I had always identified the visitations of my presence as one of those spirits Betty’s doctoring let into my head. It first came when I was taken from Betty for that brief time, and put into the white room. At other times, I had the sensation that there was someone walking beside me, or sitting behind me, always just beyond the periphery of my vision. One of the reasons I let the dog live inside was that it kept away this presence, which over the years had grown to seem anxious, needy, helpless in some way I could not define. I had never before thought of the presence in relation to my twin, who’d grown up not an hour’s drive away, but that night the combination of the call out of the blue and the twelve-letter word in my puzzle set my thoughts flowing.
Betty told me she had no idea what the Larks had named the baby boy, though she probably knew. Of course, as we were different genders, we were fraternal twins and supposedly no more alike than any brother and sister. The night my birth mother called, I decided to hate and resent my twin. I’d heard her voice for the first time, shaky on the phone. He’d heard it all of his life.
I had always thought I hated my birth mother, too. But the woman had called herself, simply, mother. My brain had perfectly taped the words she said. All that night and the next morning, too, they played on a loop. By the end of the second day, however, the intonation grew fainter. I was relieved that on the third day they stopped. Then, on the fourth day, the woman called again.
She began by apologizing.
I am sorry to bother you! She went on to say that she had always wanted to meet me and been afraid to find out where I was. She said that George, my father, was dead and she lived alone and that my twin brother was a former postal worker who had moved down to Pierre, South Dakota. I asked his name.
Linden. It was an old family name.
Was mine an old family name as well? I asked.
No, said Grace Lark, it just matched your brother’s name.
She told me that George had quickly written my name down on the birth certificate and that they had never seen me. She went on talking about how George had died of a heart attack and she had nearly moved down to Pierre to be near Linden but she couldn’t sell her home. She told me she hadn’t known that I lived so close or she would have called me long before.
The light, conversational chatter must have caused a dreamlike amnesia to come over my mind, because when Grace Lark asked if we could meet, if she could take me out to dinner at Vert’s Supper Club, I said yes and agreed on a day.
When I finally hung up the telephone, I stared for a long time at the little log fire set going in the fireplace. Before the call, I’d laid the fire and looked forward to popping some corn. I would throw kernels high in the air and the dog would catch them. Perhaps I’d sit in the kitchen and watch a movie at the table. Or maybe I’d stay by the fire and read my novel from the library. The dog would snore and twitch in his dreams. Those had been my choices. Now I was gripped by something else—a dreadful array of feelings yawned. Which should I elect to overcome me first? I could not decide. The dog came and put his head in my lap and we sat there until I realized that one of the reactions I could have was numbness. Relieved, feeling nothing, I put the dog out, let him in, and went to bed.
So we met. She was so ordinary. I was sure that I had seen her in the street, or at the grocery, or the bank perhaps. It would have been hard to have missed seeing anyone, sometime, in a person’s life around here. But she would not have registered as my mother because I could detect nothing familiar, or like myself, about her.
We did not touch hands or certainly hug. We sat down across from each other in a leatherette booth.
My birth mother stared at me. You aren’t . . . her voice fell off.
Retarded?
She composed herself. You got your coloring from your