The Conjoined

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  But then she placed her palm on her bag. Her fingers twitched. “Fuck the guilt,” she said. “We’re leaving.”

  —

  Jessica ran on the damp streets, her hair trailing behind her in a long, messy ponytail. It had started to mist, and she could feel the drops being pulled into her lungs every time she took a breath. The pounding of her feet on the pavement sounded loud and hard and simple. Her breath was just breath. There was no need to think.

  She came to an intersection and stopped. Casey’s photograph flashed in her mind. The files were waiting for her at home, piled on the coffee table, a pad of paper and a pencil placed on top. Panting in the cold, wet air, Jessica tried to calculate how long it would take her to read each piece of paper and examine each photograph. And she wondered if she would be able to detect a sliver of her mother. Maybe her words, spoken to the social worker, on a page of notes. Maybe a lock of her hair, blurry and overexposed, captured in the corner of a picture. It already felt like so long since Donna had touched her shoulder or held her hand. Maybe, just maybe, her mother had touched one of those sheets of paper and left a faint print, a finger outlined in the oils from her skin.

  During the nights that Donna had spent in another child’s room, her sturdy arms holding him as he panted from fear, Jessica lay in her bed and wished her mother would come in for just one minute, just to untangle Jessica’s hair or kiss her cheek. Now, she wanted her again.

  The walk sign blinked on. Jessica wiped her nose on her sleeve and started running. She was two kilometres away from home. If she went fast, she could be reading in fifteen minutes. She raised her chin and darted forward, hands in fists.

  —

  The evening air seeped through Jessica’s quilt, icing the knees of her jeans and creeping up her arms. She sat on her narrow balcony on a folding chair, wedged between Trevor’s bike and a stack of plastic bins filled with camping gear and the remains of the container garden she had tried to grow two years earlier. She had placed a flashlight on the floor beside a mug of tea. It would be dark soon and she didn’t want to go inside, where Trevor was stirring a pot of vegetarian chili and singing to a Tom Waits record. She couldn’t smell spices and beans and listen to his wavering, pubescent singing while reading Casey’s and Jamie’s files.

  She imagined him flipping through the papers, his fingers long and white. He would shake his head and say things like, The system never works for immigrant families or Remember how girls disappeared then and no one gave a shit or They never had a chance. It would be like one of their potluck dinner parties. Someone would tell a story about an addict or a prostitute or a child, and everyone else would try to outdo each other with how much empathy they felt, or how much they wished they could really, truly understand. Trevor would try to filter Casey and Jamie through his brain and reorder their story until it made sense to him and his mental system of privilege and risks and best practices. Jessica frowned. This one belonged to her.

  At first, she just stared at the closed folders, running her hands over the paper and blinking against the dim, grey sunset. Everything might be here. Or nothing.

  After ten minutes, Jessica slowly opened Casey’s file and began reading. The social worker’s notes were short and she offered no detail, but sometimes a line pushed itself forward and Jessica felt the pulse of that day, smelled the food that was cooking in the background, saw the light changing from dawn to day to evening.

  They trust only each other.

  Mrs. Cheng cried in my office after an exhausting interview.

  Jamie’s anger masks her fear.

  They both love and hate their father.

  Donna is doing her best.

  Jessica blinked and remembered her mother sitting at her desk, writing a letter to Granny Beth. Donna wrote letters all the time, to dozens of people, but Jessica always knew when she was writing to Granny. She turned on Bach, as if the bombast and swells could somehow drive her letter forward, give it a shape that was less concave, less ephemeral. And she murmured to herself as she wrote, words that Jessica never tried to listen to but would hear nonetheless.

  “I don’t want to bring up the past.”

  “How is your knee?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “I did my best.”

  Now, Jessica shivered at the memory. Donna had been apologizing for something, over and over again. And Granny Beth had refused to listen. She shook her head and pulled the blanket tighter over her knees before turning over one more page in the folder. A transcript. A copy of the police officer’s first interview with Mrs. Cheng, only two hours after the girls were admitted to the hospital. As the daylight dimmed, Jessica read faster and faster, and the story grew. The questions, the photographs of the girls’ room at their family home, the medical reports—everything churned and stuck, reassembled and took shape until Jessica felt like she was following Casey and Jamie everywhere they went, carefully placing her own foot in their footprints, still warm and soft.

  For a moment, she was afraid. It had been three days since her father had found those bodies, and she couldn’t remember sleeping or stopping or sitting on the toilet just to stare at the white wall of her bathroom. She felt as if she were standing at the top of a high, high hill, and the only way to get down was to hurtle herself toward the steepest side as fast as she could, feet stumbling and rolling and tripping as she went. She breathed deeply and looked out over the alley.

  It was dark now. Trevor would soon come to the patio door and ask her to come inside. But she wasn’t finished and there was an extra set of flashlight batteries tucked in her pocket. She kept reading.

