Y: A Novel (42 page)

When Quinn dies, Yula will decide to sell the land and move away—and on that day,
the life she was meant to have will finally begin. Gradually, she and I will become
strangers again, the spaces between our visits further and further apart. Because
once the mystery is gone, she’s just another person staring back at you from across
the dinner table—someone who left you out in the cold, on a bare stretch of concrete
one morning at 5:15. What do you say to a person like that? What do you say to them
over the years? Knowing the story doesn’t make it any better. We get what we’re given,
nothing more, nothing less. In the end, I do not get to have Yula as a mom.

There is no sound here except the calls of birds. The sun is setting, and the room
fills with a deep orange light. Miranda rests her hand on her stomach and we all sit
back, plates pushed toward the center of the table. We let the sun go down and the
room grow dark. And just when we can hardly see anymore, Vaughn plucks the wishbone
from what’s left of the chicken and holds it out for me to reach. It’s the one thing
in life he can’t predict: who will get the lucky break.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their generous support, thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts, Colgate
University, Hawthornden Castle, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the John C. Schupes Fellowship,
the English Department at the University of Cincinnati, and the remarkable people
behind these institutions—Peter Balakian, Jennifer Brice, Ethan Canin, Lan Samantha
Chang, Michael Griffith, Drue Heinz, Patrick O’Keeffe, and Jane Pinchin.

Thank you to my formidable agent, Claudia Ballard, and magnificent editors, Millicent
Bennett, Sarah Savitt, and Nicole Winstanley. Thanks, too, to Karen Alliston, Mary
Ann Blair, Meg Cassidy, Kathryn Higuchi, Beth Lockley, Chloe Perkins, and to everyone
at Penguin Canada, Simon & Schuster, and Faber.

For helping me with my research, thanks to Carol Alexander, Lisa Cowan, Karen Dean,
Roger Denley, Peter Hancock, Angela Hatch, Kate Schenck, and the book
Nobody’s Child
by Kate Adie.

A special thank-you to Lorna Jackson, without whom none of this would have happened.

Lastly, love and gratitude to my mother, Jeanne Shoemaker, and to my family and friends,
Shane Boudreaux, Alexis Celona, John Celona, John Connor, Jason England, Dama Hanks,
Brian Hendricks, Tania Hershman, Sara Peters, Kate Soles, Mark Stern, Sarah Taggart,
Brian Trapp, and Deborah Willis. In big ways and small ways, each of you helped me
to write this book.

Marjorie Celona
received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow
and recipient of the John C. Schupes Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in
Best American Nonrequired Reading, Glimmer Train,
and
Harvard Review
. Born and raised on Vancouver Island, she lives in Cincinnati.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
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actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Marjorie Celona Originally published in Canada in 2012 by Hamish
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Celona, Marjorie.

Y : a novel / by Marjorie Celona.—1st Free Press hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. Self-realization in women—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9199.4.C396Y25 2013

813'.6—dc23   2012009396

ISBN 978-1-4516-7438-5

ISBN 978-1-4516-7442-2 (ebook)

Page 9
: “BY A WATERFALL”

Words by IRVING KAHAL Music by SAMMY FAIN

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