Then she said my name, just my name, in a voice I had never once heard her use in fifty years of being her brother, because when she got the paper unwrapped, the paper with both our names on it in our mother hand, what was inside was two lockets. A matching pair, old gold, worn smooth with the years. And when she opened them, and then told me over the phone what was sitting inside them, I had to sit down myself.
In her locket was a baby picture of me. In mine, when she overnighted it down to me and I opened it with shaking hands, was a baby picture of her. Our mother had put each of us inside the other, and kept them, all these years, and left them wrapped together with both our names, for the two of us to find after she was gone.
There was a note folded in with them. You two came into this world eleven months apart, and you have been each other since before either of you could talk. I am leaving you a little money and some furniture. But this is the only thing that matters. You are all each other has now. Wear these, and remember that you belong to one another. Everything else is just furniture.
My sister and I have not been close these last few years. Nothing dramatic, no blowup, just life, just distance, the slow quiet drift that happens when the parent who was the center of everything is still alive and you figure there will always be time. She took the armoire because she asked for it and I said sure, go on and take it, I have the memory, and there was a little coolness even in that, a little of the keeping-score that grown brothers and sisters fall into. And our mother, who saw everything, who never missed one thing about her two children, had known. She had known we were drifting apart, and she reached out from the far side of her own death and put each of us back around the neck of the other.
My sister cried on the phone. I did too, a grown man of fifty-some years, sitting there in my kitchen holding a locket with my baby sister face in it. We talked for three hours that night, longer than we had talked in three years put together. And then she got in her truck the very next weekend and drove back down to see me, and we sat together and went through old pictures and laughed and cried and were, for the first time in a long time, exactly what our mother raised us to be to each other.
I wear that locket now. So does she. Our mother left the two of us a jewelry armoire and a little money and a houseful of furniture, and she was right about it, it is all just furniture. The only thing she really left us was each other, wrapped up in paper with both our names, hidden in a false bottom, waiting there to remind two drifting middle-aged children of the one thing that was always true. We belong to one another. We always did. She just made good and sure we would not forget it, once she was no longer here to remind us herself.