girl Mariposa, and she told us that in Spanish mariposa meant butterfly.
Mariposa shook her head and said, “My name is Mari.”
I’d refused to answer, but she kept looking at me anyway.
“When’s your birthday?” she tried again. Her words came out different from mine, and back then, I couldn’t place it. When I got older, I realized she had had an Italian accent, but she was trying not to. Jocelyn kept correcting her words when she said them in Italian, though she said Mariposa was fluent in Spanish. We never heard her speak a word in Spanish.
“September,” Harrison had answered for me. “When’s yours?”
“October,” Mari answered.
“Oh, that’s right! You’re only about two weeks apart!” Jocelyn had said, trying to push us closer together.
“You hear that, Kee?” Harrison nudged me. “You and Mari are only two weeks apart.”
Harrison told me that my eyes had lifted after, and I took Mari’s hand and dragged her inside of our house.
From that point forward, Mariposa Flores became my sister. And it was around that time that I started becoming what Mari called a “fixer.” Someone who had to fix all of the problems in the world, “the world” being my family. Mari included.
I never told Mari this, but the reason I started talking to her that day was because I knew Roisin had sent her to me. To be my sister of the heart. I was older than Roisin by two minutes. And when Jocelyn had announced that Mari and I were only two weeks apart, in my heart I knew Mari had come to live on Staten Island because I needed her.
Turned out, she needed me, too.
Her parents had died in a car accident when she was five, and she had gone to live with Jocelyn and her father, who everyone in the neighborhood called Old Man Gianelli. Old Man Gianelli died somewhere in that time, and then Jocelyn died when Mari was ten. After that, there was no one to care for her, so the state put her into foster care.
Again, half of me seemed to disappear. So I started holding my breath again. I refused to stop unless Mam found her.
I had held my breath and lost my sister. Maybe if I held my breath again, Mari would come back.
She did.
My Mam found her.
For the most part, though, my Mam tried to keep us apart. She was concerned that I was using Mari to replace Roisin, and she didn’t like it. She said it broke her heart that I’d found a replacement for my twin. Even as the years went on, Mam still kept Mari at arm’s length. She said Mari was trouble, and that she was going to bring it to our door. The tea leaves told her.
Trouble or not, and even if Mam could never understand, Mari would always be the sister of my heart.
None of us ever told Mari about Roisin, though. I didn’t want to. I worried that Mari would think I was trying to replace my sister, and then she would doubt what we shared was true.
Mari had issues with kindness, but somehow, she accepted it from me. For the most part. I knew there was a story there, about why she rejected it so fiercely, but the beautiful thing about Mari and me—we were good at keeping our secrets, but they never broke us apart.
For the longest time after Mari came into my life, the conversations with my sister came to an end, but every once in a while, when life felt extremely hard, we picked them up again.
In a moment of uncertainty, after Mam had said she read something in the leaves, I’d asked Roisin to bring the right man to me. I told her when he was right, I’d know she’d sent him because he would understand my loss, my pain, in some kind of a way. He’d feel me.
If Roisin had sent Mr. Kelly to my door, I had no idea why. Why him? Why the fuck would she send me a man that made me so uneasy? The more I thought about the way he stoned me with those green eyes, the more I leaned toward hating him for the judgment. I could tell he had something on his mind, and it had to do with me.
Ulterior motives.
Actually, that problem was only half of the battle and led me to another. The reason I’d asked Roisin to intervene in the first place was because I was starting to get serious with a