Y: A Novel (18 page)

Later, we sit in silence, eyes glued to the flickering TV screen in the blackness
of the living room. We sit on opposite sides of the couch, Lydia-Rose underneath her
zebra-skin bedspread, and I wait for her to stop being so mad.

“I’m sorry,” I say to the television, to the couch, to my empty bowl of salad, to
my sock with a hole in the toe, to sleeping Winkie.

Finally, Lydia-Rose looks at me. “Hey, it’s all right,” she says. “It’s all right.”

And so I climb underneath the bedspread with her, Sock Voodoo at our feet, pins sticking
out of its head. After a while Lydia-Rose complains she’s too warm and opens the window.
She falls asleep before I do.

The curtains stretch out in the wind like thin white arms. So often we fall asleep
together this way, in front of the TV in the living room, her head on my shoulder.

But after an hour I jolt awake, my neck throbbing with pain. Somehow, during my long
and unfulfilling day, I’ve pulled a muscle. I ransack the bathroom for Lydia-Rose’s
old Tylenol with codeine, leftover from when she had her wisdom teeth removed. I take
a heating pad and two tea towels, wrap them around my neck, and fasten them with packing
tape. I look like I’m about to be shipped somewhere.

While Lydia-Rose sleeps, I tiptoe into the kitchen and search her diary for something
about my disappearance tonight.
I hate myself for still being in love with Jeremy,
tonight’s entry reads.
I thought I could have a few drinks, that it wouldn’t be . . .
And then there’s a list of all the things she wants to achieve before she turns twenty.
Start a magazine. Travel Europe by train. Lose fifteen pounds.

There’s nothing about me. Not a word. The absence of anything—the indifference—hits
me harder than I want it to.

In the back of her diary she writes terrible poetry, and the latest one is about her
breasts. I sneak into the bedroom to tear one of the pages out—I might need to blackmail
her someday, for instance—when I feel Miranda’s eyes on me. Even through the codeine
haze, I feel her bristle with anger.

She is holding her wallet so that it gapes open, empty of cash. It’s after midnight,
and her eyes are tired. She looks at me, the towels around my neck, then down at the
diary. In an instant she knows what it is and what I’m doing. I feel the patience
drain right out of her.

“Do I need to buy a bigger house?” she says, and points to the diary. “You can’t respectfully
share a room?”

I close the diary and push it toward her, my cheeks hot with shame. “Please don’t
tell her.”

“What do you want?” she says, gesturing to the diary, the empty wallet, the diary,
the wallet.

My heart swells with guilt and I stab my fingernails into my palms.

She waves the wallet at me.
Where are you? Where are you right now?
“You’re acting like a criminal, Shannon. Skulking around. You won’t even meet my eyes.”

I try to pay attention to what she’s saying, but I don’t want her to hurt me.

“When you steal,” she says, “when you invade our privacy, it makes me feel like I’m
at risk. I can’t,” she says, “I
won’t
be made to feel at risk in my own home.”

I stare into my pink bedspread, examine the little threads, the places where the dye
is fading, and then the little hairs on my arm, bright white, my little chubby hands.
In the time it takes my eyes to travel the length of my arm, I’ve removed myself from
her words completely.

Somewhere, in the distance, I can hear firecrackers. Miranda hears them, too, and
pauses her lecture for a second.
Kah-boom, bang, boom.
“Why tonight?” she asks. “What’s going on that we don’t know about?” Her arms hang
limp at her sides.

“I’m worried,” she starts to say, though now that I’ve started to dissociate, her
voice is rising above me, thinning out into the atmosphere, “that you spend too much
time alone.”

I hear Lydia-Rose wake and go into the bathroom, then the sound of her rummaging for
something.

“Shannon,” Miranda says. “I can’t talk to you if you won’t look at me.”

I stare at my fingernails and wring my hands. “I’ll pay you back.”

“When you love someone . . .” she says. I watch her move closer to me, her exhausted
face exaggerated in the dim light, and wait for the rest of the sentence.

I lift my heavy head, the tea towels threatening to come loose, the heating pad about
to slip out of place, and slide Lydia-Rose’s diary into the toe of her slipper.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Miranda, but her anger has shifted to a more unreachable place;
it has moved past me, onto other disappointments in her life, to Dell.

“Go live somewhere else if you don’t like it here,” Miranda says and spins around,
headed upstairs.

VIII.

h
arrison, please.”

Two days before Yula gives birth to me, she watches as Harrison sits at Quinn’s kitchen
table, rolls a ten-dollar bill into a tube, and carves out a little line of cocaine
with one of Quinn’s credit cards. It’s the first time he has done this in front of
her, though she’s suspected for months. She stands in his old coveralls and rubs her
belly as she watches him. It isn’t enough to get him addicted, he says to her, it
never is.

“Where were you last night?” she says, but he does not answer.

He drops his head when the cocaine hits his bloodstream, and she thinks about how
the last time he made love to her he couldn’t come. He had punched the mattress and
she had been frightened, for the first time, that she could no longer please him.

“You’ve got work in an hour,” she says and goes back to loading the dishwasher. They’re
in the big house, Quinn asleep in the back bedroom. It is the last week of August,
and the air inside the house is still and hot. She looks out the window to the cabin,
where Eugene is taking a nap. She hopes he won’t wake soon and need something from
her.

Quinn has dark blue Fiestaware, giant clay-like mugs and saucers, plates the size
of pizza platters. Yula crowds the dishwasher, balances cut crystal on top of eggcups,
but none of it ever breaks. She bangs the coffeepot
into the porcelain sink and whaps the milk saucer against the steel faucet. “Come
on. Fuck. Get ready.”

