Y: A Novel

by Marjorie Celona

  “I want to know who I am,” I say.

  She looks at me, and her eyes sparkle. “There is one thing,” she says. “But you need to keep this between us.” She walks to her desk, scribbles something, then takes my hand and cups it around a little slip of paper. “I think this man might be your father.”

  Harrison Church, the little piece of paper says. H.C.

  XVI.

  the man in the back of the car is my father. Dominic is at the wheel and Yula is in the passenger seat, clutching her belly. Her water has broken and is seeping through the thick rough cotton of her oil-stained coveralls. My father rubs her shoulders, tells her everything will be okay.

  My grandfather Quinn is five minutes behind them, sitting between Joel and Edwin in one of their dented pickups. Joel is driving. Edwin has a shotgun and a flood lamp at his feet. Joel guns it down Finlayson Arm Road. His truck is infinitely faster than the Meteor, and it is only a matter of time before they catch up with Harrison, Dominic, and Yula.

  “They’ve hurt my grandson,” Quinn says as they speed down the road. “They’ve done something to him.”

  “We’ll catch up to them.” Joel nods at Quinn and presses the accelerator down as far as it will go.

  The truck smells of manure and marijuana. Quinn clenches his teeth and focuses on the road ahead of him. With each bend, he careens into Joel or Edwin. He braces himself with his legs, but it’s been so long since he’s exerted effort of any kind that his muscles are limp, useless. His legs are like twigs. His dead arm hangs between him and Joel, and he wills it to life so that he can shoot the men who have hurt his grandson.

  Up ahead, the Meteor’s taillights glow. Quinn watches it slow and make a hard right before it reaches the highway. They’re headed into Goldstream Park, on one of the service roads. He points at the car and nudges Joel with his shoulder. “That’s them. Go.”

  “Stay in the car.” Dominic puts his hand on Yula’s leg. “Stay here.”

  Harrison rubs her shoulders. “Listen to my brother. We’ll get you to the hospital in no time. But I need you to stay here for just a second.”

  “Where’s Eugene?” Her words come out weakly, a whimper. She shrugs off the Mexican blanket that Harrison wrapped around her and turns to face him. “Where is he?”

  “At your father’s.”

  “He’s alive?”

  “We’ll talk about this later. Just stay here.” Harrison gets out of the car and meets his brother around the back.

  Dominic opens the trunk. He fumbles in the dark for the flashlight and shovel, then rests them at his feet. “I’m going to lift him out and lay him over there.” He points to a huge redwood by the side of the road with the flashlight. “Don’t turn on the headlights until after you turn back onto Finlayson.”

  The blackness around them is thick as molasses. Then, suddenly, the headlights of a truck approaching. “Fuck. Get the fuck out of here,” Dominic says. “We’ll talk later.”

  Harrison nods at his brother and hears him groping in the trunk. He grunts. “Got him.” And then Harrison hears him walk into the woods, then the soft sound of him setting the little boy, his son, on the ground.

  Did they turn off? Joel slows down and the truck bumps along the service road, Quinn searching left and right for signs of the car, but the truck’s headlights are weak and they can only see what’s right in front of them.

  Quinn puts his hand on the dash. “Stop a second. Kill the engine. They have to be right around here. This road doesn’t go all the way up.”

  The men sit in silence for a minute, the windows rolled down. They hear voices, the sound of a trunk closing, someone’s footfalls on the forest floor.

  “Get out. Get out.” Quinn pushes into Edwin, and the men get out of the car. Edwin switches on the floodlamp and the forest jumps into life, suddenly visible. The Meteor is about a hundred yards up the road. Harrison stands by the driver’s-side door. Edwin swings the lamp to the left, and then the right, and Dominic comes into focus. Eugene’s body lies at his feet.

  Joel raises the shotgun to his shoulder and walks toward Harrison, who fumbles to get back into the car, his hands shaking so badly that he can only paw at the cold steel handle of the door.

  “Stay right where you are,” Quinn says. “Don’t move. Neither one of you move.”

  But Dominic has broken into a run; they hear it before Edwin swings the floodlamp to the right and sees Dominic disappear into the black of the forest.

