Y: A Novel (6 page)

One night, when she was fifteen, she snuck out of the house and met a group of her
friends down the road; together they drove to a warehouse in the industrial part of
town. She wore a pink-and-white mini dress that she’d stolen from Value Village and
knee-high lace-up Doc Marten boots. The main room of the warehouse was lit by strobe
lights, and a couple of DJs blasted techno on turntables at the back. It was so loud
that the bass shook the floor. Behind the bathrooms was a room lit by a single red
lightbulb. Yula wandered into the room and let herself be kissed by two tall boys,
beautiful to her dilated eyes. They ran their hands over her body and she kissed them
back, massaged their shoulders, let them put their fingers in her mouth. One stood
in front of her and the other behind; she spun between them, let them lick the sweat
from her neck. In the morning, when the party was over, she sat in the back of an
old Toyota Celica and kissed one of the boys while the other drove them into Chinatown,
where he lived above a record store in Fan Tan Alley. She lost her virginity to both
of them that morning, and it was a perfect and beautiful act, she remembered thinking
at the time, these two young boys adoring her body, taking breaks to pass a joint
between them, sips of whisky, long drags off cigarettes, until the late afternoon.
Later, they sat in a café and ate wonton soup, egg foo yong, chow mein, and lemon
chicken. One of them drove her home. She hid in her bed for the rest of the day, waiting
for the drugs to wear off so she could sleep. Her mother came in during the afternoon
and brought her a cup of tea. She nibbled at a cookie. Her stomach was as tight as
a fist.

The next day, she couldn’t remember either of the boys’ names. It
hurt to pee. She crouched over the toilet and looked at the bruises on her thighs.
Her vagina was swollen to almost twice its size. She bit her lip while she peed, grasped
the edge of the counter for support and clenched her pelvic muscles to stop the urine
because it burned. She let it trickle out of her for what felt like an hour. She dabbed
at her labia and the toilet paper came back dotted with bright flecks of blood. Her
ribs ached and it hurt to breathe; her buttocks were red from being slapped. She stared
at her naked body in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Was
this what men did to women? Her breasts were covered in blue bruises where the men
had bit her. Her mouth was as dry as ash. She found herself sobbing and hated herself
for doing so. No one had forced her to do this, and yet here she was, with a dark
and ugly secret to carry around. She shut her eyes and tried to erase the evening
from her mind. She wrapped a towel around her body and stuffed her underwear and the
pink-and-white dress into the washing machine, everything reeking of sex and cigarette
smoke.

She spent so long in the shower that the hot water ran out and she was left standing
in the cold. Was she now a whore? It seemed so easy to slip into this new role, this
new life. Had one careless act determined her future? Her skin was clean but her mouth
tasted like metal and her eyes were heavy in their sockets. She kept pressing between
her legs, surprised at how swollen and sore she was. She twisted a towel around her
wet hair and rooted in her dresser for the flannel pajamas her mother had bought her
for Valentine’s Day. She found them wadded in the back of a drawer and pressed them
flat with her hands. They were pale pink with an alternating pattern of red hearts
and little white dogs. She put them on, grabbed all her stuffed animals off the floor,
and climbed into bed, the creatures surrounding her. This new whore of a woman was
not her. She let herself cry then, horribly and hideously. This other woman was not
her. Here she was, safe in her bed.

She told her mother about the boys when she couldn’t deny anymore that she was pregnant.
She winced and waited for her mother’s sharp words, but Jo took her hand instead.
She rubbed the space where her daughter’s pinky finger should have been; it was a
birth defect, something
that Jo often apologized for, blaming it on the antinausea drugs she had taken.

“This is my fault,” her mother said when Yula told her she was pregnant. “I haven’t
looked after you.”

She asked her mother about having an abortion, but Jo told her that her pregnancy
was a sign—she believed in signs. Yula was bringing a new life into the house, and
this would solve things, her mother said, this would make everything okay. They would
raise the child together. “Let me be a mother to you both,” she said.

Yula felt so damaged inside that she etched her mother’s words deep into her mind,
where she would never forget them.

The two held each other, and Jo sobbed in Yula’s arms and apologized for what a shitty
mother she’d been.

“You haven’t—Mom, please.” Yula held her mother and stroked the back of her head.

“In my dreams I am a good mother.” Jo stood, wiped her eyes, and dried her hands on
her jeans. “Your father and I. We have a toxic relationship. I know this. You know
this. He knows it, too.”

Yula knew that her parents had once loved each other deeply. But now they fought over
everything. They fought so hard they forgot they had a daughter. They fought so hard
that a month after Yula’s son, Eugene, was born, Quinn veered his motorcycle into
an oncoming semi truck, just to scare Jo, just to shut her up—and when he pulled back
into his lane, the tires slid out on the rain-soaked road and they swerved onto the
shoulder of the highway, the motorcycle on its side. Both of them were dragged through
the gravel for more than a hundred feet. After three days in the hospital, Jo was
dead.

At first, Quinn’s grief was visible only in small gestures: a sudden clumsiness, a
dropped fork, the way he tripped on the top step as he walked to the front door. He
lost thirty pounds in the weeks that followed. The blob of his belly no longer jutted
over his pants; his shirts, suddenly, were all too big.

The day they buried her mother, Yula found a suicide note on Quinn’s desk. It was
just a few paragraphs written in pencil; it wasn’t finished. But there it was on his
desk—there was the note.
To Yula,
it began. She shoved it into one of the desk drawers; she never read the whole thing.
But there it was, always, somewhere, in her mind.

