I was waiting for the 7:15 to downtown when a woman sat down next to me and I saw my dead sister’s FACE.
My name is Dara. I’m thirty-three. My sister Becca died four years ago – car accident on Route 9, February, black ice. She was twenty-nine. I identified her body myself because our mom couldn’t stand up long enough to do it.
After that, I kind of stopped doing anything that wasn’t necessary. I work. I take the bus. I go home. I do it again.
The woman who sat down was maybe thirty. Dark hair cut the same way Becca used to cut hers, that messy bob she’d had since high school. Same gap between her front teeth when she smiled at her phone.
I told myself it was nothing. Lots of people look like other people.
But then she shifted her bag, and I saw a scar on her left forearm – thin, white, about two inches long, running diagonal.
Becca had that scar. She got it when she was eleven, catching a broken bottle our dad threw during one of his episodes. I was there. I watched it happen.
I went completely still.
I started cataloguing her like I was losing my mind. The way she held her phone with both thumbs. The way she crossed her ankles, right over left. Becca’s habits. Becca’s body.
My bus came. I didn’t move.
She looked up and caught me staring, and I said, “I’m sorry. You look like someone I lost.”
She gave me a small, careful smile. “People say that sometimes.”
That was a strange thing to say. Not I’m sorry, or I get that a lot. People say that sometimes.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She looked at her phone again. Then back at me. Something shifted in her face that I couldn’t read.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that you should call your mother before we talk any further.”
The Next Bus Came and Went Too
I didn’t call my mother.
I couldn’t move. I was sitting on a cold metal bench at 7:14 in the morning with a stranger who had my dead sister’s face and my dead sister’s scar and she’d just said the most specific, terrifying thing anyone has ever said to me.
“Why,” I said. Not a question. Just the word.
She looked down the street at nothing. Her jaw was tight. She was doing something with her thumbnail against her palm, rubbing it back and forth. Becca used to do that when she was working something out.
I felt sick.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this for a while,” she said. “There’s no good way.”
“Do what.” Still not a question. I couldn’t make my voice go up at the end.
She turned to look at me. Full on, no more glancing away. Her eyes were brown. Becca’s were brown. My mom’s are brown. Mine are gray, which my dad used to point out like it was something I’d done wrong.
“My name is Carrie,” she said. “I’m thirty-one. I was adopted when I was three days old by a family in Roanoke.”
The bus bench was very cold. I noticed that for the first time.
“Your mother’s name is Gail,” she said. “Right?”
What My Mother Couldn’t Stand Up Long Enough to Tell Me
My mother’s name is Gail.
Gail Pruitt, née Hatch. Fifty-eight years old. Lives in the same house on Wendover Street she’s lived in since 1989. After my dad left, she turned his bedroom into a sewing room and never talked about him again except to say he was gone and that was that.
I called her from the bus stop. Right there, with Carrie sitting eighteen inches away from me, watching the traffic.
My mother picked up on the second ring, which she never does. She usually lets it go to voicemail and calls back when she’s ready.
“Dara,” she said. And then she stopped.
“Mom.”
Silence.
“There’s a woman at my bus stop,” I said. “Her name is Carrie. She knows your name.”
The sound my mother made is not something I can describe accurately. It wasn’t crying. It was something that happened before crying, some room you pass through on the way there.
“Oh god,” she said. “Oh, baby.”
She’d had a baby before me. Before Becca. She was nineteen and my dad was twenty-two and it was 1993 and she gave the baby up because my dad said he’d leave if she didn’t and she believed him, which was stupid because he left anyway, eleven years later, over something about money.
She never told us. She never told anyone, as far as I know. She’d carried it for thirty-one years like a stone in her coat pocket, so familiar she stopped feeling the weight.
Carrie was that baby.
What Carrie Already Knew
Here’s the thing that wrecked me, though. Not the secret itself. The other thing.
Carrie had found my mother eight months ago.
Eight months. She’d hired someone, a woman in Richmond who does this kind of search, and it took about four months and then she had a name and an address and a phone number. She’d driven past the house on Wendover Street twice. She knew my mother worked part-time at the pharmacy on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
She knew about me. She knew about Becca.
She’d known about Becca for eight months and she hadn’t reached out because she didn’t know how to say I found you but one of you is already gone to a woman she’d never met.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” Carrie said, at the bus stop. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how to make contact without making it worse.”
I didn’t say anything for a while.
“How’d you find me here,” I said finally. “At this stop.”
She looked slightly uncomfortable for the first time. “I’ve been watching for a way in that wasn’t just showing up at your door. I saw you here a few weeks ago and I thought – a public place. If you wanted to leave, you could leave.”