  “Damn it.” Edwin swings the lamp around to Harrison, who squints in the horrible brightness.

  “I’ll shoot if you run.” Joel points the shotgun at his chest. “I’ll chase you all night. And I’ll shoot you when I find you.”

  Harrison puts his hands over his heart, as if to shield it. “I won’t. Okay. Please.”

  “You tell me,” Quinn starts. “You tell me what’s going on here.”

  The light sweeps over the forest, and Quinn looks at Edwin. “Keep that light on him.”

  And then there is the sound of the passenger door opening and Yula’s footfalls as she rounds the car and approaches Harrison from behind. When she enters into the light, Quinn sees that her face is crazed.

  She reaches out for her father’s hand. “Tell me you have Eugene.”

  “Eugene.” He stares at his daughter. In his mind, he sees the boy being lowered into the trunk, his little bare feet.

  “I need to know where Eugene is.”

  “The little boy?” Edwin swings the lamp around and walks past the car to the other side of the service road, where Eugene lies, Yula’s gray sweatshirt around his shoulders like a cape.

  XVII.

  lydia-Rose and I are friends again, and I’ve quit cutting classes. The weather has turned and every week bleeds into the next—the same endless fitz fitz of drizzle on the windows all day, all night, the same low-hanging stratus clouds, like a ceiling too close to my head. The winds have started, too. Every year here is the same: one minute we’re outside in our hoodies until midnight, the next we’re racing home at ten o’clock, the wind whipping our heels and blowing all the leaves off the trees with one big fatal breath. It happens so fast. Then everything is dead. I hate this time of year. My winter depression settles in like a heavy blanket.

  I found an address in Ontario for a man named Harrison Church. I wrote a letter. I still haven’t sent it. I carry it around in my heart like a rock. It isn’t anything I feel capable of facing, and so it sits inside of me, ignored, festering. What if I send it and then never hear back? What if he’s a horrible man? What if he isn’t even my father?

  Lydia-Rose has a new boyfriend, a guy a year older than us named Jude. I do not like Jude, but I don’t fault him for that. He lives down the street from us in a little white single-story house, a big untamed front yard separating it from the street. The grass is over a foot long and has been stamped down in a makeshift path that leads to the front door. He lives with his father and older sister, though she’s never around. His father is a sweet man, that much I can tell. Miranda says he drives a Handi-Dart, the bus for disabled people. As I said, it is not Jude’s fault that I don’t like him. He’s a good person. But now that he’s in our lives, he’s always around: we eat our meals with him; we watch movies with him; every weekend is spent with him. If I want to see Lydia-Rose, which I do, I have to see him, too.

  Jude is handsome; I’ll give him that. He is thin but muscular and wears the same outfit every day—a short-sleeved checked shirt buttoned up all the way, baggy dark blue jeans, Converse sneakers. He dyes his brown hair a bright yellow-blond and Lydia-Rose cornrows it for him, which makes him look a lot cooler than he actually is.

  Miranda seems fine with this arrangement—happy to have this young handsome man in our lives. She even lets Lydia-Rose sleep over at his house sometimes. I’d thought she would have been stricter. She has been so protective of us until now. I suppose she knows that Jude is nothing to be feared. I know she marched Lydia-Rose down to the clinic t
o get her on birth control, but beyond that she seems content to let the relationship be. Unlike so many other mothers we know, she treats Lydia-Rose and me with respect. She’s respectful of our personal space, our privacy. So many girls in our class have stories about their mothers ransacking their rooms, finding their journals and poring through them, making them empty out their backpacks when they get home from school, interrogating them if a boy calls. Miranda never does anything like that. She expects us to be decent, that’s all. And we don’t want to disappoint her. I already have. I am eager not to do it again.

  It rains all the time, and there is nothing to do. My feet are always wet and I don’t feel like wandering downtown by myself to go find Mickey, because if I don’t find him I’ll just be soaking wet and standing at a bus stop by myself, waiting for no one to come along and take me back home.

  “Shannon,” Mickey said to me one of the last times I ran into him, “something keeps us connected.”

  Yes, Mickey. But what?

