Every Year My Surviving Twin Son Honored His Sister With Lilies

Christine said she would have preliminary results within forty-eight hours.

The forty-eight hours were the longest forty-eight hours I can remember, which is a statement that requires accounting against the months after Lily’s apparent death and the period after my diagnosis of myself as a person who was managing well and would continue to manage, both of which had involved

their own extended difficulties. But this was different because within these forty-eight hours something that had been finished was not finished, something I had grieved was not gone, and the distance

between what I had understood my life to be and what it apparently was required constant navigation.

Logan handled the forty-eight hours by going to Theo’s house on the second day, which I encouraged. He needed someone who could be present with him in a way that was not complicated by history, and

Theo was constitutionally suited to presence. He came home that evening and had dinner and we talked about what we knew and what we hoped and what we were afraid of, and he was, at fifteen, more capable of holding all three at once than I had expected, though I should have expected it because he

had always been capable of holding difficult things.

On the evening of the second day, Christine called.

The Ellison family was still in Madison. James Ellison had died four years earlier, a fact that required its own small moment of acknowledgment. Patricia Ellison was sixty-one, retired from a career in secondary school education. She was living in the same house.

Her daughter’s name was Lily.

Christine said this with the particular care of someone who understands the weight of the word they are

delivering.

“She kept the name,” I said.

“She did,” Christine said.

Logan, who had been sitting beside me while I took the call on speaker, put his head in his hands.

He was not crying. He was doing the thing he did when something was too large for the immediate response, the internal stillness.

“How do we reach out?” I said.

Christine explained the process for facilitated initial contact, which was designed to allow the first

communication to go through the intermediary so that neither party was ambushed by direct contact before they had chosen to receive it. She would reach out to Patricia Ellison, explain the situation, and ask whether Lily was aware of the adoption and whether she would be open to communication.

“Some adoptees know,” Christine said. “Some don’t. We’ll need to know where she is before we can know what to do next.”

Three days later, Christine called again.

Lily Ellison knew she was adopted. She had known since she was eight, which Patricia Ellison had determined was the right age, which was a decision I had complex feelings about and was trying to hold

at arm’s length until I knew more. She was fifteen, which was the fact that remained the most extraordinary, fifteen years old and somewhere in Madison, Wisconsin, a person who had been existing in the world for exactly as long as Logan had been planting flowers.

She was willing to write a letter.

Christine told us this carefully, emphasizing the word willing as distinct from eager, explaining that Lily’s

response had been considered rather than immediate, that she had asked for a day and had given her answer after the day, which Christine said was a healthy sign of someone taking the situation seriously rather than reacting from the surface of it.

Logan wrote his letter first.

He sat at the kitchen table with a piece of paper and a pen because he had decided this was not

something you did on a screen, and he wrote for an hour with the concentration he gave to things that mattered, and when he finished he read it to me before he gave it to Christine.