by Becky Citra
Her voice is so soft and I think I must have heard her wrong.
“What?”
“Your sister.” Mom twists her hands together in a knot. “You want the truth, Hope, so here it is. Grace is your twin sister.”
Is this some kind of joke? Is she serious?
“What are you saying?” I whisper.
Mom bites her lip so hard I think she is going to make it bleed.
“Mom. You have to tell me.”
“You have a twin sister. Her name is Grace. I gave her up for adoption when you were both two and a half years old.”
Mom covers her face with her hands. “This is hard for me to talk about.”
“Hard for you? What about me?” My voice is getting louder and louder, but I don’t care. “I don’t get it. Grace is real? All this time I thought she was someone I made up; and now you’re telling me she’s real?”
“Yes.”
“And you just gave her away?”
“Yes.” Mom looks at me now. “No, not like that. I didn’t just give her away. I couldn’t look after her.”
“Why not? You looked after me. Why couldn’t you look after her?”
Mom is silent.
“Well, why couldn’t you look after her?”
“She had polio,” Mom says.
Polio.
The word sends a shiver through me. I’ve only known one kid with polio. Her name was Patty and she was in my grade two class. She had metal braces on both her legs. I remember feeling so sorry for her.
“It was hard enough having twins.” Tears slide down Mom’s cheeks. “I was only nineteen when you were born. I was exhausted all the time. And then Grace got polio. She was in this iron lung in the hospital and the doctor said that when she finally came home she would need all kinds of special care – hot compresses every two hours and exercises. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it.”
“So you gave her away.”
“There was a nurse at the hospital. Her name was Sharon Donnely. She fell in love with Grace. She worked in the polio ward. She knew how to do all the things for Grace. And she and her husband, Bill, couldn’t have children of their own, and they desperately wanted a child. We talked, and then…”
Mom’s voice trails off.
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “What about me? Didn’t I wonder where Grace had gone?”
“You did at first. But you were little and I think after awhile you forgot you had a sister.”
“Because you lied to me. You told me Grace was imaginary. That I had made her up. You and Granny. You both lied to me.”
Mom puts her hand on mine, but I jerk away.
I’m crying now too. “How can she be my twin?” I gulp through my sobs. “She doesn’t look at all like me.”
A sudden thought hits me. I stare at the photograph again. Curly brown hair. Blue eyes. A perfect nose. “She looks like you.”
“You’re fraternal twins,” Mom says, “not identical twins. You were totally different, right from the day you were born.”
She hesitates. “There are more pictures. Granny hid them in her cupboard. I didn’t know. I found them when we were looking for the life insurance. Sharon and I had agreed that we wouldn’t have any contact, but Granny must have talked to her. Granny was so upset when Grace went. She must have made Sharon agree to send a picture every year on your birthday.”
The big brown envelope. I feel sick. I hate Mom – I really hate her.
I stand up. “I don’t want to see any more pictures. And I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry.”
I swipe at my wet cheeks. “No you’re not.”
I take a big shuddery breath. “If I had gotten sick would you have given me away too?”
Mom looks like I have slapped her.
“How can you call yourself a mother?” I shout.
I run out of the kitchen.
• • • • •
I think I’ve only been asleep for a hundred seconds, but when I turn on the light beside the couch and look at my watch it’s two o’clock, the middle of the night. Mom had made me a grilled cheese sandwich for my supper but I refused to eat it. So the last thing I ate was the lime Popsicle, but I don’t feel hungry.
I have a sister. It’s like a voice keeps saying that over and over in my head, but I still don’t believe it.
I get out of bed and peer out the living-room window. It’s raining lightly and the street is slick and black in the yellowish light from the street lamp.
Grace isn’t my imaginary friend. She’s my sister. How could Mom have kept that a secret?
When I turn back to bed, I notice a big brown envelope on the table beside the couch. My heart jumps. Mom must have sneaked in while I was sleeping.
I tip the envelope onto my bed and a stack of photographs slides out. The one on top is the one I’ve already seen. The others are in order and I lay each one on my rumpled sheets. I study Grace’s face as she gets younger and younger. She is smiling in all the pictures and she seems to always be changing her hair: short, long, braids, high pigtails. Even in the braids, you can see the curls escaping around her face.
When I get to the last picture, I feel like I’ve been hit in the stomach. There are braces on Grace’s legs. Like Patty in my second grade class.
“Polio.”
I whisper the word, but it sounds as loud as a drum in my ears. I turn the photograph over. The same flowing letters.
Grace. June 23, 1947
1947 was seven years ago. She was four. I don’t know what she looked like before that. I don’t know what she looked like the last time I saw her. I close my eyes. I try to force my brain to remember, but I can’t.
A lump presses in my throat. I can’t remember.
What would it be like to have braces on your legs? Heavy. Clumsy. Ugly. I remember Patty crying once at recess because her legs hurt.
Grace looks normal in the other photographs, but she’s sitting down and you can’t really tell if there is anything wrong with her legs. I look on the backs of all the photographs. Starting from 1949, they all have the same stamp in the bottom corner.
