Tracy started packing in February.
“To get ahead,” she said. “Just in case. Not because we’re going. Because if we’re going, I don’t want to be doing it all in the last week of May with a roll of tape in my teeth. And if we’re not going, well. We’ll have done a clear-out. We’ll have thrown out all the stuff we don’t need. Win-win.”
She said it on the Thursday, in the kitchen, with the newspaper open on the table to the job ads. She’d been circling them in highlighter. There were fewer every week. Some weeks there were three.
“You do the dining room,” she said. “Saturday. The boxes. I never unpacked half of them, and I don’t know what’s in the other half. Open them, see what’s in them, put a new label on. Throw out anything that’s garbage. You can’t hurt my feelings. Anything with mice in it, throw it out twice.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll do the kitchen. The real kitchen.” She looked at the highlighter in her hand. “I’ve got a phone interview at ten. With a property management place. It’s nothing. It’s half the money. But it’s something.”
“That’s good.”
“It’s nothing,” Tracy said. “But it’s something.”
* * *
Saturday was Valentine’s Day. Tracy left a pink envelope on my plate at breakfast with a card in it with a cartoon bear holding a heart, and inside it said To my Valentine, love Mom with three hearts and a smiley face. There was a ten-dollar bill in it, folded very small.
“For the movies,” she said. “With your friends. Or with Nathan.” She raised her eyebrows over her coffee. “Just friends, I know, I know.”
“Mom.”
“I’m only saying.”
She went into the kitchen with a roll of tape and a stack of flattened boxes from the liquor store, and put the radio on, and started singing. She hadn’t sung since January. I stood in the dining room and listened to her get the words wrong to something on the oldies station, and it was the best thing I’d heard all week.
Then I started on the boxes.
* * *
LINENS was linens. Sheets, towels, a tablecloth with a burn mark on it. BOOKS was books, mostly Tracy’s, paperbacks with women on the covers in long dresses, and a few kids’ ones: a dinosaur book, a book of hockey cards someone had never put anything in, The Hockey Sweater. LIVING ROOM was two lamps and a clock that didn’t go and a framed picture of Tracy and Murray at their wedding, face down. I put it back face down.
BATHROOM 2 was a hair dryer, a foot bath still in the box, and a bag of little hotel soaps.
KITCHEN was at the bottom. It had always been at the bottom. Nathan had put it back there in October, at the end of the stack, labels out.
I knelt down on the floor in front of it. It was a liquor store box, like the others, with KITCHEN on the side in black marker in Tracy’s printing. It was taped shut across the top with two layers of packing tape, and the tape had gone yellow. She’d packed it at two in the morning the night before the movers. It’s not kitchen, she’d said in June. I know it’s not kitchen. I’ll get to it.
She’d never got to it.
I got the scissors from the drawer in the hall table and cut the tape.
* * *
It wasn’t kitchen.
On top there was a manila folder with HOUSE written on it, and under that one that said CAR, and one that said TAXES 2006. Then there was a folder with no label at all. I opened it. Inside were papers from a lawyer in Lethbridge, stapled, with Dekker v. Dekker typed at the top, and a lot of pages with signatures on them in two different pens. The divorce. Under that there was a program from a funeral, with a photo on the front of an old woman with Tracy’s eyes, smiling, in a hat. Margaret Ann Gillis, 1938-2006. Grandma.
Under that, in a plastic bag, there was a dog collar. It was red, worn to the colour of a brick, with a tag on it shaped like a bone. RUSTY. And a phone number in Lethbridge.
I sat back on my heels.
These were the things she couldn’t look at. The divorce, and Grandma, and the dog. She’d packed them all together at two in the morning in one box, and taped it shut twice, and written KITCHEN on the side so she’d never have to open it by accident. She’d lied to the box so she wouldn’t have to know what was in it.
I knew what that was like. I’d been doing it to myself since I was six.
At the very bottom of the box there was a brown envelope.
It was big, the kind with a string you wind around a button to close it. The string was wound around the button about nine times. On the front, in Tracy’s printing, younger, it said PAIGE, ADOPTION, KEEP SAFE. And under that, in a different pen, underlined twice: DO NOT LOSE.
I unwound the string.
