Y: A Novel (27 page)

“In Fernwood?”

“Yeah.”

“And who you living with?”

“It’s not the greatest situation anymore.” I tell him all about Miranda. About Lydia-Rose.
I tell him about the Ministry of Children and Family Development, about the initials
H.C.
I tell him the story of my running away. I tell him that Miranda is the best person
I’ve ever known, the most selfless, the most loving. But I want to find my real parents.
I tell Vaughn that this business of placing kids in other people’s homes is a nice
idea and all, but I think we’d all be better off with our own families in the end.

“Don’t know that I agree with you there. You don’t know anything about your real family.”

“That’s why I’m here—to find out.”

Vaughn puts down his fork. “Now, I need to tell you something and I want you to not
freak out until I’m done.” He gets up from his chair and, hands shaking again, leans
against the kitchen counter. “I want to tell you something about people.” He takes
off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “Not everybody makes it. Life doesn’t work out
for everybody, despite what your teachers and such might tell you. People want to
encourage you at your age, and there’s some dignity to that, but there’s a falsehood
to it, too, Shannon. Most things are, in some sense, predetermined.”

“Okay.” I feel like I’m back with Mickey. Please don’t be insane. Why does everybody
have to be insane?

“I’m not about to say that what she did was right. But you look okay. You look healthy,
and if you’ll pardon my language, you don’t look all effed up. I see what girls look
like around here. Your mother, Shannon—”

The neighbors’ wind chimes are clanking in the wind, and we both pause a minute and
listen to the sound.

“I’ve seen things,” he says finally, “I wasn’t supposed to see.”

“I don’t have anywhere to go,” I say, my eyes betraying me. They fill with tears and
I fight them, wipe them furiously from my eyes.

“Easy now,” he says. He pulls his chair around the side of the table and puts his
hand tentatively on mine. “Most people have good and bad in them. Like yin and yang,
all right?”

“All right.” I look at his earnest face, his scraggly red beard, his goofy T-shirt.
“If you saw my mom again—would you know it was her?”

He puts a giant forkful of stew in his mouth, and I watch him chew. “I didn’t really
see your mom’s face,” he says finally. The light is fading, and he checks his watch.
“Shouldn’t you be getting home?”

“Dunno. Do you have a car?”

“Not anymore.”

“Are you busy tomorrow?”

“Work until three.”

“Would you go to the ministry with me? Maybe if you come with me—maybe if we explain
the whole situation—Madeleine will help me a little more. We can take the bus.”

“Shannon, I want to go back to something I was saying earlier—”

“About it not working out for everyone. I remember. I don’t need her to be a good
person. But I have to know.”

“Grant Street’s not that far. You can borrow my bike—I’ve got two anyway—it’s getting
late now.”

“Is that the right thing to do?”

“It is. Listen, things get clearer as you get older. Hop on my bike. I’ll get you
my helmet. Tomorrow we’ll go to the ministry together. Okay? Come by the Y around
three.”

“Okay.”

“Hey, I’m grateful for the dinner company. And I’m happy to help you find your mom.
Listen, I’m over the moon that you’re okay. All right? You have no idea what this
is like for me, you showing up at my door. Do you know that? Huh? Look at you. You
turned out great, I can see it. You’re great. And there’s something else, too—you’ve
got some kind of crazed animal inside you. I can see it. Am I right? I know it’s there.
But just take my bike, go back to your family—they are your family, Shannon—and
I’ll help you out. But tell Miranda what you’re up to. Do you want to hurt her like
this? You said yourself she’s the nicest person you know. Don’t hurt the nicest person
you know.”

When I get to the town house, Lydia-Rose is taking notes while she watches an art-house
film for a project she’s doing on video art. There are a lot of penises. She doesn’t
say anything to me when I first walk in. We sit on the couch together, looking at
the penises. She’s eating Wasa bread, Winkie begging at her feet, and her pajama pants
are covered in crumbs.
Penises,
she writes in her notebook. She looks at me.

“You’re back,” she says. She turns the mute on, and we watch a man who looks like
an albino, the film sped up so his eyes flicker.

I start to tell her about Vaughn and stop. I don’t want her to know. I want to keep
certain things a secret. “Is Miranda upstairs?”

Lydia-Rose nods. “What’s with the helmet?” she says.

“Found it.” I look at myself in the hall mirror. In Vaughn’s white helmet, I look
like a stormtrooper.

I pad up the stairs to Miranda’s room and knock on her door. This is something we’re
still not supposed to do—even now, her room is off-limits. But I stand there anyway
and knock.

“Shannon.” She’s wearing a pale-pink housecoat. Some kind of thick cream is smeared
under her eyes. She looks at me, looks at the helmet. “I was really angry before,”
she says. “I was just so angry.”

“I want to apologize.” I look at her face and she blinks softly.

“You should,” she says. She steps back and lets me into the room, and we sit on the
Little Mermaid comforter together, which is by now so faded and threadbare that I
find it embarrassing. I want to buy her a new one—and I will. As soon as I have enough
money, I will.

She reaches into the pocket of her housecoat, takes out a cigarette, and lights it.
“Don’t tell Lydia-Rose I’m smoking again.”

“I’m sorry for running away.”

She inhales deeply and puts her ashes into a coffee tin. Minty cigarette smoke fills
the room, and she stands up and opens the window.

“Shannon,” she says. “I want you to know that you’ll always be my daughter.”

