Y: A Novel (10 page)

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 heart
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, cambium, 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.”