse. It’s nice being able to feel each footstep, my heel and then my toes, heel again and toes again. The sand feels different from Rush, softer, kind of, but harder packed too. It’s nice not to have to watch out for the wormy bits.
After ages of walking, I turn back and the sky is even nicer this way—stripes of orange and yellow and light blue as well as pink. And that’s when I see Amanda, jogging towards me.
She waves a hand, starts to slow down. “Hey!”
“Hi. You don’t need to stop—I mean, keep going if you want.”
She stops anyway, wipes a curl from her face. “It’s a nice excuse to take a break—it’s so hot this morning.”
She hits something on her watch so it beeps, and she leans forward to hold her knees. When she stands up, her curls have fallen in front of her face again and she fixes them back behind her ears. “Out for a morning walk?”
“Yeah.”
“Best part of the day down here, before anyone else is up.” When she smiles, it goes all the way to her eyes. Her eyes are blue but not piercing blue, like Laurie’s, they’re a lighter blue, kind of washed-out looking.
“Yeah.”
We start walking then, slowly, in the same direction. I want to tell her that she can go on, but I’ve said that already. A line of seagulls are flying low over the water. I’m thinking about what she said to Jean about Marco and I’m trying to figure out how to bring it up without sounding like I cared about what he said. I want her to know that it hadn’t any effect on me at all.
“I love being able to run barefoot,” she goes. “It’s totally the best thing about being here.”
I look down and she wiggles her toes.
“Do you always run barefoot?”
“I’d never wear shoes if I could help it. I used to spend the summers with my grandma, down in South Carolina, when I was a kid. I’d kick my sandals off the first day I got there, wouldn’t put them back on again until Daddy came to take me home.”
That’s the sound I’ve heard in her voice, a bit of a Southern accent that didn’t make sense because I heard her telling David she was from Connecticut.
“Do you go running every morning?”
She pulls her curl back out of her face again. “I have been. I love it—the only thing that drives me crazy is the showers being such a clusterfuck by the time I get back, with all the kids.”
I laugh, I can’t help it. “Clusterfuck” is a Laurie word—it always made me laugh.
“What?”
I hear the smile in her voice and when I turn I see it, a smile and a tiny line of frown at the same time.
“That word—it’s just … it sounds funny.”
“Clusterfuck?”
She’s fiddling with her necklace, the one with her name that she always wears.
“Yeah, we don’t have that word in Ireland.”
“What would you say, then?”
A seagull is in front of us on the beach, stone still. It doesn’t move when we pass it, just stares at the sea. I try to remember what we would say in Ireland, I try to remember anything about Ireland, but it’s like there’s a big gap where all the memories should be.
“I don’t know—probably that it’s a mess or that it’s crowded or something.”
“Oh.”
She sounds disappointed, and so am I—that I couldn’t come up with something better, and suddenly, I think of a word. A Dad word. “Actually—some people might call it a schmozzle. We might say that.”
“Schrm-uzzle? Is that Jewish?”
I glance over at her. “No! There’s no Jewish people in Ireland.”
“Really?” Her face is scrunched up, like she doesn’t believe me.
“It’s a Dublin word. We say it about the traffic or hurling, maybe. You know: There’s a schmozzle on the pitch.”
“Hurling?” She dips her head and there’s no sound, only a tiny squeak, and I realise that she’s laughing, just like that day at the table with Jean. She catches her breath. “People hurl enough to have a word for it?”
It takes me a second to get it. “Not hurling, like hurl! Hurling, the sport.”
I swing my arm to show her, but she’s laughing again, doing that head dip thing and then I’m laughing too. I’m laughing at her laugh.
“Say it again,” she goes.
“Schmozzle.”
She repeats it but she says it wrong, like there’s an “r” in it. Every time she says it, I repeat it the right way, and by the time we get to the bend in the beach where we can see the house she has it right, and it’s kind of awkward then because there’s nothing to laugh at anymore.
“You should run on,” I go. “You don’t want to be late for breakfast.”
She checks her watch. “I guess, plus there’s the schmozzle to contend with.”
I smile. “That’s right. The clusterfuck.”
She makes the beeping sound with her watch again. “Okay, I’ll see you at breakfast. Enjoy your walk.”
She starts running then and even though it doesn’t look like she’s going that fast, in only a few seconds she has put a lot of distance between us. She stays close to the edge of the water where the sand is packed hard, and I can see when bits of it are flicked back into the air behind her, the splash when she lands too close to the water.
Watching her jog away like that, something weird happens, because for a second I feel really sad, like I miss her, even though we’re not even friends, even though I’ll see her in half an hour. And then I feel annoyed with her and annoyed at myself, for not saying anything about the Marco thing, but the truth is I didn’t think about it once the whole time we were talking.
It’s this Winnie shit that has me like this, Mum—feeling sad, missing people. Tonight, after dinner, I thought about saying something to her—not apologising or anything—but just talking to her totally normally, maybe even asking her if she wanted to see part of Aunt Ruth’s letter, so I could tell her about Columbia. But when I came upstairs she was getting ready to go out again, to go to another stupid AA meeting and even though she was asking about my day and everything I knew she didn’t really care, that she probably had to go and ring Melissa or something, so I just said my day had been fine and picked up my pad to write to you. And now she’s gone, Mum, and I feel like I felt on the beach, like I might cry or something, like maybe I’m lonely or something. And that’s fifty kinds of crazy because I never get lonely; I wasn’t lonely on the street, when I was on my own, and if I was going to get lonely, I’d have got lonely then.
