For a moment, Jessica considered telling Granny Beth about Casey and Jamie, about the police investigation and the toll it was taking on Gerry, on her. But as the sunlight shone on her grandmother’s sleek white hair, she knew it would be too much. Granny Beth had just told her a story she had never told anyone. A story Donna herself had never allowed to be launched into life. Granny Beth would only wonder if what she had done or not done had started a chain of regrets and mistakes that led to the deaths of two girls who had teetered on the brink of being forgotten. Until now.
After Casey and Jamie had returned home after running away, Donna allowed Jessica to go to her friend Danielle’s house by herself. Jessica had been asking for days, but Donna kept saying, “We have to be together, to make the girls feel secure.” Jessica had wanted to shout, What about me? What if I hate this house and those stupid girls? But she didn’t. Finally, Danielle’s mother had called Donna, saying that Danielle really needed Jessica to help her through the death of their first kitten.
On the way there, Jessica sang the theme song to The Littlest Hobo. When she breathed in, she straightened up as tall as she could.
Just as they had settled on the right clothes for their Barbie dolls, Danielle’s older brother came and stood in the doorway to the bedroom. Danielle looked up and rolled her eyes.
“Go away, Jason. We’re busy.”
“Obviously. Mom just wanted me to tell you that she made some brownies.”
Danielle didn’t answer, just blew the hair out of her eyes and continued dressing her favourite Barbie in an iridescent teal ball gown. Jessica looked at Jason sideways but was careful to keep her head down so he wouldn’t catch her.
“Hey, Jessica, can I ask you a question?”
Jessica almost gasped but managed to swallow her surprise. “Sure.”
He leaned forward slightly and dropped his voice. “That Casey girl. Does she have a boyfriend?”
She felt as if she had magically, suddenly shrunk to the size and significance of a field mouse. “I don’t know. Why?”
Jason stuffed his hands into his jean pockets and shrugged. “No reason. I just heard she was sort of going out with Scott and maybe that new kid from the Island.” He turned around and took a step down the hall. “I hear a lot of things about her. When you talk to her, tell her to watch her reputation. Bad things happen to pretty girls like that.”
Danielle threw a Barbie shoe at her brother, hitting him in the shoulder. “Get out of here. You’re disgusting.”
Jessica felt stupid and young, and pushed the doll she was holding under the bed until she could no longer see it. Danielle sighed and stood up.
“We can go into my mom’s room, if you want. She lets me play with her makeup as long as I wash my hands first.” When Jessica didn’t say anything, Danielle touched her on the shoulder. “Don’t mind him. He’s just gross. Brothers are like that.”
It took an hour and a plate of brownies for her to forget the heavy wave of disappointment that Jason, with his blue eyes and floppy hair, had found Casey pretty and worth thinking about. She was new and dangerous with her black hair and long eyes. Jessica was Jessica. Solid around the middle. Skin and hair and eyes the colour of two-hour-old dishwater. When she walked home again in the fading sunlight, she tried to imagine how she might look with pink cheeks and lilac lipstick. Like a little girl who might one day grow up to be pretty. Who could do whatever she wanted, as long as it impressed her mother.
She looked out the window past her grandmother’s head. For now, Jessica could keep her own secrets.
“You want to leave, don’t you? Stay. Stay and come for a walk with me. It’s a shame to waste a lovely morning.” Granny Beth tucked her hair behind her ears and pressed her lips into a smile.
“Sure, Granny. We’ll go for a walk.” Jessica stood up and offered her grandmother her arm.
Granny Beth stared at Jessica’s body, her eyes travelling down, then up. “Are you wearing your mother’s clothes?”
“Yes,” she said. She didn’t want to explain the fight with Trevor and the sleepless night she had spent in her parents’ house, so she just laughed, one hand pulling on the red knit tassels hanging from the hem of Donna’s sweater.
“Well, you must really miss her, then. I’ll never understand why Donna insisted on looking like she was woven out of bran.” Granny Beth stood up and put her hand on Jessica’s arm. Steady.
