The Conjoined

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  “Come on, Donna. If you were sober, you would know the answer to that.” Gerry squatted and ran his hands over the floor. “Let’s just get this cleaned up and go to bed.”

  “Gerry. Look at me. Have you ever cheated on me? All those trips to Prince George and the Queen Charlottes. Surely there was someone? A waitress? A young protestor?”

  Gerry put his hands on Donna’s shoulders. “I’ve never kept any secrets from you. I may not be the easiest man to live with, but I have never lied to you.”

  “I’m sorry. Do you remember how my father died?”

  “Of course I remember. You told me all of that when we were dating.”

  Donna stopped and bent her head so that she was looking at the floor. “I work hard to trust people. To trust myself.” She placed a hand on his slipper. “It’s not easy, considering how everyone in my family dies or is just an asshole.”

  “You’re not an asshole. Your mother, on the other hand . . .”

  “Not just her. I never did tell you,” Donna said, then fell silent. “There was just never enough kindness to go around, that’s all.”

  Jessica watched as her parents finished cleaning up the mess. As soon as they had both walked into the kitchen, she quietly crept back up the stairs and to her room. She rubbed her feet together under the sheets and promised herself she would always be kind and try to make her mother happy. She had to make up for the sad, small Donna who was afraid of her own mother, who wanted to escape, who wanted to be trusting. And then she had fallen asleep.

  But Jessica knew her father wouldn’t remember this. These moments had been small to him, even though they had stayed rooted in her brain all these years. And if she told him that story now, he would only feel guilty that he hadn’t tried harder and, once again, cry sharp, masculine tears.

  “I don’t know why she did anything, Dad. But I can try to find out.”

  And then she led him to the kitchen, where she made him toast with butter and honey. Soon after, he went back upstairs to bed, his grey head bobbing weakly as he climbed the steps.

  He paused on a stair and looked back. “Once, I asked your mother if she thought all these other children coming and going might upset you.”

  Jessica felt a tingle in the back of her neck but smiled and tried to look unconcerned. “Really? What did she say?”

  “That you were strong and smart and knew the foster kids needed her help. I remember her saying, ‘Even if she feels neglected sometimes, she’ll know it’s for the greater good.’”

  Jessica didn’t answer, instead staring at the dripping tap above the sink. She had always felt she had never done enough good. Not then, not now. Donna knew she would survive. Even as she stayed in her bedroom while the other children cried and clung to her mother because they were scared and didn’t have anyone else.

  Gerry started walking up the stairs again. “Are you staying?” he called.

  “I think so. If you don’t mind.”

  “Whatever you like. I assume Trevor knows where you are?”

  “Of course,” she lied.

  “All right. Good night.”

  “Good night, Dad.”

  Jessica moved through the house, consolidating piles, dusting the furniture and throwing food wrappers into the garbage. It had been only a week since she was here last and it seemed as if her father had been living alone and dirty for three months. By ten o’clock, she had put the rubber gloves and spray cleaner back in the hall closet and began to walk upstairs. Halfway up, she could hear Gerry snoring, a deep, low vibration that meant the house could tip on its side and he still wouldn’t wake up.

  She stood in the hall and opened the door to her old bedroom. The twin bed was still there, and an old white bookcase that used to be filled with Little House and Sweet Valley High books. But everything else was gone. All her cheap Klimt posters, the stuffed animals she kept on the floor under the windowsill. Even the old plaid wallpaper had been stripped, the walls repainted a noncommittal cream. When she had moved out, she had cleaned the room herself, telling her mother that she should turn it into a home gym, or maybe even a crafting room. Her mother had shrugged and said nothing, and the room remained Jessica’s, only empty. She sat on the bed, grateful for her mother’s resistance to purge and change.

  When Jessica was a child and there were no other children in the house, Donna kneeled on the floor beside her bed every night and read three chapters from their latest book. Harriet the Spy. The Secret Garden. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. In the lamplight, with rain or snow or wind blowing against the window, Donna’s voice was measured and even, the kind of voice that Jessica often imagined Mrs. Ingalls had in the Little House books. The kind of voice that sang lullabies without fanfare. The kind of voice that woke children up with words that poured out like warm milk.

