The Conjoined

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  “You don’t have a gut reaction?”

  “My gut says a lot of things. It’s saying it wants a grilled cheese sandwich right now. Just because I have hunches, that doesn’t mean they’re accurate.”

  Jessica stood up and walked around the table to open the door. “I was hoping to find out something from you. I want answers too, you know.”

  Chris looked up. “I guess that means this interview is over.”

  “I have a job. I should get back to it.” She waited as he repacked his briefcase and walked to the door she was holding open.

  “I’ll probably need to talk to you again, Ms. Campbell.”

  “Jessica,” she said as he moved past her.

  “Right.”

  She watched as he walked down the hall toward the elevator. His feet stepped lightly, rubber soles just grazing the flat blue carpet. If he thought she was pretty, or wanted to touch her, she couldn’t tell. She had never spent that much time alone talking with a man as self-possessed as Chris Gallo. Trevor quaked from nerves. She doubted Chris had ever felt a nervous tingle in his entire life. A man who could hold her hand like a promise to never let go.

  When she was a child, she would gaze at Gerry; he was tall and unafraid. Every Saturday morning she would crawl into his lap as he read the newspaper in the den and trace the big black letters in the headlines with her fingers. Donna remained in the kitchen, whisking a bowl of buckwheat pancake batter, singing along to “Walk Like an Egyptian” or “Livin’ on a Prayer” on the radio. The rest of the week, Jessica sat at the kitchen table alone, watching her mother steer one or more of the foster kids through teeth-brushing, face-washing and breakfast while she ate her oat bran cereal, quiet and well-behaved. Sometimes she heard her father drive off just as she was waking up. Sometimes he made it home in time to eat Donna’s slow-cooked, stew-y dinners. Mostly, he didn’t.

  She picked up her notebook and, her hand on the light switch, scanned the conference room for anything she might have left behind. She gazed at the file boxes and cabinets for a moment. Her mind flickered. The children she tried to adopt out were all in foster care. She could access their files at any time. There were years of files here. Probably lots more somewhere else too. All she had to do was ask.

  “Parminder?” she whispered into the phone. “Can you meet me in the conference room?”

  FOUR

  THE NEXT MORNING, JESSICA WOKE UP, HANDS balled in fists under the sheets, sweaty against her thighs. She sat, Trevor beside her, his blank, sleeping face turned to the window. He was free of lines, those marks around mouths and eyes that betray age or worry or joy. Unformed. Soft.

  She knew she had been dreaming about Chris Gallo. It was the type of dream that leaves a shadowy, broken trail: his face in profile against a car window, sunshine hot on her arms, the smell of coffee brewing in a room she had never seen. She didn’t know what they had been doing or what he had said, but she knew he had been there, that she had been with him and that, if she could have chosen, she would have stayed asleep just to see what would happen next.

  In her underwear, she walked to the living room and lay down, curled on her side on the couch, shivering in the morning chill. She could have gotten a blanket from the closet in the hall, could have found a hoodie in the laundry basket under the dining table, but she wanted this: the bite of cold air on her arms and legs that pricked at her skin like splinters. It was grimly painful. It was the opposite of wanting to fuck someone.

  She wanted to fuck Chris Gallo. It was a simple thought, one that was elemental in its directness, and one that was easy enough to construct but hard to think. Because once she started thinking, she knew she would never stop. She wanted to fuck him. She wanted to know the weight of him, the lines of the muscles on his thighs and ass, the temperature of his breath on her neck in a room half-dark, but only half, so she could watch him watching her.

  The things I could do to him, she thought.

  But then, she knew the fucking could never be in isolation. She wanted him because she wasn’t sure she wanted Trevor anymore. She wanted him because she wanted to feel human again, and not this fog of grief and death and the unknown. She wanted him because it was a simple thing to want, even though the impetus and repercussions could never be simple. She wanted him because maybe this was the way she could no longer be scared to leave this apartment and this life and that man in the other room, and it would be a reason, an irrefutable one with hard borders and density and a cruelty that was sharp and fast. This was how it could all end.