You can’t feel lonely in a house full of people where you hardly get five minutes to yourself. It’s impossible to get lonely somewhere like this.
I know that, Mum. Everyone knows that.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
I hate Jean, you know that? I fucking hate her. She has it in for me—she’s had it in for me since I got here. It’s not my fault. Aunt Ruth would say I’m being paranoid, but ever since that first day, that first meeting, she hasn’t liked me.
It’s typical that she’d be the one who found us. I didn’t see her in the dark, almost walked right into her coming up the beach path. Robin’s really sleepy by then and she wants me to carry her again, but she’s heavy and my arm is sore from carrying her earlier. She’s only just started crying when we run into Jean, she’s only just told me that she’s scared of the dark.
It doesn’t help that I scream; it’s not that I’m scared, I get a shock, that’s all—the way she’s suddenly there, out of nowhere. It takes me a second to see who it is and once I know it’s her, I feel sick, like I might throw up right there on the sand. I think she’s going to interrogate me, start shouting, give me a lecture, but she doesn’t do any of those things, just scoops Robin into her arms and hurries up the path with her. I follow them, into the house, up the stairs. On Robin’s floor, Jean turns and tells me to go to bed and that we’ll talk later.
That’s all she says, but her eyes say more than that. All day, it’s hanging over me, this talk, and I don’t eat anything at breakfast or at lunch either. The first time in the whole day I’ve forgotten about it for a split second is when I’m on the deck with Zac and Amanda, and Zac is kidding around, imitating the way Erin looks at David and saying she totally has the hots for him.
Jean comes up from behind me and I see Zac’s face change before I hear her voice. “Zac, the wind is coming up, can you go and tidy up the cones on the beach and wrap up the volleyball net?”
He jumps down from where he’s sitting on the railing. “Sure, yeah. I’ll do it now.”
Amanda stands up too. “I’ll go help. Unless you have something else for me to do, Jean?”
It’s Amanda’s break time, so she totally just wants to hang out with Zac. Jean ignores her and turns to me. She has her Oakleys on so I can’t see her eyes and that makes it worse.
“Rhea, come upstairs with me, please.”
I’m supposed to be doing Arts and Crafts with Winnie in a few minutes, but I don’t say anything because I know she knows that too. And I bet she knows it’s my favourite part of the day, that’s what I’m thinking as I follow her up the stairs for the second time in twelve hours.
She stands by the door of her office, closes it after me. Even though there is no air conditioner it’s fresh in the room because of the cross wind from the open windows and the fan. There’s a desk with books and papers all over it, and the papers are flicking in the breeze.
“Sit down,” she says.
There’s three places to sit—a basket swing chair that hangs from its own frame in the corner, a long, low, battered black leather couch, and a brown corduroy chair opposite it. I’d love to sit in the basket chair, but instead I pick the couch. It’s one of those weird ones, with the back too far back to be properly comfortable so I have to lean forward. I’m dying to pee.
She takes the corduroy armchair, puts her Oakleys on the glass coffee table between us. Her eyes look bigger than ever and I look down at my Docs.
“So, you know what this is about.”
Behind her, there are shelves, packed tight with books but messy. They’re not in the right order, tall skinny ones towering over short thick ones. There’s even some lying flat on top of other books.
“What do you think you were doing, taking Robin down to the beach in the middle of the night?”
On top of the shelves, there’s a photo, a black and white one of a black woman. She’s wearing glasses and looking to the side, towards the edge of the photo frame. From her mouth, she’s blowing a line of smoke, only I can’t see a cigarette.
“Rhea—look at me. What the hell were you thinking? You know the rules. What would make you take Robin out of bed, in the middle of the night, and bring her to the beach?”
Jean leans forward in her chair, puts her elbows on her knees. Sitting like this, you can see she’s chubby, nearly fat. “This is a fireable offence, Rhea. If you don’t want that to happen, you’d better start telling me what’s going on.”
She has scars on her cheeks, faint but you can still see them, acne scars like David Flood back in Rush. They make her look young. I can’t tell what age she is but I can tell she’s getting madder by the way her jaw clenches. “Okay, have it your way. There’s a train at five. David can drive you to the station—it gets into Penn just after eight.” Her eyes hold my eyes. She said that on purpose, Penn Station, to make me picture it, those corridors, that night with Jay. She nods to herself, even though neither of us has said anything. “Okay then. I’ll go tell David.”
She stands up, heads towards the door. It’s only when she has her back to me that I say anything.
“I couldn’t sleep, that’s all. I hadn’t planned on getting Robin, but I heard her crying from the landing.”
She turns around but she doesn’t sit down, stands behind her chair. “First of all, you’re not allowed on the beach by yourself after it gets dark. Second, you never, ever, take the kids anywhere on your own—anywhere—for any reason. Especially not at night, especially not the beach.”
She counts her points on her fingers and she’s on her third finger even though she’s only made two points.
