IT MIGHT HAVE STARTED with our father gifting my sister and me Swiss Army knives for our birthdays. Or maybe it was the broccoli and cauliflower drowned in melted Cheese Whiz he forced us to eat. My twin sister, in our private language, shared her revenge fantasies for that particular parenting faux pas. I won’t elaborate — those fantasies are best left to the imagination. Let’s just say they’d raise red flags for any mental health professional. Consider yourself warned.
In elementary school, we devoured the Red Cross First Aid manual, reading it cover to cover dozens of times. We practiced CPR, chest compressions, and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation at home. When our father asked what we were doing, we told him we were preparing for The Big One. After all, he wouldn’t stop chain-smoking or gorging on steaks, pork chops, and fried chicken. Our father, with his ever-expanding paunch and aversion to exercise, was a walking cautionary tale. Catholic school drilled into us the dangers of smoking and overeating, and we’d heard enough stories to take the risks and dangers seriously. There was the friendly neighbor with the occasional temper tantrum, the conservation officer who made Raquel and me demonstrate our shotgun and rifle handling skills, and the high school janitor — our father’s friend — who all succumbed to heart attacks.
As adolescents, my sister and I learned to drive our father’s Volkswagen Beetle on the winding logging and country roads around Sioux Lookout. We weren’t even old enough to earn driving licenses, but that never stopped us.
With our father walking alongside us, .22 rifle or .410 shotgun in hand, we hunted ruffed grouse and snowshoe hare on the narrow trails that splintered off into the bush. Raquel had an unnerving talent for it — lining up the iron sights of the rifle, taking aim, and blowing off the tiny, feathered heads of the grouse without hesitation.
Raquel had a method for skinning the grouse, stepping on the wings and tugging at the feet to reveal the coveted breast meat. Our father taught her that technique, which he said he learned from our mother, who also taught him to hunt and fish. Snowshoe hares met similar fates, either taken down with the shotgun or, when she was feeling confident with her aim, the .22 rifle.
Our father, cigarette dangling from his lips, takeout coffee cup in hand, taught her how to clean and gut the rabbits right there on the trails with the Swiss Army knife he’d gifted her. We were reckless, fearless, and entirely too young for all of it.
When we finally moved from Sioux Lookout to Toronto, our high school teachers saw us as something else — proud, fierce warriors. For some reason, my twin and I stood out among our Toronto high school classmates. In Sioux Lookout, where native students were plentiful, our Indigenous identities weren’t such a big deal. But in Toronto, they became something we were painfully aware of.
One day, our history teacher launched into a lesson about First Nations in Canada. It quickly turned contentious. Raquel, never one to sit quietly, stood up at her desk and started shouting across the aisles, arguing and looking eager to fight physically with classmates who, to me, sounded dangerously close to rednecks. It didn’t help that we weren’t schmoozers — making friends wasn’t exactly our specialty.
Raquel always considered me the princess, the pretty one, but most people couldn't tell us apart until they noticed her scars or the crooked bend in her nose — broken not once but twice in elementary school brawls at Sacred Heart. And when a cocky classmate decided to sling epithets and slurs our way, Raquel didn’t hesitate. Mayhem followed — in the classroom, lunchroom, cafeteria, corridors. Wherever the fight spilled, Raquel was front and center.
Still, despite our battles, we had our own skills. On our birthdays after passing our hunter safety courses, our father rewarded us the way he knew best — with Swiss Army knives. Later, I threw my Swiss Army knife off the bridge at Frog Rapids and told my father I’d lost it during a fishing expedition.
Our memories of our mother were hazy — her skinning moose, filleting walleye and northern pike, and plucking chickens she’d throttled with her bare hands. I like to think she spoke only Ojibwe to preserve our native identities, but the truth is, I don’t really know.
Maybe that’s why my sister and I developed our own private language — a mix of Ojibwe, Canadian English, Azorean Portuguese, and words we invented as twins. A linguist later described it in an academic journal as a textbook case of idioglossia, more specifically cryptophasia.
