Y: A Novel (2 page)

The man wishes so badly I weren’t there that he could scream it. All his life, he’s
the one who notices the handkerchief drop from an old woman’s purse and has to chase
her halfway down the block, waving it like a flag. Every twitch of his eye shows him
something he doesn’t want to see: a forgotten lunch bag; the daily soup spelled “dialy”;
a patent leather shoe about to step in shit.
Wait! Watch out, buster!
All this sloppiness, unfinished business. Me. I’m so small he thinks “minute” when
he squats and cocks his head. My young mother has wrapped me in a gray sweatshirt
with thumbholes because it’s cold this time of day and I’m naked, just a few hours
old and jaundiced: a small, yellow thing.

The man unfolds the sweatshirt a bit, searching for a note or signs of damage. There
is nothing but a Swiss Army Knife folded up beneath my feet. My head is the size of
a Yukon Gold potato. The man pauses. He’s trying to form the sentences he’ll have
to say when he pounds the door and calls for help. “Hey! There’s a baby here! A baby
left by her mother—I think—I was waiting for the doors to open, she put the baby here
and walked away, young girl, not good with ages, late teens, I guess? There’s a baby
here, right
here
. Oh, I didn’t look—” He looks. “It’s a girl.”

There’s a small search. The police mill around and take a description from the man,
who tells them his name is Vaughn and that he likes to be the first in the door at
the Y in the morning, that it’s like a little game with him.

“Gotta be first at something, guy,” he says to the cop. They look at each other and
laugh, a little too hard, for a little too long.

Vaughn is wearing his usual garb: navy track pants with a white racing stripe, a T-shirt
with a sailboat on the front, new white running shoes. He is still young, in his early
thirties, six feet tall with the build of someone who runs marathons. His red hair
is thick and wild on top of his head, and he’s growing a goatee. It itches his chin.
He fiddles with it as he talks to the officer.
What did you see?

By now Vaughn is used to the way his life works: he is the seer. When the cars collide,
he knows it two minutes before it happens. He predicted his parents’ divorce by the
way his mother’s lip curled up once, at a party, when his father told a dirty joke.
He was nine. He thought, That’s it. That’s the sign. It isn’t hard, this predicting,
if that’s what it’s called; it’s a matter of observation. From the right vantage point—say,
overhead—it isn’t a matter of psychic ability to see that two people, walking toward
each other, heads down, hands in pockets, will eventually collide.

Sir, what did you see?

Vaughn pauses before answering. He feels time slow, and he feels himself float up.
From up here, he sees what he needs to: the sequence of events that will befall me
if I am raised by my mother. It’s all too clear. He wasn’t meant to see her. He wasn’t
meant to intervene. He has seen the look in my mother’s eyes; he has seen women like
her before. Whatever my fate, he knows I am better off without her.

What exactly did you see?

And so the officer takes down a description of my mother, but he doesn’t get it right:
Vaughn tells him that her hair was short and blond, when the truth is that it was
swirled into a dark brown bun. (When she takes it out, it falls to her collarbone.)
He says she wore red sweatpants and a white tennis sweater—he finds himself describing
his own outfit from the day before—and that she didn’t look homeless, just scared
and young. Maybe a university student, he says. An athletic build, he says.

By now, twenty people have gathered in the parking lot of the Y. Some lady pushes
through the crowd of officers and people in track pants. She swirls her arms and her
mouth opens like a cave.

“My baby!” she shrieks and sets a bag of empty beer cans in a lump at her feet. Her
head jerks. The cops roll their eyes and so does Vaughn. She’s the quarter lady—the
one who descends when you plug the meter: “Hey, man, got a quarta’?” Her hair is like
those wigs at Safeway when you forget to buy a costume for Halloween. If she had wings,
she’d look ethereal.

My first baby picture appears in the newspaper. “Abandoned Infant: Police Promise
No Charges.” Vaughn cuts out the article and sticks it on his fridge. He’s embarrassed
by one of his quotes—“I believe it’s an act of desperation”—and his eyes fill with
tears when he reads the passage from Saint Vincent de Paul, which is recited to the
press by one of the nurses at the children’s hospital:
These children belong to God in a very special way, because they have been abandoned
by their mothers and fathers. . . . You cannot have too much affection for them.

“I believe it’s an act of desperation.” Vaughn sucks in a dry breath. The quote makes
him cringe and he wishes he had said nothing at all.

