Y: A Novel (32 page)

Or, there is a better alternative. She will take Edwin’s truck and drive away from
this place. On an island, there isn’t really anywhere to go, but
she can get out of the woods and into the city. Her mother’s friend Luella lives near
Beacon Hill Park. She is a registered nurse; she can help Yula deliver the baby. Luella
will let her stay until the baby can travel. She will take me to the mainland and
start a new life. Years later, my mother will balk at how similar her fantasy was
to Harrison’s. Years later, she will feel a dark twinge of regret that they couldn’t
have made it happen somehow.

Yes, this is better. Yula begins to talk to me. She tells me we’re going to drive
into town. She says she needs me to wait a little while. Just let her drive into town.
That’s all she needs from me now.

She slides into the driver’s seat, and the truck hiccups when she shifts into drive.
It lurches forward and she doesn’t even need to press on the gas. The truck slides
through the parking lot, toward the street, as if by sheer will alone.

And here we go together, down the Trans-Canada Highway. At first there’s nothing to
see. It’s dark out, just the arc of streetlights as we go under each overpass. The
highway narrows into Douglas Street, and she drives past the car dealerships, the
A&W. A memory—driving one night with Harrison and Eugene. Harrison saying, “Hold on,
I want to run in, just pull into the parking lot for a sec.” Moments later him coming
out with a stuffed A&W Root Bear in his arms for Eugene. Her heart lifting. Everything
momentarily okay.

“I don’t want this to be happening,” Yula says to me. “I don’t want this to be my
life.”

The streetlights on Douglas are blue, each with five frosted globes. They light the
sidewalks like little white moons. The Ukrainian Dance Association. Fitness World.
Money Mart. She has never been in any of these places. There is hardly anyone on the
road but she’s a nervous driver in Edwin’s truck. The engine, a V-8, feels alive under
the hood. At each stoplight she hesitates, then presses the gas pedal too hard, and
the truck shoots forward as if propelled by a rocket. The engine makes a terrible
low growl. She notices the smell then, after all this time. It is a horrible mix of
chicken manure and skunkweed. Bile rises into her mouth.

Swiss Chalet. Mayfair Lanes. The bowling alley’s huge parking lot is empty save for
one white sedan. Two women stand at one of the bus stops,
eyeing the truck as she drives past. Luella worked as a nurse in a women’s prison
for a few years, that’s what her mother had said.
It’s no good being a woman, Yula. They drag you by your hair.
Jo told Yula once, If you’re ever in trouble, any kind at all, go to Luella. She’ll
help you.

The Esso station. Mayfair Mall. Mount Tolmie to her left. KFC. Denny’s and more car
dealerships. Past the Traveller’s Inn where she and Harrison once stayed for two nights
when they first met. They bought a case of beer and a two-six of Jack Daniel’s, got
hungry, and ate breakfast at Denny’s at three in the morning. Yula remembers throwing
a French fry at the waitress’s back. Why did she do something so immature? What was
wrong with her? She hoped Harrison didn’t think ill of her because of it. He had laughed,
then walked over to the waitress and apologized, as though Yula were his child.

More strip malls. Canadian Tire. The street lined with oak trees. Getting closer and
closer to Rock Bay. Slightly safer now than it used to be. But still so awful at night.

The Ford dealership. The liquor store. Finally, Hillside Avenue. The little motels.
The strip club. Bay Street and the Dairy Queen. Thompson’s Foam Shop, Red Hot Video,
another Traveller’s Inn. A few cars are on the road with her now, and she grips the
wheel, suddenly aware of how much pain she’s in.

A contraction forces her to lurch forward and she takes her foot off the gas, rests
her head against the steering wheel. She lifts her head and the truck is pointed toward
Herald Street, stopped in the road. A dark-haired woman with huge hoop earrings is
leaning up against a building, a can of beer in her hand. Yula presses down on the
gas again and carries on. The bright-red brick of City Hall, and then she is downtown
and the streets are littered with men in sleeping bags. This is where she’ll end up,
she thinks. This has always been the logical place for her, hasn’t it? There’s something
missing inside of her—something that makes her unable to get by in the world like
a regular person. Without Harrison and her father and the cabin on the side of Mount
Finlayson, she’s not sure she can survive. She does not feel strong. She cannot think
about Eugene now. She lets her thoughts go numb. There is nothing in her mind.

Down Douglas Street past the Eaton Centre and the Strathcona Hotel, the conference
center and the back of the Empress, the street curves and rises, and the truck works
harder to take her up past the totem poles, then left on Southgate and into the park.
She’s been in the park late at night. It isn’t dangerous like everyone says. She’s
always thought it was the safest place in the world. Aside from her home, there isn’t
a single place she feels as safe as in Beacon Hill Park.

Her contractions are closer, and the pain is too much now. She stops the car on Heywood
Avenue and looks into the dark windows of Luella’s first-floor apartment. It is late
August, but on this cold evening she can see her breath in the dim light from a streetlamp
overhead.

She knocks sharply on the front door and digs her nails into her palms. And then Luella
opens the door in a blue terry-cloth bathrobe and little black moccasins. She is in
her mid-fifties now, with long gray hair almost to her waist and long, wispy bangs.
Her face seems to glow from within. Her eyes are heavily lined with kohl, even at
this hour. They are bright blue. Her pale skin is the color of a pearl. She pulls
Yula into her apartment and cups her face in her hands. The girl has never looked
so ugly and fierce. Her eyes are hard, her jaw tense. Her face is twisted.

