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I sat there, staring at Ellie’s laptop for far too long as the moments continued to tick down. She didn’t want to interrupt me, regardless of how important her words were. It was just so unclear what I was thinking or why I was pausing. I was in a delicate headspace, clearly, but there was no way to be sure what sort of comfort I would need. I didn’t know either. But a moment of calm when everything was paused certainly helped.
Then the moment passed. When I finally moved my head back and heaved my shoulders with a resigned sigh, Ellie stepped back in.
“Her connections aren’t private,” she simply said. “We could find her guy. Maybe he’s a bit more careless. This Laurens or Lawrence or whatever.”
It turned out to be Laurens, which seemed to confirm Ellie’s suspicions that he was Dutch, for whatever that mattered. Laurens Assen was his full name. She professed as much with a bit of a snicker because that definitely was not a great surname. And as if she had been going for a perfect score, she was right that he played a bit faster and looser with his settings than my sister did. Which meant that I could see her, if we went looking through what turned out to be the hundreds of pictures Laurens had posted.
He was a sociable guy, with many snapshots of his adventures prominently displayed for anyone curious. To me, that spoke to a certain confidence or bravado that I had never known. Then again, he was several years older, meaning he might simply have been technologically illiterate, unable to take the precautions he might have preferred. Regardless, in his mess of an online presentation, we found my sister. He didn’t tag her, but her jawline jumped out at us. And once it did, we found her many times, and she was always smiling, dark eyes shining out from slightly lighter hair. Her face would glow whenever his arm was around her, pulling her close not as if he were trying to claim her but as if to say that this spot beside him was offered to her and was only hers to take.
It was the exact sort of embrace I had always wanted from someone but had never managed to find. I didn’t want to start off this sisterly adventure by being needlessly envious, but sure enough, that seemed to be where it was going.
The emotional sucker punches didn’t end with that technical knockout. There was this one picture in particular that I couldn’t move past. Surprisingly enough, it was not a picture in which he was holding her but a picture where they were on a beach, fully dressed but damp, almost as if they had run into the water or (more likely) the dark clouds overhead had opened up and poured down on them both. Because of their smiles, though, it was easy to conjure up any sort of fantasy to place them both in. I could see her a bit more clearly in that one. Our eye shapes were the same as were the color, but such things can seem so ordinary that perhaps they didn’t really count. But in thinking that, the sadness in my heart started to swell. An air of melancholy seeped out of me, engulfing Ellie as well.
As always, she knew what to do. She wrapped her arms around me, placing herself firmly at my side.
“She seems nice,” I said.
“Do you mean that or are you just happy things can’t get much worse for you?” she asked.
“Oh things could always get worse.”
At the very least, I had Ellie in my figurative corner and literally at my side. For those reasons alone, this wasn’t rock bottom. There was her smile, warmth, and genuine care. Also the wine helped, but I couldn’t have it right then.
But as if to distract me from the dry spell I had pushed upon myself, Ellie pointed out, “She could just want medical information.”
I scoffed. “Sucks for her then. Almost every disease imaginable runs in this damn family. But cancer, weirdly enough.”
While I had escaped most of those medical bullets, the threats still loomed. I knew better than anyone that this was not a good set of cards to have. And it was enough to wonder why you were even born at all if this was the curse tied into your genome.
Why did your parents bother to have you? There was a clear answer in the case of our father or in the case of any man who could have four daughters with four different women. It was a different matter for my mother. I tried not to think about that, her hope, and all the ways I fell short in it. I tried not to think about all the candles she lit in our family’s church or all the prayers she offered up at every meal. All for me. And all of it for nothing.
“She does seem nice,” Ellie reiterated.
