Y: A Novel (40 page)

Quinn looks at me with his wild gray eyes. He looks tired. “You’ve got bright eyes
like your mother.”

“Like yours, too.”

Yula gets up from the table and slings a dish towel over her shoulder. “Will you stay
awhile?” she says. “I’d like to make you something to eat.” She says she’s been to
the farmers’ market recently and has two fresh chickens, which she’ll roast with carrots,
red potatoes, fennel, and parsnips. She’ll even make me a birthday cake—yellow cake
with chocolate frosting.

Vaughn looks at me, and Miranda reaches over and squeezes my hand. Do I want to do
this? I do. I do.

But it’s early still, and Yula puts the kettle on, takes down some mugs, roots around
until she finds some tea. The kitchen is warm from the sun streaming through the windows.
Lydia-Rose squints in the sunlight. Yula has taken off her blue cardigan and wears
a ribbed gray undershirt, her arms ropy and muscular. I hope I’ll have muscles in
my arms someday.

None of us has any idea what to say to each other.

After the kettle boils and the tea has steeped, Yula puts a mug down in front of Miranda.
She bends close to her and says, “Thank you for bringing her to me.”

We do, though—we find something to say. Quinn tells us the history of the property—it
was Jo’s parents’ originally, passed down to her, inherited by Quinn when she died.
Eventually it will be Yula’s. The strangeness of the house is Quinn’s. He put in the
wooden beams, took out the exterior walls, and replaced them with the huge floor-to-ceiling
windows. We admire his handiwork, and then he and Vaughn disappear outside for a while
to look at the exterior. Both have the good sense to leave me with Yula and my family.

Once they’re gone, we reposition ourselves: Yula sits beside me, Miranda and Lydia-Rose
across from us. We drink hot cups of bush tea with honey, and Yula puts out a plate
of shortbread cookies. I take a bite of one and then give the rest to Winkie.

Miranda spends a long time telling Yula about me. She can tell I’m too nervous and
in shock to speak clearly about myself. She tells her about the homes I lived in before
she adopted me—stopping a minute when she gets to the part about Julian to check in
with me that it’s okay to go on.

“You can tell her,” I say.

Yula’s face pales and she bites her cheek while Miranda speaks. There is a horrible
moment when Yula starts apologizing and can’t stop and just looks at me and says I’m
sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry over and over again. But we get past it, and she recovers,
and Miranda tells her about our first few years together, how I wouldn’t sleep, how
she’d find me at all hours, wandering the house. Lydia-Rose talks for a time about
what it was like at first to share her mom. It’s amazing to me that we can speak so
frankly. None of these things has ever been said. But once they are, I realize I’m
not holding on to any pain from the past anymore. I can hear Lydia-Rose talk about
her initial jealousy and all I feel is grateful that I have a sister, no matter what
it took to get us to this point.

“We had three cats, too,” Lydia-Rose says, and we tell my mother about Scratchie,
Flipper, and Midnight, about burying them in the park. I have never developed the
photographs from the day we took them to the vet’s. I tell Yula that I will now. I’ll
develop them and bring them to her. I’ll show her our wonderful cats.

Miranda is honest about how I do in school—not well. She says I’m a drifter. And I’m
still not a good sleeper, and I still fidget. I talk a lot sometimes or sometimes
I say nothing at all. She says I have trouble staying in the same place or doing the
same thing for very long. This is why, she thinks, my attendance is so bad. She says
the school has called her countless times. I hang around downtown too much. I don’t
have any close friends. But I know everybody. And everybody knows me and my hair.

“I like my life,” I say, a little defensively, while Miranda narrates. “It’s been
a good life. I like my life!”

