The Conjoined

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  “Who?”

  Donna snorted. “Casey and Jamie. Who else?”

  Jessica pulled off her coat and placed it carefully over her mother’s legs. She knelt in front of her and tucked Donna’s hair behind her ears.

  “Oh, sweetie. Thank you.”

  She didn’t want to know what happened. She really, really didn’t.

  “I was alone. I just wanted to take a bath.”

  Jessica chanted to herself, Stop, stop, stop.

  “It was lovely. I had the radio on. I felt so loose and warm.”

  Jessica turned away and tugged at her running-shoe laces. Maybe if she didn’t look at the way her mother’s face was sagging and twisting around her words, this whole thing would be easier to hear.

  “I didn’t hear them come in.”

  Jessica felt Donna’s hand on her shoulder. Her mother wanted her to turn around, but she didn’t. She tensed her neck and leaned forward. She would not look. Would not.

  “They ran in with my camera. They took pictures of me. I tried to grab them, but I slipped and fell back into the tub. They called me names—Fatso, Cunt.”

  Jessica flinched. She had never heard her mother say anything so hard and mean and wrong before. She put a hand on her head. It still hurt. She wanted to lie down.

  “They took all the towels and all of my clothes and ran out, laughing. Do you know what that feels like, to be laughed at and naked and called names? No, why would you? ” Donna paused her breathing, irregular and raw. “I’m afraid, Jess. I hear them at night, moving around the house, whispering, flushing the toilet, opening the closets. I haven’t slept in five days. I haven’t been this tired since I was a little girl and all those nightmares about animals and the ocean and cliffs. These girls are planning something. I know it.”

  Jessica jumped and turned around. She stared at her mother.

  “They need counselling. I call the social worker every other day, but there are so many other children, she says. She said she knew I could get them through another week, just until the therapist’s schedule opens up. She relies on me, Jess. But look at me now.”

  Jessica was already looking. Her head, suddenly, was clear. She reached out and wiped her mother’s chin with her sleeve. In her head, she ran the same words in a circle, over and over again. I hope they run away again. I hope they run away again. I hope they run away.

  “I just have to keep them safe,” Donna said. “Just for a little while longer. No more mistakes.”

  In Granny’s house, Jessica rummaged in her purse for a bottle of Advil. Just as she swallowed two pills, dry, she heard the door to the bathroom open behind her and the swish of leather-soled slippers on the parquet floor. Granny Beth, one hand on her walking stick, stepped into the kitchen. When she saw Jessica, she paused, her blue eyes lingering on Jessica’s amber ones. She had always thought of Granny Beth’s eyes as cold and honed, as if she spent her leisure hours sharpening them, a glass of brandy on the table beside her. Now, they seemed liquid and malleable. For a moment, Jessica thought she should hug her.

  Granny Beth straightened up and smoothed down the buttons on her cardigan with her free hand. She turned her head away for only a second, but by the time she looked at Jessica again, the severe solidity of her eyes had returned.

  “Jessica. What are you doing here? And so early in the morning too.” Dolores guided Granny Beth to a kitchen chair before placing a steaming mug of tea in front of her.

  “You didn’t come to the memorial, Granny. So we never got a chance to visit.”

  Granny Beth nodded slightly, then tapped the table with her middle finger. “Dolores, please make my granddaughter a cup of tea. I’m afraid she’s looking quite wilted.”

  Jessica thought that Granny Beth looked nervous, as if her entire body itched and all she could think of was scratching her skin away. She had never known her grandmother to fidget and yet she was folding and unfolding a cloth napkin in her thickly veined hands. She hadn’t asked Jessica about the weather or her job or the drive. She sat, perched on her chair, waiting. Jessica wondered what Granny Beth expected her to say.

  Dolores returned with a second mug of tea and a bowl of oatmeal for Granny Beth. She turned to Jessica and asked, “Toast?”

  “No, thank you. I’m not hungry.”

