The computers at the Crowfoot library were on the second floor, in a row along the window, six of them. You signed up at the desk on a clipboard. You got forty minutes. If you went over, the librarian, a tall man with a grey ponytail, came and stood behind you without saying anything until you logged off.
We signed up for the Saturday after Thanksgiving, ten o’clock to ten-forty. I wrote P. Dekker on the sheet. Nathan wrote N. Reimer in the box underneath, in his square capitals that leaned to the left.
We sat at the end computer, the one by the pillar, where nobody could see the screen from the stairs.
“Okay,” Nathan said. He cracked his knuckles. They were my knuckles. They were loud. “What do we look up?”
“Mine first. My agency. The one in Calgary.”
He typed PRAIRIE CROSSING ADOPTION into Google with two fingers. It took a while. The library computers were slow, and there was a sticker on the monitor that said PLEASE DO NOT DOWNLOAD.
There wasn’t a website. There was a page from a directory with an address on 17th Avenue and a phone number. There was a notice from a law firm. And there was an article from the Herald, from 2003, with a picture of a woman in a cardigan standing in front of a closed glass door.
LOCAL ADOPTION AGENCY CLOSES AFTER 22 YEARS.
I read it out loud, quietly. The woman in the cardigan had run Prairie Crossing since 1981. She’d placed over four hundred children, she said, from China and Guatemala and Romania and Russia. She was retiring. The files had gone to the province. Families wanting information should contact the Post-Adoption Registry of Alberta Children and Youth Services.
“The province,” Nathan said.
“So we write to the province.”
“And mine?” He meant his old one. My new one. “Maple Bridge.”
He typed it in. Maple Bridge had a website. It had a blue background and a picture of a maple leaf with a bridge drawn across it, and a lot of photos of smiling families on lawns. There was a page called Contact Us and another called Post-Placement Services. Under Post-Placement Services it said:
Adoptive families and adult adoptees may request copies of file documents. Requests must be made in writing and will be processed in the order received. Please allow 6 to 8 weeks.
“Six to eight weeks,” I said.
“That’s December.”
“If we send it now.”
We both looked at the calendar on the wall above the computers, a Calgary Public Library one with a photo of the Bow River in winter. It said October. It was the eighteenth already. I’d lost a week somewhere. I’d lost it at Thanksgiving, at Tracy’s table, with the turkey breast and the instant stuffing.
“December’s okay,” Nathan said. “December’s not June.”
“December’s half.”
“December’s not half. December’s...” He counted on his fingers. “It’s six months.”
“Half,” I said.
He didn’t argue. He wrote down the address in Ottawa on the back of his hand, with the address for the province under it. Then the man with the grey ponytail came and stood behind us. Our forty minutes were up.
* * *
We wrote the letters at Tracy’s kitchen table on the Sunday.
Tracy was at the counter doing the crossword and pretending not to watch us. She’d put out a plate of the Nanaimo bars and two glasses of milk, like we were nine.
“What are you working on?” she said.
“Social studies,” I said.
“On a Sunday?”
“It’s due Tuesday.”
“Ugh,” said Tracy, sympathetically, and went back to her crossword.
I’d found her good paper in the drawer of the desk in the living room. It was cream-coloured, thick, with a little border of leaves at the top, and she’d bought it for thank-you notes after the move and never used it. I wrote the Maple Bridge letter on it in my best printing. I’d practised on a piece of looseleaf first.
Dear Sir or Madam,
My name is Paige Dekker. I was adopted through Maple Bridge Children’s Services from Hunan, China, in March 1995. My parents are Tracy and Murray Dekker. I am writing to ask for a copy of my finding record and any other papers about where and when I was found. My mother’s copy has been lost in a move. Thank you very much for your help.
Yours truly,
Paige Dekker
“Lost in a move,” Nathan said, reading over my shoulder. “That’s true.”
“It’s all true.”
“Except you.”
I put the pen down.
He’d written his to the province on a piece of looseleaf from my binder, in pencil, then in pen over the pencil. It said he was Nathan Reimer, and he was adopted through Prairie Crossing Adoption Society in February 1995, and he was asking for a copy of the finding papers and anything about a female infant who was found with him. He’d underlined female infant. I made him do it again without the underline.
“Why?”
“They’ll think it’s weird.”
“It is weird.”
“They’ll think you’re weird. They’ll put it in a pile.”
He did it again without the underline. He signed it. Nathan Reimer, with the N leaning left.
Tracy came over with the milk carton to top up our glasses. They didn’t need topping up. She looked at the two of us, bent over the table, our heads nearly together over the letters, and she smiled.
“You two,” she said.
We looked up.
“You’re so cute,” said Tracy. “You know that? You’re so cute together. Are you two... you know.”
“No,” said Nathan.
“No,” I said.
