…identical twin sister.”
I laughed. I actually laughed out loud in that small office, because I don’t have a sister. I’m an only child. My parents were both dead, and they would have told me.
Dr. Mendez didn’t laugh. “Mrs. Carter, she needed a blood transfusion. We tested her to match her blood type. The lab flagged her DNA against a sample that was already in our system. Yours. From your gallbladder surgery here six years ago. It’s a one-hundred-percent match. That only happens with identical twins.”
The woman’s name, at least the one she gave him once she woke up, was Anna. She was still upstairs, recovering from a burst appendix. She had come into the emergency room with my driver’s license number memorized and a photocopy of my birth certificate.
I asked if I could see her.
She was sitting up in bed when I walked in. It was like walking into a mirror that had been left out in the rain. Same face, thinner, tired, with grey streaks I didn’t have. She saw me and started to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t have insurance. I didn’t have anything. I knew your name. I thought you’d never find out.”
Anna had been raised by a woman named Delores in a small town in New Mexico. Delores had no birth certificate for her and no records of any kind. Anna couldn’t get a driver’s license, a bank account or a real job. She worked cash jobs her entire life.
When Delores died last year, Anna found a newspaper clipping in her jewelry box. “Newborn Twin Disappears From Mercy Hospital Nursery, 1979.” And a hospital bracelet with my parents’ last name on it.
I went home and opened my mother’s cedar chest for the first time since her funeral. At the bottom, in a sealed envelope, I found the same clipping. And a photo of two babies in one crib. On the back, in my mother’s handwriting: “Sarah and Anna. We will never stop looking.”
My parents had searched for years. Then they stopped telling me because, my father once said about “a sad thing that happened before you were old enough,” some sadness is too heavy for a child. Delores had worked as a cleaner in the maternity ward.
I paid Anna’s hospital bill. A lawyer helped her get a real birth certificate, with her real name: Anna Carter. The police officially closed a case from 1979.
She lives in my guest room now while she studies for her GED. She’s forty-seven and she says she’s finally becoming a real person.
Last weekend we visited our parents’ graves together. Anna brought flowers. I watched her stand in front of my mother’s headstone for a long time. Then she said, quietly, “They really didn’t stop looking.”
No. They didn’t. And neither will I ever stop being grateful that she came to that hospital with my name.
