The Conjoined

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  When the doctor pulled him out, he didn’t cry, only stared at the bright lights with his mouth closed, as if he were silently appraising his surroundings. The nurses wiped him, weighed him and set him down on Beth’s right side before he made a noise. Not like a baby. Like a seagull. Or a goose bleating for food. He was pale. The girl was pink.

  In her head, she had already named them Devin and Donna. When she told Charles, he nodded and smiled, seeming to not even hear her. Instead, he kissed her cheek and said, “You did a good job, my dear.” He gazed at the children sleeping in their bassinets. “You should sleep too.” And he left, leaving behind a bouquet of carnations and fern fronds that Beth was sure he had bought ten minutes earlier in the hospital gift shop.

  A kernel of worry bounced from one side of her head to the other. Charles doesn’t want them. Charles doesn’t care. But then she knew this was wrong, or at least not entirely accurate, for he had never complained, not once, when she had to sleep alone in their bed because the heat from his body made her pregnant body feel like it was wrapped in tin foil and placed in a slow-burning oven. He didn’t complain when she asked him to repaint the nursery twice because the shade of blue she wanted was not quite sky, not quite cornflower. And he didn’t complain when Beth was too big to stand and cook and he had to make do with Laura’s boiled peas and potatoes. It wasn’t that he didn’t want them. That was just his way, and that was all Beth was ever going to think about it.

  —

  The babies grew. She fed them. She sang to them. She tried to knit. But every time she took out her bag of needles and wool, Donna would begin to cry, or Devin would begin to cough and she would have to hold one or the other or both, even as they swatted at each other as she balanced them on her lap. She had read once that twins liked to sleep together in the same crib, but the one time she had tried, Donna kicked away from Devin until she had scooted to the far end of the mattress, her swaddled blanket a tangle around her tummy. Devin just screamed.

  After supper, Beth followed Charles around the house, asking him questions, telling him about the colour of Devin’s poop or the half-roll Donna managed while lying on the rug in the hall.

  “Devin needs more cuddling, it seems, doesn’t it, Charles? His little hands get so cold.”

  “How do you think I could weigh them?”

  “Tell me about your day. Tell me about it all.”

  Charles rarely answered and instead continued moving, from the sofa in the living room to the armchair closest to the glass patio doors and then, finally, to the Muskoka chairs set on the flat rocks outside their windows. It was February, but still he sat there, a snifter of brandy in his gloved hand, his scarf pulled up over his chin. When he passed by the babies on his way, he smiled at them, lips closed, moustache unmoving. Donna and Devin stared, silent.

  The only person she talked to was Laura, who came less often, once a week, sometimes twice a month. Beth wondered to herself if Laura didn’t like babies, but didn’t allow the thought to grow bigger or unfurl roots in her head. If she hated babies, she wouldn’t visit at all, right? Although, when she did come, she sat on a chair in the living room and barely watched Beth walk Devin back and forth until he fell asleep, or she kicked a ball to Donna with her eyes fixed on the view, while Devin sat on the floor, solidly eating his fist. She never touched the babies or talked to them or offered to hold them, not like the ladies on the street who couldn’t seem to resist tickling the twins with their gloved hands as they sat, fat and unsmiling, in their double pram. Beth decided that it didn’t matter. When Laura walked into the house, she brought with her a cloud of perfume and car exhaust, the smell of city sidewalks soaked with rain. She came from somewhere else, the city Beth once thought of as hers, and this, she thought, as she folded diapers on the kitchen counter at night by herself, was what she valued.

  —

  One night, when the babies were two, Charles didn’t return home from work. He had called her at five to say he needed to meet a client downtown for supper and wouldn’t be home until late. Beth put the twins down and then went to sleep herself. At three in the morning, Devin woke up whining, so she brought him into her bed and saw, groggily, that Charles wasn’t there. As Devin snored through the rest of the early morning, Beth worried. Charles could have been hit by a streetcar, or he could have stumbled into the wrong club, drunk. She imagined him lying on a dirty mattress in a back room, his pockets empty and a dribble of blood inching down his face from his open, unmoving mouth. If she got up to make a telephone call to one of his colleagues, Devin would wake. So she lay there instead, face turned toward the open bedroom door.