“Did you read the handbook? It says clearly that no counsellor is to remove a child from the house without authorisation. Do you remember how much I talked about that?”
She waves her arm in the direction of the desk, where there must be a copy of the handbook, under all her mess. Every question makes the white part of her eyes even bigger. She’s firing me, she’s decided already, it doesn’t matter what I say.
“Do you know how many people drown on these beaches every summer, Rhea? Do you know how quickly it can happen?”
I don’t know if she’s expecting me to answer all her questions, but I don’t say anything. In my head, I’m planning what to take, packing my backpack. I’ll leave Winnie’s Converse behind, to show I don’t care, but I’m going to take the Walkman.
“Robin could have drowned, Rhea. Did you think about that? If you’d fallen asleep and she’d wandered into the sea. You can’t swim. You wouldn’t have been able to save her.”
She walks around the chair, sits down again. Over her shoulder, there’s a piece of bare wall, just the right size for your subway map, and I look at that instead of at her. I can picture the lines, don’t need the paper they are printed on, can remember all the stops, the layout. I start with the A, at Inwood, 207th Street, and I’m at 59th Street, Columbus Circle, when Jean stops talking. I see her looking at my fingers, and that’s when I notice they’re moving against my thigh, drawing a line along the ridge of my shorts. I stop. She sits back in her chair, pulls her feet up underneath her. When she talks next, her voice is softer. “Rhea, where did you go just then?”
I put my arm across my chest, my hand under my stump. “What do you mean?”
“What’s going on? Why were you up in the middle of the night?”
She’s looking at me, like her eyes can see everything inside my head.
“If you’re going to fire me, just get on with it. Just fucking fire me.”
She looks at me but she doesn’t say anything and I clench my toes inside my Docs. “Rhea, what are you scared of?”
It’s a stupid dumbass question and I laugh, sit back on the stupid low-backed couch and cross my leg, so my Doc is on my knee.
“You think it’s funny?”
“I’m not scared of you, if that’s what you think. I’m not scared of you firing me and being back on the streets. I’ll be okay, I was okay before.”
An image comes into my mind, before I can push it away. The night I was peeing opposite Michael’s apartment and that rat was there, the horrible rat that shuffled out from behind the bin and made me pee down my leg.
She keeps looking at me, like she can see the rat in my head too, like she can see Aunt Ruth’s letter in my back pocket, the paper getting hot and damp in between the denim. It’s like she knows, but she couldn’t know, she’s only pretending.
She threads her fingers through her toes. The soles of her feet are light underneath, like Robin’s feet. Last night, we measured our feet up against each other, heel to heel on the beach.
“I don’t want to fire you, Rhea, but the safety of every child depends on us all following the rules.” Her voice has changed again, into her preachy one from the meeting. “Robin was in danger last night.”
I slam my foot back down on the floor. “She was fine. I’d never let anything happen to her.”
“I see that you care about her, but you can’t make up your own rules. She’s been through a lot, she needs consistency to feel safe.”
Robin felt safe last night on the beach with me, I know she did. If I leave now, who’s she going to show her drawings to? Who’s going to make sure Marco or Isaac doesn’t take her muffin from her at breakfast, like they had on that first day?
“I’m sorry, Jean.” I say it low, don’t look at her. She’s watching me, waiting for more. She has all the power, she’s always had all the power. “I know what I did was stupid. If you let me stay, I won’t do it again. I swear.”
She stays really still, watching me; the only thing that moves is the paper, blowing from the fan.
“You say that, but they’re only words, Rhea. How do I know I can trust you?”
It’s not enough, my apology, whatever I say to her will never be enough. I can stand up now and never have to see her again, never have to try and sleep in that stuffy room that smells of Winnie’s feet. I feel my legs flexing, but then I think about Robin, can feel her leaning back into me, both of us looking up, counting the stars. I take a breath.
“I know I made a bad call. I won’t do it again. I find it hard to sleep sometimes and I was just getting up to have a banana muffin, I swear. And then when I heard her, I thought she might like some too. I planned to put her back in bed before I went down to the beach but she kept crying every time I tried to leave her. The only way she stopped was when I said she could come with me.”
“She was crying when I found you.”
“She’d only just started, I swear. She was fine up until then.”
There is a plant on the third shelf, with green tendrils that go down low and out of sight. It’s a fern, some kind of fern, but it reminds me of the spider plants Lisa’s mum used to have all over the house that would grow as far as the floor and grow little spider plants.
“So what would you do differently, if it happened again?”
She’s not going to send me home, maybe she’s not. If I say what she wants to hear, parrot the handbook, word for word, maybe she’ll let me stay.
“I’d check in to see if I could comfort her and get her back to sleep. If I couldn’t, I’d wake Erin. Or if for some reason Erin wasn’t there, I’d wake Gemma or you.”
“Okay,” she goes, nodding. “Okay.” She stands up, walks around behind her seat. I stand up too. “But this is your last chance, Rhea. One more thing like this and you’re out. Got it?”
“Yep. Definitely. Thank you, Jean.”
She’s in between me and the door. I look at the clock on the table, like I only just saw the time. “I should go and help Winnie with the end of Arts and Crafts. She’ll be wondering where I am.”
