Y: A Novel

by Marjorie Celona

  Bess lifts her sweatshirt over her head. Her stomach is soft and sags over the front of her red jeans, but her breasts are full and gorgeous in her black bra. I shrug off my jean jacket, let it drop to the floor, then unbutton my tuxedo shirt. I’m wearing a gray sports bra, which I struggle to get over my head. I have never shown my breasts to anyone, not even Lydia-Rose, who changes unabashedly in our small bedroom as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I feel fierce and strong standing in Bess’s bedroom with my shirt off. My breasts are small—hardly breasts at all. Just two soft protuberances from my chest, the nipples inverted and hidden somewhere inside. I know my stomach is nothing to admire. I have no waist. It is stunning the way Bess’s breasts round at the top, gently pushing against the lace of her bra. I hear Nicky behind me and feel suddenly horrified that he might touch me, but when I turn, I see that he has settled into a chair in the corner of the room. He puts his hands behind his head and leans back. He is so drunk I’m not sure he knows what’s happening.

  “You look like a child,” Bess says to me, her eyes running over my body. “You have such a child body. Look at you!” She walks over to Nicky and pulls him to his feet. “Look at her little body!” she says, and they stand there staring at me.

  “She’s lovely,” Nicky says. “I love the way she looks.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Bess says to me, and I nod my head. She holds my face in her hands. “What’s it like to have a lazy eye?”

  I take a big breath and try to will my eye into alignment with the other one. “It’s not lazy. It’s dead.” I stare at her as best as I can.

  “She only sees out of the one eye,” says Nicky.

  “Oh, wow,” says Bess. “A Cyclops.”

  “Yeah, I’m a Cyclops.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “I trip a lot. I can’t see in 3-D.”

  I stand there and let them stare at me. Bess asks if she can touch my breasts, and I let her, and I let Nicky touch them, too. They run their hands over my breasts and stomach and my earlobes and into the thick curls of my hair. I do not feel sexy anymore. I feel like crying. I struggle against the feeling and try to grasp onto what I felt before—the longing to be touched by another person. Now that it’s happening, all I can think of is how I can get it to stop.

  Nicky cups my face and kisses me. His breath is hot and tastes sour and of vodka. He’s a gentle kisser, and I let him hold my face and kiss my lips softly, the top lip, then the bottom. I try to enjoy the feeling. I try to be present, instead of how I feel, which is like some wild helium-filled balloon floating around the room, knocking into things, searching for an exit out into the sky.

  Nicky asks why I’m not kissing him back, and I say I don’t want to. I have sucked all the sexual energy out of the room. Bess sits cross-legged on the bed. She fiddles with the ends of her hair, her stomach big and heavy over her tight red jeans. We can hear the sound of Lydia-Rose and Jude in the other room. It is a strange, haunted sound, and I do not like to listen to it.

  “You fucked before?” she says.

  Her words startle me and I fight to hide it. “No.”

  “That’s cool,” she says. We avoid each other’s eyes. I want to be home in my bed, with Winkie at my feet.

  Lydia-Rose gasps in the other room, and I wish I had something that wild and unbridled caught up inside me. But all I feel right now is a horrible emptiness, a sense that I’m watching things happen to me and will never fully take part.

  “My cousin has breasts like you,” Bess says.

  “They barely seem like breasts.”

  “They’re not so bad.” She climbs under the covers and closes her eyes, and I understand that the night is over and this is as far as it will go.

  “I’m taking off,” Nicky says.

