The Conjoined

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  But, never, even in her most sleepless moments, had she imagined finding a dead body in her mother’s freezer. She wondered if she should be grieving. But for whom? Or what? Instead, she felt a creeping, numbing dread tickling its way through her body, core to limbs. Maybe it was the grief coming. Maybe she was just cold.

  The officers stomped through the rooms and hallways saying very little to each other. Jessica and Gerry sat on lawn chairs by the side of the house, out of the way, but still with a clear view to the street. After Jessica had called 911, she found her father opening a beer in the kitchen.

  “Dad! Not now. You can’t be drinking when the police arrive.”

  “Why not? If there was ever a time I needed some booze, it’s now.” But even as he had said it, he started to put the bottle down on the table.

  “They’re going to have questions. And you have to be able to answer them.”

  “We don’t have to tell them anything. I can be drunk if I want.” Gerry brought his fist down on the counter, looking, for a moment, like a shrunken version of his once formidable lawyer self. He had saved old-growth forests, helped activists avoid criminal charges. But now he just stared at his untouched beer.

  Jessica sighed. “Dad, this isn’t a logging protest. There’s a dead body in our house. I think the stakes might be a bit higher. Maybe we should cooperate.”

  Gerry had nodded. And then shuffled to the sink to fill the kettle for tea.

  Outside in the lawn chair, Jessica twisted her hair, watching the police officers opening blinds and moving with surprising slowness through the house. She looked at her hands, white and long, and thought, They should be shaking. But they weren’t. They were only cold, even as a warm breeze blew in from the southwest. After Donna had died, alone and sleeping, Jessica had stood beside her bed, gazing at her mother’s body under the thin sheet, at her mother’s face, recognizably hers but empty, like a hollow, three-dimensional rendering. She had cried then, harsh, jagged-edged sobs that came out so quickly they hurt as they spun and ripped through her belly and chest and throat. Maybe now there was nothing left, only this barely tingling detachment and the sense that she should be feeling more, that she would feel more if she only waited.

  She started to ask her father if he was worried, but when she looked at him, he was sagging in his chair, staring blankly at the soggy maple leaves from last fall on the lawn. She patted his hand. “You all right?”

  “I just want my house back,” Gerry said, swirling his mug.

  “I don’t think you should stay here tonight, Dad. It would be better if you came home with me.”

  Gerry laughed, a short bear-like rumble. “And sleep where? On your balcony?” Jessica leaned forward, ready to argue, but Gerry put up a hand to stop her. “When your mother died, she asked me not to move. Nothing has changed. This is our house together. Period. No arguments.”

  The male plainclothes officer stepped out the front door and blinked at the sun. Jessica could see that he used to be an athlete; he stood on the step like he had been placed there by God, as if his body had a divine right to be anywhere it wanted to be, and that this was the way it had always been. For a second, she wondered what it would be like to run her hands over a man like that instead of pale, bony Trevor, who always trembled under her fingers. But then she blushed. This wasn’t the time. Really, really wasn’t.

  The officer turned his head and waved before smoothing down the sides of his curly brown hair. Gerry waved back but couldn’t quite hide the half-snarl, half-smile on his face.

  “There was a time,” he muttered, “when I could have reduced him to jelly under cross-examination.” Jessica thought it best to just ignore him.

  “Mr. Campbell? I’m Detective Gallo.” He strode across the front lawn and pointed at a patch of grass. “Do you mind if I join you?”

  Gerry shrugged. “Not at all, Detective.” Jessica almost laughed.

  The detective squatted, one knee on the ground, and looked at Jessica. “Call me Chris. You must be Jessica.”

  Before she could answer, Chris continued, “I saw your degrees on the wall in the family room. Your mother must have been proud.”

  What was the point of this small talk? Her mother was dead. Somebody else was dead and lying in the freezer. Someone—anyone—needed to explain everything before Jessica went out of her mind. She had a vision of her brain quivering on the grass at her feet, her skull an empty shell and splintering apart.

