Y: A Novel (3 page)

My foster father’s name is Parez, but he goes by Par. He is satisfied with my meager
medical records but my mother, Raquelle, searches my face and body for abnormalities.
The night they bring me home, the neighbors, who have three foster children of their
own (
There’s good money in foster care
, they’d said), are waiting in their kitchen with a tuna casserole. “This one’s got
no real father and no real mother,” my father, Par, says to them by way of introduction,
and sets me on the kitchen table like a whole chicken. “She comes from the moon, from
the sky.” He spins around, his arms in the air. He is happy and proud.

In the months that follow, Raquelle feeds me shaky spoonfuls of bouillon, mashed carrots
with cinnamon, and finally, cubes of cheddar cheese. She sits for hours placing things
in my mouth and watching me chew. The kitchen has a sour smell from a gas leak somewhere
in the stove, and dark wooden cabinets that reek of turmeric and curry. A few grimy
rag rugs line the peeling linoleum floor. I sit in an orange plastic high chair with
a dirty white bib around my neck, and take food from Raquelle’s delicate hands. She
is a tall, lean woman, with straight black hair and an angular face. She is thirty-four.
We listen to Lionel Richie on a tiny portable radio. On the weekends, she takes me
to the Salvation Army and St. Vincent’s, where she tries on huge piles of clothes
while I lie in my stroller, smelling the cheap detergent on the clothing and the pungent
leather stench from the racks of black, scuffed-up shoes.

As a teenager, Raquelle had a pituitary tumor, and is now infertile. She has wanted
a baby for as long as she can remember. She studies her calves, her muscular feet,
in the dressing room mirror. We are there for hours.

I don’t cry much, and during my first week home Par discovers that I fall asleep if
he sings the national anthem, which is all he can think of when Raquelle suggests
he sing me lullabies.

“Ohhh, Caaa-na-dah,” he croons. He has a face as round as a beach ball, with a thick,
almost comical moustache and salt-and-pepper hair that
he keeps in a short, tight ponytail. He moved to Canada eight years ago to start a
restaurant and marry Raquelle. The restaurant is called, simply, Par’s. His English
is improving, but he still thinks “true patriot love” is all one word. He sings it
fast and doesn’t know what it means.

“She’s going to be a model,” Raquelle decides, because I’m a string-bean baby and
a bit longer than average. “Top model. Superstar!”

“Nah,” says Par. He is holding me while Raquelle beats the rag rugs over the balcony.
He is a decade older than she is, thinks he knows how to raise an industrious, confident
girl. For starters, he won’t let Raquelle dress me in pink. “I want her to work in
trades. That’s where the money’s at. Plumber, ’lectrician.” He dangles my rattle in
front of my face, and I grab it expertly in my small hands. “See how good she is with
her rattle? Maybe an athlete. Full of sport.”

Raquelle sniffs. His English embarrasses her. In her worst moments, she looks at herself
in the mirror and thinks that she shouldn’t have married him, that she could have
done better. “A dancer,” she says. “I want her to take ballet. I never got to.”

At night, Raquelle and I take the bus downtown and visit Par at the restaurant. He
stands behind the host’s lectern in a crisp white shirt and red bow tie, his round
face beaming. When we walk in he disappears into the kitchen, dries off a small amber
snifter, and pours Raquelle a little Turkish raki from a bottle he keeps under the
sink. The restaurant has no liquor license; Par cannot afford it. Raquelle sits at
a circular table by the window and feeds me from a jar of maraschino cherries. The
restaurant has only one customer, a man in his seventies with deep-set eyes and skin
like wax paper. He is hand-rolling a cigarette with loose tobacco and looks over at
us.

“Beautiful baby,” he says. His voice is low and Raquelle leans in to hear him. “What
a lovely family you have.”

Par stands behind us, one hand on Raquelle’s shoulder, the other holding a mop. “Thank
you,” he says to the man.

“She looks just like you,” the man says back, motioning to my little round face.

Par leans on the mop. The men look at each other for a minute.

Outside, the street is empty. It is ten o’clock. The light from the movie theater
marquee across the street flashes through the glass-block window, brightening the
room intermittently. It is a small restaurant, with ten tables. The tables are still
perfectly set, except the one where the man with the cigarette is sitting, his napkin
in a loose pile on top of his plate. He takes a final sip of water and thanks Par
for the meal. On his way out, he nods at Raquelle and me, flips up the collar of his
coat, and lights his cigarette in the doorway, waiting until the door has closed behind
him to blow out the smoke.

“Thank goodness,” Par says and makes a big show of wiping his brow. He motions to
his one employee, a teenage girl with a pimple on her forehead. “Go on home now, Liesl.
See you tomorrow.” We sit there while he mops the floor.

I like to think that if I’d stayed with them, I would have become a ballerina with
a pipe-fitting business on the side, but after a year, Par’s restaurant went bankrupt
and his brother offered him a job back home.