We kept scrolling through his pictures, but it was hard to get a sense of who she was through this other person’s lens. He only caught her smiling during moments that had no natural connecting thread. Backgrounds were always different, skin was sun-kissed to varying degrees, and the passage of time was somewhat apparent. Most noticeable was the absence of certain things, things that I was inclined to look for because of what little I knew about Lynette. Or Lynette’s genetic line, rather. There were no pictures of my niece or any children. Rationally, that would be the best-case scenario. Plastering children all over a parent’s social media would give me pause even if someone’s privacy settings were on point, which Laurens’ were not. Ethically, there’s a conversation that needs to be had about a right to privacy, particularly during one’s more cringy youthful escapades, and I thought it was a good sign that this surprise sibling and her partner agreed with me on something fairly critical like that. For my niece’s sake, it was better that I not be able to see her, but all the same, there was a lingering disappointment that I didn’t fully understand.
I sat with that contradiction for a moment and fifteen pictures before I finally asked Ellie, “Is it weird that I want to see my niece?”
I shouldn’t have had to. I should have just known the answer to that, but I didn’t. I had to rely on Ellie for something so simple. Normally, I would feel guilty about that, but I didn’t have the energy right then.
She shook her head. “If people kept telling me I had a doppelganger out there, I’d want to see her too.”
“But it’s more than that,” I replied.
Which led to the obvious question from Ellie: “What do you mean?”
It was fair to ask, but I didn’t even know what I meant. I was trying to describe something that couldn’t be tamed by any of the many languages humans had come up with. Meanwhile, in front of me, my sister kept smiling. Or all the pictures of her were smiling. And even then I was vaguely aware of the simple fact that the pictures of ourselves we put on social media are highly manicured and present not the real truth of our lives but a fairy tale version of it. This wasn’t her real life, but it was a part of it. It was the only glimpse I had.
And I couldn’t have anything more, I realized. Or there was a chance I never would. Suppose she never reached out to me? Then this would be it. I would only have the knowledge that she existed and had rejected the possibility of any sort of connection between the two of us. Then we would continue living parallel lives, but I would always know about that other track: this other train I could maybe even see from the window but never clearly.
But this wasn’t a train. It was my sister. A third sister who might reject me at any time. But at least this one didn’t sleep with my partner, right? So I had that going for me. Because the bar is just that low. It’s so low that all she had to do was not sleep with someone she had no interest in sleeping with, and she was a better sister to me than the ones I had. And yet, she still didn’t want me. Which hurt because somehow deep down I knew that I actually wanted her to be in my life.
And with that, I was crying. It was sudden, abrupt. There was only a soft shaking to warn me of what would come, a small tremble starting in my hands, but that could have meant anything. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that it was my defenses cracking, breaking down and crumbling to dust. In one moment, I was holding it together, and in the next, I was completely undone. This was probably an escalation that skipped multiple steps, but everything I was holding in from that first smile became fuel for the storm raging inside of me. So I cried. I cried and cried and cried. And when I was done with that, when I was out of tears, I simply sobbed dryly. The dam was finally broken, and even though it was absolutely mortifying to be seen like that, I kept going, kept breaking down, and kept sobbing. My body kept shaking. A rattling filled my lungs and made it hard to breathe. But I was okay with that. I was okay with that feeling of suffocation. It meant this might be over sooner.
Ellie latched onto me again, shushing me gently and rocking me lightly. She said nothing, though, not that there was anything I wanted her to say. The embrace itself was powerful, but it only pushed out the thoughts I had been holding back so fervently.
“Why do I care?” I cried. “Seriously, why do I fucking care? I didn’t know she existed twelve hours ago.”
But there was no answer to that. I was crying out for the sake of crying out, for whatever catharsis might come from releasing that tension. At least I was safe with Ellie, I thought. It could have been so much worse. So I just sat in my emotions and let them wash over me. All the while, she held me. She rested her chin on my head. And normally that would have made me anxious because I had this weird thinning line of hair where childhood headbands had always sat, but I couldn’t be bothered to care about that right then. My world was spinning. I was scared and sad and angry and a bunch of other things. None of it I could handle anymore, and I needed to get as much of it out of my system as was possible. But it seemed like an endless pit, constantly flowing forth but never emptying.