  If she touched him. If he touched her back. It was just a dream, after all.

  In the next room, Trevor snored, that loud snort that meant he would be waking up soon. Like every morning, he would reach for her, his hand groping through the sheets for her hip. Years ago, she had smiled drowsily at the touch. Now, she was relieved she was in the other room and the air was cold enough that she didn’t even want to cry.

  —

  It took three hours for Parminder to get an answer from the administration office in Victoria. The location of closed files older than fifteen years was difficult to pinpoint. Record-keeping was a challenge, especially now that no one budgeted for paper storage. Parminder frowned at the receiver and crossed her eyes at Jessica, who was standing at the entrance to her cubicle, snapping her fingers.

  When Parminder hung up after muttering a thin thank you, Jessica pulled on the ends of her hair.

  “Well,” she asked, “where are they?”

  “Her most accurate guess is that they’re in the office in Burnaby, in one of the basement storage rooms.”

  “Her most accurate guess? What does that mean?”

  Parminder sighed. “It means that the Ministry hasn’t implemented a province-wide record-keeping protocol yet. They’re still in the development stage.”

  Jessica groaned and hung her head.

  “She’s pretty sure all the Lower Mainland files are in Burnaby. They have the most space there and she thinks she remembers one of the ministerial assistants ordering that they be centralized and archived by region. But she’s not sure.”

  “Jesus. I hate the government.”

  Parminder laughed and then tried to choke it back. “Quiet. You never know when they’re listening.” She pointed at an air vent in the ceiling. “There could be hidden cameras everywhere.”

  When Jessica phoned the Burnaby office, she got an automated message informing callers that all personnel were attending a team-building exercise and would return the next day. The following morning, she called again and was put on hold, transferred and transferred again before getting through to the communications officer who had been there the longest.

  “Yeah, I think one of the storage rooms is now an archive.” He paused. “Yes, definitely that one in the basement that used to be for bikes. Wait a minute. Let me ask Gill, the office manager. She has the keys to everything.”

  She was put on hold again. No music this time, just crackling silence.

  The next afternoon, Jessica and Parminder stood in a windowless room lined with industrial metal shelving. The office manager had led them into the back then left, dropping her ring of keys for the locked cabinets on a small, round table. As the door closed behind her, she called out, “I came in here yesterday to take a look and I’m pretty sure everything is organized by year of first contact with child protection, and then by last name. But I can’t say what’s in the files themselves—they may cross-reference other files that are somewhere else or don’t exist anymore. Good luck!” The door closed with a soft sucking sound.

  “Welcome to the pre-digital world,” Parminder muttered, then laughed.

  “I think I see a box marked 1963. Is that even possible?” Jessica wandered to a dimly lit corner and gingerly lifted a flattened lid.

  “Anything is possible. God, I feel like Doctor Who.”

  Jessica st
ood and turned to look at the rest of the room. The shelves radiated outward—long and dusty, marked by rusting bolts and strands of shredded paper. There were years here. Handwritten notes on other people’s lives, just like the ones she used to scribble as she sat in her car between cases. Lines about what they ate. How they punished their children. The damage they might have done. Boxes sagged and cabinet drawers gaped. The entire structure was collapsing under the weight of paper that wasn’t just paper. These were words that changed families, that separated children from their parents and passed those children to strangers, as if the strangers were better. Maybe they were. Sometimes they weren’t.

  “I wonder how many of these kids went on to prison. And how many of them turned out just fine,” she said as she walked toward a row of cabinets that looked slightly newer than the rest.

  Parminder laughed sharply. “I ask myself questions like that all the time. And then I get so depressed I want to quit my job and do something with no impact on people at all. For about a week, I thought I wanted to be a notary. I don’t even know what notaries do, which was the whole point.”

  “Am I doing the right thing? This isn’t ethical, is it?” Jessica paused, one hand already half-hidden in a folder.