  Donna wasn’t big or loud or obvious then. She was soft and quiet and amused. It was the best way to fall asleep.

  When a foster child arrived, Donna no longer had time to read for forty minutes every night, so instead she settled Jessica into bed, passed her the book and kissed her on the forehead. “Only three chapters, no more,” she said as she shut the door. Jessica could hear her heavy footsteps in the hall, and the squeak of the hinges as her mother entered the spare room, where another child screamed or sniffled or lay quietly, eyes fixed to the white ceiling.

  Jessica knew she was expected to be a good example, to go through her day without much instruction and to be independent, so her mother could pat and hush and love the other children through all the bad things that had happened to them. Sometimes Jessica saw their scars or bruises, or heard them calling for their mothers in the middle of the night, panic sharpening the pitch of their small, high voices. She felt bad for them, of course. When she curled up in a ball in her bed and listened to her mother running to get a glass of water or an extra blanket or a stuffed animal from the basement, she still felt bad.

  In her own house, she was small and orderly. She wasn’t allowed to feel lonely. She couldn’t misbehave. Donna never made an emergency trip to the mall to buy a Lego set for her. Sometimes Jessica would look into the bathroom mirror before she took her shower and thought she could see her face starting to crack and another, sadder face emerging from behind. She looked down, blinked twice and then looked again. The sad face retreated. It had to. She wasn’t allowed. Her life had been too easy.

  Jessica stretched her legs in the twin bed, her grown-up body filling the space. With her eyes closed, she felt exactly as she had when she was younger, maneuvering her body around the lumps in the mattress, finding the right spot for her feet that wasn’t too hot or too cold. She forgot about the bodies that had rested, undiscovered, in the basement for twenty-eight years. She forgot about Trevor. She could hear only the window screen rattling against the glass as it always had. As she fell asleep, she thought she could feel the narrow bed tilting underneath her, but she didn’t even open her eyes to see. She just wanted to sleep, even if the earth was getting ready to yawn and swallow her whole.

  In her dream, she was ten again, hiding under her mother’s desk as Donna vacuumed the carpet in the hall, unaware of Jessica’s curled and crouched body behind the office chair. The roar of the vacuum grew louder and louder until the noise seemed to give off sparks that glittered and popped behind Jessica’s eyelids. As her mother got closer, Jessica could see the spinning gears in the motor, turning and turning, sucking up dust and grime and whatever else Donna wanted to disappear. Jessica thought she could feel herself shrinking. The pile on the carpet grew taller. The vacuum was bearing down on her and she screamed, but her mother couldn’t hear over the noise. She waved her arms, but she was too small, no bigger than a dime standing on its edge.

  “Mom! Mom, can’t you see me?” The wind tunnel had started and her voice was pulled out of her chest and away, lost.

  Jessica felt the gears on her toe
s as she tried to crawl away. It was no use. She was going to be sucked in.

  When she awoke, the sheets were wound around her ankles and damp with sweat. She sat up and pulled them apart, brushing the hair out of her face as she worked at the twists and knots. When she was free, she stood up and walked to the window. There wasn’t much to see, just the lights on the mountain high above the house, and the dimly illuminated underside of low-hanging cloud, half-visible, half-immersed in the black, black sky.

  —

  Jessica was reading a National Geographic from 1997 on her old twin bed when her phone chimed. It was a text message from Parminder. It’s past eleven, but it’s not too late to get drunk. Half an hour later, Jessica, in pair of white cotton capris and a pale pink button-down shirt (Donna’s version of dressy casual), sat in a pub on Main Street, drinking craft beer that inexplicably tasted like apricots and sweaty feet. Parminder sat across from her, sipping a fruity cocktail from a straw with a wrinkle between her eyes.

