Y: A Novel (33 page)

We lower the dinghy into the water, and Vaughn holds it steady while I climb in. I
tuck myself into the bow and spread my arms over the sides while Vaughn hoists one
leg and then the other over the side and flops down. He hooks the oars into place
and swings the dinghy around so my back is to the shore and rows us out into the water.
The waves slap against the rubber sides, and Vaughn’s oars slice through the water
like blades. The muscles in his upper arms ripple when he rows.

All the windsurfers are out, their sails stretched taut. I lean over the side and
watch for jellyfish. Their circular bodies ooze by, pulsing in and out like beating
hearts.

Deadheads; kelp. A beer bottle, but there isn’t much trash in the water. Finally we
catch up to a seal, which follows us for a while, his head bobbing. Then he disappears,
only to appear moments later, improbably far away.

Vaughn rests the oars against the side of the boat and unwraps a sandwich, hands it
to me. We made them earlier in his kitchen: turkey and slivered iceberg lettuce, mayonnaise.
Vaughn eats his in three large bites, then glugs his 7-Up. He wipes his mouth with
the back of his hand. At dinner with Miranda and Lydia-Rose, I have to be careful
to take small bites and to chew everything and not to slurp. I hate it. I don’t want
to eat at all if I can’t eat like a wild animal.

We unwrap our second sandwiches and eat those like beasts, too. We are silent, our
cheeks as full as chipmunks’. A seagull lands near us and watches us chew. Vaughn
rips off a bit of crust and tosses it into the waves.

He picks up the oars again and rows a little farther out. A windsurfer loses his balance
and falls backward into a wave. I watch Vaughn row. Even the muscles in his wrists
respond to the pull of the oars. I look at my own wrists, my soft white arms. It doesn’t
seem as though he and I are even of the same species.

Vaughn rubs at the zinc on his nose. His arms are already a shade darker. He says,
“Did you ever hear back from your father?”

“No.”

Before I got the courage to send the letter, I read it so many times that I memorized
it. When I close my eyes at night, I hear it. Whenever there is silence, or any kind
of pause, the words creep into my head. Did he even get the letter? If so, did I offend
him? What if I never hear back? What if he isn’t my father after all? The possibilities
skip around in my head.

“When you’re in the thick of your life, Shannon,” Vaughn says suddenly, “it feels
like a mess—one surprise after the next. But later, when you look back on things,
it seems like a plot. One thing leads to another. Et cetera. You start to see the
causal relationships between things.” He pauses and lets the oars drop. We let the
wind push us back toward the shore, the waves lapping against the thin vinyl floor
of the dinghy. “But, you know, I suppose if you have enough time on your hands, you
can make connections about anything.”

I drum the floor of the dinghy with my feet, feel the waves push back against it.
“Just feels like a big mess to me.”

We drift closer to the marina, and the wind dies down but I can hear it whistling
through the masts. I should get a sailboat. I should live on a sailboat. Everything
is better when you’re on the water.

After a while I say, “Miranda wants to meet you.”

“Happy to.”

“She says she wishes I would have told her about all this earlier.”

“I’m sure.”

“She says she’ll give me as much space as I need. She says she’ll do whatever I need,
even if it’s to stay completely out of it.”

Vaughn shakes his head at me. “You’re one of those people, aren’t you. So unlucky
in some ways, so lucky in others.”

The seal re-emerges about five feet away from us with his shiny, bowling-ball head.

“I wish I were a seal,” I say.

“A bird,” says Vaughn.

“A fish.”

“A whale.”

“A porpoise.”

“A manatee.”

“An anteater.”

“An aardvark.”

“Tortoise.”

“Wombat.”

“Great white shark.”

“Woolly mammoth.”

“Elephant seal.”

“Back to seals then.”

“Back to seals.” The seal dunks his head and shoots back down.

“You know there’s a monster in the bay,” says Vaughn.

“I know. The Cadborosaurus.”

“Like the Loch Ness monster.”

“The Canadian version.”

Vaughn laughs and stretches out his legs, lets them dangle over the edge of the boat.
I stare at the soles of his feet, which are callused and dry.

