Y: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

cotton of
     her oil-stained coveralls. My father’s brother is driving a rusty red ’63 Mercury
     Meteor, white hardtop, with red leather bench seats. The body is so dented it looks
     like someone beat it with a bat. The heater doesn’t work, and my father grabs the
     Mexican blanket that covers the ripped-up backseat and tucks it around my mother’s
     shaking shoulders. The odometer doesn’t work either, and my father’s brother judges
     his speed by feel. He likes to drive fast. He once took a corner so quickly that the
     passenger door sprung open, loosened from its hinges.
    Here they are, in this rattletrap classic car on the night I am born: my father, Harrison;
     his brother, Dominic; and my mother, Yula. The sun has gone down, and the leather
     seats are damp and slick from the cold. Yula’s belly is so big that for the past month
     she has been wearing a pair of my father’s grimy coveralls. The material is rough
     on her skin. Her teeth chatter, and she shrieks when Dominic hits a pothole. The car
     lurches and shakes as they make their way down Mount Finlayson. Yula presses her feet
     into the floor to keep from falling forward; the road is steep and thecar has no seat belts. She feels warm tears forming in her eyes and fights to stop
     them. She has to stay focused. There is no time for emotion. Dominic presses the accelerator
     as far as it will go and the car hiccups into gear, then shoots forward. Yula watches
     him out of the corner of her eye. The car is dark; the electrical system doesn’t illuminate
     the dash and on this part of the road there are no streetlights. But she can see the
     outline of his face. Dominic is a hideous man with a shaved head—in all ways larger
     and uglier than Harrison. He has tried to sleep with her twice. He feels her eyes
     on his face and turns his head toward her, parts his mouth, and she sees the thick
     pink of his tongue rolling over his teeth. His breath is as strong and sweet as bourbon.
    There is another passenger in this car: my half brother, Eugene. Swaddled out of sight
     in the trunk. My mother prays for the car to go faster. She has been able to manage
     her contractions up until this point but feels a sudden deep pain radiate from within
     her abdomen and swarm into her belly and around to her back. Her underpants are soaked
     and she squirms in the seat to get away from the awful cold wetness. My father puts
     his hands on her shoulders and holds her gently. Her body shakes and she vomits down
     the front of her coveralls and Dominic, disgusted, floors the accelerator. The wind
     rushes past them and my mother slams into the passenger door as the car speeds down
     the treacherous road that runs like a serpent through this cold dark night.

    Five days before she gives birth to me, my mother kneels at the edge of a flower bed,
     pulling weeds. It is late summer and she is eighteen, seven and a half months pregnant.
     Her father, Quinn, sits in a deck chair, wearing mirrored sunglasses and smoking a
     pipe. He has a round, chubby face, a white beard that hugs the lower part of his chin
     like a stirrup, and a nose that hooks downward. He shouts at Yula’s son, Eugene, as
     the little boy runs back and forth, in and around the flower beds. Eugene loves to
     chase the neighbor’s wayward chickens or follow the lawn mower when Harrison snakes
     and edges it over the grass.
    My parents, Yula and Harrison, live together, with my half brother,Eugene, in a pine cabin on a property adjacent to Goldstream Provincial Park, about
     twenty minutes up the Malahat, off Finlayson Arm Road. Two homes face each other on
     the property, Mount Finlayson looming behind them: a flat-roofed, cedar-sided structure
     with floor-to-ceiling windows, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright and the hard lines and
     glass of modernism, the interior walls lined with timber beams to remind them that
     they were in the woods, of the woods—this is the home of my grandfather Quinn, a retired