Y: A Novel (26 page)

At some point when he was very young, Vaughn discovered, too, that he could manipulate
the future in small, inconsequential ways (he never wanted to disturb anything until
he saw my mother). It was a matter of visualization—he’d be walking hand in hand with
his father after a day of running errands, and in his head he’d picture a giant ice
cream cone and send the message to his father. Sure enough, moments later, his father
would suggest they go for ice cream, a bright smile on his face as if he’d come up
with such a generous idea on his own. Vaughn misses these moments of connection now
that his father is gone. There is no one
else he can communicate with in this way, though they must be out there. They must
exist.

After his father died, Vaughn lived in Langford, on the backside of Mount Finlayson,
with his mother. She, too, was predictable. She smoked and died of lung cancer. Nothing
mysterious there. Is he himself predictable? It’s obvious to him that he’ll never
marry again—that he had one shot at love early in his life, and now it’s gone. It’s
obvious he’ll never have children. It’s obvious that this is his life: weight training
every day and taking three weeks off every summer to go white-water rafting. This
is it, and that’s okay. He knows he isn’t supposed to amount to much. Some people
he meets, though, burn a little brighter. Some people burn as bright and fierce as
stars. He tries to find a way to tell a person this when he sees it in them. They’re
meant to do something; they
will
do something. Usually, he can’t find the words.

But he knows people. He
knows
people. That is all. He doesn’t think he has special powers, and he doesn’t believe
in psychics. But his eyes are wide, wide open—they always have been—and he sees everything.
He takes in the whole world at once.

“If you stand back a bit,” he says to me, “that leaf won’t hit your face when it falls.”
The little stuff, too, is important.

“Oh, thanks,” I say. We watch it tip off the edge of the eave and fall between us.

I am standing on Vaughn’s front porch on Hillside Avenue, just up from the mall. There
are a few blocks where every house is one story and has lots of crap lying around
in the yard—like the houses that line the highway long after you’ve left the city
behind. Yellow lawns like hay fields; cracked paint; homemade For Sale signs on the
cars; dead spider plants in the windows. This would be a good neighborhood if it weren’t
for this stretch of houses. What happened here? Vaughn has kept his house a little
neater, I’m pleased to see. He’s put down stepping stones in the middle of the yard,
and his front door is painted burgundy. The curtains are drawn and the eaves are full
of twigs and dead leaves. The traffic on Hillside makes a constant buzz. There’s a
guy on the corner who looks like he’s waiting to make a buck.

“You want something or what?” Vaughn looks past me at the guy on the corner and tries
to gauge the odds of us being some kind of criminal operation.

I don’t give him a minute to think. I’ve rehearsed this a thousand times. “You might
be the reason I’m alive, sir. I’d just like ten minutes of your time.”

Vaughn steps back and rests his weight on the doorframe. “I’m just starting dinner,”
he says. “But come on in.”

I had hoped for a nice, fatherly type, or a handsome man in a suit, but Vaughn is
neither. His shirt says
Don’t Mess with This Texan
. He’s a red-haired guy with a week-old beard and a deep oily tan. Every muscle in
his body is ready; his calves look like they’ve been stuffed with rocks. Faded jean
shorts and bare feet. He wears square stylish glasses, and behind them his eyes are
soft. There are bits of burgundy paint in the corners of his fingernails.

“Come on in,” he says again. “Mind the step up, and when you take your shoes off,
put them to the left of mine on the floor—if you put them on the right side we won’t
be able to open the door again without moving them.”

I slide my sneakers next to his running shoes, and he shuts the door behind me. His
house smells like fried chicken and salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Photographs of
the Grand Canyon hang in IKEA frames on the wall behind him.

“Forgive me if I don’t know who you are immediately,” he says, and cleans his glasses
with his T-shirt. “But I’ve done more than a few things that might prompt a person
to knock on my door and thank me for saving their life. Maybe if we sit down and have
a soda first, you can tell me the story until I remember it again.”

He gestures toward the kitchen. His house is warm from the afternoon sun. I take a
seat at his kitchen table while he pours ginger ale into two tall, frosted mugs, setting
one in front of me so nervously that the foam bubbles up and over the edge. I catch
it with my finger.

