“Sit still,” he says, his accent thick and impatient. “No trouble.”
“Almost ready,” Rebecca says, her voice soft as she places plates on the table. Five plates making my eyes scrunch at who will be joining us. She moves with a careful grace, like someone who’s learned exactly how much space she’s allowed to occupy.
When she reaches for the salt, her sleeve rides up, revealing a faded scar circling her wrist. My stomach knots. I recognize those marks. They match the fresh ones on my own skin making me wonder what she apparently did to earn them for them to scar like that.
Igor grunts, checking his watch. “Girls come in soon. They’ll be hungry after play.”
Girls? I frown, trying to make sense of his words. Rebecca hasn’t mentioned any children.
As if summoned by his words, the back door swings open. Fading sunlight pours in, momentarily blinding, and with it comes the sound of laughter, high, innocent, and unburdened. The kind of laughter I haven’t heard since Emma was small in the rare moments her illnesses did not consume our lives entirely.
And then I see them.
Two little girls, maybe four or five years old, with matching blonde pigtails and wide green eyes. They’re identical in every way, from their pink-cheeked smiles to the grass stains on their knees. My lungs forget how to work. They look so much like Emma did and like my mother.
“Mama!” they cry in unison, running to Rebecca.
She kneels, arms open wide, her face transformed by a smile I’ve never seen before. It reaches her eyes, crinkling the corners,erasing years of hardness I remember from my childhood. She hugs them both, kissing their foreheads with tender precision.
“Did you have fun outside, my loves?” she asks, brushing dirt from one girl’s cheek.
“We found frogs!” one announces proudly.
“Three frogs,” the other clarifies, holding up fingers to demonstrate.
“Anya, Mila, wash hands,” Igor interrupts, and the spell breaks slightly. The girls don’t seem afraid of him, but they obey immediately, scampering to the sink where Rebecca helps them reach the soap.
I sit frozen, trying to process what I’m seeing. Rebecca has other children. Twin daughters who look like the healthy sister I never had who look like my mother and me.
“Fallon, this is Anya and Mila,” Rebecca says carefully, her eyes meeting mine with a silent plea I can’t decipher. “Girls, this is… a friend who’s staying with us for a while.”
The twins stare at me with matching curious expressions, then smile simultaneously. The effect is eerie and heartbreaking.
“Your face has purple,” one of them—Mila, I think points out innocently.
“I fell,” I lie, the words scraping my throat.
Igor makes a sound that might be a laugh, and Rebecca quickly directs everyone to the table. She serves soup with steady hands, slicing bread, pouring juice for the girls with careful attention to equal amounts.
The twins chatter through their food, taking turns speaking as if they’ve worked out a system. They talk about frogs and butterflies, and a treehouse uncle Igor is supposedly building them. God knows how they can possibly think of that man as an uncle. He barely acknowledges their words but occasionally nods when directly addressed. Rebecca responds to every comment, every question with engaged patience.
She never responded to me like that. Not once in all the years before she left.
I remember standing on a chair at age eight, stirring soup because Rebecca was passed out on the couch. I remember begging her to come to my school play, only to sit on stage scanning an audience where she never appeared. I remember her forgetting to pick me up, forgetting to shop for food, forgetting my birthday three years running.
But she remembers to cut the crusts off Mila’s bread before she dips them in the soup.
“Eat,” Igor directs at me, noticing my untouched bowl.
I lift the spoon mechanically. The soup tastes like nothing. I force it down anyway, knowing I need strength. Each swallow feels like forcing down shards of glass as I stare at the two girls who could have been me and Emma if we had a real mother.
Rebecca catches my eye across the table, something like shame flashing across her face before she turns her attention back to wiping juice from Anya’s chin.
This is what it looks like when Rebecca loves her children. This is what it looks like when she’s present, sober, engaged. This is what Emma and I never had, what we never even knew to miss because we couldn’t imagine this version of her existed, not that Emma would remember her, she was only a baby when she left us.
The twins finish eating and ask to be excused, slipping from their chairs with practiced ease. They hover near Rebecca, whispering something that makes her smile again, that real smile that transforms her face into someone I’ve never met.
Rebecca’s eyes meet mine, and for a second, I see the ghost of my mother there, the one who left us, the one who chose drugs over her daughters, the one who vanished without a goodbye.