Every Year My Surviving Twin Son Honored His Sister With Lilies

In the weeks that followed, there were more letters. Not fast, not the immediate flood that sometimes happens in these situations and that can overwhelm all parties with feeling before there is a structure to hold it. Slowly, one letter at a time, with the specific pace of two fifteen-year-olds who were both careful people.

They wrote to each other about ordinary things. Books. School. Lily wrote about Madison and Logan wrote about Akron and they discovered that they had both, independently, developed strong opinions about specific films, and that some of those opinions converged and some did not, and the divergence

turned out to be interesting rather than disappointing.

She told him she had a garden.

She had not known why, exactly. Patricia Ellison, who was a practical and loving woman who I would eventually speak to at length and develop a complicated and genuine affection for, had planted a vegetable garden when Lily was six and Lily had taken to it with an interest that Patricia had found both

surprising and pleasing, because Patricia herself liked gardens and had not expected Lily to. Lily had expanded it over the years, adding flowers alongside the vegetables, tending it with a care that Patricia

had described as unusual in a child and then in a teenager.

Among the flowers she had planted, without knowing why, were lilies.

Logan read this to me aloud and then sat quietly for a long time.

“She gardens,” he said.

“She gardens,” I said.

As for the box and the note and the cut flowers, the person who had done it was someone I had not expected.

It was Aaron’s mother.

Eleanor, who was seventy-four, who had known since the beginning, who had been the one person in Aaron’s family who had been told what he had done and who had kept the secret because he had asked

her to, and who had arrived at the fifteenth birthday with the particular decision of someone who has decided they are no longer willing to carry someone else’s wrong.

She had come to our street before sunrise with scissors and a box and the photograph that Aaron had kept, the photograph from the hospital, the one with Lily’s eyes open, which Eleanor had found in

Aaron’s things years earlier and had taken and kept.