  “I mean, it looks like it would be good, but it tastes like someone muddled an old man’s cardigan and then dumped some raspberries on top.” She stared at the drinks menu written in chalk above the bar. “There are thirty-eight beers on that board. I hate this city.”

  “Craft beer and backyard chickens. You can’t say Vancouver doesn’t have priorities.” Jessica laughed but then stopped abruptly when she looked down at her lap. “I look terrible.”

  “You’re very youthful for a lady in her seventies.”

  “Watch it. I get testy when I haven’t had enough glucosamine.”

  It was easy to sit and pretend nothing was wrong, that her parents’ house had been full of slow cookers and old photographs and quilts folded in on themselves, and nothing else. Not the ghosts of frightened children, untethered from their now-adult selves. Not the stories from Jessica’s childhood that Gerry could never remember. Not Jamie and Casey, dead and frozen and almost totally forgotten. None of that. There was only Parminder’s face, smooth and dreamy in the dim candlelight, the rapid-fire voice of Nicki Minaj punching holes in the air above their heads, and the layers of drunkenness accumulating on their tongues and eyes and brains. They had begun shouting to cut through the blur.

  “How does Trevor fuck?” Parminder pointed a finger at Jessica’s nose. “He looks like the type who keeps apologizing for shit you can’t even feel.”

  Jessica snorted. “No, he’s better in bed than he looks. He’s sweet, I guess. Considerate. Asks me what I want.” She tilted her head and looked at the lights suspended from the ceiling. “Maybe he asks too much.”

  Right now, she wanted to know what it would be like to have sex with someone who never spoke, who did things without asking beforehand because he knew and she knew that this was the place to give tacit consent, that the next touch or taste might be unexpected but that it would turn out to be exactly what she wanted, even if she hadn’t known it before. Questions and answers would be rendered superfluous. Just bodies—hers and someone who held a ninety degree angle in his shoulders, whose skin barely covered the twist of tendons and muscle underneath.

  But then, this imaginary man would be perfect. How could anyone know what she wanted unless he asked? Jessica scanned the bar. There were men everywhere, men who could be all right or pretty bad or serviceable for one night with a woman who was wearing her dead mother’s clothes. She felt sad, her heart straining under the beer and short rib sliders Parminder had insisted she eat. She wanted a man to look at her, and her body to split open without anyone uttering a word or forming a coherent thought. She wanted that. Now. Or soon.

  Parminder took a sip of her drink and frowned. “He looks like a glass of milk, that Trevor. Like a tasteless glass of skim milk. Which is super-sexy, right?” And she laughed, her head thrown back, her long black hair swinging across her back.

  “You’re the love of my life, Parm. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Sweetie, that’s just the booze talking. Tomorrow morning you’ll have a torturous headache and you’ll want to kill me. And I’ll be at work, cursing you just as hard.”

  Jessica slammed her empty pint glass on the table. “Sounds like every married couple I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Well then, I love you too. You saucy senior citizen, you.”

  This was easy. This night, with Parminder and a crowd of drunken people in a bar she half-hated, might end hard, with a parched mouth and hair tangled from dried beer, but this moment? These minutes in a conversation that floated above the surface of her real problems? This was easy. She waved at the server and smiled. Yes, she thought. More.

  ELEVEN

  WHEN JESSICA OPENED HER EYES, THE LIGHT IN THE room was thick, and the air warm and damp. She blinked and stared at the curtains—white and thin, backlit. No birds, just a faint hum from the hydroelectric cables running up the mountain behind the house. She rolled over and looked at the clock on the nightstand: 11:26. Fuck, she thought. I’m supposed to be at work today.

  Slowly, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and looked down at her bare thighs. When was the last time she and Trevor had had sex? When was the last time he had hovered above her body, looking and looking because in that moment he believed she was the most beautiful woman in the world? Last month? Three months ago? When Donna was sick, Trevor had never even tried, never trailed his hand on her neck as she lay in bed. And she had been so tired, all she had wanted was a glass of wine and a warm quilt. And silence.

