“My mother isn’t a social problem.”
He blinked and his eyes refocused on Jessica’s face. He stood there—skinny, his elbows and knees barbed points on what could otherwise be a paper man. “No, of course not,” he said quietly. “She has every right to manage her health in any way she wants.”
It was an admission that wasn’t an apology. He acknowledged her position but refused to admit that his was flawed. This was how he must be at work. Jessica felt her jaw grow tight.
When Donna finally died—sleeping, in a small white hospital room, wearing her favourite necklace of amber beads—Trevor had held Jessica in his arms. He brewed her tea. He greeted people at the memorial service. He drank with Gerry in the garden as nighttime crept through the trees. And yet, she never forgot. His words—those narrow, rigid words—were like hard stones, and she couldn’t dig them out. A week passed. Another. When she woke up beside him, she went straight to the bathroom because she knew she couldn’t bear it if his voice was the very first noise she heard. She ran the water and flushed the toilet, wondering how she was going to get through another day. Trevor had wiped the snot from Jessica’s face with his sleeve the morning of the funeral, whispering, “It’s just a shirt. Just a stupid white shirt.” For that, she stayed.
Now, as the silence thickened and neither of them moved, Jessica felt heat grow sharply in her stomach, then her chest and up her neck. She swallowed to try to push down the rage, but it didn’t work. Her face burned.
“That’s enough.” She stood up and threw the recipe binder across the room, where it landed with a thud on the scarred hardwood. “I don’t want your fucking help, Trevor. Do you understand? It’s not like you’re so good at it anyway. Didn’t you just say last week that your whole job is futile? That you used to think you could change the world, but really all you’re doing is moving poor people from one shitty apartment to another? You can’t help anyone.”
Trevor stared. “Do you even hear what you’re saying right now, Jess? I’m just going to chalk it up to grief.”
Jessica began to walk into their bedroom. “You’re a joke. A failure.”
“You know what? Fuck you. I don’t care if you are grieving. See you later. I’m going out.” He grabbed his bike helmet and slammed the apartment door behind him.
His footsteps marched down the hallway outside, and she began to sob, one hand on the wall. She didn’t know what she was crying about—her mother, Trevor or the girls—but it didn’t matter. She knew that weeping was its own vortex. It spun and pulled until identifiable feelings were no more than fragments, like half-words that only hinted at meaning. She let her arms and legs curl until she was huddled, small, on the floor of the hallway. Her shoulders heaved and she thought—a brief, crystalline thought in the middle of this mess—her bones might burst through the skin, protruding like sharp, fetal bird wings. When she opened her eyes again, she remembered the apartment was empty. The night would be heavy and quiet soon and she wouldn’t even have Trevor’s angular arms for comfort.
She stood up, wiping her dripping nose on the hem of her T-shirt, and stared at the walls they had never painted, at the tiny hallway that led to one bedroom and one bathroom—all rented, all poorly constructed. A year ago, Jessica wondered if they were ever going to get married and briefly convinced herself that she wanted to. But then, as she was practising how she would say this to Trevor over dinner, she looked up and saw his narrow, smiling face. He was so happy, sitting at their cheap, second-hand table, eating the braised tempeh and mushrooms Donna had made and frozen in two-person portions. He had never asked her for more, and she saw, in a flash, that he never would. He told her every day that she was beautiful, that he could look into her amber eyes or lie beside her, his feet resting on her long, pale legs, for hours. He didn’t want anything else, just this. She felt relief and only once wondered if she would push for something different if she was with a different man. A broader one. One who took an interest in her underwear instead of never seeming to see it. One who radiated warmth in the night.
Until Donna was dying, that is. Then the idea of leaving Trevor came to her in little bursts, prompted by big things and little things in equal numbers. His unwavering politics. The boy-like sounds he made when he came. His perfect, smooth hands that she wanted to break.
She returned to the living room. Remnants of her mother’s life lay piled everywhere. She had been through every item. There was nothing that could help explain what had happened today. Sighing, she opened a loose cardboard flap and stuck her hand inside a box, stirring around its contents until she felt something hard and substantial. She pulled out a half-size Mason jar, its contents green and glistening. The handwritten label said Jalapeno Jelly, 2014. Her mother had grown and kept everything. She preserved. She remembered every harvest, every aphid infestation, every attack of grey mould. There was a clue somewhere. Jessica just had to know where to find it.
—
The next day, Jessica sat in a rarely used conference room at work, her hands folded on the laminate table. Detective Gallo sipped coffee from a paper cup across from her. Behind him were rows of stacked boxes leaning crookedly against three grey filing cabinets. They had been there for as long as Jessica had, and when she asked Parminder what was in them, Parm had shrugged.
“Who knows? Julie keeps saying she’s going to archive them somewhere, but I’ve never seen her go near them.”
Jessica stared at a stringy cobweb hanging from an air vent in the ceiling. Its free end floated and twisted, rested and then shivered. The mess might have embarrassed her on another day, but not now. Might as well be in a gloomy room to talk about heinous things. Jessica had a pen. So did Chris.