She steps out of the way and I walk past her. I think about saying sorry again, but that would be overkill. I have the door open onto the landing when she catches me. Her last sentence is like a line of tripwire. “You can tell Winnie you won’t be helping her with Arts and Crafts anymore, from tomorrow.”
When I turn around, she isn’t looking at me. Instead, she’s picked up a little jug and she’s watering the fern.
“Why not?”
She walks over to another plant I hadn’t seen, on the window ledge behind where I was sitting. She plucks off a leaf tinged with brown. “You can do the set-up and the clean-up, but in between you’re going to spend some time up here with me.”
Arts and Crafts is my favourite part of the whole day. She knows it is and this is how she’s going to punish me.
“What about Winnie? She can’t do it on her own.”
She laughs, pulls off another dead leaf. “Winnie’s been doing it on her own for years. She’ll be fine.”
I should have just said “okay, no problem” and walked out of there. I know I shouldn’t ask her why she wants to see me, what she wants to talk about, but I do anyway. “Why?”
“Because I want to get to know you better. I want to make sure I know what’s going on with you, so we can avoid anything else like this happening again.”
“I already told you—”
“Rhea, you told me before that you understood the rules, you even signed a contract saying that you’d abide by the rules here, remember? I’m going out on a limb for you here and I need to keep an eye on things. I need to know that you won’t let me down.”
I should have let her fire me. I’d be packed by now, David would be driving me to the train. Maybe I could have taken Robin with me.
“Do I have a choice?”
She waits a moment before she answers. “We always have choices, Rhea. You can see me in the afternoons and stay here, or you can go home.”
She says that on purpose, the word “home.” She knows as well as I do that I don’t have one. She might think she’s the queen of manipulation, that she has it all figured out, but I can play at that game too.
I smile a big smile. “Okay then, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I leave then and I run down the stairs and I don’t give her a chance to answer me or say anything. And over dinner and afterwards, it’s like I’m there and I’m not there, because some part of me is going over it all again, wondering if I did the right thing, as if I’m two people and one of me is already back in New York, switching subway lines, going one direction and then another, playing my game.
And when we’re sitting down for the movie and Amanda’s next to me, she makes a joke about “schmozzle” and she has to say it twice before I get it.
“Oh yeah,” I go, and then I laugh, but any dumbass can tell it’s a fake laugh.
“Is everything okay?”
When I turn around, she’s frowning.
I nod, clear my throat. “Yeah, everything’s fine. Why?”
She pulls her necklace back and forth. “I don’t know. I guess you just seemed miles away, is all.”
And right then, right when she says that, I wish I was.
R
Dear Mum,
There are loads of things I want to write to you about, but there’s hardly any time to write here. The big thing I want to tell you is that me and Winnie have made up. We didn’t make up in the way they do on television, with everyone sitting down and talking and listening to each other and hugging at the end, but I’d call it making up because we’re talking again. Normal talking, not fake.
It happened last night, when I came into the bedroom after putting the kids to bed and she’s there already, crying. I want to walk out, pretend I didn’t see her, but it’s too late because she looks around and sees me. She takes her glasses off, wipes her tears with her thumbs. I sit down on my bed, opposite her.
“Is everything okay?” I go.
It’s a dumbass question, I know it is, but I don’t know what else to say.
She nods her head. “It’s fine, I’m fine, everything’s fine.”
“Okay.” I smile but she can’t see me because her eyes are closed.
“It’s just that … Melissa’s due today, that’s all.”
She opens her eyes and starts to cry again. There’s tissues in a box on the window ledge and I hold them out for her and she takes one. I take a breath, ask her what I know I need to ask her. “Is everything okay with the baby?”
Winnie sniffs. “I don’t know. When I called, there was no answer and she hasn’t called back. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Inside my Docs, I unclench my toes, even though I don’t remember clenching them. “I’m sure she’s grand, Winnie. I’m sure it’ll all be grand.”
I have no idea if she’ll be grand or not, I don’t know anything about Melissa or about childbirth and I’m not clairvoyant, but hearing me say that seems to make Winnie feel better and she smiles at me, her first proper smile in ages.
She nods again. “Thanks, Rhea, I’m sure she will be too. It’s just very painful for me not to be able to be there, for her to be keeping me at arm’s length. I just want to be with my daughter, that’s all.”
As she’s talking, I take Aunt Ruth’s letter from my pocket, smooth the envelope out on the bed. I’m getting ready to show it to her, part of it. I want her to see the bit about Columbia.
“But you wouldn’t be able to anyway,” I go. “Even if she wanted you to, so maybe it’s just as well.”
Winnie blows her nose. “If my daughter wanted me there, Rhea, if she called me, I’d be there, no matter what.”
She keeps blowing for ages, doesn’t notice me fold the letter back up, put it into my pocket again. And after that, she stops crying and she’s asking me about my day and telling me she misses me in art class, but even though it sounds fine on the outside, inside it feels different and I’m all jangly, like I’m waiting for her to say something else. After we turn the lights out, I can’t sleep, and all I can think about is what I’m going to do if Winnie leaves. All night, I’m lying there, thinking about that, and sometimes I feel like I’m going to cry and sometimes I feel like I’m going to jump out of bed and shake her awake and shout at her and maybe even hit her and sometimes I feel nothing at all.