  Before they went missing, the older girl was hurt, and the younger saw it all and was punished. They were taken from their parents and went into foster care, first to a home where the boys were mean and hard and whispered things in their ears as they walked past them in the hall. Then, they were moved to a second home, one with a mother who never left them alone, who cooked meals that made them shit immediately afterward, who wanted to love them and really, really tried. For a couple of weeks, they stared at her, having learned how to be hard from the boys who had touched them. But they weren’t hard by nature and this foster mother wasn’t so bad, even if she always said the wrong thing. Had they stayed, they might have eventually loved her back.

  They were restless. At night, they lay in unfamiliar beds and listened to the wind and rain, could feel the cold, clean air when they pressed their palms to the windows. It would be something, they thought, to run outside, down the hill, across the bridge, and back to their old neighbourhood, their old house, their old, lumpy beds. This foster home was clean and bright and quiet, pressed up against trees the girls didn’t know the names of. If they had been younger, they would have picked up snails in the backyard, jumped into piles of leaves that were wet with rain and nothing else. But they weren’t younger. They were just old enough to make a plan.

  NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR to NINETEEN EIGHTY-EIGHT

  FIVE

  WHEN BILL AND GINNY CHENG MOVED TO UNION Street, they took pictures on the front lawn. Bill and Ginny in the back, Casey and Jamie in front, their little girl shoulders narrow under their parents’ hands. The grass was patchy and the porch needed to be painted, but it didn’t matter. They had a yard and a basement for storage. And they didn’t have to share a bathroom with anyone, not like in the attic apartment they had just left with its steep staircase and gaping windows.

  The girls were in school at Lord Strathcona, grades four and five, and Bill had been working as a longshoreman for six months, saving up for a car and now the extra rent on this little blue house. Ginny was working nights at the Patricia Hotel—cleaning, filing, answering phones. Of course, if the family had had the choice, they would have chosen a newer house in one of the quieter East Vancouver neighbourhoods. Maybe by Hastings Park. Or even near Main Street, south of the cemetery. But this is what they could aff
ord. Besides, it was close to work. The girls didn’t have to change schools. MacLean Park was only two blocks away. Ginny reasoned that the park was pretty safe, in the daytime anyway.

  During the week, Bill left the house by six and Ginny got the girls all to herself before school. She crept into their room in the mornings and watched them sleep. Casey slept by the window, her arm flung over the top of her head, mouth open. Jamie’s bed was up against the wall by the closet. She curled up, knees tucked into her stomach. Their breathing was always in tandem, even when one had a cold or the other was snoring. In and out, like they didn’t know any other way.

  Ginny blew on their ears. They woke up, stretching slowly, smiling when they heard their mother say, “Breakfast is almost ready.” They ate and ate, but stayed skinny. Ginny wondered if all her girls could grow were bones and long, thick night-black hair. Sometimes Ginny would make rice congee or steam the pork dumplings she kept in the freezer. Mostly though, Casey and Jamie weren’t interested in the kind of breakfast Ginny’s own mother used to make for her in their old Chinatown rooming house. Instead, they ate toast with jam, or sugary cereal. Ginny shivered as she watched them slurp up the pink-tinged milk. She could never understand why anyone would eat cold food first thing in the morning.

  The girls sang as they got ready for school. Songs they learned in class or the pop songs they heard on the radio.

  “It’s ‘Karma Chameleon,’ James! Come on, sing with me.”

  After she dropped them off and returned home, she replayed their off-key warbling in her head to fill the empty rooms as she tidied and ironed her clothes for work. When she lay down to sleep, she could smell their musty child-sweat from the tops of their heads. She wished she could dip her sheets in that smell and wrap herself up, warm and drowsy.

  When Bill came home, she rushed through dinner and homework, bathed the girls as quickly as possible and then left, taking small, quick steps to the hotel in the dark night. She never took the new blue Chrysler because it seemed like such a waste to drive when she could walk in eight minutes. But she never stopped peering into the bushes beside the sidewalk, or speeding up when she passed a windowless van. Things happened to women in Chinatown. The police had been asking questions at the hotel, asking if Ginny had noticed when the hooker who usually stood on the corner outside had just stopped showing up.

  “Why?” she asked. “Did something happen to her?”

  The police officer winced. “I can’t really say. We’ve found her purse and shoes. But not her.”

  She never heard anything about it on the news, but she knew that girl was dead. She had come to expect it. Everyone who had to work or live down here thought the same way.

  When Ginny was younger and getting ready for school or work, her mother used to say in Cantonese, “Watch out. You can’t always trust other people. They’re not all like us.” Back then, she used to shrug and continue out the door, purposely not looking at her mother’s body in the window, wavering and thin behind the cheap, sheer curtains.

  But as she grew older, her mother’s words grew heavier inside her head. When she and Bill got married, she heard careful, careful, careful as she walked down the street. What would he do if she disappeared or got hurt? When she began working at the Patricia, she watched the girls who stood on the corners in their wedge sandals and short denim skirts and wondered if they had the voices of their mothers echoing in their ears. Ginny silently begged them to walk away from the slow-driving cars, to put on a long coat and just go. Anyplace but here, where Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside bled into each other and where nobody ever wanted to stay. Ginny kept her eyes open and walked quickly. To stay safe, she needed to look like a woman who had something to live for.

