The Conjoined

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  Jessica walked down the hall to the bathroom, a towel balled under her arm, shaking off the sticky coarseness of the memory. In this hallway, she thought her footsteps sounded like her mother’s, like that heavy tread she had always thought of as clumsy and loving, all at once. I come from a family of psychopaths. She thought of how little she cared about Trevor’s feelings anymore, about how she never seemed to do any good at work, about how she felt no regret about the night in the car. That’s the problem, right there. Maybe I’m a psychopath too.

  Naked, Jessica pulled back the shower curtain and looked down at the blue tub. On the bottom were dark green rubber flowers, stuck down so that the young Jessica and all those foster kids wouldn’t slip as they washed their hair. They were now peeling at the edges and outlined in black mildew. Jessica bent down and tried to pry one up with her fingernail, but it wouldn’t budge. She sniffed. It smelled like feet.

  Turning, Jessica sat down on the bath mat, back against the wall of the tub. Why hadn’t her mother gotten rid of those rubber flowers twenty years ago, when everybody else’s mothers were renovating their bathrooms? Instead, she had left them to collect mould and moisture until they could no longer be separated from the tub at all and had grown sticky little strings of muck like glue. She bent her head and rested it on her bare knees.

  There was one summer when there had been no foster children and Gerry had been busy with a criminal trial for one of his clients. Every day Jessica and Donna ate breakfast together on the back deck, silently watching the ants hatching in the lawn and flying in clouds over the fence and down the alley. The breeze smelled like drying grass, like things had stopped growing just so they could rest in the sun. Afterward, Donna would turn to Jessica and ask, “What should we do today?” Jessica didn’t suggest anything outrageous, so Donna granted her wishes, driving them to the beach or Granville Island or just letting Jessica lie on a blanket in the grass, watching the clouds blow and morph as the wind sped up and slowed down. If she fell asleep, she would wake up in her room, tucked into her bed, with a glass of water on the nightstand beside her.

  Jessica wiped her nose on the back of her hand. In her head, Devin’s death was knotted together with the deaths of Casey and Jamie. Her mother’s guilt and desperation to assuage that guilt had led to how hard she tried with the girls. She wanted to save them, like every other child who had lived in their house, but she wanted to save them more. They were more damaged, more resistant, more angry. Donna had tried harder, had grown just as angry, and then released her rage into the house. She had been trying to build a life that would put Devin’s death to rest, but it had accomplished exactly the opposite.

  Casey and Jamie, tangled up in their cruelties, both small and big, had reminded her mother of Devin. Of the way she had loved him and he had loved and hurt her. It was Devin, clinging to her, who had made her hate those girls, made her fear them, made her wish they were dead.

  The only sound in the room was the whirring of the bathroom fan. In here, with the tiles and tight walls, she couldn’t hear her father, or the occasional car outside, or even the starlings shrieking as they pecked at the moss in the lawn. In the silence, she heard Granny Beth’s voice. I didn’t stop. I blamed her until the end. She didn’t need to blame Donna. She would have blamed herself anyway. Like all mothers, good or bad.

  Poor Ginny, Jessica thought as she stood up, knees creaking. She stepped into the blue tub and turned on the hot water. Ginny must still wonder. Jessica stared at the spray of water hitting her in the chest. Ginny would still be alive.

  In a flash, she wanted to shout, The truth matters. All this time, Jessica had wanted the truth, even though she knew it would turn out ugly and frightening and almost impossible to comprehend. Ginny must have spent years spinning the possibilities in her mind—from homelessness to prostitution to death to new identities. The truth would end that. She would no longer be a mother stuck in a dizzying game of maybe this or maybe that. Together, she and Jessica might be able to cobble together the truth, or, at the very least, a kind of truth that fit the missing spaces just well enough.

  Jessica soaped and scrubbed as quickly as she could, banging her elbow on the tiles as she rushed. She hadn’t done any laundry and her dirty clothes were hanging limply over the towel rack, but it didn’t matter. Ginny wouldn’t care what she looked like.

