With five children age six and under, Felicia Simms has little time for reading or reflection. She takes each day as it comes and does her best to put it to bed with her children, knowing, as the mother of Krista and Tatiana, Canada’s most famous twins, that the morning will have a fresh agenda of challenge, worry and reward. So, it took time to read Lori Lansens’ bestselling novel, The Girls, about a set of twins just like hers—craniopagus twins, joined at the head. Each night as Simms, 23, rocked her twins to bed, she’d read: a chapter, or a few pages, or until her tears made words swim on the page.
Lansens’ novel was published a year before Krista and Tatiana were born. The parallels are eerie. The novel is a joint narrative, the separate recollections of the fictional Rose and Ruby Darlen, “known to the world medical community as the oldest surviving craniopagus twins.” Lansens, born and raised in Chatham, Ont., set her novel in small-town Ontario. Simms and her partner, Brendan Hogan, raise their children in the small city of Vernon, in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley.
Simms was hooked from the opening paragraph of The Girls. How could she not be? It begins in Rose’s voice: “I have never looked into my sister’s eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon. I’ve never used an airplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that. I’ve never driven a car.” The fictional twins are 29 years old as they reminisce. Krista and Tatiana—Canada’s only conjoined twins, real flesh and blood with sparkling eyes, and a growing sense of their abilities, if not their limitations—turn two Oct. 25. Their very public lives have been an open book, with only the opening chapters yet written. The poignant story of Rose and Ruby is a work of the imagination—one of an infinite number of possible outcomes for two girls yoked together for life. Still, says Simms, “I relate to it so much.”
The twins’ second birthday will be celebrated in the gymnasium of the Pleasant Valley Christian Academy in Vernon. Although money is perpetually in short supply, the family has issued an open invitation to the town. “People want to see how they’re doing,” says Hogan, their father. The twins are treated with a mixture of curiosity and awe, and, in some quarters, with revulsion and disapproval. No one is sure what to expect: will there be 40 people or 200, wonders Louise McKay, Simms’s mom, chief party planner, and family matriarch. Gradually, though, the twins have become less an attraction, more a part of town life. “We can actually go out and get our shopping done,” says Simms, “and it doesn’t take us an hour to get through the store.”