  “Of course it’s not ethical. But it’s what you need to do. Those girls are dead. Your mother is dead. Their social worker is probably dead too. There’s no one alive whose life will change because you’re looking for their files. You need the truth. Think about that.”

  Jessica nodded and tried to smile. Parminder tucked a black curl behind her ear. “Me, on the other hand, I’m just here because this is exciting. So I guess I’m being totally unethical, like a tobacco company or Vladimir Putin. Hooray for me!” She punched the air above her head with a tightly closed fist and laughed.

  It took Jessica and Parminder an hour to figure out where the files from 1988 were kept. In the grey filing cabinet they opened, the folders were no longer in alphabetical order, if they ever had been in the first place. After Parminder cut her finger on an old spiral-bound notebook, Jessica finally found two thick folders, one labelled Cheng, Casey, and the other, Cheng, Jamie (see Cheng, Casey).

  Jessica opened the first cover. A faded photograph of a thin Chinese girl was stapled on the underside. Her pointed chin was angled slightly upward. The facial equivalent of a fuck-you, Jessica thought. The face of a girl who had to walk down city streets, protecting herself. Her bangs were crookedly cut and acne dotted her forehead. But she was pretty. She might have been skinny and angry, but she stood there like a dust-coloured bird, waiting for someone to notice the complication of beautiful bones and muscles underneath. The line of her cheek. The full, wide mouth. The suggestion of the woman she might have become.

  “Oh,” whispered Parminder as she looked over Jessica’s shoulder. “That’s quite a face.”

  Jessica shivered. She felt small and afraid, as if Casey’s eyes were seeing her as she was in 1988. Grubby, uncombed, clumsy.

  There were many days when she woke up then—stuffed animals thrown to the floor, hair sticky with the drool that had collected on her pillow overnight—that she could hear the rhythmic thudding of her mother’s mixing bowl against the kitchen counter or her father running through the house, gathering up the detritus that he needed to go to work. These were the good sounds, the ones that meant they were the only ones home. No other children would peer at her from behind their plates, eyes big or small but all with the same emptiness that indicated a bland acceptance. They were here. There was no point having any feelings about it.

  But there were other days too: days when her mother never seemed to see her, when she was the only kid who was allowed to walk home from school alone. After Casey and Jamie began living with them, Jessica noticed that everyone else’s parents picked their kids up or made them walk in groups, eyes darting from shrub to van to mailbox. On the news, sullen, ugly men went to jail for taking children and women, and yet it seemed that people kept disappearing, from places that Jessica had never heard of, which meant that they must be ordinary neighbourhoods like hers. Sometimes, she wanted to ask her mother if she was afraid, but then she stopped herself. Donna always picked up Casey and Jamie. It was them she was scared for. What was the point in asking questions if the answers were already so obvious?

  One afternoon, Jessica stopped at the convenience store. She opened the front door, knocking the bell. The man behind the counter looked up from his newspaper and smiled.

  “Hello. School over already?”

  Jessica stopped and shook off her hood. “Hi, Mr. Kim.”

  “What chocolate bar are we getting today?”

  “Shh. What if my mother hears you?”

  Mr. Kim laughed. “Your mother is a smart lady, but I don’t think she can hear you all the way in here.”

  She walked to the candy aisle and gazed at the Skors, Oh Henrys and Coffee Crisps. Every Friday, when her elementary school let out early, she came in to buy one chocolate bar, then ate it on the way home, careful to wipe her face with the tissue she kept in her coat pocket for just this instance. Her mother always had date rolls or molasses oat cookies waiting for her—sticky and sweet, but they filled Jessica’s mouth with tiny strands of fibre and nuts and filled her stomach in a distressingly healthy way. She wanted sugar that melted in her mouth and zipped through her veins until she felt dizzy.

  Twix. Because you got two bars in one.

