“He’s here.”
“I want you to know that interviewing him is a waste of time. I was there when those girls were living in our house, not him. He was never home, never tried to parent them. However those girls died, my father had nothing to do with it.”
“He’s not under arrest, you know.”
“Yes, but he’s a suspect. Which is ridiculous. I was there when he found the first body. I was there when he called the police. If he had killed them, why would he call the police in at all? Why wouldn’t he have just gotten rid of the bodies quietly and be done with it?”
“Like I said, he’s not under arrest.”
Jessica started to cry, tears leaving hot trails on her cheeks. “He’s not himself right now. My mother just died, Chris. He thinks he can handle everything, but he can’t. He’s old, and I didn’t get that until now, but he’s old.”
It was the first time she had said it, that her father was old. He hadn’t been old a year ago or even six months ago. He skied. He hiked. He went to the pub with his friends and drank pints of bitter. But when Donna was dying, he stopped. He hovered in the house, wiping at surfaces that he had never noticed before. In the mornings, he pulled out all of the mostly empty cereal boxes and methodically ate the stale flakes and puffs that had sat there for months, maybe years, because there wasn’t enough for one serving, but there was too much to throw away. Jessica had seen him then, one sunny evening, sitting on the front step in his stained and baggy gardening clothes, with his face turned toward the light, eyes closed, like an arthritic cat in the sunshine who needed warmth in his bones to withstand the inevitable cold and dark night.
This is what she was crying for. His death was a certainty, had always been, but it was here, in this kitchen with its yellow tiles and streaky windows, that she knew it was looming. She wasn’t ready. There had been so much death, so many dead people stuck inside her head, expecting the truth, or turning away from it. There was no room for her father. None.
She could hear Chris’ breathing, even and slow, as if he were trying to calm her.
“Jessica, I appreciate what you’re feeling right now. It’s natural to be worried about your father, but he’s still a strong man.”
“No, he can’t fix everything. He can’t even cook a meal by himself.”
“You’re not that different, you know. You’re calling here, trying to convince me to release your father even though he knows and I know that he can leave anytime. You found those foster care files and kept them from us. Are you sure you can handle everything you’re taking on?”
Jessica said nothing for a second. “How do you know about the files? Did my dad tell you?”
“No. I went looking for the files myself yesterday afternoon and the woman at the archives told me you had been there just that morning. It’s not often they get people inquiring after twenty-eight-year-old files, so two in one day was quite an event over there.”
“I was going to bring them to you.”
“Sure, of course.” Chris laughed, and it was the first time she heard a trace of annoyance in his voice. “Do you realize how this looks to me? You stole and kept relevant documents from the police. To some, it looks like you might be trying to protect someone. Someone like your father.”
“He has nothing to do with this. The files say nothing about him.”
“Why should I believe you?
“Because I’m telling you the truth. I’ll bring you these files right now and you can see for yourself. Tell my father to wait.”
She ran upstairs, tripping on the carpeted steps. Finally, she was sober and wide awake.
—
Jessica stood in front of the police station, sweaty hands holding the files to her chest. She looked down at the clothes that she had dug out of her mother’s closet. The wind picked up the hem of the ankle-length skirt embroidered with small circular mirrors and twisting, dark green vines. The sweater stopped just short of her knees, pulling as it stretched across her hips and ass. She knew she looked like death in this colour—an unnameable shade of wheat or beige or manila—but her T-shirt and jeans from the day before were stained and dusty from the hours she’d spent cleaning late into the night. At least her blond hair was brushed and bundled into a decent ponytail.
She didn’t know if this razored, shallow breathing was panic, if the dark spots at the corners of her vision meant she was having a stroke, if this was the way her mother had felt when it became clear that Jamie and Casey would never love her. Jessica pushed down on her chest with her right hand and closed her eyes.
After the girls had been with them for a week and a half, they disappeared. Donna called anyone who might have been a friend and was getting nowhere. Jessica listened to the same conversation repeating itself every ten minutes. Have you seen them? Do you know where they are? The exchanges were short and no one offered to help. The girls didn’t have many friends. Every time Donna put down the receiver, Jessica wanted to clap with glee. Maybe they were gone for good. The back door opened. It was Gerry.
“The girls are gone. I need you to look for them.”
Gerry dropped his keys on the table. “Now? I have a client coming in twenty minutes for an affidavit. I can’t leave.”
Donna whirled around and stared. “Fine. Stay. I’ll go. You just have to listen for the phone.”
He shook his head. “I can’t just get up in the middle of an interview and take personal phone calls. Jessica can answer the phone. Right, sport?” Jessica smiled and looked at her mother.
“You’re ridiculous. The social worker might call back. Jessica can’t talk to her.”
“Donna, how many times did you come home late when you were a teenager?”
“I don’t know. Why does it matter?”
Gerry sighed. “Because you always came back. I don’t think there’s any need to panic.”
“Do I have to remind you that things are different now? It’s not safe out there for young girls. You watch the news. You know this.”
