Y: A Novel (31 page)

“She’s lovely,” Nicky says. “I love the way she looks.”

“Can I ask you something?” Bess says to me, and I nod my head. She holds my face in
her hands. “What’s it like to have a lazy eye?”

I take a big breath and try to will my eye into alignment with the other one. “It’s
not lazy. It’s dead.” I stare at her as best as I can.

“She only sees out of the one eye,” says Nicky.

“Oh, wow,” says Bess. “A Cyclops.”

“Yeah, I’m a Cyclops.”

“What’s it like?”

“I trip a lot. I can’t see in 3-D.”

I stand there and let them stare at me. Bess asks if she can touch my breasts, and
I let her, and I let Nicky touch them, too. They run their hands over my breasts and
stomach and my earlobes and into the thick curls of my hair. I do not feel sexy anymore.
I feel like crying. I struggle
against the feeling and try to grasp onto what I felt before—the longing to be touched
by another person. Now that it’s happening, all I can think of is how I can get it
to stop.

Nicky cups my face and kisses me. His breath is hot and tastes sour and of vodka.
He’s a gentle kisser, and I let him hold my face and kiss my lips softly, the top
lip, then the bottom. I try to enjoy the feeling. I try to be present, instead of
how I feel, which is like some wild helium-filled balloon floating around the room,
knocking into things, searching for an exit out into the sky.

Nicky asks why I’m not kissing him back, and I say I don’t want to. I have sucked
all the sexual energy out of the room. Bess sits cross-legged on the bed. She fiddles
with the ends of her hair, her stomach big and heavy over her tight red jeans. We
can hear the sound of Lydia-Rose and Jude in the other room. It is a strange, haunted
sound, and I do not like to listen to it.

“You fucked before?” she says.

Her words startle me and I fight to hide it. “No.”

“That’s cool,” she says. We avoid each other’s eyes. I want to be home in my bed,
with Winkie at my feet.

Lydia-Rose gasps in the other room, and I wish I had something that wild and unbridled
caught up inside me. But all I feel right now is a horrible emptiness, a sense that
I’m watching things happen to me and will never fully take part.

“My cousin has breasts like you,” Bess says.

“They barely seem like breasts.”

“They’re not so bad.” She climbs under the covers and closes her eyes, and I understand
that the night is over and this is as far as it will go.

“I’m taking off,” Nicky says.

After Bess falls asleep, I hold her. I lie there with my arms around her. I breathe
in the stale air of her small messy bedroom, and I listen. There are people walking
by outside. I hear the smash of a thrown bottle. The candles burn out and the wax
oozes down the sides and onto Bess’s dresser. The room fills with their smoke. Bess
rolls onto her back, and I slip my arms out from under her. She snores softly, her
mouth slightly
open. A gray haze creeps in through the blinds as the sky starts to lighten, casting
the room in a muted, depressing light. It is the most horrible light in the world,
the light from an overcast dawn. I creep out of Bess’s bed and paw around on the floor
for something—anything—of interest. Old receipts from Mac’s for cigarettes, magazines,
gum. I find an expired driver’s license in her red jeans. Her name is Elizabeth. She
is twenty-six years old. I flip through a nursing textbook and an old issue of
Vogue,
some of the pages torn out and taped to her walls. They are of alabaster-skinned
women, freckled faces, long red hair. They are who Bess wants to be, what she wants
to look like. The perfume ads unleash their scent into the room when I flip past them.
So much to do this week. Apply for an after-school job. Lydia-Rose is going to be
a cosmetics girl at the Bay. I don’t know what I want to do yet. Sell hot dogs, maybe,
at the Inner Harbour. Work at the movie theater. A few of our friends work at McDonald’s,
but I don’t want the grease in my face, in my hair. Slinging popcorn and tearing people’s
tickets seems okay. I get great pleasure from tearing off perforated ticket stubs,
for some reason. It’s like popping bubble wrap. If I could get a summer job doing
just that, I would.

In the morning we trudge home. Lydia-Rose tells me she called Miranda last night and
told her we were safe but too tired to walk back, and she assures me that Miranda
was okay with this. I am sweaty and panicky. Lydia-Rose is cold; I can tell by the
way she’s holding onto Jude. We cross the Johnson Street Bridge and head toward Fernwood.

“What happened to Nicky?” Jude says. I can’t believe he’s only now noticed his friend
is gone. His blond cornrows are coming undone, and his eyes are thick with sleep.

“Left last night,” I say.

Lydia-Rose shoots me a disappointed look. She wants me to lose my virginity. She loves
the idea that the four of us could pal around. She shrugs at me to elaborate, but
I walk ahead. I stare at my feet. I wish I were able to get along with people my own
age, but I just hate them. The sky drizzles rain, and I walk faster. Lydia-Rose and
Jude catch up and she
takes my arm and the three of us walk side by side, back to the neighborhood. Her
hair has fallen out of its bun and is springing out crazily from all sides of her
head. I can’t bear to think about how I must look. At the corner, before we turn onto
our block, Jude gives Lydia-Rose a long kiss good-bye and I stand there watching them.
He’s at least a head taller than she and stoops awkwardly, his legs apart for balance.

He watches us as we walk up the pathway to our town house without him. I give him
a halfhearted wave and push Lydia-Rose inside before she can run back and kiss him
again. Someone has to curb this grossness a little bit. No one has patience for love
except their own.

The first thing I do when I get inside is pet Winkie and take her for a pee. It’s
early, not even 8 a.m. Winkie trots ahead of me, her back legs bowed and awkward,
and is swarmed by a group of small children walking to school. They place their hands
on her body, gently, and one of them gets down on his knees to hold her.