“Okay,” said Tracy. “Okay. I’m just saying.” She put the milk back in the fridge. “I’m just saying, Paigey, if you were, I wouldn’t mind. He’s very polite. Donna says he’s very polite.” She smiled at Nathan. “Donna and I talk.” This story is hosted at g.com.
“That’s nice,” said Nathan, politely.
“We’re just friends,” I said, politely.
“Okay,” Tracy said, and took her crossword and went into the living room, and turned on the TV.
We waited until we heard the TV.
“Ew,” said Nathan, very quietly, into his milk.
“Ew,” I said, into mine.
“What?” Tracy called from the living room.
“Nothing!”
* * *
I mailed them on the Tuesday, on the way to school, at the red mailbox outside the Royal Oak Co-op. I held them in the slot for a second before I let them go. I thought about them sliding down into the dark inside the box and lying on top of somebody’s phone bill. Then there’d be a truck, a sorting place, a plane to Ottawa, somebody’s desk, a pile.
Six to eight weeks.
That night I put a small circle on the calendar inside my closet door, on the ninth of December. Then I looked at all the Xs before it. October was mostly gone already. September was gone. There were four months of Xs, and the calendar ran out in December, and the fourteenth of June wasn’t even on it yet.
* * *
Dylan Strand posted the pictures on the Saturday.
I didn’t see them until Sunday morning. Tiffany phoned the house at nine. Tracy answered and said “It’s Tiffany, she sounds upset,” and I took the phone, and Tiffany said “Did you see Facebook? Did you see it?” in a voice like the school was on fire.
I went down to the computer in my pyjamas.
Dylan Strand was in 9A. He did photography club with a camera his dad had bought him that had a lens as long as a pop bottle. He’d taken pictures at the football game on Thursday, of the players and the cheer squad and the stands, and put them all up in an album called BEARS VS WESTVIEW, with about two hundred photos in it.
The first photo in the album wasn’t from the game.
It was two photos, side by side, stuck together in a program so there was a white line down the middle. On the left was me, in my cheer uniform, in the middle of a cheer, with my arms up and my mouth open. On the right was Nathan, on the bench, with his helmet off, looking at something off the side of the picture.
They were the same size. He’d made them the same size. Our faces were at exactly the same height on either side of the white line.
Under it, it said twins??
There were forty-six comments.
OMG wait are they actually?? no way thats so creepy look at their EYEBROWS paige is from lethbridge tho so? twins can live in different places dummy
THIS IS SO WEIRD. are they related or going out or BOTH eww not eww if they dont know!!! i asked nate at practice and he said no thats what a twin would say
I sat in front of the computer in my pyjamas and looked at it. I looked at my face, on the left. I looked at his. I looked at the white line between us.
I’d seen my face in the mirror for four months, and his face across the table, and in the stairwell, and at the library, at lunch, in the hall. I’d never seen them side by side. Not like that. Not lined up, with the eyebrows at the same height.
They were the same eyebrows.
The phone rang again behind me. Tracy got it in the kitchen.
“Hello? Oh, hi, Nathan. Yes, she’s right here. She’s on the computer. She’s... honey? It’s Nathan.”
I took it.
“Did you see it,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Brett showed me. He came in my room at eight o’clock in the morning with his laptop. He put it on my bed and stood there.” Nathan’s voice was flat. “He just stood there till I looked at it. Then he took it back and left.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Lots of people look alike. We’re both from Hunan. Half of Hunan probably looks like us.”
“Yeah,” said Nathan.
Neither of us said anything for a while. Behind him in Hawkwood, Gordon was laughing at something on TV. In Royal Oak the clock on the stove ticked.
“The letters’ll come,” Nathan said. “December. Then we’ll know.”
“Know what?”
He didn’t answer that.
* * *
By Monday it was everywhere.
People asked in the hall. People I’d never talked to stopped me at my locker and looked at me, and then looked down the hall for Nathan, and then looked at me again. A Grade 7 kid asked me in the lunch line if I was adopted, and when I said yes, he said “Whoa,” and went and told his friends.
In science, Ms. Dufresne gave back our cell diagrams. When she got to me and Sadie’s bench, she put mine down, and then looked at me over her glasses for a second longer than usual.
“Paige,” she said. “Is it true you and Nathan Reimer are related?”
“No,” I said.
“Huh,” said Ms. Dufresne. “Uncanny.” She went on to the next bench. Then she turned around. “It’s the eyebrows,” she said, to nobody, and pointed at her own eyebrows with her pen, and went on.
Sadie kept her head down. At the end of class she leaned over while she was packing up her binder.
“Are you?” she said. “You can tell me. I won’t tell.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
It came out before I could stop it. Sadie looked at me. She didn’t ask anything else. She put her hand on my arm for a second, the way she had at the sleepover, and then she picked up her binder and went.
