Y: A Novel (24 page)

Raquelle’s floor smells like soup and Chef Boyardee, and it hits me
hard because I remember it. I stand, eyes closed, willing some specific memory to
come into focus. The little snake in my brain is flicking its tail. Flick, flick.
I breathe in deeply, imagine myself being pushed in a stroller or carried down the
hall in someone’s warm arms, but no memory comes.

Raquelle’s door is the same fake wooden brown as the others. One of the digits of
the apartment number is tilted and slightly farther apart from the rest. I want to
fix it, but the little gold sticker won’t budge. I peer into the peephole, wishing
I could see her before she sees me, and I knock.

A skinny boy with glasses and an Iron Maiden T-shirt answers the door, and when I
ask for Raquelle, he tells me to skip off. It looks dark in the apartment, beer bottles
on the floor. A cat meows in the back. He slams the door before I can explain myself.

I take the bus downtown, walk to the Inner Harbour and through the heavy doors of
the Empress Hotel. Everyone is having high tea under the cut-glass chandeliers. I
watch an old woman struggle with a tiny sandwich, the roast beef caught in her teeth.
A little boy, her grandson, I guess, globs Devonshire cream onto a raisin scone. I
sit on a bench and eavesdrop, listen to the woman’s phony British accent. She is the
type of person who comments on everyone’s movements and then speculates on their motives,
i.e., “Oh, she’s getting up. She must be going back to her room. Nope, she’s just
going to the bathroom. Oh, look, here. Now she’s coming back.” It is nauseating to
listen to.

The little snake has almost disappeared completely from my brain and I’m tired and
starving. I try to put it in perspective—the fight with Miranda, Madeleine not being
able to help me, getting high, not finding Raquelle—but I feel doomed. My whole life
seems doomed.

I slip into an elevator and get off on the sixth floor, behind two reed-thin people
wearing bucket hats, khakis, and those hideous sandals that look like harnesses for
feet. I follow them until they get to their room and then slip down another hallway,
trawling for room-service trays. The Empress uses beautiful silver cutlery and it
occurs to me suddenly that I
could steal it. I could amass an outstanding collection of forks, teaspoons, and butter
knives under my bed.

There is murmuring behind the doors, someone’s television. At the end of the hallway
I find a tray, lift the huge salver, wipe a fork on my pant leg, and slip it into
my pocket. When I see a man coming down the hall in neatly pressed black pants, patent
shoes, maroon vest, white shirt, and black bow tie, I make a run for it, slamming
my body against the heavy door of the emergency exit stairwell, down the concrete
steps, down down down, my body flying around each curve in the stairwell, my backpack
pounding against my back, such momentum built up that when I get to the last story,
I just kind of let go and lift off and sail down the last flight of steps and land
on all fours. I can hear the man shouting down the stairwell as the door clinks shut
behind me but I’m off, off down the pathway that leads back to the harbor, past the
buskers, the cartoonists, a man wearing a gas mask as he paints neon landscapes with
something that looks like a gun, the First Nations people selling their turquoise
jewelry and little jade animal things, then down onto the causeway, with its mess
of tourists swarming the docks. A seaplane flies over my head, kicking up huge ribbons
of water as its big white feet make contact with the sea, and I push through the crowd,
past the hot dog stand and the stinky public restrooms and to the parking lot, until
I’ve reached the park beside the Johnston Street Bridge, a group of men huddled around
a huge burning spliff. They holler at me but I run past the orca mural and up Store
Street, all the way to the homeless shelter and Value Village and then up through
Chinatown, down Fan Tan Alley onto Pandora, so that I can run through Centennial Square,
see if anyone I know is hanging around, but they’re not, so I run all the way down
Quadra Street until I’m spitting huge gobs of phlegm into the drain in front of the
YMCA, sides aching, so nauseous I could vomit.

The YMCA is in a brick building and I like it immediately. Miranda used to take us
swimming at Crystal Pool or Oak Bay Rec but never here. It’s kind of hard to get to
by bus. The towers of Christ Church Cathedral rise up behind the Y like huge stone
rabbit ears.

The Y is small. A royal blue awning covers the entrance, and I can see people lifting
weights and using machines through the windows and people eating in the little café.
Something like a hundred bicycles are parked underneath the awning. Between the cafeteria
and the glass doors of the entrance is a stretch of stone wall. Birds are chirping
their little bird heads off and the traffic on Quadra is busy. In the cemetery beside
the cathedral, a group of young men sit in a circle, banging on drums. One of them
is playing hacky sack. They pass around a joint, and I can smell it all the way from
over here. Please, no more dope. Not ever again. There are dogs, too, dogs tied up
in front of the building and dogs in the cemetery, skinny homeless dogs with bandanas
or studded leather collars. They’re circling the drummers. One of the guys stops drumming
to reach out and swat the dog for some offense I can’t discern. The dog yelps and
runs to the guy with the hacky sack. There are other men around, men on benches in
trench coats, men huddled in the parking lot across the street, men on the corner.
One is throwing a pair of dice into the air. I can see all the way to View Towers
from here, but I’m not close enough to see if anyone’s about to jump off.