I must have fallen asleep because when I wake up at 5:07 it’s bright out already and I get dressed and go down onto the beach. The sea is different than the other morning—big rolls of wave instead of flat glassy water. The wind blows against the back of my head and my hair feels longer than I like it to feel and I wonder who’s going to shave it for me if Winnie leaves.
I’ve just turned back towards the house when I see her shape, Amanda’s shape, black against the sky behind, running towards me. Just because she stopped the other day doesn’t mean I expect her to stop today. Just because we’re both on the beach at the same time doesn’t mean we have to walk together. It’s not like I came down here to see her.
“Hey, Rhea!”
She beeps her watch, slows down, stops.
“You don’t have to stop every time. I don’t want to wreck your run.”
“Running in this wind is a bitch. It’s a nice excuse.”
She is more out of breath today than she was the other day.
“Just make sure you don’t hang on too long or you’ll get caught in the schmozzle.”
She smiles but she doesn’t laugh, and I wish I’d never made the stupid joke because everyone knows that a joke can never be the same twice. I wish she’d run off then. If she’s not going to laugh properly it’d be better if she just left me alone.
“Check out the kite surfers,” she goes, tapping me on the arm. “Aren’t they cool?”
I follow where she is pointing and I see the one with the purple parachute first, suspended between the sky and the wave below, before he disappears. My eyes adjust and there is another one too, a yellow one, and another one behind in black.
“Wow,” I go. “Have you ever done that?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I can’t even stand up on a long board for more than five seconds, despite Zac’s best teaching.” Bits of her curls are escaping in the wind and she holds them flat against her scalp. A wave comes close to my Docs and I walk around the other side of Amanda, to where the sand is dryer.
“How’s that going anyway—you and Zac?”
“What?”
“You know.” I raise my eyebrows. “Like, how’s it going?”
She laughs, but it’s not her squeaky one. “We’re not together—Zac’s not my boyfriend.”
Her arm bumps into my stump by accident and I move further away, to where the sand is deeper.
“I know it’s one of the rules, no couples. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything.”
She stops walking, puts her hands in her back pockets. Underneath her running top, I can see the tan marks from her togs.
“Rhea, we’re friends, is all.” She looks down at her feet, wiggles her toes. When she looks back up, her face is redder than when she stopped running. “Zac’s a nice guy, but he’s not my type.”
She’s lying, Mum, loads of the signs are there—the fake laugh, not looking at me, the way she blushes. I know she’s lying, that she doesn’t trust me to tell me about Zac, but I don’t know her well enough to say that.
“Okay.” I shrug. “Whatever you say.”
We both start to walk, but it’s awkward, nothing like the other day and I wish she’d just run on again. I think she’s getting ready to, but then she asks me a question. “How about you? Is there anyone you like here?”
I laugh. I can’t help it. “Who, me? Here? No. Definitely not.”
The sand slides under my Docs and I wish I hadn’t worn them but it would take too long to take them off.
“You’re … you’re … a lesbian, right?”
At first I think I’ve heard her wrong, but when I look at her, she’s looking at her feet again and I know I haven’t.
“Who told you that?”
My heart is fast in my chest. I know who told her—Winnie. It had to be Winnie.
“No one. I mean, I just thought … ” Her face is redder than red now, worse than before. “Oh, God. I’m sorry if I got it wrong.”
She covers her mouth with her hand and for a second I toy with pretending I’m all upset but instead I shake my head, smile.
“No, it’s okay. You’re right.”
“Thank God! I mean, I thought I’d really offended you then.”
“No, I guess it doesn’t take much to figure it out. Most people wouldn’t ask, that’s all. And it threw me when you asked if I liked anyone.”
“Why?” She kicks at a shell, misses.
“Well, maybe because I’m the only lesbian here?”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“Who else might be? Erin’s got the hots for David, we all know that, and Winnie or Gemma aren’t. Jean could be, I suppose, but if she is, believe me, I don’t want to know.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think Jean’s gay.”
“Well, there you go then. So I’m the only one.”
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.
“Thanks, Erin, you can tell her we’re almost done.”
I want Erin to wait, but she’s already disappearing out the door, down the stairs. She’s left it open though, so Jean can’t plan on saying much more, not when any of the kids could pass by any moment, not when I can hear Zac and Matt talking to each other on the landing.
I stand up from the couch. “Can I go?”
Jean nods, picks up both of our glasses, and wipes the ring marks with her hand so it makes it messier than before. I walk past her, don’t wait for an answer.
“It sounds idyllic,” she says to my back. “Growing up in a seaside village in Ireland.”
“I didn’t say it was idyllic, I said it was normal.”
“Normal,” she says, throwing the empty cups in the bin. “I get it. Dads out working, stay-at-home moms, 2.5 children?”
“Yeah,” I nod, “something like that.”
She nods too. “How many kids in your class at school?”
Behind me, I can hear Zac and Matt’s voices getting louder as they come near the top of the stairs.
“I don’t know—twenty-five? Thirty?”
“Thirty?”
“About that.”
Zac and Matt are right outside the door. Zac’s saying something about David and I want to hear what it is, but they’re already going down the stairs.
“So, out of the thirty kids, how many had lost their mom?”