“They’ve only been gone for a few hours. Give it some time before you come to the conclusion that they’ve been abducted off the street.”
Donna stood with one hand on the receiver. Jessica thought she could see her mother’s brain cycling through everything Gerry had just said, trying to find one word that could help her right now, in this moment of spinning, muddled confusion. Donna dropped her head and closed her eyes.
“Fine. Go do whatever you have to do. I’ll stay here.”
After Gerry had disappeared into the den, Donna sat on a kitchen chair and watched the phone. Jessica watched too and could have sworn she saw it twitch. She didn’t want to break the silence, so she sat still, listening and listening.
The next morning, the social worker and the police came. They asked questions, took a few things away with them, but stayed for only one hour. Jessica wondered if sixty minutes was enough time to understand the shape of missing people, if the officers could know so quickly what the girls smelled like or walked like or wanted to eat. Or if they cared.
One of them, an older man with a white moustache, nodded at Jessica and said, “It’ll be fine, sweetheart. They’ll come back.”
And he was right: the next afternoon, Jamie and Casey walked into the house, their clothes covered in grey-brown dust, their hair tangled from the overnight windstorm. When Donna ran toward them, her arms out to pull them both into a hug, they backed up, fast, until they were flat against the wall. Donna touched Jamie’s cheek and Jamie gasped, her eyes shut so tight, the lids were wrinkled and narrow. They had slept in the park, they said, but they were back, so what did it matter? It didn’t, really, except that afterward everything in the house shifted, as if the tectonic plates beneath them were grinding and tilting, pushing at the houses and streets and oceans above, preparing for a schism greater than anyone had ever seen.
Jessica s
tared at the police station. Casey and Jamie had gone missing once before and returned, but when they did, they had said very little about where they had gone or how they had spent their time. She was sure her mother had never asked them. Why not? Quickly, Jessica pushed the past away and yanked at her sweater one more time before opening the door.
Inside, an officer sat behind a wide desk, phone cradled under her ear. Plastic chairs lined the walls of the room, and people sat, staring at their phones or into space. Gerry sat in the corner closest to the front window. His hands were clasped in his lap and his eyes were shut against the fluorescent light.
“Dad?” Jessica placed a hand on his shoulder. “Are you awake?”
Gerry opened his eyes. “Did you bring the files?”
“Right here.”
“Good. Detective Gallo really wants to see them. Almost as much as he wanted to see me.” Gerry smiled and shook his head. “He most definitely considers me a suspect.”
Jessica rolled her eyes. “What did he ask you?”
“You know. Where was I when the girls disappeared. Did I resent them. Did I ask you to find and hide those files. That sort of thing. I told him I barely remember the girls. He doesn’t seem to believe me. Or maybe he does and he’s just trying to be clever.”
“I’ll tell him again. Just let me talk to the front desk.”
“All right. And then maybe we should get some lunch. What do you think? My treat.”
“It’s a date.”
Gerry closed his eyes again and rested his head on the wall behind. He seemed small and grey and still. Jessica bit her lip and stood up straight. She turned to walk to the desk, but then saw Chris standing behind her, hand extended to take the files.
“We should use an interview room,” he said, leading her to a hallway. “We have lots to talk about.”
Jessica followed him past offices and water coolers and cubicles, all lined with colourless carpet and paint. Her sweater blended right in. As they passed her reflection in a framed print of the Capilano suspension bridge, she grimly noted that she looked like a floating head.
Chris opened the door to a small room and she said, “These are my mother’s clothes.”
“What’s that?”
Jessica wanted to pull out her own tongue for speaking at all, but there was no going back now. She had to explain. “I spent the night at my parents’ house and it was kind of unexpected, and I had nothing to wear. So I had to rummage through my mother’s old clothes and this is what I found.” She waved a hand at her body and smiled tentatively. “You should have seen the outfits I rejected.”
Chris laughed. “I was going to say that I didn’t notice, but I actually did. You don’t often see an attractive woman dressed like a hippie grandmother.”
Jessica looked down at the floor. All she could hear was her own voice in her head yelling, He thinks I’m pretty. I knew it. I knew it. She wished she could slap herself in the mouth. Don’t be a dumb-ass. Out loud, she said, “My father had nothing to do with those girls. Not alive, not dead.”
Chris pointed her to a padded office chair and said, “So you keep saying.”
“It’s the truth. Treating him like a suspect is waste of time.”
“Let me ask you something, then. How is it that in the twenty-eight years Casey and Jamie Cheng were missing your father never looked into the bottom of those freezers? Hell, how is it that you never looked?”
Jessica placed her hands on the table, tightly closed in fists. “My father was never home. He never cooked. Even when my mother was dying, he could barely make a pot of coffee. Do you not listen? He was never home.”
“What about you, then? Didn’t your mother ever send you to the basement to get a steak?”
“I hated her food. Everything she cooked was wild game or grains and seeds. It was all I could do to step foot in the kitchen, much less the basement.” She looked at his face, willing her own to go blank. “Are we really having this conversation right now? I was ten years old when they disappeared. I had just learned to ride a bike. God.”