“You should ask Chloe out on a date,” I say to him. I think about her high forehead
and ponytail, her amazing android body. The look in her eyes when she talked about
him. Yes, this should happen.

“Chloe? She’s too young for me, don’t you think?”

“Nah. Ask her out. I promise you she’ll say yes.”

Vaughn tilts his head, considering this. “If you say so. Okay. But we work together.
That could get weird, no?”

“Who cares. Life is weird. You’re weird.”

He laughs again. “You’re weird.”

“You’re weirder.”

Vaughn dips the oars into the water again, rows us around some more. He says he can’t
believe I’ve never been out on the ocean before. He says there’s no excuse, living
where we do.

The tide has pushed us almost all the way back to shore. Vaughn dips the oars into
the water, rows us one stroke forward, and then I feel the rocky sand beneath me.
The waves nudge us farther and farther up the beach while we sit lazily in the boat,
letting the tide do all the work.

The sun beats down, and I feel my shoulders burning. I could stay in this boat all
day. Time is suspended in a boat. I take a deep breath and try to remember this moment,
the heat on my face, the grit under my feet, the strength of the waves. I run my hands
through the pebbles and sand, searching for sea glass. One thing leads to another.
There are tide pools between the larger rocks, tiny rivers connecting them to the
sea.

After we’ve deflated the dinghy, washed the sand from between our toes, and rubbed
our shoulders with aloe vera, I stand in front of the mirror of Vaughn’s bathroom
and wash my hands with his little cake of Ivory soap, which is now as curved and thin
as a seashell. He’s up the street, getting takeout from the Chinese joint. We’re having
hot-and-sour soup and egg rolls. I can’t wait. I’m starving. I lift my shirt in the
mirror and stare at my belly. I look like a seal pup. Planet Big Stomach over here.
I want to eat until I burst.

In Vaughn’s living room, I kneel on the couch and stare out the window. The traffic
shoots by, tailed by an endless stream of people on bicycles. I try to picture what
my life will be like, but it all seems impossible. It seems impossible that I’ll graduate
from high school, get a job beyond dishwashing in the summertime, have a home one
day, a partner, children of my own. It seems impossible that I’ll ever hear back from
my father. Or that I’ll ever travel, see Europe or Asia, take a road trip all the
way to New Orleans. Life seems full of
impossibility
. I don’t know how anyone gets through it.

This is what the inside of my mind looks like today: it’s a skinny white room with
wide-planked floors and four windows, one on each wall. In the middle of the room
is an elaborately carved nineteenth-century double-pedestal desk, stained black. It’s
a real eyesore. The room is in an old farmhouse, and the farmhouse sits in the middle
of a great green field. It’s so quiet there. Inside the farmhouse, I stay so still
I forget I exist. I barely make a ripple.

I find a pack of matches in Vaughn’s kitchen and burn the lint off my
socks, then I hold the flame under my heel until it hurts. Vaughn’s house smells like
potato chips. It always smells like potato chips. He must eat them in secret and then
stuff the bags in the bottom of the trash. There is evidence everywhere—salt and crumbs
on every surface, illuminated in the window light. One of his cupboards—the one where
he keeps his spices and cooking oil—is filled with diet pills, fiber pills, weight-loss
supplements, and vitamins. But the spices and the oil are lined up in front, so I
have to peer over them to see the pills. There is a bottle of milk of magnesia and
then a huge tub of protein powder behind the canola oil. I unscrew the lid and smell
it. It’s made with kelp and smells like the sea. In another cupboard he has a huge
stack of cookbooks, the pages dog-eared and marked with Post-it notes. His freezer
is bursting with leftover food. I take out a chocolate Popsicle, which claims to have
only one hundred calories, and finish it in two bites. I can relate to this hunger
Vaughn must feel, this need to cram the kitchen with food. Lately I’ve been feeling
so hungry that I buy a bag of potatoes on my way back from school and then boil the
whole bag and eat it with huge melting slabs of butter before Miranda or Lydia-Rose
gets home. I do not feel sick after. I feel like I could eat an entire cake.

Miranda doesn’t like to have leftovers. We have to eat everything in the house before
she’ll go grocery shopping again. She can’t bear the thought of wasted food. She also
can’t bear the idea of us eating for the sake of eating—mindless eating, she calls
it. At dinner, she tells me to slow down and chew. To chew everything twenty times.
I can’t do this. I want to eat everything in the world, and I want to eat it very
quickly.