  At six o’clock, she heard the lock turn in the front door. She heard a man pissing in the toilet. Then she heard the shuffle of socked feet walking to the living room and the final, soft sound of the springs in the sofa. He was fine. He was sleeping in the other room. But Beth’s eyes were dry and hot. She blinked against the dawn and looked at Devin, curled on his side, his thumb in his mouth. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t march into the hall and begin throwing shoes and words at her husband. She might wake the babies. It was the babies she had to think of. It was the babies she could never get away from.

  At seven thirty, after Donna and Devin had their diapers changed and were sitting in their high chairs, bowls of oatmeal in front of them, Charles walked into the kitchen, straight-backed, eyes brighter than Beth had seen in months. He put the kettle on for tea and patted Donna on the head.

  “Aren’t you tired?” She was trying, but the knife edge cut into her voice, that sharpness that hones words into ticking, tiny bombs.

  He pulled a teabag from the cupboard. “I’m fine. I’ll just have some tea and that’ll perk me right up.”

  Beth couldn’t remember the last time he had said so much to her in the morning. Or, really, at any time. “What kept you out so late?”

  “My client wanted to go to an after-hours club. You know, the one across from the steakhouse. And then he wanted coffee and doughnuts, so we went to one of those all-night diners. I can’t remember the last time I ate doughnuts at four in the morning.”

  “So it was fun?”

  Charles took a sip of tea and frowned. “I wouldn’t call it fun. But it was nice to be out. We spend so much time at home.”

  Before she could stop herself, Beth said, “Actually, it’s me who spends so much time at home.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I spend all my time at home, Charles. Not you.”

  “Well, someone has to go to work and pay the bills, my dear. Speaking of which,” Charles glanced at the clock above the sink, “I have to have a quick shower. I’m afraid I’m running a bit late.”

  When he had finally gone, Beth opened the patio doors and let in the wild, salt-tinged wind that was ripping through the arbutus trees growing on the rocks. The house still smelled of booze and man sweat, that specific odour of people jammed in tightly where there was no air and no light, only the non-trustworthy flames of candles in glass holders and cigarettes burning low. The children ran toward the door, but she held them back with her foot and they squealed in protest. Let me smell something else, something that came from far away, she thought. Just for this one minute. There it was: the faint drift of seaweed and fish both living and dead floating up from the ocean. Her chest grew and she straightened up, her spine tall and pulled tight. Maybe the twins were still crying. Maybe it was a shore bird. She didn’t know and didn’t care to find out.

  —

  Charles left. He didn’t speak to her about it beforehand or tell her where he was going. He just left.

  For months, he had been telling her his client wanted to be taken out again, and since he was the head of a big insurance company, Charles felt compelled to go. Beth wondered why it had to be him and not some other actuary, or even the man’s secretary, but as soon as she said this out loud, Charles would shrug and say it w
as all so they could afford the house and the car and the new clothes she bought. There was no counter-argument.

  He left on a Friday evening in March, after the children had gone to bed. Beth was reading in the living room when she looked up and saw him, overcoat buttoned, fedora pulled low over his forehead. He had one suitcase. Everything he wanted to take with him fit in one small suitcase. This, more than anything, made Beth sad.

  He said, “I’m leaving. I’ll send money for you, for the kids. Don’t try to find me. When I’m ready, I’ll write to you.”

  At that moment, she knew she had been too soft. She had wanted to believe that this marriage was prudent and the right decision, even though her body had screamed in protest as they stood in that church on that sunny day five years ago. She had let the idea of Charles lead her to this house on a cliff where she knew almost no one, where she chased the twins down the hall because she needed to break up a fight, where she held Devin’s hand while he lay, feverish and cranky, in a bed damp with his sweat. She had let things happen to her while she wore her floral apron over her blue or yellow dress, propped up like a dumbfounded rag doll against the kitchen counter. Not again. Never again.