And so I start to tell her everything—I don’t leave out one bit. I tell her about
the nice old couple, Belle and Hugh, who dropped me off at the bus station; about
Matthew and his smelly trench coat, his long curly hair; about getting the bread out
of the dumpster and Gregor’s apartment and Cole; about how I was too scared to go
to the youth shelter and stayed up all night in the doorway of the homeless shelter
on Burrard; about spitting the little square of acid into my hand.

What I don’t tell her about is my visit to the Ministry of Children and Family Development,
about Madeleine, about Vaughn. About wanting to find my mother. Already it seems to
me that to survive you have to keep a part of yourself hidden from everyone you know.
Something has to be yours and yours alone.

“I wonder,” she says. “I wonder if you remember this at all.” She picks up her cigarette
pack as if she’s going to light another one, but then sets it down. “When you were
five years old, that horrible man you used to live with—”

“Julian.”

“Julian. He waited for you one day outside of your day care. He made you get in his
car.”

“I remember.”

“Your sister ran and told one of the women who worked there. I still remember her
name. Krystal. Lydia-Rose ran to her and told her you’d gotten in the car of some
strange man. Krystal didn’t even stop to call the police; she just took off running
until she got to Julian’s car and tried to open the door to get to you, but he drove
off. The police found the car by Gonzales Beach. You were hurt pretty bad, sweetheart.
It was so awful.”

“I don’t remember it that way,” I say. “I remember being in his car and then you coming
and picking me up and carrying me away.”

Miranda pauses a minute, and we look at each other. “I don’t think so. I didn’t see
you until later, at the hospital. It would have been a police officer who would have
carried you out of the car.”

I search my thoughts for this, but I can’t find it. I still see Miranda’s
face, all sweaty, crying, lifting me out of the car. The feel of her soft sweater.
Looking back at Julian’s face. That’s all I can see.

“This is important,” she says. “Maybe not right now, but in your lifetime. There are
men in this world who are so damaged that they become evil.” She looks at me. “I just
don’t want you to ever encounter another man like him again.” She finally tilts the
pack of cigarettes and slides one out, taps it against her leg, and lights it. “Damaged
men are dangerous,” she says to me.

“Where is Lydia-Rose’s father?” I ask, and she searches the air in front of her, seeing
something from her past.

“Gone,” she says, and puts her hand over mine. She looks tired suddenly, and I know
not to ask her any more questions about it. I suppose she’ll sit down with Lydia-Rose
one day and tell her everything there is to know.

“Why don’t your sisters ever visit?”

She unclips the bicycle helmet and takes it off my head, and I let her comb out my
hair. It is snarled and greasy, and I let my head drop to my chest while she untangles
it, her fingers endlessly patient, one hand grasping the snarl and the other tugging
through it with the comb so that it doesn’t hurt as much. She combs, then takes a
puff of her cigarette, combs again.

“They used to,” she says. “We used to see each other all the time.”

“What happened?”

“One of my sisters died, honey. Years ago.”

“How old were you?”

She puts the comb down. “Twenty or so.”

“And Sharon?”

“Sharon and I don’t speak anymore.”

I think about the letters I found under her bed.
A real cunt of a woman.
“What happened between you and Sharon?”

“She’s mentally ill. She’s not right in the head. Some people think that should excuse
her behavior, but I don’t think so. I think we’re accountable for what we do, no matter
what.”

“What did she do?”

“She hurt me.”

“Hurt you how?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. It would take forever to explain.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s just not talk about it.”

Crows are screaming outside, and I remember when Miranda and I once went to the library
and researched what their different calls meant. The crows outside are doing our favorite
call—it’s as if they’re laughing madly. Before we knew that crows were making this
sound, Lydia-Rose and I called them the Jackass Birds. We pictured them as maniacal
beasts, roaring their heads off.

“It’s the Jackass Bird,” I say to Miranda.

“Always.”

I sit up and face her. “Can I still live here?”

The skin around her eyes is shiny from the eye cream. She dabs at it and then wipes
her finger on her housecoat. “I want you to go to school,” she says. “You think I
don’t know you tear up your attendance reports?” She fixes me with a look as if she’s
about to slap me, but then her whole face softens. “You’re not as sneaky as you think
you are. Go to school. This is my only condition.”

We shake hands. I feel bad about not telling her about Vaughn, but it’s fleeting,
and when I go back downstairs and Lydia-Rose is already asleep, I climb into my bed
and think about how after school tomorrow I’m going to jump on his bike, ride to the
Y, and then we’re going to go to the ministry together, and at that moment I feel
so excited about my life I can hardly stand it.

XIV.

q
uinn watches the taillights from his bedroom window, two red dots disappearing into
the night. He can’t sleep. He’s been up for hours. He is still awake when Yula, Dominic,
and Harrison pull back into the driveway and stumble out, drunk and stoned and shouting.
The motion lights flick on as they make their way down the gravel path to the cabin.
The two men have to hold Yula up, her feet dragging on the ground. He watches them
open the door, and Harrison slips and falls to his knees before wrenching himself
up and inside. He watches them struggle to get his pregnant daughter through the door.
What a horrible mess. He realizes his grandson has been alone all this time. He shakes
his head, feels a sudden anger rise in his chest. He takes two sleeping pills and
lies in his bed, awake, until the sun comes up. He watches the sun rise, fingers his
pill bottle, wonders if he should take two more and sleep through the day.