He sits across from me and we stare at each other. His kitchen is tidy, except for
one stretch of counter stacked high with newspapers. A photograph
of him and a border collie is stuck to the fridge with a wooden magnet in the shape
of a frog. The fridge and stove are the same dull olive green.

I fiddle with one of my suspenders and watch him watching me. And when I can’t take
it anymore—him searching my face, trying to place me, pausing on my lazy eye and wondering
if maybe he’s got something to do with it—I tell him what I know.

Cold morning, just after 5:00 a.m., the glass doors of the Y on Broughton Street,
a young woman. A small, fresh version of myself wrapped in a gray sweatshirt with
thumbholes, a Swiss Army Knife tucked under my little cold feet.

“Well, you wouldn’t have died, Shannon—” Vaughn’s phone starts to ring and he rushes
out of his chair, rifles through the slippery magazines and newspapers on his counter
until he finds the handset, and pushes a few buttons to shut it off. “Sorry—sorry.
My brother, Blaze, might pop over,” he says, shrugging at me. “Teaches tango at this
little joint on Herald Street. Nice guy. Won’t stay long.”

He takes the bottle of ginger ale out of the fridge and refills my glass, hand still
trembling. “You wouldn’t have died, Shannon. The doors were right about to open—your
mom would have known that. She left you there so that someone would see you. I just
happened to see you first.” He grabs a scrapbook off the top of the fridge, flips
through its pages until he finds the newspaper article. “Do you want this?” He holds
out the yellow page, and the corners, flimsy from age, curl up like flower petals
in his hands.

“Abandoned Infant: Police Promise No Charges Will Be Laid.”

I take the article and rub the thin newsprint between my fingers. I’ve read it hundreds
of times. I’ve studied my little potato-size face. Someone is holding me in the photo,
but his or her face has been cropped out.
Baby Jane
.

“Was she crying or anything?”

Vaughn considers this a moment and sits back down. “Your mother? That was sixteen
years ago—sheesh—you don’t look a day over—yeah. She bent down and kissed your cheek,
I think. I’m pretty sure she was crying real hard.”

“Was I hurt at all?”

“Nah.” He blinks. “You know, I thought it was you the minute I saw you through my
curtains. Jesus. You a meat eater? I’m making beef stew; there’s plenty for both of
us.”

“I would love to stay.”

Vaughn puts his hands together and makes a face like he’s being squeezed. “I really
don’t remember anything other than what’s in the papers. It was real early and the
whole thing happened pretty fast. I was more interested in you than I was in her,
if you know what I mean.”

He takes out a stack of napkins and folds two into triangles, and I wish I could fold
napkins the way they do in restaurants, but it never works out. I can tell he wants
to ask me questions, but he’s not sure what’s appropriate. He doesn’t want me to cry.

“I’m fine, you know,” I tell him. “I’m okay.”

Vaughn smiles at me. “I’m glad,” he says. “I mean, I’ve wondered.”

He hands me a peeler, and I peel potatoes and carrots while he cubes and flours the
meat.

“Slice them thin, then halve the onions,” Vaughn tells me. He says he does Shake ’N
Bake when it’s just him. “But this is more of a special occasion.”

We watch the timer on the stove while the stew simmers, and he tells me bits of his
life: a retired decathlete, a brief marriage to a kayak instructor, his days now filled
teaching weight training at the Y. “I’m there every morning anyway,” he says and picks
at his beard. “You know, it’s still weird. Every morning when I pull up, I think of
you being there.” I let him talk on and on. I can tell he doesn’t have kids. If he
did he’d say a lot of nonsense about love and hardship and the troubled girls of the
world.

He tears up pieces of iceberg lettuce into a plastic bowl and slices a tomato, sets
a bottle of ranch dressing on the table. A few years after I was born, he says, he
moved into town and has been here ever since. He puts a little bowl of plain potato
chips in front of me and tells me to eat.

“When I was sixteen,” he says, “I thought I’d like to play in the pro leagues. You
a sports fan?”

“My eye’s not so good.”

“Well then.” He starts to bend down to inspect my face, then thinks better of it and
scans the countertop. “I swear I put that oven mitt down here just a second ago.”

“It’s in your hand.”

“Thanks.”