I should have been prepared for that, Mum, I should have known where she was going. Linda Dunne’s father died in fourth class, he fell off a roof, but everyone had a mum.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“It was years ago. I can’t remember.”
“Was it a special school, for kids with disabilities?”
“No! I told you, it was just a normal school—no one had any disabilities.”
She puts her hands in her shorts pockets. “Except for you?”
I cup my stump, I can’t help it. “I could do everything anyone else in my class could do.”
She nods, so her earring bounces. “Were any of them gay?”
Her questions are coming too fast. She’s a bitch, tricking me like this, right when it’s supposed to be over.
“I thought we were finished.”
“Did you know anyone in your town who was gay?”
Billy Tyrell. The name comes into my mind first and then I remember his face—smooth skin, like a little boy’s face. His hair, wispy, soft looking, like a baby’s. Dad’s voice is in my head—I wish that faggot would buy his meat from Byrne’s instead of always coming in here.
“No,” I go. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Jean walks over to the fan, shuts it off. You can hear the kids’ voices downstairs clearer now, the sound of the house being filled up, plates being laid on the wooden table. She picks up the photo of the black woman from the shelf and starts to clean the dirt from the frame with the fingernail of her little finger.
“In a town that was so normal, it must have been hard for you, Rhea, being different.”
I don’t answer her, Mum, I don’t have to. She already said it was over, so I walk out, onto the landing, take the stairs two at a time, all the way down to the rec room where Winnie’s cleaning up the brushes and paint trays. She’s chatting a mile a minute about the paintings they all did that are drying on the table and how it’s so amazing to see them having fun and I’m listening … I’m trying to listen, but the whole time it’s like Jean’s voice is still there, underneath everything and I can’t make it go away.
And it still won’t go away, all those stupid things she said about being a little girl and being different and all that shit about food—all night they’ve been in my head. And that’s why I’m sitting up now, Mum, writing it down, telling you. And I know it’s fifty kinds of crazy but part of me thinks that if I tell you, then you’ll remember the things she said and I won’t have to.
I can just forget.
Rhea
June 26, 1999
Dear Rhea,
I hope you are doing well. I know I only sent my letter a few days ago, for all I know you may not have received it yet. I’m like a teenager on Valentine’s Day, checking the mailbox as soon as I get in from work. I know you’re probably busy but if you get a chance, drop me a line, or call me. I think I said in the last letter that you can call collect, but I wanted to make sure you had my cell phone number too, in case you were worried Cooper or Laurie might answer. It’s 407-555-0183 and you know you can call anytime—anytime at all.
I keep thinking about all the times you asked me about your mom and I feel so guilty I didn’t talk to you about her more. I don’t know why I didn’t—I guess I was trying to avoid my own pain and that wasn’t fair to you. I see that now. Now that you’re not here, I keep thinking of all these things I want to tell you, stories about us growing up. Some of the stories would make you laugh, Rhea, I know they would.
You’re very like her, you know that? She was smart too, your mom. She was my big sister and she knew everything—there was nothing I could learn that she didn’t already know. I was two grades behind her at Brearley and all the teachers expected me to be a straight A student like her. I tried really hard but I always got Bs, sometimes a B+. It didn’t seem fair at all because she spent hardly any time on schoolwork. I don’t know how, but she seemed to just know things. The only thing I was ever better at was piano, and I think she could have been better at that too if she’d had the patience for it. That was your mom all over—if she wasn’t good at something straightaway, she’d give it up and move on to the next thing, something she could do better, that came easier.
At home, she was the one who always explained to me what was going on, she comforted me when our parents were fighting. I must have been about six and she must have been eight or so when she told me that Mommy was seeing an analyst. She said it just like that, “Mommy’s seeing an analyst”—so matter of fact! She told me that was the real reason Wendy, our maid, was picking us up from school and so forth. I don’t know how she knew that—maybe she overheard our parents talking—but I remember asking what an analyst was and she called me a baby for not knowing. Looking back, I bet she didn’t know either—that was the hardest thing for Allison, to admit there could be something that she didn’t know.
I don’t know why I’m telling you all this now, or if you’ll even read this letter, but it seems like it’s important. I know what it’s like to be kept in the dark about things, for people to keep secrets. At Daddy’s funeral, I found out a big secret about his life, that he had a brother he’d never told us about. There were so many people there—his colleagues and clients and lots of people my mom and I didn’t know. So when one of the men came up and started talking to me, I assumed he was one of those people. When he told me he was my Uncle Jacob, from California, I didn’t believe him. Daddy always told us he was an only child, and, anyway, this man had an accent and Daddy never had an accent. He told me all this stuff that sounded crazy, that they grew up on Stanton Street on the Lower East Side and that their real name was David, not Davis, and that Daddy changed it after the war, when he changed Jeremiah to Jerry.
It wasn’t until ages later, months after the funeral, that I started to remember things—like the time Daddy freaked out when me and my boyfriend got an apartment in the Lower East Side after we graduated college, when he said he’d pay for me to live anywhere else in the city. And then I remembered the lady who came to stay when I was very little, who wore black and had an accent and I was scared of her. It was your mom who figured it out—that she was our other grandmother and that there was no need to be scared at all.