Vaughn is taking forever, so I ransack further. I lift the couch cushions and find
nickels and pennies and a receipt for a bicycle pump. The front hall closet is crammed
with anoraks and fleeces, the floor crowded with rain boots, flip-flops, and five
worn-out pairs of running shoes, some more worn out than others. He has a great CD
collection, lots of reggae. And then I find a photo album of his wedding. His hair
is shoulder-length and an even brighter red than it is now. He’s softer looking somehow,
not as sinewy or strong. He wears a blue suit and tie, a corsage on the lapel. He’s
standing with his arms around half of a large redwood tree. His ex-wife
encircles the other half, their hands barely touching. She is a small, thin woman
with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. She has a plain face. She looks no-nonsense
to me. She looks like someone who never farts. She’s wearing a three-quarter-length
emerald-green dress and Birkenstocks. There are only six more photographs. The rest
have been taken out. One is of Vaughn standing with three people, two of whom I guess
are his parents, and Blaze, his brother—they’re all shorter than Vaughn and grinning—and
the rest are photos of his ex-wife. Cross-legged, eating a piece of cake. In the crook
of a tree. Against the trunk of another. The last is a close-up. Her smile is a little
half-moon, her skin stretched taut. She looks more like an athlete in this photo than
in the others, even though it is just of her face. Her eyes are small and she’s squinting—the
sky is overcast but bright. And then there’s a letter folded in thirds, and I take
it out.

Though I can’t prove this with any kind of certainty, I do not believe I fulfilled
you, and I found you radiated a peculiar kind of sadness and resistance, particularly
when making love. As I came to know and love you, I accepted that your true heart
was elsewhere. Be it with a former lover or an imagined one to come, I do not know.
I mustn’t feel second rate, you’ll understand. And now that I know about Sylvie, I
know I was in fact second rate, and that you were searching for more.

I can’t be your friend, Vaughn. I don’t know how. I might have loved you the most
of all; either that or the sum of our heartbreaks never diminishes, only keeps silent
until we’re ripped open again. Whatever the case, the idea of laughing with you seems
foreign and cursed. If we can’t laugh, we can’t be.

I trust your life will bring you plenty of magic.

The rest of the album is empty. I slide it back into the bookshelf and wait for Vaughn.
What is it like to marry someone and then have it not work out? What is it like for
him to live alone? I wonder if he thinks about these things much, or at all. I can
never tell if other people are dissecting themselves and the world the way I do.

I watch him cycle up the street, the bag of Chinese takeout dangling from his handlebars,
then dismount and walk toward the house. He’s wearing navy blue rain pants, a faded
red sweatshirt with a hole in the elbow, white tennis shoes, and a ball cap. He knocks
on the front door, then opens it and says, “Anybody home?”

Part Three

XX.

i
f you ask me what I remember about Julian, I’ll tell you that his lower lip jutted
when he spoke, exposing his bottom teeth. I used to study the way he talked, watching
his lip shoot down if he said a word that started with G, J, U, or Y. He had tiny,
coffee-stained teeth. He had a gummy smile. His lower lip was plump, topped by a skinny
upper lip that seemed to fall down upon the bottom one like a lid when he closed his
mouth. He had a deep groove between his top lip and his nose—this little thing is
called the philtrum, I’ve since discovered. His eyes darkened when he drank. He was
always going to the bathroom, especially at night. Up, up, and up again, five six
seven eight times before finally settling in to sleep. Anywhere we went, he had to
find the bathroom. He wore a blue windbreaker when it was cold out, and underneath,
a mustard-colored fleece. His skin was perpetually flushed. His hands rough and cracked.
He slept in striped pajama bottoms. His stomach sagged over the waistband of his pants.
Hideous but odorless feet. On Sundays he didn’t shave and padded around the house
in gym shorts and a ripped T-shirt a couple of sizes too big. His socks pulled to
the knee, and little black slippers. He liked to read. He read everything—novels,
magazines, menus, flyers, instructions. The bathroom, stacked high with newspapers.