At lunch I didn’t go out to the bleachers.
I ate in the cafeteria with Tiffany’s group at the table by the vending machines, and Tiffany talked about Dylan Strand the whole time, and how he was obsessed with that camera, and how he’d taken a picture of her at the game with her eyes shut on purpose. I laughed when everybody laughed. I watched the doors.
Nathan came in about ten minutes before the bell. He looked around the cafeteria until he found me. Then he came over, with his Co-op bag, and stood at the end of the table.
The whole table went quiet. Everybody looked at him, and at me, and at him.
“Can I talk to you?” he said.
I went out into the hall with him. Twenty people watched us go.
“You weren’t on the bleachers,” he said.
“I know.”
“I waited.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I looked at the trophy case so I wouldn’t have to look at him. “We can’t keep sitting together. Not right now. Everybody’s looking.”
“So?”
“So they’re looking. They’re looking at our faces. Ms. Dufresne asked me in front of the whole class. Your brother came into your room with his laptop.” My voice was going up. I made it come down. “If everybody’s looking, somebody’s going to see something.”
“See what?”
“I don’t know. Anything. The way you hold a fork. The way I know where the washroom is.”
He stood there with his Co-op bag. He was so much taller than me that he had to look down, and he did, and his face was my old face, and it was doing the thing it used to do in the mirror when I didn’t look at it.
“I’m not hiding from you too,” he said.
“It’s not hiding.”
“It’s hiding. I hide from everybody. I hide from Gordon, Donna, Brett, your mom, Manny. I hide all day.” He said it very flat, very low. “You’re the only person I don’t.”
The bell went. People came out of the cafeteria all around us.
“Then sit somewhere else,” he said, “if you want.” He walked off toward the gym with his bag and didn’t look back.
That night on MSN he didn’t come online. The little man by his name stayed grey. I sat at the computer in my blanket until one o’clock. I typed sorry into the window and deleted it. Then I typed it again and left it there and went to bed.
In the morning there was a message under it. nate says:
ok. bleachers. tomorrow. let them look.
* * *
The game that Thursday was against Glenmore Ridge, at home.
It was cold. The first snow had come on Wednesday night and melted by noon. The field was brown and wet. Our breath went up in clouds. We cheered in our uniforms with our track pants underneath and our jackets on until the last minute. The bleachers were fuller than usual. People had come to look.
Manny was in the stands. He was three rows up behind the Bears bench, with his hood up and his hands in his sleeves. He was by himself. He’d come to every game. I’d seen him at all of them, always behind the bench, always by himself.
At the end of the first quarter Nathan came off the field and stood at the bench with his helmet off and his hair steaming. One of the managers held out a paper cup of water to him.
From three rows up, Manny leaned over the rail and held out his hand flat, like he was holding a cup too.
“Cup,” he said, in the voice. High and hard through his nose, like a woman with a cold who’d had enough of everybody. Then, louder: “CUP.”
I laughed.
I laughed out loud on the sideline, in the middle of the cheer, before I could stop it. I knew that voice. I’d known it since Grade 5. I’d laughed at it at my birthday with my plate in the potato salad, and it went into me the same way it always had, all at once, from under my ribs. I had to put my hands over my mouth.
Nathan hadn’t laughed. He’d taken the cup and drunk it and handed it back to the manager without turning around.
Manny had stopped doing the voice.
He was looking at me.
He was three rows up, leaning on the rail, with his hood up, looking down at me on the sideline with my hands over my mouth. He wasn’t smiling. He was frowning the way he frowned at a model when one of the pieces didn’t fit, and he’d checked the instructions twice, and it still didn’t.
I took my hands away from my mouth. I turned around. I did the cheer.
Bow Crest, Bow Crest, BLUE and GOLD.
When I looked back up at the stands, he was still looking at me.
* * *
We won, twenty-one to fourteen. Nathan scored the last touchdown with two minutes left, through the middle, the way he did, with a Glenmore Ridge player hanging off his back for the last five yards like a coat.
The bleachers stood up. Gordon was yelling. Donna was standing beside him in her good coat with her hands together under her chin. Tracy was in the row in front of them, screaming. When Gordon yelled THAT’S MY BOY, she turned around and grinned up at him and yelled GO NATHAN, and Gordon high-fived her.
We did the touchdown cheer. I went up on Cassidy and Kendall’s hands with my arms out.
From up there I could see all of it. The field, brown and steaming. The bleachers. Tracy and Gordon, high-fiving. Donna with her hands under her chin. Manny by himself three rows up behind the bench with his hood up, not cheering, watching me.
Down on the field, Nathan had stopped in the end zone with the ball in his hand. He’d turned around. He was looking at the sideline, at the cheer squad, at me, up there on Cassidy’s hands.
I looked at the far goalposts. I held. Then I came down.