“…your twin sister, Ruth,” Aunt Evelyn said, and she held both my hands as if I might fall through the floor.
We sat on the screened porch of her little house outside Tucson. The desert wind rattled the glass of tea between us. She was eighty seven, small as a sparrow, with a face I had known only in Christmas cards for fifty years.
“I do not have a sister,” I said.
“You had one,” she said. “You were born ten minutes apart, in the winter of 1971. Two little girls, with the same dimple in the same cheek. Your mother adored you both.”
She told me the rest with her eyes fixed on the cactus in the yard. Our father, a charming man with a drinking problem, had left when we were three. When we turned five he came back one afternoon and drove away with Ruth in his truck. He claimed that he had the right to one child. The police never caught up with him.
“Your mother knew he would come back for you,” said Evelyn. “So she put you on a bus to me, with a suitcase and a note, and told you it was because she was sick. She kept you hidden for a year until the court order was signed.”
I felt the whole of my childhood rearrange itself. The year with my aunt. The way my mother held me too tight at the school gate. The way she looked at the empty chair at every Thanksgiving, and the day I found her crying in the pantry and she said it was only onions.
“And she never told me,” I said.
“She was ashamed,” said Evelyn. “She believed she had failed to protect one child, and she was afraid that if she told you, you would stop believing she could protect the other.”
On the video that my cousin Beth sent by mistake, my mother had spoken to my older brother Paul in a whisper. She still does not know why we sent her away. And Paul had answered, She never will, unless you tell her about the other child. They had known, the two of them, for decades.
I drove home that night with my hands tight on the wheel. I did not go to my mother house. I went to my own kitchen and sat there until three in the morning, writing a list of every question I wanted to ask, and then tearing it up.
In the morning I did something else. I took a DNA kit I had bought for fun two years earlier and never opened. I spat into the tube, sealed it, and mailed it from the post office in my slippers.
Six weeks later I got an email. One close match. A woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma, named Ruth Ann Dobbs, fifty three years old. Her photograph came attached. She had my mother chin and my eyes, and in her left cheek was a dimple.
I wrote to her five times and deleted four of the messages. The fifth said only, “I think I am your sister.” She wrote back within the hour. “I have been looking for you my whole life. I remembered a little girl in a yellow coat.”
We talked on the phone for six hours that first night. She had grown up with our father in motels and trailers, and he had told her that her mother did not want her. At sixteen she went to live with a foster family who loved her, and she had been searching ever since, but our names had been changed.
The following weekend I took the first plane to Tulsa. At the gate I saw a woman in a yellow coat, and neither of us could speak. We simply held each other in the middle of the airport while strangers walked around us.
The hardest part was my mother. I sat down with her on a Sunday afternoon, with Paul beside me, and I said, “Mom, I know about Ruth.” She turned the color of paper. She tried to explain and could not. I took her hand and said, “I am not angry. I want to bring her home.”
We went to Tulsa together in her eighty first year. When my mother stepped off the plane she saw Ruth waiting by the baggage claim, and she walked forward very slowly, the way a person walks into a church. Ruth said, “Mama?” and my mother, who had been strong for forty eight years, finally let it go.
At her next birthday, the cake had three names on it, and the video that Beth recorded this time she sent to me on purpose.
