Sometime near dawn, while Eugene was softly snoring, Quinn took Yula’s hand and told her the truth—that the accident was his fault, that he’d purposefully tried to scare her mother. He had willed the accident to happen, and it had. He told her their relationship was full of hate and rage. He told her that they had stopped loving each other not long after she was born.
“Why?” asked Yula, her fingers tracing the soft little groove between Eugene’s mouth and nose. Quinn drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup, and winced as he spoke, his arm in a sling, too swollen to be set in a cast. His black leather jacket, almost shredded, was draped across his lap, a single gold chain looped around his neck. A thin layer of silver stubble spread out over his jaw. His hair, the color of white smoke.
“The usual story, Yula,” he said. His breath was hot and sour from the coffee. “I had an affair. She had an affair. She forgave me, and I never forgave her. The awful truth is, I never will.” He sipped his coffee, put the cup down, and played with Eugene’s little foot. “Some nights I lie awake and trace the whole history of our relationship—the moment we first met, how she let me live in the trailer when I had nowhere else to go, how goofy all that was. How we bonded because we both liked to read. We took so many long walks together—she was the kind of person I could talk to for twelve, thirteen hours.”
Yula readjusted Eugene in her arms, and her father took her hand. He ran his fingers over the space where her pinky finger would have been, something her mother used to do. Jo was going to die, he seemed to be saying with this action, and I need you to forgive me. Yula stared at her father and let him continue.
“I don’t know when things went wrong,” he said, and enveloped her hand in his. “I found myself jealous if she told a funny story at a dinner party—if she made everyone laugh. Something about it made my stomach ache. It made me angry. See, we’re intellectual equals. I am as smart as your mother, and she is as smart as me. This is a problem. There’s no pecking order. A relationship is like anything else. It needs a leader and a follower. We could never settle into any kind of routine. We’re both too alpha, maybe?”
He cleared his throat and took another sip of coffee. His hand shook when he brought the cup to his lips. “Do you remember all those runs I took you on when you were little, you in the Gerry pack? Later on in the day, your mother would take you out, too. You spent your first five years strapped to our backs while we ran. I blew my knee out first, so your mother won that round.”
He stretched out in his chair and tipped his head back, and Yula could see the fillings in the back of his mouth. He spoke to the ceiling. “She forgot my birthday one year, and I didn’t speak to her for three weeks. Three weeks, making her feel like a ghost in that house. I wouldn’t even look at her. In some ways, I think we tortured each other. Look, these things don’t seem like much, but they add up. Your mother has a gimlet eye, that’s for sure. I knew that nothing I did would ever be good enough—professionally, romantically, even when it came to you. We were competitive over parenting, for God’s sake.”
He sat up and searched Yula’s eyes. His voice was suddenly aggressive, and Yula felt herself shrinking back from him, both repulsed and afraid. “I fucking hate hospitals,” he said, little bits of froth forming at the corners of his mouth. “We need to get her better, get her out of here. The one thing we could ever agree on is that we didn’t belong in the city, in any of its institutions. You were a home birth, like Eugene. I don’t believe in any of this. It’s all bullshit. We’re different, okay? You remember this. Everything we need is at home. This other stuff—” He scanned the room as if someone was listening. “Do not believe anything anyone tells you. You have to evaluate the world with your own eyes.”
Yula pushed her chair back and prayed for her father to stop talking. He was motor-mouthing, high on painkillers, slobbering as he spoke.
She tried to stand, but he put his hand on her leg and pushed her back down. “What I’m trying to tell you about is your mother. It got sick between us. Things can get sick between two people. I hated it. I hated how much I loved her and how much I wanted her to love me. Look, this is bullshit. I needed to dominate her. She never let me dominate her. She always had to win. But I pinned her down one night and held her throat.”
Yula shot the words at his face. “I remember.”
“I wanted her to be in love with me. Me. I wasn’t trying to kill her. I needed to use my power—she needed to respect me a little.” He leaned toward Yula, and she held her breath. He was so high that his pupils were dilated. “Do you see what kind of sickness can develop between two people?”