Before they turned into the hall, Jessica looked one more time out the patio doors. The wire fence was no longer there, replaced years ago by a wrought iron barricade. In the morning sunlight, the rocks were benign and simple, just shades of grey dotted with moss and lichen. She wondered how Granny Beth could live here so long, watching the same landscape change in small, incremental ways that added up to almost nothing. That cliff was where Devin had slipped and fell, where he had skidded, grasping and afraid, onto the hard-edged rocks below before rolling into the cold black ocean, his sister standing above him. This was where Granny Beth had grieved and where she was grieving again, now. But then, Jessica understood that people became tangled in their sadness, that the constant reminder of loss could also be a reminder of love, even if it was love that had long since passed. Gerry was no different. And neither was she.
She and Granny Beth stepped out the front door and took the path through the woods, where they could hear but not see the ocean throwing itself against the rocks.
—
Jessica lay in her childhood bed and stared at her childhood ceiling. She had no idea what time it was, only that it had been daylight for hours already. She could smell herself in the room, as if she were under the covers with a sweatier, heavier Jessica, who had eaten cheese at midnight and wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her pyjamas. Slowly, she peeled back the quilt and sat up, running her hands through her long, tangled hair.
It had been three days since she had left her apartment, two since she had driven with Chris to Grouse Mountain. She hadn’t told Gerry about her visit with Granny Beth or the photograph with Devin. While they were eating dinner last night, she thought about asking if he knew any of this, if Donna had ever told him about the brother she lost. But Jessica and Gerry talked about the first season of True Detective over their microwaved chicken pot pie as Brahms played on the radio. She told herself that if he did know, if there was any way he could explain her mother further, he would. The lack of answers consumed him too.
Jessica hadn’t called Trevor either or answered any of his calls. Instead, she had let her mind circle and circle over every conversation she could remember, as if she were looking for a crack, a tiny hole he had left unfilled that would mean he had somehow let the cheating in, and therefore she had done nothing wrong when she had fucked the detective who was investigating her family. She thought of the time Trevor had told her about his childhood friend who had died of the flu. That time he had sung the entire soundtrack of The Sound of Music, just to prove he could. His early morning whispers in her ear, describing the previous night’s dream.
They had talked about having children only once. After they had been living together for a month, Jessica had turned to him as they lay in bed and asked, “Should we have a baby?”
She didn’t know why she asked him like this. She could have said, Do you want to have a baby, or Sometimes I think about having babies, but instead she asked him if they should, as if she knew he would have the right answer just waiting, curled underneath his tongue.
“Do you think the world needs more children?”
Of course, she thought. Of course that’s what he would say. She drew an invisible circle on the middle of his chest. “Not necessarily. But it wouldn’t be just any child. It would be our child.”
Trevor sighed and ran his hand through his unruly hair. “I hear you. But think about how many kids you see every day who are unwanted. If we really wanted to do some good, we’d adopt one of them.
”
Jessica was quiet. Those children whose faces she looked at Monday to Friday were broken or scarred and glued back together haphazardly. Their pasts were tangible, erupting whenever a little girl touched herself the way her stepfather had done, or whenever a little boy punched a classmate in the genitals. These were the children she and Trevor could adopt. She pulled the covers up to her chin.
“I don’t really want babies. I just wanted to know what you thought.” As the words tumbled out, she wasn’t sure if this was what she meant. It wasn’t so much that she wanted children, but she wanted to know the possibility was there, that a man who cared so much for the rest of the world could care for a skinny, mewling infant with his chin and her nose. She wanted to know that he loved her so deeply that he would have babies with her, despite himself. Despite what was good for the planet or society or his own ideologies. Instead, he had told her no, even before she had had a chance.
Trevor smiled. “You’re too smart to join the mommy brigade anyway.” And he kissed her, pulling her body to him as the sun thickened behind the blinds. She thought, He’s right. Of course, he’s right.