She could see on Chris’ face that he believed her but that it still made no sense to him that those bodies—those small, contorted bodies—could have rested, undisturbed, in the basement of a home where people lived and slept and ate. Jessica understood that the story needed to be linear, that, in Chris’ head, one event had to lead logically to the next. But it didn’t need to include her father.
She leaned forward, the edge of the table digging into her ribs. “Shouldn’t you be trying to find out the real story?”
Chris glanced at the files on the table in front of him. “We’re still waiting on the post-mortem. Until then, I’m doing what I can, which includes questioning anyone who knew those two girls. That’s all. May I remind you that we don’t have a homicide yet and therefore no suspects. Yet.”
“Why is the post-mortem taking so long?”
“It hasn’t started.”
Jessica wanted to howl. “Why not?”
Chris sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “Those bodies were frozen, as I’m sure you remember. It takes time to,” he paused and his eyes flicked back down and settled on Jessica’s face, “defrost them.”
For a minute, Jessica felt sick again. Of course. Of course. And yet, who would ever think about the mechanics of bodies buried in deep chest freezers or about the intricacies in removing and preparing them for examination? With her hands clasped on the table in front of her, she whispered, “I’m sorry. I should have realized.”
“Don’t be sorry. You’re not the only one who wants this case to be resolved. Dead girls from the eighties are a big deal around here, especially for my boss.” Chris cleared his throat and when he spoke again, his voice was quieter, smoother. “Why were you at your dad’s last night?”
She looked up and shrugged. “It’s stupid, really. I got into a fight with my boyfriend and I just wanted to be with someone who understands, you know? And my dad has been lonely anyway, so I went.”
“Did you show him the files?”
“No, I left them in the car. But I told him what was in them.”
“What did you tell him?”
Jessica explained it all to Chris: why the girls were taken into care in the first place, and the names of their parents and Casey’s boyfriend. When she was done, she rested her chin in her hands. “It’s a terrible story, but not that surprising, in some ways.”
“How so?”
“I already knew they were troubled, so it all just makes sense. I can see why my mother wanted to help. Who wouldn’t?”
Jessica stared at the wall, sifting through the images in her head of the girls arriving, then unpacking, then walking to the car on their way to school. Every time she thought of them, the girls seemed to be walking away with her mother hurrying after. Her ten-year-old self was rooted to the spot, it felt, as if she knew there was no point in chasing Casey and Jamie and Donna, as if she knew they needed to sort it out among themselves and that she, younger and unknowing, was safer being left behind.
On a Saturday evening, after the girls had returned, Jessica sat behind the Douglas fir, digging a hole with her mother’s favourite spade. The remnants of her napkin-wrapped dinner lay on the dirt beside her—tempeh steak, braised beets and barley pilaf. When the hole was the size of a pie plate, Jessica dropped in her food and began filling it again, carefully gathering up stray needles and sticks to strew over the dirt. She peered up toward the back porch, looking for her mother’s face in the kitchen window. It was close to sunset and the lights were still off inside. With a lift of her chin, Jessica could see almost everything.
Casey and Jamie had been back for six days. In that time, Jessica had learned to stay away, to never speak to them and, above all else, to never let them see her watching. Her mother, on the other hand, still hadn’t figured it out.
T
hrough the window, she saw Casey’s and Jamie’s heads, and then her mother’s, her hair bouncing as she hurried past. Quickly, Jessica pulled her legs in so that her entire body was hidden by the fir’s gnarly trunk. The back door opened and the girls ran out, wearing thin jackets. Donna followed, waving her hands.
“You can’t just leave, girls! I’m responsible for you. I have to know where you’re going.”
“Leave us alone,” Casey hissed. Jamie giggled before opening the gate to the back steps.
“You don’t have to run off just because I wanted to talk. Come back inside. We can watch TV. I can make popcorn.”
For a moment, the girls stopped and seemed to be considering Donna’s offer. Jamie took her hand off the gate and Casey fiddled with the zipper on her jacket.
“Look, I know about your parents and the abuse. Your social worker has to tell me these things. We don’t need to talk right now, but you might want to think about talking to someone. Especially you, Casey.”
“Oh no,” whispered Jessica to the pine cone in her hand.
Casey’s back straightened and she took a step forward. Donna smiled and held out her hand. But then, Casey drew her arm back and punched Donna in the mouth.
“We weren’t abused, you bitch. If it weren’t for you or those fucking social workers, we would be perfectly happy. Do you understand? Or do you need me to punch you again?”
Donna shook her head and held her chin in both hands. From where Jessica was sitting, she could see that her mother was bleeding over her teeth.
“That wasn’t happiness, Casey,” Donna said, wiping blood from her mouth.
Jamie jumped forward and pulled at Donna’s hair with both hands, fingers buried deep in the mess of curls. Jessica stood up and took a step toward the house. None of the other kids had ever hurt her mother like this. None.
Donna grabbed Jamie’s wrists and propelled her into a deck chair. Casey pushed at the gate and started running down the stairs.
The Conjoined Page 10