Yes, she knew. Yula knew her parents loved and hated each other. She could also see that they were each convinced they were special—each of them individually, but also the relationship as a whole. She felt the same arrogance from their neighbors on Mount Finlayson, as if living out of the city, in nature, made you different somehow. Apart from the rest. Spiritually, not just geographically. And yet she believed it. Despite herself, she felt it, too—they were all, somehow, different.
“I can’t be alone, Yula,” her father said suddenly. “I wish I could, but I just can’t.”
Someone tapped lightly on the door, and Yula and her father looked up. It was Jo’s friend, Luella. She was a heavily made-up woman with long, light brown hair and rings on every finger. She wore a turquoise skirt with a black knee-length dress over it, leather riding boots, and a black jacket. Red lipstick. Yula thought she looked like a movie star.
“Hi,” Luella said.
Yula was fascinated with Luella. She was a registered nurse, but she painted—she’d even had a show in an art gallery. Yula liked her but couldn’t say for certain why. She was tactile—affectionate—and rested her hand on Yula’s shoulder when she spoke. She’d once told Yula that she wore mostly black because other colors were too distracting, like bees buzzing around her head.
Yula’s mother didn’t have any friends other than Luella. She kept herself so isolated. Occasionally someone would come out to the property and have dinner with them, but it was such a rare occurrence that Yula wasn’t sure it had happened more than twice. Luella, though, seemed to be a constant in her mother’s life. They spoke on the phone every other night. Yula remembers the three of them walking through the park to Beacon Drive-In to get soft-serve ice cream, then sitting in the bleachers by the soccer field and eating the cones. Luella’s long brown hair had white-blond highlights back then. She wore a lot of powdery foundation, which sparkled when the sun hit her face. Unlike Jo, she covered herself in jewelry—ten or fifteen beaded necklaces circled her neck; her ears were lined with silver hoops, her fingers heavily ringed. She wore striped pedal pushers that day, a thick elastic belt cinched around her waist, a sleeveless black silk blouse, and red peep-toe heels. She looked like something out of a French fashion magazine, Jo had said. Jo sat between Luella and Yula in corduroys and a plaid shirt. She never wore makeup. Sometimes, when the women talked, they would reach across and hold hands.
Quinn made a sound and shook his head, then padded out of the room. He seemed to disapprove of Luella; Yula didn’t understand why.
“Honey.” Luella walked toward Jo and gently took her hand. She wasn’t the type to cry. She stood beside the bed, holding Jo’s hand. Quinn didn’t come back in again.
They sat in the hospital room for the next two days, not waiting for Jo to wake up anymore but waiting for her to die. She went, finally, on the third day.
Three days before I am born, Yula and Harrison work in the garden while Eugene is sleeping. The leaves are crowding the flower beds, and they scoop them into black garbage bags before they turn acidic. Harrison works away in a pair of suede gardening gloves; a cigarette in his mouth slinks smoke into the corner of his eye. He wears navy coveralls and his orange ball cap, his white-blond braid running the length of his back.
When they get tired, they drive into town and order egg sandwiches and French fries from Mom’s Café and read the Golds
tream Gazette. Another swimmer has drowned in the Potholes, and a grow-op down the road, though not the one next to Joel and Edwin’s place, has been raided.
“What’s the difference between an island and an archipelago?” Yula says to Harrison, pointing to the word in one of the articles. She cuts up bits of her sandwich for Eugene, fiddles with his ears, wipes the crumbs from the corners of his mouth. He is docile today, still sleepy from his nap, and Yula keeps bending over to kiss his forehead. She is always surprised by how much she loves the way he smells.
“I don’t know, Yula.” Harrison laughs and dips his sandwich in a smear of ketchup. “Island is easier to spell.” He watches a man at a neighboring table take out a cigarette machine and roll two cigarettes; he puts one behind his ear and one in the pocket of his shirt. Harrison asks the man to roll him one and tosses him a couple of quarters in return.
Harrison’s skin is deep brown from working in the sun, and the space around his eyes is covered in fine lines, moist from sweat. His hair needs to be washed; one piece hangs down in a little dreadlock under his cap. His face these days has a tired, pinched look.
