We were scared without Edmund. You reached for the ladder and knocked it over. How would we get down? “Wait a minute,” you whispered. “No,” I said and jumped. I heard my arm break. Do you remember how hard you cried? Your face was purple, the colour you told me your penis turned sometimes. You’d told me in church, how your penis turned purple like the velvet robe the minister wore. I didn’t have a penis, you told me. This was the main reason we weren’t identical. I was born so quickly and then you took two more hours to come into the world. Dad nicknamed us “Late” and “Soon.”

You were screaming as you looked down at me from the garage roof. Edmund heard us all the way from the barn and came back to find me lying there on the grass by the fallen ladder. He carried me home with you weeping at his side. Dad and Edmund took me to the emergency room. Dad recited Wordsworth poems while he drove, to distract me. Remember how much he loved the English Romantics? He would have been a scholar in a different life, Mum always said. As Dad carried me into the hospital, he kept repeating, “A host of golden daffodils beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Don’t cry, little Soon,” he said. “You’re strong.”

Remember when we were fifteen, picking apples after school? Edmund picked us up when we were finished in the orchard. It was already getting dark when we came home that Tuesday and Mum wasn’t making supper as she always did at that time of day. She was reading a magazine, having a cup of tea with her apron on. She told us Dad had dressed in his suit and tie for work that morning like he always did and left for the canning plant. But then he’d called in the afternoon. He had checked into the Cornwallis Inn in Kentville because he needed time alone, time to sort things out. He was depressed and needed a break, she told us as she flipped through the magazine without looking up. He wanted us to come down for supper, just us, he didn’t need her to come — she could stay home alone, have some time to herself. I think she was relieved. All summer he’d been quiet. She sipped her tea and ate a cookie. It was a Pim’s, a biscuit from France with orange jam filling. Mum loved them. Edmund was nineteen. He drove us to the hotel in his red pickup truck. He’d come home from firefighter practice just to take us.

Do you remember the old daphne shrub out by the barn which flowered each spring? Dad moved to the hotel a few weeks after Mum found the Cajun woman from New Orleans sitting beside the blooming daphne. She was feeling her ancestors, she said, the Acadians who had been sent away by the English in the Grand Dérangement, the Expulsion in 1755, and wondering if they ever sat beside these bushes they had planted and wondered if anyone would remember them. Mum invited her up to the house for tea. Between sips, she told us she lived in a house on stilts where moss hung off trees like ghosts.