Paige came over at two on the Saturday of Easter weekend with a tin of Nanaimo bars and her brown envelope in her backpack.
Donna let her in. Donna was in her apron with flour on it. She was doing hot cross buns for tomorrow, the way she did every year, from her mother’s recipe, and the whole house smelled of them.
“Paige! Come in, sweetheart. Nathan didn’t say you were coming.”
“I asked her,” I said.
I was at the bottom of the stairs. I’d been sitting on the fourth one since half past one, waiting.
Donna looked at me, then at Paige, then at me again. Whatever was on our faces, she saw some of it.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
* * *
Gordon was in the garage, putting the winter tires in the rack. Brett was in the basement. I went and got them both.
“Kitchen,” I said. “Can you come in the kitchen. All of you. Just for a minute.”
Gordon wiped his hands on a rag. “What’s up, bud?”
“Just come in the kitchen.”
He came. Brett came up the basement stairs, slowly, and stepped over the second one from the top, and stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed. Donna turned the oven down. She took her apron off and folded it and put it on the counter, and sat down at the table, the way she sat down at the dentist’s for a cleaning. Gordon sat at the head, in his chair. Brett didn’t sit. He leaned on the doorframe.
Paige sat beside me. She’d asked to be there. It’s my family, she’d said, on the phone, on Thursday. I want to be there. I don’t want you to do it by yourself in my kitchen.
I’d practised it. I’d practised it in the basement, on the bench, at the ceiling. I’d practised it in the field house, running laps. I’d had it all in order, the whole thing, start to finish.
None of it came.
I put my hands flat on the table. Gordon’s table. The one with the scratch on the end where Brett had dropped a hockey skate in 2004.
“I’m not Nathan,” I said.
* * *
Nobody said anything.
Gordon looked at me. He had a smile on his face that hadn’t caught up yet.
“What?” he said.
“I mean I am,” I said. “Now. I am now. I wasn’t.” I didn’t have the words. Nobody had ever given me any. I had to do it with the ones I had. “Before June, before the hospital, I wasn’t him. I was in Lethbridge. I was a girl. I was raised as a girl. I was Paige. Paige Dekker.”
Donna put her hand down on the table.
“Nathan,” she said.
“I was always a boy,” I said. “The whole time. I knew. I didn’t have a word for it. I just knew. Since I was little. And I never told anybody, because there was nobody to tell.”
Gordon had stopped smiling.
“And she,” I said, and looked at Paige. “She was your son. She was Nathan. She was raised as your son. Here. In this house. In my room.” I made myself keep going. “And she was always a girl. The whole time.”
Paige was looking at the table.
“That’s not possible,” said Gordon.
“On our birthday,” I said. “Last June. The fourteenth. We both made a wish. On the candles, in our heads, the same night. We wished to wake up as who we were.” I looked at Donna. “She wished to wake up as a girl. I wished to wake up as a boy. And we fell. We both fell. And we woke up in the hospital a week later, like this. Her in my body. Me in hers.”
“That’s not possible,” said Gordon again.
He said it quieter, to the table instead of to me.
I took the card out of my wallet. Paige took hers out of her jacket pocket. We put them on the table, side by side, in front of Gordon. One year. Then wish again, together: stay, or go back.
Gordon read them without touching them. Then he read them again. His lips moved on the last part.
“Back,” he said. “You can go back?”
“We don’t know,” I said. “That’s all it says. We’re not going back. Either of us.”
Gordon looked at the last word on the card and stayed on it.
“Then we found out,” I said. “In February. We found out why it was us.”
Paige opened the brown envelope and took out her certificate. I went to the drawer under the phone, where I’d put the certificate that morning, and took out mine. We put them on the table beside the cards. The two of them side by side, the same paper, the same stamp, the same east gate, the same day.
Together with a female infant.
Together with a male infant.
And the clipping, between them. Two babies on one blanket.
“We’re twins,” I said.
Gordon picked up my certificate. He held it in both hands. His hands were shaking. I’d never seen Gordon’s hands shake. They didn’t shake when he lifted a furnace. They didn’t shake in minus thirty.
“That’s not possible,” he said, very quietly, to the paper.
It was the third time. He didn’t say it again.
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Donna wasn’t looking at the papers.
She was looking at Paige.