He sits at the foot of his bed, waiting for the phone to ring. Surely the police have
found my mother; it’s an island, after all. There’s nowhere to go. Once they find
her, it will only be a matter of time before they get curious and wonder why his description
doesn’t match. He sits on the bed all day and stares at the phone. He stares at it
all night. In the morning, he hoists navy blue sheets over the curtain rods to block
out the light and wedges newspaper under the door. He sleeps for an hour, dreams that
he is hurtling through four floors of a building on fire.

When he wakes, the room is dark but his eyes are burning. He closes his eyes and he
is falling through the building again, and when he lands there is blood under his
fingernails.

On his bedside table are a picture of his girlfriend, a rolled-up magazine for killing
spiders, and a triangular prism. If he opened the curtains, his face would glow a
million colors.

Someone, his neighbor, is playing the piano. Poorly, absent-mindedly.

He shakes his head.

“I remembered wrong,” he tells the room, rehearsing, but the phone does not ring.

He reaches for the magazine and knocks the prism to the floor. It doesn’t break. He
puts the magazine on his lap and spreads its pages in his hands.

“I space out sometimes. Especially in the morning. I must have gotten her mixed up
with someone I saw earlier, or the day before.”

He watches the phone.

He tries to sleep on his back with a pillow pulled over his eyes. He tries to sleep
on his stomach. He buries his head in the bedding like a vole.

“I’m sorry,” he says to his empty bedroom, to the image of my mother burned into his
mind. “I’m sorry if I did something wrong.”

Finally, he tucks the article into one of the scrapbooks he keeps on top of the refrigerator
and tries to forget about me, about my mother and his lie. He knows, somehow, that
there was an act of love behind the abandonment. He knows, somehow, he wasn’t meant
to intervene.

A wild card, a ticking time bomb. I could be anyone; I could come from anywhere. I
have no hair on my head and there’s a vacant look in my eyes, as if I am either unfeeling
or stupid.

I weigh a little over four pounds and am placed in a radiant warmer in neonatal intensive
care. I test positive for marijuana, negative for amphetamines and methamphetamines.
The hospital takes chest X-rays, draws blood from my heel, tests my urine. I do not
have pneumonia; I am not infected with HIV. I am put on antibiotics for funisitis,
an inflammation of the umbilical cord, and this diagnosis is printed in the newspaper
in a final plea for my mother to come forward. She is probably sick, one of the doctors
is quoted as saying, and most likely needs treatment. The antibiotics run their course,
my mother never appears, and the Ministry of Children and Family Development files
for custody.

One of the nurses on the night shift calls me Lily. Her name is Helene, and she is
twenty-five years old. She has chestnut-colored, shoulder-length hair that frizzes
when it rains, thick bangs, and a small plump face
with a rosebud mouth. She stops by on her breaks and sings me “By a Waterfall.”

There’s a whippoorwill that’s calling you-oo-oo-oo

By a waterfall, he’s dreaming, too.

Helene lives alone in an apartment on Esquimalt Road with a view of the ocean. She
looks at my tiny face and imagines what her life would be like if she took me home
and became my mother. She rearranges her apartment in her mind, puts a bassinet in
the small space between her double bed and dresser, replaces one of the foldout chairs
at her kitchen table with a high chair. She bakes a Dutch apple pie for me while I
watch; all the time she is singing. But Helene meets a man a few weeks later, and
her thoughts overflow. She cannot make space for both of us in her mind. She marries
the man. They move to Seattle.

I am passed back and forth, cradled in one set of arms and then another. Once it is
safe for me to leave the hospital, I am placed in a foster home.

My new parents don’t baptize me because they aren’t religious. They name me Shandi
and we live in a noisy brown apartment building in a part of the city that has no
name. We are on one of two side streets that connect two major streets, which head
in and out of downtown. At night we listen to the traffic on one side coming into
town, and the traffic on the other side heading out. There is a corner store a block
away, a vacuum repair shop, and a park with a tennis court. City workers come in the
morning to clean the public restroom and empty the trashcans, and in the late afternoon,
young mothers push strollers down the path, shortcutting to the corner store. At night,
the park comes alive. The homeless sleep on the benches or set up tents under the
fir trees. The tennis court becomes an open-air market for drugs. In the morning,
it is littered with hypodermic needles, buckets of half-eaten KFC, someone’s forgotten
sleeping bag. Teenagers from the high school down the street play tennis on the weekends,
pausing to roll and smoke joints. It is an otherwise beautiful park, with giant
rhododendrons, yew hedges in the shape of giant gumdrops, and Pacific dogwoods with
dense, bright-white flowers. A few long-limbed weeping cedars stand here and there
amid a barren grassy field.