  —

  She was easy to find. One online search yielded her home address, a basement suite in a beige stucco house in the southeast, just around the corner from a strip of Vietnamese noodle houses, bubble tea cafés and liquidation outlets. Another search turned up a short obituary for Bill on a longshoreman’s reunion website, dated 1989, the year after the girls had disappeared. An hour later, Jessica sat in her car across the street, staring at a white iron fence. There was no lawn, only a thin layer of gravel with a stained water fountain stuck in the middle. A squat Chow paced the upstairs front porch, his black tongue dangling out of the side of his mouth. Jessica didn’t like dogs. She thought she could smell his mange through the open driver’s side window.

  She didn’t know what she was waiting for. All the way over, she had been practising what she was going to say. I have news. I’m so sorry. I knew them. I lived with them. But as she had pulled her car over, all those words withered on her tongue. They were insubstantial. They didn’t begin to explain what she knew, how she knew it and why she was here. Ginny had lost her children. Maybe she thought they might still be alive. Maybe she sat at home every night with the door unlocked, waiting for Casey and Jamie to burst in, mouths spilling over with tales of adventure and danger and triumph. Or maybe she knew, with a mother’s certainty, that the girls were dead, and spent her days imagining all the different ways they could have jumped off a bridge or been murdered by a pervert who preyed on teenaged runaways.

  How could Jessica, the daughter of the woman who had, at the very least, failed to protect the girls, walk in and expect communal crying or gratitude or catharsis? No, better to wait until she knew, really knew, what she needed to say.

  I think my mother really tried. She meant well, until she didn’t. I’m so sorry.

  In the rear-view mirror, she saw a small Chinese woman with short hair. She carried two cloth shopping bags in one hand and wore a light blue jacket. She walked with her head down, looking only at the progress of her feet and the pavement below. She was like many women Jessica had seen shopping at the Chinese malls in Vancouver. Efficient, sensibly dressed, free of makeup. But even as they walked with set faces and purposeful steps, there was always a hunch in the shoulders and neck, as if their bodies were folding into the air, intent on making themselves as invisible as possible. Jessica could guess what had happened to each of these women hurrying from alley to alley in Chinatown or waiting for the bus stop at Main and Hastings to make them walk like this. She felt as though cold rain were dripping down her back.

  Jessica straightened in her seat and put a hand on the door. It had to be now. Or she would never do it.

  As the woman turned into the front path, Jessica jumped out of the car and hurried to the gate. She caught up and the woman’s bobbed head turned back and looked Jessica in the face. She had the same long eyes as Casey, but hers were turned down at the edges. She might have been pretty once, but Jessica doubted she had ever believed it.

  “Ginny?” she whispered.

  “Yes?” She tried to pull her jacket closed, as if she needed the protection.

  “My name is Jessica Campbell.”

  Ginny frowned and began to back away.

  “Maybe you remember my mother. Her name was Donna.”

  “Donna,” Ginny said quietly. “The foster mother.” She paused and looked up at the overcast sky. “The police were here last week.”

  Of course. Jessica felt stupid. Of course, the police had come to tell Ginny that they had found her daughters. Of course, she already knew they were dead. She half-turned
her body, ready to walk away at this very moment without one extra word, just a broken conversation hanging in the spring air, dissipating as both women began to forget. But then, Ginny placed a hand on her wrist.

  “Is there more?” she asked. “Do you know what happened?”

  Jessica stopped moving. Ginny’s eyes were wide open, like she couldn’t look away.

  “Is it all right if I come inside?”

  Ginny nodded and opened the gate, waving for Jessica to follow her. They took a side path around the house and came to a narrow white door lit by a 60-watt bulb in a cheap aluminum shade. Ginny opened the door and switched on a light.

