The Conjoined

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  On her days off, they spent all afternoon together. Sometimes they went shopping for groceries. Other times, they walked through the city, going to Stanley Park to see the Rose Garden and Lumberman’s Arch and the animals in the zoo. Casey loved going downtown to stare at the diamonds in the windows at Birk’s or the dresses on display at The Bay.

  “When I get married, I want a dress like this,” Casey said, pointing at a full-skirted ball gown with rosettes on the hem.

  Jamie wrinkled her nose. “That’s so girly. What about something like this?” She put out a hand to touch a straight white column. Ginny caught her dirty fingers just in time.

  “That’s for old ladies, James. I want something romantic. Because weddings are all about romance, you know.”

  Ginny laughed, but her heart beat hard against her chest. Casey was a beautiful girl, small and sharp, with eyes that seemed to see everything. Liquid and dark, bottomless. Not everyone would think she was pretty, but those who saw how lovely she could be would chase her until they owned her. Until she could fit in a box of their choosing, like a dried butterfly with its wings pinned open. She ran her hands over the goosebumps on her arms.

  Jamie punched her sister in the arm. “You’re just talking like that because you’re in love.” Ginny stared and Jamie bent her head, already understanding the mistake she had made. Casey sat on a white chair.

  “What are you talking about?” Ginny could barely breathe through the words, but she had to say them.

  Casey rubbed her eyes and smiled like she didn’t want to. “It’s nothing, Mom. Jamie’s just shooting off her mouth again.” Jamie nodded but looked small, still folded in a corner.

  “Is there a boy from school? Has he asked you out?”

  “Yeah, a boy from school.” Casey looked at her mother and then away again. “He’s been calling.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “I think he’s nice.”

  Ginny put a hand on Casey’s shoulder. “Maybe he should come by for lunch and I can meet him.”

  Casey stood up and shrugged off her mother’s touch. “Oh, Mom. It’s nothing. He’s just some boy. We’re not getting married or anything.”

  “But don’t you think I should meet the boy you’re dating?”

  “Yuck. Who says dating anymore? Mom, if it gets serious, I’ll tell you. Okay?”

  And Ginny said nothing, only watched as her two daughters walked toward the bathing suit section, giggling at the string bikinis on display. She didn’t want to follow them but knew she had to. After all, how would they ever find their way back home without her? They might fall into that shifting, unnamed place where girls disappeared, the place that sucked away their identities so cleanly that only their mothers remembered the weight of their bodies, the women they once hoped to be. Ginny stepped forward, her feet like stones.

  —

  There was peace. A heavy contentment that settled over their house like a favourite quilt. Ginny watched the summer mornings bloom and thicken from the hotel’s front desk, remembering the sunrises she watched when her daughters were babies and she nursed them in a chair by an uncovered window. She missed those hours, but now, when she returned home from work and saw the girls watching TV or trying to duplicate outfits they had seen in fashion magazines with what they already owned, she thought to herself that perhaps this was just as good. Because their faces still looked up with smiles when she walked in the front door. Because the tops of their heads were warm when she kissed them. Because they were still hers.

  She knew Bill was still coming at night, could practically smell the exhaust from his car as she came home some mornings. Whatever promise he had made Casey and Jamie, he was keeping it. So Ginny carried on.

  The fall was still warm and sunny when the girls started school again, both now in high school and old enough, Ginny thought, to get themselves to bed and up again. On their way to the bus stop most mornings, they walked past the hotel and Ginny waved to them through the front window, watching as they struggled to balance their overstuffed school bags. After her shift at the diner, she went home and showered, breathing in the traces of Casey’s shampoo—ghosts of fruit, an undercurrent of soap.

  One afternoon, Ginny sat at the kitchen table with Casey and Jamie, listening as they gossiped.

  “She’s not a slut, she’s just lonely,” Casey said.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Maybe she just needs a friend.”

  “Whatever. She’s gross.” Jamie rolled her eyes.

  The sunshine slanted through the back window and spilled yellow over the girls’ faces. Ginny looked at Jamie—smooth-faced, with a mouth that smiled wide. She could have been a baby in that light.

  When Ginny turned to Casey, she sucked in her breath and blinked. Her daughter sat leaning her head on her hand, shadows tracing the lines of her face. Ginny had always known she was beautiful, but as she looked at her now, she saw that it wasn’t about the shape of her eyes or the shininess of her hair. At this very moment, on a sunny Saturday in early September, there was something else spilling out through Casey’s skin and lips and neck. She was still, moving only as much as she needed to in order to breathe. Ginny could almost see the weight of Casey’s body, as if she were an anchor and the rest of the room relied on her gravitational pull for its order and comfort. When Ginny closed her eyes, she felt sure she could feel pulses of warmth, the pump of her daughter’s blood. Casey looked calm. Happy. Red-cheeked. Like there was no other person in the world she would rather be.

  Later that night, as Ginny was stocking toilet paper in the vacant rooms at the hotel, she combed through her mind, searching for the reason Casey might look so happy. There was the boy she talked about in the summer. There were the continuing visits from their father. But Ginny could think of nothing else.

