Y: A Novel

by Marjorie Celona

  I watch him disappear up Johnson Street and shove the flyer in my pocket. I guess I could go to the party. Why not? My heart pounds at the thought of not going home.

  I still have ten bucks so I walk up to McDonald’s and get a chicken sandwich and fries and swivel around on a plastic seat under the big chandeliers. It’s six o’clock. What am I supposed to do for four hours?

  At seven, the manager asks me to leave, so I walk up Douglas and talk to some lady at the bus stop with a huge backpack and a couple of dogs. She has chin-length black hair and a nose ring and says she’s going to the mainland tomorrow.

  “You been off the island before?” she says.

  I shake my head. She is almost crazed to hear this.

  “No, no, no,” she says. “You can’t become one of those people who never leave. Don’t do that.”

  I laugh. “Okay, okay.” I like her already.

  “Your folks ever take you on a holiday?”

  “My folks are dead.”

  “Oh,” she says. She pats one of her dogs, this big slobbery-looking thing, and then looks at me like she doesn’t have anything left to say.

  It’s getting cold and my desire to go to the party is waning. I kind of just want to hang out with Winkie and then get in my bed.

  When the bus comes, I finger the change in my pocket and instead tell the same sob story as last time, but the bus driver looks at me cold and hard and then asks me in a loud voice to get off his bus.

  The lady with the dogs looks at me and smiles. “You need to work on your act,” she says. “You gotta act like this is the first time anything like this has happened to you, like you just can’t believe you don’t have enough for a lift home.”

  When I get back to the town house, I open the front door as quietly as possible and stand at the bottom of the stairs, holding my breath. I can hear Miranda and Lydia-Rose talking in the kitchen. I close my eyes and strain to listen.

  “Is she?” Miranda is saying.

  “What?”

  “Is she using drugs?”

  “I don’t know.” Lydia-Rose sounds annoyed. “Probably. What do you expect? You’re too easy on her.”

  I hear Miranda curse, something she never does. “Are you on my side or not right now?” she says.

  “I wish it was just us.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Miranda says. “Don’t start that.”

  I hear one of them rattling around in the cupboards, then the sound of Miranda going upstairs. “Twenty more minutes. Then I’m calling the police.”

  “I’m making something to eat. You want to eat?” Lydia-Rose calls out, but Miranda doesn’t answer.

  I wait a few minutes, then open and close the front door again and walk up the stairs. Lydia-Rose is sitting at the kitchen table, pale-faced, scribbling in her diary.

  “Mom was going to file a police report,” she says without looking at me. “I talked her out of it.”

  I put the shoe box on the table. “Thanks.” I crouch and pat Winkie, let her lick the salt off my fingertips from the McDonald’s fries.

  “Where were you?” she says.

  “Nowhere.”

  “You better go talk to her.”

  The hallway is black except for a small stream of light filtering in from the kitchen. Miranda stands at the top of the stairs, backlit by her bedroom light. I stop on the landing and lean into the newel post.

  Lydia-Rose stands behind me, and we look up at Miranda. Here I am: dorky blond thing with wild white hair, bum-eyed Smurf. Miranda stares down at Lydia-Rose, her nearly six-foot-tall daughter, this striking young woman, and me.

  “I don’t know who you are tonight,” Miranda says to me.

  I shrug. I tell her I got wrapped up in looking at CDs at the record store. I tell her I got upset after my appointment with Leo and needed to walk around. I tell her about the crab fisherman but not about the guy with the flyer. “I can’t believe I lost track of the time,” I tell her. I look at Lydia-Rose, and she rolls her eyes.

  Miranda stares at me. “It’s me or nothing, Shannon,” she says. “I’m all you’ve got.”

  When I don’t respond, she goes back into her bedroom, leaving me in darkness. I grope for the banister and slide my feet down each stair. If Lydia-Rose were in a better mood, she’d joke with me that I need night-vision goggles. But tonight all she has to offer is a cold, dead stare. She looks at me like she hates the very core of my being.

  “Not much of an apology,” she says.

