Y: A Novel (9 page)

While Miranda is at work, Lydia-Rose and I go to Blue Jay School. It is in a nicer
neighborhood than the one we live in, in an old white character house, and is both
a day care and a kindergarten. Blue Jay is run by a woman named Krystal, who has long
wild hair and drives a black Pontiac Trans-Am with a yellow firebird on the hood.
I decide she is my idol and stare at her whenever possible. Her jeans are high-waisted
and very tight, and she looks like a rock star, skinny arms in a muscle shirt, big
hair-sprayed bangs, and gorgeous almond eyes. “Is she yours, too?” she says to Miranda,
her eyes on me, when Miranda drops us off the first day.

“Sure is.”

“What a sweet little girl,” Krystal says. “And such a pretty girl, too.”

“Oh,” I say, looking down.

Miranda leaves and we are told to sit cross-legged with the other children. Krystal
takes a piece of felt and cuts out little animals and tells us stories using these
makeshift puppets. She serves us pieces of oranges and apples, cut into what she calls
“boats.” We are allowed four each, but I sneak extras into my pockets and eat them
in the bathroom, my mouth and hands sticky with juice for the rest of the day.

At lunchtime, I discover that Miranda has slipped a little envelope into my lunchbox.
Inside is a piece of paper folded in two, a makeshift card. When I open it, there’s
a picture of me, asleep on the couch, Winkie curled up beside me.
For your treasure chest,
the back of the picture says, and I hold it close to my body so no one else can see.

When it rains, which is all the time, Krystal helps us into our Muddie Buddies, navy
blue–and-red waterproof jumpsuits, so that we can still go outside. But despite Krystal’s
good intentions, kindergarten is a rough place. We are always getting punched. The
older kids tell Lydia-Rose and me that we smell bad, that our clothes are secondhand
and covered in cat hair. Two girls tell me they want to push me on the swings, and
when I climb onto the swing and begin to lift off, they start to laugh and tell me
they’re going to punch me on the downswing—so I never come down, I swing higher and
higher, kick at them with my legs, dodge their fists as I swoop toward the sand.

“You have deformed knees,” the popular girl, Peggy, says to me when I show up one
day in shorts. She has perfect legs: small knees with calves that round out on both
sides, tapering to thin, delicate ankles. Like an hourglass stretched. My knee bones
jut, collide with each other, and I have to stand with my feet apart. Peggy can lift
her legs behind her head and touch her toes in a V. She has a brown oval the size
of a penny on the back of her white thigh. We all gather to see her acrobatics—but
mostly to see her underpants. Lydia-Rose steps into the circle, and Peggy points at
her forearm. “You’re the color of a baked potato,” she says. “Maybe more like dirt.”

I begin to sneak off by myself during recess, and finally I find a place at the back
of the house where I can hide behind a pile of firewood. It smells so good that I
break off a thin splinter of bark and put it in my mouth. Beyond the firewood is a
gutted Volkswagen Beetle in the middle of the lawn, the long grass pushing its way
into the interior. We are forbidden to go near it, but I can’t help myself. I crawl
in and grip the steering wheel, which is small and black and won’t turn in my hands.
The seats smell like mold, and the grass tickles my thighs. But in that car, away
from the fists of other children and Lydia-Rose’s loud cursing and Krystal’s beautiful
face, I am at my happiest. I grip the wheel, pretend my legs are long enough to reach
the pedals, and shift into first, second, third. I am five and a half and can’t imagine
having lived anywhere else but Miranda’s, having had anyone else’s life but this one.

But even though my life is moving forward, Julian starts watching me. He sits in his
car outside the day care while Lydia-Rose and I wait for Miranda to pick us up. The
first time I see him we are playing Hunter-Gatherer, a game we’ve made up about being
cave people. I’m busy strangling a pudgy three-year-old underneath the monkey bars
and Lydia-Rose is waiting for me to tell her what to do.

“Bad antelope! Bad antelope!” I keep yelling at the kid. “Gonna feed my wife and kids
with you.” I drag the kid by the ankles and set him in front of Lydia-Rose. “Eat!
Eat! Eat!”

Lydia-Rose gets busy fake-eating the kid’s foot, and I look up.

“Hey, Shannon.” He says it like he’s been saying it for years. “You probably don’t
remember me. Brought you some gummy bears.” He is in a suit; maybe he just got off
work.

I take the gummy bears from his hand, give half to Lydia-Rose, and watch him wave
good-bye.

“Who’s that?” she asks.

“My old dad.” The words sound funny in my mouth.

He comes again a week later. Always gummy bears, sometimes wine gums, too, but I think
they have wine in them, so I decline.

“I don’t drink,” I tell him. We are sitting in his black Mercedes-Benz. He has asked
me to sit with him and eat gummy bears.

“I don’t drink either,” he says. The radio is on. A husky-voiced woman talking about
the prairies. Something about jazz. Julian’s car seats are black leather and hot from
the sun. He still has a lot of hair on his arms. I look out the window and watch Lydia-Rose
swinging on the monkey bars. She lets go and lands in a crouch, stands and does a
cartwheel. Julian tells me that Moira left him, moved to another city. He hasn’t spoken
to her in years.