I looked him up—Uncle Jacob—when I was in Sacramento at a conference, and he drove up from San Francisco so we could meet for lunch. He had a photograph of him and Daddy and their mother. It was black and white, could have been anyone I suppose, but by then he’d told me enough that I believed him. He told me more about their family than Daddy ever did, about their father who’d died in Russia before they came to New York and their baby sister who died a few months after they got here. He teared up when he told me that story, about their mother sending Daddy out to get the doctor, but the doctor wouldn’t come because they didn’t have enough money, and how Daddy went up and down every street looking for someone to help him, someone to come, but no one would. He dabbed his eyes with his napkin and said a lot of children died back then, so many children, and people didn’t talk about it the way they do now. He told me her name was Ruth, the baby who died.
I’m telling you all this so you know more about your history, to show you that I understand what it’s like to find out things like that, to find out people you love have lied to you.
Have you thought about what I said about school? I’m not sure how late they keep the places open for the fall, but if you still want to go, call me and we can start doing whatever needs to be done. Maybe there’s even a private school in New York where you can make up the credits? Whatever it takes, I’ll help you do what needs to be done.
I wanted you to know I’ve been thinking about that conversation we had on your last night. It’s all I can think about at the moment and I’m working through it all in therapy too. It’s really hard to try and figure it all out—what’s fair, what you need to know, when I’m being overprotective. I have these letters that your mom sent me over the years, and I’ve been thinking about sending them to you because they might help you understand a bit more, get to know her in a way. But it seems like such a lot to lay on you, on top of everything else. My therapist said that you’re an adult and that I need to be honest with you and let you make decisions for yourself. I know she’s right. I know it’s your life and that I can’t live it for you, that I can’t always protect you from the truth.
So if you’d like me to send you the letters from your mom, call me or write to me and I’ll send them to you. I’ll send you everything I have from her. I’ll do whatever you want, whatever will help. Just let me know what it is.
I love you.
Aunt Ruth xox
Dear Mum,
I had my night planned out tonight, instead of waiting to see if Winnie would be around, because I’m getting the picture—she’d rather go to one of her AA meetings than be with me. I’d picked out my spot on the deck—the chair with the nice cushion, near the outside lamp—where I want to sit down and write to you, but when I come around the corner, Amanda’s already there and she’s writing too. I want to walk away, back quietly around the corner, but the deck creaks and she looks up.
“Hey,” she goes.
“Hey. You look like you’re busy.”
She looks down at the notebook in her lap, closes it over. “Not really.”
“You’re a writer?”
She wrinkles her nose. “No. It’s just a diary, that’s all.”
It’s not too late to turn around, to find somewhere else. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“I haven’t seen you on the beach all week.”
“I’ve been sleeping better, getting up too late.”
“I wanted to talk to you. Do you have a few minutes now?”
I could still go, say no, that I have to do something, I know I could but I hear myself saying “okay” instead. She clears her sweatshirt from the chair next to her, but I don’t sit there, instead I pull myself up on the railing, tuck my feet under the middle bar for balance. There’s two moths flying close to the lamp, bouncing off the glass.
“What did you want to talk about?”
I know she’s going to tell me the truth about her and Zac.
“Sorry if I acted weird, you know, on the beach the other day?” The lamp lights up half her face, glints off her necklace. “Remember, when you brought up me and Zac?”
I nod.
“And remember I told you that he wasn’t my type?”
“I remember.”
She swings her necklace back and forth. “So when I said he wasn’t my type, I meant something else.”
I knew it. I raise my eyebrows. “That he actually is your type?”
“No.” She shakes her head. From the road somewhere behind the trees, a trail of car light catches the edges of her hair, the frizz of curls that have escaped and frame her face. “I can see why you’d think that, but, no, he’s really not.”
Something about her voice makes me believe her. “What then?”
She looks over her shoulder, as if someone might appear from around the corner, then down at her feet. “He’s not my type because guys aren’t my type.”
I shift on the railing. “What?”
When she looks at me, she looks like she might cry. “I don’t like guys, Rhea. I think I’m a lesbian.”
That’s when I laugh, Mum. I laugh so hard I dislodge my foot and have to grab the railing to stop myself from falling off.
“What’s so funny? What are you laughing at?”
I steady myself, take a breath, start to say something, but I laugh again. I don’t know if I can explain to her what Tierney had said, how funny it is, how clichéd.
I shake my head. “You’re not a lesbian, Amanda.”
“What?”
I smile as I explain. “I know you probably think you are or you’re curious about it or something. Maybe you’re bored or you want some experience to tell your friends about back at school after the summer, I don’t know … ”
Amanda’s looking at me, I can’t read her expression. I wish I had Tierney’s phone number and I’m thinking that Winnie might. I want to tell her about tonight, I want to tell her so she’ll be proud of me for spotting it early this time.
“ … and I’m flattered but I’m not interested, Amanda. Been there, done that, got the tattoo.”
There’s silence then for a second, the music from the movie downstairs, the beat of the sea.
Amanda tilts her head to one side. “You think I’m coming onto you?”
I put my hand in the pocket of my shorts, to feel Aunt Ruth’s letters, to make sure they are there. “I don’t know—”
“You do think that, don’t you?” Amanda’s standing up. “Get over yourself, Rhea.”
