The Conjoined

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  She had said yes because she thought she didn’t need to care. But she did. And her feelings were like ravens with one clipped wing, flying in concentric circles, calling to each other in a conversation that was really just a series of echoes saying the same fucking thing. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t.

  Finally, Jessica let go of the steering wheel, grabbed her purse from the passenger seat and climbed out of the car, making sure to press the lock button on her key fob. She took an elevator to the fifth floor and walked down a short hallway to her cubicle, where she sat and turned on her computer. Waiting for her email to load, she took in the piles of unfinished work that had accumulated in her absence. Photos of children waiting to be adopted. Binders from other offices, with children from Dease Lake or Trail or Nanaimo. Old files that needed to be archived. Jessica slumped in her chair and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her peach sweater. Another one of Donna’s, embroidered with nubby red poppies. She couldn’t remember if she’d combed her hair this morning.

  She picked up a stack of photos. Each child wore a different expression. Some grinned widely, others looked away from the camera, corners of their mouths tucked in tightly. One little boy stared straight at the camera, a defiant tilt to his chin. Go ahead, he seemed to be saying, adopt me. See if you can handle it. The corresponding files were on her desk, but she knew without looking what they said.

  History of abuse. Fetal alcohol syndrome. Oppositional defiant disorder. Attachment issues.

  It wasn’t hard to write each child’s story in a way that obscured the truth. She couldn’t lie, of course, but she could make every biography seem just needy or normal or adorable enough. Potential parents read her words and gazed at the pictures and felt the child’s arms around their necks, the magic warmth of child’s breath on their ears. Once they said yes, then it was over. She could move the file to someone else’s desk and start all over again, with a new set of hurt and aggressive and emotionally cold children. Whether the parents could handle the challenge was something she didn’t need to consider. Before today, this relieved her.

  She tapped on her keyboard.

  “Justin is a four-year-old boy who fears and hates men. He was physically abused in his birth home and has lived with three foster families. He has tortured small animals and cannot be trusted with cutlery. He needs a home that can contain his rage and minimize the possibility that he will one day become an abuser himself. He enjoys water sports.”

  No surprises. But probably no parents either. Jessica laid her face down on her desk and shut her eyes. She thought she heard Donna’s voice. If I hadn’t chased him, things might have been different. If he were alive, things might have been different. I tried to save everyone. But I couldn’t.

  When Jessica sat up, brushing the hair out of her eyes, Parminder was leaning on the edge of her desk, arms crossed.

  “I thought you were asleep,” she said, patting Jessica on the top of her head.

  “I wish.”

  “Come on. You know you can’t live without all this glamour.” Parminder waved her arm at the rows of cubicles and laminate desks.

  Jessica laughed. “I told Karen I would be back tomorrow, but I woke up at six thirty, so here I am. Lucky you, getting me one day early.”

  Parminder leaned in. “Did you find anything useful about those girls?”

  “Not really. I mean, I’m still looking, you know?” Jessica shrugged and began to flip through a green binder to her right.

  “I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I just keep coming back to the same thing.” Parminder leaned in even further so the fabric on her blouse was brushing Jessica’s cheek. “Donna couldn’t have killed those girls. It’s just impossible. She was a foster mother. She was basically a professional mother. I mean, I know she wasn’t perfect, but she was as close to a saint as we get around here.”

  Jessica nodded and reached for a pen.

  “Your whole family is made up of people who just want to help. How proud was your mother of you? You’re a social worker, your job is to help kids. The police are lunatics if they think anyone in your family had anything to do with this. Maybe I should call them myself, volunteer my services as an investigator on the case.” Parminder laughed and straightened up. “You’re following in your mother’s footsteps, you know. Good for you.”

  Jessica stared at Parminder’s brown eyes, so wide open, so full of earnest goodwill. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Following in my mother’s footsteps.” How stupid, she thought. How utterly, completely stupid.

  All her working life, she had been trying to help people but ended up failing. She had been trying to be her mother, to be the woman who always knew the right thing to say, or the right casserole to bake, or the right time to start weeding someone else’s garden because they had been too sick all spring. But instead Jessica had taken children into foster care who should have stayed home, or left children with parents when they should have been removed. Now, she sold damaged kids to desperate families and together the confusion only grew, leaving children who ran away or parents who began to drink their fears into oblivion. In all this time, she had assumed it was the system’s fault, that her failures had to do with the rules they had to follow or the lack of resources, but now she knew it had been her all along. She wanted to be her mother but there was always a part of her that knew it wasn’t possible. There was a part of her that didn’t want to help anyone at all, that just wanted to stand somewhere empty—an unused path in an unnamed green belt, a mall at dawn—and feel the uninhabited air lick at the skin on her arms and neck. No certainty, no feeling that she was only following the smell—thick and musky, warm and yeasty—her mother had always left behind.

  And now, she knew. Her mother had failed too. Spectacularly.

  If Jessica kept her job, how much damage would she leave behind? Who else would she sleep with, just to feel that she was teetering on the edge, living out the danger that she spent her whole career trying to subvert? Looking at Parminder’s face, she straightened her shoulders, then reached for her purse.

