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When the tall man who looks like Death brings Helena off the plane, her sister is there waiting for her. Helena can tell that this girl is her sister, and not one of the photograph-copies; she can feel it beating in her chest. They are both thirteen years old. She knows, she can feel it: they were born on the same day.
She’s round in places Helena isn’t round – which means that she’s been fed, which means good things for both of them. Her hair is long and shining and brown and it falls around her face. She has eyeshadow smeared all around her eyes, big clunky headphones on her neck, hands shoved into the pockets of a sweatshirt. She looks: scared. She looks: hopeful. Helena is also both of those things, so Helena loves her.
There’s a woman standing behind her with red hair, and she pulls the-tall-man-who-looks-like-Death away from Helena. The two of them have a whispered conversation that Helena doesn’t listen to. She stares at the girl who is her sister. “Hello,” she says. (This is one of the one-hundred-and-seventy-two English words she knows.)
“Hey,” says the girl, her voice raspy and trembling. She sounds like a dog you aren’t supposed to shoot. Hey has the same sound as hello, so it probably means the same thing. “Wow,” says the girl, and then “you really are my sister.”
“Wow,” Helena echoes. The sound rounds out her mouth. “Yes,” she adds. “You are my sister. Really. Also there are more. But not us.” English fails her; she closes her mouth.
“Yeah,” says the girl who is Helena’s sister. She swallows and looks away. “We’re lucky. Most kids don’t – don’t get to find their families at all, yeah? Not like us.”
“No,” Helena says, “no – not like us, the others, they are—” but the woman with red hair is back, and she has a hand on Helena’s sister’s shoulder, and Helena tenses, but she doesn’t do anything to hurt her. The hand is just there, not doing anything. Strange.
“You two get introduced?” she says, voice loud and slow the way people’s voices get when they know Helena doesn’t speak English. “I still don’t know your name, chicken.”
“Helena,” says Helena.
“Oh, shit,” says Helena’s sister.
“Language,” says the woman with the red hair.
“Yeah, yeah, sorry,” says Helena’s sister, though she doesn’t sound like she means it. “I’m – yeah. My name’s Sarah. Sorry. I – yeah.”
“Sarah,” says Helena. She smiles. Sarah smiles back at her. They are walked away through the airport by the woman who says her name is Siobhan-Sadler-call-me-S-love-I-know-it’s-a-mouthful. She watches Sarah the whole time. Sarah watches her. They keep passing the same smile back and forth, different corners of the same different mouth.
They get in the backseat of a car. Helena watches Sarah buckle her seatbelt; Helena buckles her seatbelt. They drive off.
“You’re gonna like Canada,” says Sarah. She stops; her mouth does a weird twist. “Alright, maybe you won’t. Can I tell you a secret?”
“Yes,” says Helena, fast, in case she takes it away – the chance for Helena to have a secret with her sister, something she never would have thought of before.
“It’s shitty here,” Sarah says, low, so that Siobhan-Sadler-call-me-S doesn’t listen from the driver’s seat. Helena leans in close. They lean in close to each other. “It’s cold,” Sarah says, “and there’s all this bloody slush, and everyone’s got these weird accents, and it’s shite.”
“But you’re here,” Helena says.
Sarah grins and laughs and at the same time tries to crush both of those things and looks at the rearview mirror and looks away and twists herself in so many directions at once it looks like it should hurt her. “I’m nothing special,” she says, even though her mouth is still holding onto a smile. “You’ll figure that out.”
Helena hits her in the arm.
“Ow,” Sarah says, and Helena realizes this was a mistake: you don’t get hit for lying, here in Canada, in this family. Helena wasn’t supposed to.
“Sorry,” she says.
Sarah is still grinning a little bit. “It’s fine,” she says. “Pushed my – pushed our foster brother down the stairs, once, we’re big on tough love here.”
“No,” Helena says. “Soft love.” She can’t find the word. She holds her hand open like a photograph of a slap, and then softens it. Her fingers curl. “Love,” she says.
Sarah touches her fingertips to Helena’s. Her face looks sad. “Was it like that, where you were,” she says.
Helena doesn’t say anything. She curls her hand into a fist, so that Sarah’s fingertips are touching the sharp points of her knuckles. Sarah curls her hand over Helena’s fist, wrapping it in her hand, making it safe to hold. Her face is still so sad. Helena has just met her, and she already knows: Sarah was wrong. She’s special. Helena can tell.
“But now I am home,” she says to the silence, and she uncurls her fist. Her fingers cup Sarah’s fingers, linked together like two parts of a chain. There doesn’t need to be any other part of the chain. If there are other parts out there, Helena never has to meet them. Not anymore.
“Yeah,” Sarah says. She squeezes Helena’s hand a little bit. “We look after each other here. You’re family. I’ll kick the shit out of anyone who even tries to – I’ll kill them for you, you got it? You’re gonna be safe here.”
Somewhere, a gun goes off. A dog dies. I’ll kill them for you: a sentence said in a field to a woman with black hair.
Safe is a foreign word. Not foreign because it doesn’t translate; foreign because it’s such a complete unknown.
“Safe,” Helena echoes.
“Oh,” Sarah says, “it means—”
“I know what it means,” Helena says. “It means you.”