“…that you and she were born the same snowy night in January of 1955, forty minutes apart, in the farmhouse near Brindle Creek, Washington,” Carol said, “and the midwife wrote out only one birth paper.” I sat at her kitchen table with my coat still on. Carol is eighty one, and her hands shook around the teacup. She told me our mother Opal was so weak after the twins came that Aunt Verna took the smaller baby home to Phoenix for one winter. The baby was named Lorraine. One winter became a lifetime, and the only paper the family owned had my name on it.
I asked Carol why nobody had ever told me. She closed her eyes. “Mama was ashamed,” she said. “Daddy had lost the farm, and Aunt Verna had no children and begged to keep her. They agreed in a hard season, and then they could not undo it. They made me promise at ten years old never to say a word.” She went to the hall closet and came back with a shoebox tied with kitchen string. Inside were birthday cards, one for every January, each signed “To my other half, from Lorraine,” each addressed to me, and each never given.
I read the cards until my tea went cold. Lorraine had been a typist at a shipping office in Phoenix. She wrote about a cat named Biscuit, a yellow kitchen, and a scar above her left eyebrow from a fall off a porch rail, the very scar I carry from a swing in Flagstaff. She wrote that she dreamed of a sister who laughed like her. In 1976 she needed surgery, and the hospital asked for a name and a birth paper. Aunt Verna had only the one, so Lorraine was admitted as Nora Jean Whitaker. She passed away there that spring, still wearing my name.
A twin sister raised apart used the one shared birth paper, and Nora learns the truth and gives her sister a name of her own.
Carol and I did not wait for the police. The next morning I drove with her to the licensing office, and I told the supervisor, Mrs. Delgado, everything I had learned, plain and unpolished. I told her I had not known, and I told her the cards were in my purse if she wished to see them. She was quiet for a long minute. Then she said, “Mrs. Mitchell, you did nothing wrong. You were a baby when this began.” She explained that a record could be corrected with a sworn statement, a church record, and the written word of whoever delivered us.
The midwife was long gone, but her ledger was not. We found it in the county historical society at Brindle Creek, kept in a cedar box beside the donated quilts. Under January 1955 the midwife, Agnes Voss, had written two lines in a slanting hand: “Girl, six pounds four ounces, Nora Jean. Girl, five pounds one ounce, Lorraine Rae. One paper filed. Opal too ill to sign for the second. Will return.” She had meant to come back and file the second paper, and then the winter had swallowed the plan. I held that page and understood that my sister had been written down and loved, and simply never finished.
We also found a baptism record at Little Hollis Chapel, where a pastor with careful handwriting had listed both girls by name on the same Sunday in March. Carol cried when she saw it, because for seventy years she had believed her sister was a secret even the church did not know. Mrs. Delgado took our papers and made calls to people with titles I could not follow. Three weeks later the state corrected its files, placing the passing of 1976 under the right name, Lorraine Rae Whitaker, and keeping me as the living Nora. My new license came in the mail, and it was finally mine. I read the name on it three times, slowly.
The second thing I needed to do could not be done through any office. Carol drove me to a quiet cemetery in Phoenix, where Aunt Verna had laid Lorraine to rest. The stone said NORA JEAN WHITAKER in letters weathered gray. I stood in front of my own name for a long time. Then I spoke to her out loud, the way you would to someone across a table. I said I had always felt like a woman with an empty chair beside her, and now I knew whose chair it was.
With Carol beside me, I paid for a new stone out of my own savings. It reads LORRAINE RAE WHITAKER, BELOVED TWIN OF NORA, 1955 to 1976. My three children came when it was set, and my daughter Beth brought yellow roses, because Lorraine wrote that she loved a yellow kitchen. My little grandson asked why Grandma was crying and smiling at once. I told him that sometimes you find something you did not know you had lost, and the finding feels just like the losing, only warmer.
That evening Carol and I sat on my porch in Flagstaff, and she finally said what she had carried for seventy years. “I should have told you when I turned eighteen. I was afraid you would hate Mama, and hate me.” I took her hand. I told her I hated no one, that a ten year old girl keeps the promises that grown ups hand her, and that she had saved every one of those cards when it would have been easier to burn them. She laid her head on my shoulder like a child, and we sat together until the stars came out above the pines.
Last Christmas I opened the shoebox again and found a card I had missed, tucked beneath the string. It was dated January 1976, three months before the surgery, and it said only: “If I ever have to borrow your name, I promise to take good care of it.” I held it against my heart. For almost fifty years I wore the name of two sisters without knowing it, and she kept her promise. Now each of us has a name of her own, and mine has never felt so full.
