Four years ago my husband and his mother buried one of my twin girls while I lay in a hospital bed, too weak to stand at her grave. Last Tuesday, eight hundred miles from that cemetery, my daughter’s swim coach walked up smiling and said, “Both of your girls are doing great.” Then she offered to take me to the other one.
Jordyn got sick on a Thursday, a fever nothing could knock down and a limpness in her arms that scared me worse than the number on the thermometer.
The doctors ran every test they had and never landed on one answer. Probably an infection in her blood, they said.
She was gone by Sunday.
I don’t remember much of what came after that.
They put me in a bed two floors down with a drip in my arm, because I’d stopped eating and the floor tilted every time I stood up.
Seth and his mother handled everything. Debra picked the funeral home, the casket and the little white dress, and I signed whatever she slid in front of me.
I couldn’t make it to the service. Seth said it was BETTER that way.
After that I kept going for Abigail, because she was what I had left.
Four years went by and it never got any smaller.
So I asked Seth if we could leave. Sell the house, start over somewhere nobody tilted their head at us in the grocery store.
We bought a split-level outside Eau Claire with a creek out back and a neighbor who mows his lawn at six in the morning.
Abigail turned six in May, and I signed her up for summer swim lessons at the town beach.
Second week, I walked down at noon to get her. She was crouched on the sand, stuffing a wet towel into her mesh bag.
Her coach came over swinging a clipboard, a sunburned woman named Missy with a whistle on a cord.
She said the line about both my girls the way you’d mention the weather.
I laughed a little and said, “I think you’ve got me mixed up with another mom. I’ve only got ONE.”
Missy frowned at her clipboard. “Huh. I’m still learning everybody. But Abigail’s a twin, isn’t she? Those two are identical. I just figured they were both yours.”
My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
“We split them into two groups,” she said. “The other group’s finishing up at the far dock. Your OTHER one’s down there. Come on.”
My legs just followed her.
I still didn’t understand a word of what she was telling me.
At the end of the dock a row of kids sat wrapped in towels with their feet hanging in the lake.
Missy stopped, pointed at the third towel and said, “There SHE IS. ABIGAIL’S TWIN SISTER.”
My lungs just QUIT.
The third towel
The girl in the third towel turned her head.
She had Abigail’s face. Not close to it. The same face, the same curls going to frizz where the lake had got into them, the same gap on the bottom where a tooth had come out. And Abigail was behind me on the sand. I could hear her flip-flops slapping.
“Jordy,” Missy called, “your mom’s here!”
Jordy. Nobody had called her that since she was in a high chair.
The girl looked at me. Then she looked past me, up the bank to the parking lot, and her mouth shut like she’d been caught at something. Her left hand was in a gray Velcro brace, held against her stomach the way you’d hold a bird.
I got down on the planks because my knees were gone. I said, “Hi.” That was all I had.
“Hi,” she said. She had Abigail’s voice too, that scrape in it.
Missy was talking about sunscreen and the Thursday schedule. I heard none of it. I was looking where the girl had looked, up past the rope and the trash cans to the last space in the lot, where a silver Buick sat with its engine running and a dent in the back bumper I’d have known anywhere.
Debra’s car.
What was my mother-in-law doing in that lot, at noon on a Tuesday, with the engine on?
The box marked J
When we moved, Seth wouldn’t let the movers touch one box. He carried it himself, a liquor store carton with a J on the side in marker, and he put it on the top shelf of our bedroom closet before he’d bring in a single lamp.
Inside it was the folder Debra handed me in the hospital. Everything I’d signed. I never opened it. I’d tried once, the week before we left, and Seth had come in and taken it out of my lap and said, “It’s funeral bills, Carly, it’ll only put you back in that bed.” He was right about the bed. I put the box on the shelf and left it there.
Seth drove Abigail to swim lessons. Every morning, eleven-fifteen, and he’d offered before I could. He said he liked the drive. I thought it was sweet. He took Tuesdays and Thursdays off from the shop for it, which he’d never done for anything.
Abigail had a friend at the beach. Jordy. Jordy can’t do the ladder either, she said at dinner. Jordy’s mad at me. I thought she meant a girl called Jordan, or one of those friends kids make up, and I’d said “Is Jordy nice?” and she’d said “She’s the same as me,” and Seth had asked her to pass the corn.
And Debra had followed us. Not at once. A month after we closed on the house she rented a condo twelve minutes away, off the highway, because she wanted to be near her granddaughter, she said. She’d never lived more than three miles from the place where she was born. Her sister Evelyn had spent her last thirty years in a county home in Wausau, and Debra visited her every Sunday and came out gray, and used to say that some people can’t carry what’s put on them and it’s a kindness to know which ones.
She said it to me once. In the hospital. I’d thought she was talking about herself.
Now I was on my knees on a dock with a girl who had my daughter’s face, and everything on that list lined up behind me like the kids on the towels.
“Are you the lady?” the girl said.
I said, “What lady?”
She looked up at the Buick again.