She’d been looking at her since I said she was your son. She was looking at her the way she looked at a photo in an album when she was trying to remember the year. Paige hadn’t said anything. She was sitting with her hands in her lap and her shoulders up and her eyes on the cards.
“The dock,” said Donna.
Paige looked up.
“The dock,” Donna said again. Her voice had gone very thin. “At the lake. When you were seven. You fell off the end of the dock.” She was holding the edge of the table. “What did we get you after?”
Paige looked at her.
“I didn’t fall,” Paige said. “Brett pushed me.”
From the doorway, Brett made a sound.
“I was seven,” Paige said. “I was in my Spider-Man shorts. He pushed me off the end because I wouldn’t jump, and I went in, and you came in after me in your white pants. Your good ones. And you said you were going to kill him.” Her voice was going. She kept it going. “And then you didn’t. You bought me a slushie. At the store at the marina. Blue raspberry. You let me have the large.”
Donna put both hands over her mouth.
She didn’t make a sound. She sat at her own kitchen table with both hands over her mouth and her eyes on Paige, and the tears went straight down over her fingers.
“And you made me promise not to tell Dad,” Paige said, “that you’d said you’d kill Brett. Because you said he’d think you were soft on me.”
“Oh,” said Donna, through her hands. “Oh. Oh.”
* * *
It came out of Paige after that. All of it. She couldn’t stop it.
“You used to come in at night,” she said to Donna. “When he was asleep. And sit on my bed. And rub my back. You did it till I was ten. You said don’t tell your father. You said he thinks I’ll make you soft.”
Donna nodded behind her hands.
“The horseradish,” Paige said to Gordon. “You always take it first. You leave the bottom. I always asked for it before you could get it.” She was laughing and crying at the same time. “Every Sunday. Fourteen years.”
Gordon was staring at her.
“Timbits hockey,” Paige said. “I cried every Saturday. You said I’d grow out of it. You bought me a double chocolate every time after. Even though I cried. You never once didn’t.”
“The dump,” Gordon said.
It came out of him like he’d been hit.
“Saturday mornings with the trailer,” Paige said. “Then Tim’s. Double double for you, box of Timbits for me, eaten in the truck. Don’t tell your mother.”
“She always knows,” said Gordon.
“Did you two have a nice time at Tim’s,” said Paige, in Donna’s voice, exactly.
Gordon put the certificate down. He put his face in his hands.
* * *
He was like that a while. His shoulders went. He didn’t make any noise. Donna had taken her hands off her mouth and was holding Paige’s hand across the table, both of hers around one of Paige’s, holding on like it was a rope.
Then Gordon got up.
He got up out of his chair without saying anything and went out through the door to the garage. We heard him go through the garage to the office. We heard the filing cabinet drawer.
He came back with the green folder that said NATHAN. He hadn’t known I’d taken the certificate out of it. He opened it on the table and looked at the empty place in the brown envelope and then at the paper on the table. He sat down.
“I read this,” he said. “In Changsha.”
He was talking to Paige.
“In the hotel. The night after we got you. The agency woman gave us the envelope, and your mother was asleep with you on her chest, and I sat in the bathroom with the light on so I wouldn’t wake you up, and I read every page. Together with a female infant.” He put his finger on it. “I asked her. The agency woman. The next morning, at breakfast. I asked her, what does that mean, together. Is there another baby. Is there a sister.”
Nobody moved.
“She said they find babies together all the time,” Gordon said. “She said it doesn’t mean anything. She said they leave them at the same gate on the same day because it’s market day, or because it’s a good gate, by a hospital. She said don’t worry about it, Mr. Reimer. She said you’ve got your boy.”
He looked at the paper.
“I didn’t worry about it,” he said. “I put it in the drawer. I had my boy.”
* * *
Brett hadn’t moved from the doorway.
He hadn’t said anything since the sound he’d made when Paige said Brett pushed me. He was still leaning on the frame with his arms crossed. But his arms had gone tight, and his jaw, and he was looking at Paige the way he’d looked at her in the hall outside the powder room in October.
“You stopped flinching,” he said.
Everybody looked at him.
“He stopped flinching.” He was talking to Paige, not me. “I mean, he did. In July. When I came in the room. He’d always flinched, since he was seven, since the dock. Since I pushed you. And in July he stopped.” His voice was doing something it never did. “I thought you’d just grown up. I thought the hospital grew you up.”
“I didn’t flinch,” I said. “I wasn’t scared of you.”
