Y: A Novel (41 page)

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.