Raquel used our secret language to fuel her fantasies of mayhem, which began when our father forced us to eat broccoli and cauliflower smothered in melted Cheese Whiz. She felt an irrational indignation about it, as though the cheese smothered vegetables were a personal affront and would automatically expand her waistline and bra size. Our father was relentless, insisting we eat the cauliflower and broccoli, drowned in cheese spread heated into sauce in the microwave.
“Why don’t you eat more cauliflower instead of steak?” I teased, poking at his paunch beneath his undershirt at the supper table.
“Why don’t you quit that stinky smoking?” Raquel pressed, pointing at the cigarette smoldering in the ashtray.
Our father liked to brag that our heavy-duty microwave — the one responsible for melting Cheese Whiz into sauce — was the first of its kind in any household in the northern town. A dubious honor, but one he took seriously.
Twice, our father accepted social work positions in Northwestern Ontario, and twice, he packed us up and moved us right back to Toronto — first in his Volkswagen Beetle, then in his Rabbit. For years, we bounced between the vast sprawl of Toronto and the isolated wilderness of Sioux Lookout, never quite belonging to either. Over time, his appearance shifted. He trimmed his long shaggy hair from braids and ponytails to a clipped crew cut. He shaved off his seventies-style bushy sideburns, shedding remnants of the past. But none of it stopped the inevitable. Burnt out, discouraged, he brought his twin daughters back to the city he once called home. Disillusioned, he abandoned the north — the struggling communities, the trips he took by bush plane and floatplane from his base at the federally operated Zone Hospital.
Meanwhile, Raquel and I had begun asking questions. How had our father met our mother — this Indigenous woman, who apparently lived in Osnaburgh House, near Pickle Lake and existed in our earliest childhood memories like a ghost?
The private language between Raquel and me had formed instinctively when we were infants. It baffled everyone — except our father, who caught fragments of meaning. But Raquel and I understood each other with perfect clarity. We even started using it in high school classes, which only added to our mystique.
One day, our English teacher pulled me aside. He informed me that I needed tutoring on my enunciation and pronunciation, suggesting that my speech had been warped by the strange gibberish I spoke with Raquel. He had questions about our mode of communication, too.
Raquel wasn’t about to let me meet with Mr. Hill alone. She suspected he had ulterior motives. So, she stationed herself at a desk in the back of the classroom, silent but watchful. At the back of the room sat a wooden desk with an Olivetti-Underwood manual typewriter mounted on top. Raquel preferred the smooth glide and satisfying clack of the IBM Selectric, but that typewriter had been moved to the typing classroom — after several machines mysteriously vanished in a break-in.
While Raquel clacked away at the typewriter, hammering out the final draft of her English essay, Mr. Hill began tutoring me. At first, it seemed routine. Then his hands landed on my shoulders. He started rubbing my back, his touch lingering too long. Then he crossed a line — his hand brushed my breast. When he leaned in and blew into my ear, I burst into hysterical laughter. I didn’t know how else to react. The absurdity, the awkwardness — it all came out in loud uncontrollable giggles.
From across the room, Raquel’s alarmed voice cut through in our private language. “What the fuck is he doing to you?” she demanded.
Still laughing, I managed to choke out, “He felt up my tits.” My laughter was loud, almost manic, as if it could drown out the reality of what was happening.
Mr. Hill turned to Raquel, his expression almost inviting her to join in his twisted game. That was the moment everything shifted. Raquel ripped her essay from the typewriter roller, slipping the page between the onionskin pages of her English anthology. Then she stormed across the classroom, her folding Swiss Army knife gripped tightly in her hand.
Mr. Hill recoiled, scrambling to shield himself behind his desk — a fortress of stacked books, handwritten tests, and typed assignments. But Raquel wasn’t about to back down. Raquel lunged forward, the blade slicing into flesh and tissue. A geyser of blood erupted, narrowly missing me.
Raquel stood frozen, staring in grim fascination as Mr. Hill choked and gagged on his own blood. The sound was grotesque, wet and gurgling. Then, as if snapping out of a trance, Raquel shook me from my stunned silence, and we bolted.
We slipped out through the nearest exit of the high school, an old heritage building surrounded by towering maple trees and piles of decaying leaves. The air was thick with the earthy scent of autumn.
