…LAKE GEORGE. I FORGIVE YOU.”
I made my neighbor play it again. Then I asked her to send me the video, and I went home and sat on the stairs and cried for an hour.
I had a twin sister. Ruth. We hadn’t spoken in thirty-two years.
When we were fourteen, our family went to Lake George for the summer. Our little brother, Jamie, drowned while Ruth and I were supposed to be watching him. We had been arguing on the dock. Each of us told our parents the other one was in charge of him that afternoon. We blamed each other for the rest of our lives. After our mother’s funeral, Ruth said something unforgivable, and I said something worse. We never spoke again.
I didn’t even know where she lived.
It took me two days of phone calls to find her. A social worker finally called me back. Ruth was living in a memory care facility twenty minutes from my house. She had been diagnosed with early-onset dementia three years earlier. She had no husband, no children. Her emergency contact form said “sister,” with no name and no number.
She had walked out of the facility several times in the past few weeks, always in the middle of the night. Each time, staff found her blocks away, with a little suitcase, saying she was going home.
“Home” was my house. Our parents’ house. I had bought it after our father died, and I had never told her.
The next time Ruth left the facility, I was waiting. I sat on my porch at two in the morning, wrapped in a blanket, until I saw a woman in a white nightgown coming up the sidewalk with a suitcase.
She stopped in front of the steps and looked at me. “Ellen? Is Mom awake?”
I told her Mom was sleeping. I took her suitcase. Inside were a hairbrush, a photograph of the three of us at the lake, and a page torn from a notebook that said in shaky handwriting: “Tell Ellen it was nobody’s fault.”
She had written the sign for my neighbor’s camera because she knew she might forget to say it.
Ruth moved into my guest room with a full-time caregiver. Some days she knows exactly who I am. Some days she thinks it’s 1979 and we’re going to the lake tomorrow. On those days, I tell her we are.
Last month, on one of her clear days, she held my hand and said, “We were just kids, Ellie.” I said, “I know.” It took us forty-seven years to say those words. But we said them.
