Y: A Novel
Page 21
Her contractions are closer, and the pain is too much now. She stops the car on Heywood Avenue and looks into the dark windows of Luella’s first-floor apartment. It is late August, but on this cold evening she can see her breath in the dim light from a streetlamp overhead.
She knocks sharply on the front door and digs her nails into her palms. And then Luella opens the door in a blue terry-cloth bathrobe and little black moccasins. She is in her mid-fifties now, with long gray hair almost to her waist and long, wispy bangs. Her face seems to glow from within. Her eyes are heavily lined with kohl, even at this hour. They are bright blue. Her pale skin is the color of a pearl. She pulls Yula into her apartment and cups her face in her hands. The girl has never looked so ugly and fierce. Her eyes are hard, her jaw tense. Her face is twisted.
“My mom said I should come to you if I was ever in trouble,” Yula says.
Luella and my mother lie in the bed together, waiting for the labor to progress. My mother tells her what happened: They left the boy for a few hours while they took a drive to the beach. She was too stoned. She fell asleep. When they got home, he was sick. So sick. He’d drunk two bottles of flavored cough syrup. She thought he would be okay. He died while she was sleeping. Then: Dominic standing by the side of the road, Eugene’s body at his feet. Her father.
“Harrison and his brother were trying to hide him from me,” she tells Luella. She tells her about the plot to bury her son in the woods. Harrison’s bag of cocaine. “They killed my son,” she says. “I just thought he drank the cough syrup. I thought he’d be okay. He’d already vomited it up.” If she’d known about the cocaine, she says. If she’d only known. She never would have gone back to sleep. “How could they have let me go back to sleep?”
My mother blinks, and the room comes into focus. It is a small bedroom, the walls painted purple with white trim and crowded with art. Luella’s bed has a wrought-iron frame. A mahogany bedside table holds an elegant silver lamp and a fancy clock. The door to the bedroom is closed, and a pale-blue nightgown hangs from a hook on the back. It is such a civilized bedroom compared to her own. The floors are swept, the little Persian rug still bears the track marks of a vacuum. One of Luella’s oil paintings hangs on the walls, a portrait of a woman in a white dress and red scarf, her arms around a little girl. My mother wishes she could stay in the safety and stillness of this small tidy bedroom forever.
She stares at the ceiling. Her legs are cramping and she stretches them out, arches her feet. “Why did they let me fall asleep? If I’d known, if I’d known, I never would have let myself fall asleep.”
Luella strokes my mother’s forehead. “Let’s go to the hospital. Make sure the baby’s okay.”
“I’ll go to jail. They’ll take her away from me.”
Luella sits up and fiddles with one of the rings on her hands. She looks at my mother’s face and imagines this small sweet girl, her best friend’s daughter, in prison for killing her son.
My mother reaches for Luella’s hand. “I don’t want this baby to ever know who I am,” she says. The words come out of my mother’s mouth unwittingly, and then it begins.
XIX.
lift it by the little handles there—yeah, that’s it—and, one, two, three,” Vaughn says, and we lift the dinghy into the air and walk, grapevine-stepping, down the pebbled beach toward the water. It is the first sunny day in what feels like months, the water and sand so bright that we scrunch up our faces, hair blown back in the vicious wind. When you’re this close to the sea, everyone walks with his or her head down and a kind of pained look, as though their lips were being pulled back toward their ears via invisible wire. It’s almost a sinister smile. The cyclists wear it, too, as they whip around the coast on their spindly bicycles built for speed. I’ve come to think of it as Island Face.
Vaughn and I have been hanging out every once in a while, weekends mostly, for the past few months. I finally told Miranda about the ministry and Madeleine, and about writing a letter to my father. Every morning she and I check the mailbox together, hopeful. We finally have a morning routine.