  Sometimes, when Jessica would come home from work to her apartment, she wanted to crawl into bed, covers wrapped around her, and just breathe with her hot cheek resting against the pillow. The weight of saving children or, at the very least, keeping them from harm, pushed down on her shoulders until she thought she could no longer walk or stand or even sit upright. And so she unlocked the apartment door and dropped her bag and keys on the floor, ready to stagger into the bedroom.

  But if Trevor was home, he took her hand and led her to the sofa, where he patted and smiled, propping her up with cushions. She said, “I can’t do it anymore,” or “I’m not helping anyone,” or “I have to quit, and my mother will be so disappointed.”

  And he nodded and looked thoughtfully at her drooping face. After a few minutes of silence, he pulled softly on her hair and said, “It’s been a hard day. Don’t make decisions when you’re feeling this frustrated.”

  At first, Jessica tried to explain. “But maybe there’s something different for me to do. I’ve only ever been a social worker. I’ve never tried anything else.” And it was true. Her life had been certain, pre-mapped, a trajectory that excluded questions. Until now, this was fine.

  “Honey, you feel doubt because you’re smart, because you care about your kids. There would be something wrong with you if you didn’t get down once in a while.” Trevor kissed her forehead. “These feelings show just how perfect you are for your job. And for me.”

  Jessica stared at Trevor’s smooth face and steady blue eyes. He knew. He knew how it was all going to work. She didn’t need to worry. He winked. “We’re going to be fine. Better than fine. We’re going to work together to save the world, like Lois Lane and Superman.” Trevor punched the air and laughed so hard Jessica had to smile. This is bigger than me, she thought. It’s both of us and everyone else who needs us. Maybe she could do some good after all.

  It felt like it had been a long time since he had been all she needed, since his touch on her belly had slowed and calmed her breathing so she could sleep or smile or have sex. Coffee, she thought as she puttered around her childhood bedroom, looking for clean clothes. If I don’t have some coffee, I just might die.

  In the kitchen, she dumped a spoonful of instant coffee into a mug and stared at the kettle as it heated up, the beat in her head a painful echo of the hip hop that had pounded in last night’s bar. Milk. Milk would make all of this taste less like shit. As she reached for the handle on the fr
idge, she saw a piece of paper stuck to the door with a horn-of-plenty magnet. Her name was scrawled across the top in black ink.

  Gone to see Det. Gallo. Wish me luck. Love, Dad.

  Jessica punched the fridge and cried out, bringing her red knuckles to her mouth. In her T-shirt and underwear and bare feet, she ran out the front door and peered into the backseat of her car. The files were still there, locked up. What did her father think he was going to do without them?

  Back in the house, she grabbed her phone from her purse and dialled the direct number Chris had given her. A woman’s voice answered. “RCMP North Vancouver.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought I dialled the direct line for Detective Gallo.”

  “His line is on forward. You’ve reached the front desk. Do you want his voice mail?”

  “No. Listen, my father is there talking to him. I need to speak to Detective Gallo right now. It’s urgent.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jessica Campbell.”

  “I’ll see if I can reach him.”

  The music playing into her ear was unidentifiable, just a string of notes that were pleasant but not distinctive enough to be good. Jessica drummed her fingers on the counter and exhaled loudly, blowing the hair off her forehead.

  “Jessica?”

  “Chris. Is my father there?”

  “Did he tell you he was here?”

  The kettle began to whistle, a strange, breathy, high-pitched sound that was almost human. “Damn,” Jessica whispered as she strode across the kitchen to turn off the stove.

  “Did you say something?”

  “No, I’m just turning off the kettle and I’m in my underwear and I’m trying not to sound like a bitch or an idiot but it’s not working, so whatever. Is my father there or not, Chris?”

  The pause was tangible. She could practically hear him debating what to reveal and how much. She wanted to reach into the phone and tear his face open with her hands, just so she could get to what he knew without waiting for him to be fair or deliberate.