Y: A Novel (21 page)

I sat between them, wrapped in a wool blanket. I was still cold from the night before.
Matthew hadn’t told me that the Burrard Street shelter would only take you if you
were over eighteen. I pleaded with the guy who seemed to be in charge of the operation,
but he said I’d have to go to the youth shelter downtown. He wrote the address on
the back of a brochure about HIV and drew a crude little map. He was gruff, unfriendly.
He wore faded jeans and white running shoes, a little silver cross around his neck.

I tried to find the youth shelter. I did try.

I walked down Nelson, past a group of First Nations teenagers standing outside a supermarket,
undeterred by this awful classical music blaring from speakers in the awning. They
all wore red jackets and bandanas. Two of the boys held each other at arm’s length
by the collars of their coats—
I’m gonna fuckin’, I’m gonna fuckin’, don’t you push me, man, don’t you fuckin’
—and two of the girls tried to break it up by kicking the boys’ shins. I knew they
were just punks, but they frightened me all the same. It was all over the news: there
had been 128 shootings in the city since January. The shootings didn’t happen downtown
very often, but still, I kept looking behind me, ready to run.

Granville Street was packed with people, all with that wet carpet smell. The closer
I got to Hastings, the more people there were. I pushed them off when they stumbled
into me. I stopped and bummed a smoke off a couple of tourists who were staring dumbly
at a man sitting on a wooden pallet in the doorway of a twenty-four-hour café, a river
of piss streaming out under his feet.

I walked up Hastings, past the Royal Bank and Birks Jewellers. The sidewalks were
all torn up by construction, so I walked on the road. It didn’t feel as dangerous
anymore. There were fewer people around. Everything was made out of concrete. I’d
never seen a cityscape so gray. It was colder and damper down here—closer to the water.
A Blenz Coffee; a Mr. Big & Tall. And then I was past the skyscrapers and it was just
little old buildings, an art college, a record store. The offices of the B.C. Marijuana
Party. The New Amsterdam Café, a big pot leaf over the awning; a war memorial. I made
it past Cambie Street, and the city came alive. It was midnight, but there were almost
as many people on the street as there’d been on Robson. Victory Food Market; Asia
Imports. Pawnshop after pawnshop. Everything was boarded up except for an all-night
grocery store with bars on the windows. About thirty people were gathered in front
of it, shuffling around, taking turns going inside. I watched a man, scrawny, tall,
and hunchbacked, with a bearded face and eyes buried deep in their sockets. I watched
two women, one short and First Nations, a scraggly ponytail clinging to her back like
seaweed, the other pink-skinned with terrible dope sores, her stringy
hair pulled taut from her face and yanked into a mean little bun. I stared at the
women, but they did not look at me. I’d never seen people like them before. The street
smelled like piss, and I marched forward, one foot in front of the other, trying to
walk with purpose. Trying not to look scared. I could do this. I was as much a freak
as anyone else. In some ways I felt good walking down this street of broken faces.
I stood at the edge of a park and watched a man shoot heroin into his neck. I let
myself have the thought that I might find my mother on a street like this one day.
I let myself have the thought that I might be on a street like this one day. And then
it was all hotels, their lobbies stuffed with men, and abandoned shopping carts filled
high with empty bottles and rough wool blankets and plastic bags, and a laundromat,
and a check-cashing business, and after that everything was just empty, just blocks
of boarded-up and painted-over storefronts, the windows barred or covered with flyers
or broken. I shivered and looked around. A few people—men or women I couldn’t tell—were
asleep in doorways. There was pigeon shit everywhere, and when I looked down I saw
a hypodermic needle at my feet and a bright-pink condom wrapper, a bloody handkerchief,
and someone’s old tennis shoe.

It started to rain, and I walked under the awnings as much as possible to avoid the
rain and the splash of the city buses as they shot by. I thought about Matthew in
that shitty room with no bathroom and no bed, the square of paper on his tongue, him
wagging it at me.

“Weed?” A man motioned to me from an alleyway. A group of men had gathered under a
fire escape, taking turns getting head from a woman in white jeans. I stood and watched
for a minute. One of the men slipped a bill into the woman’s hand and she limped down
the alley, away from the group. I had walked all the way to Chinatown.

What’s to say? I walked as fast as I could back to the Burrard Street shelter and
crouched in the doorway until it was morning.

One cop was a stubby guy with a shiny bald head. He introduced himself as Officer
Lucchi. The other guy had a silver goatee and hair the color
of cigarette ash. His hairy wrists peeked out from the sleeves of his uniform and
he wore a gold chain around his neck. His name was Officer Hoffman.

They sat on either side of me, drinking coffee out of paper cups. I pretended to be
asleep. The door to the outside deck blew open, and Officer Hoffman took a breath
of the crisp ocean air.

“Good day for a cigar,” he said.

Officer Lucchi fiddled with an elastic band, stretching and snapping it between his
fingers. They talked about their kids. Lucchi said he had three boys, all in their
teens.

“And I looked at him and said, ‘Don’t pretend like I don’t remember where you said
you were going tonight,’” he was saying. “‘You telling me I have amnesia?’”

Hoffman shook his head. “I’ve got easy kids.”

A mosquito was buzzing around Lucchi’s leg, and his hand swooped down on it, triumphant.
“Fucker,” he said. He put the elastic band in his pocket. An announcement came on
that we were nearing Swartz Bay. It was time to go.