She tells Yula that I never said anything, not even once, about wanting to find my
birth parents, even when she asked. She says I keep secrets, but she’s realized over
the years that it’s a way of protecting myself from being hurt, that it’s not malicious,
that I carry the special things in my heart, wrap them up deep inside so they’re never
discovered, never taken. Physically, am I healthy? Yes. My arm hurts at night from
Julian breaking it when I was a little kid. Tendonitis. Miranda says I’ve never said
anything about the pain, but she sees me worrying my wrist at the dinner table, rubbing
it when it rains. The blindness seems not to be a problem at all. It was at first;
I walked into everything. Miranda was so scared they’d take me away from her because
of all the bruises on my arms and shins. But now I seem to navigate the world just
fine. She thinks I can probably even get my driver’s license, though I have no interest
in it. I’m a bus person through and through. I haven’t menstruated yet. She’s worried
about that. She’s not sure if it means anything. She tells Yula that she thinks I’m
a special person, put on the earth for a reason. She says she’s never met anyone like
me. She says she feels honored that she was given the opportunity to shepherd me through
my life. I suppose it isn’t surprising that she thinks about me so much and with such
depth and sensitivity, but it startles me all the same to hear it. I blush. I feel
my legs start to kick
together, that old familiar pattern of nervousness. Winkie unearths herself and begs
to be lifted onto my lap, and we pause a minute to pat her, to give her all our attention.

“You and your daughter have such beautiful skin,” Yula says to Miranda. “Did you grow
up here?”

“On the mainland.”

I look at Miranda. I barely know anything about her life before I came into it.

And then it’s Yula’s turn to speak.

“Just sit with me awhile,” she says to me, Miranda, and Lydia-Rose. “I’ll tell you
everything.”

XXVI.

i
t is my seventeenth birthday, and in some ways, this is where the story—at least this
part of it—ends. Yula says we should spend the afternoon exploring the property while
she cooks. If we want to wander over to Joel and Edwin’s, she’ll call ahead so they
don’t shoot. She laughs when she says this, but I can tell she’s at least partly serious.
She says it’s really something to see all the rusted-out cars, tractors, bicycle parts,
tires, old porcelain sinks, toilets, and stained-glass windows they’ve collected over
the years. It’s like an outdoor junk museum.

Winkie will likely have a few ticks on her by the time we return; Yula says she’ll
help me comb over her body, and if we find any, we’ll burn them off with a match.
She assures me that Winkie won’t mind this, that it’s a painless experience. The tick
will retreat when it feels the match on its backside, and we’ll pull it out with a
pair of tweezers, flush it down the drain.

If we cross the street, we can visit a rescue farm. There are eight horses there right
now, Yula says, two llamas, three goats, three pigs, and a bunch of chickens. Donkeys,
too. No one will mind if we wander over and pet the animals.

Beyond that, the forest is always worth exploring. Some of the trees are over six
hundred years old. Douglas fir, Western red cedar, hemlock.
Bigleaf maple, arbutus, black cottonwood. Yula tells us all their names, points out
the window. “Stand next to one of them and look up the trunk,” she says. “But make
sure someone is standing behind you. You’ll fall over, you’ll just tumble back and
fall.”

This is a rain forest. This is sacred land. “Go out into the woods,” Yula says.

We leave her in the kitchen and say good-bye to Quinn, half drunk, slumped on the
porch in a rocking chair. No one is wearing proper shoes for a hike, and we gingerly
make our way through the ferns and fallen needles and over the felled trees. Vaughn
holds Winkie because my arms are tired. She takes in all the smells around her, her
head over his shoulder, nose twitching. It’s so much colder, damper, in the shade
of the forest. Something I managed to pick up in school: the human eye is more sensitive
to green than to any other color. We see almost every shade of it.

We walk single file. There is only a narrow, tamped-down path; the rest of the forest
is thick with trees, and we would be easily separated. Vaughn makes a little trumpeting
sound, and we trumpet back. This is what we’ll do if we get lost: we’ll trumpet at
one another until we’re all found. He leads us, Miranda next in line, the back of
her denim shirt already wet with sweat. Lydia-Rose walks behind me, the slowest of
us all in her heeled gladiator sandals. She has to stop and readjust the straps because
the heat makes her feet swell. My jeans are too long and slip under my shoes and I
have to keep yanking them up. But we press on anyway, peculiar party that we are,
and every once in a while Vaughn reminds us to stop and look around. The path is so
gnarly with roots that I realize this whole time I’ve only been looking down. Lydia-Rose
steadies herself against me and looks up the trunk of a Douglas fir. Yula was right.
She stumbles into me, then doubles over, suddenly dizzy. We all do this; we all get
vertigo.

