“There are things I shouldn’t have done,” Julian says.
I reach for a gummy bear and squish it between my fingers.
He laughs and squishes one, too. “You were my daughter for a while.”
“I remember.”
“I played Chopin for you at night.” He hums a few bars but I don’t know what to say. I am suddenly too hot; my feet are baking in my little canvas shoes. “I taught you the alphabet.”
“Moira did.”
“Me actually.”
I slip off my shoe and stick my toe in the air vent.
“I love you, Shannon,” he says. He passes me another gummy bear and I put it in my mouth, then take it out and put it in front of the air conditioner to dry off the spit. Julian asks me not to. He asks me again.
But I can’t stop. “Who invented air?”
“No one invented air.”
“Can I have an ice cream?”
“Just—please, Shannon—take your toe out of the vent. It’s getting dirt all over the—”
“Miranda doesn’t let us have ice cream.”
“Okay—your toe, Shannon, now.” He makes a grunting sound and grips the steering wheel. “Stop it. Fucking stop it now.” A big vein pops out in his forehead. His hands are taut. He reaches for me and pulls me toward him, roughly, and I hit my shin on the gearshift.
He pushes his mouth against my ear. That’s when I remember. Just a little. Just a nudge at first—a small flash in my brain—after all, I was only two. A hand, a fist? Smack of skin on skin, his grip too tight, a lazy kick meant for no one to see, crunchy crack of bone. The whir of the X-ray machine. White bones on film. My fingers dipped in a pot of hot soup. An eye patch, a cast. His voice thick and weary: What comes after G? Say it backwards, faster now. Jell-O jiggler. Wiggly worm. Did I fall or did he drop me? Thin skull on hard linoleum. Dull thud. Then: no sound.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he is saying, “I’m not going to—I’m not going to hurt you—” and then Miranda is banging on the driver’s side window, her big face sweaty and red. She runs from the car with me in her arms and Julian stares after us, his fist in the air. There’s no sound coming out of his mouth, but I can tell by his eyes that he is calling her a bitch.
IV.
after sixty-five million years, the dinosaurs are back. Harrison knocks on the door of the cabin, tells Yula and Eugene to put on their boots, and takes them by the hand. They skirt the edge of the property, through the tall skinny trees that line the cabin for privacy, past the neighbor’s chicken coop with its barbed wire to keep the dogs from getting the eggs, past the chickens gathered around a tin dish filled with ears of corn and cantaloupe rinds from someone’s discarded breakfast. They walk past all of this until they are standing in waist-high grass. Here and there are pockets of tamped-down grass, and Harrison tells Eugene that this is where the deer have been sleeping. The sky is big over their heads and Mount Finlayson looms, tree-covered and dense with green, in the distance. Most days it is obscured by clouds. To their left is the forest, to their right an endless field that leads to Joel and Edwin’s scrap yard. Harrison picks up Eugene and walks into the forest, ducking suddenly under a branch. Yula follows, and then she is no longer under the great expanse of sky; she walks carefully through the trees, for she is seven and a half months pregnant with me, and it is steep and slippery. Harrison and Eugene are headed to the waterfall directly below.
“Be careful,” Harrison calls back to her, and she grips the spindly tree trunks for support as she makes her way down, down, down, until she’s balancing on a rock in the middle of a stream, the water moving slowly past her because there is a dam below the waterfall to stop it from rushing by. It is so much darker and cooler now that they’re in the woods. Eugene crouches and points to a tiny fish, so small it is almost imperceptible. The fish senses his presence and darts under a rock, sending rivulets of mud spiraling into the water so that Yula, Eugene, Harrison—and all the creatures—can no longer see him.
“Now I’ll take you to Dinosaur Island,” Harrison says and lifts Eugene into the air again. The boy is silent with awe and appreciation. Yula follows them, clambering alongside the waterfall on her hands and knees, amazed at how Harrison scales it effortlessly, her son clinging to his back. They reach a shelf and walk past the waterfall, the rocks covered in mud and moss, and suddenly they are in a stone cave that Harrison says is where the dinosaurs live. Stones balancing on top of stones, something between a cairn and an old chapel. There are frogs, old birds’ nests, dragonflies, and fossils of trilobites, which Harrison picks up and shows to Eugene, tracing the little boy’s finger over the indentations, describing the creatures’ bodies, their time on the earth.