  After Bess falls asleep, I hold her. I lie there with my arms around her. I breathe in the stale air of her small messy bedroom, and I listen. There are people walking by outside. I hear the smash of a thrown bottle. The candles burn out and the wax oozes down the sides and onto Bess’s dresser. The room fills with their smoke. Bess rolls onto her back, and I slip my arms out from under her. She snores softly, her mouth slightly open. A gray haze creeps in through the blinds as the sky starts to lighten, casting the room in a muted, depressing light. It is the most horrible light in the world, the light from an overcast dawn. I creep out of Bess’s bed and paw around on the floor for something—anything—of interest. Old receipts from Mac’s for cigarettes, magazines, gum. I find an expired driver’s license in her red jeans. Her name is Elizabeth. She is twenty-six years old. I flip through a nursing textbook and an old issue of Vogue, some of the pages torn out and taped to her walls. They are of alabaster-skinned women, freckled faces, long red hair. They are who Bess wants to be, what she wants to look like. The perfume ads unleash their scent into the room when I flip past them. So much to do this week. Apply for an after-school job. Lydia-Rose is going to be a cosmetics girl at the Bay. I don’t know what I want to do yet. Sell hot dogs, maybe, at the Inner Harbour. Work at the movie theater. A few of our friends work at McDonald’s, but I don’t want the grease in my face, in my hair. Slinging popcorn and tearing people’s tickets seems okay. I get great pleasure from tearing off perforated ticket stubs, for some reason. It’s like popping bubble wrap. If I could get a summer job doing just that, I would.

  In the morning we trudge home. Lydia-Rose tells me she called Miranda last night and told her we were safe but too tired to walk back, and she assures me that Miranda was okay with this. I am sweaty and panicky. Lydia-Rose is cold; I can tell by the way she’s holding onto Jude. We cross the Johnson Street Bridge and head toward Fernwood.

  “What happened to Nicky?” Jude says. I can’t believe he’s only now noticed his friend is gone. His blond cornrows are coming undone, and his eyes are thick with sleep.

  “Left last night,” I say.

  Lydia-Rose shoots me a disappointed look. She wants me to lose my virginity. She loves the idea that the four of us could pal around. She shrugs at me to elaborate, but I walk ahead. I stare at my feet. I wish I were able to get along with people my own age, but I just hate them. The sky drizzles rain, and I walk faster. Lydia-Rose and Jude catch up and she takes my arm and the three of us walk side by side, back to the neighborhood. Her hair has fallen out of its bun and is springing out crazily from all sides of her head. I can’t bear to think about how I must look. At the corner, before we turn onto our block, Jude gives Lydia-Rose a long kiss good-bye and I stand there watching them. He’s at least a head taller than she and stoops awkwardly, his legs apart for balance.

  He watches us as we walk up the pathway to our town house without him. I give him a halfhearted wave and push Lydia-Rose inside before she can run back and kiss him again. Someone has to curb this grossness a little bit. No one has patience for love except their own.

  The first thing I do when I get inside is pet Winkie and take her for a pee. It’s early, not even 8 a.m. Winkie trots ahead of me, her back legs bowed and awkward, and is swarmed by a group of small children walking to school. They place their hands on her body, gently, and one of them gets down on his knees to hold her.

  A city truck pulls up, and a couple of men jump out and block off a section of the pavement with road cones. They draw lines in the street with chalk. Winkie and I spin around at the corner and walk back to the town house. I’m not supposed to take her farther than a block—her legs have been giving out lately, and Miranda doesn’t want her to get any worse than she already is. When one of the men starts up a jackhammer, I cover my ears, and Winkie runs.

  Lydia-Rose is in the shower when I come back inside, and Miranda is at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. She taps the table as I walk past, and I sit down.

  “Want some coffee?”

  I smile at her. She wants to have a morning ritual with somebody. “Sure.”

  She pours me a cup and loads it up with milk and sugar. Her face is bright, but I can see that she
’s tired, that there is something on her mind.

  “You two were okay last night?” she says and her voice comes out strained, brittle.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ve got school in an hour.”

  “I know.”

  She taps the table again, and I see that the tapping wasn’t meant as an invitation to sit down but rather to show me something. She is tapping a piece of paper, folded in three.

  “This was in the pocket of one of your pants,” she says. “You forgot to take it out when you stuck them in the hamper.”

  I look at it. It is the brochure for young adult housing from the YMCA.

  She waits for me to say something. I reach for my coffee, but my hand is too shaky and I know I’ll never be able to bring it to my mouth. I press the soles of my feet into the floor and pray for the moment to be over.

  “I don’t want there to be secrets in this house.” Miranda gets up and puts on a pot of oatmeal, sprinkles in raisins and cinnamon as it boils. I watch her back as she stirs. She’s wearing her pink Molly Maid polo shirt. She’s either gained weight or the shirt has shrunk in the wash, the back of her bra visible through the fabric. I’ve seen pictures of her when she was our age and she looked just like Lydia-Rose, long and lean.