“I hope the coffee’s okay. The receptionist makes it every morning. I think. I hope.” Jessica told herself to stop talking.
He smiled. “It’ll do. My taste buds aren’t what they used to be anyway. I keep a bottle of hot sauce in my pocket at all times.”
Jessica laughed but really wanted to snap her pen in half. She looked at Chris’ face, almost perfectly symmetrical but for a small kink on the bridge of his nose. Brown eyes, brown hair. He looks warm, she thought. Like he never wears socks. Maybe he smelled like cocoa.
He cleared his throat. “Thanks for meeting with me. I know this is a very difficult time for you and your father right now.”
“I can’t say I feel like dancing in my underwear, that’s for sure.” Why did she keep saying these things? She needed to shut up. Answer questions and that’s all. No more editorializing. Stop.
“I should make a note of that.” Chris pretended to write in his notebook. “Interviewee doesn’t feel like dancing in underwear. There. That’ll make the chief happy.”
Jessica laughed until she had to wipe her eyes with the back of her hand. Her body—so tight and so curled up into itself—hung on to the laughter for longer than Chris’ joke was worth. When she caught her breath, she sat up straight. “All right then, Detective. Ask me your goddamned questions. I might actually be ready.”
He flipped to a page in his notebook. “Obviously, it’s too soon to definitely say that the bodies are the Cheng sisters, but we’re working on that assumption. If it weren’t for you, it would have taken us much longer to figure that out.”
Jessica nodded and Chris continued. “What I want to find out from you are details on their stay with your family.”
“I don’t know how accurate my memory is.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ll take as much as we can get. Do you remember the approximate date they arrived at your house?”
“It was the year I turned ten, so 1988. I remember that it was the fall. School had already started, so I want to say it was the middle of September.”
“Did anyone ever tell you why they were in foster care?”
“No. My mother never went into details about any of the kids.”
Ch
ris angled his head. “Kids can overhear a lot. As I’m sure you know.”
Jessica stared at the notepad in front of her. She had always had the feeling that there was something very muddy and insidious in the girls’ past. Something that was beyond her ten-year-old self to even imagine. But what?
“They were certainly troubled. I know they were treated badly by some other foster children at their previous placement, but I don’t know what happened to them before that. They were the only ones my mother had difficulty handling. And that’s saying a lot.”
For a minute, she said nothing. She thought about one afternoon, twenty-eight years before, when Donna was in the kitchen, stirring a pot of bison stew. Jessica sat at the counter, reading her mother’s old copy of The Secret Garden. Casey and Jamie had gone to visit their mother and the house was quiet but for the bubbling coming from the stove. Donna checked the oven. Whole wheat biscuits. She sighed.
“It’s going to be windy and rainy tonight. Look at the clouds to the west.”
Jessica nodded but kept on reading.
“Granny Beth used to say that she could always feel the rain coming. She’d get a headache and have to lie down. And I had to be quiet. I wasn’t even allowed to flush the toilet.”
Jessica looked up and saw Donna leaning against the lip of the sink, her hands twisting the tie of her apron. She blinked hard, twice, and Jessica wondered if she was trying not to cry or if the memories of her small, silent self were threatening to seep through her head and spill though her eyes.
“Is that why we never see her? Because she needs quiet all the time?”
Donna smiled. “No, sweetie. After your grandfather died when I was a baby, Granny Beth and I were always alone, just me and her. And after a while, we got on each other’s nerves. So when I turned eighteen, I left.”
“But why don’t we see her now?”
Donna pulled on the ends of her hair and looked at the ceiling. “I guess after I moved out, we got used to not seeing each other. Besides,” she said, moving back toward the stove, wooden spoon in her right hand, “she was never very easy to deal with. She was the kind of mother who scared kids. Including me.”
Jessica thought she knew what this meant. After all, the kids who stayed with them were scared of something, and she thought that, a lot of the time, it must be their mothers. Mothers who were mean or cheap or always drunk. Granny Beth was mean. Jessica had never seen her hug anyone or smile as if happiness were filling up her whole body. No, she smiled like she had eaten a piece of mouldy bread at a tea party but didn’t want to be rude and spit it out.
“Is that why we help foster kids? Because you want to help kids with scary mothers?” All she could see were the broad stripes across the back of her mother’s sweater, crossed by apron ties that sagged over her shoulders.
“I always wanted to be the kind of mother that Granny Beth wasn’t. The kind of mother who didn’t complain or humiliate or pick at old mistakes. I wanted children to love being with me.” Donna paused and turned around, spoon dripping dark brown liquid on the floor in front of her. “So, yes, I guess that is why we help foster kids. It’s all I ever wanted.”
In the conference room, Chris stared at Jessica, his face slightly green from the fluorescent light above. “That’s what she said?” he asked. “That being a foster mother was her calling?”
“Yes. I think when the girls were living with us she came to doubt herself a little, which is what happens when a foster family is dealing with children who are particularly challenging.”
