Every Year My Surviving Twin Son Honored His Sister With Lilies

He told her about the garden. He told her about the lilies, why he had started planting them, what he had been thinking about on every birthday. He told her about the cemetery, about the headstone with

her name on it, about the lily he left every year. He told her that he had known she was supposed to be there from before he had words for knowing it. He told her that finding out she was alive was the biggest thing that had ever happened to him and that he was not trying to pressure her and that if she

needed to go slowly, he could go slowly, and that the garden was going to be replanted the following spring with fifteen lilies and one more, and that the one more was for the first year of knowing she was alive.

He folded it and handed it to Christine on a video call, which was an imperfect but functional method of exchange.

My letter was harder to write.

I wrote it four times before I had a version that was true without being too much, that expressed what I

needed to express without making Lily responsible for receiving it. I told her about the hospital and what I had been told and what I had believed. I told her about Logan and the garden and what it had meant, what it still meant. I told her about the grave and about going there every birthday, which I owed her,

even though going there every year had been for a grave that was empty and for a daughter who was not there.

I told her that none of what had happened to her was what I would have chosen.

I told her that whatever she wanted from this, whatever pace she wanted to move at, I would follow her

lead. That I had missed her for fifteen years based on a lie and that the missing did not obligate her to anything. That I hoped she had been loved, which Christine had already told me she had been, and that I hoped she would give us a chance to know her, but that I understood if that was complicated and if it

required time.

Christine sent both letters.

Lily responded in one week.

Her letter was shorter than ours. It was three paragraphs, written in the handwriting of a fifteen-year-old who had been thinking very carefully about what to say and had decided to say only what she was

certain of.

She said she had always known something was on the other side of the adoption, that there was a birth family, that they existed somewhere. She said her parents, James and Patricia, had been good parents, that she had been loved, that she was not angry, or not only angry, that she was also curious and

frightened and that she did not know yet what she wanted this to become.

She said she had been told her birth mother had not been able to care for her.

She had believed this for fifteen years.

She said she was going to need some time to adjust to the version where that was not the story.

In the third paragraph she said: I have a brother. I have had a brother for fifteen years and didn’t know it. I keep thinking about that.

Logan read the letter four times.