Y: A Novel (37 page)

“Vaughn. Vaughn. You awake?”

I am tapping on his bedroom window, on my tiptoes, praying none of his weird neighbors
emerge and ask me what the hell I’m doing. But it’s urgent,
and he isn’t answering his front door. So, I’m in the weeds, tapping. I’m still in
the penguin pajama bottoms, and I’m wearing Vaughn’s big white bike helmet. I’m so
full of emotion that I could catch on fire.

I hear Vaughn’s big laugh before I see him, and then he’s standing in the small space
between his house and the neighbor’s, in gym shorts and flip-flops, his denim shirt
buttoned up wrong so that the left side hangs down farther than the right. Behind
him, Chloe appears in a pair of sunglasses, car keys jangling in her hand. She waves,
her hair twisted into a bun on top of her head. She’s wearing a nylon tracksuit, black
with a pink stripe, and bright-red running shoes.

I take in the whole scene: his shirt, the time of day, her.

“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry,” I say to Vaughn and blush.

“Hey, it’s no problem.” He waves good-bye to her, and we watch her get into her car
and drive away. She drives a brand-new silver Mini, and I wonder where she gets her
money.

“Oops,” I say to Vaughn, but he shakes his head, tells me not to worry.

He looks at me, then at the envelope in my hands. “Should we get some breakfast?”

“Yeah.”

Vaughn gets his bike, and we ride together to the greasy spoon across from the hospital.
I ride on the sidewalk while he rides alongside me on the road. If anyone yells at
me, which they frequently do, Vaughn tells them to mind their own beans. He tells
me when to change gears, and when he sees how tightly I grip the handlebars, he says
I need to loosen up or I’ll damage my wrists. He tells me to roll my pajama bottoms
up a bit or tuck them into my socks. He cycles slowly beside me, one hand on his knee.
He can tell I don’t want to ride on the street or go very fast. I tell him it’s because
of my eye, but the truth of the matter is that I’m scared. He says I’ll get better
at it—one day, he says, I won’t notice the speed at all. The cars slow behind him
on Shelbourne Street; there isn’t enough room to go around. He rides ahead of me on
the sidewalk for a while, glancing back every now and again to make sure I’m okay.
He stretches his arms out like a bird, as if to show me how easy and effortless all
of this could be.

When we get to the café, we lock up our bikes and spend a few minutes wandering up
and down the block, considering the old art deco building. There used to be a magazine
stand attached to the café, but it’s been boarded up and is covered in graffiti. A
blue marquee above our heads, the bulbs burned out years ago, says
Magazines.

“They’ll bulldoze this place soon,” Vaughn says. “After a while no one will remember
it.”

Inside, we sit at the counter on squeaky metal stools. The walls are decorated with
old photographs of famous people, mostly baseball players, in crooked gilt-edged frames,
and there’s a handwritten sign in the window advertising homemade doughnuts. From
our seats we can see through to the kitchen, where a tall, skinny guy wearing a bandana
is frying eggs on the grill.

The old guy who runs this place fills our coffee cups with his big shaky hand, hollering
at his daughter to put on a fresh pot. Vaughn has a rapport with both of them—he seems
to have a rapport with everybody in this town. The old guy’s daughter tells Vaughn
he’s goofed up the buttons on his shirt. She is a husky woman with olive skin and
frizzy black hair. She has a little tattoo of a heart on the back of her hand.

I run my fingers over the laminated menu and try to figure out what to have, what
will be the biggest plate of food for the least amount of money. Vaughn always pays
when we’re together, but I don’t want him to think I don’t notice or appreciate it.
I rip open a pink packet of sugar and pour it into my hand, and Vaughn eats a little
personalized container of peanut butter with his teaspoon. We are starving.

“This your daughter, Vaughn?” the waitress says to him and gestures at me with an
empty coffee carafe.