  Vaughn and I haven’t seen each other since we went to the ministry. I feel weirdly protective of myself since Madeleine told me the name of my father. I feel like I don’t want anyone to get to know me too well. I feel like I carry around a big heavy secret. I don’t know why, exactly, but I feel ashamed.

  There is nothing to do but watch television or go downtown and sit in a coffee shop until the manager kicks us out for asking for too many refills. Or go to McDonald’s, order a large fries, eat half of it, pluck one of Lydia-Rose’s hairs off her head and slide it into the fries, go up to the counter, demand new fries because of the hair, get those fries, eat them. Walk to another McDonald’s, repeat. I’m just trying to find some way to spend the time. People talk about when you’re young as being full of possibilities, but the uncertainty of it all makes me feel lost and insane. I try to be cheerful. I try to live in the present. But it’s hard.

  Sometimes we go to this coffee shop downtown that has pool tables. It’s in the basement so we have to walk down a little black metal staircase to get there. We can play chess there, too. I don’t know why we like it so much, but we always gravitate to it when there’s nowhere else to go, no more fries to be eaten. By now we know the regulars and the staff. The regulars are guys with long gray hair and skinny goth girls in their twenties. On Fridays they have an open-mic night that we go to sometimes, but the real appeal of the place is that the tables are covered in broken shards of glass set into tar so that you can look down and see hundreds of versions of your face—we never get sick of doing this—and it’s one of the last places in town that lets you smoke indoors. In this pitiful weather, it’s a necessity.

  So Lydia-Rose, Jude, and I are there drinking coffee with one of Jude’s friends, this guy named Nicky. Jude and Lydia-Rose are always trying to set me up, and Nicky is their favorite candidate. He’s okay. He’s a little less cool than Jude—a little lower on the social ladder. He wears the same uniform as Jude, the checked shirt and baggy jeans, but his sneakers are all wrong—cross-trainers. Does he not notice the difference between sneakers and running shoes? He has dark brown hair and a dark complexion—I think he’s half Hawaiian, though we never ask him and he never talks about it—and little scars all over his face from a battle with acne that is, thankfully, now over. He’s short, like me, just over five feet. I like him for this but am hard pressed to say much more. He seems to lack a personality. Or he seems to be perpetually trying to copy Jude. But, whatever, he’s harmless. He is a guy I can handle.

  So here we are. I look great—I’ve got on a white tuxedo shirt, jean jacket, black dress pants, and my suspenders. I’ve pulled my hair back with bobby pins so I don’t look so much like a lion, and Lydia-Rose has traced black eyeliner over both my top and bottom lids. We both wear the same pale-pink lipstick. Lydia-Rose, as usual, looks stunning. She has on a black lacy slip over a long white cotton dress and knee-high army boots. Her hair is pulled back in a severe bun and she has finally—at my insistence—plucked her eyebrows.

  I can feel Nicky’s eyes on me. And I can feel Jude’s and Lydia-Rose’s eyes on him, watching me. My face is hot. Everything I do seems suddenly unnatural—the way I pick up my coffee, the way I cross my legs. I suddenly don’t know what to do with my hands. What did I used to do with my hands? I try to act like however I remember myself acting. I’m the kind of person who might shove her hands in her pockets, so I do that.

  And then this woman comes over. I’ve seen her in here plenty of times. She’s always trawling for guys and always disappointed when it’s just the same pack of long-haired men in leather jackets, full of dumb jokes, playing pool. She’s maybe around twenty. She isn’t bad looking—long curly auburn hair, big bright green eyes, wide hips, and dark eyebrows. She wears tight red jeans and an oversize sweatshirt that slips off one shoulder and exposes a black bra strap. It’s kind of a sexy look, in a desperate way. I can tell she’s drunk. She looks like someone who’s just run away from home and now doesn’t know what to do.

  “Got a smoke?” She stands over our table and tells us her name is Bess. Up close she’s even more attractive. Her face is covered in pale freckles, and she has big plump, glossy lips.

  Jude runs his eyes over her, and Lydia-Rose gets a wild look. She’s been in a strange mood all day. When he sees her eyes, he reaches for her hand and she leans into him. He’s good about things like that.