  We walk into the kitchen, and I watch her take a salad bowl out of the cupboard. Two globs of olive oil, one blip of balsamic vinegar. Pinch of salt. Grated lemon peel. She works in silence, in the light of a streetlamp streaming through the window. The sound of Miranda’s radio travels down through the floor vents, and then the gurgle of her turning on the shower.

  Later, we sit in silence, eyes glued to the flickering TV screen in the blackness of the living room. We sit on opposite sides of the couch, Lydia-Rose underneath her zebra-skin bedspread, and I wait for her to stop being so mad.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to the television, to the couch, to my empty bowl of salad, to my sock with a hole in the toe, to sleeping Winkie.

  Finally, Lydia-Rose looks at me. “Hey, it’s all right,” she says. “It’s all right.”

  And so I climb underneath the bedspread with her, Sock Voodoo at our feet, pins sticking out of its head. After a while Lydia-Rose complains she’s too warm and opens the window. She falls asleep before I do.

  The curtains stretch out in the wind like thin white arms. So often we fall asleep together this way, in front of the TV in the living room, her head on my shoulder.

  But after an hour I jolt awake, my neck throbbing with pain. Somehow, during my long and unfulfilling day, I’ve pulled a muscle. I ransack the bathroom for Lydia-Rose’s old Tylenol with codeine, leftover from when she had her wisdom teeth removed. I take a heating pad and two tea towels, wrap them around my neck, and fasten them with packing tape. I look like I’m about to be shipped somewhere.

  While Lydia-Rose sleeps, I tiptoe into the kitchen and search her diary for something about my disappearance tonight. I hate myself for still being in love with Jeremy, tonight’s entry reads. I thought I could have a few drinks, that it wouldn’t be . . . And then there’s a list of all the things she wants to achieve before she turns twenty. Start a magazine. Travel Europe by train. Lose fifteen pounds.

  There’s nothing about me. Not a word. The absence of anything—the indifference—hits me harder than I want it to.

  In the back of her diary she writes terrible poetry, and the latest one is about her breasts. I sneak into the bedroom to tear one of the pages out—I might need to blackmail her someday, for instance—when I feel Miranda’s eyes on me. Even through the codeine haze, I feel her bristle with anger.

  She is holding her wallet so that it gapes open, empty of cash. It’s after midnight, and her eyes are tired. She looks at me, the towels around my neck, then down at the diary. In an instant she knows what it is and what I’m doing. I feel the patience drain right out of her.

  “Do I need to buy a bigger house?” she says, and points to the diary. “You can’t respectfully share a room?”

  I close the diary and push it toward her, my cheeks hot with shame. “Please don’t tell her.”

  “What do you want?” she says, gesturing to the diary, the empty wallet, the diary, the wallet.

  My heart swells with guilt and I stab my fingernails into my palms.

  She waves the wallet at me. Where are you? Where are you right now? “You’re acting like a criminal, Shannon. Skulking around. You won’t even meet my eyes.”

  I try to pay attention to what she’s saying, but I don’t want her to hurt me.

  “When you steal,” she says, “when you invade our privacy, it makes me feel like I’m at risk. I can’t,” she says, “I won’t be made to feel at risk in my own home.”

  I stare into my pink bedspread, examine the little
threads, the places where the dye is fading, and then the little hairs on my arm, bright white, my little chubby hands. In the time it takes my eyes to travel the length of my arm, I’ve removed myself from her words completely.

  Somewhere, in the distance, I can hear firecrackers. Miranda hears them, too, and pauses her lecture for a second. Kah-boom, bang, boom. “Why tonight?” she asks. “What’s going on that we don’t know about?” Her arms hang limp at her sides.

  “I’m worried,” she starts to say, though now that I’ve started to dissociate, her voice is rising above me, thinning out into the atmosphere, “that you spend too much time alone.”

  I hear Lydia-Rose wake and go into the bathroom, then the sound of her rummaging for something.

  “Shannon,” Miranda says. “I can’t talk to you if you won’t look at me.”

  I stare at my fingernails and wring my hands. “I’ll pay you back.”

  “When you love someone . . .” she says. I watch her move closer to me, her exhausted face exaggerated in the dim light, and wait for the rest of the sentence.