A city truck pulls up, and a couple of men jump out and block off a section of the
pavement with road cones. They draw lines in the street with chalk. Winkie and I spin
around at the corner and walk back to the town house. I’m not supposed to take her
farther than a block—her legs have been giving out lately, and Miranda doesn’t want
her to get any worse than she already is. When one of the men starts up a jackhammer,
I cover my ears, and Winkie runs.

Lydia-Rose is in the shower when I come back inside, and Miranda is at the kitchen
table, drinking coffee. She taps the table as I walk past, and I sit down.

“Want some coffee?”

I smile at her. She wants to have a morning ritual with somebody. “Sure.”

She pours me a cup and loads it up with milk and sugar. Her face is bright, but I
can see that she’s tired, that there is something on her mind.

“You two were okay last night?” she says and her voice comes out strained, brittle.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got school in an hour.”

“I know.”

She taps the table again, and I see that the tapping wasn’t meant as an invitation
to sit down but rather to show me something. She is tapping a piece of paper, folded
in three.

“This was in the pocket of one of your pants,” she says. “You forgot to take it out
when you stuck them in the hamper.”

I look at it. It is the brochure for young adult housing from the YMCA.

She waits for me to say something. I reach for my coffee, but my hand is too shaky
and I know I’ll never be able to bring it to my mouth. I press the soles of my feet
into the floor and pray for the moment to be over.

“I don’t want there to be secrets in this house.” Miranda gets up and puts on a pot
of oatmeal, sprinkles in raisins and cinnamon as it boils. I watch her back as she
stirs. She’s wearing her pink Molly Maid polo shirt. She’s either gained weight or
the shirt has shrunk in the wash, the back of her bra visible through the fabric.
I’ve seen pictures of her when she was our age and she looked just like Lydia-Rose,
long and lean.

It’s like there’s a fissure growing inside me. The part that wants so strongly to
show Miranda the letter I wrote to my father and to tell her about Vaughn. And then
the part that wants to keep all this information to myself, to keep it sacred, safe,
and hidden. I can’t reconcile the two.

Miranda spins around, wooden spoon in one hand, a little glob of cooked oatmeal about
to fall off the end. I look at her then, in the bright morning light of the kitchen.
Her face is wet. The men are still jackhammering outside.

“Are they going to do that all day?” she says suddenly, and her tone is so accusatory
it’s as if everything that is wrong in the world is my fault.

I shake my head and push the brochure aside. “I have to tell you something,” I say.

XVIII.

m
y mother sees her son lying by the side of the road, one little red boot on, the other
foot in a white sock. Her sweatshirt is wrapped around his shoulders. She feels something
fall down inside of her, like a guillotine. The men are talking: Joel, Edwin, Quinn,
and Harrison. She sees Joel push Harrison into the Meteor and slam the door. Edwin
lifts Eugene off the ground and walks toward her. She feels her face twist into ugliness,
like the gnarled stump of a tree. She has the overwhelming desire to pick up a rock
and pound it against her mouth until her teeth break. She wants to break every bone
in her face. She wants to take out her jawbone and bury it in the ground.

Instead, she hears the sound of Joel’s fist hitting Harrison’s face. The car rocks
back and forth. And then Quinn has her by the shoulders and is guiding her into the
truck. He helps her into the cab, then pushes her legs in, tucks her arms into her
lap, pulls the seat belt over her belly, just like he used to do when she was a child.

Joel gets out of the car and jogs toward Quinn, tells him, quickly, gasping for breath,
about the cocaine, about Harrison’s plan to bury Eugene. He has blood on his knuckles.
Yula looks at the Meteor, where she can see the outline of Harrison slumped over in
the front seat. Quinn closes her door, and the cold of the truck seeps through her
clothes and into her skin.

She watches Quinn and Joel walk to the Meteor and get in on either side of Harrison.
Are they going to kill him?

Edwin drives her and Eugene to the hospital. The weight of her son rests against her
body, and then against Edwin’s, as they curve around the Malahat. It is a fifteen-minute
drive.

When they pull up underneath the bright-red awning of the emergency entrance, Edwin
tells her he’s going to take Eugene in first, then send a nurse out for her with a
wheelchair.

“Be right back,” he says. “Hold tight, honey. They’re going to take care of you.”
His voice is soft and gravelly. He leaves the truck running, feeble heat coming out
of the vent like soft breath. Edwin flips up the collar of his flannel jacket and
reaches into the cab for Eugene. Her gray sweatshirt falls away from his body as Edwin
lifts him. He cradles the boy and walks toward the entrance. His pants are half tucked
into his boots, the laces untied. The pneumatic doors slide open and Edwin disappears,
obscured by the fogged-up glass.

I could be born here, into this life. My mother could wait for the nurse to emerge,
pushing a wheelchair with a slippery leather seat. My mother could allow herself to
be wheeled through the doors, to check in, to be pushed past the patients in the waiting
room who have just seen a man carrying her dead son. A short labor, like her first,
the baby born without incident, despite being premature. The police outside the door,
waiting for it to be over. She’ll give her statement. Maybe she’ll get to nurse me.
She will be charged with her son’s death. She’ll plead guilty. She is, after all.
And what will become of Harrison? Will he survive Quinn and Joel’s beating? What if
he doesn’t? Quinn will go to jail, another life taken. If Harrison survives, the police
will charge him, and he will spend the next decade at William Head. Quinn will not
file for custody of me, being too old. I’ll be taken away, this harrowing beginning
to my life forever stamped down upon me. The birth certificate cursed with my mother’s
name.