The oars shift on the floor of the dinghy as Vaughn and I jostle it toward the ocean, his side at least a foot higher than mine because he is so much taller. The sea sparkles and dazzles as bright as a thousand suns. Whenever I can close my eyes, I do. We both wear bright-orange life jackets and ball caps, our pant legs rolled, our sneakers shooting around in the dinghy, banging into the oars, into my backpack where we’ve put the sandwiches and cans of 7-Up. It is almost too cold and windy to be doing this. The sun on my skin feels healing, and necessary, and I raise my face to the sky and let it burn into my cheeks. Vaughn’s face, of course, is slathered with zinc oxide, his nose completely white. He’s wearing mirrored wraparound sunglasses, and I look at him and see the beach behind me, the trees beyond it, then the sky.
“You gonna rub that in?” I point at his white nose.
He laughs. “I know this is hard to believe,” he says, “but I really don’t care what I look like.”
There is a group of children on the beach, pails dangling from their little hands, and gulls, and the smell of salt and seaweed is at times—when the wind blows a certain way—overwhelming. Sand fleas bite our ankles and hermit crabs scatter when disturbed. The dinghy is army green, the words Fish Hunter printed in black block letters on the side. It is Blaze’s boat, and we have borrowed it. We’re not going to fish, just bob around in the water for a while. Vaughn says that someday we’ll put an outboard motor on the thing and take it all the way to Discovery or Chatham Island. He says there’s a rope swing on one of them, but he can’t remember which.
People describe the sea as looking like glass, but I think it looks like metal, and I still don’t understand why people think the sea is blue. It’s green. At the shoreline, we stand at the edge of the world. As the tide comes in, the whole world pushes into itself, and when the tide goes out, we all stretch toward the sea. It looks like someone has spread a huge piece of tinfoil right in front of me and is shaking it from some invisible point.
A seagull is floating in the water a few feet away, and we eye each other for a moment. He coasts to shore and I follow his tracks in the sand as he walks toward the group of children, who are eating French fries spread out on a piece of newsprint. The gull’s little feet slap the wet sand and he walks right up to the children, dips his head quickly, and then lifts himself into the sky, fries dangling out of his mouth like worms. The children scream but are delighted.
We lower the dinghy into the water, and Vaughn holds it steady while I climb in. I tuck myself into the bow and spread my arms over the sides while Vaughn hoists one leg and then the other over the side and flops down. He hooks the oars into place and swings the dinghy around so my back is to the shore and rows us out into the water. The waves slap against the rubber sides, and Vaughn’s oars slice through the water like blades. The muscles in his upper arms ripple when he rows.
All the windsurfers are out, their sails stretched taut. I lean over the side and watch for jellyfish. Their circular bodies ooze by, pulsing in and out like beating hearts.
Deadheads; kelp. A beer bottle, but there isn’t much trash in the water. Finally we catch up to a seal, which follows us for a while, his head bobbing. Then he disappears, only to appear moments later, improbably far away.
Vaughn rests the oars against the side of the boat and unwraps a sandwich, hands it to me. We made them earlier in his kitchen: turkey and slivered iceberg lettuce, mayonnaise. Vaughn eats his in three large bites, then glugs his 7-Up. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. At dinner with Miranda and Lydia-Rose, I have to be careful to take small bites and to chew everything and not to slurp. I hate it. I don’t want to eat at all if I can’t eat like a wild animal.
We unwrap our second sandwiches and eat those like beasts, too. We are silent, our cheeks as full as chipmunks’. A seagull lands near us and watches us chew. Vaughn rips off a bit of crust and tosses it into the waves.
Vaughn rubs at the zinc on his nose. His arms are already a shade darker. He says, “Did you ever hear back from your father?”
“No.”
Before I got the courage to send the letter, I read it so many times that I memorized it. When I close my eyes at night, I hear it. Whenever there is silence, or any kind of pause, the words creep into my head. Did he even get the letter? If so, did I offend him? What if I never hear back? What if he isn’t my father after all? The possibilities skip around in my head.