He stirs the stew with a wooden spoon and offers me another glass of ginger ale, but
I have to go to the bathroom and wander out of the kitchen and down the hallway. It’s
a small house with a living room in the front and bedroom to the side. The bathroom
is at the back of the bedroom, separated by a sliding door. It’s tiny, with a plastic
shower stall. I stand for a minute in Vaughn’s bedroom and inspect. His bed has maroon
sheets and a navy blue comforter balled up at the foot of it. A paperback copy of
Neuromancer
lies on one of the pillows, along with a tiny headlamp, and the bedside table is
stacked with some outdoor magazine called
Explore
. He has a cheap-looking lamp in the corner with no bulb in it, and there are cobwebs
hanging from the ceiling. He must not notice this or the thin coat of dust on the
white venetian blinds. I separate the blinds and look out the window. A small stretch
of wild lawn separates Vaughn’s house from his neighbor’s, a yellow stucco number
with boarded-up windows. A couple of rusty-looking bicycles lean against the side
of the neighbor’s house, along with the innards of an old lawn mower, a couple of
wooden doors, and a splintered mirror in a moldy gilt frame. A stack of planter boxes
tower precariously beside the mirror, one of them sprouting some kind of wild-looking,
ivy-like plant. I close the blinds and look under Vaughn’s bed. A DVD of
Trainspotting,
a couple of dust bunnies, the vacuum attachment for hardwood floors. Nothing weird,
thank God. He has a little TV across from the bed, balanced on top of a dresser. It,
too, needs to be dusted. The ceiling is low, the walls the color of putty. In most
ways, it is a depressing room and doesn’t give much away about its occupant.

The bathroom is livelier. Vaughn shaves with a Mach-3 disposable razor and uses Barbasol
Beard Buster shaving cream. He washes his hair with Head & Shoulders and there’s a
little tube of some gross-looking anti-itch cream that I don’t wish to inspect further.
The walls are covered in workout routines cut out of magazines and secured with Scotch
tape.

Vaughn’s hand towels smell like Tide, and there’s a brand-new bar of Ivory soap resting
on the side of the sink. I’m so hungry I could eat it. I wish it were a piece of white
cake. Balancing in a glass beside the soap is a toothbrush so big that I can’t imagine
cramming it into my mouth. The bristles are splayed from months—years?—of use. The
floor needs to be mopped, I guess, but it isn’t too bad. The mirror needs a good Windexing,
and I search under the sink for some but there’s only toilet paper, a crank flashlight,
and a stick of Old Spice deodorant. I think after dinner I’m going to ask Vaughn if
I can stay with him for a while. I’ll clean the house and mow the little strip of
lawn. I can sleep in a sleeping bag on the couch, and we’ll just work out some kind
of schedule for the bathroom—shouldn’t be hard, especially if he’s out of the house
and at the Y every morning. I could probably get a job at the mall. I took a food
safety course at school, so I could work at the souvlaki place or Mrs. Vanelli’s pizza.
There’s so much fast food around here. There’s a good Chinese place around the corner,
too. East Garden or something. Wonder if Vaughn likes Chinese. I bet he does. There
are two gas stations down the street and the new Thrifty Foods and a Zellers store,
and it’s a little noisy being right here on Hillside, but I can buy some earplugs
tomorrow, and I’ll buy some for Vaughn as well. His brother can teach us the tango.

When I walk back into the kitchen, Vaughn is doing calf raises and flipping through
a cookbook. “Looking at my biceps routine, I bet.” He smirks at me and I blush; obviously
I’ve been gone a little too long. The stew is bubbling in the pot, and there’s a big
part of me that wants to stop time and just eat the whole thing myself.

“I always wanted to be a dancer,” I say.

“Nothin’ to it.”

Vaughn sets a bowl in front of me filled to the brim with beef stew, a pile of potatoes
and carrots heaped on top. We put huge amounts of salad on our plates. His cutlery
is flimsy and the plates are chipped. We toast our mugs of ginger ale, and I wonder
why he doesn’t drink. Recovered alcoholic? I look at the deep lines around his eyes
and decide there’s something there—in his past. Something hasn’t gone the way it was
supposed
to. Halfway through dinner he gets up to answer the phone, and when he hangs up he
tells me that Blaze isn’t coming—got held up at work.

“It’s this woman he’s seeing.” He nods at me. “Can I ask where you live?”

“On Grant Street.”