Y: A Novel (23 page)

When I scroll down, I see a list of all the foster homes I have lived in. A woman
named Anna in a six-bed house in Royal Oak, her status listed as level three, whatever
that means; Julian and Moira; Par and Raquelle. Another name is listed, too, after
Anna’s—someone named Linda McIntosh. I do not remember this. When I click on Julian’s
and Moira’s names, the screen takes me to a page that requires a password. I search
the perimeter of Madeleine’s desk but don’t find one. The same thing happens when
I click on Par and Raquelle. I write down everyone’s full names on a couple of pink
Post-its and stuff them into my backpack.

At the bottom of the page is a postscript:
Letter from H.C., William Head.

Nothing happens when I click on it.

I look up, and Madeleine is standing in the doorway. She holds the photocopied newspaper
article in her hand. In her navy blue dress and white heels, she looks as if she’s
stepped right out of the fifties. She looks as if she’s waiting for a sailor to debark
from a ship.

Another social worker walks out of an office and peers in at us. Madeleine shakes
her head at me, motions gently for me to return to my chair. “I’m afraid this is all
I can do for you right now, Shannon.”

I take the newspaper article. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.

“The act of abandoning a child changes everything,” she says. “There’s nothing more
I can do to help you.”

“Okay. Thanks.” I wave to Madeleine as I walk out the door and then stand for what
feels like forever at the bus stop. I feel bad about making
fun of her. Am I a bad person? I think about this almost every day. Would I know if
I was?

Outside of the Mac’s on Cook and Pandora, I flip through the phone book until I find
Julian’s name. There it is. He still lives on Olive Street. Raquelle’s name is listed,
too. She’s still in the same apartment. I barely remember her. I remember being left
alone a lot. I remember watching a little boy stick a penny up his bum. I don’t think
I’ll call her. Anna—I don’t remember her at all. There was that girl who wet the bed.
I’d like to see her again. But who knows what her name was? Anyway, Anna’s not listed.
And neither is this Linda McIntosh. Who the hell was she? It’s like there’s a black
curtain hung over a part of my brain and it’s too heavy to slip off and see what’s
underneath. Fuck it, who cares.

Letter from H.C., William Head.

This, though, is interesting. William Head is a prison in Metchosin. I know this because
my drama teacher took us to see a play out there one time. The prisoners have a little
theater. We watched their performance of
Endgame.
The guy who shuttled us from the prison entrance to the theater told us he was in
for murder. He was in his eighties.

I walk into Mac’s and get a hot chocolate, which is syrupy and gross, so I give it
to a man playing the trumpet outside and we talk for a while. I like him. He’s always
around, playing that crappy old trumpet. He has curly hair, lots of it, piled on his
head like a wig, but today he’s wearing an orange toque. He tells me his name is Mickey.

“Mickey,” I say. “Got a cigarette?”

He looks at me like I’m nuts. The guys around here have
not
seen this new side of me. He rolls me one, lights it with a dog-eared pack of matches,
takes a big long puff, and hands it to me.

“Tastes weird.”

“Might be some hash mixed in there,” he says and winks. He’s got watery eyes and a
deeply lined face and he’s short, five-four max. I like short people, short men. So,
fine, I’ll smoke this cigarette. I’ll smoke this
hash. We lean up against the big glass window of Mac’s, and he picks up his trumpet
and blows into it some more.

“I went to the mainland,” I tell him. I tell him my trip did nothing to curb my restlessness.
I tell him I am still so curious. I want to feel to the fullest extent.

He rests his trumpet against his thigh and turns to me. “With eyes like those, you
need to be outdoors. Maybe you ride horses? Yes? No? You should be at the ocean definitely.”

“Okay, Mickey.” My way of dealing with people who make no sense is just to agree.
Works every time.

Some dudes drive up blasting hip-hop, and I bob my head to the music for a minute.
They say hey to Mickey and come out of Mac’s a minute later with bags of potato chips
and Slurpees, then peel away.

A shitty-looking car pulls up and parks so close to our feet that Mickey calls out,
“Hey, man.” The car is red with a white top, but it’s so rusted out that there are
holes in the chassis. The engine sounds like it’s dying when it kicks off. The driver’s
door squeals when it opens and a shriveled little man steps out and pushes it shut
with his hip. He’s got a puffy face and a white beard. He looks a hundred years old,
and it takes him forever to get to the entrance. When he comes back out, there are
two packs of cigarettes in his hands. He tosses one into Mickey’s trumpet case. It
takes the old guy a couple of tries to start the car.

“Mickey, Mickey, give me a real smoke.” The hash joint is gross, and I’ve let Mickey
smoke most of it anyway. I don’t feel anything except my heart beating too fast and
too loud.

“I can hear your heart,” he says to me, and we look at each other for a minute. My
chest thumps up and down. My hands have started to sweat. “Close your eyes for a second,
Shannon. Say good-bye to yourself for a day.”

I close my eyes. The concrete feels like it’s tipping. I’m worried I’ll slide into
the street. With my eyes open, I can control the feeling. It’s easy to describe: it’s
like a minute ago I was living in the world, and now I’m watching a movie of it. The
frame rate has slowed. I’m at twenty-four
frames per second while everyone else is seeing life flicker-free. That’s all. That’s
all there is to being high.

