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.
Back at the big house, Quinn is drunk. Yula has coaxed him into his bed, tucked him under the sheets. He drifts in and out of sleep, his fingers clawing the air periodically, like an overturned bug.
“Hi, Papa,” Yula says and drums her fingers on the edge of the bed, People magazine wedged in the space between the mattress and bed frame. The smell of Vicks VapoRub and yellow spit-up fills the room like sour milk and mint.
“Yula.” Quinn looks at her with damp eyes. “What time is it?”
“About four thirty.”
“Hm?”
“Four thirty. Time to put in the chicken.” She takes his hand and massages the loose brown skin of his bad arm, works up the forearm, draws little circles on his shoulder with her fingertips. His skin looks like scales. She pick up a black comb and rakes a few strands of his long white hair, scuffs at the dandruff on his scalp, and holds her hand against his forehead to keep the flakes out of his eyes. His skin is so dry it crisps.
She folds down the sheet, squeezes a washcloth into a bowl of ice water by his bed, and presses the cold fabric to his skin.
Her father lies there, parched and shrunken, half rotten apple, half man. Paper thin in the narrow green bed. He falls asleep, finally, and his bad arm sinks heavy in Yula’s hand.
Every time he falls asleep, she places her hand on the back of his head, hoping to finally feel his spirit lift out and away. She imagines the weight of being an orphan—suddenly, unexpectedly. She looks around the room. Someday she wants to be the only one here.
She notices me then, watching them both in the doorway.
“He’s getting so old,” she says.
I walk toward her. I’m hot from being outside. Vaughn, Lydia-Rose, and Miranda are still at the rescue farm, patting the horses. My clothes smell of the earth, my shoes rimmed in mud. I look down, suddenly aware that I’m wearing them still, that I’ve tracked mud into this perfect, spotless house.
But Yula is looking at her father. “We deserve each other, he and I.” She tucks his arm under the sheets, smoothes them over his chest. “Where you go, I will go. Ruth 1:16.”
I wrinkle my nose. It hadn’t occurred to me that my mother might be religious. I feel a kind of sliminess in my stomach, a cold shiver. Suddenly, more than anything, I just want to go home. I want it to be nighttime, and I want to be in Vaughn’s bright-blue rental car, driving through the blackness, past the forest and the beasts and back into the city, with the hobos and the villains and all the weird people of the night.
Instead, we walk into the kitchen together, her arm lightly on my back. I feel a little bolt of electricity run down my spine when she touches me. I’ve noticed this before; some people’s touch is charged. Others—they make no impact.
The kitchen smells delicious and sweet, the cake baking in the oven, a bowl of freshly whipped chocolate icing on the counter, covered with plastic wrap. She tests the cake with a toothpick, puts it back in for a few minutes. It is round and golden, and I can’t wait to eat a gigantic piece.
She tells me she has wondered about my father. He moved to Montreal years ago, she says—and I startle, wondering whether I should tell her that he isn’t in Montreal, that he has two sons, a wife, a home somewhere in Ontario. I decide not to. She says when she closes her eyes she can see him driving an old car down the cobblestone streets, in the video store, pausing for the doors of the city bus, practicing French with a store clerk. “Je pense que ce lait est aigre, monsieur,” he says, handing back the big jug with distaste. In her mind, my father, or an actor hired to play him expertly, pays for a new jug with a crisp five-dollar bill, his big square hands unmistakable as he fumbles with his wallet in the pocket of his coat.
She looks at me, staring at her. “You have your father’s hair. He had curls just like this, like—”
“A tumbleweed. I know, I’ve heard it all my life.”
Yula clicks her tongue. “It’s not that we didn’t want you.” She tilts her head and looks at me. “Your father was a troubled man,” she says, and we don’t speak of him further.
I sit at the kitchen table and watch her cook. She takes two whole chickens out of the fridge, washes them, fills their cold cavities with water and dumps it out, and pats them dry with paper towels. She places them gently, side by side, in a roasting pan, heats up a cup of butter in the microwave and tips it over the skin, crushes rock salt between her fingers and stuffs the cavities with slices of lemon and sprigs of thyme. Every time her hand moves from salt to chicken to lemon to thyme, she wipes it with a paper towel. No contamination. I watch her quarter the potatoes, halve the parsnips and carrots, slice
the fennel. She slices it all slowly and deliberately, as if it’s important to her that the pieces look just right. She pours sunflower oil over all of it, then sprinkles more rock salt. She goes outside and emerges moments later with a bunch of rosemary in her hand. She moves with the efficiency of someone who has cooked all her life, but her hands are trembling and she keeps pausing, rearranging things in the roasting pan, adding a little more salt, a squeeze of lemon. She looks at me to see if I’m watching her.