Remembering Trevor was easier than phoning him. It was easier than thinking about Chris, even though all she wanted was to close her eyes and remember the way his chest felt under her palms and the looseness of his face when he came. But thinking about all of that was tangled up with present-day Trevor and how Chris wasn’t him and how maybe that was what made her want him in the first place.
She didn’t want to think about Granny either, or about the child who had died but whose presence had hovered beside Donna no matter what. They had been born together, touched each other without meaning to, looked at each other and seen their own features—re-ordered and re-angled but still the same—looking back at them. Twinship was something magical, something that compelled myth and witchery and the mutterings of old women. What was it like to be joined by flesh, to never know a moment without the breath of someone else just like you but different? How long did they believe they were the same person? Jessica pulled on the ends of her ponytail until she felt sharp prickles in her scalp. After her mother had chased Devin to the edge of the rocks, put her foot on his chest and watched him sliding through the dark and down toward the sea, did she feel as if she were falling too? Did she know what it felt like to plummet through salty air, to slice through wind knowing you were going to die? She knew. Of course, she knew. She had relived that moment throughout her life, walked up hiking trails with Devin dragging behind her, still attached.
Jessica let go of her hair and moaned. It was easier not to think, but she couldn’t even manage that.
Sitting on the bed, she held her phone to her ear and called her boss. “Karen? It’s Jess. I hate to call you on a Sunday, but I don’t think I can make it into the office tomorrow.” She flipped through one of her father’s old copies of National Geographic as Karen murmured vague reassurances about grieving and accumulated vacation days. This had happened last Thursday and Friday and now today. After she hung up, she knew she would cook breakfast, lunch and dinner for her father, drink wine and sit on the deck, watching the sun disappear westward behind the mountain, the house hunched in shadow. She was glumly satisfied with this.
Every two minutes, despite herself, she thought the same thing: My mother lost her twin. She might have killed him. When Granny Beth had said that Donna was trying to create good, Jessica had known it was true. Everything her mother had cooked or said or grew was for the specific purpose of atonement. She had been the reason Devin was running outside on the wet rocks. She had been the one who could have saved him but might have pushed him instead. So she had to be the one to make up for his missing life. She brought strange children into her home. She saved them. She gave back the years she had watched fall from a cliff into the ocean. She had meant to do good, and it had been working.
Until Casey and Jamie arrived.
They had picked and scratched, peeling back the shell Donna had grown over her younger, guilt-ridden self. Underneath, they had found the girl who had let her rage chase her brother to his death. They had reminded her of Granny Beth, who was cruel, intentionally and unintentionally, who had created a home where anger simmered low until it boiled over, catastrophically. They had reminded her of Devin, of the love and hate that had knotted her and her brother together, even now. They had picked a cavity big enough that all of this came bubbling out. And whatever happened, happened tragically. Jessica stared at the quilt and remembered one night. A night she had forgotten about on purpose.
Ten-year-old Jessica woke and sat up, eyes open wide in the dark. She pressed her hand against her chest, feeling the skitter of her heart underneath the skin. There were noises. She could hear them seeping through the walls.
She stood up and tiptoed to the door. She turned the knob, holding her breath, hoping the slow separation of the door from its frame would be silent or at least not so loud that whomever was moving up and down the hall would hear it. An inch of space now. Jessica exhaled. Six. She cocked her head and looked out.
None of the lights were on, not even the one on her mother’s desk on the landing, which Donna sometimes left on if Gerry was working late. The air gently blowing in from the open bathroom window was cool and tinged with damp, the sort of night air that foretold a rainstorm in the morning. Jessica could just make out the pictures hanging in the hall and the potted rubber plant at the end, next to her parents’ bedroom door.
Maybe she had been dreaming. Maybe there was nothing to worry about.
But then she felt a sharp breeze, a stinging gust that closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her arms, tense and unmoving, were covered in goosebumps. She heard their voices and the rustle of plastic. They were at the other end of the hall, standing by the stairs.
