Y: A Novel (4 page)

On my second birthday, my parents buy me a rocking horse, a marble night-light shaped
like a lighthouse, and the complete set of Beatrix Potter books. While Moira is at
work, Julian holds me in one hand and plays the piano with the other. I squirm and
fidget. His hands are bony and covered in hair. His fingers hold me too tight.

Sometimes Moira has to work nights, and on these nights Julian insists that I learn
how to read. We start with the books
Pat the Bunny
and
Goodnight Moon,
and even though I love petting the fuzzy white bunny and saying “Goodnight, mush”
over and over, he grows tired of it and of me. When I see his face loom over mine,
the look in his eyes as he points to and sounds out each word, I begin to cry. His
teeth are little and coffee stained. The words look like symbols, like hieroglyphics.
When he points at the word
the,
I stare at him and burst into tears. He forces me into my bed, our evening ruined
by my stupidity.

“I can’t,” he says, when Moira gets home that night, “I can’t have her crying all
the time.”

Moira ties the floral apron around her waist and warms a pot of soup. “Clint said
I can have the long weekend off.” She scratches the back of her calf with her big
toe, and Julian winces—he hates it when she does that. And he hates it when she mentions
Clint.

She is called into work at night more and more often. When she gets home, I hear her
pleading with Julian to calm down while I stare
at the glow-in-the-dark stars pasted to the ceiling above my little white bed. Julian
has tucked me in so tight, I can barely breathe or move my arms.

Is she blind? Is she dumb? I want to tell her how frightened I am of Julian—of being
alone with Julian—but I don’t yet have the words. I stare into her face. I cry and
wail and beat my fists into her soft belly. “What is it, little one?” she says to
me. “Why are you so angry?”

One day Julian announces that he is going away for a week, and Moira takes me to Willows
Beach. She pushes me on a swing for a few minutes, then stops, stands on her tiptoes,
and waves to a man coming toward us. It’s her boss, Clint. He’s a tall man in a burgundy
dress shirt, skinny tie, and black dress pants. He has a sharp face and a long curved
neck, like a heron. He’s carrying a little girl about my age—two and a half—and we
stare at each other from behind the legs of our parents while they talk. She is a
confident child, dark-haired and dark-eyed like her father, and I am afraid of her.
Moira and Clint walk down the beach together and the girl and I are left to play.
We see a garter snake dart in and out of the tall grass, and the dark-haired girl
chases it until it disappears somewhere underneath the playground. She begins to cry
and Clint reappears, picks her up roughly, and puts her in his car. He takes Moira
in his arms and kisses her cheek, then bends down and looks at me. I have about an
inch of fine white hair on my head and am wearing a little white dress. Clint smiles
and says I look like an angel.

When he gets in his car and drives away, Moira gets a look on her face as though she
is suddenly in mourning. She stares at me as if I am someone she’s seen before but
can’t quite place. She buys me a root beer–flavored Popsicle from the concession stand,
and I concentrate on eating it before it melts and falls into my lap and ruins the
leather seats of her car.

When Julian gets back from his trip, he gives me a stuffed bear wearing a red- and
green-striped scarf. He gives Moira a floor-length camel-haired coat. I hear them
yelling one night, then a cold hard slap. After that, we do not see Clint again.

When the weather is nice, Julian rides to work on his bicycle, his briefcase secured
to the rattrap with bungee cords. One night he rides home after dark, a ghost on a
dimly lit side street. It begins to rain and the temperature drops fast, steaming
up the windshield of a car approaching him from behind. The car hesitates at the intersection.
Julian is paused at the light. When the car makes a sharp right-hand turn, it catches
the wheel of Julian’s bicycle and sends him spinning. He hits the curb and is launched
off the bike with such force that his back skids along the asphalt before he finally
comes to a stop. He stands, curses at the car, which has fled into the night, and
pedals the rest of the way home on the sidewalk. The blood on his back sticks to his
suit jacket like molasses.