Ellie began running her fingers through my hair, only for them to get caught on a knot. To escape, she had to pull down harder and more forcefully. She lightly banged her fingers against my shoulders as she ripped a hair or two out Because of course I couldn’t have anything nice. Not even a small gesture of kindness like that one.
After that somewhat awkward moment, she said, “When I was a child, I used to dream about having a long-lost sister. I didn’t really understand the mechanics of it. But I still wanted a sibling. Being an only child was lonely. Grass is always greener on the other side, I suppose.”
And I knew she was right. It was something I had also longed for. Wanting a proper sibling was just a part of childhood for a lot of people, and the only requirement to be in that group was that you did not have siblings you could be close to. I hit that requirement in a roundabout way. So clearly there was some validity to this reaction, right? There was this desire that now could, in theory, be fulfilled but also maybe not. I had grown up, and as an adult, I knew the complications child-me couldn’t have considered. For a sibling to appear, there had to be a loss, usually a loss of innocence or trust. In exchange, you gained the knowledge that the family unit we had depended on growing up wasn’t so secure. Our parents had to do certain intimate things away from each other and outside the home. Maybe a vow or two was broken or a heart trampled on. And while our parents went about their way, creating children who may never know them or us, they set those children up on trajectories that may take them far away from you, and your paths may never cross. Even if they do, from that setup lies the potential for more hurt, for more rejection, and for the ultimate failure of those childhood fantasies.
Regardless, Ellie had managed to ground me with a story about herself, and that’s a hard thing to do successfully. It wasn’t just because I was locked up in a prison of my own sadness. Generally, talking about yourself in a time like that is a risky move. If you bring it too close to home, it just sounds like you want the moment to be about you. And there are people who do want that, people who only care about amassing moments that are all about themselves regardless of what the cost of each may be. They pay the fee, even if that cost was the well-being of a friend.
Ellie was different, though. She was different from anyone I had ever known. Just like I needed her to be.
When I was more settled, Ellie pulled away, and I was left with the difficult task of pulling myself back together. It wasn’t about my looks, though, and the visible tear tracks still plastered on my cheeks. I just needed to be able to hold a conversation. Or I needed to uphold whatever standards Ellie set for me to have more wine. That was the one true relevant standard.
She watched me carefully. I took another deep breath, as if I were releasing the worst of my negativity into the air, freeing myself up from those chains. It was not a convincing performance.
“I’m taking the extra bottles with me,” she declared.
That’s the sort of indirect accusation that could cause offense. But my (previously and maybe still) oldest sister was a recovering heroin addict, and I had this lingering fear that I was going to go down that route too. We didn’t share that much DNA or our upbringings, so I didn’t have the worst odds, but I was still afraid of that kind of destruction. And Ellie was aware of this. I told her once when she and I went out for extra cocktails after a work-place happy hour that was hastily thrown together with a vaguely “Oktoberfest” theme. We had already stumbled back to her place, and I had nearly broken my ankle trying to step inside her front door. That was the inciting moment for the breakdown that followed.
And once you’ve had one overly personal breakdown during the twilight hours of what had been a work function, then your concern that you too will spiral into an addiction appears to have some merit, one that a dear friend will have to take seriously.
Ellie did treat me with kid gloves, sometimes. There were times when she was a bit overprotective, and I would be a liar to deny that or how it occasionally bothered me. But I wouldn’t be giving you the full truth if I didn’t also point out that I fed her concerns with repeated mishaps and other stumbles. So it was what it was: a set of events that included me chugging down this new glass, and while I wasn’t incredibly drunk, I did think that slamming the glass down against the kitchen counter was a good idea. It wasn’t. Because with that hit, the glass cracked from the bottom to halfway up the glass.
In shock, Ellie and I watched it for a moment, but apparently, I didn’t think strategically about my grip and removing my hand from the now broken glass. In fact, I must have been doing the opposite. I must have been squeezing it or something like that because a crack became a break. It was almost a shatter, in fact. As the line grew in length before it fully separated.
Suddenly, there was broken glass against my skin as my hand lay against other bits and shards.
Of course, I thought to myself rather than feel any bit of surprise. Of fucking course.