“How is this going to work?”
“Look. I found some bologna in the fridge. And pickles. Let’s take it to the bedroom, before anyone wakes up.”
“Case? I didn’t mean the food.”
“Do I have to go over this again? We’ll just have to be careful. We can take my stuff over next weekend, or sooner if we skip school.”
“Does it have to be his place? Can’t we take the stuff to Mom’s?” Jamie sounded scared. Little. “Don’t you remember what happened last time?”
“This time will be different. We’ll be safe, I promise.”
“But I’m going back to Mom’s later. Right?”
Casey let out a breath. “Yes, of course. Once they stop looking for us, we’ll take you to Mom’s, like you just got tired of living on the street. You’d be going back there anyway, once this foster shit is all sorted out. But no one will allow to me to live with him, unless they don’t know and just think we’ve run away.” She stopped for a minute and Jessica could hear her finger tapping the wall. “I promised him, James. He just got his own apartment and everything. You have to help me.”
“Yes,” Jamie said. “I know.”
Jessica stared at the dark bulk of her bed and dresser. They were planning another escape, a permanent one—Jamie to their mother’s house, Casey somewhere else. Her head pounded. But she stood up straight, so quickly she stumbled into the door jamb. Her mother was coming, she could feel it.
“What are you plotting, girls?”
For a moment, no one spoke. No one had turned on any lights. All Jessica could hear was the breathing of three people, the dampness of air being cycled in and out and in again.
“I asked you a question.”
It was Jamie who answered. “We were just hungry. So we were going to get a snack, that’s all.”
“I could smell it from my bedroom. You like my husband’s junk food, do you?” Jessica had never heard her mother’s voice like this, sharp and mean, the way Granny Beth sometimes sounded on the phone. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what else you were talking about.”
“We don’t have to tell you anything.” Casey’s words were tough enough, but she spoke quietly, as if she were tired, or scared.
“No, you don’t. I might have cared once, but I really don’t give a shit now.” Jessica pushed down on her chest with her hand so she wouldn’t gasp. “Since you don’t like talking to me and would rather eat, why don’t we go down to the kitchen and see what else you might like?”
“No, we’re fine. We’ll just go back to bed.”
“Come on now, girls. I insist. As a matter of fact, there is quite a lot of food in the fridge that is on the verge of going bad, and it would really help me out if you two would eat it. Since you’ve been so hungry lately.”
“We’re full.”
“Did you not hear me? I insist. I will sit in the kitchen and watch you eat all the leftover and dried-up food you can handle. And then, you can throw up and eat some more. Come with me.”
Jessica heard the girls start to cry, the deep breaths that meant they were still trying to prevent the sobs from coming, even though they knew they never could.
“Why are you crying? It will be fine. It will only take a couple of hours. As long as you apply yourselves.”
Through the crack in the door, Jessica saw her mother push Casey and Jamie toward the stairs. At first, the girls dug their heels in and tried to push back, but Donna bent her head and said, “If you don’t, I will tell the police that you have been communicating with the disgusting man who got you pregnant, and then we’ll see how well your plan works out. Don’t fight me, girls. I’ve had lots of experience dealing with brats like you.”
Jessica stepped back and closed her bedroom door. For the rest of the night, she didn’t sleep. She huddled in her bed, covers over her ears so she wouldn’t hear any of the noises coming from downstairs. She knew, with all the certainty her brain could gather, that her mother was doing something terrible, but it was the middle of the night, so maybe she hadn’t heard or seen anything and she was dreaming, lying sleeplessly in a dream house just like the real one. Maybe in the morning it would be forgotten and, if glimmers of this appeared during the day, she could dismiss them as nonsensical and absurd. Jessica felt tears at the corners of her eyes but she didn’t know why she was crying. She wasn’t sad. She was just scared shitless. She ran those two words over in her head, the grown-up coarseness of them heavy and deliberate. Scared shitless. That’s what it was.
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