Y: A Novel (22 page)

Outside, in the living room, Dominic and Harrison sit on the couch and watch the sunrise
out the window. They pass a bottle of beer between them. Dominic has switched on the
space heater, and it glows red in the middle of the room, filling the air with a high-pitched
buzz. Other than the bedroom, the cabin is one big room, living room bleeding into
kitchen. The furniture is cheap, found one weekend at the Sally Ann, dragged down
the narrow gravel pathway, then set down and kicked across the scuffed wood floors.
For a long time the cabin has had a ladybug infestation. It started with one, three,
sixteen, twenty per windowsill, thirty in
one corner. For a while, Yula scooped them into Tupperware containers and ushered
them into the yard. Harrison puts his finger next to a cluster of them on the windowsill.
They startle; their little metal bodies break apart and fly. He traces over an outline
of a heart on the fogged-up kitchen window and stares at the dented, rusty classic
car in the driveway.

XI.

b
ack on the island, I stand in Caffè Fantastico on King Street and admire a poorly
done watercolor of a fishing boat at dawn. I have skipped school and spent the better
part of the morning leering at things I don’t like about this city: the narrow sidewalks,
the ceaselessly beeping traffic lights for the blind, the bronze plaques everywhere
blabbing about some historical event, some site made important once by a man whose
name I ought to know. The playground across from the café for disabled children is
only half finished: I watch a few construction workers hammer down the wide ramps
and railings for wheelchair navigation and fasten giant plastic geometric shapes in
bright colors with giant plastic screws.

I order a coffee, and the girl behind the counter starts telling me about the date
she went on last week. She hasn’t heard from the guy since. “And that was Sunday,”
she’s saying. “Now it’s Wednesday.”

“Yep,” I say, and I take my mug to a worn-out looking couch at the back of the café
and slip off my raggy old duffle coat—it’s September, but it’s already freezing.

I am waiting for Lydia-Rose. It’s been a week since I ran away and neither she nor
Miranda has spoken to me since. I’ve been sleeping on the neighbor’s couch like an
unwanted houseguest, until, as Miranda put it, we can “reach an agreement.”

“Hey, you!” Lydia-Rose says, too gaily, and I understand instantly that although she’s
agreed to meet here, she hasn’t even begun to forgive me. She stamps her sneakers
on the café’s welcome mat and undoes the top two buttons of her coat. She has on a
fedora and jeans with a patch on the knee. I want to tell her about Matthew and Gregor
and Cole, but I pinch my lips together instead—
Shut up, shut up!
—and take her in my arms. She smells like Miranda’s pumpkin bread, her breath like
gummy sours.

“Shannon.” She says it dark, deeply, and puts her cold face on mine. She is almost
a foot taller than me, and we hug awkwardly. She pulls away and snaps one of my suspenders.
“You wear these every day or what?”

“Sure.”

I sit on the beat-up couch and wait while she gets herself a hot chocolate. Her backpack
is half open. I peer at the neat stack of notebooks and paperback novels inside, their
dust jackets covered in parcel paper so they don’t get ruined. After a brief infatuation
with performance art, she has decided she wants to study literature.

“I’m reading this book right now that you’d love,” she says to me politely, as if
we’ve only just met. The mug of hot chocolate steams in her hand. She takes a sip
and a big gob of whipping cream clings to her lip. “About a locksmith who breaks into
people’s houses.”

“Sounds great.”

Lydia-Rose leans back into the couch and crosses her legs. She looks goofy in the
hat, with her long, narrow nose and dark, deep-set eyes. Now if she’d only learn to
pluck her eyebrows; they’re big and unruly. She takes off the hat and puts it on my
head, and her hair sticks up in tufts. “You skipped today.”

“I know.”

“I’m just saying.”

“I can’t go to school anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” I point at her lip, and she wipes off the foam with her forearm. “I
don’t want to hear any more about Trotsky, and I don’t want to speak French.”