Raquel spoke to me in our private language, her tone calm, almost soothing. She reassured me that nobody had seen us in the empty classroom or deserted corridors after school. Our high school was the largest in the Borough of East York, she reasoned. With so many students, so many faces, how could anyone pin it on us?
We walked along streets shaded by maple trees, the sidewalks buried beneath vibrant mounds of fallen leaves. Raquel kept talking, her voice steady. She was confident the sheer size of the school and its student body would make it nearly impossible for anyone to figure out how Mr. Hill had met his fate.
Later, the community surrounding the high school was left reeling — shocked and appalled. Letters to the editors flooded local newspapers. School board meetings were hastily convened, with parents, teachers, police officers, administrators, and trustees exchanging heated words in the library and gymnasium. Coffee, tea, cookies, biscuits, and doughnuts were served — a surreal backdrop to the chaos. Our father dragged Raquel and me to one of these meetings, where we stuffed ourselves with date squares and oatmeal cookies, washing them down with coffee until we were jittery from the caffeine.
Outside, the neighborhood around the high school transformed into a scene from a disaster movie. Police vehicles prowled the sleepy streets like it was ground zero for a nuclear fallout. Officers patrolled the locker-lined corridors on foot for weeks, their presence casting a shadow over the school.
Rumors swirled among students and teachers. Some claimed the crime was payback from drug dealers, exacting revenge on Mr. Hill for unpaid marijuana debts. It emerged that, during his university days, Mr. Hill had been detained for marijuana possession but escaped charges. Whispers suggested he’d bought his freedom by ratting out dealers — and that he might have done so again recently. After all, several high school students had been arrested for dealing marijuana in the past few months.
Our father decided it was time for a change. Convinced it would be safer, he moved us from our public high school in East York to a Catholic high school across Toronto. He joked trouble followed us to every school we attended.
We settled into our new school and soon started working part-time at a supermarket owned by our father’s high school friend, conveniently located in the same neighborhood. At first, we were happy with the arrangement, even though we occasionally had to fend off advances from our boss.
Raquel handled him with icy hostility — tight-lipped and glaring with a fierce, unyielding expression. But one evening, I confided in her that the boss had groped me while I was stocking the spice rack. Her fury only grew when she opened her pay envelope, handed to her by me, and discovered she hadn’t been paid for the night shifts she’d spent cleaning the meat department.
Then, shortly after closing time, as we were preparing to leave, the boss summoned Raquel to his office, accusing her of a shortfall in the cash register till. His tone was sharp, his anger palpable, as he demanded answers about the missing money. The boss mumbled about shortchanging customers. He grumbled, barely audibly, about how many cashiers he was forced to fire for dipping their hands into the till.
Raquel grew furious and could barely control herself. I couldn’t remember her being so angry, as she, shaking and trembling with rage, summoned me to the boss’ office alongside her. When I paused and hesitated, she snatched my hand, called me a yelping bitch, and pulled my hair. As she steered and herded me to the office, Raquel grew impatient with my protests. She turned me around, kicked me in the butt, and dragged me by my braided ponytail to the boss’ office, which overlooked the floors, shelves, counters, and displays of the supermarket. With me in tow, Raquel stormed up the narrow steep stairs to our boss’ office.
She brought along her pay stub, upon which she had written the word “bastard.” She complained the boss had not paid her the proper amount of money for the overtime work she had done cleaning the meat cutting equipment, the saws, grinders, display cases, and sausage making equipment in the butcher’s shop and meat department of the grocery store.
“But you’re not working overtime. You’re only paid overtime, if you work more than forty hours a week.”
“But you didn’t pay for those hours, period,” Raquel protested.
Our boss sat at his desk in the elevated office with a view of the entire grocery store, eyeing closely the numbers. He pulled off his eyeglasses, rubbed his brow, made a circular motion with his fingers on his temple. He saw that she had written bastard in big bold capital letters on her pay envelope and stared ahead blankly at his calendars, ledgers, and his desktop calculator, which spit out a spool of receipts with columns of dollars and cents figures.
