Y: A Novel (14 page)

. . . There’s one nice thing. When they let you out, they act real happy. Like it’s
your birthday. They pat you on the back like you had a rapport. And you know what
they say to you? You know what they say to you when you get out? They tell you to
go out into the world. They tell you to do great things.

Nothing more except a postcard made out to Miranda’s mother, the address in Miranda’s
writing, but no message and no stamp, never sent.

I ransack her room further for a diary, a notepad, flip through a couple of paperbacks
for something slipped inside, but there’s nothing in here about me—it’s all her past,
her secrets, her life before I came into it.

When she gets home I am cross-legged on the couch, feeding bits of Ritz crackers to
Winkie. Miranda’s hair is tied up in a kerchief. She walks stiffly when she returns
from cleaning, especially if she’s had to get on her knees to scrub underneath something,
or had to walk up and down too many flights of stairs. She stops at the kitchen sink
and washes her hands—to get the smell of the latex gloves off, she says—then feels
my forehead. She brushes the cracker crumbs off the couch and into her hand. She pats
Winkie’s head.

“Feeling better?” Miranda puts her hand on my knee. They are the strongest-looking
hands in the world.

“No.”

“You sad today, honey?”

“No.”

I push myself off the couch, grab my backpack, and run down the stairs, slip my feet
into my sneakers, and kick the same little rock all the way until I get to school.

I wish I could think of Miranda as my mom, and I’ve tried. I’ve tried as hard as I
can all these years. But I watch her and Lydia-Rose together—the way they twitch their
noses when they’re thinking—and every time I see something like that, I’m reminded
that I don’t belong here with them. I’m reminded that something is missing. At night
I imagine that my real mother is coming for me, her arms outstretched. I imagine she
looks just like me, that we have the same hands.

Sometimes, when I’m in a pettier mood, I like to imagine that she walked into the
ocean or disappeared into the woods to be eaten by the elements, so racked with guilt
from leaving me. Sometimes I imagine she was an alcoholic. Or a sixteen-year-old girl
living in a basement suite with a punk rock band. Free rent if she put out and kept
the kitchen clean. My father, I guess, was one of the musicians. I like to wonder—drums,
bass, or lead guitar? Maybe saxophone or electronic keyboard. I have no ear for music—the
notes clink around in my head when I listen to it and I can’t
tell what’s good or bad. All I know is that one of my parents must have been blond.
Maybe my mother hadn’t realized she was pregnant until it was too late, and the abortion
clinic turned her away. I try not to think about what I know is most likely true—that
she was a prostitute—and instead I imagine that she’s perfect, and beautiful, and
didn’t mean to abandon me.

In my head, late at night, I draft letters to my mother and father. I say everything
I want to say, everything that needs to be said. In my head, I am so eloquent.

VI.

i
t was after midnight when Yula got the call that her parents had been in a motorcycle
accident. She ran through the forest, Eugene strapped to her body, a flashlight in
her hand, until she got to Joel and Edwin’s scrap yard. She tore through the rusted-out
cars, the dead tractors, the ancient lawn mowers and disassembled engines, the pyramid
of tires, the dilapidated horse barn used as a garage. She ran to their trailer, up
the narrow metal steps, and pounded on the door. It was unclear to her whether Joel
and Edwin were lovers, or simply two men who didn’t fit in anywhere else and didn’t
want to be alone. She knew that Joel slept on one side of the trailer and Edwin on
the other, because they made a big deal of it every time she saw them. She pounded
on the door until they opened it, standing side by side, Joel in a plaid flannel jacket
and his underwear, Edwin in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. Joel held a shotgun.

“Yula.” Joel put the gun down and beckoned her inside, but she shook her head. They
were burly, unshaven men. Joel had huge hairy calves.

“Can you take me to the hospital?” she said and motioned to one of their old rusty
pickups.

