I put the certificate back on the Sunday, when Gordon was at a job in Silver Springs and Donna was at church.
The office was cold. It always was, off the garage. I opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet and found the green folder that said NATHAN and the brown envelope at the back of it. I slid the paper back in, behind the swimming certificate, where it had been. I squared the edges with my hands. I let the folder down into its hanger and pushed the drawer shut with my hip.
Then I stood there with my hand flat on top of the cabinet.
Together with a female infant. It had been sitting in that drawer since 1995. Gordon had put it there. He’d have read it once, in a hotel in Changsha, or on the plane home, or at this desk. Together with a female infant. And then he’d put it in the file and closed the drawer and never thought about it again, because why would you. Babies got found together. It didn’t mean anything.
It meant her. It had meant her the whole time.
I went back into the house and made toast.
* * *
The weights were the only place it was quiet.
It was February, so there was no football. There wasn’t anything. Ferreira said off-season was where you got made, and gave us a sheet with lifts on it, and I did them in the basement every night at nine with Brett, the radio on the classic rock station, the furnace coming on and off.
Brett talked now.
He’d started in January. Not a lot. He’d say something between sets, while he was putting plates on, not looking at me. About school. About his calculus teacher, who wore the same tie every day and said beautiful when you got a derivative right. About the U of A, which had sent him a letter in a big envelope in December that Donna had put on the fridge with three magnets.
“Engineering,” he said. “Mechanical. Dad wanted me to do the trades. Take over the shop.” He slid a plate onto the bar. “I said I’d do the engineering and come back and run it better.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said we’ll see.” Brett put the collar on. “That’s Dad for no.”
“He told me I could take the trucks,” I said. “In the fall. In Edgemont. In the truck.”
Brett stopped with his hand on the collar.
“He said that?”
“He said if I wanted. He said it’s there.”
Brett took a while to answer. He lay down on the bench and did his set, ten, and racked it.
“Good,” he said, at the ceiling. “Somebody should want it.”
I spotted him for the next set. He did it with his eyes closed.
“I’m going in September,” he said, when he’d racked it. “End of August. Edmonton. Lister Hall, it’s this big res tower.” He sat up. “You’ll have the basement to yourself.”
“Okay.”
“And Dad.” He wiped his face with his towel. “You’ll have Dad to yourself.”
He said it like a weather report. I didn’t know if it was a warning or a present. I didn’t ask.
* * *
On a Wednesday in February I went to Mom’s for supper again.
She’d asked Donna, and Donna had said yes, and Donna had looked at me when she hung up the phone and said “That’s twice now. She must like you.”
“She does,” I said.
Donna laughed. “Well, I like her,” she said, and went back to the potatoes.
At Royal Oak the boxes were all along the dining room wall now, taped and labelled, in stacks. They were Paige’s labels. KITCHEN 1, KITCHEN 2, BOOKS, PAIGE’S ROOM. The KITCHEN box was gone. I looked for it. Paige saw me look and shook her head a little. Later.
Mom was at the kitchen table with the newspaper.
It was the job ads. She had a yellow highlighter, and she’d gone down the page with it, and there were three yellow lines on the whole page. She’d circled one of them twice. She was sitting with her chin on her hand looking at it.
“Payroll,” she said, when she saw me looking. “With the health services. The new one. They’re putting all the old health regions together into one, and they need people to do the money.” She tapped it with the highlighter. “It’s less than I was making. It’s a lot less. But it’s a government job. Government jobs don’t go away.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“If I get it,” said Mom. “There’ll be a thousand people applying. Every accounts payable person in Calgary is out of work.” She folded the paper over. “Anyway. You don’t want to hear about that. You want spaghetti.”
I did want spaghetti. She’d made the spaghetti again, with the sausage, because I’d had three plates last time. She’d remembered.
After supper Paige went up to get a binder for science. Mom started on the dishes. I got up and took the dish towel off the oven door and dried.
I didn’t think about it. I’d always dried. In Lethbridge, every night, since I was tall enough to reach the rack, Mom washed and I dried. We didn’t talk while we did it. It was the one time of day we didn’t have to.
Mom stopped with her hands in the water and looked at me.