“My mom said I should come to you if I was ever in trouble,” Yula says.

Luella and my mother lie in the bed together, waiting for the labor to progress. My
mother tells her what happened: They left the boy for a few hours while they took
a drive to the beach. She was too stoned. She fell asleep. When they got home, he
was sick. So sick. He’d drunk two bottles of flavored cough syrup. She thought he
would be okay. He died while she was sleeping. Then: Dominic standing by the side
of the road, Eugene’s body at his feet. Her father.

“Harrison and his brother were trying to hide him from me,” she tells Luella. She
tells her about the plot to bury her son in the woods. Harrison’s bag of cocaine.
“They killed my son,” she says. “I just thought he drank the cough syrup. I thought
he’d be okay. He’d already vomited
it up.” If she’d known about the cocaine, she says. If she’d only known. She never
would have gone back to sleep. “How could they have let me go back to sleep?”

My mother blinks, and the room comes into focus. It is a small bedroom, the walls
painted purple with white trim and crowded with art. Luella’s bed has a wrought-iron
frame. A mahogany bedside table holds an elegant silver lamp and a fancy clock. The
door to the bedroom is closed, and a pale-blue nightgown hangs from a hook on the
back. It is such a civilized bedroom compared to her own. The floors are swept, the
little Persian rug still bears the track marks of a vacuum. One of Luella’s oil paintings
hangs on the walls, a portrait of a woman in a white dress and red scarf, her arms
around a little girl. My mother wishes she could stay in the safety and stillness
of this small tidy bedroom forever.

She stares at the ceiling. Her legs are cramping and she stretches them out, arches
her feet. “Why did they let me fall asleep? If I’d known, if I’d known, I never would
have let myself fall asleep.”

Luella strokes my mother’s forehead. “Let’s go to the hospital. Make sure the baby’s
okay.”

“I’ll go to jail. They’ll take her away from me.”

Luella sits up and fiddles with one of the rings on her hands. She looks at my mother’s
face and imagines this small sweet girl, her best friend’s daughter, in prison for
killing her son.

My mother reaches for Luella’s hand. “I don’t want this baby to ever know who I am,”
she says. The words come out of my mother’s mouth unwittingly, and then it begins.

XIX.

l
ift it by the little handles there—yeah, that’s it—and, one, two, three,” Vaughn says,
and we lift the dinghy into the air and walk, grapevine-stepping, down the pebbled
beach toward the water. It is the first sunny day in what feels like months, the water
and sand so bright that we scrunch up our faces, hair blown back in the vicious wind.
When you’re this close to the sea, everyone walks with his or her head down and a
kind of pained look, as though their lips were being pulled back toward their ears
via invisible wire. It’s almost a sinister smile. The cyclists wear it, too, as they
whip around the coast on their spindly bicycles built for speed. I’ve come to think
of it as Island Face.

Vaughn and I have been hanging out every once in a while, weekends mostly, for the
past few months. I finally told Miranda about the ministry and Madeleine, and about
writing a letter to my father. Every morning she and I check the mailbox together,
hopeful. We finally have a morning routine.

The oars shift on the floor of the dinghy as Vaughn and I jostle it toward the ocean,
his side at least a foot higher than mine because he is
so much taller. The sea sparkles and dazzles as bright as a thousand suns. Whenever
I can close my eyes, I do. We both wear bright-orange life jackets and ball caps,
our pant legs rolled, our sneakers shooting around in the dinghy, banging into the
oars, into my backpack where we’ve put the sandwiches and cans of 7-Up. It is almost
too cold and windy to be doing this. The sun on my skin feels healing, and necessary,
and I raise my face to the sky and let it burn into my cheeks. Vaughn’s face, of course,
is slathered with zinc oxide, his nose completely white. He’s wearing mirrored wraparound
sunglasses, and I look at him and see the beach behind me, the trees beyond it, then
the sky.

“You gonna rub that in?” I point at his white nose.

He laughs. “I know this is hard to believe,” he says, “but I really don’t care what
I look like.”

There is a group of children on the beach, pails dangling from their little hands,
and gulls, and the smell of salt and seaweed is at times—when the wind blows a certain
way—overwhelming. Sand fleas bite our ankles and hermit crabs scatter when disturbed.
The dinghy is army green, the words
Fish Hunter
printed in black block letters on the side. It is Blaze’s boat, and we have borrowed
it. We’re not going to fish, just bob around in the water for a while. Vaughn says
that someday we’ll put an outboard motor on the thing and take it all the way to Discovery
or Chatham Island. He says there’s a rope swing on one of them, but he can’t remember
which.

People describe the sea as looking like glass, but I think it looks like metal, and
I still don’t understand why people think the sea is blue. It’s green. At the shoreline,
we stand at the edge of the world. As the tide comes in, the whole world pushes into
itself, and when the tide goes out, we all stretch toward the sea. It looks like someone
has spread a huge piece of tinfoil right in front of me and is shaking it from some
invisible point.

A seagull is floating in the water a few feet away, and we eye each other for a moment.
He coasts to shore and I follow his tracks in the sand as he walks toward the group
of children, who are eating French fries spread out on a piece of newsprint. The gull’s
little feet slap the wet sand
and he walks right up to the children, dips his head quickly, and then lifts himself
into the sky, fries dangling out of his mouth like worms. The children scream but
are delighted.