Jo had broken six of her ribs, her back, her right arm, and both of her ankles, but
it was the road rash that was the ugliest, the most painful. The asphalt dug so deep
into her skin in places that the doctors said they couldn’t extract it until the swelling
went down. Yula stood at the end of the bed and stroked her mother’s foot. Jo’s face
was crusted with blood and there was a bandage around her head. She had skidded so
hard on the concrete that her helmet had broken in two and a streak of hair on the
back of her head had been ripped off. Her jaw was broken in three places. As she’d
lain at the side of the road, her tongue had fallen back into her throat and closed
off most of her airway; by the time the paramedics came, both her lungs had collapsed
and her throat and nose were filled with blood.

Quinn’s left arm was crushed. It had almost been torn off completely. But he’d landed
on his side, not on his back like Jo, and though he’d never fully use his hand again,
he would make a quick recovery. His leather jacket and pants were thicker than Jo’s
and had protected him from the gravel. He’d kept his head tucked into his chest; he
knew how to fall. He stood at the edge of the bed with Yula and they waited for Jo
to wake up. They waited for hours, then days. Yula sat in an armchair in the corner
of the room, nursing Eugene, and Quinn knelt beside Jo’s bed and told her how sorry
he was, how wrong he was, what an awful man he was, and how her life would be different
now, better, much better, and that he would leave if she wanted him to, anything she
wanted, if she would wake up and be okay.

Sometime near dawn, while Eugene was softly snoring, Quinn took Yula’s hand and told
her the truth—that the accident was his fault, that he’d purposefully tried to scare
her mother. He had willed the accident to happen, and it had. He told her their relationship
was full of hate and rage. He told her that they had stopped loving each other not
long after she was born.

“Why?” asked Yula, her fingers tracing the soft little groove between Eugene’s mouth
and nose. Quinn drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup, and winced as he spoke, his arm
in a sling, too swollen to be set in a cast. His
black leather jacket, almost shredded, was draped across his lap, a single gold chain
looped around his neck. A thin layer of silver stubble spread out over his jaw. His
hair, the color of white smoke.

“The usual story, Yula,” he said. His breath was hot and sour from the coffee. “I
had an affair. She had an affair. She forgave me, and I never forgave her. The awful
truth is, I never will.” He sipped his coffee, put the cup down, and played with Eugene’s
little foot. “Some nights I lie awake and trace the whole history of our relationship—the
moment we first met, how she let me live in the trailer when I had nowhere else to
go, how goofy all that was. How we bonded because we both liked to read. We took so
many long walks together—she was the kind of person I could talk to for twelve, thirteen
hours.”

Yula readjusted Eugene in her arms, and her father took her hand. He ran his fingers
over the space where her pinky finger would have been, something her mother used to
do. Jo was going to die, he seemed to be saying with this action, and I need you to
forgive me. Yula stared at her father and let him continue.

“I don’t know when things went wrong,” he said, and enveloped her hand in his. “I
found myself jealous if she told a funny story at a dinner party—if she made everyone
laugh. Something about it made my stomach ache. It made me angry. See, we’re intellectual
equals. I am as smart as your mother, and she is as smart as me. This is a problem.
There’s no pecking order. A relationship is like anything else. It needs a leader
and a follower. We could never settle into any kind of routine. We’re both too alpha,
maybe?”

He cleared his throat and took another sip of coffee. His hand shook when he brought
the cup to his lips. “Do you remember all those runs I took you on when you were little,
you in the Gerry pack? Later on in the day, your mother would take you out, too. You
spent your first five years strapped to our backs while we ran. I blew my knee out
first, so your mother won that round.”

He stretched out in his chair and tipped his head back, and Yula could see the fillings
in the back of his mouth. He spoke to the ceiling. “She forgot my birthday one year,
and I didn’t speak to her for three weeks. Three
weeks, making her feel like a ghost in that house. I wouldn’t even look at her. In
some ways, I think we tortured each other. Look, these things don’t seem like much,
but they add up. Your mother has a gimlet eye, that’s for sure. I knew that nothing
I did would ever be good enough—professionally, romantically, even when it came to
you. We were competitive over parenting, for God’s sake.”