Yula and Harrison have been together for a year now. They are still playful. This is the best part of their relationship; when they are together, it’s as if they are children again. They speak in baby voices. They are sweet and full of laughter. When Harrison comes home, he lifts my small mother into his arms and carries her around the cabin, telling Eugene that his mother can fly. In these moments Yula is always slightly outside of herself. She knows it cannot last—everything sours, spoils, eventually. She tries to enjoy it—being carried through the air—but something stops her. The way some of her hair has caught on one of Harrison’s buttons, the way his hands grasp her underarms too tightly. There is always some small amount of pain, of wanting it to be over.
He is such a jovial, juvenile, boy of a man. He believes he is destined for greatness. He believes he is special. He believes he is unlike anyone he has ever met before.
“Do you know I used to sing?” he tells Yula one night, his eyes wild. He presents her with a dusty VHS tape, and they watch a shaky recording of him singing in a church choir, then a blurry close-up of his face as he sings the solo in “Once in Royal David’s City.” He wears a maroon cassock and a white ruff around his neck. As he watches the video, his eyes darken. He walks into the kitchen and returns with a whisky bottle and a mug full of ice clinking around in his shaking hand.
When the video ends, Yula holds him like a baby and lets him weep into her neck. When he drinks, he cries. He and Dominic were sent to a reform school by their parents because they were, in his mother’s words, “uncontrollable.” He tells Yula about the beatings by the schoolmaster. He talks about his desperate need not to be abandoned. He talks about living with a perpetually broken heart. When he’s really drunk—or if he gets too high—he babbles about being raped when he was in jail, but Yula can never get him to talk about this when he’s sober. He gets a vacant look in his eye and tells her that he doesn’t have any idea what she’s saying. He drinks again and tells her about all the people he’s known who have died. It seems to Yula an impossibly long list. He cannot have lost so many people. Is he exaggerating? He tells her about being tormented by Dominic, two years older. He is so tender and damaged. Yula longs to minister to him. His self-absorption is, somehow, seductive. She waits for him to be drunk enough, then takes him in her arms and whispers, Tell me.
Four days before she gives birth to me, Yula’s alarm goes off at seven thirty and she walks across the lawn and gets her father’s coffee brewed and ready, puts The Globe and Mail on the kitchen table with a stack of brown toast, three pieces buttered, three pieces with grape jam, and a pear like a giant green raindrop. What Quinn doesn’t eat she gives to the neighbor’s chickens, which run toward her when she calls them and take the bits of crust from her hands. The sun is hot on the back of her neck as she bends to feed them, one hand on her belly.
She and Harrison have been fighting lately over how much she looks after her father. When Harrison came into Yula’s life she explained her need to look after Quinn, calmly, over coffee the morning after their first night together. Her father was her priority, second only to Eugene. Could he understand this? Would he be okay with it? When he moved into the cabin, they discussed it again. She told him about the suicide letter. She told him not an hour went by when her h
eart didn’t jolt a little, wondering if this was the day when she would find him.
But, more so, she likes it here. She hates to leave—she hates the way people claim her belly when she’s in public, asking how far along she is, who is the lucky father, isn’t she a bit young to be with child, then telling some anecdote about a teenage pregnancy, a neighbor, a cousin, someone they met once. When she and Harrison fight, he stays out with Dominic. Three, four nights in a row. She can’t leave anyway; someone has to make sure her father doesn’t get too lonely; someone has to answer the phone when Harrison calls at three in the morning with no way to get home, his hands bloody from a fight, his eyes wild and wet with drugs—cocaine now, she’s sure of it; someone has to clean her father’s house and make sure he eats. Every month, Quinn slips a small envelope of money (her inheritance) under the welcome mat to the cabin, enough for all the bills, and sometimes a little extra for Yula to take Eugene to the movies or the car for an oil change or to buy Harrison some new Mark’s Work Wearhouse boots. It is a terrible, entangled arrangement. They live exclusively off the money from Jo’s death. Quinn parcels it out monthly, as stingily as he can, so that there’ll be something left over when he goes, too. His pension is gone—eaten by back taxes, which he never paid while he was working. And so they live at the edge of reality, beholden to no one, isolated and strange.