  “I’m not either. But at my age, if you don’t eat, you quickly disappear.” Granny Beth lifted a spoon of grey mush to her mouth and frowned before swallowing. “I just wish I was eating a bowl of lobster bisque instead.”

  Jessica didn’t respond, but instead reached into her purse and pulled out the photograph. She placed it on the table in front of Granny Beth. She could swear the air around them chilled.

  Granny Beth gazed at the photograph before picking it up and bringing it closer to her eyes. As she stared at the image of this very same house, her hand, the one holding the print, shook. It was just a tremble, a slight and fast wobble, but it worked its way down from her fingers to her wrist to her elbow, until her arm collapsed on the table, knocking over her tea and launching the photograph into the air. It floated side to side until it landed, softly, on Jessica’s placemat. Dolores appeared with a kitchen towel and began wiping up the spilled tea. Granny Beth, blinking her eyes hard, pushed Dolores out of the way.

  “Get out,” she whispered. “We need to be alone.”

  When Dolores had left, taking the wet placemats with her, Granny Beth narrowed her eyes and pointed a lilac fingernail at Jessica’s nose.

  “You have no idea what you just started.”

  —

  The sun had shifted and was now shining directly through the skylight above the kitchen table. When Jessica was younger, she had hated coming with her mother to Granny Beth’s, and as soon as she stepped through the front hall and into the common rooms at the back of the house, she sucked in her breath and held it, as if the lack of air could unfog her eyes and make what she was seeing that much sharper and greener and finer. The windows here, unlike the covered ones that faced the street, were tall and wide and the vertical blinds always open. If Jessica stood with her toes touching the baseboards, her nose inches from the glass, it was as if she were standing on a cliff, the ocean just a running leap away. If she shouted, she was sure she would see the trees on Gambier Island sway with the sound.

  She sat, waiting for her grandmother to speak, looking at the view that her mother grew up with, that she had almost never spoken about. Jessica didn’t think it was strange before, but now, as Granny Beth opened and closed her fists, waiting, it seemed, for the right words to form themselves into the right sentences, she thought it was a gaping hole in the story of Donna’s life. Donna, who had loved the outside and the rush of fresh air as she stepped from steamy kitchen to disordered yard. Donna, whose own body had seemed to change with the landscapes she marched through. Hair like curls of young ferns. Voice like the crunch and scratch of hiking boots on gravel. If a child grew up like this, with the ocean underneath her, in front of her, pushing at her ears, that child would live forever with the scent of sea water soaked into her scalp. Or the always rippling shadow of waves moving through her face. She would be marked, like the bent and scarred arbutus clinging to the rocky overhang at the very edge of Granny Beth’s property.

  Granny Beth put a hand on Jessica’s arm. “You’ll have to understand something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We promised each other, many years ago, that we would never speak of this, of him again.” Granny Beth shook her head. “I never thought it would be me breaking that promise.”

  Jessica gently lifted Granny Beth’s hand off her arm and held it. The skin was thin, like living, warm paper. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  “Oh, I do. You’ve brought me that,” and she pointed at the photograph lying on the table. “You didn’t come all this way just to visit with me. I’m not so old and
daft that I think you actually like me.” Granny Beth smiled, her lips closed.

  Jessica said nothing. If she laughed, the moment might pass, broken into pieces that wouldn’t fit back together again. So she only looked at Granny Beth’s face, at the fear and hesitation wrestling through her jaw, the muscles around her temples.

  “His name was Devin,” she said quietly. “He was my son. He was Donna’s brother. They were twins.”

  There were three—men or beasts, the girls never really knew. They might have been hurting them with fists or hooves or horns. This is the way with hurt: the weapons mean very little if the asshole wielding them is angry enough or strong enough. The girls screamed, of course, but who would hear them? In this half-alley, where the closest humans were in the same pain, or a different pain that manifested in the same deafness, their cries could have been feral cats in a fight or babies from the open windows in the grimy hotel above.

  When the man-beasts left, the sisters crawled to a doorstep and hunched there, pulling their clothes over themselves. There was no wind in this dead-end alley. They didn’t speak, didn’t cry. To the left, they could see the lights of passing cars, a plastic bag circling in the storm. That way, they thought. When they stood up, they fell, so they held on to each other and stood again.