“When you’re in the thick of your life, Shannon,” Vaughn says suddenly, “it feels like a mess—one surprise after the next. But later, when you look back on things, it seems like a plot. One thing leads to another. Et cetera. You start to see the causal relationships between things.” He pauses and lets the oars drop. We let the wind push us back toward the shore, the waves lapping against the thin vinyl floor of the dinghy. “But, you know, I suppose if you have enough time on your hands, you can make connections about anything.”
I drum the floor of the dinghy with my feet, feel the waves push back against it. “Just feels like a big mess to me.”
We drift closer to the marina, and the wind dies down but I can hear it whistling through the masts. I should get a sailboat. I should live on a sailboat. Everything is better when you’re on the water.
After a while I say, “Miranda wants to meet you.”
“Happy to.”
“She says she wishes I would have told her about all this earlier.”
“I’m sure.”
“She says she’ll give me as much space as I need. She says she’ll do whatever I need, even if it’s to stay completely out of it.”
Vaughn shakes his head at me. “You’re one of those people, aren’t you. So unlucky in some ways, so lucky in others.”
The seal re-emerges about five feet away from us with his shiny, bowling-ball head.
“I wish I were a seal,” I say.
“A bird,” says Vaughn.
“A fish.”
“A whale.”
“A porpoise.”
“A manatee.”
“An anteater.”
“An aardvark.”
“Tortoise.”
“Wombat.”
“Great white shark.”
“Woolly mammoth.”
“Elephant seal.”
“Back to seals then.”
“Back to seals.” The seal dunks his head and shoots back down.
“You know there’s a monster in the bay,” says Vaughn.
“I know. The Cadborosaurus.”
“Like the Loch Ness monster.”
“The Canadian version.”
Vaughn laughs and stretches out his legs, lets them dangle over the edge of the boat. I stare at the soles of his feet, which are callused and dry.
“You should ask Chloe out on a date,” I say to him. I think about her high forehead and ponytail, her amazing android body. The look in her eyes when she talked about him. Yes, this should happen.
“Chloe? She’s too young for me, don’t you think?”
“Nah. Ask her out. I promise you she’ll say yes.”
Vaughn tilts his head, considering this. “If you say so. Okay. But we work together. That could get weird, no?”
“Who cares. Life is weird. You’re weird.”
He laughs again. “You’re weird.”
“You’re weirder.”
Vaughn dips the oars into the water again, rows us around some more. He says he can’t believe I’ve never been out on the ocean before. He says there’s no excuse, living where we do.
The tide has pushed us almost all the way back to shore. Vaughn dips the oars into the water, rows us one stroke forward, and then I feel the rocky sand beneath me. The waves nudge us farther and farther up the beach while we sit lazily in the boat, letting the tide do all the work.
The sun beats down, and I feel my shoulders burning. I could stay in this boat all day. Time is suspended in a boat. I take a deep breath and try to remember this moment, the heat on my face, the grit under my feet, the strength of the waves. I run my hands through the pebbles and sand, searching for sea glass. One thing leads to another. There are tide pools between the larger rocks, tiny rivers connecting them to the sea.
After we’ve deflated the dinghy, washed the sand from between our toes, and rubbed our shoulders with aloe vera, I stand in front of the mirror of Vaughn’s bathroom and wash my hands with his little cake of Ivory soap, which is now as curved and thin as a seashell. He’s up the street, getting takeout from the Chinese joint. We’re having hot-and-sour soup and egg rolls. I can’t wait. I’m starving. I lift my shirt in the mirror and stare at my belly. I look like a seal pup. Planet Big Stomach over here. I want to eat until I burst.
In Vaughn’s living room, I kneel on the couch and stare out the window. The traffic shoots by, tailed by an endless stream of people on bicycles. I try to picture what my life will be like, but it all seems impossible. It seems impossible that I’ll graduate from high school, get a job beyond dishwashing in the summertime, have a home one day, a partner, children of my own. It seems impossible that I’ll ever hear back from my father. Or that I’ll ever travel, see Europe or Asia, take a road trip all the way to New Orleans. Life seems full of impossibility. I don’t know how anyone gets through it.