The boss said Raquel was fired. She pounded the desktop with her fist, shouting, “You can’t!” He told her to stop crowding him and to get the hell out of his office and store. He shoved her, so she stumbled into the open door of a filing cabinet. Then he angrily pushed her towards the office door. Raquel responded by stabbing him in the side of the neck with the same Swiss Army knife our father had given us. He struggled as blood gushed from his neck, holding his throat, choking, gasping, bleeding. His chest became covered in blood, soaking into the fabric and material of his pristine striped button-down shirt. Soon he slumped back in the chair at his desk.
In our private language, Raquel ordered me to leave the crime scene with her. “There was a robbery here — we saw nothing — no suspects. There was nothing we could do.” I protested we should try to help him, for heaven’s sake. Then pandemonium broke out when I insisted we tried to aid our unconscious boss while we still had a chance. But Raquel restrained me and commanded me not to touch him. I tried to stem the flow of blood, but Raquel dragged me away and countered we could do nothing, and I broke into protests, hysterics. While I sobbed and pleaded we needed to rescue him, she argued we should leave promptly. I blindly slapped her, and she punched me in the side in return. Finally, we left him in his chair at his desk in that elevated office, at the back of the store, with a view of the entire floor with its shelves of groceries and counters of fruit, vegetables, and refrigerated dairy.
Raquel surmised investigators would conclude our boss was the victim of a botched robbery after hours.
A few days later, our father served supper, with roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, as well as, of course, broccoli and cauliflower smothered with Cheese Whiz melted in our brand-new microwave oven.
Then he loudly cleared his throat, as if he needed to make a major announcement. Police wished to speak to us about the investigation into our former employer’s demise in his grocery store. Then I remembered Raquel told me she was worried she had left the pay stub and empty cash envelope, upon which she had written BASTARD in bold emphatic letters, on his desk. Police and detectives had a few questions for me and my sister.
Our father said he told the police he had picked us up in the Volkswagen Rabbit after work. He even told the police he had spoken with his friend, our boss, while we waited in the car. Then the police and detectives started treating him as a suspect. They asked him numerous questions, which he refused to answer. Our father insisted he would not allow us to speak with the police, unless we had a lawyer, a social worker, and himself as parent and guardian present.
Raquel and I realized we had a major problem. Later that night, we lay in our separate bunk beds in the bedroom we shared, speaking our private language, in hushed voices. We agreed the situation was untenable; we could not tolerate the police, never mind our father’s lawyer and social workers at any so-called interview. We decided to flee Toronto.
In the early morning, we borrowed our father’s Volkswagen Rabbit, a car which we loved. In the past, the imported German car had delighted us with its extraordinary gas mileage, road handling ability, and ease of driving.
We decided we would drive the car to Osnaburg House, near Sioux Lookout, where we had once lived, where we believed our biological mother still lived on the reservation. During the middle of winter, even in Toronto the temperature felt frigid, with drizzling snow and wind gusts against the icy city streets.
We took turns driving the Volkswagen Rabbit north to Sault Ste Marie, where we filled the tank with gasoline. Then, after we ate vanilla and chocolate Frostys at a Wendy’s restaurant, we continued to drive across Northern Ontario on the TransCanada highway. We agreed we couldn’t remember experiencing such cold and frigidity in our lives.
The drive across Northern Ontario was unforgiving — snow blizzards, gusting winds, near-zero visibility, and treacherous, ice-slick highways. More than once, we fishtailed dangerously, nearly colliding with transport trucks hauling logs, sawdust-laden trailers, and four-wheel-drive pickups battling through the snow. We refueled the Volkswagen at filling stations in Thunder Bay and then again in Sioux Lookout, our former hometown.
Every time a police cruiser passed, we braced ourselves, worried they’d flag us down and discover that both our learner driver’s licenses had been suspended for reckless driving and speeding. But luck stayed with us.