In the late afternoon, she goes back to fix Quinn a plate of pasta and do the morning’s dishes. Then she’ll dust and vacuum. Tomorrow she’ll clean the windows using a special kind of wiper with an extendable handle that Quinn insisted she buy at the hardware store. Sometimes, when she’s cleaning Quinn’s bedroom, she takes her mother’s red satin jewelry box off the dresser and sits on the bed, her arms around it. Inside is her mother’s watch, her parents’ wedding rings, which Quinn no longer wears, love letters from when they first met, and a Swiss Army Knife. She sits on the bed and holds the box to her heart.
She puts a pot of water on the stove for the pasta and waves to Harrison as he rides by the kitchen window on a lawn mower, listening to his Walkman, Eugene on his lap. She rests a minute, her hand on her belly, and notices that the toast she set out for Quinn this morning is still on the table, the coffee untouched. She stands in the doorway of his bedroom and watches him, listens to the soft rattle as he pours the last of his sleeping pills into his hand. She eyes the bedside table—empty bottles of sleeping pills and painkillers and antidepressants, even Eugene’s bright-pink children’s aspirin. For a moment she is frozen, then suddenly she is standing over him, slapping his face and punching his stomach.
“God fucking damn it,” she spits. She punches Quinn’s stomach again and he retches, spits the pills down his shirt. She drags him into the shower and straddles his body, grabs his hair in fistfuls, turns on the cold water and smacks his head against the tiles until he fights back.
“Okay, fuck. Stop.” He pushes her off and retches down the drain. They sit in the shower, hugging their knees. His hair hangs in slimy white strands down the sides of his face, the ends dripping. His neck is rippled in little folds beneath his chin; she has never noticed it until now. He looks smaller to Yula somehow, and barrel-chested, as if he is affecting the posture of an old, weathered boxer.
The steam from the shower makes the spray-on dye run out of Yula’s hair, and it slides down her shirt in black and purple streaks. Her clothes are waterlogged and cling to her pregnant body like kelp. She leans against the wall of the shower, her back sore from the weight of her belly. She rubs the skin on her swollen feet.
“Yula,” Quinn says. He reaches for her with his good hand. “Oh, Yula.” He spits into the drain. “I can’t do it. I want to, but I can’t.”
His fingernails are caked with dirt. Yula gets the nail clippers and digs it out, then shampoos his hair. She wraps him in a big blue bathrobe, and after she’s changed into dry clothes, they sit on the front porch and share a cigarette.
Harrison waves from the cabin’s kitchen window. He has on yellow dishwashing gloves and an orange baseball cap. Yula sits with Quinn until he’s sleepy, until she’s convinced that he wants to live again. Later, while he eats his dinner, she washes and folds his clothes and turns down his bed.
“Stay with me, Yula,” her father says. “Don’t ever leave me. I don’t know what I would do. Don’t ever leave me, Yula.”
“I won’t, Papa.” She watches him eat, then takes his plate, washes it, and puts it back in the cupboard. She puts a smear of toothpaste on his toothbrush and sets it at the edge of the sink along with a glass of water, his antidepressant and antianxiety pills.
When she treks back to the cabin, Harrison takes her in his arms. Her body is so tired it feels as though her bones are disintegrating.
“He’s all I’ve got left,” she says as Harrison holds her. “I can’t lose him, too.”
“I’m here with you.” Harrison tucks her hair behind her ears. “I’m all you need.”
She feels his cold eyes on her suddenly. It’s an argument they have weekly and never finish. He is unhappy living under the thumb of her father, but she is too scared to leave. The thought of what might happen if she left—of losing her father—is too horrible.