  But she forced herself to answer. “My mother just wanted me to help others. And to be happy.”

  “I really should ask you both a few questions, but before I do that, there’s something you need to know.” Chris looked up at Gerry, his brown eyes squinting against the sunlight.

  “Spit it out. I want to get this over with.” Jessica could hear the thoughts behind her father’s words. Get the fuck out of my house so I can have a drink.

  Chris hesitated just long enough for Jessica’s stomach to flip. “What is it? What’s going on?” Her voice sounded weak, like it was cowering in a corner, hunched.

  “In the second freezer,” he said, and paused. When he started speaking again, his voice was quiet. “There’s another body.”

  Jessica stood up and walked toward the bamboo by the front steps. Her head was pounding. She touched a shiny green leaf. So thin. So easy to shred. When she was a child, it was easy to slide behind the plants in the garden. If she stood still enough, breathed with the wind that blew shadows backward and forward, no one would ever see her and she could watch, undisturbed, anything she wanted.

  “What?” Gerry sputtered. “How can there be two bodies?”

  “That’s what we’re wondering too, Mr. Campbell. And we’d really like to know who they are.”

  Jessica reached out and grabbed a branch of the skinny bamboo. It snapped in her grasp. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it had to be them.”

  “Who?” Gerry gripped the sides of the lawn chair.

  Detective Gallo stood and approached her. He placed a hand on Jessica’s arm. “Who are you talking about, Ms. Campbell?”

  “The sisters,” she said. “Jamie and Casey. The foster kids. The ones who disappeared.” Then, before she could finish what she was trying to say, she bent over and threw up, vomit running down her shirt, on the grass and Detective Gallo’s shoes. “I’m sorry,” she muttered before Gerry caught her in his arms and sat her down on the cool grass.

  THREE

  IN THE EVENING, JESSICA KNEELED ON THE FLOOR in her living room, her mother’s recipe binder on the coffee table in front of her. She stared at the ingredients for Donna’s baked falafel balls, reading them mindlessly in the dimming room. Chickpeas. Baking soda. Fennel seeds. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand and blinked. There, on the top right hand corner of the page, her mother’s oily thumbprint. She bent her head to look closer, examining the looping lines, the spaces between. This was the thumbprint of a woman who cared about fibre and pickles and dying gracefully.

  Ten days before she died, she had turned to Jessica and said, “It’s going to happen soon, you know.” When Jessica started to cry, Donna had patted her hand. “Don’t be sad, honey. It’s just the end of this journey, that’s all. I want you to remember me as a whole person and not just this.” She waved her newly skinny arms around the mint-green hospital room. “Remember everything. That’s the only way to understand my life, or life at all. Every memory, no matter how small, is worth something.”

  And then she had sighed and closed her eyes. Jessica whispered, “I love you, Mom.”

  Donna nodded and said, “I was never perfect but you’ll want to remember me that way. You have my permission to think about how much I annoyed you too.” She laughed quietly and soon fell asleep, breath slow and quiet in the evening sun.

  What did that mother, the one Jessica thought she remembered, have to do with the two bodies i
n the freezers? Nothing, she wanted to scream at the walls. Donna loved everyone. She baked and weeded and complained for days if she had to buy cinnamon at a supermarket. “If I could grow it myself, I would,” she’d grunt as she slammed the door to the pantry. She constantly told Jessica every last detail of her menstrual cycle. She cried before she had to phone Granny Beth. There was no way, none at all, that she could have kept a secret as big as this for this long. Jessica, as she grew older, realized that her mother had filled every particle of space in every room and that her stories and memories and words were always going to be bigger than anyone else’s. Donna wondered aloud why her daughter was so silent, but she never seemed to wait for a response.

  The evening before Casey and Jamie arrived, Donna had tucked Jessica into bed and whispered, “I want you to remember one thing: these girls have had a hard life. Their last foster home wasn’t safe, not like our house. They deserve kindness and understanding.” And she kissed Jessica’s forehead and left, before Jessica could ask in response, Does that mean a little girl with an easy life doesn’t deserve anything at all?

