from her sister, Grandma. That is what I heard Mommy say on the phone. But I think the lady looks nice. She looks like you.” I stood in the hallway of the brick house in Millbrook Hollow with that photograph shaking in my fingers. My daughter Renata came down the stairs two at a time, white as flour. I did not shout and I did not accuse her of anything. I only said, “Renata, whoever she is, I would like to know.” Her shoulders dropped. She took the photograph, turned it over, and read the date aloud. Then she said, “Mom, please sit down. I have been trying to find a way to tell you for six weeks.”
“Five years ago we stopped speaking over a foolish argument about the house of your late husband, and I was too proud to call,” Renata said. “Then in March, my husband Daniel gave me one of those spit in a tube family kits for my birthday. Three weeks later a message came from a woman named Edith Lindqvist. The kit said she was a close relative. It said she was my aunt.” Renata pressed both hands over her mouth. “Mom, you have a twin sister. Her name is Edith. She was born eleven minutes before you, in a Harrisburg hospital, in the winter of 1956.”
I could not speak. My mother raised me on a farm outside Lititz, and she always told me I was a plain, single baby born in a snowstorm. She passed away in 1999 and never said a word about another child. Renata explained what Edith had pieced together. In 1956 my mother was nineteen and alone, and the home for young mothers told her she could keep only one baby. She chose the one who was crying. That was me. The other baby was placed with a kind couple named Lindqvist, who raised her in a yellow house on Larkspur Lane, forty minutes from my own kitchen.
A woman finds out her daughter secretly located the identical twin she never knew she had, and the sisters meet at last.
“Edith knew about you all her life,” Renata said softly. “She searched for forty years. When she saw my name on the kit, she cried on the phone for an hour.” I held up the little photograph and asked about it. Renata smiled through her tears. “She mailed me that picture. It was taken on the fourth birthday of her son Walter. She wanted you to see that she had a good life.” So that was the woman who had been taken from me, by the rules of another time and not by anyone with a cruel heart. I felt something loosen inside my chest.
“But why did Theo say those things?” I asked. “Because I told him a story to keep my secret,” Renata admitted. “I said the lady in the yellow house had a different name and looked like his grandmother, so he would not blurt anything out. He is eight. He mixed it all up, and I did not know he had found the picture in my drawer.” Theo peeked around the staircase, red in the face. I knelt down on my sore knees and opened my arms. “Sweetheart, I am the real one, and so is she. There are two of us. Nobody took anybody away. It was just how things were done long ago.”
Daniel came in from the garage just then, wiping his hands on a rag, and he looked as guilty as a boy with a broken window. “I told her to tell you sooner,” he said. “I am sorry we kept it quiet.” I waved the apology away. Six weeks was nothing against sixty nine years. What mattered was that my daughter had picked up the phone to a stranger, when she could have ignored the message, and that she had done it for me. I told her so, and she leaned her forehead against my shoulder the way she did when she was small.
“Where is she now?” I asked. “Forty minutes from here,” said Renata. “Edith has been sitting by her phone since noon. I wanted you to have a nice dinner first, but I think dinner can wait.” So we left the roast in the oven, buckled Theo into the back seat, and drove to Larkspur Lane. I held the tin of cookies on my lap like a treasure. All the way there I thought about my mother and the choice she made at nineteen, with nobody to ask. I decided I would not blame her. A frightened girl does what she can with what she has.
The yellow house had a porch swing and a pot of red geraniums by the steps. The front door opened before we reached it. A woman with my chin, my gray curls, and my crooked left eyebrow stood gripping the frame. Neither of us spoke for what felt like a full minute. Then she whispered, “You smell like cinnamon,” and I laughed and cried together, because I had been baking since sunrise. She held out both arms. I stepped into them, and sixty nine years folded up like a letter that had finally been delivered to the right address.
We sat on that porch swing until the streetlights came on. Edith brought out a shoebox of birthday cards she had written to me and never sent, one for each year, sixty nine in all. Her handwriting slanted just like mine. Her husband Gus had passed away six years before, and her son Walter lived far away in Ohio, so she had been alone in that house for a long time. I told her about the farm, my knees, and my late husband. Theo ate three cookies and announced that the lady in the photograph was officially his second grandma.
Before we left, Renata hugged me and said, “I am sorry for the five years, Mom. I let a silly fight steal time from us.” I told her we had both been proud, and that pride was the one thing I wanted to leave in that yard. The next Sunday, Edith came to dinner in Millbrook Hollow, and we stood side by side beneath the family photograph on the wall. Theo took a new picture of us, two gray heads and one crooked eyebrow each. On the back he wrote in crayon: “The real Grandmas. Both of them.” One baby went home in 1956, and at last the whole family came home together.