  It’s like there’s a fissure growing inside me. The part that wants so strongly to show Miranda the letter I wrote to my father and to tell her about Vaughn. And then the part that wants to keep all this information to myself, to keep it sacred, safe, and hidden. I can’t reconcile the two.

  Miranda spins around, wooden spoon in one hand, a little glob of cooked oatmeal about to fall off the end. I look at her then, in the bright morning light of the kitchen. Her face is wet. The men are still jackhammering outside.

  “Are they going to do that all day?” she says suddenly, and her tone is so accusatory it’s as if everything that is wrong in the world is my fault.

  I shake my head and push the brochure aside. “I have to tell you something,” I say.

  XVIII.

  my mother sees her son lying by the side of the road, one little red boot on, the other foot in a white sock. Her sweatshirt is wrapped around his shoulders. She feels something fall down inside of her, like a guillotine. The men are talking: Joel, Edwin, Quinn, and Harrison. She sees Joel push Harrison into the Meteor and slam the door. Edwin lifts Eugene off the ground and walks toward her. She feels her face twist into ugliness, like the gnarled stump of a tree. She has the overwhelming desire to pick up a rock and pound it against her mouth until her teeth break. She wants to break every bone in her face. She wants to take out her jawbone and bury it in the ground.

  Instead, she hears the sound of Joel’s fist hitting Harrison’s face. The car rocks back and forth. And then Quinn has her by the shoulders and is guiding her into the truck. He helps her into the cab, then pushes her legs in, tucks her arms into her lap, pulls the seat belt over her belly, just like he used to do when she was a child.

  Joel gets out of the car and jogs toward Quinn, tells him, quickly, gasping for breath, about the cocaine, about Harrison’s plan to bury Eugene. He has blood on his knuckles. Yula looks at the Meteor, where she can see the outline of Harrison slumped over in the front seat. Quinn closes her door, and the cold of the truck seeps through her clothes and into her skin.

  She watches Quinn and Joel walk to the Meteor and get in on either side of Harrison. Are they going to kill him?

  Edwin drives her and Eugene to the hospital. The weight of her son rests against her body, and then against Edwin’s, as they curve around the Malahat. It is a fifteen-minute drive.

  When they pull up underneath the bright-red awning of the emergency entrance, Edwin tells her he’s going to take Eugene in first, then send a nurse out for her with a wheelchair.

  “Be right back,” he says. “Hold tight, honey. They’re going to take care of you.” His voice is soft and gravelly. He leaves the truck running, feeble heat coming out of the vent like soft breath. Edwin flips up the collar of his flannel jacket and reaches into the cab for Eugene. Her gray sweatshirt falls away from his body as Edwin lifts him. He cradles the boy and walks toward the entrance. His pants are half tucked into his boots, the laces untied. The pneumatic doors slide open and Edwin disappears, obscured by the fogged-up glass.

  I could be born here, into this life. My mother could wait for the nurse to emerge, pushing a wheelchair with a slippery leather seat. My mother could allow herself to be wheeled through the doors, to check in, to be pushed past the patients in the waiting room who have just seen a man carrying her dead son. A short labor, like her first, the baby born without incident, despite being premature. The police outside the door, waiting for it to be over. She’ll give her statement. Maybe she’ll get to nurse me. She will be charged with her son’s death. She’ll plead guilty. She is, after all. And what will become of Harrison? Will he survive Quinn and Joel’s beating? What if he doesn’t? Quinn will go to jail, another life taken. If Harrison survives, the police will charge him, and he will spend the next decade at William Head. Quinn will not file for custody of me, being too old. I’ll be taken away, this harrowing beginning to my life forever stamped down upon me. The birth certificate cursed with my mother’s name.

  Or, there is a better alternative. She will take Edwin’s truck and drive away from this place. On an island, there isn’t really anywhere to go, but she can get out of the woods and into the city. Her mother’s friend Luella lives near Beacon Hill Park. She is a registered nurse; she can help Yula deliver the baby. Luella will let her stay until the baby can travel. She will take me to the mainland and start a new life. Years later, my mother will balk at how similar her fantasy was to Harrison’s. Years later, she will feel a dark twinge of regret that they couldn’t have made it happen somehow.