  “Can I get you some tea?” She slid off her sneakers and stepped into a pair of terry cloth slippers. She walked toward the tiny kitchen. Jessica stood by the door. The living room was neat, with space for one loveseat and a low coffee table. A table with two chairs had been pushed up next to the kitchen counter. Every surface was clear. Even the fluorescent lights mounted on the ceiling were dust-free.

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Have a seat.” Ginny pointed to the dining chairs and sat down herself, sighing as she leaned back.

  “Do you work close by?” Jessica had no idea what she was saying. She just needed to hear Ginny talk about herself for a while. She needed to hear that she was all right. That losing her daughters hadn’t ruined her.

  “No. I work at that big private girls’ school on the west side. I’m a lunch lady.” And she laughed as she touched the top of her head. “I wear a hairnet.”

  “Do you enjoy it?”

  “It’s okay. I like the students. I like being around young girls.” A tremor moved through Ginny’s face. “You’re not here to talk about my job though, are you?”

  Jessica thought she might throw up or, more precisely, that her stomach might leap out of her body through her skin and empty its contents on the linoleum underneath their feet. She gripped the edge of the table with both hands.

  “I’ve been trying to find out what happened.”

  Ginny said nothing, only stared at Jessica’s face.

  “I haven’t found much, only the foster care files. And those were mostly about their lives before they came to live with us. I don’t need to tell you about that.”

  Ginny began to shake. Her face contracted, as if conflicting thoughts were blowing through the skin and muscle, pushing at the flesh in waves. She touched her cheeks, her fingertips just resting on her closed eyes. After a minute, she looked up and then sat on her hands. “Yes. I remember everything.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m upsetting you. Maybe I should just go.” Jessica leaned forward and put her hand on Ginny’s shoulder. After a moment, Ginny shook it off.

  “Don’t go. Tell me what you know.”

  Jessica told Ginny about Casey and Jamie’s arrival at their home, how they ended up hating Donna and had acted out. She told her that Donna had been trying to save the girls because she had lost a twin brother when she was a child. As she listened to herself, Jessica realized that she had found nothing conclusive, nothing that pointed directly to how the girls had died or why or with whom. When she was done, she looked at the kitchen table, listening to the emptiness her words had left behind.

  “I used to see the girls every week at my mother’s apartment in Chinatown. They told me many things about your mother, things they hated. I told them over and over again to behave and just get through it, one day at a time, and soon we could live together again. The last time,” she smiled, a tight, small smile, “we talked about New Kids on the Block.”

  “Did they say anything that was unusual, anything you remember specifically?”

  Ginny started to cry, not even bothering to cover her face or wipe her nose. “No. There was nothing strange at all. When the police asked me, all those years ago, if I thought they had run away, I said no. But the officers kept saying that’s what probably happened until I started to believe it. I started to think of Casey and Jamie as runaways, even though, in the beginning, I knew it couldn’t be true.” Her eyes were open and fixed on Jessica’s face, but even Jessica knew that Ginny wasn’t looking at her. The grief was an opaque veil and Ginny sat in her own particular dark.

  Quickly, Ginny reached out and held one of Jessica’s hands. “Did she kill them? Do you think your mother did it?”

  Jessica could swear she felt her mother’s curls brushing her cheek then, but when she reached up to brush them away, she felt tears instead. Fuck you, Mom, she thought. Fuck you for making me do this.

  “I don’t know. I hope she didn’t but every time I think about it, I think she must have.”

  After a few minutes, Ginny blinked hard and released Jessica’s hands. “Why them? Why not you instead?” She looked away. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “My daughters weren’t monsters, you know. They used to be happy. We used to make them happy.” Ginny folded her arms over her chest. “There were nights when I imagined them being beaten or starving to death in a dirty basement somewhere. When the police came last week and told me they were dead, I was relieved. It was like I could walk by myself again, instead of walking with both of them on my back.”

