The Conjoined

by Jen Sookfong Lee

  Casey cocked her head slightly and looked at Wayne. It was his turn.

  “Mine.” He said it so quietly he was sure no one had heard. But he was wrong.

  Bill turned around and stared. “Excuse me?”

  Wayne still sat on the floor, his back against the wall. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t stand up. His legs had turned to rubber. “The baby is mine, Bill. Casey and I have been together for a while now.” He stopped talking for a moment to look around the room, hoping that, somehow, none of this was real and he would see he was in his own bedroom in his own bed. “We’re in love.”

  Suddenly, Bill tipped his head back and laughed. “That’s funny. Are you really pregnant? What’s going on here?”

  Casey waved her hands in the air. “You’re not listening, Dad. Wayne and I are in love. We’re having a baby. We’re going to get an apartment when Wayne finds a job and—.”

  And then Bill was on top of Wayne, punching at his head as if it were a balloon he was madly trying to pop. Wayne heard his nose break and then he could no longer see, only feel Bill’s fists on his face and his foot on his ribs. He tried to speak, but the blood pouring into his mouth made him choke, and he could only spit and breathe. Where was Casey? What was she doing?

  He heard her yell, “Daddy! Stop!” And then, mercifully, he did stop. Wayne rolled over on his side and held his nose in his hands, afraid that it had become so brittle that it would break in two and fall, with a slap, on the wood floor.

  “You’re a whore. Do you understand that? A little snot-faced whore.”

  Wayne heard a thump and Casey screaming, a wordless scream with no syllables, no pause, just a long, slicing wail. He wiped at his eyes and tried to stand up, but he could only lift his head and blink toward the sound, hoping his head would clear.

  Slowly, the room came into focus. Casey lay on the floor. Bill stood over her, foot raised.

  “Bill! What the fuck are you doing?” Fear. Stinking, fetid, cold, cold fear.

  Casey covered her stomach with her hands. Bill kicked them away before looking at Wayne, who crawled slowly forward. Bill shook his head, raised his foot again, and stomped, as hard as he could.

  “No, no, no, no,” Casey whimpered.

  Wayne saw Jamie sitting in the corner of the couch, a comic book open on her lap. He shouted at her, “Help her. Now!” She jumped up and kneeled down beside her sister, her eyes so wide it seemed like they had lost their lids.

  “You see?” Bill asked. “You’re a fucking pervert. You’ve ruined everything. Fucker.”

  Jamie began to half-drag Casey toward their bedroom. Bill stretched out his arm and pulled Jamie backward by the collar of her shirt. She let go of Casey’s shoulders and her head made a dull thump as it hit the floor.

  “You,” he said to Jamie. “Did you know about this?”

  She was still and silent. As Wayne began to pass out, the last thing he saw was Bill’s fist hitting Jamie in the face and her body staggering backward toward the fireplace. The baby was dying. Casey might be dying. Bill might kill him right now. “Maybe,” he whispered to the rug beneath his cheek, “it’s for the best.”

  What they did, in the aftermath, that’s what everyone remembered. After all, what’s one missing weekend in the course of one life, or two? We reminisce over beginnings. We dwell on endings. We say the middles take too long. We shrug. And so, the girls who were once happy, who were wrecked, who were angry for a reason, became lost. In no time at all.

  TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  JESSICA STOOD ON THE FRONT LAWN OF HER PARENTS’ house with her father. It was the May long weekend and the garden was already full and bursting. Peonies, the magnolia tree, lilac. She felt drunk in the sun.

  The house was empty. The last moving truck had just driven away. Gerry was supposed to meet the movers at his new condo with the key, but he had stayed, feet planted in the thick grass, hand on his daughter’s elbow. He hadn’t said anything for ten minutes, so Jessica didn’t move, just blinked at the pink magnolia blossoms waving in the wind. Finally, Gerry turned to face her. “I guess we’d better go.”

  “I guess.”

  “Your mother would have never let me sell this place.” They rarely spoke of Donna these days, each unsure of the words they might use.

  Jessica sighed. “I know.”

  “It feels good. Like I can go anywhere.”

  “I know.” And she did, because this feeling that you could stand with your arms as stretched out as possible and still touch nothing but air, this is what they both finally had. Every morning, Jessica blinked at the clean, white walls of her new apartment. One sofa. One bed. A desk in the corner. No photographs. No clutter. Just this blank of a room—quiet, unstained, smooth.

  “At first,” Gerry said, “I wanted to stay. But after a while, it felt like Donna was on top of me all the time, perched like an eagle on my shoulders. All I could do was think of her and those gummy stews she made us eat. The way she laughed like a man. Her hair. All that hair.”

  Jessica leaned to the side, her shoulder touching her father’s. He was shaking, just a little.

  “I didn’t think I wanted to stop thinking about her, but I do. Just sometimes, you know, when I feel like it.” Gerry turned to Jessica, his eyes damp in the corners. She nodded, remembering, and he nodded back.