Besides, she can’t imagine her life any other way: listening to her father’s troubles, polishing, cleaning, examining his tabletops for dust. She makes him one frozen meal after the other, finds his shit-stained underwear and bleaches them clean, asks him to tell her stories about her mother—why not; what doesn’t she want to know. Later, she hears him crying in the shower and, not knowing she’s still there, watches him walk into the living room and lie on the rug, weep, and clutch his body with his wet hands. Unwillingly, not wanting to, she sees it.
“I need my dad,” she says.
Eugene wakes from his nap, runs to her, and wants to know why her hair is wet and her eyes full of tears. He is almost three years old, his hair shiny and black. “You’re crying,” he says.
She sits at the kitchen table and pulls him onto her lap, but he is fidgety in her arms. His leg kicks out and rocks the table, and Harrison’s bottle of beer smashes to the floor.
“Go to sleep, you little shit,” she says and carries Eugene roughly into the bedroom. This moment of nastiness is something she will regret forever.
Later, Harrison stands over the garbage can, peeling potatoes, not speaking. He has let his hair grow to the middle of his back and wears it in a thick braid with a twist tie at the end. He pierced his ears last night (hers, too, a second time) and the lobes are swollen and red. When he gets quiet like this, she assumes he is high. He’s been getting high too much, she thinks. He’s losing too much weight. His limbs are so spindly these days they look like they’ve been wrung. He wears ripped jeans and a red bandana, a black T-shirt with a unicorn on the front. He has a French–English dictionary in his back pocket, but my mother doesn’t ask him why. Some girl, probably. She runs her eyes over the little scabs covering the inside of his arm and says nothing. When did he start doing this? She tries to remember if he picked at himself when she first met him; the scabs look like they’ve been there for years.
A few months ago, he lost his job as a mechanic and has been working the night shift at a bakery in town; at least that’s what he tells her. What he does after she drops him in front of the bakery she does not know. Their relationship feels so precarious sometimes—this business of living across from Quinn, of Quinn’s paying the bills, of Quinn everywhere—that she dares not challenge Harrison much about anything. She daydreams about standing up to him, demanding to know his whereabouts, who was on the phone just now and what is he high on, but in the moment, face-to-face with him, it is as if someone plugged up her throat. She imagines her life if he left her, and the thought is unbearable. She wishes, desperately, that he would marry her.
Later, they lie in bed and Harrison reads to her from a little guidebook he’s bought about trees, lists off the different layers of the trunk.
“Outer bark, phloem, cam
bium, sapwood, heartwood,” he recites, throwing one of Eugene’s stuffed bears against the ceiling, catching it with his feet, then throwing it again. “Heartwood. The dead wood in the center of the tree that gives it its shape and strength.”
“Are you high right now?” Yula says and takes a sip from a mug of milky tea, but he doesn’t answer. She looks around the bedroom. Harrison never seems to mind—never seems to notice—the clothes on the floor from his mad dash to get dressed in the morning, the knife coated in peanut butter left stuck to the dresser. He takes the mug from her, takes a sip, then sets it on the bed, its contents threatening to spill all over their checkered sheets. She gets up and leans against the doorway, traces a crack in the wall with her finger, flicks away a ladybug that has landed on her arm. She watches Harrison, this mess of a thing.
She takes his arm and pushes into the little scabs with her finger. “You’re addicted. I need it to stop.”
He moves out of her grasp, annoyed, and picks bits of lint from his long braid. “Everyone has their cross to bear,” he says.
After it gets dark, they sit on their porch under a scratchy blanket and look at the stars. Harrison tells her he longs to have money and to live on the Queen Charlotte Islands. There is no sound except Eugene talking in his sleep, no light except from their matches. The air is so damp the blanket feels wet. Their hands are clammy. Harrison pushes three Chips Ahoy cookies into his mouth and tries to chew, does it again once he swallows the big mess. He pushes two cookies into Yula’s mouth and makes her swallow. He laughs so hard he roars, and cookie crumbs shoot into the air as though from a whale’s spout.
Y: A Novel Page 6