  Jessica brought the package up to the counter and felt in her backpack’s side pocket for her two-dollar bill. It wasn’t there. Quickly, she shrugged off the pack and set it on the floor, where she opened up the main pocket and pulled out her lunch bag, binder and social studies textbook. Still not there. She checked her coat and jeans. Nothing.

  “Sorry, Mr. Kim, but I think I lost my money.” She thought she might cry from shame.

  “Don’t worry. You can just come back later. I’ve got lots of Twix here.”

  Jessica stuffed all her things into her backpack and ran out, down the street and around the corner. Quickly, she opened the back door and went up the stairs to her room. She pulled out her desk drawer and lifted out an old cookie tin. She shook it. Silence. She popped the lid off. Empty.

  She sat on her bed and tried to remember the last time she had counted her money. It had been Sunday, after Donna had taken her shopping. Forty-seven dollars and thirty-one cents. And it was all gone.

  “Jessica, is that you?” Her mother’s footsteps were coming down the hall. “Jess? Why are you just sitting there in your coat?”

  Jessica tilted the tin so her mother could see. “It’s gone, Mom. All of it.”

  Donna stood with her hands on her hips, filling the doorway with her wide-legged pants. “What do you mean? Did you lose it?”

  “No, I didn’t lose it! Someone must have taken it. They must have taken it.” Jessica threw the tin on the floor and watched it bounce and roll.

  “Are you saying Casey and Jamie took your money?”

  “Who else? You?”

  Donna looked up at the ceiling for a minute before sitting down on the bed and taking Jessica’s hand. “Listen, we don’t know if they took it or not. But even if they did, what would we do about it?”

  “You’re my mother. You make them give it back.”

  “It’s not that simple. Our family dynamic is very delicate right now. If we start accusing them of stealing, then they might run away or hurt themselves. I can replace your money, Jess. But I think we should just leave it between us. What do you say?” She patted the top of Jessica’s head, her touch soft but still forceful, and Jessica knew she didn’t have a choice. Jamie and Casey were the ones who had never had much money, who were living here because their parents hurt them or didn’t care or couldn’t cope. Jessica knew this and so she was quiet and sat down at her desk, back to her mother.

  Later that evening, when Jamie and Casey pass
ed by her closed bedroom door, she imagined their bodies sliding through the air. She could swear she heard a dry rasping, like snakes uncoiling in desert sand.

  —

  Quickly, Jessica shook her head, closed the cover of the file and stuffed both folders into her bag. She hurried over to the open cabinets and began to shut them, slamming the drawers, metal on metal.

  “I know this is obvious, but I don’t think we’re supposed to take files out of this room.” Parminder winked as she watched Jessica fumble with the manager’s keys.

  “Come on, Parm. Let’s get out of here before I start feeling guilty.”

  They left the room exactly as they found it. Jessica knew it was only a matter of days before the police came looking for the files, so she would have to read quickly and return them as soon as possible. Her bag hung off her shoulder, heavy and strangely red-hot, as if she were carrying a box of freshly cooked French fries. She walked with Parminder down the hall to the elevator, imagining the folders nestled against her wallet and phone, spines bending when the lining pushed against them. Photocopies were soulless. She had to touch the photographs, the indentations of pen on paper. She had to be alone to read every word. No Trevor, no Gerry, no Detective Gallo. This was between her and Donna.

  “What would your mother say?” Parminder asked as she stared at the elevator lights.

  Jessica looked down at her black flats. “I don’t know,” she said. But she did know. The mother she remembered would never have used her credentials inappropriately. How can we hold those in power to account if we don’t live ethically too? Jessica looked over her shoulder, half-expecting to see Donna standing behind her, arms crossed over her chest. That’s right, I’m talking to you, Miss Jess.

  “Thank god. The elevator’s finally here.” Parminder’s voice seemed far away.

  Jessica blinked. The doors slid open and she began to walk in, but then she stopped, mid-step. There was time. She could return the files right now and it wouldn’t make any difference. She could call Chris Gallo. She could do the right thing, as she always had.