At six on Easter morning Tracy went around the house in her slippers, hiding chocolate eggs. I lay in bed and listened. A cupboard opened and shut. The closet by the back door creaked. She came up the stairs, stopped on the squeaky one, and stood very still, waiting to find out if the kid upstairs had woken up.
I’d been awake since four. I’d been awake, more or less, since the Reimers’ kitchen.
Donna had phoned at nine the night before. Tracy answered it in the living room and said “Oh, hi, Donna,” in her phone voice, and then “Sure, she’s right here,” and passed it over with her eyebrows up.
I took it into the closet.
“I’m not going to say anything to her,” Donna said. “I promised. I just wanted to hear you.” She breathed. Behind her the TV was on, and the dishwasher, and Gordon was saying something low in another room. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you eat?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t,” said Donna. “You never ate when you were upset. Not since you were tiny.” She stopped. “Goodnight, sweetheart.”
She’d said it to me all year, at the door and on the phone, the way she’d say it to anybody’s girl. She hadn’t said it to me since June. I sat on the closet floor under the calendar for a while after she hung up, with the phone in my lap, until Tracy called up the stairs to ask if I wanted cocoa.
* * *
The eggs were where Nathan said they’d be.
He’d told me on MSN the week before, at midnight, along with everything else. she hides them in the same places every year. the vcr. the mailbox. the fruit bowl under the bananas. theres always one in the toe of a boot. always. look in the boots.
There wasn’t a VCR anymore. There was a DVD player, with an egg in the slot, wrapped in pink foil. There was one in the mailbox and two under the bananas. I found more in the living room in places he hadn’t told me about, behind the lamp and in the spider plant and under the remote. Tracy followed me around with her coffee and her camera saying warmer and colder like I was six.
Then I went to the back door and got down on the mat and put my hand into the toe of her winter boot.
It was a big one. A purple egg the size of my fist.
“You remembered the boot,” Tracy said.
She put her coffee down on the shoe rack. She took a picture. Then she put the camera down too.
“You remembered,” she said. “Since you were two. You used to go straight for the boots. You wouldn’t even look anywhere else.”
I knelt on the mat with the egg in my hand.
“Yeah,” I said.
It was the last thing I was going to remember for her. I’d decided that at four in the morning, lying in the dark, listening to the furnace.
* * *
Nathan came at one.
Gordon dropped him off. I watched from the front window. The white truck pulled up at the curb and Nathan got out, and Gordon didn’t drive away. He sat in the truck with the engine running and looked at the house. When he saw me in the window he lifted one hand off the wheel and held it up and kept it there.
I put mine up too.
Then he drove to the end of the street, slowly, and turned.
Nathan was wearing a shirt with a collar. It was one of the golf shirts from the closet in Hawkwood, the navy one, the ones that still had their tags on in June. Somebody had ironed it. He had his brown envelope under one arm and a pot of yellow tulips in the other hand.
“From Donna,” he said, on the step. “She said you don’t come to Easter with nothing.”
“Oh, look at those,” Tracy said, behind me. “Come in, come in. You tell her thank you. Look at you in a collar.”
He came in. He wiped his feet twice. He put the tulips on the counter beside the toaster and the Chinese cookbook.
Tracy had set the table in the kitchen. The dining room was still boxes, stacked to the window, KITCHEN 1 and KITCHEN 2 and BOOKS in my writing. She’d put a cloth on the little kitchen table, and the good plates, and a candle. There was a ham with pineapple rings on it and cloves stuck in it like tacks. There were scalloped potatoes, and buns from the Co-op in a basket under a tea towel.
“Sit, sit,” she said. “Nathan, you’re there. Do you like ham? Of course you like ham. Everybody likes ham.”
She talked all through lunch. She talked about the ham, which she’d never made before; ham had always been her mother’s job. She talked about her interview on Tuesday, the second one, for the payroll job with the health services, in front of a panel. She talked about whether her black dress was too much for a panel. She said it was supposed to snow on Wednesday, the fifteenth of April, can you believe it. Nathan ate two plates of ham. Then he looked down at his plate like he’d only just noticed it was there, and put his fork down.
I didn’t eat at all. I moved the potatoes around.
“Not hungry, honey?” said Tracy.
“I had too many eggs.”
“That’s what they’re for,” she said, and laughed, and told Nathan about the boot.
* * *
After lunch she ran the water in the sink.
Nathan got up without a word and took the tea towel off the oven door. He stood beside her at the counter. She handed him a plate. He dried it and put it in the cupboard to the left of the stove, the right cupboard, and held his hand out for the next one.
Tracy stopped.
She stood with her hands in the water, looking at him. She’d looked at him like that once before, in February. I’d been upstairs getting a binder, and he’d told me about it after, on the phone.
“Mom,” I said. “Can you sit down?”
She looked at me. Then at Nathan, with the towel. Then she took her hands out of the water and dried them on her jeans and came and sat at the table. Nathan hung the towel back on the oven door. He sat down beside me, across from her.