He smiles at Yula and takes out his wallet, puts a couple of tens on the table. Mom’s has been remodeled; they’ve added a new section in the back and a jukebox. “We could go somewhere, you know,” Harrison says. He reaches over and ruffles Eugene’s hair. “We could move.”
“Like where.”
“Nothing fancy. Drive up north. You, me, Eugene.” He gestures at her stomach. “The baby.” When Yula doesn’t respond, he shakes his head and nods toward the door. “Need a smoke.”
Outside, Harrison leans on the hood of the car and lights his cigarette with a cupped hand. Across the street, a few people are walking up the steps to Holy Trinity Church, and he watches some kids playing in the empty lot beside it. He wonders if the old car will start. He stands there and watches the kids kick a rock around on the pavement. He drums his fingers on the roof of the car until Yula is ready to go.
That night, he doesn’t come home. Yula makes her dinner alone, and eats it alone, and forgets to turn off the water after the broccoli is done so that it boils and boils as she eats on the porch with Eugene, and when she goes inside to wash her one plate, the pot has blackened and is smoldering at the edge of the stove.
And she starts to whimper, because she doesn’t know what else to do—the handle of the pot too hot to touch and the smoke-filled room and the minutes that feel like whole years as she stands there weeping, for so long that she feels herself grow into an old woman, alone in her kitchen with a smoldering pot, alone with her little boy, as if all her lifetime has passed in that kitchen, her wrinkled skin, her aging hands, waiting and waiting, for Harrison to come home.
VII.
a couple of days after she turns thirteen, Lydia-Rose gets her period. I do not have mine yet and am horrified and embarrassed—mortified—by the idea. Miranda buys her a big pack of pads and Lydia-Rose bursts into tears and says she feels like she’s wearing a diaper. They disappear into the bathroom for an hour while Miranda shows her how to use a tampon. When they come out of the bathroom, Lydia-Rose is still crying.
“I can’t do it,” she says to me. Her hands are shaking.
I shrug at her. I don’t know what to say.
Miranda kisses us good night and tells Lydia-Rose that they’ll discuss it tomorrow. For now, she says, try to survive with the pads.
Lydia-Rose sits on my bed and holds her head back for fear of a nosebleed. “I hate this,” she says. “I hate this. I hate this.”
I put my hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs it off.
“I’m such a baby,” she says. “I hate this.” She stabs a pushpin into Sock Voodoo’s crotch. She stands up and makes me look at her butt. “You can tell, can’t you. You can see the goddamn pad.”
“I can’t see it.” This isn’t entirely true. At thirteen, Lydia-Rose is five foot ten. She stands in an arc over the dresser, her back slightly hunched from being so tall. Her ballet flats are as long and thin as skis. I am barely five feet. When we walk to school in the mornings, kids yell that we look like Bert and Ernie.
Our bedroom is a disaster. Lydia-Rose has a faux zebra-skin bedspread, and I still have my old pink comforter, which is covered in dog hair. Her balls of yarn compete for space with my mixed CDs on a tipsy wooden desk. A teetering bookshelf and tower of banker’s boxes filled with photo albums threaten to crash down. Lydia-Rose’s ukulele and paint-by-number attempts crowd the top of our dresser, and our stint at making Fimo animals has left crooked dinosaurs and red hedgehog-like things balanced on all available surfaces. Lydia-Rose tried to knit a stuffed giraffe with Madame Knitting Guide this morning, and little giraffe parts, some half-eaten by Winkie, litter the room. Last year, Lydia-Rose painted the ceiling black and stencilled yellow stars and then hung maroon curtains over the window that she made herself. A wayward bird smashed a hole the size of a baseball in the upper-right-hand corner of our window the other day, but we’re in no rush to get it fixed. Pencil crayons, tubes of oil paint, papier-mâché masks, berets, scarves, ironic posters, buttons, a baby carriage filled with CDs, rows of shoes, a pile of screws and washers, a stack of stuffed animals shoved in one corner, an outstanding collection of sea glass, sixteen paperbacks, and a full-length mirror reflecting it all, giving us the mess twice.