Finally, we pulled into a convenience store and gas bar on Front Street in Sioux Lookout, where the cold gnawed at our skin. Our breath curled into smoke in the crisp air as we stomped our sneakered feet for warmth. We grabbed coffee and potato chips, fueling up for the next stretch of the journey. From there, we plunged deeper into the North, heading toward the remote First Nations communities. The highway soon narrowed into little more than a bush road, winding through rugged terrain. Our destination loomed ahead: our mother’s hometown, an Indigenous community we had never seen.
As we drove, Raquel and I debated — would we even be welcome there? Would we need permission from the chief or the tribal council to visit? Would the police cause trouble? The fact that we had never visited our mother and her reservation had always been a sore point between us and our father. Our father had never fully explained why. It felt like an open wound — especially since he was a social worker, a supposed bridge-builder between generations and cultures. Sioux Lookout had been his home base, but he had also worked in Fort Severn, Fort Hope, and Osnaburgh House — communities so remote, some were accessible only by air.
Less than twenty kilometers from the Highway 599 intersection that would lead us to our mother’s reservation, our Volkswagen Rabbit — a car we had come to see as our hero — gave out. It sputtered once and died. We stared at the frozen landscape in disbelief. The severe cold and fuel starvation must have done it in.
There was no choice — we would have to walk. The thought of trekking for dozens of kilometers through the brutal subarctic cold was daunting. Hitchhiking to Osnaburg House or even Pickle Lake seemed like a better bet. At least there, we could warm up, find shelter, maybe even snag a hot chocolate or coffee.
So, we set off, trudging along the shoulder of the northern highway as it wound through the stunted forest and muskeg — the farthest reaches of the Canadian Shield swallowing us whole. We were tiny insects crawling across the snowy expanse of northern Ontario, swallowed by a landscape where rocky terrain faded into bogs, muskeg, swamplands, and stunted conifers.
By the time the Ontario Provincial Police cruiser pulled up, we were on the edge of hypothermia, our bodies numb with cold. We let ourselves be picked up, too frozen to argue. The cruiser took us to the police detachment on Fourth Avenue, across from Johnny’s Tomboy grocery store. The sight of the store sent an eerie jolt of recognition through us — it reminded us too much of the grocery store where we had worked in Toronto.
As the officer stepped into the store for coffee and snacks, I leaned toward Raquel and murmured in our private language. Our father had always warned us never to trust the police.
Soon, we were taken to the airport. The officer spoke with the airline clerk at the reservations desk, and just like that, we had tickets — one flight to Thunder Bay, then another for a transfer and connecting flight to Toronto.
Apparently, our father had already agreed to fly to Sioux Lookout to retrieve the beloved Volkswagen Rabbit from the garage where it had been left behind.
Standing in the airport terminal, staring at the aircraft we were meant to board, Raquel and I instinctively switched to our private language, our voices rising in agitation. The police officer watched us curiously, taking notes.
“Is everything all right?” he asked. “I mean, you’re speaking a language I’ve never heard before.”
I turned to Raquel. “What do you think is about to happen to us?” I asked. Would we be hauled off to some notorious jail in Thunder Bay? Interrogated in a windowless room under dim lights, a two-way mirror, and hidden microphones until we cracked?
Raquel agreed — she didn’t like the way things were unfolding. Even so, she admitted later she couldn’t help but admire the prospect of flying in the light aircraft.
Still, I said flatly, “My sister is afraid you want us to board that plane.”
The officer sighed. “Well, you do want to go back to Toronto, don’t you?”
“We wanted to visit our mother,” I countered.
“Your father said that can’t happen right now.”
Raquel turned away from the police officer and rolled her eyes. I eyed the aircraft — a light propeller plane with two engines, peeling paint, a dented fuselage, and landing gear with worn tires. It hardly looked capable of surviving the frozen sky.
“You don’t really expect us to board that plane, do you?” I asked, eyeing the battered aircraft with suspicion.
“How else do you expect us to get you back to Toronto?” the officer countered.
I shook my head. “We took a jet airliner to the Azores to visit our grandparents,” she said. “It was smooth — until we hit turbulence in the middle of the Atlantic. But even then, the pilots let me sit in the cockpit.” I gestured toward the aging propeller plane. “This looks like it flew in the Battle of Britain.”