“No,” Brett said, without looking at me. “You weren’t.”
He uncrossed his arms. He looked at Paige.
Paige looked at him.
“Fourteen years,” Brett said. “We lived in the same house. Your room was across the hall. I never asked you one thing. Not what’s wrong, not are you okay, not anything.” He swallowed. “You were always so quiet. I thought you didn’t want me to. I thought that’s just how you were. And you were in there the whole time. You were right across the hall.”
“It’s okay,” Paige said.
“It’s not,” said Brett. “It’s really not.”
He came into the kitchen. He came over to the table, to Paige’s side of it, and he didn’t sit. He stood beside her chair, very tall, looking down at her. Then he put his hand flat on the top of her head, just for a second, the way you put your hand on the head of a little kid.
“Hey,” he said, and his voice cracked. “Hey, Nate.”
Then he heard it. I saw him hear it.
“No,” he said. “Sorry, no. What do I...”
“Paige,” said Paige.
“Paige,” said Brett. “Hey, Paige.”
He took his hand off her head. He went and stood at the sink with his back to all of us and ran the cold water, and didn’t wash anything, the way Mom did in Royal Oak.
* * *
For a while after that there was just the oven, ticking. The hot cross buns were going too dark in there and nobody got up to take them out.
Donna was still holding Paige’s hand. She’d moved her chair. She’d moved it all the way around the corner of the table so she was beside her, close, with her knee against Paige’s knee.
“Sweetheart,” she said. “Sweetheart. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Paige didn’t say anything.
“You could have told me,” said Donna. “Any time. You could have told me.”
“I couldn’t,” Paige said. “There wasn’t anything to tell. There weren’t any words.” She looked at the table. “And Dad was always saying. About being soft. About being a man. About growing out of it.”
Gordon flinched.
I saw it. He flinched the way Brett said Nathan used to. His whole big body, all at once.
“And I didn’t know if you’d still...” Paige stopped. She couldn’t. She started again. “I didn’t know if you’d still want me.”
Donna made a sound I’d never heard her make.
She put her arms around Paige. Both arms, in the kitchen chair, sideways, hard, the way she’d done at the front door in October, only more. Her hand flat on Paige’s back. She put her face in Paige’s hair and held on, and Paige held on back. They sat like that at the corner of the table with the papers in front of them and the oven ticking.
I sat there and watched my mom hug my sister.
She was Paige’s mom, not mine. I knew that. But I’d lived in this house for ten months. I’d eaten her eggs. She’d held my coat out at the door. I sat there and watched her hold on to her real kid, the one she’d lost in June without knowing it. It was the best thing I’d ever seen. It was going through me like hail.
* * *
Gordon was the last.
He’d been sitting with his hands on the folder, looking at Donna and Paige. Now he looked at me.
He looked at me over the two cards and the clipping. I didn’t look away. I’d never looked away from Gordon. That was one of the things Brett had noticed.
“And you,” Gordon said.
His voice was rough. It was the voice from the end of the semi-final, in the truck. You know how long I waited.
“You wanted to play,” he said.
That was the camp in July, and the coulee wind, and the coach writing where has this kid been on a card. It was the helmet thrown down the sideline. It was the heavy end of a furnace in Edgemont. It was maybe.
“Yeah,” I said.
Gordon nodded. He nodded slowly, like somebody agreeing to a price he couldn’t afford.
“Okay,” he said.
Nothing was okay yet. I knew that, and so did he. It was going to be a long time before anything in this kitchen was okay. But it was the word he used. It was the only word he had for sorry. Brett had told me that in the basement, in March. He doesn’t say sorry, he says okay. That’s how you know.
“Okay,” I said back.
I’d never said sorry either, not in ten months, not once in this house.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Everybody looked at me.
“For your son,” I said. “For June. For not telling you. For eating all your eggs.” I couldn’t stop. It was coming up in me like the cold water at Sylvan Lake. “For letting you think I got better. I didn’t get better. I was just somebody else.”
Gordon shook his head.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t.” He put his big hand flat on the table, between the two cards. Then he reached across it and put it on the back of my neck, the way he did at the barber’s, the way he did at the end of the dock. He left it there. It was heavy and warm.
“You were somebody,” Gordon said. “That’s not nothing. You were somebody.”
He kept his hand there.
It wasn’t okay. It was the start of it.