Hal Rhodes Photography Studio, Harrison Hot Springs, BC.
Tears sting my eyes and my nose starts to run.
I have a sister. And I can’t even remember one tiny thing about her. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.
Suddenly I want Mom.
She’s not in her bedroom or in the kitchen. The apartment is so quiet it’s eerie. I can hear the fridge humming.
Just like that, I know where Mom is. My hands fumbling, I take off my pajamas and put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I throw on a jacket and dash out of the apartment. I should be scared stiff to be outside in the middle of the night, but I’m not. I race down the street, the rain like mist on my face. I run all the way to the park.
Mom is sitting on her bench. She’s in her nightie and her hair is in wet, stringy ringlets around her shoulders. I can’t tell if it’s rain or tears on her face.
I sit down beside her.
She’s shivering so hard it frightens me.
It’s weird. I was so mad at Mom, but my anger has disappeared. And even though right now she looks crazier than ever, I know that my mom is not crazy. All these years, she’s been missing Grace.
I hold Mom’s hand. It feels like ice.
“I saw her at Stanley Park once,” Mom says. “You and Granny had gone to get an ice-cream cone and I saw her coming out of the washroom with Sharon. She was little. Four years old. I saw the braces first and I thought, That little girl has polio, and then I saw that it was Grace.”
“Did she see you?” I say.
“No. I turned around until they were gone. But I went to their house a few months later. I knew where they lived. I was going to tell Sharon I couldn’t do it like this anymore. I needed to see Grace.”
Mom is quiet then. Shivering even harder.
“What happened?” I ask.
“There were different people living there,” Mom whispers. “They told me an awful thing. Sharon and Bill had been killed in a car accident. It must have happened soon after I saw Grace.”
“Killed?” My stomach flips over. “What did you do?”
“I couldn’t do anything. They said they had heard that a great-aunt had taken Grace. But they didn’t know the aunt’s name or where she lived.” Mom’s voice wobbles. “A great-aunt. She might be really old. I don’t want someone really old raising Grace.”
“Granny was sort of old,” I say. I don’t add that a lot of the time Granny looked after me more than Mom did.
Mom pulls her hand away from mine. She twists her fingers together. “Losing her parents like that. I can’t bear to think of Grace going through that.”
Her parents. For a second, I don’t know who she means. Then I realize that she’s talking about the people who adopted Grace, the people called Sharon and Bill.
People that Mom hardly knew. I push that thought away. I don’t want to blame Mom for any of this. She sounds so sad, and I don’t know what to do.
“I really thought I would find Grace again one day,” Mom says. “I thought that maybe she liked parks and I would find her in a park. Stupid idea, right?”
“Not really,” I say.
“I don’t know if she’s okay, Hope. I don’t know if she’s happy.”
“I don’t think the great-aunt lives in Vancouver,” I say slowly. “I think she lives in a place called Harrison Hot Springs. It’s on the back of the photographs.”
Mom stares at me. Her blue eyes look dark, like the ocean on a cloudy day.
“We could go there, Mom. To Harrison Hot Springs. Wherever that is.”
I take a big breath. It’s the only thing that will make Mom better.
“We could find Grace.”
Chapter Sixteen
We don’t leave for a week. There are so many things to do. Mom talks to Mr. Pinn about the life insurance money. He promises to make some phone calls and two days later Mom comes home with three crisp one hundred dollar bills.
“The rest is in the bank,” she says.
I’ve never seen a one hundred dollar bill before. And we have three of them!
I go down to the pool and tell Joe I’ll be away for a while.
Mom checks the bus schedule. A Pacific Coach Lines bus leaves for Harrison Hot Springs every day at eleven o’clock. Mr. Pinn is a gold mine of information about Harrison Hot Springs. He told Mom it’s a little village in the Fraser Valley, tucked at the end of Harrison Lake, which is huge. He says people go to the famous Harrison Hot Springs Hotel to swim in the pools, which are heated by the hot springs. The bus trip is a milk run. That means it stops in all the little towns on the way. It will take us more than three hours to get there.
I pack my suitcase. I stuff in shorts, T-shirts, underwear, my bathing suit, The Secret of the Wooden Lady and The Clue of the Black Keys (which I plan to read over again), my hippo, Harry, and my Dear Grace letters. I figure the letters might give me luck. I don’t know if it’s going to be hard or easy to find Grace.
Mom almost changes her mind. “I don’t think I can do this.”
“You can.”
“We probably won’t find her.”
“We will. Mr. Pinn said there are only about three hundred people living in Harrison Hot Springs. How hard can it be to find one person in three hundred?”
That makes Mom smile.
I wish I felt as sure as I sound. The plan seemed perfect when I thought of it. Find Grace and Mom will stop being so sad. But what if it doesn’t work that way? What if it makes Mom worse?
And there is another question chewing away at me. If we find Grace, what are we going to do then?
• • • • •
The Pacific Coach Lines bus is better than the city bus. It’s bigger and the seats are comfortable with high backs. The driver stows our suitcases underneath the bus, and I scramble up the steps to grab a seat near the middle of the bus by the window. Mom sits across the aisle from me. There are only a few other people who get on, and they go to the back.