Mickey rests his head against the window and shuts his eyes. His fingers are working
the pistons of the trumpet. He puts it to his lips and then rests it on his thigh,
as if he’s forgotten he was going to play. I don’t know how much time goes by. An
hour? Three? I watch the street. I wish I could float through the city, in between
the lampposts and curving under ledges. I want to reach with an outstretched hand.
I want to open all the windows. I think there are angels in this city. They are in
the windows with the lights left on.

There’s a poster for a band shellacked to a telephone pole.
Blue City,
it says, and I wonder which city is blue. Little children, little dogs, little bicycles
go racing by as we sit outside Mac’s. I close my eyes and dream of my father. He is
a man who stands eye to eye with me. He is barrel-chested and his skin looks weird,
as though he’s suddenly developed acne. In the dream he answers the door in a pair
of cargo shorts, a muscle shirt that gapes below his underarms, and worn-out tube
socks that have slipped beyond his feet and gathered in front of his toes so that
they look like giant, half-on condoms.

My mother’s hair is matted and cut just above her shoulders, which she says she had
to do because it is so damaged. It is a weird color, a botched dye job. She is sunburned
from swimming, her skin all broken out, and she is wearing a Harley-Davidson tank
top and army fatigues, a bunch of her tattoos visible. She has a little white dog
that spends the whole dream running around with a stuffed snake in its mouth.

My father makes chicken and then dumps a can of mushroom soup over it. We eat dinner
on an old couch, which is so old that when I sit down I sink to the floor. Half of
one of the arms is torn off, like some animal has recently been in the apartment and
gnawed it.

I take my plate into the kitchen. The counters are covered with flour and broken eggshells.
There are eggs just sitting out, sweating in the heat, a box of ice cream bars melting
on the counter, and something that looks like vomited-up macaroni salad. A baby wails
from one of the back bedrooms,
and I discover it, bald and gray-eyed, in the middle of an unmade bed.

Then I am a little boy who travels to Europe with his older brother, mother, and father
and shoots his father on a deserted beach. The gun is light in my hands and my heart
is bursting. My father lies half-submerged in the sea.

“Wake up,” Mickey says and takes my hand. Somehow we are on the roof of a building
across from Beacon Hill Park, the art deco one that looks like a wedding cake. I shift
my weight. I wiggle my toes. I run my tongue over my teeth.

I look at Mickey. He is talking to himself in a low, sad voice. We are both in some
kind of tragic mood, a hundred feet off the ground, looking down.

“Take the vulnerable, sweet, and secret things in life very seriously,” he says when
he sees me staring at him, “if you want to be true to yourself.”

I show Mickey the piece of paper with
H.C.
written on it, and then all the addresses. I unwad the photocopied article about
my abandonment and show it to him. My story is nothing new to Mickey. Everyone in
this town, it seems, knows about me. But he takes the article and reads it nonetheless.
His eyes are clearer. We’re both coming down.

“Why don’t you go find him,” he says. “This Vaughn guy.” He points at Vaughn’s name,
his quote.
I believe it’s an act of desperation
. “He saw your mother.”

Mickey wraps his scarf tighter around his neck and picks up his trumpet case. He signals
to me that our afternoon is over and disappears down the narrow set of steps that
somehow got us up on this roof in the first place.

This part of the city has no name. I close my eyes and hear the rush of traffic heading
into town on my left side, out of town on my right. I can feel the hash pulsing around
in my head like a little hyper snake, trying to find its way out of one of my ears.
The corner store is boarded up, graf-fitied,
a For Lease sign swinging. The vacuum repair shop is open, four dusty vacuums on display
in the window, little ancient-looking price tags wrapped around the hoses.
Go, little snake.
I walk inside and look around, but no one is behind the desk. I plug in one of the
uprights and take it for a spin, and still no one comes. I file this information in
my head should I ever need to steal a vacuum.

The city park has been landscaped further, the yew hedges shaped into perfect spheres.
The tennis court is surrounded by a barbed wire fence. It’s unclear how a person enters
it to play tennis. Maybe no one does. I find all kinds of trash among the flower beds,
beer cans and stacks of cigarette butts, greasy newspapers that once held fish-and-chips.
It is a rare, perfect day, the sky Michelangelo-blue above my head, cumulus clouds
unmoving. The buzz of lawn mowers, the traffic, the stupid, stupid sun.

Raquelle’s apartment is two minutes from the park, sandwiched between two identical
apartment buildings, three stories high, white stucco with brown trim, brown wooden
balconies, the windows unadorned.
Shangri-La,
it says on the door. Did it always say that? Who names these depressing buildings,
I want to know. I scan the list of names, find hers, and press the buzzer. My reflection
warbles in the glass door in front of me.

I press it again after a few minutes, then I press them all. “Pizza’s here!” I shout
into the intercom, and finally someone buzzes me in.

The lobby smells like old carpet and mildew. The walls are mirrored and the floor
is covered in pale-pink tile, a burgundy runner shooting out in front of me and around
the corner to the elevator. There’s a royal blue armchair, a stack of
Pennysaver
s beside it. Metal mailboxes built into the wall. The hallway is lit by fluorescents,
and I wonder if everyone feels as sad as I do when they stand in front of the elevator,
hands full of grocery bags, struggling to push the little black button that says
Up
. The elevator opens so slowly it’s like something out of a horror film, a hideous
man waiting to leap out at the last minute and rip me apart with terrible claws, but
it’s empty, the floor with its peeling linoleum, the walls made of fake dark wood.
I press the button and wait for the interminable doors to close, and the thing clunks
into life, and we wearily ascend.