“I wish,” he says, and then we’re telling her the story while she stands there shaking
her big frizzy head. She’s the kind of woman who would stand there forever if we kept
on talking. She beams at us, in no rush for the story to be over. The sunlight pours
through the windows and dazzles all the silver things: the salt and pepper shakers,
the cutlery, the metal sides of the napkin holder, the rim of the counter, the edge
of the stools, the woman’s little wedding ring.

“You hearing this, Dad?” she says to her father, and he nods while he refills our
cups again. His white hair is pulled back into a little ponytail, his nose spiderwebbed
with hundreds of broken blood vessels, his cheeks bright pink. The two of them don’t
look related at all. The old guy asks us what we’d like and we both say pancakes.

When he’s gone, I take out Harrison’s letter and hand it to Vaughn. He reads it, one
hand cupped over the page. The paper is blindingly white.

After he’s done, he hands it back to me. “Escargot,” he says.

“I know.” We laugh a bit.

“Well?” he says.

“I’d given up,” I say. “So much time passed. I figured I’d never hear from him.” But
the thing I find most shocking, I tell Vaughn, is how much has happened to my father
in sixteen years. He has gone to jail; he has gotten over my mother; he has married
and had children. He has suffered and come out on the other end of it. He lives thousands
of miles away.

“It takes awhile to understand this,” Vaughn says to me, “but there’s enough room
in a life for failure and loss.” He picks up his coffee and takes a big sip, swivels
in his stool. “You can really fuck up in your life. You can fuck up and then have
things be okay.

“You learn something else, too, after a while,” Vaughn says. “Everyone’s happy when
someone fails.”

“I wonder if he’ll come out here,” I say.

Vaughn scans the letter again. “He will.”

“I hope he tells his wife about me.”

“He’ll do that, too.”

“How do you know?”

“Just do.” Vaughn holds the photo of my father up to my face. “It’s hard to say,”
he says. “Hard to tell, really, what he looks like.”

I study my father’s face again. His eyes are small and dark. His nose is crooked.
His hair falls around his face like white silk. It’s his eyes that make him attractive.
They are soft, almost feminine. They are terribly sad.

I try to get a sense of what kind of person my father is from the photograph. He doesn’t
look like a bad person. He doesn’t look like he has
any money. He looks a little rough around the edges, I guess, but not as bad as I’d
imagined. The thinness is troubling. I wonder if he’s sick. Still on drugs? That seems
impossible, after what he said in his letter. I don’t know what I wanted him to look
like, but now that I can see him, I know I didn’t want him to look like this. I wonder
what his children look like, if they look like me. I wonder about his wife. I wonder
about Eugene.

“Escargot,” Vaughn says again.

“Will you come to Finlayson Arm Road with me?” I ask.

“Yep.”

“Soon?”

Vaughn nods. We pause for a minute while the old guy sets two stacks of pancakes in
front of us. Vaughn unwraps a little foil-covered packet of butter and drowns his
cakes in hot syrup. He cuts through the stack with the side of his fork, shovels a
huge bite into his mouth. “How we getting there?” he asks between chews.

“Know anyone with a car?”

“Sure, sure.”

I stare at my pancakes. For the first time in my life, I don’t feel like devouring
them all on the spot. “Do you think you’ll recognize her?”

“Your mother?” Vaughn sets down his fork and looks at me. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“What if she’s not there?”

“Then she’s not there.”

“Then what?”

“Someone will be there. We’ll talk to them. We’ll make a new plan.”

“But what if no one is there.”

He takes another bite. “You never take the road back empty-handed, Shannon. You return
to the place you left and see it for the first time.”

I fiddle with my pancakes, spread butter and syrup over and underneath them, but I
still don’t take a bite. They look weird suddenly. Eating seems weird. The old guy
fills Vaughn’s coffee cup again, and his daughter starts talking to a couple who have
just come in. Her laugh is suddenly loud and grating. The light in here is too bright.

“I saw Julian,” I tell him.

His body stiffens, and he turns to me. “What? When?”

“It was my choice. I went to see him.”

