Y: A Novel Read Free Page A

for me to leave the hospital, I am placed in a foster home.
    My new parents don’t baptize me because they aren’t religious. They name me Shandi
     and we live in a noisy brown apartment building in a part of the city that has no
     name. We are on one of two side streets that connect two major streets, which head
     in and out of downtown. At night we listen to the traffic on one side coming into
     town, and the traffic on the other side heading out. There is a corner store a block
     away, a vacuum repair shop, and a park with a tennis court. City workers come in the
     morning to clean the public restroom and empty the trashcans, and in the late afternoon,
     young mothers push strollers down the path, shortcutting to the corner store. At night,
     the park comes alive. The homeless sleep on the benches or set up tents under the
     fir trees. The tennis court becomes an open-air market for drugs. In the morning,
     it is littered with hypodermic needles, buckets of half-eaten KFC, someone’s forgotten
     sleeping bag. Teenagers from the high school down the street play tennis on the weekends,
     pausing to roll and smoke joints. It is an otherwise beautiful park, with giantrhododendrons, yew hedges in the shape of giant gumdrops, and Pacific dogwoods with
     dense, bright-white flowers. A few long-limbed weeping cedars stand here and there
     amid a barren grassy field.
    My foster father’s name is Parez, but he goes by Par. He is satisfied with my meager
     medical records but my mother, Raquelle, searches my face and body for abnormalities.
     The night they bring me home, the neighbors, who have three foster children of their
     own ( There’s good money in foster care , they’d said), are waiting in their kitchen with a tuna casserole. “This one’s got
     no real father and no real mother,” my father, Par, says to them by way of introduction,
     and sets me on the kitchen table like a whole chicken. “She comes from the moon, from
     the sky.” He spins around, his arms in the air. He is happy and proud.
    In the months that follow, Raquelle feeds me shaky spoonfuls of bouillon, mashed carrots
     with cinnamon, and finally, cubes of cheddar cheese. She sits for hours placing things
     in my mouth and watching me chew. The kitchen has a sour smell from a gas leak somewhere
     in the stove, and dark wooden cabinets that reek of turmeric and curry. A few grimy
     rag rugs line the peeling linoleum floor. I sit in an orange plastic high chair with
     a dirty white bib around my neck, and take food from Raquelle’s delicate hands. She
     is a tall, lean woman, with straight black hair and an angular face. She is thirty-four.
     We listen to Lionel Richie on a tiny portable radio. On the weekends, she takes me
     to the Salvation Army and St. Vincent’s, where she tries on huge piles of clothes
     while I lie in my stroller, smelling the cheap detergent on the clothing and the pungent
     leather stench from the racks of black, scuffed-up shoes.
    As a teenager, Raquelle had a pituitary tumor, and is now infertile. She has wanted
     a baby for as long as she can remember. She studies her calves, her muscular feet,
     in the dressing room mirror. We are there for hours.
    I don’t cry much, and during my first week home Par discovers that I fall asleep if
     he sings the national anthem, which is all he can think of when Raquelle suggests
     he sing me lullabies.
    “Ohhh, Caaa-na-dah,” he croons. He has a face as round as a beach ball, with a thick,
     almost comical moustache and salt-and-pepper hair thathe keeps in a short, tight ponytail. He moved to Canada eight years ago to start a
     restaurant and marry Raquelle. The restaurant is called, simply, Par’s. His English
     is improving, but he still thinks “true patriot love” is all one word. He sings it
     fast and doesn’t know what it means.
    “She’s going to be a model,” Raquelle decides, because I’m a string-bean baby and
     a bit longer than average. “Top model.