He is a changed man, angry. He has failed, and now Raquelle and I, too, are a symbol
of his failure. After he leaves her, Raquelle starts waiting tables at Scott’s downtown,
where she worked before she got married. She likes the pink vinyl booths and has missed
the handsome cook, who calls her “dearest” and kisses her hand. The restaurant is
open twenty-four hours. During her shifts, I am left with the neighbors’ foster children,
who look after me in exchange for soda pop and comics. We sit on the fire escape and
I play with a big tabby cat, who runs his sandpaper tongue over my little hand when
I pat him. The children carry me inside and tell me not to make a sound. They view
me as a guinea pig or suckerfish—something foreign to be prodded and experimented
on—something fascinating, but not at all, not for a second, human.

One day at the restaurant, the cook holds out his hand to Raquelle, a small mound
of white powder in the webbing between his thumb and index finger. Pretty soon, that’s
where her paycheck goes, too.

“I’m real sorry, superstar Shandi,” Raquelle says, tapping her nails on the social
worker’s desk. “But your new parents’ll have lots more money than me.”

They do. Julian and Moira have me baptized and change my name to Shannon. They are
both lawyers. We live on Olive Street in a periwinkle character house with white trim,
in a nice, middle-class neighborhood two blocks from the ocean. Some of the houses
on our block are built to look like ships, porthole windows lining the top floor,
curved white walls like windblown sails. Ours is a big, bright house, two stories,
with wainscoting in the living room and an upright piano. A wooden spiral staircase
leads upstairs to a master bedroom with cathedral ceilings and an en-suite bathroom
with a newly glazed claw-foot tub. My bedroom is across from theirs and is the size
of a jail cell. I have a squeaky white crib, a small antique dresser, and a nonworking
coal-burning fireplace.

It is colder in this part of town, and the air smells of salt and seaweed. The park
across from our house is filled with families during the day and empty at night. We
have a large front yard and an even bigger backyard; instead of a fence, we have a
rock wall. It surrounds the property, save for the entrance, which is marked by an
ornate wrought-iron gate, chunks of sea glass wedged between the tracery. A Garry
oak takes up most of the front yard, and the back is carefully manicured, a shale
stone path leading from the deck to a wooden gazebo with a bench swing.

A week after my new parents bring me home, they have a party to celebrate my arrival.
I sleep in Moira’s arms while she and Julian share what they know about foundlings.
I’m eighteen months old now and although I can walk and say a few words, I still look
like a baby. I have yet to grow any hair. To hide my baldness, Moira has knitted me
a little cap that looks like a bluebell.

“Some mothers,” she is saying, “think their baby is possessed, and the only way to
save it is to kill it.” She is tall and stocky with a down-turned mouth. She has curly,
chin-length hair and an apple-cheeked face peppered with pale-brown freckles. There
is something beautiful about Moira—her Scandinavian features, that white translucent
skin—but something cagey in her eyes. In photographs, she is often not looking at
the camera.

Five of her colleagues are gathered in the living room, all women. Julian mulls wine
in the kitchen and talks to a group of men from work with whom he plays racquetball.
The soundtrack to the movie
Diva
plays out of large black speakers.

“You know, we looked it up,” Julian says and slides a cinnamon stick into the steaming
pot. He wears one of Moira’s floral aprons. “In the States, twelve thousand babies
are abandoned every year—in hospitals. That number doesn’t include the trash bins.”
He snickers, and the men shift their weight.

From the love seat in the living room, Moira can see her husband stirring the mulled
wine. “Don’t repeat that awful statistic,” she calls.

He isn’t a handsome man. Soft in the stomach but skinny everywhere else, and his hair
sticks up like a hedgehog’s. He looks a bit like a hedgehog, too. Sharp snout, full
cheeked. Moira shifts me onto the lap of one of her coworkers and goes into the kitchen
to put the cobbler in the oven. Since I arrived, she has rediscovered cooking, and
has made molasses cookies and applesauce from a recipe her mother gave her.

The evening drags on too long, and I become fussy. Julian carries me upstairs and
muscles me into my crib, where I wail so loudly that he returns five minutes later
and sticks me in the back of the closet.

“Fuck, shut up,” he mutters as he comes down the stairs. One of Moira’s coworkers
hears him and shoots him a look. He takes her hand later, after everyone has had too
much to drink, and tells her he has always found her beautiful.

On Sundays, we walk as a family along Dallas Road, down the pebbled beaches, past
the world’s tallest totem pole, all the way to Ogden Point. If it’s not too cold,
we walk the length of the breakwater. The salty wind slaps against my face, and the
smell of the sea stays on my skin for hours. Sometimes Moira picks me up and I put
my little feet on the turquoise guardrail, spread my arms and let the wind blow me
back against her.

When my hair finally starts to grow in, it is as soft and white as corn silk. Moira
dresses me in her old baby clothes, which are hand-sewn,
expensive, and kept in a cedar chest. She takes Polaroid pictures of me in little
velvet vests with soft white moons, corduroy overalls, and wide-striped sweaters.
My hair glows in the sunlight; I am so well dressed.

When she makes dinner, Moira takes me in her arms, and I press my body into the crook
of her hip. It’s soft-lit in the kitchen. She likes the lights off. Moira bends and
smells the steam and her face glows blue from the gas flame. I touch her cheeks, which
are freckled and soft. I twirl her hair in my fingertips. She has such coarse hair;
it feels rough in my hands. She puts her face to mine. “Ay-bee-cee-dee-eee-eff-gee.
Now what?”

“Aick,” I say and she rewards me with a nibble of soft white potato.