The officer sighed. “I’ll talk to the staff sergeant. We might be able to arrange an alternative mode of transportation.”
Did that mean we weren’t about to be arrested? Imprisoned? Later, Raquel wondered if we had misjudged everything — because instead of a jail cell, we became boarders, found ourselves staying in the house of a police officer and his family for the night.
The town had only one TV channel — CBC. We watched an episode of The Waltons, which we had already seen with our father. We snacked on Coca-Cola with ice cubes, homemade buttered popcorn, and Old Dutch salt-and-vinegar potato chips before heading to bed.
The next morning, the officer drove us to the train station, where we boarded The Canadian, a transcontinental train bound for Toronto. We had never been on a passenger train before, and the ride turned into an unexpected source of comfort and joy. In the dome car and dining car, we struck up conversations with other passengers, embracing the lull of the journey. Over a day later, we rolled into Union Station. Our father was waiting, smiling and laughing as he picked us up.
Life resumed. We returned to our Catholic high school, and by summer, we found work as cashiers at the IGA in The Beaches on Queen Street East.
Then, in our final year of high school, our English teacher introduced us to her close friend — a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of Toronto. She was fascinated by our private language. She interviewed Raquel and me, eventually inviting us to participate in a linguistic research study. Bewildered, we agreed. But as we did, a wave of self-consciousness settled over us — an odd mix of embarrassment and shame.
The researcher reassured us. “You’re special,” she said. “Your language is remarkable.” The doctorate student studied our private language meticulously — recording samples, deciphering its semantics, and unraveling its internal grammar. Within months, she had managed to transcribe and translate much of our cryptophasia. She even learned to speak it, though her attempts were rough, rudimentary — a diluted version of the original.
That winter, in the early eighties, she published an article in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics, describing our language as a textbook case of idioglossia and more specifically cryptophasia in identical twins. By then, though, our lives had already moved on — we were in community college, training to become paramedics.
A month before we graduated from high school, our father came to visit us at the grocery store where we worked. He had only stopped by to buy a carton of cigarettes — our boss gave him the family discount. He joked as he stood at the checkout, teasing us about double-checking the prices on his cigarettes. He laughed, smiling as he bantered.
Then, in an instant, everything changed.
His laughter cut off. His face twisted. He clutched his chest, stumbled — and collapsed. His eyes rolled back into his head. A massive heart attack. Cardiac arrest.
We sprang into action, drawing on everything we knew. Well-versed in first aid, we took turns administering CPR — tirelessly, relentlessly, refusing to let him go. We alternated, delivering life support manually as exhaustion gnawed at us. For a time, we kept him breathing. His heart, damaged but functioning, kept beating. We even managed to restart it — forcing it to pump, to hold on. But by the end of the week, our father succumbed to heart failure in the intensive care unit. The cardiologist and emergency physician explained it bluntly — too much of his heart tissue had been destroyed by the infarct.
Still, the police officers and paramedics who had witnessed our efforts were impressed.
Somehow, in the aftermath of that chaos, in the middle of grief, we realized exactly what we wanted to do. We enrolled at Centennial College for paramedic training. Eventually, we found ourselves working as flight paramedics on air ambulances in Northern Ontario — Raquel based in Sudbury, me in Thunder Bay. For the first time, we were truly apart.
Then, one cold winter day, I was called to evacuate a woman suffering life-threatening complications from diabetes. The hum of the aircraft, the urgency of the mission — it was another beginning. I picked up the patient at the nursing station in Osnaburgh and accompanied her on the air ambulance to Thunder Bay.
It was the moment I had always expected — one that had felt inevitable ever since I started working in Northwestern Ontario as a flight paramedic. As I adjusted the intravenous tubes and oxygen lines for the unconscious Indigenous woman, something about her face unsettled me. Familiar.
I scanned the patient’s chart, flipping through medical records. Date of birth. First name. Last name. Place of birth. Home reservation. Everything matched. Even the nurse at the Osnaburgh nursing station had joked about the facial resemblance when I arrived to retrieve the patient.