* * *
There were letters from Maple Bridge in it, a lot of them, from 1994 and 1995, on paper with the maple leaf and the bridge. There was a photo, small and square, of a baby in a pink quilted jacket on a red blanket, with a number written on the back in ballpoint. There were forms in Chinese with red stamps on them, round ones, and a photocopy of a photocopy that was so pale you could hardly read it.
And there was an English page with NOTARIAL CERTIFICATE across the top, and a stamp at the bottom, and a signature.
I read it on my knees on the dining room floor.
This is to certify that the female infant YUE LIN was found on 14 June 1994 at the east gate of the Yueyang Municipal Hospital, Yueyang City, Hunan Province. No relatives could be found. The infant was found wrapped in a blue blanket in a basket, together with a male infant, and both infants were sent to the Yueyang Social Welfare Institute. The date of birth of the infant is estimated from the date of finding.
Together with a male infant.
I read it again. I read it a third time.
Found wrapped in a blue blanket in a basket, together with a male infant.
In Hawkwood, in a grey filing cabinet in the office off the garage, in a folder that said NATHAN, there was a page that said the other half of this. I’d never seen it. Nathan had seen it. He’d told me on MSN in September, at one in the morning, and I’d typed it doesnt mean anything. lots of babies got found together.
In the kitchen, Tracy was singing.
I got up. I walked past the kitchen door without looking in and went up the stairs to my room and got the red album out of the bottom of my closet, where I’d kept it since June. I took it back down to the dining room and sat on the floor and opened it to the first page. CHANGSHA, MARCH 1995. The hotel. The radiator.
On the facing page was the little square of newspaper in the plastic sleeve. The grainy photo. Two babies side by side on a blanket, both of them looking at nothing with their mouths open, like they were about to say something.
It hadn’t. It had gone out for two.
I took it out of the sleeve. I held it in my left hand, the one with the hook, beside the notarial certificate.
Then I went to the phone in the hall, and dialled Hawkwood, and stood with my back to the wall.
* * *
Brett answered.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Paige. I need Nathan.”
He went quiet for a second. Something in my voice. I could hear him hear it.
“Hang on,” he said, and put the phone down on the counter, and I heard him go up the stairs, two at a time, not stepping over the fourth one.
“Hey,” said Nathan.
“Get your dad’s file,” I said. “Tonight.”
He didn’t ask which file. He didn’t ask why.
“Okay,” he said.
* * *
We couldn’t do it at either house. We did it at the library.
We signed up for nothing. We didn’t need the computers. We went to the quiet section on the second floor at the back, past the magazines, where there were four long wooden tables and a sign that said SILENT STUDY and nobody but an old man asleep over the Financial Post. We sat at the table in the corner, by the window that looked out over the snow on the parking lot.
It was the next Saturday, the twenty-first. I’d waited a week. He’d had to wait until Gordon was out on a job to get into the office.
He’d brought it in a Ziploc bag, inside his backpack, inside his coat. He took it out like it might break.
I’d brought mine in the brown envelope with the string.
We put them down side by side on the table. His went on the left and mine on the right: two notarial certificates, the same paper, the same typing, the same stamp at the bottom, the same signature. Two left hands held them flat, one at each edge. His was big and mine was small, and the little finger on each of them bent in at the top joint toward the others.
He read mine. I read his.
This is to certify that the male infant YUE JUN was found on 14 June 1994 at the east gate of the Yueyang Municipal Hospital, Yueyang City, Hunan Province. No relatives could be found. The infant was found wrapped in a blue blanket in a basket, together with a female infant...
It was the same gate and the same day, the same blue blanket, the same basket.
I put the clipping down between them. The two babies on the blanket, looking up out of the grainy newspaper with their mouths open.
Nathan looked at it for a long time.
“That’s us,” he said.
He said it quietly. It was the silent study section, but that wasn’t why.
I couldn’t answer. I sat there with my left hand flat on his certificate and my eyes going.
* * *
We sat there.
Outside the window it had started to snow again, small and dry, the kind that doesn’t stick. In the parking lot a man was scraping his windshield with a credit card.
“The kid in the hall,” Nathan said. “In September. Are you guys siblings.”
“Dylan’s post.”
“Brett.”