I tuck my Docs tighter under the bar. She’s bending down, gathering up her notepad, her sweatshirt. When she turns around, her face is totally out of the light, but I don’t need to see her anger to know it’s there.
“I thought of all people, you were someone I could talk to about this. I thought you were someone who would understand!”
She’s convincing, I’ll give her that, but Laurie was convincing too.
“Come on, there’s no need for all the dramatics, I’m only saying—”
“Only saying what? That after less than a month you know me better than I know myself? That you know everything there is to know about being gay? Fuck you, Rhea!”
I hadn’t pegged her for that type, Mum, the type to curse and storm off, but that’s exactly what she does. When she’s with anyone else, she’s always laughing, smiling, even Winnie said she was easygoing, but she’s not tonight. Tonight, she stomps off around the corner and I listen to her footsteps, heavy on the deck, the horrible squeak the screen door makes as it opens and then slams shut.
Jean’s been on at David to put WD40 on that door but he hasn’t. He said he asked Matt to do it but Matt said he must have asked Zac but either way no one has done it. And I think about doing it then, Mum, getting the WD40 from the shed in the back and putting it on so I can surprise David in the morning when he comes in early to bake, but then I remember it was Jean who wanted it in the beginning, that she’ll be happy too, so I decide to leave it.
And instead I take the chair where Amanda was sitting, the one I’d planned to sit in, and I take out my paper and write this letter to you, the thing I’d wanted to do all along.
Rhea
Dear Mum,
I didn’t hear anything in the night. I don’t know how I didn’t, but I only woke up when Winnie was zipping her bag. She’s dressed. The room is still dark and it’s hot. Always, this room is hot.
I sit up in bed. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
“Sorry I woke you,” Winnie says. “I was trying to be quiet. I thought you were going to wake up earlier, when Jean came in with the phone, but you were out cold.”
I am awake now, properly awake. The clock says 4:23 a.m. Winnie’s bag is packed, I see that now. Jean was here with a phone. Phone calls in the night don’t mean good things, nothing in the night ever means good things.
“What’s wrong?” I go.
Winnie sits down on my bed, she’s smiling. “Melissa had a baby! A boy!”
That’s not what I was expecting her to say.
“She had a boy?”
“They’re going to call him Darryl. She wants me to come and see him.”
With each sentence her smile gets wider.
“Darryl?”
There was a film with a boy who was a robot called Darryl, but I don’t say this to Winnie. She grabs my hand, holds it. “Isn’t it the cutest name?”
She has her makeup on and her perfume.
“So, you’re going? Leaving? Now?”
She squeezes my hand tighter, too hard, so my fingers are squashed too tightly together. “I can’t believe it, that she wants me there. It’s what I’d hoped for, prayed for, but I knew it had to be her decision.”
“How are you going to get there in the middle of the night?”
She stands up, lets go of my hand and in the hot room it somehow feels cold.
“I hope I have everything,” she goes. “I hope I remembered everything.”
“What time is the train?”
She’s going through the drawer of her bedside locker, pulling out tissues, a book.
“I’m not getting the train. There’s a boat from Montauk to Block Island and from there I can get another boat to Connecticut. David’s driving me and Dan’s picking me up at the other end. Melissa’s husband. I’ve never met him, Rhea. Can you believe that?”
She turns around and her eyes look different behind her glasses, bigger or something, or brighter, her whole face looks brighter, her skin. This must be what happiness looks like.
“But what about … here?” I nearly say “What about me?” but I stop myself just in time and she doesn’t notice because she has her back to me again, unzipping her bag to stuff something inside, zipping it up again.
“Jean said not to worry about anything. She knows how big a deal this is for me.”
“But what about Arts and Crafts?”
My voice sounds panicky and Winnie hears it too. She sits down on my bed again, puts her hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t worry, you’re not going to be thrown in the deep end to do it on your own. Jean’s been talking to some lady in East Hampton, an art teacher. I think she wanted to line her up, just in case.”
“Just in case?” So everyone knew this was coming, everyone except me. Winnie’s hand kneads my shoulder.
“And I know it might be strange with me gone for a bit, but I’ll be back soon. I know you have other friends here now—Amanda and Erin, not to mention all the time you’re spending with Jean.”
I flinch away from her, because she doesn’t have a clue and I don’t know how I ever thought she did. But just as I do, David is there, knocking on the door, and I don’t think she notices because she kisses me on the cheek, holds my other one with her hand.
“Don’t worry about a thing, Rhea. You’ll be fine, you’re doing fine. And I’ll see you real soon.”
And then she lets go of me and picks up her bag and when the door closes, it’s only me in the hot room.
The clock says 4:47 a.m. now, twenty-four minutes after I woke up, and I wonder if I hadn’t woken, would she have left without saying goodbye? And twenty-four minutes wasn’t enough time to tell her about Columbia or what Aunt Ruth had said about your letters or what had happened with Amanda. It wasn’t even enough time to ask what “real soon” meant.
And it seems like I’m making the same mistake, over and over, always thinking there’ll be another time, a better time, enough time. But there’s not, Mum, is there? No matter how long you have, it seems like you always want more, that there’s never going to be enough.
R