I put my envelope on the table. It was hers, really. The brown string one, PAIGE, ADOPTION, KEEP SAFE, in her writing from 1995. Nathan put his down beside it.
Tracy put one finger on the string.
She didn’t ask where I’d found it. She sat with her finger on the string and looked at me.
“Mom,” said Nathan.
He’d never called her that. All year it had been Ms. Dekker, on the step, at the table, on the phone. He said it now in his big low voice, and she turned her head.
“I’m Paige,” he said.
He told it slowly. He’d told it yesterday at the Reimers’ and it had come out in pieces, out of order, with Gordon’s voice going over the top of it. Today there was nobody to stop him. He started at the beginning.
“I was always a boy,” he said. “The whole time. Since I can remember. In Lethbridge. In the hoodies.” He looked at his hands. “I didn’t know what to call it. I still don’t. I just was.”
Tracy didn’t move.
“On my birthday I wished. On the candles, in my head. I wished I could wake up as a boy.” He looked at me. “She wished too. The same night. In Hawkwood.”
“I wished I could wake up as a girl,” I said. It came out very small. “I’d wished it every year since I was six. Every year I stopped before the end. That year I said all of it.”
Nathan untied the strings. He slid the papers out onto the cloth. The two certificates, side by side, with their red stamps. The two cards from the hospital in the blue ink. The clipping out of the red album, the two babies on one blanket, that she’d thought for fourteen years was the orphanage’s picture.
“We woke up like this,” he said. “In the hospital. Both of us. It wasn’t the dress. It wasn’t anything you did.”
Tracy’s eyes went to the clipping. They stayed there.
“We’re twins,” Nathan said. “That’s us. In the basket.”
Then it was done.
The tap dripped into the sink. The candle was still going in the middle of the table, a little lemon one, and the ham sat on the counter with its pineapple rings drying out. I waited for her to start. I’d seen her start in January, in her coat, with the box from work: I’m fine, it’s fine, I’ll find something. Everything at once. That was what Tracy did when she was frightened.
She didn’t say anything.
She reached across the table and took Nathan’s left hand. She turned it over. She took the little finger between her finger and thumb, the crooked one, and straightened it, very gently, and let it go. It curled back.
“My hook,” she said.
Then she looked at me. I put my left hand on the cloth beside his. Two hands with the same finger. She’d painted mine pink in June, in the hospital, while I was asleep. She’d held on to it all year.
She let go of Nathan. She looked at me.
“You’re not her,” she said.
“No.”
She looked at Nathan.
“She’s him.”
“Yes,” I said.
“She remembers.” Her voice had gone flat and careful. “Everything. She remembers everything.”
“I remember the pool,” Nathan said. “I remember Dad’s truck. I remember you singing in the car on the way to Pincher Creek and the dog in the back.”
Tracy stood up.
She went to the sink. She stood there with her back to us and her hands on the edge of the counter, looking out the window at the lane and the garage. Pickle from next door was on the fence. She turned the tap on. She turned it off again. Pickle licked a paw and looked at her.
Beside me Nathan was very still, the way he’d sat at the Reimers’ yesterday while Gordon said that’s not possible to the papers.
Then she came back.
She didn’t sit down. She came around the table to my side and stood over me and put both her hands on my face. They were cold from the counter. She held my face and looked at it. The eyebrows. The long face. She’d been looking at it since a cold hotel in Changsha.
“And you’ve been doing my daughter’s remembering for her,” she said. “Since September.”
“Yes.”
“The vent. Rusty on the vent. The slide.” Her thumbs were on my cheekbones. “The boot.”
“Yes.”
“For me.”
“Yes,” I said.
She didn’t let go of my face.
“Oh, honey,” she said.
* * *
Then she let go and turned around.
Nathan had stood up. I don’t think he knew he’d done it. He stood by his chair in the ironed golf shirt, too big for the kitchen, with his arms at his sides.
“Did you know?” Tracy said. “Before? When you were little?”
“Yeah.”
“Your whole life.”
“Yeah.”
“And you never said.” Her voice cracked on it. “You never said one word to me.”
“You wanted a girl,” Nathan said. “To do things with. Nails. Movies. You said so.” He was looking at the floor. “You bought the sandals.”
The white sandals. He’d never once had them out of the tissue. I’d worn them every day last summer.
“I wanted you,” said Tracy.
“I know.” He kept looking at the floor. “I didn’t know if that was the same thing.”
She made a sound. It was the sound she made into her pillow at night, when she thought I couldn’t hear her through the ceiling, only now it was out loud, in the kitchen, in the daytime.
She went to him. She put her arms around him, and he was so much taller than her now that she had to reach up, and her face went into his shoulder. She’d held the other body all those years. She’d held it in a hotel in Changsha and on the soccer field in Medicine Hat and in the hospital in June with its nails pink. Now she was holding on to a boy in a navy golf shirt who came up over her head. He’d been her kid the whole time. This chapter was taken from novelping(.)com without permission.
