Free Y: A Novel by Marjorie Celona

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, untilshe’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.
    He is such a jovial, juvenile, boy of a man. He believes he is destined for greatness.
     He believes he is special. He believes he is unlike anyone he has ever met before.
    “Do you know I used to sing?” he tells Yula one night, his eyes wild. He presents
     her with a dusty VHS tape, and they watch a shaky recording of him singing in a church
     choir, then a blurry close-up of his face as he sings the solo in “Once in Royal David’s
     City.” He wears a maroon cassock and a white ruff around his neck. As he watches the
     video, his eyes darken. He walks into the kitchen and returns with a whisky bottle
     and a mug full of ice clinking around in his shaking hand.
    When the video ends, Yula holds him like a baby and lets him weep into her neck. When
     he drinks, he cries. He and Dominic were sent to a reform school by their parents
     because they were, in his mother’s words, “uncontrollable.” He tells Yula about the
     beatings by the schoolmaster. He talks about his desperate need not to be abandoned.
     He talks about living with a perpetually broken heart. When he’s really drunk—or if
     he gets too high—he babbles about being raped when he was in jail, but Yula can never
     get him to talk about this when he’s sober. He gets a vacant look in his eye and tells
     her that he doesn’t have any idea what she’s saying. He drinks again and tells her
     about all the people he’s known who have died. It seems to Yula an impossibly long
     list. He cannot have lost so many people. Is he exaggerating? He tells her about being
     tormented by Dominic, two years older. He is so tender and damaged. Yula longs to
     minister to him. His self-absorption