Y: A Novel

by Marjorie Celona

  XII.

  my mother comes out of the bedroom sometime in the late afternoon, Eugene slumped over her shoulder. The living room is empty, the car gone. She lays Eugene on the couch, tucks a coffee-stained pillow under his head. She gave birth to him in the back bedroom of her parents’ big house. Her mother, Jo, wiped her brow and later, after he was born, taught her how to nurse. Yula was sixteen. Quinn was outside, pouring concrete into a hole in the soil. The pine cabin took thirty days to build. A month after it was done, Jo was dead.

  Harrison and Dominic have left the space heater on, and the room is too warm. Yula flicks off the heater and examines her son’s face. Eugene was not a tactile child. He did not like to be touched. It seems to her now that this is the most intimate she has ever been with the boy. She runs her fingers over his face and studies the way the bridge of his nose rises up and forms a deep ridge between his eyes. His eyelashes are thick and black. His lips are full, the insides stained red from the cough syrup.

  How could she have let herself fall asleep? Yula places her hand on the top of her son’s head. He is as cool as a harbor seal. When her mother died, Yula held her hand over her mother’s head and felt her mother’s soul shoot out and away. The back of her son’s head is cold. There is no energy there, no heat. He has died alone, without anyone to witness it. This is the greatest tragedy of all, Yula thinks, that she did not bear witness to her son’s death. This is worse than the death itself.

  Moments later she hears the screaming. It seems to be coming from a place outside of her—somewhere within the cabin but not from her own mouth. She crouches on the floor in the middle of the cabin and hears the scream all around her, from every surface and every wall. Whose voice is this? She does not recognize it. The shadows are too black, and the wind makes a horrible hollow sound. It rushes right through her. And then there is no floor beneath her and no walls. She feels herself falling, but when she puts out her hands, she can still feel the hardwood floor. The house must be falling. A sinkhole has opened up in the earth and she is plummeting toward its center. Her hair rushes past her face and streams out above her. She reaches for Eugene but he is still on the couch, balanced at the edge of the sinkhole, and she puts out her hands and waits for it to tip. She will catch him. She will catch her boy when he falls.

  Harrison finds her on the floor of the cabin, unconscious, and Eugene, his skin almost blue, on the couch. He rushes outside, where Dominic is waiting in the old car, the engine idling. In a panic they discuss things, and the decision is final: they will give the boy a private funeral and a proper burial. They will do it now. He was raised in the woods; he will be buried in the woods. They will do this before Yula wakes, and they will wait awhile before they tell her. There are too many factors at stake. The boy might have drunk the two bottles of cough syrup, choked on his vomit, and died—he might have. But Harrison’s bag of cocaine is missing, and this is the greater concern. Harrison can’t—won’t—go back to jail. He just won’t. And then there’s the baby. A mother who lets her child die will not be allowed to raise another. The baby will be taken away. No, and this is final—Harrison and Dominic will bury Eugene, and they will do it out of respect and love for Yula, for the new baby, for their family. They’re not “covering up” anything. This is not a sinister act. This is a father who wants to continue down the righteous path he suddenly sees himself on; this is a father who wants to leave the isolated compound, leave the drugs behind, take Yula and the baby and start a new life, far away from here. Leave the old man, Quinn, to fend for himself. Yula has given up too much of her life to him and his suffering anyway. And he is a miserable man. He killed Yula’s mother. He is the murderer here. Let him die alone in his big house. Harrison will tell Yula the plan in the next couple of days, when she’s out of shock. He will sit her down, kiss her, tell her that this is a sign. They will set out together, take the ferry off the island, find a new life somewhere on the mainland. They will stay with one of Harrison’s friends in Abbotsford, then drive to the Interior in somebody’s borrowed van. He will work construction again. Yula can clean motel rooms. Dominic will sell most of his stash and lend them some start-up money; he’ll stay on the island and keep an eye on the miserable old man. This will be Harrison’s promise to Yula; this will be the thing that will let her leave. What is the alternative? Jail for them all? A baby born to murderers? No. They will bury Eugene and flee. No one will know. Everyone will assume, when they leave, that they’ve taken Eugene with them. Why wouldn’t they? A family starting again. A new beginning. They’ll bounce back from this. The human heart is resilient. It can bust apart; it can heal.

