My older sister Doris answered on the seventh ring, and from the first word I could tell she had been expecting this call for sixty seven years. I had not planned to say so much. I only asked whether she remembered where I had been in the summer of 1995. There was a long silence on the line. I could hear her kitchen clock ticking in Savannah. Then she said, in a very low voice, “Ellie, I think you had better sit down. I have been keeping something from you since you were a baby, and I have run out of time to keep it.”
I sat on my couch with the white leather album open on my lap and Jenna on the cushion beside me, her hands twisted together, her sweet frightened face turned toward the phone. I put it on speaker. Doris told it all in a rush, as though she had rehearsed it. Our mother, Ruth, had given birth to twin girls in April 1958, in a small hospital in Ohio. Two identical daughters, with the same dark curls and the same dimple in the left cheek. Our father had lost his job at the mill that winter. There was no money. They could barely feed three children.
“Mama sent one of you to her sister in Florida,” Doris said. “Aunt Pearl had no children of her own. She was a nurse in Key West, and she wanted a baby so badly. It was only supposed to be for a year. But a year became two, and Mama could not bear to take her back, and Pearl would not give her up. They agreed to keep it quiet. I was six. I remember the day Pearl drove away with a bundle in a blue blanket. I cried for hours. Mama made me promise never to say the name of your sister.”
I put my hand to my chest. I looked at the photograph of the woman in the lavender dress, with her head thrown back, laughing, her hair a little darker than mine, her chin lifted. I had thought she was me. I had been unable to understand how. “What was her name?” I asked. “Marian,” said Doris. “Marian Pearl Voight. Pearl raised her as her own. She grew up in Key West. She was a nurse like Pearl, and a diver, and she had a wicked sense of humor. I saw her once, at the funeral of Pearl, in 1991. She did not know about you.”
Two sisters can live a lifetime apart and still carry the face of each other, and find each other at last under the umbrella of a stranger on a rainy afternoon.
Jenna drew a shaky breath. She asked, very softly, how her mother fit in. Doris said that Colleen, the bride in the wedding picture, had been the best friend of Marian since the seventh grade. They had worked together at the same hospital. Marian had been the maid of honor at the wedding in Key West, in a lavender dress. And in the summer of 1998, Marian had learned she was pregnant, by a man who had left her. She was forty years old. She was frightened, and she was also very sick. She was diagnosed with a cancer that would not respond to treatment.
I felt the fingers of Jenna close on my wrist. The voice of the old woman came through the phone, steady now and kind. Marian had asked Colleen to adopt the baby. She had arranged everything in a hospital in Miami, and she had signed the papers when the child was three days old. She had asked that the birth certificate be sealed, to protect Jenna from the pain of knowing a mother who would not live to raise her. She died in 2004, when Jenna was five. Colleen had raised Jenna as her daughter and told her only that her birth mother had been a friend.
“So you are not her mother,” I whispered to Jenna. “Marian was.” She nodded, her eyes streaming. “And you are her twin,” she said. “You have her face.” We stared at each other across the album. It was true. In the lamplight, I saw her cheekbones, the line of her brow, the same slightly crooked left eyebrow. I had met my own niece at a bus stop in the rain, and I had held an umbrella over her without knowing, and it was the most natural thing I had ever done.
Doris wept on the phone. She said she was so sorry. She said she had lived her whole life with the weight of a promise she had made at six years old, and that she did not know how to break it. “I always thought I would tell you when Mama died,” she said. “Then she died, and I was afraid. Then you retired, and I was afraid. I am eighty two years old, Ellie. I do not want to go into the ground with this.” I told her I forgave her. I told her I was glad. Jenna leaned over and said into the phone, “Aunt Doris, thank you.”
She stayed with me that week. We pored over the photographs. There was one of Marian at twenty, sunburned and grinning, on the deck of a dive boat. One of Marian in scrubs. One of Marian and Colleen at a table, with a cake. In every picture the face was mine, and yet it was not. It was alive with a kind of freedom I had never known. I had spent my life in a small town in Florida, teaching school, taking the bus. My sister had spent hers underwater.
At the end of the week, Jenna took me to Key West. We stood on the end of the pier at sunset, and she opened a small carved box that Colleen had kept, and she let me pour the ashes of Marian into the sea. They had been waiting for a sister. The water was green and clear, and the sun melted into it like butter. I said a short prayer. I said, “Marian, I am sorry it took us so long.” And a small wave lapped up against the post, as though somebody had answered.
Jenna calls me Aunt Ellie. We have supper every Sunday, and she brings the album, and we add a new picture each week. In the front, I put one more photograph. It shows the two of us on the bench at the bus stop on Kennedy Boulevard, under my big black umbrella, laughing at a joke I cannot remember. Beneath it, in careful ink, I wrote the date. Under that I added a single line. Found, March, in the rain.