“Lydia-Rose is an artist,” I tell Yula and point at Quinn’s drawings on the wall.
“He just draws whatever’s lying around,” Yula says.
I move to the window and look outside. It’s a desolate place out here. Yula’s cottage stands alone. Stumps and roots poke out from the long grass, which sways gently in the warm wind. I’m not afraid exactly, but I do find it kind of creepy.
“What happened to Luella?” I ask her. “Are you still in touch?”
Yula stands beside me at the window. “We were for a while. She’s fine. She got married.”
“Oh.” I look at her, unsure of what to say next or how far to go.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. Her eyes are angry, as though she’s simultaneously furious at herself and at me for suddenly being here, dredging up all the demons of the past. I see what a broken, fragile person she is. I see she isn’t fit to be anybody’s mom, despite what Harrison told me about her limitless capacity for love. But being loved so desperately isn’t good for a person either, and it’s Miranda’s evenness that I crave, especially in this moment, when my mother is looking to me for comfort and I need it to be the other way around.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. I need her to stop looking at me with those dead gray eyes.
“It’s okay,” I tell her again. There are swallows in the trees, so many swallows suddenly, and we watch them move in a great black swarm.
I try to imagine having grown up in the little moss-covered cottage across from us, in this field, in this isolated place halfway up a mountain. I try to imagine Yula as my mother, calling her Mom, my cheek against her bony little shoulder, walking hand in hand through the grass.
“I know it looks deserted, but there are a lot of us living out here,” Yula says. “Might be a hundred or more.”
What has my mother been up to all this time? I think of Harrison’s letter, how he has moved on, begun a new life. Thousands of miles away. A wife. Children. My mother has not let herself experience a single moment of happiness since Eugene’s death. She walked through the doors of the hospital after she was discharged, and the only person waiting for her was Quinn. We deserve each other, he and I.
I think hard and fast about what my life would have been like out here. What I would say, what she would say. I can’t picture any of it. I can’t imagine having lived anywhere but with Miranda, having had anyone else’s life but my own.
“Sometimes I see a little smoke beyond those trees over there,” Yula says and points to the edge of the forest. “There’s a little cabin, like mine.”
“Who lives there?”
“A woman and her children. She has two of them, a boy and a girl.”
“Oh.”
“I run into them sometimes when I’m out walking. The little boy loves marshmallows more than anything in the world. Do you like marshmallows?”
“I don’t know. I guess they’re all right.”
“Huh. Yes, I’m never sure whether the little girl likes them or not.” She laughs. Her eyes close, and I watch her, lost somewhere in the shadows of her mind. She pinches a crease in her loose jeans, by her hipbone, worrying the fabric between her forefinger and thumb. “Sometimes I stand by the window all day,” she says, “hoping the boy will come and visit me.”
When the timer goes off, Yula opens the oven door, and the room fills with steam and the smell of chicken and thyme. The cake is iced and waiting to be eaten on the counter, a pack of birthday candles by its side. She puts on two big red oven mitts and takes the chicken out carefully, the muscles of her arms flexing as she sets it on top of the stove.
Vaughn, Miranda, Lydia-Rose, and I are seated at the table, paper napkins in our laps. We have each spent a long time washing up, all the way to our elbows, and I’ve combed over Winkie’s skin for ticks, which, thankfully, haven’t latched on to her. All of us are in our stocking feet, our muddy shoes in a row outside. Vaughn keeps one foot over the other to hide a hole in the toe of his sock.
Winkie is served first and eats little bits of chicken out of a bowl, her tail wagging. Quinn emerges from the bedroom, sobered up from sleep, and takes his seat, a little dopey-eyed. Yula takes her time arranging the chickens and roasted vegetables on a large bright-blue platter. “Just a second, just another second,” she says. She brings the platter to the table and it is beautiful, the chickens in the middle surrounded by carrots, little browned wedges of red potato, and thin slices of fennel. She apologizes that she has nothing for a salad, but she’s made green peas and puts those on the table, too, in a big glass bowl, steam rising into the air, a pat of butter melting in the center. She trembles a bit, standing there watching us, and Quinn finally tells her to please sit down.
