On the back of the yellowed hospital bracelet, in faded ink, someone had written a single word. Second. Diane caught my arm when my knees went, and told me she had been adopted by a family in Cincinnati three days after we were born, and had only found out I existed from a DNA test last fall.
My mother gave one of us away, I said. Why. And Diane looked at the side door, the one my brother Roger had just walked out of, and said, she did not give me away. Your father took me. And your brother knows where he took me first.
It took weeks to put it all together, gently, between two women in their sixties meeting for the first time. In 1961 our father, before he left for good in 1967, had taken one twin in the middle of a terrible year and handed her to strangers, and told our mother the baby had not survived. Mama carried that lie, and that grief, her whole life, and never once spoke of the year I was born.
For sixty-four years I thought I was the only daughter, and my own mother had been mourning a child she was told was dead.
Roger had learned the truth as a boy, and our father had made him swear to keep it, and the weight of it had sat on my brother for a lifetime. That was why he charged down the aisle. Not cruelty. Fear.
Diane and I did the DNA, formally, and there was no doubt. Twins. We buried our mother together that week, two daughters at the graveside instead of one, and I like to think, wherever she is, she finally got to stop grieving.
We are making up for sixty-four years as fast as two old women can. Diane has my scar through the left eyebrow, from a swing she fell off in Cincinnati the same year I fell off mine. Some things, it turns out, the distance never could change.