Page 7
I felt it swell at the sight of two amorphous blobs, vague outline of limbs entwined with one another, heads inclined as if sharing a secret. My heart beats to tear through my chest, my collarbone pounding with the rhythm of it. I am no longer flesh and bone; I am one organ only.
And it will have its way.
I didn’t know I stopped breathing until I take a deep gasp, the black spots on my vision fading with the action. My hands come back to life, curling around the ultrasound as my mind grapples with the new information, scanning the tidy columns of known things it has acquired and not finding a spot to fit this particular fact.
It’s in the shape of a question mark, and I don’t allow for those. There is no place for this, so I stare until the feeling is back in my hands and feet, until I’m able to slowly sit up, the world righted again though so much in it has gone wrong.
I fold the picture, taking care to crease only the white lines separating the pictures, as if the yet-to-be-born could be harmed. It makes a perfect rectangle, a life-changing fact that fits neatly in my pocket. I put the rest of the pictures back, stack the bins, toss all the useless things no one ever sees back where they were, relegated once again to nonexistence.
Like my twin sister.
I. Things I Know
A. Ultrasound
1. According to date and name of mother, one of the fetuses is me.
2. Both of the fetuses are female.
3. This has been kept from me on purpose.
II. Things I Don’t Know
A. Sister
1. If she was born
2. If she died
3. If she was adopted
B. How Isaac Harver got my number
I shake my head and erase out the last line as irrelevant. I don’t like not knowing things, but that list has suddenly become longer than I imagined possible, and I need to prioritize. I write unlikely next to adopted. We’re not rich but definitely comfortable enough to afford two kids. I’ve chewed the eraser off my pencil, spitting out the soft pink nub and crunching the metal that held it between my teeth while I think.
Mom came home half an hour ago, Dad shortly after. She’s banging pots and pans around in the kitchen, his earplugs are doing overtime, so neither one of them knows I’m not playing clarinet up here. Instead I’m weighing my options.
I can walk downstairs, the ultrasound trailing behind me like a ticker-tape parade celebrating the dawn of a new world, one in which I’m aware of my anonymous sibling. I know how that will play out. Mom will cry; Dad will yell; I will stand like a pillar in a storm, demanding truth. I spit out the metal casing from the eraser and chomp down on the wet wood of the pencil, appreciating the give in it when everything else seems to be pushing back at me.
I fold up my list, blowing away the last bits of eraser that linger from eradicating Isaac Harver’s name. If only I could drag one across my brain, ridding myself of him up there too. My heart gives a little shudder at the thought, and I look down at my chest.
“Shut up,” I say.
Mom’s voice floats up the stairs, hitting the same notes as always. Din—ner. It’s an F sharp followed by a half step down to the F, the normalcy of our routine inked out in notes of black and white. I can shatter this, sweep everything to the side in a discordant crash, but then I’ll have to deal with Dad’s bullish baritone, Mom’s panic in a jarring soprano. My blank stare, whole rests of nothingness, can only bear so much.
Or, I can do what I do best.
Figure things out on my own.
four
Our courthouse looks like what you’d expect in a small Ohio town; someone started with ambition and then ran out of energy. Or money. Or both.
The front does everything a courthouse should. It looks serious, imposing, like a brick bastion of justice that fell from the sky. But once I walk through the double doors on Wednesday after school, all the trappings of glory fall away. I’m hit with a mix of mildew and ancient cigarette smoke that only a demolition is going to address. The plaster walls have cracks like varicose veins, small explosions of age. One last holdout of nobility—a grand old wooden staircase—is stripped of its dignity by the orange traffic cone on the landing, draped with caution tape of no specific nature. I can only assume I’m supposed to watch out for the water dripping from the ceiling.
There’s a directory mounted on the wall, white peg letters canted at angles that make me want to reach out and straighten them. The office of vital statistics is in the addition, a polite word for the pressboard square attached to the back of the building. I walk in, worried that my feet might punch right through the linoleum floor, or that my voice will blow the wood paneling from the studs. The waiting room looks sick, badly lit by fluorescent lights, the mismatched set of chairs all clear castoffs. The lady behind the counter glances up at me, her fingers still moving across her keyboard.
“What do you need?”