I try to explain to her that I am anti-intellectual. Every time anyone wants to “analyze”
anything, I feel a kind of rage. I detest abstract discussion of any kind and find
my eyes rolling around in my head when anyone wants to talk about why we exist, or
what is art, or life’s meaning, which people often do. It seems to me as if people
want to talk about this sort of thing all the time.

I wait for Lydia-Rose to smile, but she doesn’t.

“No, listen, I’m serious. I’m not like you. It’s hard to read with my eye the way
it is, the words go all blurry after a couple of lines. If I could see, I’d get my
pilot’s license, and then I’d learn to shoot a gun and drive an eighteen-wheeler.
All I want is to be able to tell one tree from another, and if a bird flies by, I
want to know what kind of bird it is. That’s all I want to know. There’s no point
in me going to school.”

“Okay, Shannon.” Her face falls a bit, and she fiddles with her cuticles. “You need
to apologize to Mom.”

“I will.”

“Not on your time. On her time. Now.” She takes a big sip of hot chocolate and winces
when it burns her mouth. “You can’t just run away and expect everything to be all
right.”

“I don’t expect that.”

She puts her mug between her knees and stares into it as she talks. “We stayed up
all night waiting for you. We even took the bus downtown and walked around, asking
people if they’d seen you. We walked around so long we missed the last bus home and
Mom said, To hell with it, we’ll walk down, maybe we’ll run into you that way. She
was so scared she was shaking. Do you know that?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not sorry, is the point. I can see it. We walked home and it took forever
and I have blisters on the bottoms of my feet, and Mom called the police again when
we got home and at some point I fell asleep in the living room and when I woke up
Mom was gone and I waited up for her and she got in at dawn, she’d gone downtown again,
she spent the fucking middle of the night asking fucking drug dealers and fuck-offs
if they’d seen you, my fucking mom, all right?”

“All right.”

“She got home and we made coffee and she was fucking shaking from being out all night
in the cold—and then she went right back out again and knocked on all the neighbors’
doors—”

“It wasn’t exactly a picnic for me either—I just mean—I didn’t run away and then have
some kind of amazing time—”

“We went through your things to see if there was anything—I don’t know—a note, something
that would help us find you,” she says. “Mom couldn’t stop crying. It was awful to
see.”

My stomach lurches. My shoe box. My mother’s sweatshirt. It horrifies me to think
of them unfolding it, their eyes moving over my photographs, the weight of my Swiss
Army Knife in their hands.

“Don’t go through my stuff,” I whisper, but Lydia-Rose acts like she doesn’t hear
me.

“Do you know what it was like,” she is saying, “to finally get a call from the police
and have them tell us that you were on the mainland? Mom just started screaming. And
then suddenly there you are, stepping out of a cop car, reeking of cigarettes. Looking
like absolute shit.”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry I made you guys so worried. Sometimes I don’t want to be
cooped up in that town house.”

“Okay. Be a fuckup then.” Lydia-Rose buttons up her coat and takes the fedora off
my head. “And don’t bother coming home if you’re going to be this new fuckup version
of yourself.”

“I’m not a fuckup.”

“Then come home and apologize to Mom. Everything we’ve done for you.”

“I didn’t ask to be a part of your family.”

“I didn’t ask for you to be a part of our family either. You ever stop and think about
what it’s been like for me? I lost my mom to you.”

“That’s not true.”

“We were happier when it was just us. I know this. I begged—I fucking begged her—to
take you back.”

“That isn’t my fault.”

“Just come home and apologize to Mom.”

“But I’m not sorry.”

“What are you so angry about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Figure it out. Figure it out and let us know. I’ll be at home.”