  Charles was waiting for her to say something. Did he think she would cry? Had she been the man, it would be her leaving, not him. Sadness and tears played no part in this. She was envious, angry, full to the eyes with bitterness.

  He picked up his suitcase. Beth nodded and said, “If you’re going to leave, then just leave.” She turned to look out the dark windows, where shapes in shadow sat hunched and still on this windless night. She heard the door close and the sound of his keys being pushed through the letter slot and falling on the tiled floor.

  —

  At first, it seemed as if nothing had changed. Donna and Devin kept fighting. Beth kept pulling Donna off her brother, yelling, “You’re bigger than him,” and Donna would sob and say, “But he started it. It was him!” Beth knew this was true. She had watched Donna cook a pretend meal for him: mud pies, fallen leaves for salad, gravel the size of peas. She had seen Devin laugh at the table set for two on the tree stump outside and, later, turned from the stove to catch him stealing Donna’s dolls and pulling off their heads. He dropped them haphazardly around the house as if his sister’s heartbreak meant as little to him as a trail of broken, discarded toys. But it was Donna who could hurt him with her strong arms and tight grip, even if all she was trying to do was hug him before they went to sleep. Devin wasn’t small, but he caught cold after cold after cold, and couldn’t run fast enough when his head ached or his throat was raw from coughing. At the very least, Beth thought, she could prevent Donna from drawing blood.

  After two weeks, she called Laura, who hadn’t come by like she usually did, something Beth had been grateful for since she had no desire to explain Charles’ absence. But she missed Laura’s fine, high laugh, the way she looked around the house from her chair in the living room, her gaze never falling on the children, floating instead at a line just above their heads. So adult. So clean and easy.

  Walt answered. Beth looked at the clock. Two in the afternoon. What was Walt doing at home?

  “Hello, Walt. It’s Beth.”

  “Beth,” he whispered. Even in that one syllable, she knew he was drunk.

  “How are you?”

  “Wonderful. Right as rain.” He laughed and Beth could hear the thickness of whiskey in his throat.

  “Is Laura there?”

  “Why would she be here?”

  Beth paused. He really was very drunk. “What do you mean?”

  “Charles, that bastard. He’s not home, is he?”

  “Actually, no. He’s likely at work.”

  Walt began laughing again, but the laugh ebbed out and soon she thought she heard him sob. “Holy hell. You don’t know, do you?”

  “Walt, I think I’d better get off the line now. I’ll call back another time.”

  “Laura’s gone, Beth. She left me. She took off with Charles. With your Charles.”

  Beth stared at the phone on the wall, at the curled green cord that led to the receiver in her hand. It was real. This was real. “It was Laura?”

  “Yes, you little idiot. They had been carrying on for a year. I knew she was seeing someone else, but never did I think it was Charles. The man is unhinged. The war repeats in his head, all the time, every day.”

  “Did she tell you it was Charles?”

  “She told me she wanted to be honest. I told her she just wanted to inflict more pain. Our parting words. Lovely, don’t you think?” He really was crying now.

  “Do you know where they are?”

  “Her mother sent me a letter, said they were in Edmonton, living near the house Laura grew up in. Her mother always liked me, you know. Charles doesn’t strike her fancy, it seems.”

  This phone, this goddamned telephone was hot in her hands. If she didn’t let go, her whole body might catch on fire, flames licking at her wrist, her arm, her shoulder.

  “Walt, I’d better go. The twins will wake up from their nap soon.”

  “Wait. Maybe we could go for coffee. Beth, please.” She knew that, if she could see him, he would be wearing wrinkled clothes that he had slept in. He would smell. He would be trying to hold her hand, his own trembling because the first whiskey of the day hadn’t steadied his nerves yet.

