Y: A Novel (17 page)

I tell Lydia-Rose this, and she does not speak to me for days.

Now that I am older, I am a better spy. I’ve snuck into Miranda’s room countless times,
read all her letters from her sister Sharon, determined that Sharon was in rehab for
a while and that this was the cause of a lengthy falling-out (discovered via more
letters, in a manila envelope underneath the mattress). I’ve also discovered that
Miranda doesn’t seem to notice if I slip a five- or ten-dollar bill out of her purse
every once in a while, so I do it every few weeks and buy myself a pair of shoes from
the Sally Ann or some cigarettes so I can finally learn to smoke. I have a summer
job in the mailroom at the Maritime Museum, but it’s volunteer work—for experience,
Miranda says. That’s fine, but I need something on the side every now and again. Because
Lydia-Rose is already sixteen she has a job bagging groceries after school. That’s
where she met Jeremy.

Lydia-Rose keeps a Moleskine diary stuffed in the toe of her giant tiger slippers,
and I have read every page. She writes about everyone except me. Pages and pages about
Miranda, about her teachers, her friends, some woman she met on the bus, the old Chinese
man who stands outside the corner store, about Jeremy. Sometimes I’ll do something
strange—or, if I catch myself saying something profound, I’ll say it again—in an effort
to affect her, but nothing makes its way onto the diary’s pages. Even when we fight.
I must not be in her head as much as she is in mine. I would never keep a diary, lest
someone like me discovered it. There are too many ugly thoughts in my head. Who wants
to write this stuff down? Who wants to remember it?
Today I thought about stepping in front of a bus. Today I wondered whether it would
hurt more to slit my wrists or hang myself in the closet. Today I prayed to God because
my stomach hurt so bad I thought I was dying.

Miranda starts having me see a counselor. He is a short man named
Leo, with a bald head and a thick, dark brown beard. We sit cross-legged on the floor,
on little blue mats. He throws his hands around when he talks, has me chart my moods
on a piece of graph paper. He tries to talk me out of things, gets me to punch a pillow.
But my problem, I tell Leo, is the way I was born.

Leo considers this for a minute, then asks me what I know about my birth parents,
and so at our next appointment I bring in my shoe box with the sweatshirt, the Swiss
Army Knife, the newspaper articles. But I don’t say a word. I sit on my little blue
mat and keep it all inside my head.

“Do you think about her often?” Leo asks. “Your birth mother?”

I take out the Swiss Army Knife, flip open the little blades and the ice pick, shove
them back inside. “Dunno.”

Leo’s eyes follow my hands, and something darkens in his expression.

“Do you—” he starts, leaning in slightly—“ever think about hurting yourself?”

I know how this goes so I don’t answer this one either. The girls in my class have
been dropping like flies. First they get this weird, faraway look in their eyes, then
they start wearing long-sleeved shirts, even in summer, then they disappear for a
while and come back with big white bandages wrapped around their wrists. Then they
lose twenty pounds, transfer to the fucked-up school, and no one ever sees them again.
That is
not
what’s going to happen to me.

“No, Leo,” I tell him finally. “I don’t.”

After my appointment, I’m supposed to go home, but instead I tug on my mother’s sweatshirt
and head for the bus stop. When I whine and make a big fuss about forgetting my bus
fare at home, the driver lets me on for free. I spend ten of the twenty dollars I
stole from Miranda’s wallet this morning on two used CDs from Lyle’s Place, then head
to Market Square. A bunch of guys are sitting around banging on bongo drums, so I
sit by them and nod my head in time until one of them passes me his drum and I get
to bang along. But it’s pointless and boring and there’s too much pot smoke, so I
walk to the Johnson Street Bridge and look out over the water. The wind
is cold and rips through the sweatshirt, through my jeans. I clutch the shoe box to
my chest. I want to know who my mother is. I want to know who my real family is, who
I really belong to, why I look this way, why I feel this way. I want to know these
things more than anything in the world.

The sun comes out behind me, and I turn to face it. It’s late in the afternoon and
the temperature is dropping. The wind gusts and rattles the masts of the boats below.
I walk over the bridge and onto one of the docks, where a man is unloading crabs off
an aluminum boat. He’s a small guy with a big moustache. He wears a ball cap, overalls,
and gum boots. I watch him hoist a plastic crate off the boat and set it on the dock,
reach into it with bare hands, pick up a protesting crab, and then toss it into a
keeper cage that has been tied to the dock with rope. When the cage is full he throws
it over the side, and it sinks with a dull splash into the ocean.

“Ever get pinched?” I ask.

He laughs. “Sometimes. Not too often. It’s usually not the one you’re picking up,
it’s the one underneath him.”

He tells me the crabs were caught off Esquimalt Lagoon. They’ll be shipped to Vancouver
and then to Hong Kong.

A man with a ratty beard and a toque pulled low over his forehead walks by and nods
to us. He has smooth, pale skin and looks about twenty-five; his cheeks are flushed
from the wind. As he passes the crab boat, he stops and says, “How’s it goin’? How’d
it go out there?”

The crab man nods and says it was all right.

“Got a light?” The crab man’s friend is tall and skinny, his toque pulled down so
low that I can barely see his eyes. He twitches an unlit cigarette up and down in
his mouth.

“No.”

“Party tonight.” He hands me a flyer and tells me how many deejays there are going
to be, that it goes all night. “You want to go?”

I look at the flyer. “Doesn’t say where it is.”

The guy twitches his cigarette. “Call the number after ten,” he says and points to
the fluorescent green numbers scattered all over the flyer in a weird robot font.
“Then come find me.”

“Okay.”

He tugs his hat even lower over his eyes and spins around, heads back toward downtown.
A seagull slaps its feet along the dock, and I follow it to the edge, where we both
stare into the foamy green water.

“Don’t jump,” the guy calls out.

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.