Through the glass window of the café, I watch her walk down the street. She has her
head down as if she’s crying. But I don’t want to think about her and her feelings.
I’ve got enough swirling around inside me. She’ll be fine. She and Miranda. I want
to hate them. I do. It would be easier. I want to hate them so much that the earth
will open up and they’ll sink down into its fiery center. I want to hate them so much
that they’ll die. But they’re not bad people and never have been. How do you become
a part of someone else’s family? You don’t, and you never do.

The Ministry of Children and Family Development is right beside the highway. I’m tired
and grouchy from being on the bus to get here. In the waiting room are two worn-in
couches, a coffee table with the
Times-Colonist
strewn over it, and a plastic rack filled with pamphlets on methadone, depression,
and trauma. The walls are lined with posters advertising upcoming counseling seminars
and support-group meetings. There’s a shelf in one corner stacked high with loaves
of bread. A sign reads,
Help yourself: but please, two bags per person. Thanx.
In another corner is a box of children’s clothing.
Only one bag of clothing per person from this donation box.

“I want to tell you something, honey.” The social worker’s name is Madeleine. She
has a pale-pink complexion and blond hair that’s been dyed dark brown. She wears a
sleeveless navy blue dress with a white bow on the front and cheap white pumps. Her
upper arms have a lazy, bloated quality to them that I associate with upper-middle-class
women who do things like eat cake batter straight out of the mixing bowl. Her office
is right off the waiting room and is the size of a bathroom stall. A half-eaten tuna
fish sandwich sits on a square of wax paper on her desk. Her trash bin is full of
protein bar wrappers. “A low percentage of abandoned children have successful reunions.”

I stare at her, hard. She peers into my bad eye like she’s searching for something.

“I want to find my mother.”

She types for a minute on an old piece-of-shit IBM desktop. “I remember reading about
you. I was just a teenager at the time.”

Her eyes darken as she reads whatever is on the screen. She swivels a bit in her chair,
and I stare at her feet. A ratty-looking Band-Aid is stretched across her heel. She’s
barelegged and her legs are thick and spidered with tiny varicose veins. I can’t decide
whether she’s attractive. Her face is pleasant enough, boring but there’s nothing
inherently wrong with it. I wonder why she’s so dressed up. The office is dingy and
lit by flickering fluorescents. Her keyboard is covered with a thin film of grime.

“I want to be honest and realistic with you.” She puts out her hand as if I’m supposed
to take it. “Abandoned children don’t have the same hope for a reunion as those whose
parents have put them up for adoption. Often”—her voice wavers, and she takes a sip
from a bottle of flavored mineral water—“the place they were found becomes their only
contact with who they are.”

I stare at the tuna fish. The air in the office is hot and stale. There’s a report
on her desk, and I stare at its first line.
If you crack open the shell of the Ministry of Children and Family Development, 10,000
foster children will spill out, each child requiring a specific type of care.

“Shannon,” she says, in a voice more forceful than before, “it’s likely your mother
was homeless. On drugs. Sick with AIDS. A victim of incest or rape. In an abusive
relationship or mentally ill.” She coughs into her elbow and pushes her hair behind
her ears. “Sometimes, Shannon, it’s better not to know.”

I hear someone enter the waiting room and moments later the high-pitched ding of a
desk bell.

“What I can do,” she says, “is make a photocopy of the newspaper article for you—about
when and where you were first found.” She waits for my reaction, but there isn’t one.
I’m so disappointed that I feel almost dead. “Okay, then,” she says. “Give me a second.”

She leaves the office, her heels somehow squeaking like tennis shoes
every time she takes a step. And only then do I understand what is possible. The computer’s
screen is tilted in my direction, displaying my file.

My full name appears at the top of the screen, my date of birth, social insurance
number, my designation as “special needs.”
Complications from being born prematurely,
the file reads.
Vision impairment. Evidence of a learning disability. Emotional and behavioral problems.
“Developmental delays” in growth and speech. It says I tested positive for drugs
at birth and spent the first few months of my life in neonatal intensive care. It
says I didn’t have any hair on my head until I was two.