“What do you mean? How were they challenging?”
Jessica squirmed in her chair and tapped her pen on the table. “They assaulted her a few times. They had a habit of skipping school and staying out too late. They called her names and stole money. That kind of thing.”
Chris wrote something down in his notebook. “That’s terrible. That must have been really hard for her.”
“It was shocking to me then, I suppose. Of course, now I know that lots of kids act out violently all the time. Not so unusual in the grand scheme of things.” Jessica shrugged, but her hands were icy and they shook, like bird wings.
“But it would have been upsetting for your mother, right? None of the other foster kids had ever treated her in the same way.”
Jessica turned to look out the window, remembering the morning after the girls arrived. She had woken up at dawn, like she did every morning. Her eyes opened as soon as the crows began cawing in the tree behind the house, their brays panicked and irregular, foretelling something evil or catastrophic or just plain bad. Jessica sat up quickly and then lay back down. Her mother had a rule: she had to stay in bed until seven, no matter how long she had been awake or how badly she wanted to put on her socks and shoes and run outside. So she fidgeted under the quilt and stared at the sunlight seeping thicker and brighter through the thin curtains. She could swear there were beetles crawling through her insides, feelers digging at the walls of her body while tiny voices cheeped, Out there, we must go out there. The clock’s second hand was moving—it had to be—but as she stared at it, it seemed stuck, wedged at six fifty-two, in that time that was clearly morning but also too close to dawn. She closed her eyes and counted to four hundred and eighty. When she opened them again, the hands had moved and she whispered, “Finally,” before reaching for last night’s socks on the rug beside her bed.
She ran downstairs and pushed open the patio door. The air slid over her cheeks and chin and filled her up, and she felt like she was instantly three inches taller, bigger and tougher than any foster kid who used to live with them. She looked back and listened. Two pairs of cheap canvas running shoes on the mat in the hall. An extra-large ball of bread dough rising on the counter. In the night, she had heard her mother walking through the house, the stops and starts that meant she had been listening at Jessica’s door and then Casey and Jamie’s. There had been no crying, which Jessica didn’t quite understand. The kids always cried the first night. Casey and Jamie, though, stayed in their room and made no sounds at all. Maybe it was because they were older. Maybe it was because they were together. Jessica shrugged and turned away from the brown-tiled floor and dark, cool kitchen and back to the yard and sky and warmth. This moment in the sun—away from the shadows that proliferated in the corners of the house—was what she had been waiting for.
She looked up, the memory receding. Chris sat quietly, still waiting for her to reply. “We were mostly a short-term home and the kids only stayed a few nights,” she said. “After I moved out, my mother fostered one boy for about a year, but he was just a toddler.” Jessica doodled a lopsided heart on her notepad. “My mother wasn’t used to violence. I don’t think anyone had ever hit her in her entire life.” As soon as she said this, she wasn’t sure it was true. Her mother had never really told her what Granny Beth had done to her or described the shape of her cruelty. Granny hadn’t even come to the funeral; she’d sent a basket of flowers with a card instead.
“How did your father react to all of this?”
Jessica flinched. “He was never home. I’m pretty sure he barely remembers them at all. He was working a lot. Almost all the time, really.”
“He’s a lawyer, isn’t he?” Chris frowned.
“Not the kind you deal with, I’m sure,” she said quickly. “He was an environmental lawyer. One of the first in Vancouver. Back then, he was trying to save Burns Bog. Or maybe it was Camosun Bog. Some kind of bog.”
“He had no contact with the girls at all?”
“Well, he must have had some, like at dinner and maybe a bit on the weekends, but I don’t think I ever saw them together. At least, not without my mother.”
“But is it possible he could have spent more time with them than you remember?”
Jessica shifted her weight from one thigh to the other. “What are you trying to say? That my father had something to do with all this?”
Chris tapped his cheek with his finger before answering. “I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just trying to figure out who the girls saw and talked to before they died.”
“My father barely talked to me, Detective, never mind the foster kids.”
“Chris.”
“What?” Jessica knew she sounded like she was barking, but she didn’t care. She knew, like anyone who worked in social services, that when women and children were hurt, the first suspects were always the men—the fathers, the boyfriends, the uncles. But still. Not her father. Not him.
“You can call me Chris.” His face remained expressionless.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said.
“Of course.”
“Do you think my mother killed those girls?”
“I don’t know that anyone killed them. There hasn’t been a post-mortem yet.”
Jessica snorted. “I suppose they could have hit their heads and just fallen into the freezer all on their own.”
Chris laughed. “Okay. It certainly appears that their deaths are suspicious. I’ll give you that.”
“Do you think my mother did it?”
He sighed and looked into his empty coffee cup. “All I think is that their lives ended suddenly and far too soon. Whenever we investigate any suspicious death, we work from the inside out and, so far, the inside is really only what you’ve told me.”
“You’ve just said a whole lot of words that mean absolutely nothing.”
Chris placed his hands palms up on the table. “Then I guess that means I have a whole lot of nothing right now.”
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