“Grandma says I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
Abigail’s flip-flops
Abigail came down the dock at a run and stopped dead beside me. She looked at me, at Missy, at the girl in the towel. Then she did a thing I will see for the rest of my life. She sat down on the planks next to her sister and took her good hand without being asked, like they’d been doing it every day.
“Mom,” she said. “Don’t be mad.”
“Abby.”
“Dad said it was a surprise. He said you’d get a surprise at my birthday party and you’d be so happy.” Her eyes were already filling. “I wasn’t supposed to say it was Jordy. I said her name anyway, that one time.”
At dinner. Pass the corn.
“How long, baby?”
“Since the first lesson. And on Saturdays we go to Grandma’s and she’s there. Dad takes me.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “We have a dog with a bad leg. Her name is Pickle.”
Saturdays. Every Saturday since June, Seth had put Abigail in the truck and told me he was taking her to see her grandmother, and I’d stood at the kitchen window and thought: good, they need that, they’re the ones who got me through.
Missy had a hand over her mouth. She’d got there faster than I had. She said, “Oh my God. I thought Debra was just the grandma who did the pickups. She signed the sheet. I thought you knew.”
“Who signed the sheet?”
“Debra Hale. For Jordy.” Missy held up the clipboard like it could explain itself. “And for Abigail, her dad. You were never on the list. I’ve been teaching them both for two weeks.”
I looked at Abigail. She was six. She had kept this for three weeks, for her father, because he’d asked her to.
“Why was it a secret from me, Abby?”
She picked at the Velcro on her sister’s brace and didn’t look up.
“Dad says you can’t know because of what happened in the hospital. He says you get sick.”
The Buick
I stood up and took Jordy’s good hand. She came with me for four steps. Then she saw how far we’d gone from the dock and her whole body locked, like a cat on a vet’s table, and she made a sound I’d never heard from either of my daughters, high and flat.
“Grandma,” she said. “Grandma. GRANDMA.”
Missy stepped in front of us. She didn’t want to. Her face said so. But she had the clipboard against her chest and she said, “Ma’am, I can’t. I’m so sorry. Only the names on the sheet. I can’t hand her to you. Let me walk her up to Mrs. Hale and you three can sort it out in the lot.”
So that’s what happened. Missy took Jordy by the shoulder and walked her up the bank with the whistle swinging, and Abigail and I followed, and I got my phone out and dialed 911 with my thumb as I walked. I told a woman on the line that my daughter, who was dead, was in a parking lot at the town beach, and she asked me to say that again.
I said it again. It sounded like what it was.
By the time I reached the Buick, Debra was out of it. She had on the green windbreaker. She had Jordy up on her hip, six years old and too big for it, and the girl had her face buried in Debra’s neck. Debra’s hand moved on her back in small circles. She looked at me over the girl’s head, and she wasn’t surprised. That was what I couldn’t get past. I’d have given anything to see her surprised.
“Carly,” she said. “Put that phone down. You’re frightening her.”
“That’s my daughter.”
“I know whose daughter she is.” Her voice stayed low and even, a voice for a waiting room. “The deputy will be here in ten minutes, and I’ll show him what I’ve got, and he’ll tell you it’s a civil matter. Then Seth and I will take her home, and you can do whatever you do.”
She reached into the Buick and came out with a manila folder, thick with a rubber band round it, and held it against Jordy’s back like a shield.
A truck turned into the lot. Seth’s. It rolled to the far end, past the Buick, and stopped crooked across two spaces.
He sat behind the wheel with both hands on top of it and didn’t get out.
Page nine
The deputy came and read what Debra gave him and said what she’d said he would. A temporary guardianship, signed by the father, renewed twice. Disputes between parents were for the court. He gave me a card. Debra drove off with Jordy in the back, in a car seat with a faded cartoon horse on it, and Seth followed her and left me standing there with Abigail’s wet towel.
I took Abigail home. Seth’s truck wasn’t in the driveway. I put her in front of the TV and went upstairs and stood in front of the closet.
The carton was where he’d put it four years ago. It had dust on the J.
I pulled the folder out and sat on the floor with my back against the bed. There was a funeral home invoice on top from Gilmore & Sons, the casket, the dress, the plot, and I turned it over and put it aside. Under that was a stack the hospital had printed for the family, and I went through it page by page until I came to page nine.
It was a social work note. A woman named Nielsen had typed it. The date was the Saturday, the day before the Sunday I’d been told. It said the mother had been removed from the pediatric unit after an incident at the bedside, that she’d been found with a monitor lead in her hand and had not let go of the crib rail, and had to be taken down by two staff. A hold, seventy-two hours. She was not fit to consent to anything. The grandmother, Debra Hale, was to take temporary custody of the child, and the family’s wish was that the mother not be told anything until she was stable.
I read it three times. I didn’t remember any of it. Not the lead, not the rail, not the staff. I’d been told I stopped eating. Nobody had mentioned that I’d tried to take my baby out of the room.
So Seth wasn’t lying when he said it was better that I didn’t go to the service. I’d have been dragged out of that too.
Page ten was a progress note from the Sunday, eleven at night. The fever had broken. The child had come off the vent. She was moving everything but her left hand.