I curled up in the back of the police car and listened to them talk. Lucchi said he
was going to Ottawa for a week to visit an old girlfriend.

“Want me to look after your wife while you’re gone?” Hoffman said.

“Fuck you,” said Lucchi.

“Wrap it up, all right?” Hoffman said, and the two men laughed. “Seriously, man, wrap
it up. You don’t know what’s going around these days.”

When we turned onto Grant Street, Miranda and Lydia-Rose were waiting in front of
the town house, hands on hips. Lydia-Rose looked at me with hate in her eyes. Her
hair was wild, uncombed. She put her arm around her mother, as though she were protecting
her from me.

For the first time, Miranda looked old. Her eyes were dark and heavy, the skin on
her face slightly gray. She swayed a bit as she stood there, as if it was taking every
muscle in her body to keep her upright.

The police took one last gloomy glimpse at us and disappeared around the corner. I
watched their taillights; I watched a squirrel run up a big tree. When there was nothing
left to look at, I faced Miranda. I had never seen her look so tired.

“Go inside,” she told Lydia-Rose, pushing her toward the town house.

I fiddled with the strap of my suspenders, looked at my sneakers, and waited for her
to speak.

Instead she stepped toward me and put her hands on my shoulders, then pulled me in.
She held me like this for a long time, my head on her shoulder.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“No.”

“I don’t want you in the house right now,” she whispered. “I don’t want you to come
inside.”

I tried to pull away, but she held me tightly. “I think,” she said, “it’s time we
found alternative living arrangements.”

“But—”

“I’m too angry,” she said, “to have you in my house.”

I struggled against her, but she didn’t budge. I felt the strength of her arms for
the first time, the result of years of physical labor.

“Do you know that I had everyone on the block out looking for you? I had to call every
one of them just now and tell them you were fine. Tell them you were being brought
home by the police.”

“Where do you want me to go?”

I heard her swallow, and then her words came out slowly and precisely, as if this
was something she’d been rehearsing for a long time. She told me that one of our neighbors
had offered to let me stay with her for a little while, a woman who used to babysit
me. She’s a nice woman, Miranda said, and could use some help around the house. “She’ll
be nicer to you than I’d be right now.”

“How long do I have to stay with her?”

“Until you’re ready to be a part of our family again.”

“But I never—”

She took a labored breath and kissed my cheek. “A few days. That’s all. Just let me
cool off.”

She released me finally, and we stood eye-to-eye. I said the cruelest thing I could
think of to say. “You’re not my mother.”

She told me to wait on the sidewalk while she got my things.

“We’re at a real fork in the road here, Shannon,” she said.

Part Two

X.

e
ugene is curled in a ball in the middle of Yula and Harrison’s bed when they finally
get back from Dallas Road. He is wearing Harrison’s Cowichan sweater and silver oven
mitts on his hands. It has been hours and hours since they left, and the cabin is
dark and damp with cold. Yula switches on the lamp by the side of the bed and puts
her hand on the child’s forehead. It is hot and dry to the touch. Dominic stands in
the doorway, smoking a cigarette. He is a huge man with a shaved head and white-blond
eyebrows, eyelashes, and patchy facial hair, which make him look as though his face
has been dusted with glitter. He has tiny eyes, one blue, one brown, and leathery
hands with bitten fingernails. My mother feels his eyes on her and finds him repulsive.

Harrison is on his knees in the living room, sifting through the cigar box he keeps
under the couch for the little baggie of cocaine that his brother gave him the day
before. The boy was hungry. One of the kitchen chairs is pushed up against the counter
and his dirty footprints are on the countertop, his handprints on the cupboards. An
empty bag of marshmallows is on the floor and the fridge is open, a couple of moldy
oranges in the bottom of the crisper. There are cans of soup and tuna fish, but the
boy is too young to know how to use a can opener. He has found and eaten the crumbs
from a bag of potato chips in the trash. The medicine cabinet
in the bathroom is open, two empty bottles of grape- and cherry-flavored cough syrup
on the floor.

Yula runs her hand down Eugene’s cheek and sees the cold pool of vomit under his chin
that has seeped through the sheets and onto the mattress. She hears my father emptying
the contents of the cigar box onto the floor and then cursing, the soft crackle of
Dominic’s cigarette burning down. The bedsprings creak under her weight. In another
few hours it will be dawn. She can hear the rush of the creek below the cabin, a raccoon
rummaging through their trash can. Dominic pinches out his cigarette and puts the
butt in his shirt pocket. He stands in the doorway and wrings his big hands. “He’ll
be fine. He’ll be all right,” he says.

When the boy begins to vomit again, each of them takes a turn cradling him in the
bathtub. The vomit bubbles out of Eugene’s mouth like sea foam. Later, the bedroom
fills with blue light and the morning arrives. Yula holds her son in the corner of
the bedroom, the Cowichan sweater over both of them like a blanket, the oven mitts
hours ago thrown on the floor. She sits with her legs straight out in front of her,
repositions her son so his weight isn’t on her belly. She cradles him as best she
can. She is furious with Harrison for getting her high—furious with herself for leaving
her son for so long—and has shut the door. Eugene is breathing in little gasps. His
heart pounds against her body as she holds him. She wants to call the hospital, but
she is too stoned. She will give herself an hour to come down, and then she will call.
She is tired, but she knows she cannot let herself fall asleep. He’ll be okay, won’t
he? Yes, she thinks, he’s just sick from the cough syrup.