  A week before the girls died, Jessica had crept up the stairs to the landing and sat on the floor, head resting on her mother’s leg as Donna sat at her desk. Casey and Jamie were watching Dynasty in the family room with the door shut. Gerry was reading files in his study. Jessica pulled her knees up to her chest and exhaled. Her body felt boneless. She smiled.

  Donna sat here every Friday night. Usually, Jessica never tried to see what her mother was doing. If she asked, Donna smiled and shook her head. “Nothing you’d care about, munchkin.” But Jessica knew. Donna was gluing or reading or collecting, trying to make sure that the foster kids never forgot her, or that she never forgot them. Jessica sometimes heard her talking to herself.

  “This is the right spot.”

  “What a beautiful face.”

  “I can’t find the right word.”

  When Jessica was younger, she would fall asleep, her body curled around the feet of her mother’s chair, her cheek flat against the pile of the carpet. She would wake up in her own room in the morning, so she knew her mother had put her to bed, no matter what she had been working on. The foster kids might swirl around her during the day or even cry for her in the night, but at least—the very, very least—her mother had never left her sleeping on the floor, half-hidden by the desk.

  One night, Jessica sorted the photographs her mother had thrown to the floor, the ones not clear enough to warrant a place in the albums. Two-year-old Timmy from last spring who danced whenever the radio was on and cried whenever Gerry came into the room. Anya, who spoke only Russian and pointed at pictures in the Sears catalogue to show Donna what she needed. Dishes meant food. Towels meant bathroom. Jessica by herself, turning her head as the shutter released so that the image was all hair and motes of light and movement, only flat.

  “Mom, why am I an only child?”

  For a moment, Donna stopped moving. Jessica saw how completely immobile her mother’s legs were, the pause in sorting and cutting and smoothing. But underneath the silence and stillness she felt a vibration—the kind of buzz you hear only in the middle of the night when everything else is quiet. The kind that could be mechanical or human or animal. The kind of buzz that you can never identify.

  “Well,” said Donna, “after you were born, we tried for a few years to have another, but we just couldn’t.” Donna sighed. “Sometimes you can’t control these things.”

  “Does that make you sad?”

  “Me? Not at all. If you had a brother or sister, I would never have thought to work with foster ch
ildren.”

  “Oh.” Jessica wasn’t sure what kind of answer she’d expected, but it wasn’t this.

  “Does it make you sad?” Donna was speaking quietly now and Jessica had to pull herself forward from under the desk to hear her.

  “No. I just wonder what it would be like.”

  Donna pushed with her feet and rolled her chair back. She slid off and sat down on the floor, cross-legged, facing Jessica. “I don’t know what it’s like, either. It was just me and Granny Beth. And that was no fun at all.”

  “Was she mean?”

  Donna frowned and then looked down at the carpet. “No, not mean exactly. She just wanted me to be a certain way and I wasn’t. She wanted me to be like her. The kind of lady who always does the right thing and whose clothes are always perfect.” She laughed, a hand on her own knee. “God knows that was never going to happen.”

  Jessica leaned forward and patted her mother on the arm. “But you do the right thing. Most of the time.”

  Donna laughed and then looked into Jessica’s eyes. Jessica squirmed. Finally, her mother spoke. “Honey, thank you for saying so. But we all make mistakes. Sometimes, they’re the kind of mistakes that you spend the rest of your life thinking about.”

  Even then, Jessica knew there was deeper, more complicated meaning behind Donna’s words, one she couldn’t quite hear. After several minutes of picking lint off the carpet, it came to her.

  “You know what, Mom? It’s okay if you’re too tired to hang out with me sometimes. The foster kids need more than I do. I understand.”

  When Jessica looked back at her mother’s face, she saw tears running down her cheeks and falling off her jaw onto the knees of her corduroys. Jessica pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her hands and tried to wipe the tears away, but Donna began to laugh and shake her head from side to side.

  “You’re a gem, you know that? Come on, Jess, let’s see if we can dig up some ice cream from the freezer. It’ll be a secret, just between us.”

  For five minutes, neither Jessica nor Gerry said anything, standing there in the yard. A sparrow pecked at the lawn, then hopped up the walk to the stairs. If Donna had been here, she would have scooped him up into her wide hands and stroked his smooth head. Gerry sneezed and the bird flapped his wings in a panic and flew away, circling higher and higher.

  “I almost forgot,” Gerry said, reaching into the back pocket of his pants. “This came for you in the mail today.”

  Jessica stared at the thick white envelope, at her name handwritten in black ink. The return address was for the RCMP detachment. Below the postal code, another handwritten name: Chris Gallo. She looked up at the blue sky, at the lone cloud drifting toward the city. Quickly, she dropped the letter into her open purse. She might read it later. Or tomorrow. Or never.

  “Let’s go,” Gerry said. “I don’t want to see this house ever again.”

  Jessica opened the driver’s side door in her little red car before looking back. After they had found the bodies, she’d spent a lot of time trying to understand who the true Donna actually was. It was only now, standing on the street, staring back at the windows she used to peer out of, that she really, really got it. Her mother was earthy, haphazard, committed. She could never shake her past; she kept secrets, hid her rage and thought she knew better. She was a miraculous gardener and a terrible cook. She created life once, and took it away—by accident or neglect or worse—three times. She was all of this and there was no point in separating any of it. From now on, when Jessica thought of her mother, she would think of her as mashed up, asymmetrical, stuck all over with bits of hair, crumbs and seeds. She was everything she had ever touched or eaten or loved or despised. Like Jessica. Like everyone.

