Y: A Novel Read Free

the police have
     found my mother; it’s an island, after all. There’s nowhere to go. Once they find
     her, it will only be a matter of time before they get curious and wonder why his description
     doesn’t match. He sits on the bed all day and stares at the phone. He stares at it
     all night. In the morning, he hoists navy blue sheets over the curtain rods to block
     out the light and wedges newspaper under the door. He sleeps for an hour, dreams that
     he is hurtling through four floors of a building on fire.
    When he wakes, the room is dark but his eyes are burning. He closes his eyes and he
     is falling through the building again, and when he lands there is blood under his
     fingernails.
    On his bedside table are a picture of his girlfriend, a rolled-up magazine for killing
     spiders, and a triangular prism. If he opened the curtains, his face would glow a
     million colors.
    Someone, his neighbor, is playing the piano. Poorly, absent-mindedly.
    He shakes his head.
    “I remembered wrong,” he tells the room, rehearsing, but the phone does not ring.
    He reaches for the magazine and knocks the prism to the floor. It doesn’t break. He
     puts the magazine on his lap and spreads its pages in his hands.
    “I space out sometimes. Especially in the morning. I must have gotten her mixed up
     with someone I saw earlier, or the day before.”
    He watches the phone.
    He tries to sleep on his back with a pillow pulled over his eyes. He tries to sleep
     on his stomach. He buries his head in the bedding like a vole.
    “I’m sorry,” he says to his empty bedroom, to the image of my mother burned into his
     mind. “I’m sorry if I did something wrong.”
    Finally, he tucks the article into one of the scrapbooks he keeps on top of the refrigerator
     and tries to forget about me, about my mother and his lie. He knows, somehow, that
     there was an act of love behind the abandonment. He knows, somehow, he wasn’t meant
     to intervene.

    A wild card, a ticking time bomb. I could be anyone; I could come from anywhere. I
     have no hair on my head and there’s a vacant look in my eyes, as if I am either unfeeling
     or stupid.
    I weigh a little over four pounds and am placed in a radiant warmer in neonatal intensive
     care. I test positive for marijuana, negative for amphetamines and methamphetamines.
     The hospital takes chest X-rays, draws blood from my heel, tests my urine. I do not
     have pneumonia; I am not infected with HIV. I am put on antibiotics for funisitis,
     an inflammation of the umbilical cord, and this diagnosis is printed in the newspaper
     in a final plea for my mother to come forward. She is probably sick, one of the doctors
     is quoted as saying, and most likely needs treatment. The antibiotics run their course,
     my mother never appears, and the Ministry of Children and Family Development files
     for custody.
    One of the nurses on the night shift calls me Lily. Her name is Helene, and she is
     twenty-five years old. She has chestnut-colored, shoulder-length hair that frizzes
     when it rains, thick bangs, and a small plump facewith a rosebud mouth. She stops by on her breaks and sings me “By a Waterfall.”
    There’s a whippoorwill that’s calling you-oo-oo-oo
    By a waterfall, he’s dreaming, too.
    Helene lives alone in an apartment on Esquimalt Road with a view of the ocean. She
     looks at my tiny face and imagines what her life would be like if she took me home
     and became my mother. She rearranges her apartment in her mind, puts a bassinet in
     the small space between her double bed and dresser, replaces one of the foldout chairs
     at her kitchen table with a high chair. She bakes a Dutch apple pie for me while I
     watch; all the time she is singing. But Helene meets a man a few weeks later, and
     her thoughts overflow. She cannot make space for both of us in her mind. She marries
     the man. They move to Seattle.

    I am passed back and forth, cradled in one set of arms and then another. Once it is
     safe