It snowed on the Wednesday after Easter, the way the man on the news said it would. Tracy had put Donna’s tulips out on the back step, and fifteen centimetres came down on top of them, wet and heavy. By Friday it had all melted, and the tulips stood up again in their pot, a bit bent, and Tracy said that was Calgary for you.
Nothing else melted that fast.
Tracy knocked on my door now. She’d never knocked before. She’d come in with laundry, or to say goodnight, or to sit on the end of my bed and talk about her day. Now she knocked, twice, and waited, and said “Can I come in?” like it was a hotel.
“You don’t have to knock,” I said, the first time.
“I know.” She stood in the doorway with the laundry basket on her hip. “I want to.”
She still called me honey. She called Nathan honey too, when he came over, and then looked surprised at herself. She was on the phone with Donna most nights, in the living room with the French doors shut. When I came down for water I could hear her through the glass, laughing sometimes, and once crying, and once saying “No, you listen,” in a voice I’d never heard her use on anybody.
Murray drove up on the Saturday after Easter. Tracy had phoned him on the Monday and told him there was something Nathan needed to tell him in person, and he’d said Nathan? The Reimer kid? and then Is this about the boyfriend thing? and Tracy had hung up on him and then phoned him back.
He picked Nathan up in Hawkwood in the red Ranger. They were gone four hours. nate says:
we drove to cochrane and back dekker #7 says:
and nate says:
i put my feet on the dash. he looked at them for about 5 km. then he pulled over by the side of the road and sat there nate says:
then he said well buddy dekker #7 says:
buddy? nate says:
he always called me buddy. in person. on the phone it was kiddo. i never knew why nate says:
he said well buddy. and then he didnt say anything till cochrane dekker #7 says:
is he ok nate says:
he bought me a burger. he said i eat like his brother. he said deanna is going to have a lot of questions nate says:
hes ok
* * *
The job came on a Tuesday, the last one in April.
I was home from cheer, at the kitchen table with my social studies. The phone rang. Tracy answered it with a spoon in her other hand, stirring the chili, and then she put the spoon down on the counter, not in the spoon rest, right on the counter, and turned the burner off.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. This is she.”
I watched her listen. She’d gone pink up her neck.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. Can I... could I phone you back tomorrow? Just to think about the... yes. Yes, I understand. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
She hung up. She stood with her hand on the phone on the wall.
“Payroll,” she said. “Alberta Health Services. Starting the twenty-fifth of May.”
“Mom.”
“It’s less,” she said. She turned around. “It’s a lot less. It’s about two-thirds of Coulee.” She sat down at the table across from me and pulled my social studies binder over and turned it to a clean page and took my pencil out of my hand. “Okay. Okay. Let’s see.”
She did the math on the back of my homework. Rent and the car and the phone and groceries. She did it twice. She did it a third time with the numbers a bit smaller. I sat and watched her write and cross things out.
“We can’t stay here,” she said at last. “Not on this. Not in this house.” She tapped the pencil on the page. “But we can stay.”
* * *
We had supper at the Reimers’ that Sunday. We’d had supper there every Sunday since Easter. Nobody had decided it. Donna phoned on the Saturday, and Tracy said what can I bring, and that was it.
The table was the same one from Easter Saturday, with the scratch from Brett’s skate. There were six chairs now. Donna had brought one up from the basement.
Tracy waited till the pot roast had gone around.
“I got the job,” she said.
Donna put her fork down. “Oh, Tracy.”
“Payroll. It’s less. It’s a lot less. I’m going to take it.” She looked at her plate. “I’ve been looking at places. There’s a little bungalow in Ranchlands, off Ranchlands Boulevard. Two bedrooms and a basement. It’s close to the new train station, the one that’s opening in June.”
“Ranchlands,” said Gordon. “That’s ten minutes from here.”
“It’s in the zone,” Tracy said. “For Bow Crest. I phoned the board.”
For a second the table went still. Nathan was looking at his plate. I was looking at Nathan.
“Well,” Donna said, carefully, “you know if it didn’t work out. If you had to go to Lethbridge, to your sister’s, just till you found something. We’ve got room. She could stay with us. She could have her...”
She stopped. She’d been going to say her room. Nathan was sitting in front of her, and her room was his.
“I’m not going to Lethbridge,” said Nathan.
“Nobody asked you to, bud,” said Gordon.
“I’m just saying. If she’s here, I’m here. Till June. After June too. I’m not going anywhere she isn’t.”
“Nobody is going to Lethbridge,” Tracy said.
She said it louder than she meant to. Brett stopped chewing.
“I phoned them back on Wednesday,” Tracy said. “I took it. I’ve got a viewing on the bungalow next Saturday. Nobody is going to Lethbridge.”
Gordon looked at her down the table. He put his knife and fork together on his plate the way he did when he wanted to talk business.
“Tracy,” he said. “I’ve got to ask. Just so I know. So we all know.” He cleared his throat. “What is she now? To you?”