We don’t talk. We chow down. We eat. We eat like we’ve never eaten before, like we haven’t eaten in years. When our plates are empty, we fill them again. Yula cuts us each thick slices of sourdough bread, and we drag them through the chicken grease, mopping up the oil and the lemon and the salt.
She smiles at me while she eats, the corners of her mouth shiny. Her moon-gray eyes sparkle, and the story of the children in the forest rings in my ears.
We finish the loaf of bread and Yula slices the cake, setting huge pieces in front of us on delicate blue-and-white plates. Each piece is decorated with a single bright-red raspberry and fresh mint leaf, and mine has a pink-and-blue-striped birthday candle in the center. The cake is warm and golden-white and tastes faintly of almonds. The chocolate icing stands up in soft little peaks and melts on my tongue when I taste it. We finish the cake and I trace my fingers along the plate, through the last bits of icing.
I’ll visit my mother once a month for the next six months, take the bus all the way out here on a Saturday afternoon, or meet her every once in a while for breakfast in town. We’ll get to know each other bit by bit, and each time we meet she’ll tell me a little more about the circumstances of her life, and on and on we’ll continue to probe, in an effort, I suppose, to reach the end of each other. Yet if we did—if we knew everything there was to know—we would become the most predictable, boring people in the world. If I have learned anything, it’s that mystery is inherent to being interesting, especially when it comes to whom we decide to love. And so one day I’ll call and say I can’t make it this time, and for the next few years it will continue this way: some visits kept, others not.
After we exchange a few more letters, my father will take a road trip out to see me, unannounced, and we’ll meet for lunch in a noisy café. He will be so soft-spoken that I’ll struggle to hear what he is saying. He will tell me how broke he is, that his bad habits have taken hold of him again. When we part, he will hand me an envelope with a couple of twenty-dollar bills, and I will decide it is best to lose touch, to let him slip away. Miranda and Lydia-Rose will resume their rightful places in my heart, and Winkie and I will dream of owning a little apartment by the ocean one day.
When Quinn dies, Yula will decide to sell the land and move away—and on that day, the life she was meant to have will finally begin. Gradually, she and I will become strangers again, the spaces between our visits further and further apart. Because once the mystery is gone, she’s just another person staring back at you from across the dinner table—someone who left you out in the cold, on a bare stretch of concrete one morning at 5:15. What do you say to a person like that? What do you say to them over the years? Knowing the story doesn’t make it any better. We get what we’re given, nothing more, nothing less. In the end, I do not get to have Yula as a mom
.
There is no sound here except the calls of birds. The sun is setting, and the room fills with a deep orange light. Miranda rests her hand on her stomach and we all sit back, plates pushed toward the center of the table. We let the sun go down and the room grow dark. And just when we can hardly see anymore, Vaughn plucks the wishbone from what’s left of the chicken and holds it out for me to reach. It’s the one thing in life he can’t predict: who will get the lucky break.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their generous support, thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts, Colgate University, Hawthornden Castle, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the John C. Schupes Fellowship, the English Department at the University of Cincinnati, and the remarkable people behind these institutions—Peter Balakian, Jennifer Brice, Ethan Canin, Lan Samantha Chang, Michael Griffith, Drue Heinz, Patrick O’Keeffe, and Jane Pinchin.
Thank you to my formidable agent, Claudia Ballard, and magnificent editors, Millicent Bennett, Sarah Savitt, and Nicole Winstanley. Thanks, too, to Karen Alliston, Mary Ann Blair, Meg Cassidy, Kathryn Higuchi, Beth Lockley, Chloe Perkins, and to everyone at Penguin Canada, Simon & Schuster, and Faber.
For helping me with my research, thanks to Carol Alexander, Lisa Cowan, Karen Dean, Roger Denley, Peter Hancock, Angela Hatch, Kate Schenck, and the book Nobody’s Child by Kate Adie.
A special thank-you to Lorna Jackson, without whom none of this would have happened.
Lastly, love and gratitude to my mother, Jeanne Shoemaker, and to my family and friends, Shane Boudreaux, Alexis Celona, John Celona, John Connor, Jason England, Dama Hanks, Brian Hendricks, Tania Hershman, Sara Peters, Kate Soles, Mark Stern, Sarah Taggart, Brian Trapp, and Deborah Willis. In big ways and small ways, each of you helped me to write this book.
Marjorie Celona received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and recipient of the John C. Schupes Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Glimmer Train, and Harvard Review. Born and raised on Vancouver Island, she lives in Cincinnati.
Y: A Novel Page 27