My Twin Sister Vanished When We Were Sixteen. Forty Years Later, My Granddaughter Came Home With a Photograph That Proved She Had Been Looking for Me Too.
The photograph fell out of my granddaughter’s backpack while I was looking for a permission slip.
If it had landed face down, my life might have stayed exactly as it was for another day.
Maybe another week.
Maybe another year.
But it landed face up on my kitchen floor.
And forty years disappeared.
“Grandma?”
Eight-year-old Lily Mercer was sitting at the table eating apple slices when she noticed I had stopped moving.
I did not answer.
I couldn’t.
The photograph was old.
Not professionally old.
Family old.
The colors had faded toward yellow, and one corner had been bent so many times that the paper had started separating.
Two teenage girls stood beside a carnival booth.
Same height.
Same dark hair.
Same crooked smile.
Matching denim jackets.
One girl held a paper cup.
The other had her arm around her shoulders.
I knew both faces.
One was mine.
The other belonged to my twin sister.
Mara.
I had not seen Mara since the summer we turned sixteen.
