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146 pages

English

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On a sunny May morning, social worker Jessica Campbell sorts through her mother s belongings after her recent funeral. In the basement, she makes a shocking discovery - two dead girls curled into the bottom of her mother s chest freezers. She remembers a pair of foster children who lived with the family in 1988: Casey and Jamie Cheng - troubled, beautiful, and wild teenaged sisters from Vancouver s Chinatown. After six weeks, they disappeared; social workers, police officers, and Jessica herself assumed they had run away. As Jessica learns more about Casey, Jamie, and their troubled immigrant Chinese parents, she also unearths dark stories about Donna, whom she had always thought of as the perfect mother. The complicated truths she uncovers force her to take stock of her own life. Moving between present and past, this riveting novel unflinchingly examines the myth of social heroism and traces the often-hidden fractures that divide our diverse cities.

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	13 septembre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781770909052
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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THE CONJOINED
A Novel
Jen Sookfong Lee
for my mother
CONTENTS TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTEEN ONE TWO THREE FOUR NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR to NINETEEN EIGHTY-EIGHT FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTEEN TEN ELEVEN TWELVE NINETEEN FORTY-SEVEN to NINETEEN FIFTY-NINE THIRTEEN TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTEEN FOURTEEN FIFTEEN SIXTEEN NINETEEN EIGHTY-EIGHT SEVENTEEN TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTEEN EIGHTEEN Acknowledgements Copyright About the Author
It didn’t take much time at all. So little, in fact, that no one remembered the two days and one night the girls went missing during a windy weekend at the beginning of October. It was a blank spot, penultimate, and so near the end that the end swallowed it up. No one saw it for what it was then, in 1988, and no one saw it for what it was twenty-eight years later.
They were sisters . One was almost done with childhood, while the other was running full speed toward adulthood. They had grown up poor , in Vancouver, near what the rest of us used to call Skid Row, where junkies and old ladies tottered down Powell, weighted with a thick, foggy high or groceries in a rolling wire basket. Still, they had been happy little girls, the kind who dragged produce boxes out of the alleys in Chinatown to build forts in their yard at home, the kind who lay on their stomachs in the living room, waiting for the radio station to play just the right song. Some said they were beautiful, but it was hard to tell. Their real faces, the ones that might have emerged when they were twenty-five or thirty , were still well-hidden by fine, uncombed hair, acne, the traces of babyhood in their cheeks.
We all recognize that kind of perfection. The bony knees. The lines in their palms that crossed skin that was otherwise unmarked and unwrinkled . It’s the perfection that makes us hold our breath , because we know it can never last. Ice cream melts . Sunsets fade. And little girls can’t stay happy forever . Storms and men and dark corners behind brick buildings will conspire to wreck them. And so it was.
That weekend in October disappeared from memory in a matter of weeks . And the girls? So did they.
TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTEEN
ONE
JESSICA STOOD AT THE KITCHEN WINDOW, HER ARMS hanging at her sides, hands in pink rubber gloves. The backyard was a mess, as it had always been while her mother was alive. On the side, an unchecked patch of rhubarb was beginning to push up against a ragged camellia bush. At the back, the old bamboo stakes were still stuck in the ground, dried remnants of pea tendrils and tomato leaves partially tied with twine. Needles from the Douglas fir—taller than any other tree on the block, with a herd of starlings that never stopped complaining—lay like a pilly brown sweater over the lawn.
But the cacophony hinted at other, more ordered things. The minted pea soup her mother would make every spring. The giant peonies bunched in milk bottles on the dining room table. The smell of lavender as it hung upside down from the mud room ceiling, drying. The neighbours might have tidy rows of heather and rhododendrons—hearty and low-maintenance plants that could withstand the stormy North Shore—but it had been Donna who grew her own pumpkins for pie. It had been Donna they turned to for plum jam. And it had been Donna who came to their doors when a husband was dying or a cat had to be found. She didn’t need to be invited. She just knew.
Jessica pushed the hair off her forehead, leaving a line of soapy water on her blond eyebrows. Behind her, the cupboard doors were open. Bottles of nut oils and plastic containers filled with flax seeds and kamut lined every shelf in the pantry. For the past month, while her mother was dying in the cancer ward at the hospital, her father had lived on Hamburger Helper, raw carrots and steak burritos from Taco Del Mar. That morning, as Jessica stared at the carefully labelled rows of carob chips and bee pollen, Gerry put his wide hand on her shoulder and said, “I’m not going to miss this shit.”
Jessica smiled briefly. “Are you saying you don’t want to keep it?”
“What would I do with it? Mix it with some gin and call it a martini?”
“That would be a terrible waste of perfectly good alcohol.”
Gerry snorted. “That’s my girl.”