  Maybe Casey was just growing up. Maybe she just didn’t want to be a surly teenager anymore. Maybe she had decided she was going to stay in school.

  Ginny knew that she wanted this dreamy contentedness to continue. How nice to come home to a family who smiled, who never looked at you with hate, who said goodbye when you left for work instead of ignoring you. And she knew that it might not last, that any word or sideways glance or unkind wind might break the thin wall between this and the sulky, sweating world outside.

  NINE

  GINNY HURRIED THROUGH THE GREY-LIT STREET. Shivering moonlight pushed its way through a gap in the clouds. She had forgotten her apron at home and needed to run back to grab it before her break was over. Every footstep drummed with the one thought in her head: shit, shit, shit.

  She never forgot anything. Why today?

  As she turned the corner onto Union, she squinted and paused for a half-second. That was Bill’s car parked in front. She checked her watch. One fifteen. The girls should be long asleep by now. All the way home, she had been hoping this was the one day he wouldn’t show up, but there was the battered blue Chrysler, its rear end poking crookedly out into the street. She sucked in her breath and smoothed down the front of her jacket. If she had to see him, she had better look decent.

  From the street, she could see the living room curtains were wide open. Bill was standing by the fireplace, the already short sleeves on his T-shirt rolled up even further. His shoulders. When was the last time she had seen his shoulders? She reached into her pocket for her keys but noticed the front door open, unlocked and not even pushed into its frame. Ginny stepped in, hands already curled into fists. “Idiot,” she whispered. “Can’t even lock the damned door.”

  She was about to stride across the room and ask him what the hell was happening, when she looked down and saw a man lying on the rug. He was face up and breathing heavily. He held one of her kitchen towels to his nose but the blood had already soaked through. Drips were running down his hand and onto the floor. Ginny dropped to her knees and touched the top of his head.
r />   “Wayne?” she said. “Is that you?”

  Wayne, Bill’s old friend from the New Canadian class in high school. The only one, he always said, who understood what it was like to come to this country expecting everything before realizing that they were going to achieve nothing at all.

  Bill pulled Ginny’s arm and yanked her up to a standing position. “Do you know what you’ve done?” he hissed.

  She tried to pull away, but his grip grew tighter as she struggled. “What are you talking about?”

  “This filth has been fucking your daughter.”

  Ginny stared. “No. That’s not true.”

  Bill pointed at Wayne. “Tell her, motherfucker.”

  Wayne moaned and pulled the towel away from his face. Ginny gasped at his swollen nose and eyes. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. I love her, Ginny.”

  “I don’t understand.” Never in her life had Ginny felt this stupid. Her brain twisted and rattled and still she felt like she was running through a swamp, batting slowly at words that floated around her.

  Bill shouted in her face. “He says he loves her! Your daughter. Your slutty daughter. Get it?”

  “I’m sorry, Ginny. I love her. I’ll marry her.”

  Bill grabbed Ginny by the shoulders and shook her. “You’re never home. What kind of mother are you?”

  Ginny pulled her arm back and punched Bill in the throat. He staggered away, and she ran to the girls’ bedroom and pushed open the door. Casey lay on her bed and Jamie crouched at its foot. At first, all Ginny could see was a mess of blankets and sheets and Casey’s long hair on the pillow beneath her. But when Jamie stood up, Ginny saw her younger daughter’s swollen left eye. She looked down. A ball of towels between Casey’s legs. They looked and smelled red and wet and fresh.

  Casey mumbled, “Mom’s home. Mom’s home. Mom’s home.” And put out her hand.

  Ginny kneeled on the floor beside the bed. Jamie said, “Dad kicked her in the stomach. I didn’t know what to do. Mom, what are we going to do?”

  Ginny cupped Casey’s cheek in her hand and kissed her forehead. “Was there a baby?”

  “Yes. My baby. Our baby. Did Wayne ask you if we could get married?” Casey smiled, then grimaced. “It hurts, Mom. Like a knife over and over again.”

  Ginny was crying so hard she could no longer see, only feel her daughter’s head with her fingers and smell the burnt flesh odour of blood and more blood. Jamie’s face was pressed into her back and their bodies heaved together, each inhale of breath shuddering through mouths and throats and lungs. Her daughters wanted her to fix this, to calmly patch and kiss and settle, but she couldn’t think where to begin. All she knew was that she had failed, that all the hard work she had spent nights and days immersing herself in had ended up like this. She rested her forehead on the edge of Casey’s bed and sighed so deeply, she could have sworn she had turned inside out.

  “I’m going to call an ambulance,” she said to Jamie, who nodded with her eyes closed. “You stay here and hold your sister’s hand.”

  She pulled the door closed behind her. Bill had collapsed into the armchair, his jaw hard and his eyes whittled down to slivers. Wayne hadn’t moved. Ginny stared at the phone hanging on the wall. There would be questions. From doctors; police officers too. No one would believe that she was a good mother. No one would think she had tried her best. She was on the verge of losing her girls, not to a bearded, smelly man in a rusty pick-up truck, but to a phalanx of people who would look at her and see her mistakes, the gaps of time that she had left her daughters alone, the frank conversations she might have started with them but didn’t. She had worried over the wrong threats.