“Paige never does that,” she said.
She said it like she was surprised. Then she heard herself, and her face changed, and she went back to washing.
“I mean,” she said, “she always did. Every night, in Lethbridge. Since she was little. And then we came up here and she stopped, and she’d just go upstairs, and I stopped asking.” She handed me a plate. “New city.”
I dried the plate. I put it in the cupboard. I knew which cupboard.
“She will,” I said.
“She will,” I said. “Dry. Ask her. She will.”
Mom handed me the next plate, and the next one, and we did the whole rack without talking, the two of us at the sink in Royal Oak with the window going dark, and it was the closest I’d been to her since the twelfth of June.
* * *
On the Saturday Gordon drove me to the field house at Crowchild for off-season. Ferreira had a deal with the high school coach. Bow Crest kids could use the indoor track on Saturday mornings if they stayed out of the way.
Gordon drove with the radio off. He did that when he wanted to say something. He drove all the way down John Laurie with both hands on the wheel, which he never did either.
“That girl,” he said, at the lights by the university.
“Paige.”
“Paige.” He nodded. “She phoned here in January. When you had the flu. Seven-forty in the morning.”
“I know.”
“She was crying.” He looked at me in the mirror. “She asked me to wake you up. She said Dr. Anand said nobody waits.” The light went green. He didn’t go right away. “How does she know what Dr. Anand said?”
“I told her.”
“You told her what the doctor told us. About you being hard to wake.” He drove. “That’s a funny thing to tell a girl.”
I looked out the side window.
“She worries about you,” Gordon said. “A lot. More than a girlfriend worries. I’ve had girlfriends. Your mother worries like that. Nobody else.” He was quiet for a block. “Is there something I should know, bud?”
The field house was coming up on the right. I could see the lot, and the other Bow Crest kids’ parents’ cars, and the doors.
“No,” I said.
Gordon pulled in. He put it in park and didn’t turn the engine off. He sat with his hands on the wheel.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. But if there is. You tell me. Whatever it is. You hear me?”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever it is,” Gordon said again, to the windshield.
I got out. I went in through the doors and ran on the track for an hour and a half. Every lap I came around the end by the window, and every lap the truck was still in the lot with the engine running. He didn’t go home. He sat out there the whole time.
At school, Manny was back.
He’d stopped eating in the library in February. I don’t know why. It was too cold for the bleachers by then, so we’d moved into the cafeteria, to the table by the window. One day he just came over with his lunch and sat down at the end of it, like he had on the bleachers the first week in September, and didn’t say anything about it, and neither did I. Now he sat there most days. Manny didn’t talk to Paige much. He talked to me, about his game, and the guys at the skate park, and the girl with the kickflip, who’d told him to move again.
It was Manny’s table. Paige had told me it was theirs. She sat at the other end of it, beside Sadie, and they talked about cheer.
On the last Thursday in February the lunch line was long, and the lunch supervisor was a new one, a big woman with a whistle, who stood at the end of the line handing out trays and saying “Tray” to each kid in a flat bored voice.
Sadie came back to the table with hers and sat down.
“She’s so grumpy,” Sadie said. “She’s like, tray.”
And Paige, without looking up from her lunch, without thinking, holding her hand out flat like she was holding something, said it.
“Tray.”
High and hard through her nose. Then, louder, the way you’d say it to a kid who wasn’t taking it fast enough: “TRAY.”
It was perfect. It was exactly the voice. It was the voice from my birthday, from the Zipper line, from the stands at the game. It was the voice Manny had been doing at me since July, waiting for me to laugh.
Sadie laughed so hard she put her hand in her yogurt.
Manny stopped eating.
He had his sandwich halfway to his mouth. He put it down. He looked at Paige, at the other end of the table, with her hand still out flat and a smile going on her face. Then he looked at me.
Then he looked at her again.
He didn’t do anything. He just sat there with his sandwich on the table in front of him and looked at her. His face was doing the thing it did over a model, when the instructions say one thing and the piece in your hand says something else. You turn it over and over. It still doesn’t fit.
Paige saw him looking. Her smile went.
The bell rang.
