“Drive us around to the underground parking,” she ordered the driver.
“Why…” Aggie began.
“I don’t want you to get wet,” Angela explained.
Luckily the elevator was empty. Angela knew she had to keep herself and her twin from being seen together, at least in downtown Vancouver. They were too memorable a sight. She hurried Aggie along the hotel passageway and breathed a sigh of relief when she closed and locked the door of the suite behind her.
“This is nice!” Aggie exclaimed.
Angela followed her sister’s voice into the living room. The furniture was shabby genteel. To the right was a small kitchenette with fridge, two-burner stove and teakettle. The British habit of tea must prevail in Vancouver too. The view from the living room windows was spectacular. Though only on the fourth floor, they could see over the traffic and trees, across a large body of water to the land on the other side.
“That’s Kitsilano directly opposite us,” Aggie explained. “Then there’s Jericho Beach and the University Endowment Lands.”
“And the water must be English Bay. Is it another arm of the Fraser River?” Angela asked.
“No. It leads to Burrard Inlet, after you get around Stanley Park. We’ll have to walk around the park along the seawall. It’s one of the sights of Vancouver.”
Angela murmured an assent, though she knew they couldn’t risk exposure that close to downtown, at least not until after Monday. If the man chose someone else for his extended romp in the sack, they could go wherever they wanted.
“Let’s go to Chinatown for lunch,” Aggie’s enthusiastic voice interrupted Angela’s thoughts.
“Sounds good to me,” she agreed. Surely they could lose themselves in Chinatown.
Aggie donned rain boots she had providently packed and Angela pulled on a dark red coat with a hood. With her hair covered, they wouldn’t be so noticeable. She called a cab to meet them in the basement parking lot.
The Chinese district was closer to downtown than Angela had hoped, but even on a rainy Saturday it teemed with a jostling mix of tourists and vociferous Chinese. She and Aggie ducked into the nearest restaurant and were greeted with comforting indifference, even when Angela took off her coat and their identicalness became obvious. The menu was written almost entirely in Chinese characters, with only a few undescriptive English words scattered throughout. Aggie asked the waitress to bring them something hot but not too exotic.
A huge bowl of hot noodles with spicy chicken and thin slices of green vegetables filled Angela and her sister to abundance. The total bill came to an unbelievable $4.25 Canadian. No wonder Chinatown was a tourist mecca. As they left the restaurant, Angela was careful to pull the hood back over her hair even though the rain had dropped to a thin mizzle. No need to take risks.
The young women spent the afternoon browsing the shops of Chinatown. Aggie bought a Buddha figure in the first store they entered, then learned that it was actually a Bodhisattva in the second. She explained to Angela that a Bodhisattva was a Buddhist who decided to forgo entering nirvana, or heaven, until he had helped everyone else on earth to become a Buddha.
They toured the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden and learned that it was built near where Sun Yat Sen had stayed when he visited Vancouver. The garden was a replica of an ancient scholar’s home and had been painstakingly built by Chinese hands of authentic materials. Angela felt a welcome peace steal into her spirit as she listened to the patter of rain on bamboo leaves outside the master’s study. Water dripped off the red tile roofs and formed a lacy curtain hiding and then revealing the pebbled courtyards and glossy green foliage. She wanted to stay in the garden forever, but eventually she and Aggie moved on.
Angela bought a concealing silk scarf with a red dragon motif. Aggie loaded them down with a teapot in the shape of a pig, a pair of large straw fans and books on Buddhism, the garden, the history of the Chinese in Vancouver and Chinese cuisine. By the time they arrived back at the hotel, again entering through the basement, Angela felt closer to her sister than she had since childhood. The emotion was a double edged sword.
Unluckily, the hotel didn’t have room service. The receptionist explained over the phone that there was an excellent restaurant right next door. Angela pleaded a headache to avoid going with her sister to the restaurant for dinner. She asked Aggie to bring her back a doggy bag. They spent the evening watching old movies on television and laughing over childhood memories.
By the end of the weekend, Angela’s headache was real. The constant skulking around the hotel preyed on her nerves. Though they spent the day Sunday on the skytrain and had lunch and dinner far from downtown, the coming explanation was never absent from Angela’s thoughts. She knew Aggie was suspicious. Her sister had grown quieter as Sunday progressed, and when Aggie slammed the hotel door behind them Sunday night, Angela knew the moment of revelation had arrived.
Chapter 8
“All right.” Aggie grabbed Angela’s arm and dragged her toward the living room. She pushed her down into a chair. “Spill.”
“Okay. Promise me one thing. Don’t kill me until you hear the whole thing.”
Aggie didn’t think her sister’s attempt at a joke was funny. She flopped onto the sofa and stared at her twin.
“Is it that bad?”
“I’m a prostitute.”
Angela’s words hit Aggie like a baseball bat between the eyes. She felt the trust of twenty-eight years shatter like fragile crystal. How could Angela not have told her?
“You really were hurt,” she stated. “When my wrist was sore, you were in trouble. You were hurt, weren’t you?”
Angela nodded and slipped to the floor to sit at Aggie’s feet. Aggie watched detached as her hand moved to caress her sister’s hair. Her twin’s head lifted and Aggie hardly recognized the hard eyes that had once been her mirror image.
“I have to get out,” Angela stated calmly.
“Tell me what happened.”
“I went to what I thought would be a normal trick,” Angela began.
“Normal,” Aggie whispered.
“You detach,” Angela explained. “But this john was a real bastard. He wanted to make me feel bad, to humiliate me.”
“What did he do?”
“He handcuffed me.”
Aggie rubbed her wrist.
“He sodomized me. He bit me. I got a tetanus shot in case he had rabies.” Angela’s laugh was bitter. “Then he wrapped the money in a condom and shoved it up my ass. That was it, the last straw.”
Aggie felt the wetness on her cheeks before she realized she was crying.
“You have to help me get out,” Angela pleaded.
“Of course,” Aggie agreed. “You can come live with me in Cincinatti. You have a degree. I’m sure you can get a job.”
“A degree in art history isn’t very practical.”
“Just come live with me.” It was Aggie turn to beg.
“I have a plan.”
Aggie stifled a groan when she heard her sister’s words. She knew the plan would be something weird or her sister would have told her outright. She also had an intuition that it would involve her active participation. She pushed her doubts into a corner. Better to let her sister give an unprejudged explanation.
“What’s the plan?” she asked in as neutral a voice as she could manage.
Her sister must have heard or anticipated her reluctance, for her voice was defensive as she replied.
“I know it’s going to sound crazy, but I want you to listen to the end.”
“Agreed.”
“Okay.” Angela’s chest swelled as she took a deep breath. She stood up and walked into the hallway. When she returned, she held a scrap of paper in her hand. “A few weeks ago a man put this ad in the New York Times.”