…the one who’d been driving.”
My aunt Ruth told me the story slowly, crying the whole time.
When I was four, my mother’s car skidded on ice and went off the road. In the back seat were two little girls: me and my cousin, Sarah. We were the same age and looked so alike that people mixed us up at family gatherings. Sarah’s mother, my aunt Linda, had been killed in a different accident a few weeks earlier, and Sarah had been living with us.
Both of us survived. But Sarah suffered a severe brain injury. Doctors said she would need care for the rest of her life. My mother was devastated and guilty. She was the one driving. Sarah’s father had died years before. Sarah had no one else.
My mother made a decision no one ever questioned. She had Sarah placed in a long-term care facility. And she started calling me “Sarah” too, at first by accident, and then on purpose, because hearing Sarah’s name every day was the only way she could bear the guilt.
“Your real name is Anna,” Ruth whispered. “You were Anna until you were four.”
Last year, after decades of therapy, the real Sarah had recovered enough to live in a supported apartment. She’d started asking about her family. My brother had found her and brought her to the reunion. He’d planned to tell me after my surgery. “The real Sarah” wasn’t an insult. It was her coming home.
I met her two weeks later. She was quiet and kind. She had my face, my scar from the same car accident, and a laugh exactly like her mother’s in the old photographs.
“I always wondered what happened to the other little girl,” she said.
We have lunch together every Sunday now. She calls me Anna. I’m learning to answer to it. Some days it feels strange. Most days it just feels like finally hearing my own name.