  Harrison bundles Eugene in Yula’s gray sweatshirt and carries him out to the car. Dominic opens the trunk and watches his brother lower the boy in. It isn’t as if it’s easy—it isn’t as if Harrison isn’t broken inside, some part of him crying out and bleeding as he adjusts the boy’s head so that it rests at a more natural angle. He tucks his little hands by his sides. The boy’s feet are bare, and Harrison thinks this is wrong somehow.

  “Wait,” he tells Dominic, then goes into the cabin for Eugene’s little red boots and socks.

  The cabin is dark and Yula is still on the floor. Her hands are curled like claws. He walks into the bedroom and opens the top drawer of the dresser, where they keep their underwear and Eugene’s clothes. His little socks are rolled into balls at the back of the drawer, and he takes one out and puts it in his pocket. One of Eugene’s rubber boots is on the floor, but he can’t find the other one, and it isn’t under the bed. He searches the cabin quickly and gives up, walks back outside with the one boot in his hands.

  “Can’t find the other one,” he says to Dominic, as if to make up for it somehow. He slides the socks over Eugene’s cold feet and puts the boot on. Dominic has put a flashlight and a shovel in the trunk, too, and Harrison stands over the boy, looking at the awful scene for a minute before he closes the trunk and gets into the car, his brother at the wheel.

  “’Preciate all this,” Harrison says out the side of his mouth. He flips up the collar of his jacket and blows hot breath on his hands. Just as Dominic starts down the gravel driveway that leads to the long stretch of Finlayson Arm Road, Harrison sees Yula in the side mirror, running after them. It is early in the evening, and the sun is setting fast behind her. Harrison squints in the golden light and puts his hand on his brother’s arm.

  “Stop,” he yells to Dominic, and Dominic hits the brakes. Harrison leaves the passenger door open and jogs toward her, takes her in his arms. “Baby, baby. It’s going to be okay now, I promise you.” He pulls away from her and cups her face in his hands. She is sweaty and her skin is cold, clammy to the touch.

  “We have to go to the hospital,” she says, her voice shaking. Her face is pale. She can barely say the words. “Harrison, it’s too early. It’s too early.”

  Harrison looks at his brother, tapping his hand on the steering wheel, chewing his lip. The sun falls rapidly past the forest’s edge, and the temperature plunges.

  “My water broke.” She says it as softly as a frightened child.

  What should he do? “Okay,” Harrison says. “Okay. We’re going to go. Come on, get in the car.”

  “I can’t find Eugene.” She grabs his jacket, but her fingers are numb from the cold and it slips from her hands. She pounds her fists against his chest. “Where’s Eugene? Where’s Eugene?”

  Dominic gets out of the car and stands between them. “We took him to your dad’s. He’s over there. He’s fine.”

  It’s such a bold lie that Harrison almost stumbles. He braces himself on his brother’s arm.

  “He’s fine, Yula,” Dominic says again. “He was just sleeping. He’s fine now.”

  Yula looks back and forth between Harrison and his brother. His words are so beautiful that she wants to swallow them whole. Is this true? Did she dream this? Is Eugene with her father, in the big warm house? She wants to run back toward the house, but a pain swells in her back.
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  “He’s there, baby,” Harrison says. He takes her hand and pulls her against his body, lets her put her whole weight on him. “He’s with your dad, in the house.”

  Yula spits and then wipes her mouth. “I want to go see him.” She walks as if through mud, holding her belly with one hand. “I want my baby.”

  And then Dominic is behind her, grabbing her, his hands on her shoulders, pulling her toward the car. She fights him, but she is no match for his strength. She slumps in his arms and the men lead her to the car.

  “Get in the car, baby. Get in the car.” She lets Harrison muscle her inside. He kisses her forehead, shuts the passenger door, and nods to Dominic.

  “Let’s do this,” Dominic whispers to Harrison. “Let’s go.”