  “I don’t think that’s wise, Walt. Just . . .” She stopped for a moment, not knowing what she should say to the weeping man whose wife had just run off with her husband. “Take care, okay?”

  Afterward, she stood outside on the rocks, one hand on the arbutus closest to the house. She could go anywhere, like she had always wanted. She could sell this house that seemed to hover over the sea and take the children with her. There, across the ocean. Or back, down the highway and to the city, where lights burned through curtains in the night, where you could find music at any time on any day, if only you listened hard enough. She didn’t have to stay here, where she had to wrestle her hair against the wind every time she stepped outside, where Charles’ holey socks and thin underwear still sat folded in the dresser. She stretched her arm toward the water and felt the bite of salt-heavy air on her wrist. But here, she had the illusion of freedom. Here, she could wear what she wanted and say what she wanted and be certain that no one would ever know because her windows faced out there, where her words flew and then dropped, disappearing into the water like unseen stones. This house may have been Charles’ idea, but it had since become the only place where she knew how to exist. Her touch, her smell, the evidence of her movements were everywhere, absorbed into the walls and floors as if they were made of sponge. But the house was wild too, unwatched but witness to the sky and sailboats and islands that changed every minute in small ways, but also didn’t. There was nowhere to run, but you could see farther than you’d ever want to.

  They would stay. The next morning, she told the children their father was dead. When they cried, she gave them peanut butter cookies and never mentioned Charles again.

  —

  The twins grew. Every year, Beth hoped that they would stop fighting, that she would walk into the living room and see them cuddled together, reading a book with a blanket over their knees. Instead, she could hear them wherever they were in the house, their voices high and angry, the sounds of toys breaking and the concluding, inevitable crying. Beth tried to talk them through it, tried to sit down and explain to them how being cruel to each other only made everyone miserable, but they didn’t listen, only kicked their feet against the table legs before jumping off their chairs and running to opposite ends of the house.

  Once, when they were alone, Donna said, “I love him so much, Mother. But he’s always so mean, like he hates me.” Beth told her to keep her distance, and she tried. But eventually, like two pieces of the same magnet, they found each other again. And the fighting continued.

>   She stopped trying to talk. Instead, she demanded silence in the evenings after supper and locked them in their bedrooms if she just couldn’t take it anymore. There was no father here. Beth had told the children and everyone else that Charles had died, which seemed to be the easier explanation. So she had to be hard. She had to shut her ears to the soft crying from behind their locked bedroom doors, even though in her head she could see the two of them, each curled on a bed, each with eyes closed tight against the tears that were falling out anyway. It didn’t matter. If they wouldn’t stop fighting, she would make them stop.

  By the time Donna and Devin started school, Beth could see her methods were working. Donna began making pets of the small animals that scurried through the bushes around the house. She lay on her stomach on the rocks outside, chin resting on her hands, watching for any small movement, her breath seeming to still whenever a vole or a baby crow came looking for the line of nuts and bread crumbs she left for them every morning. Devin stayed indoors, where he built towers and cranes out of his Erector Set, and then smashed them with an old wooden spoon that Beth let him have. They made friends—separate friends—and never seemed to notice each other anymore. Beth, for the first time since Charles had left, sighed with relief.

  But, still, sometimes in the night, Devin called for her and she stumbled, her dreams still hanging off her body, trailing after her, into his room, where he would be sitting up, crying into his sheets, his forehead hot with fever or bad dreams or both, and she would have to crawl into his single bed with him, half her body hanging off the edge, cold in the night air.

  It was dawn one morning as Beth lay there, eyes shut even though she knew light was beginning to push through the curtains. If she looked at the clock, it would be five thirty or six, and the spell of sleep would be broken and she would be curled around her son, tense with the anticipation of his waking self, the one who asked her for cookies fifteen times in a row until she flushed all the cookies in the house down the toilet. The one who crept into her lap whenever she sat down, burying his face in her neck like a baby. So she lay there, eyes closed, her nose in Devin’s hair.