“Can you make me some toast first?” my father asks. He licks what’s left of the line
off the table and picks at a scab on the inside of his arm until it bleeds. “With
peanut butter. I like peanut butter.”

He holds his arm to his body like a broken-winged bird and gropes in Quinn’s cupboards.
He kisses her face, his mood suddenly jubilant, and farts.

“Well, hello there!” he says and waves his hand back and forth behind his butt. “Chocolate
chips. With chocolate chips.”

She makes him peanut butter toast with chocolate chips on top, then peers in at Quinn,
lying in the back bedroom with his arms over his face.

“Can I take the car?” she whispers when she sees he’s awake.

Quinn’s voice is thin and tired. He mumbles feebly. It is good enough to be a yes.
Yula walks back into the kitchen, takes out a frozen lasagna for him, and sticks it
in the oven. She sets the table as though she were throwing dice, and the plate, knife,
and fork bounce and clang their way perfectly into place: another high score.

“We leave in five minutes,” she says to Harrison, dropping the keys to the Meteor
on the kitchen table. He puts a chocolate chip into his mouth, picks up a knife coated
in peanut butter, and waves it in front of her face as though he were conducting a
miniature orchestra.

“Where to?” he says.

“To work.”

She walks back into Quinn’s room to change the sheets on his bed while Quinn paces
groggily, waiting. She checks the roll of toilet paper, Windexes the bathroom mirror,
pushes some dust off his bedside table with her hand, then wipes it on her pant leg.
She spits into her hand and shines the doorknob. Her mother’s red satin jewelry box
rests on the chest of drawers. She opens it, holds the Swiss Army Knife in her palm,
feels the heavy, pleasant weight of it, and slips it into her pocket. It will be her
knife now.

The last time she went to the cemetery was last Christmas. Yula drove and Quinn sat
in the front seat, holding a little bouquet of lavender. He had on a wool coat, a
navy blue V-necked sweater, and freshly ironed
pants. He looked dignified. Eugene and Harrison sat in the backseat, not speaking.
Harrison wore a checked shirt, a tie, and a jean jacket; Yula wore a parka over her
skirt.

Quinn told Yula to stop at Safeway, and they all went in and milled around the produce
aisle, sneaking grapes into their mouths, until Quinn found what he needed. A little
tree, a gift card hanging off its branches, for $7.99.

The cemetery was by the highway and looked like a miniature golf course. There were
no headstones, only flat stone markers under a row of cherry trees. They found Jo’s
grave and stood in a semicircle around it. Quinn pushed the tree into a little thing
in the ground that was supposed to hold flowers.

“I’m sorry it took me so long to visit you this time,” he said. Eugene moved away
from them and began to study the graves, running his hands over the inscribed names,
looking back at his mom and Harrison every now and again.

Yula fished a pen out of her parka and handed it to Quinn, and the two of them signed
the red-and-gold card attached to the tree.

“Come and sign the card with me, Eugene,” she said. The wind felt cold and wet on
her legs, and the damp of the grass had settled into the soles of her shoes. Her fingertips
were bright red. She signed Eugene’s name, balancing the card on her knee, then showed
it to her son. Harrison bent down and signed his name, his handwriting as shaky as
a child’s.

“Every car is filled with a family. Everyone’s going home for dinner,” Quinn said
suddenly, looking out at the highway.

“Yula, I love you.” Harrison stands in the doorway of Quinn’s back bedroom, his shirt
around his waist now, his chest bare.

Harrison and Quinn lock eyes. Quinn gets into bed and rolls over, his back to them.
Yula and Harrison step into the hallway, and Harrison takes her arm. His eyes are
suddenly full of anger. “I’m not the biggest fan of your father, Yula,” he whispers.
“Of any of this.” He steps toward her. “I told you, I want us to move.”

“I have to stay,” she says. She looks at Harrison’s body, and she looks at his hands.
He is a beautiful, dangerous thing, and she puts her hand on his chest. “My father
is sick.”

It gets so cold here at night, even in August. Yula tucks Eugene into her and Harrison’s
bed and turns off the space heater for fear of a fire. She tells her son she won’t
be gone long. She’ll take Harrison to work and be back in less than forty-five minutes.
She’ll climb into bed with Eugene and in the morning Harrison will be home, flour
on his jeans and little bits of dough under his fingernails, with stories for both
of them about the people he saw on the bus.

It takes three tries to start Quinn’s old car, but she gets it going and down the
road. She drives with one hand on the wheel, the other on her belly. Harrison sits
with his legs on the dash and watches himself light a joint in the vanity mirror.

“Me, too.” She holds out her hand and takes it from him. He pulls the Mexican blanket
from the backseat and throws it over his lap. She drives down the narrow road slowly,
overly worried about deer or Joel and Edwin gunning it up the hill. She waits for
the pot to kick in so she can relax.

“You’re not taking me to work,” Harrison says and takes the joint from her hand. “I
quit. Look—I’m going to tell you the story, and you’re going to see that I did the
right thing.”

Yula feels her stomach lurch. “I’m sick of this shit,” she says. “I’m sick of looking
after you.”

“Shut up, shut up.” Harrison rolls down his window and puts out his head. “Drive to
the water. Let’s talk for a while.” Yula obeys and pulls onto the highway: finally,
the sky, the speed. Eugene will be okay, she tells herself, he’s sound asleep and
she’ll be gone only a little over an hour. She’s left him alone before for short periods
of time, careful to lock the cabin so that he can’t get out, surrounding him with
his favorite stuffed animals, swaddling him in the goosedown duvet in case he gets
cold.