When she was done, there was almost no trace of her mother in the kitchen. Only her set of handmade clay dishes, glazed blue and brown, and the cross-stitch she had hung above the door that said, God grant me the patience to accept that which I cannot change . Jessica packed the recipe binders into a box to take back to her apartment just off Commercial Drive. She doubted she would ever make slow-cooked pulled tofu, but she knew that as soon as she opened the covers the smells of her mother’s cooking—muddy and sticky, laced with cumin and soy—would cloud up around her, and she would hear Donna’s voice telling her how to gently knead a ball of oat dough so the bread wouldn’t turn out stiff and heavy.
“Just fold and pivot, Miss Jess. No need to punch it like it’s an ex-boyfriend.”
And then she would hear her laugh. That verging-on-manly chuckle that jiggled her belly and shook the grey-blond curls that fell around her shoulders, riotous. Donna might have dropped stray threads and beads from her clothes while she clomped through mulch and mud, but her touch was always light. Just a fingertip, or the brush of her knuckles across her daughter’s forehead when she was checking for a fever.
Jessica walked by the big back window and saw her reflection, ghostly against the view of the mountain. She had never looked like her mother. As a teenager, Jessica had grown thin while Donna added to her already substantial body. And her eyes were dark amber like Gerry’s, or a cat’s. But she had her mother’s untameable hair, which Jessica wrangled into submission with a flat iron three times a week. Now, because of all the sweat accumulating on her scalp, she could see the curls forming around her ears, a halo of slowly twisting ringlets. She ran her hand over the top of her head, but this only made it fuzzy, like a baby’s. Time to give up , she thought. She cared about being pretty most days, but at this very moment, swathed in her mother’s hand-sewn apron, she really couldn’t give a shit.
Jessica rummaged through the hall closet, looking for a tape gun. She could hear her father in the basement, singing “King of the Road” as he sorted through Donna’s canning supplies. Jessica knew they had to empty out the spare bedroom too, the one the foster kids used to sleep in. She could barely remember any of their names and wondered if her mother had kept the photographs she took of them.
“Of course, she did,” Jessica muttered. “She kept every last fucking thing.”
There had been no kids in the last ten years, but Jessica was sure the twin beds were still set up, and the small dresser was still empty, waiting for the few pieces of clothing the kids brought with them. When Jessica told her fellow social workers at the office what her mother used to do—accepting a new child every few weeks, holding them when they had nightmares, never scolding when they wet the beds—they listened intently and held their hands to their chests.
“She must have been a saint,” said Parminder. “All my parents did was prevent me from killing my brother.”
“No, not a saint,” Jessica had replied. “But close.”
One night, when Jessica was six, she had woken up from a nightmare, screaming and pulling at the damp sheets knotted around her legs. Donna came in, fixed the blankets and sat with her, humming a song that was tuneless and wordless but still washed over Jessica like warm water.
She had said, into her mother’s belly, “I want you with me always.”
Donna laughed and then sighed. “Well, if I were with you all the time, you’d get pretty sick of me.”
“No, I wouldn’t. For real.”
“Sure, you would. When I was a little girl, I always wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere far, far away from home and Granny Beth. But then,” Donna paused and tucked a curl behind Jessica’s ear, “Granny never wanted me to stick around anyway.”
Jessica wasn’t sure what her mother had meant when she said that, but as she grew older, she began to see that Granny Beth, unlike other grandmothers she knew, never came to birthday parties or brought her tree ornaments at Christmas. Instead, they drove to Lion’s Bay to see her once a year in the summer, in her house on the cliff. Donna had told Jessica every time that she was never to step outside the sliding glass door on to the rain-slicked rocks beyond the living room. The wrought iron fence was solid enough, but when the wind blew from the open sea to the west, everything man-made seemed to shrink, to lose solidity against the sharp-edged air.
Granny Beth gave them tea and Peek Freans and never asked why Gerry didn’t come, just as Jessica never asked about her dead grandfather. Once, Jessica said Gerry was working and Granny Beth stared and said, “Is that what he calls it? Work ?” And Jessica stopped talking. Donna filled the air with stories that withered in the space between them until the hour was up. When they drove away, Donna turned on the car radio as loud as she could. Jessica was glad for the noise.
Her mother was no saint. But her grandmother was even less so. Donna had to fill in the gaps somehow.
“No wonder you’re a social worker,” Parminder had continued. “You must have felt it was your destiny.”
Jessica had nodded, but she hadn’t been sure if that’s what it was. Now, as she taped shut box after box, she thought there just wasn’t anything else she was equipped to do. Of course, she had to try to help kids. Of course, she had wanted her mother to be proud. Of course, it hadn’t turned out like she’d expected.
She had quit child protection after nine months. At the time, she had said to her mother, “There has to be a better way than just walking into a house, staying for an hour and taking kids away. The families need support, not upheaval.” Donna had ag