  Yes, this is better. Yula begins to talk to me. She tells me we’re going to drive into town. She says she needs me to wait a little while. Just let her drive into town. That’s all she needs from me now.

  She slides into the driver’s seat, and the truck hiccups when she shifts into drive. It lurches forward and she doesn’t even need to press on the gas. The truck slides through the parking lot, toward the street, as if by sheer will alone.

  And here we go together, down the Trans-Canada Highway. At first there’s nothing to see. It’s dark out, just the arc of streetlights as we go under each overpass. The highway narrows into Douglas Street, and she drives past the car dealerships, the A&W. A memory—driving one night with Harrison and Eugene. Harrison saying, “Hold on, I want to run in, just pull into the parking lot for a sec.” Moments later him coming out with a stuffed A&W Root Bear in his arms for Eugene. Her heart lifting. Everything momentarily okay.

  “I don’t want this to be happening,” Yula says to me. “I don’t want this to be my life.”

  The streetlights on Douglas are blue, each with five frosted globes. They light the sidewalks like little white moons. The Ukrainian Dance Association. Fitness World. Money Mart. She has never been in any of these places. There is hardly anyone on the road but she’s a nervous driver in Edwin’s truck. The engine, a V-8, feels alive under the hood. At each stoplight she hesitates, then presses the gas pedal too hard, and the truck shoots forward as if propelled by a rocket. The engine makes a terrible low growl. She notices the smell then, after all this time. It is a horrible mix of chicken manure and skunkweed. Bile rises into her mouth.

  Swiss Chalet. Mayfair Lanes. The bowling alley’s huge parking lot is empty save for one white sedan. Two women stand at one of the bus stops, eyeing the truck as she drives past. Luella worked as a nurse in a women’s prison for a few years, that’s what her mother had said. It’s no good being a woman, Yula. They drag you by your hair. Jo told Yula once, If you’re ever in trouble, any kind at all, go to Luella. She’ll help you.

  The Esso station. Mayfair Mall. Mount Tolmie to her left. KFC. Denny’s and more car dealerships. Past the Traveller’s Inn where she and Harrison once stayed for
two nights when they first met. They bought a case of beer and a two-six of Jack Daniel’s, got hungry, and ate breakfast at Denny’s at three in the morning. Yula remembers throwing a French fry at the waitress’s back. Why did she do something so immature? What was wrong with her? She hoped Harrison didn’t think ill of her because of it. He had laughed, then walked over to the waitress and apologized, as though Yula were his child.

  More strip malls. Canadian Tire. The street lined with oak trees. Getting closer and closer to Rock Bay. Slightly safer now than it used to be. But still so awful at night.

  The Ford dealership. The liquor store. Finally, Hillside Avenue. The little motels. The strip club. Bay Street and the Dairy Queen. Thompson’s Foam Shop, Red Hot Video, another Traveller’s Inn. A few cars are on the road with her now, and she grips the wheel, suddenly aware of how much pain she’s in.

  A contraction forces her to lurch forward and she takes her foot off the gas, rests her head against the steering wheel. She lifts her head and the truck is pointed toward Herald Street, stopped in the road. A dark-haired woman with huge hoop earrings is leaning up against a building, a can of beer in her hand. Yula presses down on the gas again and carries on. The bright-red brick of City Hall, and then she is downtown and the streets are littered with men in sleeping bags. This is where she’ll end up, she thinks. This has always been the logical place for her, hasn’t it? There’s something missing inside of her—something that makes her unable to get by in the world like a regular person. Without Harrison and her father and the cabin on the side of Mount Finlayson, she’s not sure she can survive. She does not feel strong. She cannot think about Eugene now. She lets her thoughts go numb. There is nothing in her mind.

  Down Douglas Street past the Eaton Centre and the Strathcona Hotel, the conference center and the back of the Empress, the street curves and rises, and the truck works harder to take her up past the totem poles, then left on Southgate and into the park. She’s been in the park late at night. It isn’t dangerous like everyone says. She’s always thought it was the safest place in the world. Aside from her home, there isn’t a single place she feels as safe as in Beacon Hill Park.