Every Year My Surviving Twin Son Honored His Sister With Lilies
was fully himself in a room, and he said: “I need to find her.”
I said: “Yes.”
The conversation with my mother continued for another hour after that, during which I asked questions
and she answered them and I cried at some points and at other points felt something colder than tears, the specific feeling of being altered at a structural level, of understanding that the foundation of something is different from what you believed it to be.
She had known for twenty-six years.
I had to sit with this separately from the rest. My mother, who had made Logan’s birthday cakes and
watched him plant lilies and stood at a distance at the cemetery while he talked to an empty grave. My mother, who had carried this for twenty-six years because she had made an agreement with Aaron and had kept the agreement past the point when it was possible to believe it was still right.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
“Because I didn’t know how to,” she said. “And then more time passed and I knew less how to. And then
more time. And I watched Logan and I told myself what I’d always told myself, that she was with a good family, that she was loved, that it was too late to change anything.”
“It’s not too late,” Logan said from across the room, where he had moved at some point without my noticing. He was at the window, looking at the bare stems in the garden. “It’s not too late because she’s fifteen. She’s exactly as old as I am. She’s out there somewhere being fifteen right now.”
I called Aaron.
I had his number because co-parenting logistics require contact, not because either of us maintained
anything beyond the minimum. He answered on the fourth ring with the voice of someone who has been expecting a call and has been hoping it would not come.
“I know,” I said.
He was quiet.
“Someone left a box in Logan’s garden,” I said. “With a photograph of Lily when her eyes were open. And
a note. And now Logan and I both know.”
“Grace,” he said.
“Don’t,” I said. “I am not having the conversation you want to have right now. I need two things from you
and then we can have whatever conversation you think is necessary. I need the name of the agency and I need whatever information you have about the family.”
“I don’t know if I can just give you that,” he said.
“Aaron,” I said. And I said his name in the specific way that I had never said it before, with everything that was in the room at that moment, and whatever he heard in it was sufficient.
He gave me the agency name.
He gave me the name of the couple, which he had known, a couple named James and Patricia Ellison
who had been living in Madison, Wisconsin, at the time of the adoption. He said he did not know if they were still there, that he had not maintained contact, that he had chosen not to know because not knowing was easier.
“It was not easier for Logan,” I said.
I ended the call.
I called the adoption agency, which was a forty-five minute call involving intake staff and supervisors and the specific protocol that adoption agencies have for situations of this kind, which is to say they were not unkind and they were also not going to simply hand me information without process, and the process
was going to take time.
“How much time?” Logan said, when I reported back.
“They said two weeks,” I said. “For the initial response. To determine whether they can facilitate contact.”
Two weeks.
Logan looked at me.
“Two weeks,” he said, not as a complaint but as an acknowledgment.
“We’ll start elsewhere,” I said. “The name Aaron gave me. The city.”
I found a search firm that specialized in locating individuals for adoption reunification, a firm recommended by the agency as ethical and effective. I called them that afternoon and spoke with a woman named Christine who had done this work for eighteen years and who asked questions with the
efficiency of someone who has asked them many times and knows which answers produce useful search parameters.
The Ellison family, Madison, Wisconsin, adoption finalized in early spring twenty-six years ago.