It was a Gordon question. It came out of him heavy and square, like he’d measured it. Donna said “Gordon,” and he put his hand up. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“I’m asking,” he said. “I want to know where everybody stands.”
Tracy looked at me across the table, past the pot roast and the gravy boat, past the glass of milk Donna always poured me without asking. Then she looked back at Gordon.
“She’s staying,” Tracy said. “Whatever she’s called.”
Gordon nodded. He nodded slowly. Then he picked his fork back up.
“Okay,” he said.
Donna got up and went into the kitchen very fast and ran the tap.
* * *
After supper the mothers did the dishes, and Gordon and Nathan went down to the basement with Brett to look at something wrong with the weight bench. I went and sat on the back step.
It was the first warm night. The sky was still light at eight. Somewhere down the cul-de-sac somebody was mowing a lawn, the first one that year, and the smell came over the fence.
The door opened behind me. Brett came out and sat down on the step beside me. He had two cans of pop. He gave me one.
At first he just drank his pop. He looked at the yard, at the hoop over the garage with no net in it.
“So what do you like?” he said. “Like actually.”
I looked at him.
“I don’t know anything,” Brett said. “You played hockey for years and you hated it, and I didn’t know. I lived across the hall.” He turned the can around in his hands. “So what do you like.”
“Birds,” I said.
“Birds.”
“Jays. The magpies. The chickadees at the cabin, on the feeder. There’s a poster in my room. At Tracy’s. Steller’s jay.”
Brett thought about it.
“The magpies are jerks,” he said.
“They’re smart. They remember faces. If you’re mean to one it tells the others, and they all remember you.”
Brett looked up at the power line over the lane, where there was a magpie sitting, doing nothing.
“Huh,” he said. “That explains a lot.”
We sat there. He finished his pop and crushed the can flat between his hands, slowly, so it didn’t make much noise.
“Did you want to tell Dad?” he said. “Back then. About the dock.”
“Mom said not to.”
“I know she did.” He put the flat can down on the step. “I mean did you want to.”
I thought about being seven in my Spider-Man shorts on the end of the dock at Sylvan Lake, soaking wet, with the slushie, blue raspberry, the large.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t want you to get in trouble.”
Brett looked at the yard.
“Okay,” he said, after a minute. “Well. Thanks.”
Then he said, “Hey, Paige,” the way he’d said it at Easter, like he was practising it.
“Hey,” I said.
* * *
At school nobody knew anything. Then on a Thursday in May everybody did.
It was Dylan Strand again, the way it had been in October. He came over to Manny’s table at lunch with his tray and stood at the end of it, between me and Nathan, and looked from one of us to the other.
“Okay,” he said. “I have to ask. My mom saw you at the Co-op on Saturday. Both of you. With both your moms. She said you looked like a Christmas card.”
Nobody said anything. Connor kept eating.
“So are you related or what?” said Dylan. “For real this time.”
Nathan looked at me down the table. We’d talked about it on the phone, what we’d say if anybody asked again. We hadn’t decided anything.
“Yeah,” Nathan said. “We’re twins.”
The table went quiet. Then Dylan put his tray down on it so hard his milk fell over.
“I said that,” he said. “I said that in October. I posted it. Everybody said I was an idiot.”
“You were an idiot,” said Cassidy, from the next table, without turning around. “You were also right.”
Sadie was looking at me. She hadn’t moved.
“Since when?” she said.
“February. We found the papers. From the orphanage.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I’m telling you now.”
Sadie thought about it. She picked Dylan’s milk up and put it back on his tray.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s why you have the same eyebrows.”
“Wait,” said Connor, with his mouth full. “So who’s older?”
Nathan and I looked at each other.
“Nobody knows,” I said. “They found us together. In one basket. Nobody wrote down who came first.”
“So you could be older,” Connor said to me.
“I could be older.”
“You’re not older,” said Nathan.
“You don’t know that.”
“I can tell.”
“You can’t tell. Nobody can tell. That’s the whole point of a basket.”
At the window end of the table, Manny kept out of it. He had his sandwich in his hand and he was looking at me, the way he’d looked at me in February, turning it over.
By the end of the day it was all over Grade 9. Our social studies teacher asked. Ms. Dufresne said she’d assumed so since September and couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Somebody wrote TWINS on Nathan’s locker in dry-erase marker, and he left it there.
On Mother’s Day I made Tracy breakfast in bed, eggs and toast and the good jam. She cried, and said it was the jam. Then I phoned Donna and said happy Mother’s Day. Donna cried too and said it was her allergies, and in the background Gordon said she doesn’t have allergies. The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
In the afternoon I took the bus to the skate park.
Manny was there. He was always there on Sundays. He was at the far end, by the low rail, trying to do something with his board that involved jumping, and falling off the board, and getting up. A girl with a red helmet was doing kickflips by the stairs. Every time Manny fell she looked over and didn’t laugh.