Moira is not home. Between the bars of my little bed, I watch him. I am three years
old, my hair a big puff of white cotton, my eyes big and cloudy blue. He strips off
his jacket and slowly peels off his shirt, which is caked with deep red blood. He
drops it onto the carpet and walks toward me, lifts me into his arms, and sets me
on his and Moira’s bed. He goes into the bathroom and returns with a wet towel and
a tub of Vaseline, lies on his stomach, and tells me to rub the towel over his back
as gently as I can. He finds the remote controls tangled in the sheets and turns on
the television, presses Play on the VCR. I play with the blood on his back, running
my little fingers down the sides of his spine. He puts a gob of Vaseline in my hands,
and I smear it over the blood. I am bored and fidgety and so he makes a game out of
it, asks me to draw circles and squares and letters and numbers in the pink gunk.
Cat People
is on the television. We watch it together while I rub his back, and when I wake
up it is already morning.

Not long after, Moira finds a deep blue bruise on my thigh. Julian confesses that
he has trouble holding me. He says I wiggle out of his arms and drop like a stone.
He says he prays for me to be still. At night, he tries to shake off the memory of
his father beating his legs with a belt until they buckled and bled. He is a haunted
man. He shudders every time I cry.

“Will she ever stop?” he pleads. Moira sits at the edge of their big bed, her head
in her hands. The guilt of her affair hangs between them. She will make it up to him,
she says. She will make everything okay. What choice does she have? Despite the darkness
she sees in him, she cannot imagine her life without him in it, without this solid,
beautiful home.

We begin playing a game she calls the Stillness. For every minute I sit still, I am
rewarded with a cube of marble cheese. If I sit still for five minutes, I get a square
of raspberry-flavored dark chocolate.

“Concentrate, Shannon,” she says to me, tapping my knuckles with a wooden spoon when
I break out of the Stillness and begin to move around. “Concentrate and I won’t have
to hurt your little hand. I don’t want to hurt your little hand.”

I want to tell her that Julian holds me so tightly that he hurts me, and that is the
reason I move around, but I am afraid to say the words. I am not bad, I want to tell
her, I am in pain.

“I want you to practice the Stillness for seven minutes now. We’re going to work our
way up to ten, okay?” She waves her spoon in the air like a magic wand.

At a routine checkup, the family doctor finds purple thumbprints on my limbs. He takes
Moira into his office and tells her to make sure she and Julian are gentle with me.

“She’s a bit of a Jell-O jiggler,” Moira laughs, and the doctor does, too. Moira tells
him it’s the staircase and my wobbly legs, the way I wrench myself out of Julian’s
arms.

“She’s a very special girl,” the doctor says to her. “Take best care of her.” He gives
me a lion sticker on our way out, and when Moira and I get back in the car she turns
to me and says if I can’t be still I’ll have to go and live with another family.

The longest word in the Oxford English dictionary is
floccinaucinihilipilification
. It means “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.”
This is the last thing Julian teaches me before I’m rushed out the door in the arms
of a social worker, my little arm in the bright blue cast. One of my fingernails catches
on the zipper of the lady’s coat, tears, and leaves a bloody trail. Moira stands in
the doorway, her face pale. There is nothing in her eyes.

In the backseat of the lady’s car is an old video game: Pac-Man. I play it, one-handed,
with a boy who is older than me, and he says if I get the keys sticky he’ll sock me
in the gut. The lady straps me so tightly into the car seat that I can barely breathe.
She drives a wood-paneled station wagon and the beige seats are coated in plastic.
It smells so strongly of vinyl that I throw up and the boy hits me when he sees what
I have done.

I am afraid of the dark. We are led by the hand down a carpeted staircase, and I can’t
tell whether we’re in a church or somebody’s basement. Little wooden crosses dot the
walls and everywhere I look there’s a Styrofoam cup with a lipstick smear. The room
smells like Hamburger Helper. The man who’s holding my hand looks like Raffi, but
he speaks in a gruff voice and there’s dirt under his nails. There are fifteen cots
in rows of five and we each get a blanket and a small pillow. When he lets go of my
hand, I ask him to stay, but my voice is too quiet and the room sucks the sound.
Lights out,
someone says and someone else says,
I don’t want to be next to this stinky fucker,
and someone else says,
Shut it,
and that’s that. The boy is in the cot next to mine. When my eyes adjust, I can see
the whites of his. We watch each other, and when I reach out my hand he whispers,
Baby,
but takes it nonetheless. We fall asleep this way, and all night people come and
go.