He sat up and searched Yula’s eyes. His voice was suddenly aggressive, and Yula felt
herself shrinking back from him, both repulsed and afraid. “I fucking hate hospitals,”
he said, little bits of froth forming at the corners of his mouth. “We need to get
her better, get her out of here. The one thing we could ever agree on is that we didn’t
belong in the city, in any of its institutions. You were a home birth, like Eugene.
I don’t believe in any of this. It’s all bullshit. We’re different, okay? You remember
this. Everything we need is at home. This other stuff—” He scanned the room as if
someone was listening. “Do not believe anything anyone tells you. You have to evaluate
the world with your own eyes.”

Yula pushed her chair back and prayed for her father to stop talking. He was motor-mouthing,
high on painkillers, slobbering as he spoke.

She tried to stand, but he put his hand on her leg and pushed her back down. “What
I’m trying to tell you about is your mother. It got sick between us. Things can get
sick between two people. I hated it. I hated how much I loved her and how much I wanted
her to love me. Look, this is bullshit. I needed to dominate her. She never let me
dominate her. She always had to win. But I pinned her down one night and held her
throat.”

Yula shot the words at his face. “I remember.”

“I wanted her to be in love with me. Me. I wasn’t trying to kill her. I needed to
use my power—she needed to respect me a little.” He leaned toward Yula, and she held
her breath. He was so high that his pupils were dilated. “Do you see what kind of
sickness can develop between two people?”

Yes, she knew. Yula knew her parents loved
and
hated each other. She could also see that they were each convinced they were special—each
of them individually, but also the relationship as a whole. She felt the same arrogance
from their neighbors on Mount Finlayson, as if living out of the
city, in nature, made you different somehow. Apart from the rest. Spiritually, not
just geographically. And yet she believed it. Despite herself, she felt it, too—they
were all, somehow, different.

“I can’t be alone, Yula,” her father said suddenly. “I wish I could, but I just can’t.”

Someone tapped lightly on the door, and Yula and her father looked up. It was Jo’s
friend, Luella. She was a heavily made-up woman with long, light brown hair and rings
on every finger. She wore a turquoise skirt with a black knee-length dress over it,
leather riding boots, and a black jacket. Red lipstick. Yula thought she looked like
a movie star.

“Hi,” Luella said.

Yula was fascinated with Luella. She was a registered nurse, but she painted—she’d
even had a show in an art gallery. Yula liked her but couldn’t say for certain why.
She was tactile—affectionate—and rested her hand on Yula’s shoulder when she spoke.
She’d once told Yula that she wore mostly black because other colors were too distracting,
like bees buzzing around her head.

Yula’s mother didn’t have any friends other than Luella. She kept herself so isolated.
Occasionally someone would come out to the property and have dinner with them, but
it was such a rare occurrence that Yula wasn’t sure it had happened more than twice.
Luella, though, seemed to be a constant in her mother’s life. They spoke on the phone
every other night. Yula remembers the three of them walking through the park to Beacon
Drive-In to get soft-serve ice cream, then sitting in the bleachers by the soccer
field and eating the cones. Luella’s long brown hair had white-blond highlights back
then. She wore a lot of powdery foundation, which sparkled when the sun hit her face.
Unlike Jo, she covered herself in jewelry—ten or fifteen beaded necklaces circled
her neck; her ears were lined with silver hoops, her fingers heavily ringed. She wore
striped pedal pushers that day, a thick elastic belt cinched around her waist, a sleeveless
black silk blouse, and red peep-toe heels. She looked like something out of a French
fashion magazine, Jo had said. Jo sat between Luella and Yula in corduroys and a plaid
shirt. She never wore makeup. Sometimes, when the women talked, they would reach across
and hold hands.