  She looked into the living room, at the triangle of light on the floor from the kitchen, down the hall toward her quiet, neat bedroom. This was her house. Somehow, she had let in something crawling and slick with evil. She rubbed her hands together and knew, finally and with no exceptions, that all her hard work and misplaced caution had been no use. Ginny picked up the receiver. She might as well call. Maybe there was a chance that someone would understand.

  One Friday after school, the sisters ran away. They took a bus, a SeaBus, and then walked the narrow streets along the waterfront, turning to watch the trains grinding on the tracks. They headed east, to Skid Row, the neighbourhood they knew so well, that their mother would say they had never feared enough. The older girl, the brave one, was looking for a man, one she hadn’t spoken to in weeks, but she knew where he drank, where he bought doughnuts, where his parents lived, just around the corner from the smokehouse. His clothes always smelled of ham.

  They waited outside, across the street. Wind pushed at them as if it had picked up speed rolling down the mountains and then erupted along this very sidewalk. Rain fell, but not fast enough to send the girls to the ripped awning at the abandoned gas station down the block. So they stood, shivering in the Cowichan sweaters their foster mother had forced them to wear that morning.

  They waited until nine thirty. No lights behind the unmoving curtains. The older sighed and said, “Fuck this,” and began walking toward the pub he sometimes fell asleep in, his head on the sticky bar, a hand still grasping a pint glass half-full.

  They had never walked these streets at night. In the day, people on benches were still and sleeping and the pigeons were grey and pink and purple and cute. In the day, the solids in the puddles of vomit had been picked clean by rats and seagulls, and the store owners stood on their thresholds, hosing down the curbs in wide arcs. In the night, nothing human was a secret, especially if it was ugly or mean or dirty. In the night, no one could see they were still children, or no one cared. The younger slipped her hand into her sister’s and whispered, “Let’s go back. We can wait at the house for a while longer.” But just as the words left her mouth, the girls were grabbed from behind and pulled into a half-alley where garbage coated the ground, slick. They reached for lamp posts or finger holds in crumbling brick walls, but they weren’t fast enough or strong enough and they were dragged back and back and back until their bones were limp. They heard hard breathing behind them and closed their eyes.

  TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTEEN

  TEN

  IT HAD STARTED TO RAIN AGAIN. JESSICA LOOKED UP from the foster care files and blinked at the dark alley beyond the balcony rail. The flashlight illuminated only the papers on her lap, so all she could see were the lights in the apartment building across the lane. The pavement sounded slick as cars sped through the street on her right. She shivered. The blanket had stopped helping an hour ago.

  Jessica blew on her fingers and thought of how her mother had reacted when she’d told her she was going to major in social work at university. Donna had been raking the last of the fallen leaves, her scarf wrapped around her neck and up over her chin. Jessica, just home from school, touched her on her woolly sleeve.

  “The university admissions people came to talk to us today,” she said, hair blowing into her mouth.

  Donna nodded and asked, “Learn anything?”

  “I talked to the one lady from UBC for a while about what I should do and—,” Jessica looked up at the sky, at the blue patches closing over as clouds from the southwest bunched and grew seamless, “—we both thought that I should apply to the Faculty of Social Work.”

  Donna dropped the rake on the grass and clapped her hands together, a smile so wide and bright that Jessica closed her eyes. Her mother hugged her and whispered in her ear, “It’s what I always wanted for you. I’m so proud.”

  That night, Gerry came home early and the three of them went out for pasta and red wine. Gerry made toasts about his daughter’s social conscience and generations of community involvement. Jessica said nothing, but smiled when her parents looked at her. She didn’t know what she had started, but maybe it was worth it. Donna ordered three pieces of tiramisu and then rested her head on Gerry’s shoulder. Yes, it was wor
th it.

  Jessica looked down at the open folders on her lap, created by another social worker twenty-eight years ago. The files were maddeningly inconsistent. The social worker’s notes on the interview with Ginny were full of detail, as if she were giving her every chance to prove she was a fit mother. But in the end, it didn’t matter because it was clear that the girls had been abused, and the social worker couldn’t let them go home until she had the time to adequately assess their safety there. Besides, Ginny was renting a house she couldn’t afford and her absence while working to make the rent wasn’t acceptable. Until she could find one well-paying job or an appropriate and cheaper home, the girls would have to live somewhere else.

  I’ve referred her to BC Housing, she wrote, but the waitlists are long. The girls will have to stay in care for the time being.

  There were two medical reports, which documented Casey and Jamie’s overnight stay at St. Paul’s hospital. Casey suffered a miscarriage at approximately ten weeks. Signs of physical assault, including bruising on the abdomen, back and thighs. Treated for shock. Vaginal bleeding moderate to light. Otherwise healthy. Jamie had a black eye and broken rib. The social worker noted that Bill was taken into custody, while Wayne received medical attention. Nothing on charges or trials or prison terms. Jessica supposed Detective Gallo already knew that part of the story. Besides, it would only be Bill who would have been charged with anything criminal. In 1988, Casey was fourteen, the age of consent. Her relationship with Wayne, as strange and inappropriate as it was, had at least been legal.