“You got so big,” she said, into his shirt.
He put his arms around her. He bent his head down onto the top of hers.
I got up. I didn’t know where to go. I thought I’d go upstairs, or out to the back step, and give them the kitchen. I pushed my chair in as quietly as I could.
“Don’t you go anywhere,” Tracy said.
She said it into Nathan’s shirt. She didn’t turn around. She took one arm off him and held it out behind her, toward me, with the hand open.
I went.
* * *
Later we sat at the table with the ham put away and a box of Kleenex in the middle where the candle had been. Tracy had blown it out. She’d taken her earrings off and put them beside her plate, which she did when she had a headache.
“Your father,” she said.
She said it to Nathan. It took her a second to work out which of us to say it to.
“I want to tell him,” Nathan said. “Me. Not on the phone.”
“He’ll drive straight into a ditch.”
“In the truck,” Nathan said. “He asked her at New Year’s if she wanted to go for a ride. Like we used to.”
“I went,” I said. “He said you used to put your feet on the dash.”
“He let me,” said Nathan. “Every time. He said don’t tell your mother.”
Tracy laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, a real one, and then she put her hand over her eyes and sat like that for a minute.
When she took it down she reached across the Kleenex for my card. She turned it the right way up.
“I read you this,” she said. “In the hospital. Upside down. I said somebody’d been talking to Trish.” She read it again. “Stay, or go back.”
“Yes.”
“Which is it?” She looked at me, and then at Nathan. “Which are you going to...”
“Stay,” said Nathan.
“Stay,” I said.
Tracy nodded. She put the card down on the cloth and squared it with one finger, like a receipt.
“Does Donna know?” she said.
“Yesterday,” I said.
“Yesterday.” She took her hand down. She looked across the kitchen at the tulips on the counter. “She knew. She knew all through lunch. She knew when she was at the store buying those.”
“She phoned last night,” I said. “She didn’t tell you. She promised.”
“I know. I talked to her.” Tracy looked at the tulips some more. “I talked to her about the weather.”
The phone rang at four. Tracy looked at it on the wall and didn’t move. Then she got up and answered it. “No,” she said. “Yes. Hang on.” She took it into the living room and pulled the French doors shut. Through the glass we could see her on the couch with her knees up, listening. She was on for forty minutes.
When she came out she’d been crying again, and she’d put her earrings back in.
“We’re going over there,” she said. “For supper. She’s got too much ham too.”
* * *
The Reimers’ living room had a couch and a loveseat and Gordon’s chair, and nobody knew where to sit.
We all stood there. Donna had taken Tracy’s coat at the door and was still holding it. Gordon stood by his chair with one hand on the back of it. He’d shaken Tracy’s hand in the front hall, and said “Tracy,” and she’d said “Gordon,” and he hadn’t let go of her hand for a long time. Now she was just inside the doorway in her good sweater, with her purse held in front of her in both hands. Nathan and I were in the middle of the carpet.
It was the same room. I’d had the chicken pox on that couch. I’d watched every hockey game of my life on that TV, with Gordon yelling at it. Nathan had lived in it for ten months. Neither of us knew which side of it to go to.
Donna looked at me. Tracy looked at Nathan. Then they both looked at the other one, and then at each other.
“Well,” Donna said, and stopped.
The basement door opened. Brett came up the stairs in his socks and a Crowchild hoodie, skipping the second step from the top. He stopped in the doorway and looked at the five of us standing around his living room like furniture somebody had delivered to the wrong house.
“Huh,” Brett said.
He walked into the middle of the room and sat down on the floor. He sat with his back against the front of the couch and his legs out on the carpet. He picked the remote up off the coffee table and put the hockey on with the sound off.
Nathan sat down on the floor beside him.
I sat down on the other side.
After a minute the couch creaked behind us. That was Tracy, at my end. Then it creaked again, and that was Donna, at Nathan’s. Gordon sat down in his chair and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, the way he sat in the stands.
On the TV a man in white skated a long way with the puck and lost it.
“He eats everything,” Donna said, to Tracy, over our heads. “I’ve never bought so many eggs in my life.”
“She doesn’t eat a thing,” said Tracy. “I put it in front of her and she moves it around.”
“Oh, she always did that. Since she was tiny. I used to hide carrots in the meatloaf.”
“Carrots,” said Tracy. “Okay. Carrots.”
Brett snorted. Nathan looked at the TV. I looked at the carpet, at the lighter patch by the coffee table where somebody had spilled something a long time ago, and felt my face go hot, and didn’t mind.
Donna got up after a while and went into the kitchen. She came back with the hot cross buns from yesterday, the ones that had stayed in the oven too long while nobody got up to take them out. She put the plate on the floor between me and Nathan.
Nobody said anything about them being burnt. Brett took two.