The forest floor crunches under our feet and the trees are loud with birds. There
are banana slugs on the path, and Vaughn dares us to lick the underside of one. He
says it will make our tongues go numb, but we have no interest.

Miranda and Vaughn walk ahead of us for a while, comparing their lives. They seem
relaxed around each other, and I’m relieved. Then the
forest thins out a bit, and we find ourselves in a sea of rusty automobiles, tall
grass poking out the windows, tires sunk into the earth. Miranda and Lydia-Rose refuse
to walk through it for fear of getting tetanus.

“You two go ahead,” Miranda calls out. “Meet us across the street. We’re going to
go see the animals.”

We wave to them, and Vaughn makes the trumpet sound. We stop and admire an old tractor,
so old it looks like part of the forest—its rusty sides are the color of cedar. Farther
along is a drop tank from World War II. It’s been here so long it doesn’t smell of
fuel. I put my hand on it, gingerly, as if it might explode.

A helicopter flies overhead, so loud I hold my ears. It looks like a giant silver
dragonfly. There are all kinds of dangerous and sharp-looking things on the ground:
anchors, chains, that sort of thing. The drop tank has rusted, but it still shines
in the light. It looks like a big bullet, and it’s warm from the sun. Winkie runs
up to it and nudges it with her snout. Some water trickles out, and she furtively
laps it up and then bucks a few times.

Another helicopter appears, its shadow hovering over me, Vaughn, and Winkie. It’s
a relief from the white of the sun, and I wish it would stay. I look up. I count to
three and hold my breath. Winkie cowers. The sound of the rotors is so loud, it feels
like my ears might melt. And then, just like that, it’s gone.

A trailer is up ahead and we figure this is where Joel and Edwin live.

“You want to see if they’re home?” says Vaughn. I shrug. I’m not sure that I want
to meet these guys. Vaughn taps on the door, and we wait, but nothing happens, no
one comes. He tries again, presses his ear against the door, but there is no sound,
save for a squirrel chittering at us in a nearby tree.

“All right,” Vaughn says. “Let’s go see those animals.”

We push through the junkyard, past the trailer, until we reach a narrow street, the
little farm across from us.

“You okay?” Vaughn says.

“I think so. I like it out here.”

I can see Lydia-Rose and Miranda in front of a gray barn, talking to
a woman who is feeding a donkey. There are sheep here, too. They look alarmed. They
look as though they haven’t seen a person in years.

“I mean, is your mind okay.” He puts his hands on his hips and stares at me.

I stare back. “Did you recognize her? Could you tell it was her?”

Vaughn looks at his cowboy boots, then back at me. He takes a while to respond. “I
can’t really. No. I mean, I can tell she’s your mom. But if I saw her on the street,
I’m not sure. I’m not sure anything would happen in my head.”

“She seems kind of stunned. Shell-shocked or something.”

“Yeah. Look, you call the shots here. We can stay for dinner or not. This is all completely
up to you.”

“Okay,” I say. “I think I’d like to stay.”

We cross the street, and Lydia-Rose bugs out her eyes when she sees me.

“This donkey is over forty years old,” she says. His fur is as thick and dense as
a Brillo pad. “He likes it if you scratch the insides of his ears.”

So I do. I rub the donkey’s ears and, sure enough, he puts his head down, like Winkie
does when she’s trying to get the most out of something. The ground is muddy, and
my Vans are soaked through, the bottoms of my jeans wet. Lydia-Rose’s feet are black;
Miranda’s espadrilles are mud-caked, probably ruined. We’re all sweaty and shiny-faced,
except for Vaughn, who breathes in deeply and evenly, oblivious to the heat. Three
horses are nuzzling the ground in a paddock behind the barn, eating grass. I look
around for the llamas but don’t see them. Winkie sniffs at the donkey, and the two
animals consider each other, each a little astounded.