  “Where are you going?” Parminder asked as Jessica pushed past her into the hall.

  “I’m going to see Karen. I’m quitting right now.”

  “What? Why?”

  Jessica turned and took Parminder’s hand in hers. “It’s the right time, Parm. If I stay any longer, I might just go insane.”

  At the end of the hall, Karen’s office door was open. It was going to be easy. For the first time in years, Jessica felt like she could dance her way across the industrial-grade carpet. She didn’t even take one last look around.

  —

  It was easy for Jessica to say to herself, I’m going home. It was even easy to say, I’m going home to pack my stuff and leave my boyfriend, because those words, said in a steadfast voice in her car with the windows up, meant very little. They were a plan, an outline, but didn’t describe the messiness of trying to sneak in when Trevor wasn’t home, or of calculating more boxes than she thought she would need because she didn’t want to go back twice. In the car, she didn’t allow herself to question her use of home, when, in truth, the apartment Jessica had been living in had ceased to be a home the very moment seven weeks ago when she had looked at Trevor and felt an unsettling in her stomach. The sight of him didn’t make her sick exactly, but the image of him standing in the small kitchen in a pair of stretched-out underpants seemed to pass right through her, leaving a visual trail on her insides that made her slightly dizzy and forced her eyes closed.

  Jessica dragged a pile of empty boxes up the stairs and into the hall outside her apartment. She stared at her key ring for a half-second, trying to remember which key opened the door. Slowly, she turned the lock and peered in. No one home. Thank fuck.

  Quickly, she began emptying out her half of the closet and the two shelves she used in the medicine cabinet. She was grateful
she had never accumulated much, that most of the art (photos taken by journalists in war zones, usually of empty-eyed civilians with dirt or flies dotting their faces) and furniture were Trevor’s. Once upon a time, she had meant to decorate with throw cushions and maybe some wallpaper, but never got around to it. After a while, she didn’t notice the dun-coloured beanbag chairs and second-hand television bench. They were just there. As she had been.

  Jessica pulled books off the shelf in the living room and dropped them into a box, enjoying the thud they made as they landed. She began to sing to herself, an off-key version of “Moondance” by Van Morrison. This was the last time she was going to look out this window at the alley and the Dumpsters, smell the rotting bananas from the produce market around the corner. She laughed and tossed a copy of The Wealth of Nations over her shoulder.

  “Jess? What are you doing?”

  Jessica turned around and saw Trevor standing in the open doorway, bicycle helmet still on his head. She took a step back but there was nowhere to go. She had planned to leave a note. It was more humane than a text, but not as messy as a face-to-face explanation. Fuck.

  “Hi.”

  Trevor pulled off his helmet and placed it on the kitchen counter. Slowly, he turned to look at her. “Are you packing?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. Then, she stepped forward, trying to smile. “I think it’s time for us to be apart. I’ve been at my dad’s so much anyway, and all that time alone made me think about what I want from life. I need to just be by myself, to figure things out. And you deserve someone who is really ready for a long-term relationship, you know?” Jessica knew that she was uttering every break-up cliché she had ever read in a fashion magazine, but it was all she could think of. She hoped Trevor wouldn’t notice.

  “I’m not stupid, Jess. What’s the real reason?”

  It was only yesterday that she had said to herself, The truth matters. It did, she knew that, but standing here with a paperback edition of Sense and Sensibility in her hand, she knew that speaking the truth would bring it into existence, give it a size and form that Trevor would recognize and never forget.

  “It’s not just about you, or us. I quit my job this morning. I just—” she paused and looked up at Trevor, so tall and lean, an unwavering manifestation of what it meant to be right and good. “I just can’t be part of your world anymore.” Before he could breathe in or respond, she said, quickly, “And I slept with someone else.”

  For a moment, she wanted to take the words back. Then maybe they could be the way they were, when Trevor was just enough certainty to make her feel like she was unafraid and her place was permanent and purposeful. They fit together then. But she remembered, when the moment passed, that Chris was the push she had been looking for.

  He hadn’t moved. “Who?”

  “You’ve never met him. It doesn’t matter.”

  “How many times?”

  “Only once.” Strange, how the number of times was important, how having sex only once made a difference in the calculation of betrayal. Jessica almost smiled.

  Trevor walked toward her. “I’m not a traditionalist. You know that. If you say it was a one-time thing, then we can work it out.”

  She stared at his thin face, the ears that stuck out farther than she thought a grown man’s should. “Why are you not angry?”

  “I love you. My world has always included you. We work so well together. We know what’s really important. Only you, Jess. Only you understand this.”

  Jessica wanted to laugh. This was the very thing she needed to leave behind: this earnestness, the idea that one person could be greater than all the rest and change everything. She wondered if Trevor would ever know how ridiculous he was. She didn’t want him anymore. Her mind was clear.