Manny picked up his sandwich and put it back in the foil and put the foil in his bag. He stood up. He didn’t look at either of us.
“See you,” he said, to the table, and went.
* * *
I phoned her that night on the phone, not MSN.
I took the cordless up to the landing and held it up as high as it would reach and sat on the top step with my back against the wall. Donna was in the kitchen below. I could hear her loading the dishwasher.
“He knows,” Paige said, before I’d said anything. “Manny. He knows.”
“He doesn’t know.”
“He knows. You saw his face.” Her voice was going. “I didn’t even think. Sadie said tray, and it just came out. It’s been in me since Grade 5. It’s like a sneeze.”
“He doesn’t know,” I said. “He just knows. Like Brett.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I told you. One of them you can say out loud.” Visit g.com for the full chapter.
The line went quiet.
I sat on the top step. Under me, the dishwasher started. Down the hall Brett’s door was shut, with music coming under it. In my room, on the desk, the PARTICIPANT medal was lying by the lamp where the wizard used to be.
I’d been thinking about it all day, since the cafeteria, and before that. I’d been thinking about it since the library, with the two papers on the table and the two hooks side by side, and since the dishes in Royal Oak, and since Brett on the bench saying who are you.
“We should tell them,” I said.
Nothing came down the line.
“All of them,” I said. “Before June. Gordon and Donna. Your mom. My mom. Brett. We tell them.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. We just do it. We sit them down and we tell them.”
“They won’t believe it.”
“We’ve got the papers.”
“The papers say we’re twins,” Paige said. “They don’t say the rest.”
“Then we say the rest.”
There was a long time on the line where neither of us said anything. I could hear her breathing. I could hear the furnace come on in Royal Oak, through the phone, the old one, the one that rattled before it caught.
“I’m scared,” she said.
It was very small. I’d never heard her say it before. She’d said a lot of things. She’d never said that one.
“Yeah,” I said.
I didn’t say me too. I didn’t have to. I sat on the top step with the phone and my free hand flat on the carpet. I was scared all the way down, the way the sky is before a storm comes over the coulees, green and heavy and quiet, when the birds stop.
“Before June,” I said.
“Before June,” she said.
* * *
The next night, in the basement, I spotted Brett for his last set.
He was benching heavy. He’d put on more than usual. He did eight, nine. On ten the bar stopped halfway and started to come back down. I put my hands under it and helped it up, just a little, just enough. He got it to the top, and I guided it onto the rack.
He lay there breathing. I stood over him, behind his head.
“Thanks,” he said, at the ceiling.
I didn’t move away. I stood there with my hands on the bar on the rack.
I’d never said anything to him. Not like this. I’d said yeah and okay and pass the salt. I’d said it’s the head injury. I’d never said one thing in this house that was mine.
“You’re a good brother,” I said.
Brett sat up.
He sat up so fast he nearly hit his head on the bar. He turned around on the bench and looked at me, and his face was doing something I’d never seen it do, which was not know what to do.
“Where’d that come from,” he said.
He didn’t make it a question. He never did. But his voice wasn’t the same.
“Just saying,” I said.
He looked at me. He looked at me for a long time, with his towel in his hand, sweating, in the basement, with the radio playing something with a long guitar part and the furnace roaring.
Then he looked down at the towel.
“Okay,” he said. He folded it. He folded it in half and in half again, very carefully, like Donna folding a napkin. “Okay. Thanks.”
He got up. He went up the stairs. He stepped over the second one from the top.
At midnight he was at my door.
“You awake?” he said.
“Yeah.”
He stood there. Usually he said okay and went. This time he stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame, and the light from the hall behind him, and didn’t go.
“You too,” he said.
Then he said “Okay,” and went.
I lay there in the dark in the room that used to be hers, under the blue blanket, with the card in my wallet on the desk beside the PARTICIPANT medal, and the Xs on my locker door at school going all the way to the twenty-seventh of February.
It was like the first warm day. A chinook comes over the mountains in the middle of February, when everything’s been frozen for weeks. You wake up and the eaves are dripping. The snow’s gone soft, and everybody’s out in their driveways with their coats open, looking at the sky like they don’t trust it.
Me neither. I lay there and let it come in anyway.