But there was no time to process this information and intuition fully. The woman was unconscious, slipping away due to renal failure — another victim of uncontrolled diabetes. Through the cabin windows, the air ambulance soared above the Canadian Shield, golden light spilling over forests, rocks, and waterways as the sun set.
I kept reading through her medical records, a gnawing dread settling in my chest. The prognosis was grim. She wasn’t expected to regain consciousness. Her best chance — if she had one at all — was advanced life support and intensive care at Thunder Bay Regional Hospital.
When we landed, the ambulance raced her to the emergency department of the regional hospital. I debriefed the nurses, who quickly transferred her to critical care under the doctors’ orders. Then, in the dim glow of the waiting room payphone, I dialed Raquel. She had just finished a shift in Sudbury, but I didn’t care if I woke her.
“I think I found our mother,” I whispered.
Silence. Then, finally, she spoke. “I’ll take time off,” Raquel said. “I’ll fly to Thunder Bay.” By morning, she arrived on an air ambulance flight in her paramedic outfit.
Together, we kept vigil by the woman’s bedside. She had been moved to palliative care. A nursing supervisor — someone who recognized us as the flight paramedic twins — passed by, eyeing us curiously. Her expression shifted, equal parts irritated and inquisitive. I believe she was about to accuse us of being downright unprofessional. “What’s your relationship to the patient?” the supervisor asked.
I hesitated, then answered vaguely. “Family.”
She studied us for a long moment. Then, with a knowing nod, she said, “Of course. I can see the resemblance.”
“You can?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. Raquel glanced at me, surprised at my relief. The nursing supervisor offered another soft apology as she reminded us that our mother was not expected to survive. “We understand,” I said.
Two nurses entered the room, offering us comfortable chairs to sit vigil. But we remained standing.
We had learned, long ago, that speaking our private language in public only invited confusion, alarm, ridicule. Eavesdroppers never understood — it was easier to stay silent. And so, in silence, we maintained our vigil. When our mother passed quietly in the netherworld between late night and early morning, without ever waking, without ever speaking to us, we felt something shift — something inevitable.
In our strange, winding lives as twin sisters, as daughters, we had somehow come full circle.
At dawn, we slipped away from the hospital, returning later. After a hurried and harried trip to a big box store around the shopping mall at Intercity, we returned to the nursing station with flowers and gift baskets for her family and survivors as well as the nurses. We felt relieved we made the return trip before her relatives from Osnaburgh House could arrive and quickly departed.
Afterward, we found ourselves at a fast food restaurant near the waterfront in Thunder Bay. We ate hamburgers and fries, sipping coffee as we stared through the frosted restaurant windows. Outside, Arctic air twisted into mist and fog along the streets and pathways, rising in thick clouds over the freezing water.
Lake Superior sprawled before us, the Sleeping Giant resting along the hazy horizon in the distance. Even now, even after everything, we still discussed and debated why our father had never wanted us to meet our mother and still failed to understand.
Outside, in the parking lot, I turned to Raquel and asked — in our private language — if she still had her Swiss Army knife. She grinned and pulled it from her flight jumpsuit’s cargo pocket. “Of course.”
Without hesitation, I grabbed the knife and tossed it into the dumpster behind the restaurant. She scowled, ready to dive in after it — but the knife had already vanished into a pile of stale fries drowned in ketchup.
Nearby, from the speakers of a parked car, Swing Out Sister’s hit single “Breakout” broke into the cold air and resounded. Raquel turned around in amazement and said, “They’re playing our song.”
We danced. That song had been our anthem in our freshman year of college — a burst of energy, a sliver of joy. We would never forget the rush of it, the lift of possibility, the way it made us feel alive. And when we finally crossed the stage at our college graduation, it was the song we asked them to play. Because somehow, after everything, we had survived, and maybe, just maybe, we had made it, finally.
— JOHN TAVARES
Born and raised in Sioux Lookout in Ontario, Canada, John Tavares still lives in that Northwestern Ontario community, but is the son of Portuguese immigrants from Sao Miguel, Azores. He graduated with concentration in psychology from arts and science at Humber College in Etobicoke and studied journalism at Centennial College in Scarborough and East York.