  Harrison thinks a minute, drums his fingers on his thigh. “I don’t know what to do about Eugene.”

  “I’ll get out at the bottom of the hill and then you can carry on to the hospital. I’ll bury him myself. Just don’t let her see me take him out of the trunk.”

  The brothers look at each other for a minute. In another few minutes, it will be dark.

  “This is going to work out,” Dominic says. “This is going to have a happy ending. Just take her to the hospital. Stay with her while the baby is born.”

  XIII.

  sometimes Vaughn pictures time as being a long stretch of satin, all the events of the past and future laid out and shimmering before him, a tiny shifting line where the present moment keeps inching forward. His father shared his gift of prescience, but the two men never spoke of it. Still, by the time Vaughn was three, he could sense his father’s actions moments before they occurred. He could see his father so much more clearly than he could see other people. He concluded, eventually, that it was because his father was like him: two men so aware of their own placement in time—of their place in history—that the future was never surprising, only inevitable.

  At some point when he was very young, Vaughn discovered, too, that he could manipulate the future in small, inconsequential ways (he never wanted to disturb anything until he saw my mother). It was a matter of visualization—he’d be walking hand in hand with his father after a day of running errands, and in his head he’d picture a giant ice cream cone and send the message to his father. Sure enough, moments later, his father would suggest they go for ice cream, a bright smile on his face as if he’d come up with such a generous idea on his own. Vaughn misses these moments of connection now that his father is gone. There is no one else he can communicate with in this way, though they must be out there. They must exist.

  After his father died, Vaughn lived in Langford, on the backside of Mount Finlayson, with his mother. She, too, was predictable. She smoked and died of lung cancer. Nothing mysterious there. Is he himself predictable? It’s obvious to him that he’ll never marry again—that he had one shot at love early in his life, and now it’s gone. It’s obvious he’ll never have children. It’s obvious that this is his life: weight training every day and taking three weeks off every summer to go white-water rafting. This is it, and that’s okay. He knows he isn’t supposed to amount to much. Some people he meets, though, burn a little brighter. Some people burn as bright and fierce as stars. He tries to find a way to tell a person this when he sees it in them. They’re meant to do something; they will do something. Usually, he can’t find the words.

  But he knows people. He knows people. That is all. He doesn’t think he has special powers, and he doesn’t believe in psychics. But his eyes are wide, wide open—they always have been—and he sees everything. He takes in the whole world at once.

  “If you stand back a bit,” he says to me, “that leaf won’t hit your face when it falls.” The little stuff, too, is important.

  “Oh, thanks,” I say. We watch it tip off the edge of the eave and fall between us.

  I am standing on Vaughn’s front porch on Hillside Avenue, just up from the mall. There are a few blocks where every house is one story and has lots of crap lying around in the yard—like the houses that line the highway long after you’ve left the city behind. Yellow lawns like hay fields; cracked paint; homemade For Sale signs on the cars; dead spider plants in the windows. This would be a good neighborhood if it weren’t for this stretch of houses. What happened here? Vaughn has kept his house a little neater, I’m pleased to see. He’s put down stepping stones in the middle of the yard, and his front door is painted burgundy. The curtains are drawn and the eaves are full of twigs and dead leaves. The traffic on Hillside makes a constant buzz. There’s a guy on the corner who looks like he’s waiting to make a buck.

  “You want something or what?” Vaughn looks past me at the guy on the corner and tries to gauge the odds of us being some kind of criminal operation.

  I don’t give him a minute to think. I’ve rehearsed this a thousand times. “You might be the reason I’m alive, sir. I’d just like ten minutes of your time.”

  Vaughn steps back and rests his weight on the doorframe. “I’m just starting dinner,” he says. “But come on in.”

  I had hoped for a nice, fatherly type, or a handsome man in a suit, but Vaughn is neither. His shirt says Don’t Mess with This Texan. He’s a red-haired guy with a week-old beard and a deep oily tan. Every muscle in his body is ready; his calves look like they’ve been stuffed with rocks. Faded jean shorts and bare feet. He wears square stylish glasses, and behind them his eyes are soft. There are bits of burgundy paint in the corners of his fingernails.

