The clinical nature of our relationship doesn’t bother me, the hard and fast definitions of what we are to each other reading more like a contractual agreement than anything bordering on affection. We’re cutouts on top of a wedding cake, fingers interlaced but bodies permanently frozen far apart from each other, our smiles painted on. And who cares, really? Wedding cakes are supposed to have toppers. Girls like me are supposed to have boyfriends. Checkmark.
My phone dings at me as I walk in the door, right on schedule. Picture, it says.
“Mom,” I yell, kicking off my shoes. “I need one of my baby pictures.”
I flip through the mail on the table, adding to the pile of acceptance letters from colleges I have no intention of going to. Still, they look nice padding the bottom drawer of my desk.
“Mom,” I call again, raising my voice to be heard over the ice dispenser as I get a drink. There’s no answer. I gulp down half the glass of water and pour the rest on the aloe plant she keeps on the kitchen windowsill. Its leaves are trimmed back, the tips brittle and brown from where she’s had to clip it so many times to treat the little burns she always manages to accumulate in the kitchen. She’s had the same plant for ten years; it’s one of the more useful things we own. So I water it when I’ve got anything left in my glass, one hard worker to another.
“Mom,” I try for a third time, irritated now. I’ve got homework, studying, and hopefully at least two hours of practice ahead of me. Taking care of this baby-picture business was supposed to be a quick chore, a box to checkmark. But she’s not home, which means I’m going to lose time digging through plastic bins jammed at the back of the hall closet.
I open the door and flop to the ground, dragging out an old globe, a pair of waders that fit no one, a shower mat that ended up in here for some reason, and a shoe rack with zero pairs of shoes on it. The photo bins are stacked nicely on top of one another, the only thing in here with any semblance of order.
But that’s on the outside. Once I pop the top off the first one, I realize I’ve signed up for more than a few minutes of browsing. Mom’s never been the neatest person, but the tubs aren’t even sorted by decade. There’s a shot of my mom in the nineties wearing plaid and drinking beer out of a Styrofoam cup in the same bin as a sepia-toned shot of someone I don’t know and don’t have a timeline’s chance of ever having met.
“Seriously?” I mutter under my breath as I toss a picture of Dad proudly displaying his first cell phone. I jam my hand to the bottom of the pile and close my eyes, counting on dumb luck to deliver me from this mess of undated, unnamed, unorganized people. A sharp edge slides under my thumbnail and I yank back, dragging it with me.
The paper is thin, the corner jammed a couple millimeters under my nail, angry red dots of trapped blood welling around it. I pull it free and unroll it, expecting to see the receipt from when Mom bought the plastic bins.
But it’s a picture. Specifically, an ultrasound.
“Wonder what Lilly would make of that,” I say to myself. I don’t know if fetal-me would be more interesting to her than Cole Vance’s tiny penis.
Except . . . it’s not me. Or rather, it’s not just me.
I scan panel to panel, analyzing what I see, separating black from gray, sound bouncing back off solid versus liquid. The shapes are difficult to distinguish, more white noise than picture. But the neatly printed text at the bottom cannot be misinterpreted, my mother’s name and the date—when she would’ve been pregnant with me.
But I’m not alone in there.
A paradigm shift is defined as a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions, and people often come unmoored when they occur. The Catholic Church persecuted Galileo when he argued for a heliocentric universe; people didn’t know germs caused illnesses until the nineteenth century.
And I thought I was an only child until just now.
I take it well, all things considered. That is to say I fall over, crumpling the photos I’d tossed aside. A thousand sharp-edged corners dig into my skin as all the blood leaves my head, my fingers and toes tingling as every drop concentrates to my center. To my engorged heart.
I felt it swell at the sight of two amorphous blobs, vague outline of limbs entwined with one another, heads inclined as if sharing a secret. My heart beats to tear through my chest, my collarbone pounding with the rhythm of it. I am no longer flesh and bone; I am one organ only.
And it will have its way.
I didn’t know I stopped breathing until I take a deep gasp, the black spots on my vision fading with the action. My hands come back to life, curling around the ultrasound as my mind grapples with the new information, scanning the tidy columns of known things it has acquired and not finding a spot to fit this particular fact.
It’s in the shape of a question mark, and I don’t allow for those. There is no place for this, so I stare until the feeling is back in my hands and feet, until I’m able to slowly sit up, the world righted again though so much in it has gone wrong.
I fold the picture, taking care to crease only the white lines separating the pictures, as if the yet-to-be-born could be harmed. It makes a perfect rectangle, a life-changing fact that fits neatly in my pocket. I put the rest of the pictures back, stack the bins, toss all the useless things no one ever sees back where they were, relegated once again to nonexistence.
Like my twin sister.
I. Things I Know
A. Ultrasound
1. According to date and name of mother, one of the fetuses is me.
2. Both of the fetuses are female.
3. This has been kept from me on purpose.
II. Things I Don’t Know
A. Sister
1. If she was born
2. If she died
3. If she was adopted
B. How Isaac Harver got my number
I shake my head and erase out the last line as irrelevant. I don’t like not knowing things, but that list has suddenly become longer than I imagined possible, and I need to prioritize. I write unlikely next to adopted. We’re not rich but definitely comfortable enough to afford two kids. I’ve chewed the eraser off my pencil, spitting out the soft pink nub and crunching the metal that held it between my teeth while I think.
Mom came home half an hour ago, Dad shortly after. She’s banging pots and pans around in the kitchen, his earplugs are doing overtime, so neither one of them knows I’m not playing clarinet up here. Instead I’m weighing my options.
I can walk downstairs, the ultrasound trailing behind me like a ticker-tape parade celebrating the dawn of a new world, one in which I’m aware of my anonymous sibling. I know how that will play out. Mom will cry; Dad will yell; I will stand like a pillar in a storm, demanding truth. I spit out the metal casing from the eraser and chomp down on the wet wood of the pencil, appreciating the give in it when everything else seems to be pushing back at me.
I fold up my list, blowing away the last bits of eraser that linger from eradicating Isaac Harver’s name. If only I could drag one across my brain, ridding myself of him up there too. My heart gives a little shudder at the thought, and I look down at my chest.