The Same Face
My mother kept a photograph in the top drawer of her nightstand for as long as I can remember.
It was not a good photograph by any technical measure. It was small and creased from decades of handling, the image faded to the particular warm sepia of pictures taken in the early 1950s on film that has spent too long in contact with human hands. Two little girls stood side by side in front of a wooden porch railing, squinting into the sun. They were wearing identical white dresses with eyelet trim. They were holding hands in the automatic way of children who have always held hands, without thinking about it, because the other hand is simply where your hand goes.
They had the same face.
My mother was on the left, according to her, though she admitted she could not always tell for certain, even in a photograph of herself. That was the thing about being a twin, she said. You spent your whole life knowing your own face from the outside, the way other people saw it, because you could look at your sister and see it.
Miranda was on the right.
Mom showed me that photograph when I was about seven years old, sitting on the edge of her bed while she cleaned the drawer. She held it in both hands and looked at it with an expression I did not have language for at seven but understand now: the expression of someone looking at something irreplaceable that they have lost.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“That’s me,” she said. “And that’s Miranda.”
“Who’s Miranda?”
She was quiet for a moment. “My sister,” she said. “My twin.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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