  Ginny stared at the wall behind Jessica’s head. She said nothing for several minutes and Jessica wondered if she should just leave. But then Ginny said, “I used to think it was all his fault.”

  Jessica thought she might have heard wrongly, so she leaned forward and asked, “What did you say?”

  “Wayne,” Ginny said louder. “The man who got Casey pregnant. I used to blame him.”

  “Of course.”

  “But as I got older, he seemed less important. I had more time to think backward and backward again. It never ended, how far back I could think to get to the one thing, the one day that started all of this.” Ginny turned and looked at Jessica, her eyelids heavy and red. “First, it was Bill moving out, then it was him losing his job, then it was our marriage. Not too long ago, I decided that trying to find the one person or the one minute that could have changed our lives was pointless. So I stopped. And then they told me the girls were dead. I haven’t done much thinking since then.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jessica tried to remember how many times she had said those words and not meant them. If she could, she would take all those moments back just so this one conversation would have the density that signified real sorrow, the weight of true, kindred grief.

  Ginny didn’t respond, but nodded her head with her eyes on the table, as if she were agreeing with a voice Jessica couldn’t hear. Wayne. Jessica hadn’t thought of him much and had only considered him as the man who had victimized Casey. But as she sat in Ginny’s apartment, her bare feet on the cold linoleum floor, she wondered if that was really what it felt like. Casey had loved him. He might have been a sexual predator or a manipulator or just a man who had made a series of bad, bad decisions.

  “Do you know what happened to Wayne?”

  “He moved up north to see if he could get into logging, but he didn’t last long. He was a city boy, after all. The last time I heard anything about him, he was still living with his parents and was working at the mall downtown in maintenance. But that was ten years ago. Sometimes,” Ginny paused and picked a hair off the table, “I think I want to talk to him.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s probably the only one left who remembers. My mother is dead. Bill too.”

  “How did Bill die?” Jessica asked quietly.

  “Accident. They said he was hit by a bus crossing the street.” Ginny stood and steadied herself on the lip of the kitchen counter. “But if you ask me, he stepped into the road on purpose. He felt a lot of guilt. It was just as well, I suppose. His trial was supposed to start the next day.”

  Before Jessica could say anything else, Ginny slid past her and opened the
door. “I need to be alone now.”

  “Wait. Let me give you my card.” Jessica reached into her purse and pulled out her nondescript Ministry business card. “If you ever want to talk, or need anything, my cell number is on the bottom.”

  Ginny shrugged and stared at the strip of gravel and footpath outside. Jessica backed out, clutching the hem of Donna’s sweater. “Goodbye,” she said. Ginny was silent as she shut the door.

  FIFTEEN

  JESSICA SAT DRESSED FOR WORK IN HER COMPACT, efficient car, her practical, roomy bag on the passenger seat beside her. Chris was in her head—his face, his one hand undoing the hooks of her bra, the painful slowness of his movements when she thought she wanted him to be fast but he somehow knew she really didn’t. Here, in a hot car, staring at the front door to her mouse-brown, low-rise office building, she wanted to hold him in her cupped palms. She wanted him to be small enough to fit, or maybe she just wanted to be big enough to contain him, for her life to have a space he could slip into.

  But it wasn’t possible. And it wasn’t what she actually wanted anyway. He had filled a role for one night. He was the other man, the opposite of Trevor, the man who had appeared on her parents’ front step unbidden and self-exposed, and she had been unable to refuse what had seemed like an outlandishly generous gift. She didn’t love him. But she couldn’t stop thinking that she could if circumstances were different. And this was the thought that hurt.

  Her mother was dead. Casey and Jamie were dead. Chris was trying to find out why and so was she. They had fucked and it was good. The rest of it—the dark, swirling mass of the work they had to do, how she was pulling back layers of her family’s bad decisions and subsequent traumas—created no room for her and Chris to be together again. If this were a romance novel, Jessica would have stopped reading and tossed the book into her closet.