  Bess picks up my coffee and takes an uninvited sip. “I love your face,” she says to me, then spins around to survey the room. She’s slurring her words a little. “How about that smoke then,” she says, and Jude hands her a cigarette.

  I look at Nicky. He’s shifting around in his seat as though he’s either uncomfortable or has to use the bathroom. I try to picture him as someone’s husband. I can’t. I look at him and think that whatever people mean when they say “So-and-so’s got personality,” it isn’t this.

  “You ever been in love, Nicky?” I prod his foot with mine. I don’t know why I’m provoking him. Something about his meekness makes me angry.

  He reddens and shakes his head, and Jude and Lydia-Rose burst out laughing.

  I light a cigarette, and Nicky and I share it without speaking. Lydia-Rose and Jude start to kiss, and Bess stares into the million little pieces of her face in the table. It’s dark outside now, and the coffee shop is dim and full of smoke. Two guys in the back are setting up the mic stand.

  “Let’s go sit on the top of the parkade and look at the city,” Bess says. “I’ll get us some beer.”

  We stand outside the liquor store, shifting from foot to foot to keep warm. Bess emerges with two six-packs in a plastic bag, and we walk to the Yates Street Parkade then up the eight flights of stairs, huffing and wheezing and practically dead by the time we reach the top. We walk to the edge of the lot, spread our jackets on the concrete, and face the harbor. The boats sit in the water like big ducks. We drape our legs over the railing and Nicky spits out his gum. We watch it fall to the sidewalk. Bess passes us each a warm can of beer, and Jude and Nicky have a contest to see who can drink theirs first. It’s cold out, so we smoke constantly, our fingers kept warm by the embers. Lydia-Rose drums her boots on the concrete and leans against Jude. And suddenly the air is as warm as July, though the sun went down long ago and the sky is a deep purple blue with no moon. I am half drunk. I lie back and feel the cold concrete on my shoulders and the back of my neck. Bess does the same, and we watch each other in the bright white light of the lot. Her lips are full and red and wet with gloss. She has little wrinkles starting to form at the corners of her eyes. Her chest heaves up and down as she breathes. I examine her hands. Her nails are bitten down and ragged, a single silver ring on her index finger but no other jewelry. I move closer to her, the pull of her body like a magnetic field. But she’s looking past me at Nicky, who is sharing a smoke with Jude and Lydia-Rose. He’s put on a toque and is suddenly more handsome in his black knit hat, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He’s grinning wildly—Jude is making fun of h
im for some stupid remark he made in class—and Bess reaches up and puts her hand underneath his shirt and starts to stroke his back. He flinches at first—her hand must be cold—but then shuts his eyes and lets his head drop. Lydia-Rose and I lock eyes. She nudges Nicky with her boot, and then he opens his eyes and looks at me. It is a peculiar look. He seems to be asking me if it’s okay. I reach for another sip of beer.

  “Shannon,” Bess says, “feel how warm Nicky’s back is.” She smiles and reaches for my hand, and I let her put my hand against his back, which is so warm against the night air that it feels hot to the touch. I understand her immediately. She is an instigator, a fire starter, an accelerant of a human being, throwing herself into the middle of a crowd and lighting it up. She is fucking lighter fluid.

  “Let’s go to my apartment,” she says, and then we’re all stumbling down the eight flights of stairs and out onto the street. I follow her in her tight red jeans as she leads us out of downtown, over the Johnson Street Bridge, past the railyard, and into Esquimalt. We walk for over an hour.

  When we get to her apartment we’re sober and freezing. We stand in front of the refrigerator and drink from a big cold bottle of vodka. We drink it as fast as we can, eager to get back to that feeling where sex seemed possible. Jude and Lydia-Rose disappear in the dark of the living room, and Bess leads Nicky and me into her bedroom. She lights a few candles jammed into liquor bottles, and I examine the room. She has a double bed, the sheets sloppily pulled over the mattress, a ratty wool blanket wadded at the bottom. The floor is covered in clothes, papers, textbooks, and packs of cigarettes. Her closet door is open and full of cardboard boxes, a few pieces of clothing draped over the edges.