It takes a long time to get out of Vancouver. The bus makes a couple of stops and more people get on. Just when I think the city is going to go on forever, green fields with black-and-white cows in them, barns, and farmhouses appear. For a while, I keep track of the towns where the bus stops – Maple Grove, Haney, and Mission.
Eventually, I slide across the aisle and sit beside Mom. I dig in the bag by her feet for a bologna-and-mustard sandwich. Mom is asleep, her head pressed up against the window. She looks beat. I’ve gotten her this far anyway, which is a small miracle.
Three bites into my sandwich and I suddenly feel sick and can’t eat any more. If Granny were here, she would say it was nerves. If I have to be honest, a teeny tiny bit of me is scared, but mostly I’m excited.
I have a twin sister!
The thing is, I know something about twins. I read all the Bobbsey Twin books when I was little and I’ve read other books with twins in them. So I’m pretty sure that when I meet Grace, we will have an instant bond. We’ll probably be telepathic and know each other’s thoughts.
I told that to Mom last night and she got a funny look on her face and said, “First we have to find her.”
• • • • •
The bus is hot and stuffy and I’m starting to doze a little too, when the driver announces the town of Agassiz. I jerk bolt upright in my seat and then lean over to poke Mom awake. Agassiz is the last town before Harrison Hot Springs. A lot of people get off, and then we are on our way again. We pass a few farms, but mostly the view out the window is forest.
The trees are blowing in the wind and raindrops spatter against the window. The road is twisty and the bus sways on the corners.
Suddenly houses spring up on both sides of the road. I spot a sign that says Camping, a gas station, a café, and a bright blue shack with a giant wooden ice-cream cone on the sidewalk in front of it. The bus is heading straight toward a huge stretch of choppy gray water, which must be the lake Mr. Pinn talked about. I think we’re going to drive right into the lake when the bus swings to the left. A minute later, it rumbles to a stop.
“Last stop!” the driver calls out cheerfully. “Harrison Hot Springs!”
We spill off the bus and all of the passengers mill around for a few minutes, waiting while the driver opens the compartment underneath and unloads suitcases and bags onto the pavement. The bus is parked in front of a huge bubble-gum pink building with a white roof and windows with white frames. A man in a spiffy gray uniform is standing under a pink-and-white striped awning. A fancy sign says Harrison Hot Springs Hotel. I feel like I’m in a fairy tale.
A cold wind is blowing; I hop up and down while I wait impatiently for Mom, who is the last one off the bus. By then the other passengers have disappeared. The bus rumbles away and we’re left standing there beside our suitcases.
The wind wraps Mom’s turquoise skirt tight around her long legs, her hair is wild and flying everywhere. It’s obvious that the man in the uniform can’t take his eyes off her. “Are you coming into the hotel?” he calls out. “Can I help you with your luggage?”
Mom hesitates. “I think so. Maybe.” She sighs. “I mean, yes, thank you.”
He’s very helpful, jumping to grab our suitcases, opening the glass door, and ushering us inside. No one has ever held a door open for me before. I feel like Queen Elizabeth. I look around in awe. We’re in a pale blue room with bright red furnitu
re. There’s a totem pole in the corner and four super-tall trees with skinny white trunks. (Real trees inside the hotel! I’m not kidding!)
“Outlandish,” Mom murmurs beside me. “What on earth is this going to cost?”
“We’ve got three hundred dollars,” I remind her in a whisper.
“But it’s got to last.” A frown crinkles Mom’s forehead. “There are bound to be lots of motor courts in this town. They’ll be cheaper. Maybe we should look around.”
“I want to stay here. Please, please, please.”
Mom sighs. “No promises. Watch our suitcases while I ask.”
She goes up to a counter with a sign that says Reception and I peer into another room. There’s more white trees in there and an enormous fireplace made out of stones. A table is set with teacups and teapots and plates with cookies and pieces of cake. People are perched on sofas and armchairs, holding teacups and napkins and chatting. I wish I had enough nerve to steal a cookie.
Mom is taking a long time. I cross my fingers. I am eleven years old and I have never stayed in a hotel in my whole entire life.
Then Mom is back. She’s holding a shiny gold key. And she’s smiling.
Chapter Seventeen
I adore our room. Mom says they told her at the desk that it’s called French Provincial, which sounds so elegant. It has blue-and-white curtains that go from the ceiling all the way to the floor, a ginormous bed with puffy pillows, and two chairs covered in purple velvet.
We even have our own bathroom with a gigantic bathtub on curved feet, stacks of thick towels, and soaps wrapped in pale pink paper. I try some lotion from a glass container and test the taps, which gush with steaming hot water.
When I come back into the room, Mom is flipping through a skinny yellow phone book. “There’s no Donnely in here. There are only a couple of pages for Harrison Hot Springs. And there’s no Donnely.”
For a second, I don’t know what Mom’s talking about. Then I remember that Donnely was the last name of Sharon, the nurse who adopted Grace. I guess I just thought that Grace’s last name would be King, like mine.