  I lift my heavy head, the tea towels threatening to come loose, the heating pad about to slip out of place, and slide Lydia-Rose’s diary into the toe of her slipper.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Miranda, but her anger has shifted to a more unreachable place; it has moved past me, onto other disappointments in her life, to Dell.

  “Go live somewhere else if you don’t like it here,” Miranda says and spins around, headed upstairs.

  VIII.

  harrison, please.”

  Two days before Yula gives birth to me, she watches as Harrison sits at Quinn’s kitchen table, rolls a ten-dollar bill into a tube, and carves out a little line of cocaine with one of Quinn’s credit cards. It’s the first time he has done this in front of her, though she’s suspected for months. She stands in his old coveralls and rubs her belly as she watches him. It isn’t enough to get him addicted, he says to her, it never is.

  “Where were you last night?” she says, but he does not answer.

  He drops his head when the cocaine hits his bloodstream, and she thinks about how the last time he made love to her he couldn’t come. He had punched the mattress and she had been frightened, for the first time, that she could no longer please him.

  “You’ve got work in an hour,” she says and goes back to loading the dishwasher. They’re in the big house, Quinn asleep in the back bedroom. It is the last week of August, and the air inside the house is still and hot. She looks out the window to the cabin, where Eugene is taking a nap. She hopes he won’t wake soon and need something from her.

  Quinn has dark blue Fiestaware, giant clay-like mugs and saucers, plates the size of pizza platters. Yula crowds the dishwasher, balances cut crystal on top of eggcups, but none of it ever breaks. She bangs the coffeepot into the porcelain sink and whaps the milk saucer against the steel faucet. “Come on. Fuck. Get ready.”

  “Can you make me some toast first?” my father asks. He licks what’s left of the line off the table and picks at a scab on the inside of his arm until it bleeds. “With peanut butter. I like peanut butter.”

  He holds his arm to his body like a broken-winged bird and gropes in Quinn’s cupboards. He kisses her face, his mood suddenly jubilant, and farts.

  “Well, hello there!” he says and waves his hand back and forth behind his butt. “Chocolate chips. With chocolate chips.”

  She makes him peanut butter toast with chocolate chips on top, then peers in at Quinn, lying in the back bedroom with his arms over his face.

  “Can I take the car?” she whispers when she sees he’s awake.

  Quinn’s voice is thin and tired. He mumbles feebly. It is good enough to be a yes. Yula walks back into the kitchen, takes out a frozen lasagna for him, and sticks it in the oven. She sets the table as though she were throwing dice, and the plate, knife, and fork bounce and clang their way perfectly into place: another high score.

  “We leave in five minutes,” she says to Harrison, dropping the keys to the Meteor on the kitchen table. He puts a chocolate chip into his mouth, picks up a knife coated in peanut butter, and waves it in front of her face as though he were conducting a miniature orchestra.

  “Where to?” he says.

  “To work.”

  She walks back into Quinn’s room to change the sheets on his bed while Quinn paces groggily, waiting. She checks the roll of toilet paper, Windexes the bathroom mirror, pushes some dust off his bedside table with her hand, then wipes it on her pant leg. She spits into her hand and shines the doorknob. Her mother’s red satin jewelry box rests on the chest of drawers. She opens it, holds the Swiss Army Knife in her palm, feels the heavy, pleasant weight of it, and slips it into her pocket. It will be her knife now.

  The last time she went to the cemetery was last Christmas. Yula drove and Quinn sat in the front seat, holding a little bouquet of lavender. He had on a wool coat, a navy blue V-necked sweater, and freshly ironed pants. He looked dignified. Eugene and Harrison sat in the backseat, not speaking. Harrison wore a checked shirt, a tie, and a jean jacket; Yula wore a parka over her skirt.

  Quinn told Yula to stop at Safeway, and they all went in and milled around the produce aisle, sneaking grapes into their mouths, until Quinn found what he needed. A little tree, a gift card hanging off its branches, for $7.99.

  The cemetery was by the highway and looked like a miniature golf course. There were no headstones, only flat stone markers under a row of cherry trees. They found Jo’s grave and stood in a semicircle around it. Quinn pushed the tree into a little thing in the ground that was supposed to hold flowers.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long to visit you this time,” he said. Eugene moved away from them and began to study the graves, running his hands over the inscribed names, looking back at his mom and Harrison every now and again.

