Years passed.
Robert moved again. Then Mom and my father moved.
Anna married and changed her surname.
By adulthood, the misunderstanding had hardened into something worse than anger.
Fear.
Anna was afraid to discover Margaret truly hadn’t wanted her.
Margaret was afraid to force herself into the life of someone who had once sent her card back unopened.
“I thought about her every birthday,” Mom said.
Helen nodded.
“So did she.”
I was still staring at the photograph of myself.
“The baby Margaret needed more than me.”
For the first time, I understood why Mom had never told me.
“You thought I’d feel guilty.”
She looked at me.
“I thought you’d think I wished you’d been her.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
The answer came so quickly it almost hurt.
Mom grabbed my hand. “I loved Anna. Then I had you. One didn’t erase the other.”
Her eyes moved to the photograph.
“I spent years telling myself maybe it was better not to talk about her. I never wanted my daughter growing up thinking she was someone’s replacement. And once you’d grown up, the longer I’d kept quiet, the harder it became to explain why.”
I looked down at the photograph again, at Anna’s words beneath my name.
“So all those years, Anna thought I was the reason she lost you.”
“When she was 12,” Helen said.
I looked at her.
“What about later?”
Helen smiled through her tears. “Later was different.”
She reached into the bottom of the box. There was a small bundle tied with string.
Inside were photographs, old addresses, scraps of paper and notes.
Anna had started looking for Margaret again years later.
Not continuously.
In bursts.
An old address in one notebook.
A possible married surname in another.
A clipped photograph she’d found somewhere years later.
A letter returned from a house Mom had already left.
Then Helen pulled out a folded piece of paper.
“Mom wrote this after she got sick.”
Mom couldn’t take it.
So Helen read.
Only a few lines.
Anna wrote that she no longer blamed Margaret.
She wrote that when she became a mother herself, she finally understood how someone could love a child and still get something terribly wrong.
Then Helen stopped.
“There’s one part you should hear from me.”
Mom looked at Helen who then nodded toward me.
“Mom never forgot Amani. Not even after all those years.”
I blinked.
“From the photograph?”
“Yes.”
Helen smiled.
“She called you her little sister.”
I couldn’t speak. I’d gone my whole life not knowing someone out there had thought of me as her little sister.
The photograph in my hand changed again.
For Anna at 12, I had been the baby who replaced her.
For Anna as an adult, I had become the sister she never got to meet.
Mom reached for Helen.
“Did she hate me?”
Helen took her hand.
“No.”
“Was she angry?”
“For a long time.”
Mom nodded as though she deserved that. “But she never stopped loving you.”
Mom closed her eyes, as Helen squeezed her fingers.
“Before she died, she told me something. She said if I ever found you, I wasn’t supposed to ask why you didn’t come for her.”
Don’t miss
Mom opened her eyes.
“She wanted me to ask you if you thought she didn’t want you.”
Mom broke down again.
“I did.”
Helen nodded.
“She thought so.”
“I would’ve gone anywhere for her. She needed to know how much I cared.”
