…”dark about your sister. I’m sorry. You deserve to know her. Her address is above.”
I didn’t call the police. I don’t know why. I think some part of me already understood.
I opened my front door. The real one. The porch light came on, and I walked out onto the shared steps of my duplex, and looked to my left.
I’d lived in that duplex for two years. The other unit’s front door is right beside mine, painted the same green, with the same brass number plate, a 2 instead of a 1. When I mounted my camera on the porch post, it was angled toward the steps. Both doors are in the frame. I’d never noticed which one opened in the clips. Why would I? They look exactly alike.
The other unit had been empty since spring. Someone moved in three weeks ago. Nineteen nights ago.
She was still standing at the curb, holding the paper. When she saw me, she lowered it, and her hands were shaking as much as mine.
“I’m Grace,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been trying to knock for three weeks.”
We sat on the steps until the sun came up. Our mother had twins at twenty, alone, with no money. She kept one baby and placed the other for adoption. Me. She never told Grace. Grace found the letter in a shoebox after our mother died in January, along with my name and the address of the adoption agency, and from there it took her five months to find me.
She rented the other half of my duplex because she couldn’t think of any other way to be near me without scaring me. Every night she woke up at 4:12, because that’s what time we were born, it said so in the letter. And every night she walked out to the curb, looked at my door, and lost her nerve.
“I figured if I stood where your camera could see me, eventually you’d come out,” she said. “I didn’t think about how it would look.”
It looked terrifying. It was also the best thing that ever happened to me.
We have breakfast together every morning now. Sometimes at her kitchen table, sometimes at mine. We moved the camera to face the street. And on the 14th of every month, at 4:12 a.m., we both wake up anyway, and meet at the curb with two cups of coffee, just to say hello.