She’d sat next to me on purpose. She’d been waiting for the right morning.
I should have been creeped out. Maybe I was, a little. But mostly I was doing the math on how long she’d been carrying this, alone, trying to figure out how to not hurt us. Four months of searching. Eight months of knowing. That’s a year of this woman’s life spent trying to be careful with people she’d never met.
Becca would have liked her. That was the thought I had. It came in sideways and it was the worst thought I’d had in four years, which is saying something.
The Scar
I asked her about it. I had to.
“The scar on your arm.”
She looked at it. Turned her forearm over, looked at it the way you look at something you forget is there.
“Kitchen accident,” she said. “I was maybe nine or ten. Broke a glass and caught it wrong.”
Not a bottle. Not our dad. A glass, in a different house, in Roanoke, with different parents who I’m sure were fine, who adopted a three-day-old girl and raised her and had no idea she’d someday sit on a bus bench in this city and tear a hole in a stranger’s chest.
Same scar, different story. Same body, different life.
I don’t know what to do with that. I’ve been sitting with it for three weeks now and I still don’t know.
What Happened After
We missed four buses.
We sat there for almost two hours. Carrie talked, and I listened, and sometimes I asked things and she answered. She’s a physical therapist. She has a husband named Doug and a dog named something I immediately forgot. She grew up fine, she said. Good family. She wasn’t looking for a replacement for anything. She was just looking.
“What were you looking for,” I asked.
She thought about it. “Medical history, at first. Then it got bigger than that.”
She’d found out about Becca from my mother’s Facebook. A memorial post. My mom had written something on the anniversary, one of those things you write when you don’t know what else to do with grief. Carrie had read it on her phone in a parking lot in Roanoke and cried for an hour.
“I never got to know her,” she said. “I don’t have the right to be that sad about it.”
“That’s not how it works,” I said.
I don’t know why I said it. I don’t actually know how it works. But it felt true and she nodded like it was.
My mother drove up at 9:40. She’d gotten in the car twenty minutes after I called and driven the forty minutes to the city in thirty-eight, which is very on-brand for her. She parked badly, half up on the curb, and walked toward us with her hands clasped in front of her like she was going into church.
She stopped about six feet away.
Carrie stood up.
My mother looked at her for a long time. She looked the way people look when they’re trying to memorize something. Then she said, “You have your grandmother’s nose. My mother. She died in 2004.”
Carrie’s chin went. She held it together but her chin went.
“I’m sorry I didn’t look for you,” my mother said. “I want you to know I thought about you every single year. That’s not enough. I know it’s not enough.”
“It’s enough,” Carrie said.
It was probably not enough. But she said it, and my mother made the sound again, the one before crying, and then they were hugging in front of a bus stop on a Tuesday morning and I was standing there being a witness to the strangest thing that has ever happened to me.
Where We Are Now
Carrie came to dinner three weeks later. My mother made pot roast, which is what she makes when she’s trying to say something she doesn’t have words for.
We sat at the table where Becca and I used to do homework and my mother put out the good plates and we ate and talked and it was incredibly normal and incredibly strange and I kept looking at Carrie’s hands and seeing Becca’s hands and having to put that away somewhere and look at something else.
After dinner, Carrie asked if she could see pictures.
We looked at pictures for two hours. My mother narrated. Carrie asked questions. I sat next to her on the couch and watched her look at my sister’s face like she was studying for a test she’d never get to take.
At one point she laughed at something, a photo of Becca at seventeen in a truly terrible Halloween costume, and the laugh was Becca’s laugh. Same catch at the end, same slightly too loud. My mother heard it too. I saw her face.
Nobody said anything. We just kept looking at pictures.
I don’t know what Carrie is to me. Not a sister, not exactly, or not yet, or not in any way I have language for. She’s someone who shares a body type and a laugh and a scar with someone I loved and she’s been careful with me in a way that I didn’t ask for and didn’t know I needed.
She texted me last Tuesday. Just a picture: her dog on a couch, looking ridiculous. No caption.
I sent back a thumbs up.
It’s not much. But I’ve learned not to need things to be much. Sometimes you just sit with what you have and let it be what it is.
The 7:15 still comes every morning. I still take it downtown. Sometimes I look at the people sitting near me and think about all the things they’re carrying that I can’t see.
Mostly I just look out the window.
But I look a little more carefully now.
—
If this one got into you, pass it along to someone who needs it today.
For more unsettling encounters and mysterious circumstances, check out what happened when the key was in his gym bag and it fit the lock of an apartment I’d never heard of, or when my wife didn’t know I was standing twenty feet behind her in that hotel lobby. You might also be intrigued by the story where my wife said “it’s not what you think,” and the name on her phone proved her right.