Page eleven was mine. The hold had lifted Monday at ten past three. I’d been cleared and discharged Wednesday morning, and my name was on the bottom, signed on a line that said I was handed my own belongings.
Three days. Debra had had Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to walk down two flights and tell a woman who was sitting up in a bed that her daughter was alive.
Under page eleven there was a yellow sticky note in handwriting I knew from forty birthday cards. It said: Carly, if you’ve read this, ask me before you do anything.
She had put it in four years ago. She’d known I would open it one day.
The kitchen island
At seven they came to the house. Seth had called from the road and said Debra wanted to explain it, and that she had the girl with her because the girl wouldn’t be left. I said fine. I had the folder on the island with page nine on top, and a glass of water I hadn’t touched.
The girls went straight to the den. Abigail said, “Come on, Jordy, I’ll show you where I keep my rabbit,” and the two of them went down the hall together in the same walk, the left arm held a little different on one of them. I heard the TV go on. I heard someone laugh.
Debra didn’t sit. She stood at the end of the island in her windbreaker with her purse still on her arm.
“You tore at her,” she said. “Do you understand that? There were two nurses on you. You had your nails in my arm. I’ve still got a mark.” She pushed up a sleeve and there was a pale line, an old one. “They told us she’d be dead by morning and then they told us she might live and never walk, never use that hand, and you wouldn’t stop. You were going to take her out of there on a ventilator.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I made a decision at that nurses’ station. I made it fast and I made it for everybody. Seth stood there and let me, because he knew I was right.” She turned to him. “Say it.”
Seth was by the refrigerator with his arms folded tight. He said nothing.
“Evelyn,” Debra said, “did exactly that. She went to pieces and they put her in a home, and I watched my mother never get over it. I wasn’t going to watch it twice. I put that child in my own spare room and I learned how to do her exercises from a video. I paid four thousand dollars a month for the therapist. I drove her to Madison every other week. She walks because of me. She holds a fork because of me.”
“Page nine,” I said.
“I’m not finished.”
“You’ve been finished since Wednesday.”
She went on anyway. Gilmore was a man from her church and he’d done what she asked, and a stone with Jordyn’s name on it stood at Mount Calvary and she’d gone to put flowers on it twice a year so the dates would hold up. She said I’d have been a danger to the girl at six months and at two years. She said I was a danger now, look at me, I’d called the police on a beach. She said Jordy asked about her mother every birthday and Debra told her the truth, that her mother was sick, and wasn’t that the truth.
“Ten past three on the Monday,” I said. “The hold came off. I was sitting up, I was eating. You could have come down.”
Debra opened her mouth.
“And your paper says temporary guardianship pending the mother’s recovery. I recovered. I’ve been recovered for four years.”
For the first time in all of it, she had nothing on her face at all.
The stone at Mount Calvary
Seth moved before she did. He put his hands flat on the counter, and I thought he was going to be sick. He said, “Mom. Give me the keys to the condo.”
“Seth.”
“The keys. And the folder with the order in it, the real one, with Jordyn’s doctor’s name on it. Carly’s going to need the pediatrician and the therapist by tomorrow.”
“You’ll take her from the only home she’s had.”
“It’s the only home she’s had because of me,” he said. “I should have walked down those stairs on the Wednesday. I never did. Every Saturday I thought I would.”
Debra looked at her son the way you look at a stranger who has your son’s coat on. Then she set her purse on my island, took the condo key off the ring, and put it down beside page nine without a word. She went out. I heard the Buick back out of the driveway and I heard it stop at the end, for a long time, before it went.
Seth is sleeping in a motel off the highway. Neither of us has said what comes after the motel. I don’t think we get to say it yet. He drives to the house in the morning and sits on the porch step and Abigail brings him juice.
Jordyn slept in Abigail’s room the first night, in the second bed we’d bought for sleepovers. She woke at two in the morning and asked for Grandma, and I sat on the floor and said Grandma wasn’t here yet, and she said, “You’re the lady.” I said I was. She said she knew, she had a picture. Debra had kept a photo of me on the dresser, one from before, with Abigail and Jordyn both in my lap, and told her every night that was her mother, who was resting.
On Saturday I drove both girls out to Mount Calvary with a bag of grass seed and a pair of garden shears. The stone was small and white, with a lamb on it. JORDYN, and two dates two years apart.
Jordyn read her own name off it slowly, with her good finger under each letter.
“That’s me,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to take it away?”
“We’ll talk to the man this week. Mr. Gilmore’s going to take it up himself, and he’s going to pay for the digging.”
She thought about it. Then she pulled the plastic flag out of the grass beside the stone, the little one the cemetery sticks in for the lawn crews, and carried it back to the car like something she’d won.
“Can I keep this?” she said.
“It’s yours.”
If this one got to you, send it to someone who has been told they’re too fragile to know the truth about their own family.
For another unsettling family secret, read “My Spare Key Was in a Folgers Can, and My Daughter Knew Where”. And when family loyalties come with a price, “I Wired His Mother $6,800 a Month to a Number on a Parts Invoice” and “My Mother Staged My Condo the Week I Bought It. She Knows Every Room.” are gripping next reads.