“Shannon. What on earth for?”

I furrow my eyebrows at Vaughn. I’m in no mood to be interrogated. “Don’t get all
worked up.”

“Okay.”

I keep glaring at him.

“Okay,” he says, throwing up his hands. “I’m sorry.”

“I wanted to see what happened to him, to see what he’d be like.”

“And?”

“He’s a disgusting little man.”

“Are you glad you went?”

“No. Not really. I don’t know.”

“Well, you survived it—all of it. The past, I mean. That’s what matters.”

I pause a minute, staring at my uneaten pancakes. “Do you get along with your family?”

“I saw my brother yesterday,” he says. “I hadn’t seen him in weeks.”

“Okay.”

“He’s shrinking, for one thing. Used to tower over me. Now we stand eye to eye.”

“Where does he live?”

“Not far.” He pushes his plate away, tosses his napkin over it.

“You like each other?”

“He thinks I’m okay,” he says. “I like him more than he likes me.”

“What’s with you and Chloe?”

“I asked her out a couple of months ago,” he says, “like you told me to.”

“Told you it’d work out.”

“Well. We’ll see.”

“But you like her?”

“Jeez,” he says. “What’s with all the questions?”

I look at him. “I’m a snoop.”

The old guy comes over and clears our plates, and Vaughn says he’ll take my pancakes
and a powdered doughnut to go. He puts a twenty-dollar
bill on the counter, tells the guy to keep the change. We leave the café together,
his right hand on top of my head, his left holding a Styrofoam container with my pancakes
and the doughnut. The hot morning sun is obscured by a cloud and the air cools. The
hair on my arms stands up in protest.

“You going to send Harrison a picture of yourself?” Vaughn asks. He unlocks our bicycles,
fastens his helmet and hands me mine.

“Maybe.” I study my reflection in the picture window of the café. “Definitely wearing
this bike helmet.”

“Suits you.”

“I know.”

Vaughn swings his leg over his bike and pushes off, and I watch him cycle up the street.
He has said nothing about giving him back his bike or extra helmet, and I wonder,
suddenly, how much of a burden I have become over this past year—how much of an obligation.
I hope he needs my company as much as I need his.

At some point he senses I’m not following him. He swivels the bike around and coasts
back down to where I’m standing.

“What if she’s not there?” I say to him.

“Then she’s not there.”

“What if I never find her?”

“Then you never will.”

“What if she isn’t happy to see me?”

“Then we’ll leave right away.”

“What if she doesn’t like me?”

“Not possible.”

“When’s the soonest we can go?”

“We’ll go this weekend,” he says.

XXIV.

i
t is five in the morning and my mother is walking as fast as her tired body will let
her, down Quadra Street, away from me, away from my little face. Her boots pound the
pavement, and her whole body shudders with each reverberation. She feels as though
the ground will shoot right through her. The sky is clear overhead, and the city is
waking up. She crosses Fort Street, makes a right at View, and heads toward the entrance
to the Towers. The front doors are locked, but she bangs on them anyway. She wills
someone to come down. A man is passed out on the long ramp that leads to the entrance
and she tries to kick him awake. When he doesn’t stir, she searches his pockets for
keys. But there is just a bottle cap and a couple of pennies.

When the police find her, she is slumped against the side of the building. She is
in shock from giving birth and being cold. Her blood pressure is dangerously low.
The paramedics think she is just another drunk. She is hauled into the ambulance roughly
and taken to Jubilee Hospital. She could be anyone. She could come from anywhere.
There is no ID in her pockets, and she stays in the intensive care ward, nameless,
until she wakes.

Harrison has been arrested. He tells the police everything there is to tell, save
for one important detail: he says my mother had nothing to do
with Eugene’s death. He tells them that she was visiting a friend when it happened,
and that she’d left Eugene in his care. It was all his fault. He was the one who left
the boy alone. The cocaine was his. He says the words quickly and quietly, then writes
them down.