  NINETEEN FORTY-SEVEN to NINETEEN FIFTY-NINE

  THIRTEEN

  ELIZABETH ROSE PARKER HAD ALWAYS BEEN A PRACTICAL woman. As a child in Comox, she lived with an unmarried aunt after her parents died of pneumonia, and she learned soon enough that her pale and silent aunt would never love her. She left for Vancouver at seventeen with four hundred and sixty-three dollars tucked into her stockings in her lone suitcase. She was a waitress, then found a job as a clerk at a stationary store. Three years later, when she was engaged to be married to Charles Worth, she considered all her options carefully, comparing the security of being an actuary’s wife to the shifting, dangerous possibilities of being a single woman. Charles had been a pilot during the war, flying over Japan and Burma and almost dying twice. Once, when they were on a date to see The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, he had told her he never wanted to take another chance, that staying firmly rooted to the earth and coming home to a pretty wife and a nice meal were all that he needed to stay alive and sane. He had patted her hand. She had felt gratified.

  But even as they stood in the small church off Burrard Street, Charles’ face seemed to be disappearing in the yellow and red light from the stained glass windows, fading so quickly that Beth blinked and blinked, hoping that it was just her nerves playing with her mind and not a bad omen for their brand new marriage. Her hands were sweating in their gloves. The church was so hot that it was all she could do to stand there and not rip off her veil and run, panting and half-blind, into the street where the September breeze blew eastward. Once she was outside, maybe she could make it to a streetcar line and then to the train station, where she could go anywhere, do anything, as long as she could do it alone. She stared at his face, transparent in the sunshine, and tried to remember the angle of his nose, the colour of the flecks in his eyes. She couldn’t. He may as well have been a fake man with a wooden skeleton and unyielding, painted skin.

  The ceremony ended. She held Charles’ hand. She became Mrs. Worth.

  At first, they lived in an apartment on Pendrell Street in the West End, in one of those new stucco buildings with wrought iron balcony railings and Spanish-style roof tiles. It was nice and respectable, and another young couple, Walt and Laura, lived just down the hall. Walt was a veteran too and, on long summer evenings, as Laura and Beth sunned their feet on the balcony, Walt and Charles stayed in the dining room, curtains drawn against the light, smoking and whispering. Once, when Beth walked by to fill a glass of water, Charles’ head was resting on Walt’s shoulder and she could swear she heard him crying. She had never heard a man weep before and stood, half-hidden in the hall, rooted to her spot by the wrenching, churning noise. That night, in bed, she turned to him and was about to ask how he was feeling when he took her hand in one of his and said, “It’s getting late. A good night’s sleep will do wonders for both of us.” Before she could respond, he rolled away from her and was silent, his back as still as the night outside.

  During the day, she and Laura walked the downtown streets, stopping for tea at the Hotel Georgia when they were feeling spiffy, stopping for doughnuts and coffee at their favourite diner on Granville Street when they weren’t. When the weather was good, they walked on the beach at English Bay in their bare feet until the sand was crusted halfway up their shins and they had to rinse off, holding their shoes in one hand, at the open shower by the changing rooms.

  On a windy fall day, Laura sat down on a bench facing the water and pointed at the ocean, glittering with sunlight, blue and grey and white. “Where would you be if you weren’t right here?” she asked, her dark brown hair blowing against her cheek.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What would you be doing right now if you weren’t married to Charles? Where would you go? Who would you be with?”

  Beth sat down beside her and buttoned her jacket up to her chin. “I don’t know. I used to know how to type. Maybe I would be doing that in an office downtown.”

  Laura laughed and the sound circled on the wind. “Don’t say anything too crazy, Beth. Don’t you ever think about going to Hollywood and being in the movies? Or getting on a steamer to Europe?”

  “No. I mean, maybe when I was younger, but not now. What would be the point?”