  When Casey and Jamie grew big enough to leave the house by themselves, fear prickled through Ginny’s skin every time she had to go to work and leave them. Where would they go? Who might knock on the door? Had she remembered to tell them to stay away from the Carnegie Centre, where human misery had snowballed so that vomit and shit and dirty sexual favours in exchange for drugs seemed normal? There were so many hidden doorways and spaces between buildings where men could lurk, the kind of men who looked for young girls without their mothers.

  Bill told her to carry a knife. He had even given her a folding one that his best friend Wayne had bought from the pawnshop, but she just tossed it into the junk drawer in the kitchen and never thought of it again. It was a cold, hard, palm-length piece of fear, a solidification of what she already felt. She didn’t need that. She needed to be smart. As she had always been, ever since her father had died and she and her mother had moved to their small room with the sink but no toilet. Her mother had stuffed Chinese sausages at the Dollar Meat Store while Ginny had left school in grade ten and learned to clean hotels. Now, she practically ran the Patricia at night. She learned to protect what she had. Her job. The girls. She called home from work as often as she could. She never stopped thinking about them, reasoning that if she kept them alive in her head, the universe would know they were wanted and loved and therefore nothing bad would ever happen to them. She told them to be careful. She told them other people weren’t like her.

  Ginny’s mother had also said, “Don’t give your husband everything. He’s just another person. He will make mistakes. And then where will you be?”

  So Ginny took ten dollars out of her paycheque every week and deposited it in a bank account in her name. She felt guilty, but then she reasoned that she might never use that money anyway. Nevertheless, a digging feeling scraped at her insides.

  She loved Bill. He had charmed her mother even though he had come to Canada as a teenager. “He’ll never get anywhere with that accent, you know,” her mother had said. “People hear me and they think I’m stupid. And I’m not a man who will have to support a family one day.” Ginny was mad that her mother would say such a thing out loud, but then, she also knew she was right. Bill had once been a teenager who dreamed of becoming an electrician, but school and reading became harder and harder until he dropped out at the beginning of his grade eleven year. Even then, he thought he could get a good union job in construction or at CN Rail. He worked and worked, leaving positions because there was nowhere to go, sometimes getting fired for mouthing off in his staccato, angry-sounding accent, never quite making it into the union because he could never stay in one job long enough, and bouncing from one shitty apartment to the next. It was only now, at the age of thirty-seven, that he seemed to be getting anywhere, even as Wayne and his other friends still struggled to find work. A year ago, he drank beer until he fell asleep every night. Ginny would come home in the mornings and have to hide the empty cans before the girls woke up.

  “I want to forget,” he had said. “Every week, I line up at construction sites begging for work. I’m better than that.” Then he had punched the wall and his fist went all the way through the aging plaster, lath splintering around his tensed arm. “If I could,” he had whispered to her, “I would hit myself like that.”

  But now, it was better. He had proved himself with the house and the car. Ginny told her mother that he was going to keep at it. That there was nothing but progress and good things from now on. She looked in the bathroom mirror every morning and reminded herself that each day would be better than the one that came before. They would work hard, and they would be rewarded. There was no room for error.

  SIX

  ONE FOGGY AFTERNOON THREE YEARS LATER, BILL came home from work early, his boots and coveralls clean. Ginny had just given the girls crackers and cheese for their after-school snack and they were now lying on the rug in the living room watching Degrassi Junior High. Bill sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. Ginny wondered if she should allow the girls to watch the show. One of the characters was pregnant. It was too real. Too scary. Or not scary enough.

  “I got fired,” Bill muttered, tugging at the laces of his boots.

  Ginny stared. “Wh
at? Why?”

  “I got into a fight with the new foreman this morning.”

  “Oh no. Bill.”

  “He acts like he knows everything, that fucking kid. I don’t know how he got that job, so I asked him, and he got all mad and said he was one hundred percent qualified. Then I said I might just call the union and ask if he’s legit. He laughed. Laughed at me, Ginny. And then he said, ‘As soon as they hear your stupid-ass accent on the phone, they won’t believe a word you say. If they can understand you in the first place.’ So I punched him in the mouth.”

  Ginny bent her head and looked at her hands folded in her lap. “Jesus,” she whispered.

  “The police came and took me to the station. The union lawyer got me out on bail. He said the foreman might get disciplined, but I’m the one who got charged. I could go to jail. I’m done, Ginny. Done.”

  Bill looked small. A lock of glossy black hair fell over his forehead, but Ginny didn’t move to smooth it back. Damn him, she thought. After all the work I’ve done.

  But still she smiled. “You can find another job. You have a good reputation.”

  He laughed, then shrugged off his coat. “Maybe. Not anymore. I don’t know. Remember how hard it was for me to find this job?”

  So she stopped asking. He looked for work for a while, sometimes taking temporary jobs at construction sites with Wayne, other times signing up for free information sessions at community colleges where he would sit through some seminar on welding or electrician certification. But as soon as he sat down with the application forms, he gave up.

  “I don’t have any transcripts. Where the hell am I supposed to get those?”

  Ginny sighed. “You have to phone your old high school and ask.”