  “Come on in,” he says again. “Mind the step up, and when you take your shoes off, put them to the left of mine on the floor—if you put them on the right side we won’t be able to open the door again without moving them.”

  I slide my sneakers next to his running shoes, and he shuts the door behind me. His house smells like fried chicken and salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Photographs of the Grand Canyon hang in IKEA frames on the wall behind him.

  “Forgive me if I don’t know who you are immediately,” he says, and cleans his glasses with his T-shirt. “But I’ve done more than a few things that might prompt a person to knock on my door and thank me for saving their life. Maybe if we sit down and have a soda first, you can tell me the story until I remember it again.”

  He gestures toward the kitchen. His house is warm from the afternoon sun. I take a seat at his kitchen table while he pours ginger ale into two tall, frosted mugs, setting one in front of me so nervously that the foam bubbles up and over the edge. I catch it with my finger.

  He sits across from me and we stare at each other. His kitchen is tidy, except for one stretch of counter stacked high with newspapers. A photograph of him and a border collie is stuck to the fridge with a wooden magnet in the shape of a frog. The fridge and stove are the same dull olive green.

  I fiddle with one of my suspenders and watch him watching me. And when I can’t take it anymore—him searching my face, trying to place me, pausing on my lazy eye and wondering if maybe he’s got something to do with it—I tell him what I know.

  Cold morning, just after 5:00 a.m., the glass doors of the Y on Broughton Street, a young woman. A small, fresh version of myself wrapped in a gray sweatshirt with thumbholes, a Swiss Army Knife tucked under my little cold feet.

  “Well, you wouldn’t have died, Shannon—” Vaughn’s phone starts to ring and he rushes out of his chair, rifles through the slippery magazines and newspapers on his counter until he finds the handset, and pushes a few buttons to shut it off. “Sorry—sorry. My brother, Blaze, might pop over,” he says, shrugging at me. “Teaches tango at this little joint on Herald Street. Nice guy. Won’t stay long.”

  He takes the bottle of ginger ale out of the fridge and refills my glass, hand still trembling. “You wouldn’t have died, Shannon. The doors were right about to open—your mom would have known that. She left you there so that someone would see you. I just happened to see you first.” He grabs a scrapbook off the top of the fridge, flips through its pages until he finds the newspaper article. “D
o you want this?” He holds out the yellow page, and the corners, flimsy from age, curl up like flower petals in his hands.

  “Abandoned Infant: Police Promise No Charges Will Be Laid.”

  I take the article and rub the thin newsprint between my fingers. I’ve read it hundreds of times. I’ve studied my little potato-size face. Someone is holding me in the photo, but his or her face has been cropped out. Baby Jane.

  “Was she crying or anything?”

  Vaughn considers this a moment and sits back down. “Your mother? That was sixteen years ago—sheesh—you don’t look a day over—yeah. She bent down and kissed your cheek, I think. I’m pretty sure she was crying real hard.”

  “Was I hurt at all?”

  “Nah.” He blinks. “You know, I thought it was you the minute I saw you through my curtains. Jesus. You a meat eater? I’m making beef stew; there’s plenty for both of us.”

  “I would love to stay.”

  Vaughn puts his hands together and makes a face like he’s being squeezed. “I really don’t remember anything other than what’s in the papers. It was real early and the whole thing happened pretty fast. I was more interested in you than I was in her, if you know what I mean.”

  He takes out a stack of napkins and folds two into triangles, and I wish I could fold napkins the way they do in restaurants, but it never works out. I can tell he wants to ask me questions, but he’s not sure what’s appropriate. He doesn’t want me to cry.

  “I’m fine, you know,” I tell him. “I’m okay.”

  Vaughn smiles at me. “I’m glad,” he says. “I mean, I’ve wondered.”

  He hands me a peeler, and I peel potatoes and carrots while he cubes and flours the meat.

  “Slice them thin, then halve the onions,” Vaughn tells me. He says he does Shake ’N Bake when it’s just him. “But this is more of a special occasion.”