  Yula fished a pen out of her parka and handed it to Quinn, and the two of them signed the red-and-gold card attached to the tree.

  “Come and sign the card with me, Eugene,” she said. The wind felt cold and wet on her legs, and the damp of the grass had settled into the soles of her shoes. Her fingertips were bright red. She signed Eugene’s name, balancing the card on her knee, then showed it to her son. Harrison bent down and signed his name, his handwriting as shaky as a child’s.

  “Every car is filled with a family. Everyone’s going home for dinner,” Quinn said suddenly, looking out at the highway.

  “Yula, I love you.” Harrison stands in the doorway of Quinn’s back bedroom, his shirt around his waist now, his chest bare.

  Harrison and Quinn lock eyes. Quinn gets into bed and rolls over, his back to them. Yula and Harrison step into the hallway, and Harrison takes her arm. His eyes are suddenly full of anger. “I’m not the biggest fan of your father, Yula,” he whispers. “Of any of this.” He steps toward her. “I told you, I want us to move.”

  “I have to stay,” she says. She looks at Harrison’s body, and she looks at his hands. He is a beautiful, dangerous thing, and she puts her hand on his chest. “My father is sick.”

  It gets so cold here at night, even in August. Yula tucks Eugene into her and Harrison’s bed and turns off the space heater for fear of a fire. She tells her son she won’t be gone long. She’ll take Harrison to work and be back in less than forty-five minutes. She’ll climb into bed with Eugene and in the morning Harrison will be home, flour on his jeans and little bits of dough under his fingernails, with stories for both of them about the people he saw on the bus.

  It takes three tries to start Quinn’s old car, but she gets it going and down the road. She drives with one hand on the wheel, the other on her belly. Harrison sits with his legs on the dash and watches himself light a joint in the vanity mirror.

  “Me, too.” She holds out her hand and takes it from him. He pulls the Mexican blanket from the backseat and throws it over his lap. She drives down the narrow road slowly, overly worried about deer or Joel and Edwin gunning it up t
he hill. She waits for the pot to kick in so she can relax.

  “You’re not taking me to work,” Harrison says and takes the joint from her hand. “I quit. Look—I’m going to tell you the story, and you’re going to see that I did the right thing.”

  Yula feels her stomach lurch. “I’m sick of this shit,” she says. “I’m sick of looking after you.”

  “Shut up, shut up.” Harrison rolls down his window and puts out his head. “Drive to the water. Let’s talk for a while.” Yula obeys and pulls onto the highway: finally, the sky, the speed. Eugene will be okay, she tells herself, he’s sound asleep and she’ll be gone only a little over an hour. She’s left him alone before for short periods of time, careful to lock the cabin so that he can’t get out, surrounding him with his favorite stuffed animals, swaddling him in the goosedown duvet in case he gets cold.

  She drives all the way to Mile Zero, and by the time they get out of the car and walk down the long staircase to the beach, it’s almost dark. They sit on the biggest log they can find and look out to Port Angeles. The log is wet from the spray and soaks through my mother’s coveralls. Harrison gets that look in his eye, and she takes him in her arms and lets him talk.

  “When I was a teenager I used to suck off guys in the bathroom for drugs,” he says, and pretends he’s giving head. His lips are dry and cracked, and Yula runs her finger over them. He gets in these moods more and more frequently, needing to confess his past to her, needing to be babied. She tries to listen but her thoughts are with Eugene. She needs to get back.

  My mother picks up a big smooth rock and lobs it into the ocean. Her belly aches and she rubs it, slips her hand inside her coveralls, and feels the incredible warmth radiating from inside her. “Tell me why you quit the bakery.”

  But now Harrison is irritated by her questioning—he’s so fucking damaged, she thinks—and doesn’t want to talk. She prods anyway. “Tell me what happened this time.”

  The waves are quiet. It isn’t too windy to talk. When he doesn’t respond, she looks at my father and yells in his ear, “I’m bothering you, aren’t I.”