Y: A Novel (29 page)

I frown. “In the article, you said—”

“Shannon, not a day goes by when I don’t think about it.”

“Red sweatpants? White tennis sweater?”

And then he’s telling me all kinds of things: how the inside of his van smelled like
diesel fuel that morning and he thought he might have a leak—that he was living in
Langford at the time, took him over an hour to drive in—that my mother took short
steps, not long strides. In the last sixteen years, he says, it was the one day he
didn’t get a proper workout. The night before, he’d watched
Uncle Buck.

“You have to understand something,” he says. “I wasn’t supposed to be there yet; I
was early. I was living so far out of town, I left early thinking there’d be traffic,
and there wasn’t. Shannon, it was an error—my presence. Or, at least, my intervening
would have made it so. Your mother wasn’t crying. No. She was beyond that. When you’re
truly hurt, you don’t have enough left inside of you to cry. Listen, I didn’t
want
to intervene with what was happening. It seemed important not to trouble the waters
of fate like that. There was a look in your mother’s eyes—”

“So you
would
recognize her?”

“Pretty sure, yeah.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry, Shannon. I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing.”

I look at his big sad eyes. I shrug at him. What am I supposed to say? “This is it.”
I pull the cord, and we jostle into position by the back exit.

I hate being out here. Suburbia. It’s hideous. How can people live like this? Row
after row of the same-looking house. I’d kill myself for sure.

Vaughn unloads his bike and we walk up the street toward the ministry.

“Strange location,” Vaughn says. “I never come out here.”

“It’s weird out here.”

“It is.”

“Only robots live out here. Robot people.”

“There are a lot of robot people.” Vaughn laughs.

“It’s this building, here.”

Vaughn holds the door for me, and we walk into the waiting room. He inspects the loaves
of bread, picks out a whole wheat one, and pushes two slices into his mouth. I start
reading a pamphlet about methadone. Vaughn taps the front-desk bell and we pace around
the room. The door to Madeleine’s office is shut, as are the other doors. I can hear
people talking behind them.

“Guess we should have called ahead?” Vaughn shrugs at me, and for a moment I miss
the organization and efficiency of Miranda.

But then the door to Madeleine’s office opens and a man spills out, red-faced and
disheveled, tugging a little girl behind him by the hand. She has to run to keep up
with his strides so that he won’t drag her to the floor.

Madeleine steps out in a white cotton sundress and open-toe white wedges. Her hair
is pulled back by a headband covered in daisies. Her blond roots are showing even
more than last time.

“Oh,” she says and looks back and forth between me and Vaughn. “We’re about to close.”

“Spare five minutes?” Vaughn steps forward and offers his hand.

She smiles weakly and takes it. “Come on in,” she says and gestures to her little
office.

Surprisingly, Vaughn does most of the talking. He tells her who he is, how I found
him. His voice gets really quiet when he leans in and tells
her he may have misremembered what my mother looked like, that the description he
gave the police wasn’t as accurate, say, as it could have been. “I’d know her if I
saw her again, though. I want to help Shannon find her. I understand there’s something
in her file about William Head, something about the initials
H.C.
”

“I’m afraid,” Madeleine says, running her long fingernails over her forearm, “that
information is confidential.” She looks tired. She is not charmed by Vaughn, and whatever
door that had opened between her and me seems to be closed now. She looks at her computer
for a second and taps her nail on the mouse. “We never became aware of your birth
parents’ identity. There’s nothing I can do to help you.”

“Why did you leave my file up for me to see?” I look at her and try to burn a hole
in her forehead with my eyes.

“A mistake. I’m sorry.” She purses her lips, gets up from her desk, and opens her
office door. “What you can do, Shannon, is request a copy of your file through Freedom
of Information. I can help you do that.”

Vaughn puts his hand on my shoulder and thanks Madeleine for her time, then shimmies
past her. “Shan, I’ll be outside,” he calls. Madeleine and I stare at each other until
he leaves.

“Shannon, you keep in touch, if you want,” she says. “You come back and see me anytime.”

I don’t want to cry; I don’t want to feel bad. I dig my nails into my knees and press
my calves together until I feel the scabs from my stars. It burns and stings, and
I focus on the pain, which is manageable and small.

I remember her words from our last visit.
Sometimes it’s better not to know.
I feel so heavy with disappointment that the weight of me could crash through the
floor. “I don’t care if they’re monsters,” I tell her. “I just want to know who they
are.”

She looks down at me and closes her office door. She leans against it for a minute
and closes her eyes, as if she’s willing the day to come to an end. She reaches to
straighten out her headband and exposes the inside of her wrist, which is so white
it’s almost blinding. A long-ago stitched-up scar runs the length of her arm.

“I want to know who I am,” I say.

She looks at me, and her eyes sparkle. “There is one thing,” she says. “But you need
to keep this between us.” She walks to her desk, scribbles something, then takes my
hand and cups it around a little slip of paper. “I think this man might be your father.”

Harrison Church,
the little piece of paper says.
H.C.

XVI.

t
he man in the back of the car is my father. Dominic is at the wheel and Yula is in
the passenger seat, clutching her belly. Her water has broken and is seeping through
the thick rough cotton of her oil-stained coveralls. My father rubs her shoulders,
tells her everything will be okay.