This is what the inside of my mind looks like today: it’s a skinny white room with wide-planked floors and four windows, one on each wall. In the middle of the room is an elaborately carved nineteenth-century double-pedestal desk, stained black. It’s a real eyesore. The room is in an old farmhouse, and the farmhouse sits in the middle of a great green field. It’s so quiet there. Inside the farmhouse, I stay so still I forget I exist. I barely make a ripple.
I find a pack of matches in Vaughn’s kitchen and burn the lint off my socks, then I hold the flame under my heel until it hurts. Vaughn’s house smells like potato chips. It always smells like potato chips. He must eat them in secret and then stuff the bags in the bottom of the trash. There is evidence everywhere—salt and crumbs on every surface, illuminated in the window light. One of his cupboards—the one where he keeps his spices and cooking oil—is filled with diet pills, fiber pills, weight-loss supplements, and vitamins. But the spices and the oil are lined up in front, so I have to peer over them to see the pills. There is a bottle of milk of magnesia and then a huge tub of protein powder behind the canola oil. I unscrew the lid and smell it. It’s made with kelp and smells like the sea. In another cupboard he has a huge stack of cookbooks, the pages dog-eared and marked with Post-it notes. His freezer is bursting with leftover food. I take out a chocolate Popsicle, which claims to have only one hundred calories, and finish it in two bites. I can relate to this hunger Vaughn must feel, this need to cram the kitchen with food. Lately I’ve been feeling so hungry that I buy a bag of potatoes on my way back from school and then boil the whole bag and eat it with huge melting slabs of butter before Miranda or Lydia-Rose gets home. I do not feel sick after. I feel like I could eat an entire cake.
Miranda doesn’t like to have leftovers. We have to eat everything in the house before she’ll go grocery shopping again. She can’t bear the thought of wasted food. She also can’t bear the idea of us eating for the sake of eating—mindless eating, she calls it. At dinner, she tells me to slow down and chew. To chew everything twenty times. I can’t do this. I want to eat everything in the world, and I want to eat it very quickly.
Vaughn is taking forever, so I ransack further. I lift the couch cushions and find nickels and pennies and a receipt for a bicycle pump. The front hall closet is crammed with anoraks and fleeces, the floor crowded with rain boots, flip-flop
s, and five worn-out pairs of running shoes, some more worn out than others. He has a great CD collection, lots of reggae. And then I find a photo album of his wedding. His hair is shoulder-length and an even brighter red than it is now. He’s softer looking somehow, not as sinewy or strong. He wears a blue suit and tie, a corsage on the lapel. He’s standing with his arms around half of a large redwood tree. His ex-wife encircles the other half, their hands barely touching. She is a small, thin woman with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. She has a plain face. She looks no-nonsense to me. She looks like someone who never farts. She’s wearing a three-quarter-length emerald-green dress and Birkenstocks. There are only six more photographs. The rest have been taken out. One is of Vaughn standing with three people, two of whom I guess are his parents, and Blaze, his brother—they’re all shorter than Vaughn and grinning—and the rest are photos of his ex-wife. Cross-legged, eating a piece of cake. In the crook of a tree. Against the trunk of another. The last is a close-up. Her smile is a little half-moon, her skin stretched taut. She looks more like an athlete in this photo than in the others, even though it is just of her face. Her eyes are small and she’s squinting—the sky is overcast but bright. And then there’s a letter folded in thirds, and I take it out.
Though I can’t prove this with any kind of certainty, I do not believe I fulfilled you, and I found you radiated a peculiar kind of sadness and resistance, particularly when making love. As I came to know and love you, I accepted that your true heart was elsewhere. Be it with a former lover or an imagined one to come, I do not know. I mustn’t feel second rate, you’ll understand. And now that I know about Sylvie, I know I was in fact second rate, and that you were searching for more.
I can’t be your friend, Vaughn. I don’t know how. I might have loved you the most of all; either that or the sum of our heartbreaks never diminishes, only keeps silent until we’re ripped open again. Whatever the case, the idea of laughing with you seems foreign and cursed. If we can’t laugh, we can’t be.