  The next morning, they came with almost nothing: just one small backpack between the two of them and even that was only half-full. It was just them, really, and their baggy no-name jeans. Donna’s house was full—bulk bin oats; piles of books; unsorted laundry, both dirty and clean—and they slid in, cutting through the air, their girl bodies like slivers.

  Jessica was ten, and Jamie and Casey were thirteen and fourteen, the kind of girls who stood at angles, their elbows and knees and shoulders just points on thin, thin bodies. They were beautiful, the two of them, but it was Casey, the older one, who had the eyes that were long and still, whose face was shaped as if it had been drawn with a fine-nibbed pen. Jamie was cute, but Casey made Jessica want to run away and hide under a quilt, ashamed by her huge curly hair, her ungainly height. If I could, she thought, I would peel that face right off her and press it down over mine.

  Two weeks later, Jessica woke up and heard her mother crying in her bed, alone because Gerry was at the office late, as usual. When she crept up to the closed door, she thought she heard Donna moan, “What am I doing wrong?” But the wind was blowing and the branches of the tree in the yard were tapping and scraping on the roof, so she couldn’t be sure.

  Jessica went back to bed and stayed there, sheets wrapped tight. She didn’t want to dream that she was running down a sidewalk, a sweaty, thick man pounding the concrete behind her. In dreams, she could never tell what would happen if the man actually caught her, but when she woke, sharp air in her lungs, she thought of Clifford Olson, of the Paper Bag Rapist, of the girls who disappeared from the streets in New Westminster and Surrey and Skid Row and whose faces she saw on the news. It could happen to anyone. To girls who had grown too tall and ate too much, like her. To girls who were beautiful and would become only more beautiful, like Jamie and Casey.

  Three weeks after that, Jessica returned home from school and they were gone.

  —

  In the living room, the sun had almost disappeared, and Jessica flipped blindly through Donna’s old recipe book and said to herself, “It’s just a big mistake. An accident.” But she couldn’t think of an accident that could possibly end like this. And she could hear those words, the ones she had just remembered, bouncing through her head. What am I doing wrong? Jessica didn’t believe her mother could do anything wrong then. In some ways, she still didn’t.

  The lock in the front door turned and Trevor walked in wearing his bicycle helmet and carrying a backpack. When he turned on the light, he jumped at the sight of Jessica sitting silently on the floor.

  “Jess? What are you doing sitting in the dark?”

  Jessica blinked against the light. “I was just looking at my mom’s recipes.”

  “Were you cleaning out her stuff today? Was it hard?” Trevor took off his helmet and sat down on the other side of the coffee table.

  “No,” she started, but then she began to laugh. “Actually, yes.” She stopped laughing and tears spilled onto her cheeks. “We found something.”

  She watched Trevor’s face change as she told him what had happened. In the lamplight, it seemed that he was growing more transparent, becoming a single-layered version of the man she had lived with for three years. When she was done, she slumped forward and rested her forehead on the table in front of her.

  “What? I don’t understand.” Trevor reached out and gripped her arm.

  Jessica said nothing and closed her eyes, her lashes brushing the tabletop.

  “Jesus Christ. Jess, are you okay? What are you thinking?” He slid his hand down and closed his fingers over her balled-up fist.

  “I don’t know. I think about my mom and those girls and what my dad is doing right now and then that foot and the rest of the body it belongs to. And then I can’t think anymore.”

  “Are you sure it’s them? Could it be anyone else?”

  She turned her head so her cheek rested on the smooth wood. It was cool on her burning face. “I suppose they could be anybody, really. Like the nieces of a deranged neighbour who broke into our house to dispose of the evidence. But if I’m being rational, I just know it’s those girls. They were the only ones who disappeared. Everyone said they ran away, but now I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “You didn’t have to identify the bodies or anything, did you?”

  “No, I just told the detective what I remembered. I couldn’t even remember their last name. Chan? Chung? Something like that. My dad took the police upstairs to my mom’s closet to see if they could find any pictures or old files.”

