How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? (16 page)

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 mysel
f
?”

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.”