“Ms. Dufresne. The eyebrows.”
“Sadie,” Nathan said. “You can tell me. You said I don’t know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You knew,” he said. “So did I. I knew in August, in the office, with my thumb on the word.” He looked at the certificates. “I knew on the landing in September when you said Hunan.”
I’d known too. I’d known in the hospital mirror, with my hand on the rail and the finger bent in at the top joint, the same as mine. I’d known it at Stampede. I’d known it every time I’d looked at him across the table. I’d just decided not to. I’d been deciding not to know things since I was six, and I was good at it.
We were never going to look like our families. Tracy had yellow hair. Gordon and Donna and Brett were all fair, all tall. We’d been the only ones at every table who didn’t look like anybody. We’d been sitting at those tables for fourteen years looking for a face that matched, and the whole time it had been in another city, at another table, with a different cake.
“Say it,” Nathan said.
“I said that’s us. Your turn.”
I looked at him. At my old face, with the eyebrows that went up in the middle. At the pink line over the right one. At the hook on his left hand, flat on the table beside mine.
“Twins,” I said.
It came out very small. It was the first true word anybody had said about either of us since June, maybe in fourteen years.
“Twins,” said Nathan.
The old man asleep over the Financial Post snored once and turned the page in his sleep.
* * *
Wish again, together.
We’d been found together. We’d been put in one basket in one blanket, at one gate, on one day, by somebody who’d wanted us to stay together. Then somebody at the Institute had registered us separately, a girl and a boy, as orphanages did. And two agencies, one in Calgary and one in Ottawa, had sent two families to two hotels in Changsha a month apart, and nobody had told anybody about the other baby except one line on one page.
Together didn’t mean anybody. It didn’t mean Tracy or Manny or whoever had written the cards.
It meant us.
“So that’s it,” Nathan said. “That’s what it means. On the fourteenth. We have to be together. Us. Not just in the same city. Together. Like the basket.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We know it more than we knew it yesterday.”
“If I’m in Lethbridge,” I said.
He didn’t answer that.
“If I’m in a basement in Lethbridge on the fourteenth,” I said, “and you’re here.”
“You won’t be.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Then I’ll be in Lethbridge,” he said. “I’ll take the bus. I’ll walk. I’ll be wherever you are.” He said it flat, like Gordon said where a furnace was going to go. “I’ll be there.”
I believed him. I put my hand on top of his on the table, on top of his certificate, both our hooks together. He didn’t move his.
* * *
We sat there a while longer. The snow came down outside. The man in the parking lot gave up on his windshield and sat in his car with the heater going.
“Your mom thinks we’re going out,” Nathan said.
He said it out of nowhere. He was looking at the clipping.
I looked at him.
“Donna thinks we’re going out,” he said. “Tracy thinks we’re going out. Tiffany and Kendall and the whole cheer team. Gordon winks at me. He winked at me last week. At supper.”
“Ew,” I said.
It came out of me before I could stop it, the way it always did, and then I heard what it meant now, what it had always meant. We weren’t each other’s anything. We were each other’s brother and sister. We’d been calling it ew since September, and it had been funnier than we knew.
Nathan made a noise. He put his hand over his mouth. His shoulders went.
I started laughing too. I couldn’t help it. I put my forehead down on the table on top of the certificates and laughed into them, with my shoulders shaking, and he was laughing beside me, big and silent, with his hand over his face, the two of us in the corner of the silent study section with a sign over our heads that said SILENT.
The old man woke up and looked at us.
We couldn’t stop. Every time one of us started to stop, the other one went ew, quietly, and we were gone again. I was crying. I didn’t know which kind. Both. It was both.
The librarian came over. It was the tall one with the grey ponytail. He stood at the end of our table with his arms crossed and looked down at us, the two of us with our faces red and wet, laughing over two pieces of paper and a square of old newspaper.
“This is the silent study area,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. Sorry.”
“We’re twins,” Nathan said, out of nowhere, to him.
The librarian looked at my face, and then at Nathan’s, and then at our eyebrows.
“I can see that,” he said. “Do it quieter.”
He went away.
Nathan and I looked at each other across the table, across the certificates, across the clipping with the two babies on it.
Then we started again.