  Trevor stood up and rubbed the top of his head, making his wheat-coloured hair stand up in spikes. “But surely she wouldn’t have kept anything that reminded her of them.”

  Jessica lifted her head and sighed. “I don’t know, Trev. I don’t know how someone thinks after they commit murder.”

  He stopped moving. “So you think she killed them, then.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “But it came out that way. Subconsciously, you think she did it. Maybe you’ve got some deeply buried memories that are making you think that. You know, I work sometimes with a psychotherapist at that clinic on Powell who could help you. And then maybe we can figure all of this out.” Trevor reached into his back pocket and pulled out his phone, tapping on the screen to look through his contacts.

  “Trevor, stop. I don’t need one of your flaky therapy friends. God.”

  “I’m just trying to help, Jess. This is a really challenging situation you’re in. Who knows how this will impact you?” He sat down on the floor again and put a hand on her cheek.

  Jessica shook him away. “I’m not one of your clients. I don’t need you to patronize me like this.”

  “If you want me to back off, then I’ll back off.” Trevor put his hands up in a gesture of surrender, but she knew it wasn’t that. He was pretending, mocking the very idea of giving in. “But I really think I could help you sort through all of this. I mean, the first thing you have to do is reconcile this mess with the memories you already have of your mother. Donna was a wonderful woman. And even wonderful people do bad things sometimes, right?”

  Jessica stared at the vein throbbing in Trevor’s neck. What would happen if she just took a sharp pen and pricked it, right there? This wasn’t the first time she had thought about hurting Trevor, breaking his thin arms in half or pulling one of his ears until it peeled off. It had started before her mother died. At first, when Donna was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Jessica and her father were upbeat. “Maddeningly cheery,” Donna had said to her oncologist at an early appointment. But then, when surgery, radiation and, finally, chemotherapy tore through her body, Jessica and Gerry stopped joking and simply held Donna’s hand while she twisted in her bed, cold sweat beading and running down her face. Jessica couldn’t remember how many times
she had cleaned up her mother’s vomit from that one spot on the carpet just beside her pillow. The stain grew outward—dark, ovoid.

  After two treatments, Donna told the doctors she wanted to stop. If chemotherapy was supposed to save her life, then she would rather die. When she explained this to Jessica, it was all very simple. Jessica understood. Donna was proud of her life. She just wanted to rest. She wanted to die knowing that it was a dignified death she had chosen, not a life that she had to scramble and fight to return to.

  “I wouldn’t be the same when it’s over anyway,” she said as Jessica rubbed her shoulders. “Even if I survive, I’ll have to be careful or take more drugs or stop digging in the garden because I get so tired. Forget it. I’m going to die while I still like myself.”

  When Jessica went back to their apartment and told Trevor what her mother had decided, he stared at her blankly.

  “You mean she’s giving up?”

  “No. Not giving up. Dying on her own terms.”

  Trevor shook his head. “Dying on her own terms would mean dying in her sleep at ninety-five, surrounded by incense and candles.”

  “She can’t have that,” said Jessica, sighing.

  “Sure, she can. She can get through the chemo and get better. She could live forever.”

  “She has only one choice right now, Trev. Take the chemo or not. And she’s chosen not to. We have to respect that.”

  He pointed out the living room window. “Do you know how many people there are in this city who are dying of AIDS or malnutrition or even hepatitis? These people can’t afford shoes, much less choices. Your mother has every opportunity to choose life, and she won’t. It’s a waste, Jess.”

  Jessica listened to Trevor’s words about the world around them and, for the first time, wanted to punch him in the mouth. He could talk about anyone else like this: her boss, the prime minister, their next-door neighbour. But not her mother. Not her mother, who had cried—involuntary, shuddering cries—as Jessica held her over the toilet, her own tears running into Donna’s tangled hair. Not her mother, who had screamed, wordlessly, in the middle of the night because there was no human language that could describe her pain. Not her.