  When she had first tried to find Ginny, she thought she had needed to tell her about the girls’ deaths. After all, Ginny was a grieving mother, a woman who had tried but didn’t succeed, who had worked harder than Jessica would ever need to just to survive. Jessica thought she could help. But now, she knew that what she had actually needed was just the opposite. Ginny and Wayne had told her everything. The beat of the lazy days Casey and Jamie spent in the summer. How Casey’s hair smelled as she walked past, the air like fingers running down your face as you breathed in. The shrill squeal that Jamie let out when she was happy, a girl caught in the vortex of her own joy. They were small, those details that alone meant little but when added up could build into the fleshy, three-dimensional figures of two teenaged girls. Jessica had needed to know the shape of their loss. That Casey and Jamie were more than the words she had used to use at work: at risk, behaviourally challenged, victims.

  What Wayne and Ginny were grieving, Jessica now knew like she knew the weight of her mother’s hand. Familiar. Resonant. Necessary.

  The girls had been more than Donna’s mistake or her attempt at making up for the loss of her own brother. And now that Jessica understood how much more, she could finally believe she was not her mother. Not a psychopath, not the inevitable result of two generations of people who raged at things they couldn’t change and made mistakes trying to change them anyway. She would find another way, eventually. When enough time had passed, she might want more. She might want to feel cozy again, cosseted by things that were hers because she had deliberately chosen them. She might want to be held by a man who came to her without purpose, who loved her with no plan, who asked her if she wanted a baby without anticipating her answer. A small yard. A job she could do well. One day: when the voiceless wind now filling her life lost its newness, and she began to reach for throw cushions, a pepper mill, a cat sunning itself on the sidewalk.

  They drove down the street and onto the highway, and Gerry closed his eyes against the wind coming through the open windows. She had not told him about Devin or her meeting with Wayne. It would have made no difference anyway. Jessica still didn’t know how the girls had died or if Donna had had anything to do with it. Her father had decided to let go of the house on his own, so she knew, really, that there was nothing more for him to finish. As she steered around the curve, she could almost swear that the sharp breeze was really her mother’s breath as she brushed her hair at night. You have curls just like mine. It’s a lot of work to keep them under control. Jessica smiled at the windshield. Donna’s hair had never been under control, had sprung from her head like crackling wires, softening only when it rained and she was caught without an umbrella. Her mother had said a lot of things even while her physical person—so loud, so full of effort and missteps—defied her best intentions. She had tried to make her world kind and beautiful and productive, and yet she had stomped and broken and served food that was dense when it should have been light. But if it were possible, Jessica would lean up against Donna right now, arms wrapped around her waist, head buried in her stained and limp apron.

  A logging truck sped past, its load trembling as it careened down the slope of the highway. Gerry spoke. “I miss her anyway, no matter what.” When she looked over, his mouth was slack and he was snoring. He was talking in his sleep, but it didn’t make what he said any less true. She missed her too.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  To everyone at ECW Press, in particular Jack David and Crissy Calhoun, for facilitating my writing rebirth and for welcoming me so joyfully and unreservedly.

  To Carolyn Swayze, for always believing in my abilities.

  To June Hutton and Mary Novik, for never loving my writing too much, but always loving me just enough.

  To Troy Anderson, for being the catalyst for this book through his unwavering commitment to the people who live on the margins, and for being the best father our son could wish for.

  To Brad Watson, for sharing his valuable insights into the world of social services and foster care, and for being the only boss I ever had who is also a friend.

  To Shawn Krause, Carrie Mac, Brendan McLeod, Andrea MacPherson and Adrian Picard, for reading drafts upon draft
s of this novel, and for listening to me blubber about work, life and transitions.

  To my sisters, Linda Lee, Pamela Chin, Tina Lee and Emma Berg, for being the best examples of how girls really do run the world.

  To the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, for their financial support in the development of this novel.

  The writing of this book has straddled the biggest changes of my work and personal lives so far, and there are many people who have supported me while I was convinced everything was falling apart. So, to Théodora Armstrong, Carolyn Cameron, Sandra Chu, Dena Cheney, Rosa D’Amato, Amanda Growe, Marilyn Harrison, Michelle Harrison, Nicole Harrison, Amanda Leduc, Angie Lee, Vicki Leung, Amy Mazzone, Tamiko Ogura and Vicki Yan, thank you with everything I have and everything I feel.

  And, finally, to Oscar and Molly, for being permanent residents in my heart, and for reminding me each day and night that this is all worth it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JEN SOOKFONG LEE was born and raised in Vancouver’s East Side, and she now lives with her son in North Burnaby. Her books include The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award; The End of East; and Shelter, a novel for young adults. A popular CBC Radio One personality, Jen appears regularly as a contributor on The Next Chapter. Jen teaches writing at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia.

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