Under there was my mother. Her own first name, Ellen, written in her own hand, the first four letters of it, and then the pen stopped.
The curator showed me the image on her computer. Somebody else had taken the pen and written over it. Rose.
My mother was a twin. I found that out in a museum back room at fifty four years old, wearing cotton gloves.
The curator had already done some of the digging, because that overwritten line had bothered her for six years. Rose was listed as missing after the water came through on the second night. Her two children were brought in by a neighbor, a boy of four and a girl of two. My mother was the one at the table when they came in. She started to write the name of her sister and wrote her own instead, because they were twins, and her hand did not know the difference. Then she could not finish, and another volunteer took the pen.
My mother sat at that table for nine days writing down other people who were lost, while her own sister was one of them.
Rose was never found. The children went to a county home. My mother was twenty four, single, and had nothing. She tried to take them. The county said no.
A year later she moved away and never went back. She told everybody she had been in Oklahoma that year, because if she said she had been there, somebody would ask.
The curator had one more thing. The children were adopted together in 1969 by a family named Wendt. The museum keeps a list of flood survivors who have contacted them over the years, and the girl was on it. She had written in 2021 asking if anyone had records about her birth mother.
Her name is Carol now. Carol Wendt Burke, fifty nine, a retired postal worker. The museum put us in touch.
I sent her a picture of my mother. She wrote back one line. That is the face of my mother.
Of course it was. They were identical.
Carol and her brother Don drove up in October. I had never had a cousin in my life. Now I had two. We sat in my kitchen with every photo of my mother I own, and Carol held one up next to her own face so Don could see, and he said he did not remember his mother at all but he remembered a woman who looked like that singing to them in a shelter.
That was my mother. She sang to them while she worked the intake table. She never told a soul.
The museum asked if our family would like to add something to the exhibit. So now, under that glass, beside the ledger, there is a small card. It says the volunteer who wrote these eleven lines was Ellen, twin sister of Rose, and that the two children she wrote in on the sixth page grew up, and found their way back.
Carol and I go every spring. We stand in front of it together. Sometimes people ask if we are sisters. We tell them close enough.