My grandfather Quinn is five minutes behind them, sitting between Joel and Edwin in
one of their dented pickups. Joel is driving. Edwin has a shotgun and a flood lamp
at his feet. Joel guns it down Finlayson Arm Road. His truck is infinitely faster
than the Meteor, and it is only a matter of time before they catch up with Harrison,
Dominic, and Yula.

“They’ve hurt my grandson,” Quinn says as they speed down the road. “They’ve done
something to him.”

“We’ll catch up to them.” Joel nods at Quinn and presses the accelerator down as far
as it will go.

The truck smells of manure and marijuana. Quinn clenches his teeth and focuses on
the road ahead of him. With each bend, he careens into Joel or Edwin. He braces himself
with his legs, but it’s been so long since he’s exerted effort of any kind that his
muscles are limp, useless. His legs are like twigs. His dead arm hangs between him
and Joel, and he wills it to life so that he can shoot the men who have hurt his grandson.

Up ahead, the Meteor’s taillights glow. Quinn watches it slow and make a hard right
before it reaches the highway. They’re headed into Goldstream Park, on one of the
service roads. He points at the car and nudges Joel with his shoulder. “That’s them.
Go.”

“Stay in the car.” Dominic puts his hand on Yula’s leg. “Stay here.”

Harrison rubs her shoulders. “Listen to my brother. We’ll get you to the hospital
in no time. But I need you to stay here for just a second.”

“Where’s Eugene?” Her words come out weakly, a whimper. She shrugs off the Mexican
blanket that Harrison wrapped around her and turns to face him. “Where is he?”

“At your father’s.”

“He’s alive?”

“We’ll talk about this later. Just stay here.” Harrison gets out of the car and meets
his brother around the back.

Dominic opens the trunk. He fumbles in the dark for the flashlight and shovel, then
rests them at his feet. “I’m going to lift him out and lay him over there.” He points
to a huge redwood by the side of the road with the flashlight. “Don’t turn on the
headlights until after you turn back onto Finlayson.”

The blackness around them is thick as molasses. Then, suddenly, the headlights of
a truck approaching. “Fuck. Get the fuck out of here,” Dominic says. “We’ll talk later.”

Harrison nods at his brother and hears him groping in the trunk. He grunts. “Got him.”
And then Harrison hears him walk into the woods, then the soft sound of him setting
the little boy, his son, on the ground.

Did they turn off? Joel slows down and the truck bumps along the service road, Quinn
searching left and right for signs of the car, but the truck’s headlights are weak
and they can only see what’s right in front of them.

Quinn puts his hand on the dash. “Stop a second. Kill the engine. They have to be
right around here. This road doesn’t go all the way up.”

The men sit in silence for a minute, the windows rolled down. They hear voices, the
sound of a trunk closing, someone’s footfalls on the forest floor.

“Get out. Get out.” Quinn pushes into Edwin, and the men get out of the car. Edwin
switches on the floodlamp and the forest jumps into life, suddenly visible. The Meteor
is about a hundred yards up the road. Harrison stands by the driver’s-side door. Edwin
swings the lamp to the left, and then the right, and Dominic comes into focus. Eugene’s
body lies at his feet.

Joel raises the shotgun to his shoulder and walks toward Harrison, who fumbles to
get back into the car, his hands shaking so badly that he can only paw at the cold
steel handle of the door.

“Stay right where you are,” Quinn says. “Don’t move. Neither one of you move.”

But Dominic has broken into a run; they hear it before Edwin swings the floodlamp
to the right and sees Dominic disappear into the black of the forest.

“Damn it.” Edwin swings the lamp around to Harrison, who squints in the horrible brightness.

“I’ll shoot if you run.” Joel points the shotgun at his chest. “I’ll chase you all
night. And I’ll shoot you when I find you.”

Harrison puts his hands over his heart, as if to shield it. “I won’t. Okay. Please.”

“You tell me,” Quinn starts. “You tell me what’s going on here.”

The light sweeps over the forest, and Quinn looks at Edwin. “Keep that light on him.”

And then there is the sound of the passenger door opening and Yula’s footfalls as
she rounds the car and approaches Harrison from behind. When she enters into the light,
Quinn sees that her face is crazed.

She reaches out for her father’s hand. “Tell me you have Eugene.”

“Eugene.” He stares at his daughter. In his mind, he sees the boy being lowered into
the trunk, his little bare feet.

“I need to know where Eugene is.”

“The little boy?” Edwin swings the lamp around and walks past the car to the other
side of the service road, where Eugene lies, Yula’s gray sweatshirt around his shoulders
like a cape.

XVII.

l
ydia-Rose and I are friends again, and I’ve quit cutting classes. The weather has
turned and every week bleeds into the next—the same endless
fitz fitz
of drizzle on the windows all day, all night, the same low-hanging stratus clouds,
like a ceiling too close to my head. The winds have started, too. Every year here
is the same: one minute we’re outside in our hoodies until midnight, the next we’re
racing home at ten o’clock, the wind whipping our heels and blowing all the leaves
off the trees with one big fatal breath. It happens so fast. Then everything is dead.
I hate this time of year. My winter depression settles in like a heavy blanket.

I found an address in Ontario for a man named Harrison Church. I wrote a letter. I
still haven’t sent it. I carry it around in my heart like a rock. It isn’t anything
I feel capable of facing, and so it sits inside of me, ignored, festering. What if
I send it and then never hear back? What if he’s a horrible man? What if he isn’t
even my father?