  “That’s what I can’t be a part of anymore. I’ve lived my whole life trying to be my mother and save every last child on this earth. But even she couldn’t do it. She failed.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She hadn’t planned on explaining anything about Donna or the girls to him, but what difference would it make? Jessica looked down at the floor. “I don’t know if she murdered those girls. But it was because of her they died. She didn’t protect them like she was supposed to. She didn’t act like the grown-up. She let them down. She let their mother down.”

  On the last day Jessica had seen Casey and Jamie, they ate breakfast together, silently. She had walked to school with Danielle. As she trudged down the front walk, she looked back and could see her mother standing in the living room window, handing the girls their coats and school bags.

  At three thirty, when she returned home, Donna wasn’t there. An hour later she came back, dumping the car keys on the table by the door. “They must have gone out after school,” she said. “I waited for forty-five minutes in that parking lot. Well, this isn’t the first time they’ve taken off.” At bedtime that night, the girls still hadn’t come home and Donna called the social worker.

  By mid-afternoon the next day, everyone assumed that they had run away again. Their coats and school bags were gone, along with the money that Donna kept in a jar in the kitchen for emergencies. The social worker came by for a meeting and to gather up the few pieces of clothing Jamie and Casey had left behind. “You did your best, Donna. Don’t worry. We’ll find them.”

  Jessica saw a quick darkness on her mother’s face that disappeared as soon as she squinted to look closer. Quietly, Donna said, “I just hope they haven’t been abducted.”

  The social worker nodded as she shifted the plastic bag of clothes from one hand to the other. “The police know about the possibilities. Trust me.”

  Donna turned and ran a finger across a layer of dust on the hall table. “Of course.”

  Jessica watched it all. No one asked her any questions. She lay down on the sofa in the living room and felt the air touching her skin—light and empty, free of the girls’ hot and sharp breath. She smiled to herself. It was over.

  Trevor pulled her hands away from her lap and held them with his long fingers. “I get it, Jess. I’m so sorry.” Most of the time, Trevor was cold, a quaking skeleton. But right now, he was warm and steady and if this had happened three months ago she would have laid down on the rug and pulled him over her so that they could sleep, just like that. He cleared his throat and said, “She meant so much to you.”

  “But do you see? I tried to be just like her, and she failed. All I do is fail. I mean, I even failed you. I can’t do it anymore. I won’t.”

  “We can work on it together. We’ll go to counselling. This doesn’t have to destroy us. You don’t have to be a social worker. We can find something else that makes you happier, that fulfills you so none of this happens again.” Trevor inched closer. His nose almost touched hers.

  Jessica felt herself believing him. Maybe there was another way. Maybe she could still help someone and be good at it. Maybe she could make up for what her mother did. Maybe one night with another man was simply a small blip in the continuum of their relationship. Trevor wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand and grinned.

  “Come on, baby. We could be like superheroes together. Defending the ninety-nine percent. We could be legends.”

  Jessica balled her hands into fists. She wasn’t her mother. She was never going to be. “Sometimes I think you don’t even hear yourself,” she said. “I don’t want to be in this relationship anymore, Trev. I don’t want to save the world. Maybe it’s petty and small-minded, but I just want to eat chips and watch reality television right now. I’m not a hero. I don’t want to be.”

  Trevor kicked away one of her boxes with his foot. “Well, I’m not a dick but I’m going to sound like one for a minute.” He pointed at her. “You need to get your head out of your ass, Jess. All you’ve been doing is staring at yourself in the mirror thinking about how bad you have it. Get over it. You’re not homeless.
You’ve not been gang-raped by child soldiers. You’re an upper-class white girl who just thinks about herself and fucks another man at the worst possible time. Go ahead. Leave. I have better things to do than convince you to stay.” He stood up and walked to the bedroom, where he closed the door so quietly, Jessica wondered if he had simply disappeared.

  In fifteen minutes, she had loaded all the boxes into her car. She pushed her key under the front door and stared at the sliver of light coming from the apartment. He was going to be fine. Tomorrow, he would start writing songs about how she had betrayed him. Two weeks from now, he would pack all of their photos and ticket stubs and gifts in a box and shove it into the back of the closet. In a month, he would join an online dating community. And, maybe, in a year, he wouldn’t be angry at her anymore.

  It was dark as she drove down the alley and into traffic. She could hear the car tires turning on the road, each revolution propelling her forward—fast. She looked up through the windshield and wondered if she would see transparent, tissue-thin versions of herself floating off into the night air. She was shedding. First work, then the apartment, now Trevor. Soon, she would be down to her very core, even if she didn’t know what that looked like yet. She had spent the last nine days trying to unearth who her mother really was because she thought that would lead to how Casey and Jamie had died. But now, as the street lamps lit the smear of grey clouds above her, she finally understood that she would never know. She was driving headlong into a vast, howling future, so empty that it blistered her skin with its cold aridity. She knew enough. Any less and she would have never realized that her life, crafted to be just like her mother’s, was foolish and ineffectual. Any more and this feeling of rushing air and bottomless stomach would evaporate, replaced with the weight of knowing, of unalterable truth. Jessica turned on the radio. Taylor Swift. Of course. She sang along. She had never felt so light.