  “There is none. But so what? I have to think of something, or my brain might just fall out of my head.” Laura turned and smiled, her blue eyes and dark lashes like electric lights even here, in the middle of the day. “I would go to Paris and live in a romantic attic apartment and have brilliant men come to entertain me every evening.”

  Beth patted her friend on the shoulder. “I don’t know that anyone who lives in Paris right now thinks it’s very romantic.”

  “Oh, the war.” Laura waved her hand and shook her head. “The war has been over for two years and I’m tired of it. Let’s talk about where we should have lunch instead.”

  Later, as Beth stood in her kitchen, staring at the open refrigerator just before suppertime, she finally understood what Laura was trying to tell her. They were restless, girls pretending to be women in marriages that didn’t seem quite real yet, that may have frightened them at first with their certainty, their solid beginnings and middles and endings, but that now bored them. They were waiting: for children, for bigger houses, for newer cars, for something to weigh down their desire to walk the city until their feet ached and cracked. She remembered, suddenly, how she had wanted to run away from her wedding, how her white dress had felt like a harness and leash. But it was futile to think about escape now. Her life was easy. She should appreciate that.

  And yet, the next time she and Laura walked through the building’s front doors, she thought about grabbing her friend’s hand and hailing the first taxi they saw so that they could drive as far as their money would take them. Even if it was just to the edge of the city, where the trees and ocean choked out everything else and there were spots—muffled and brown—they would never be found.

  —

  When Beth became pregnant, Charles insisted that they needed to buy a house. For a few weeks, Beth managed to convince him that this was an unnecessary expense. After all, one baby couldn’t possibly take up that much room, even if their apartment was a little small. But then, after one particularly long doctor’s appointment where the nurse and doctor spent forty minutes listening to Beth’s belly with stethoscopes, she had to return home and tell Charles that they were having twins. They had to move now. There was no question.

  It didn’t take long. Charles found a new house in Lion’s Bay, an hour’s drive from the city. At first, Beth thought it was too far and didn’t even want to go see the house at all. But when she finally stood at the
tall windows in the living room, facing the ocean, she felt like she was standing at the edge of the world, as if she could float through the windows and land, feather-soft, in Hawaii or Japan or the Philippines. She and Laura could plot their fantasies here, with the babies cooing at their feet. It would be like they weren’t in a house at all.

  Charles rented an office in West Vancouver, closer to home. They painted. They bought furniture—all of it white and blue. Beth told the sales clerks that she wanted their house to be light, to feel like it was perched among the clouds. Laura drove up every Tuesday for lunch and every Friday evening with Walt for supper. Soon, Beth grew too big to leave the house and Laura came every day, bringing doughnuts and Danishes and chocolates. When Beth ate, she could feel the babies turning inside her, both in the same direction as if they were in a chase, with one just a single beat ahead of the other.

  One afternoon, Beth asked Laura when she and Walt might start their family. Laura shrugged and tucked a stray hair back into her impeccably waved bob. “Maybe next year. Walt has a lot on his plate right now. Every bridge around here needs an engineer, it seems.”

  Beth nodded and didn’t think about what Laura’s words might really mean if she picked at them and tried to peel them back. Beth didn’t think about much. If she began to imagine what it would be like to take care of two newborn babies by herself, in a sparsely settled town where she had to drive to buy just a pint of milk, she might curl into a ball and never get up. She had never met her neighbours. She didn’t even know where the pharmacy was. It was easier to just eat her lemon curd Danish and let her mind empty as the waves flung themselves against the rocks just outside the glass doors. It was smarter to act like a fool, even if she wasn’t.

  —

  When the babies came, four weeks early, Beth had been in labour for so long that she didn’t even know she was pushing until the first one, the girl, was held up for her to see. She was crying, covered in thick, white paste. She seemed far too big for an infant who had had to share a womb. The second, the boy, was breach. She could hear the howls of her daughter at the far end of the room and yet she was still strapped into a hard, surgical bed, pushing until she felt sure the blood in her head had begun to explode, vein after vein after vein.