I sat on the edge of the bowl with my feet hanging in it and waited.
He saw me after about ten minutes. He picked up his board and stood there with it. Then he walked over and sat down on the edge, not right beside me, about a metre away, with the board across his knees.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Nate’s not here.”
“I know. I came to see you.”
He looked at me. He’d been looking at me like that since the cafeteria in February. Like a piece that didn’t fit, turned over and over in his hand.
I’d practised it on the bus. I’d practised it all week. None of it came out.
“Manny,” I said. “In Grade 5, you threw up on the field trip to the Science Centre, on the bus, on Mrs. Pelletier’s shoes. You made me promise. I never told anybody.”
Manny went very still.
“In Grade 7,” I said, “you cried at the end of the movie with the dog, at your house, with your mom out, and I said I wouldn’t tell, and I didn’t. Your mom calls you Manveer when you’re in trouble and beta when you’re not. You’re scared of the basement at your grandmother’s. The wizard took you nine hours. The stars were four of them.”
His face didn’t change.
“It’s me,” I said. “It’s been me since June.”
Manny didn’t move. Down at the stairs the girl in the red helmet did a kickflip and landed it. Nobody clapped.
“I knew,” Manny said.
“You didn’t.”
“I knew.” He was looking at the bowl, not at me. “He stopped doing the voice. In July. At your front door. I did it, and he looked at me like I was crazy. He never did it back. Not once. Ten months.” He turned the board over. “Twins I could take. Twins doesn’t explain the voice. You don’t stop doing the voice. It’s our voice.”
“I know.”
“And then you did it.” He looked at me now. His face was red. “In the cafeteria. For Sadie.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For Sadie, Nate.”
It came out of him and he heard it. He sat there with his mouth open.
“Paige,” I said. “It’s Paige now.”
“Paige.” He said it like a word in a language he was taking for the first time. “Paige.” He shook his head. “This is the stupidest thing that ever happened. You know that? This is stupider than the volcano.”
“Yeah.”
“You let me sit with him. For a year. Doing the voice. At him.”
“I know,” I said. “He told me. He said you never gave up.”
Manny looked at the bowl some more. His ears were red too.
Then he held his hand out, flat, palm up, like he was holding something.
“Tray,” Manny said.
High and hard through his nose. The Grade 5 lunch supervisor, standing at the end of the line, in her hairnet, bored out of her mind.
“TRAY.”
I laughed. I laughed so hard I nearly fell into the bowl. He grabbed the back of my hoodie and held on, and he was laughing too, and the girl in the red helmet looked over at us like we were both insane.
When I could talk again I said, “I’ve still got the wizard. Nathan brought it to me. It’s on my shelf.”
“I know. It was gone off his desk in the fall. I thought he threw it out.” He let go of my hoodie. “Keep it. It was always yours.”
* * *
We moved on the long weekend, the Saturday, the sixteenth of May.
Gordon brought one of the trucks, a white Reimer Mechanical van with the ladder rack taken off. He brought Brett and Nathan too, and Donna came behind in her car with sandwiches. Tracy had rented a trailer, and Gordon took one look at it and sent it back.
It took four hours. It was three kilometres.
The bungalow in Ranchlands was small and brown, with a crabapple tree in the front about to come out, and a basement with a window that looked up at the grass. My room was down there. It had a closet with a sliding door, and a carpet somebody had shampooed for us, and a smell like the inside of a new shoe. Nathan carried my bed down the stairs by himself. Brett carried the dresser and complained the whole time.
“What do you have in here,” he said. “Rocks?”
“Hair stuff.”
“It’s rocks.”
Upstairs the mothers were doing the kitchen. Tracy was taking plates out of newspaper and Donna was putting them in the cupboards, and they’d argued already about which cupboard. Gordon was under the sink, looking at a pipe. I came up the stairs with an empty box and stopped in the kitchen doorway.
“And I gave them ten dollars,” Tracy was saying. “On Valentine’s. For the movies. I said just friends, I know.”
“Gordon winked at him,” said Donna. “Every time. Gordon, you winked at him. At the door.”
“I didn’t know,” said Gordon, from under the sink.
“Every time.” Donna had to put the plate down. “He’d come in from her house and Gordon would say how’s your girlfriend and wink.”
Tracy put her hand on the counter and bent over it. She was laughing so hard nothing was coming out. Donna had her hand over her mouth and her eyes were streaming.
Nathan came in behind me with a box of BOOKS. He stood there and looked at the two of them.
“It’s not funny,” he said.
“It’s very funny,” said Tracy, without straightening up.
“Ew,” I said.
“Ew,” said Nathan.
That set them off again, both of them, worse.
The last thing off the van was the KITCHEN box, the old one with the yellowed tape, which I’d packed myself with the real kitchen things in it this time. Brett carried it in and put it on the counter. Tracy wiped her eyes and slit the tape with her car key and opened the flaps.
The kettle was on top.
“Oh, thank God,” Tracy said, and filled it.