“There are things I shouldn’t have done,” Julian says.

I reach for a gummy bear and squish it between my fingers.

He laughs and squishes one, too. “You were my daughter for a while.”

“I remember.”

“I played Chopin for you at night.” He hums a few bars but I don’t know what to say.
I am suddenly too hot; my feet are baking in my little canvas shoes. “I taught you
the alphabet.”

“Moira did.”

“
Me
actually.”

I slip off my shoe and stick my toe in the air vent.

“I love you, Shannon,” he says. He passes me another gummy bear and I put it in my
mouth, then take it out and put it in front of the air conditioner to dry off the
spit. Julian asks me not to. He asks me again.

But I can’t stop. “Who invented air?”

“No one invented air.”

“Can I have an ice cream?”

“Just—please, Shannon—take your toe out of the vent. It’s getting dirt all over the—”

“Miranda doesn’t let us have ice cream.”

“Okay—your toe, Shannon,
now
.” He makes a grunting sound and grips the steering wheel. “Stop it. Fucking stop
it now.” A big vein pops out in his forehead. His hands are taut. He reaches for me
and pulls me toward him, roughly, and I hit my shin on the gearshift.

He pushes his mouth against my ear. That’s when I remember. Just a little. Just a
nudge at first—a small flash in my brain—after all, I was only two. A hand, a fist?
Smack of skin on skin, his grip too tight, a lazy kick meant for no one to see, crunchy
crack of bone. The whir of the X-ray machine. White bones on film. My fingers dipped
in a pot of hot soup. An eye patch, a cast. His voice thick and weary: What comes
after
G
? Say it backwards, faster now. Jell-O jiggler. Wiggly worm. Did I fall or did he
drop me? Thin skull on hard linoleum. Dull thud. Then: no sound.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he is saying, “I’m not going to—I’m not going to hurt
you—” and then Miranda is banging on the driver’s side window, her big face sweaty
and red. She runs from the car with me in her arms and Julian stares after us, his
fist in the air. There’s no sound coming out of his mouth, but I can tell by his eyes
that he is calling her a bitch.

IV.

a
fter sixty-five million years, the dinosaurs are back. Harrison knocks on the door
of the cabin, tells Yula and Eugene to put on their boots, and takes them by the hand.
They skirt the edge of the property, through the tall skinny trees that line the cabin
for privacy, past the neighbor’s chicken coop with its barbed wire to keep the dogs
from getting the eggs, past the chickens gathered around a tin dish filled with ears
of corn and cantaloupe rinds from someone’s discarded breakfast. They walk past all
of this until they are standing in waist-high grass. Here and there are pockets of
tamped-down grass, and Harrison tells Eugene that this is where the deer have been
sleeping. The sky is big over their heads and Mount Finlayson looms, tree-covered
and dense with green, in the distance. Most days it is obscured by clouds. To their
left is the forest, to their right an endless field that leads to Joel and Edwin’s
scrap yard. Harrison picks up Eugene and walks into the forest, ducking suddenly under
a branch. Yula follows, and then she is no longer under the great expanse of sky;
she walks carefully through the trees, for she is seven and a half months pregnant
with me, and it is steep and slippery. Harrison and Eugene are headed to the waterfall
directly below.

“Be careful,” Harrison calls back to her, and she grips the spindly tree trunks for
support as she makes her way down, down, down, until
she’s balancing on a rock in the middle of a stream, the water moving slowly past
her because there is a dam below the waterfall to stop it from rushing by. It is so
much darker and cooler now that they’re in the woods. Eugene crouches and points to
a tiny fish, so small it is almost imperceptible. The fish senses his presence and
darts under a rock, sending rivulets of mud spiraling into the water so that Yula,
Eugene, Harrison—and all the creatures—can no longer see him.

“Now I’ll take you to Dinosaur Island,” Harrison says and lifts Eugene into the air
again. The boy is silent with awe and appreciation. Yula follows them, clambering
alongside the waterfall on her hands and knees, amazed at how Harrison scales it effortlessly,
her son clinging to his back. They reach a shelf and walk past the waterfall, the
rocks covered in mud and moss, and suddenly they are in a stone cave that Harrison
says is where the dinosaurs live. Stones balancing on top of stones, something between
a cairn and an old chapel. There are frogs, old birds’ nests, dragonflies, and fossils
of trilobites, which Harrison picks up and shows to Eugene, tracing the little boy’s
finger over the indentations, describing the creatures’ bodies, their time on the
earth.

Yula and Harrison have been together for a year now. They are still playful. This
is the best part of their relationship; when they are together, it’s as if they are
children again. They speak in baby voices. They are sweet and full of laughter. When
Harrison comes home, he lifts my small mother into his arms and carries her around
the cabin, telling Eugene that his mother can fly. In these moments Yula is always
slightly outside of herself. She knows it cannot last—everything sours, spoils, eventually.
She tries to enjoy it—being carried through the air—but something stops her. The way
some of her hair has caught on one of Harrison’s buttons, the way his hands grasp
her underarms too tightly. There is always some small amount of pain, of wanting it
to be over.