A woman is standing in front of the cathedral with a basket in her hands. She looks
up and down Quadra as if she’s waiting for someone. But she’s not that interesting,
so I run my hands over a yew hedge, kick a couple of dead rhododendron flowers off
the bottom of my shoes—rhododendrons are the ugliest flowers in the world; when they
die, it looks like a bunch of dirty toilet paper lying on the ground—and stare at
the Y. It always sounded kind of virtuous to me, abandoning a baby at the YMCA, but
this place is a goddamn shithole. Sure, there are a hundred yuppies milling in and
out and getting on their bicycles in their gross head-to-toe spandex, as if you need
to dress up like Spiderman to ride a bike, but they’re not going to be here at a quarter
to five in the morning. These homeless guys, though, they’d be here. There’d be even
more of them than there are right now. They’d be all over.

“What would you do if you found a baby?” I’m standing beside the drum circle, yelling
over the bongos. “What would you do if you came here one day and there was a baby
here? What would you do?”

The guy who slapped his dog rests his palms on the bongo drum and looks up at me.
He’s short-lipped—I can see all his teeth even though he’s not saying anything. Big
yellow smoker’s teeth. He looks young but he’s got huge lines around his eyes like
someone carved up his face. His head is shaved and he’s wearing a green army jacket
that looks a little too small. “What’s up, little honey?” he says. His friends keep
drumming. He digs in his pocket, pulls out a baggie. “Weed, little honey? Huh, little
baby?”

The men on the bench are more interesting to talk to. One of them, Vincent, I’ve seen
before. He wears a white tennis shoe on one foot and a black Nike sneaker on the other,
a green nylon jacket, a purple scarf, and ill-fitting black pants. He’s a mumbler.
He has short black hair cut awkwardly around his face, which is dark-skinned and heavily
creased, like a Cree’s. I like this man. I run into him every time I go downtown.

“Shannon,” he says, and takes my hand in his.

The man beside him tells me his name is Dean. He talks about himself for a while,
and Vincent doesn’t say anything. He smells his fingers and plays with his scarf,
the ends of which are covered in cigarette burns.

I look at Vincent. “If you came here one day and you saw a baby lying on the ground,
what would you do?”

“Dead baby?” Dean squeezes the tobacco out of a bunch of cigarette butts and rolls
a cigarette with the half-burnt tobacco. He licks it shut, takes a big long drag,
and passes it to Vincent, who sucks on it like it’s helping him breathe.

They hold it out to me, but I’m not that hard-core yet. “Just a little baby,” I say
to Dean. “Alive. Wrapped in a sweatshirt.”

Dean shrugs, and Vincent takes another deep hit of the cigarette. His fingertips are
dark yellow, dirt caked and encrusted in every groove of his nail. I’m not sure I
like this Dean guy, but I press on. “I was found here. Right over there, in front
of the Y. When I was a baby.”

“Oh yeah?” Dean makes eye contact with me for a second and then goes back to the cigarette.
“Vince, finish it.”

I can see they have no interest in me, so I cross the street and stand in front of
the entrance to the Y. I take the fork out of my pocket and carry it inside with me
like a spear.

People are accommodating to someone so small. The woman behind the front desk is named
Chloe. She’s got a high forehead, made even higher by her ponytail, which is pulled
so tight it stretches back the skin on her head, making her look like a Siamese cat.

The Y is a noisy place. It smells like chlorine. There’s terrible country rock playing
and people going in and out of a turnstile, like at the entrance to a subway. Some
of the people make lame jokes with Chloe on their way out.

“Another day, another dollar,” a fat guy says to her, shaking his head as he waddles
past. Chloe does this sort of half-laugh and widens her eyes at me. She is lonely;
I can tell from her big eyes.

I pretend at first that I want to buy a membership, and she tells me there’s a special
rate if I pay in advance for a whole year.

“I don’t think I can get my hands on that kind of money,” I tell her, and she hands
me another brochure.

Chloe’s veins bulge out of her forearms, and I try not to stare. Besides, she’s staring
at me. We can’t get enough of each other. Short weirdo with a bum eye; android fitness
freak.

“We have financial assistance interviews,” she says. “I’m sure we can work something
out for you.”

“Even if I don’t make any money at all?”

“Even then.” Chloe goes into salesman mode and starts telling me about the yoga classes,
swimming, aerobics classes, state-of-the-art machines, dance classes, Pilates, and
all the opportunities for volunteer work, something I’ve always hated. “We rely a
lot on the generosity of our volunteers,” she says, and I give her a big bright phony
smile. Then she gets a funny look on her face as if she’s seeing me for the first
time—the entirety of me, bum eye and all—and asks me if I have a home.

“A home?”

“We have youth programs, too, community outreach programs. We facilitate a supported
independent living program for young people. We offer counseling services, employment
training, that kind of thing.
We also have a program where we set you up with your own bachelor apartment, help
you get on your feet. You want a brochure?”