A Post-it note is pressed to the wall. Go big or go home, it says.
Our bedroom is never beautiful except at 6:30 in the morning, when it looks like the sun is rising right into the room. The mirror reflects the light and shoots it everywhere. I tell Lydia-Rose that we should get up at dawn more often, but she is never game.
That night, we don’t sleep. We shove a towel under the door to block the noise and put on a Nirvana album that I secretly hate but don’t want to admit it.
Lydia-Rose stands in front of the mirror in her bra and flattens her breasts with a scarf. Then she tells me to wrap packing tape around the scarf, while she holds up her arms. She shines the desk lamp on her face and draws stubble on her chin with a smoky eyebrow pencil, then shoves her hair under an AC/DC ball cap, leaves the bedroom, and comes back with two pairs of men’s corduroy pants, a denim shirt, shoulder pads, and two pairs of huge black army boots, three sizes too big, from Miranda’s consignment pile. She pulls on the shirt, pushes the shoulder pads in, slips her legs into the big pants and her feet into the boots. She turns to me, gives herself a moustache with the smoky pencil, and colors in her eyebrows. Winkie sits at the end of my bed, looking at her as if she’s insane.
“Now you,” she says, and throws a boot in my direction. I slip my foot into it and then reach for the big pants. I don’t have to do much to my upper body; Lydia-Rose tosses me a sweatshirt because we know it’ll suffice. She picks up the pencil and gives me a huge moustache, then pulls a Canucks toque over my huge and ridiculous blond hair.
We stand in front of the mirror, heads cocked.
Boys stare at Lydia-Rose. When her arms are full of textbooks and she’s about to kick her locker door shut, they come running. Let me get that for you, they say. They give her the window seat on the bus. They let her move to first in line. They offer to pay. She is, at thirteen, a knockout.
“You’re hideous,” I say. “I’m sorry, but you’re a really ugly man.”
Lydia-Rose laughs and examines her face. She moves her legs apart and tries to stand like a guy.
I can’t stop laughing. “You’re fine from the neck down. It’s your face—sorry—it’s your face that’s the problem.”
I am right. The boots, baggy khakis, and facial hair have made her look like a gangsta-rapper. But her face frightens us both. She is a weasel-faced, heavy-browed, dark-skinned man; America’s Most Wanted material; the guy staggering out of his trailer in white underpants on Cops; a crack dealer; someone who digs kiddie porn; Kokanee-out-of-a-can.
“Holy shit-fuck,” I say. “Maybe it’s the hat?”
She puts it on backwards and we consid
er the new look. I am laughing so hard that no sound is coming out of my mouth.
We stagger out of the bedroom in our boots. Lydia-Rose tosses me a pair of gloves and then I understand what’s happening—she wants to sneak out. “Don’t take off the gloves—your hands look so stupid,” she whispers.
She creeps into the kitchen, takes a sausage out of the fridge, and gives it to Winkie to keep her occupied. Then we open the front door in increments, until it’s wide enough for us to slip through, and once we’re outside we break into a run, baggy pants flapping, boots pounding, all the way to the McDonald’s down the street. Lydia-Rose holds the door for a couple of ladies. I have to pee but I don’t dare. We sit, slouch-shouldered, with our legs apart, elbows on the table. We let our stomachs sag. At one point, I burp.
“I hope we don’t run into anyone we know,” Lydia-Rose whispers.
“How the fuck are we going to order?”
“I’ll do it.” She stands and grins like a prizefighter, marches right over to the counter. I watch, horrified. I study the face of the boy taking her order. He looks scared.
But in the green vinyl booth of McDonald’s that night, no one bothered us. There were a couple of girls about our age in the next booth over, with trendy parkas and striped mittens, earmuffs, and bright-pink cheeks. I smiled at them and they looked away quickly, then looked back again. Lydia-Rose looked legitimately like a man. A creepy man. I don’t know what the hell I looked like. Ronald McDonald?
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