At first, she hated her father. Hated him with a ferocity she had never before felt.
She dreamed of killing him, of walking into the house with a shotgun and shooting
a hole in his heart. She thought of feeding him rat poison. She thought one day she
might walk up behind him with a belt and pull it around his neck.
I’ll break every bone in your face,
she said aloud as she did the dishes, and then pictured doing it—crushing his cheekbones
with a cold sharp rock.

And yet she found herself looking over at his house multiple times a day, stopping
by to give him his mail, ask him if he needed anything, borrow a couple of eggs. Since
Jo’s death, he’d let the house go, and more and more Yula’s anger turned to sadness.
She couldn’t stand the thought of finding her father dead one day, surrounded by dirty
dishes, unopened mail, stinking cartons of milk left on the counter, muddy footprints
in and out of every room, the television left on and never turned off—blaring music
videos while her father lay openmouthed and cold to the touch, face up on his bed.
No, she wouldn’t let this happen. She would take care of her father.

On Sundays, Yula took Eugene to Sooke on one of Quinn’s old dirt bikes and they had
dipped cones from Dairy Queen or waffles at Mom’s Café, a little diner across from
the community center. They waited in line for an hour sometimes, but it never mattered;
it was part of the routine. Yula held Eugene on her hip until he got too big and then
she fastened him to her overalls with a dog leash. Sometimes she gave him a bag of
marshmallows to keep him occupied while they waited. He loved the big white gummy
cubes. They were his favorite thing in the world. And then one day, while she and
Eugene stood patiently in line, she saw Harrison, the man who would become my father.
He was six feet tall, with deeply tanned
skin and long hair a mixture of blond and white, like butterscotch ripple ice cream.
He was large and strong looking, but there was a softness—a boyishness—to his face
that made him look both naive and kind. He wore a muscle shirt and steel-toed boots
into which he had stuffed his mud-caked jeans. His black eyes were shaped like almond
slivers, his nose crooked from two ugly bar fights. The hair on his forearms glistened
like white silk. My mother could not stop staring. He walked toward her with his eyes
on Eugene.

“You’ve got big bright eyes like your mother, don’t you,” Harrison said. He crouched
and asked the boy if he could join them for breakfast. He was twenty-five; my mother,
seventeen. He smelled like horses, like cheap cologne, like mint. He had a raspy voice
and some kind of shiny gel in his hair. His arms shone like they’d been oiled.

Over breakfast, Harrison told my mother that he’d moved to town to be closer to his
brother, Dominic. Before that, he’d been living in a boarding house in Abbotsford.
He didn’t need to tell her that he’d been in jail for most of his teens and early
twenties; he had a look about him that Yula knew well. She knew the overly muscled
forearms. She knew the poorly done tattoos. The way he looked around, guiltily, every
time they ran out of things to say.

“I’ve always been a castaway,” Harrison said to her. “Don’t know what to do with myself
in the world.”

Mom’s Café was crowded and they had to share their table with two construction workers,
who eyed Harrison when they sat down. Yula held Eugene on her lap and fed him bits
of waffles with her fingers. The construction workers leered at her breasts when she
leaned over to grab the syrup, and when Harrison saw this he pounded his fist on the
table, sent the cutlery to the floor. Eugene wailed, but Yula found herself oddly
sexually aroused. The men left the café and Harrison followed them outside, told Yula
he’d be back in a minute. When he returned, his knuckles were bleeding. He wiped the
blood on his napkin and looked at her with sweet eyes.

“You know them?” he said. His face hardened.

“No—never—I don’t.” She saw it then for the first time: his paranoia,
his violence, his possessiveness. She saw other things, too: his sudden loyalty, his
need to be loved. She reached for his hand.

Harrison never asked about Eugene’s real father, not even when he moved into the cabin
with Yula. Somehow Yula knew that whatever Harrison and his brother did for a living
wasn’t legal, but she knew it was better not to care. He was good to her son. One
night she heard him telling Eugene that if they spent enough time together, they’d
develop a likeness. He put his face next to Eugene’s in the mirror and widened his
lips, and Eugene pursed his. Yula took a Polaroid of them this way, and it stayed
on their fridge forever.

III.

o
n my fifth birthday, I am adopted by a woman with a daughter of her own. We live on
a one-way street in a beige town house in Fernwood, within walking distance of downtown
and a block from the big stone high school. Hand-painted “Slow Down!” signs are stapled
to the telephone poles, and a fat woman in a wheelchair sits outside her house all
day shrieking at us. The fat woman is called a Block Parent, and we are supposed to
run to her if we are ever in danger, but she is terrifying. Our town house is mashed
together with six other town houses, all in a row, with a small parking lot in the
back. There are no front or backyards here, no sidewalks even. Each floor of the town
house is small. The rooms are tiny, with low ceilings, and warm. Every room smells
like mushroom soup, except for the bathroom, which smells like Ivory soap.

I have arrived with the following possessions: a backpack stuffed with two pairs of
pants, two shirts, pajamas, a toothbrush, and seven pairs of underwear, one for each
day of the week. I also have a big shoe box with me, which the social workers call
my “treasure chest.” Inside, I keep the things I was found with: a Swiss Army Knife
and a gray sweatshirt with thumbholes. I also have some photographs, taken in my various
foster
homes. I hide the treasure chest under the bed; I keep my clothes in the backpack,
in case I have to leave again.