sometimes you don't see the things that change you

Sometimes you don’t see the things that change you

Sarah Jameson listened to the staccato beats of the rain on the attic's roof. She did not like the way her 30^th year started out. Two weeks ago, she had a party, followed the next week by a funeral. In between, her parents had been killed in a car wreck two days after her birthday.

Sarah wrapped her plaid sweater more tightly around her shoulders. A dank, musty smell assailed her nose as she moved boxes around to clear a space. Then, she sat down on the attic floor in front of a large green and purple wooden box. Tears came again, unbidden, as she thought about her parents and her now lonely, threadbare life.

She wiped the tears from her cheeks. " Keep it together, Sarah. You have used up your lifetime supply of tears." Why had she come up to the attic, she asked herself? She had forgotten many things in the past few days, every day a Groundhog Day with no Bill Murray to shoulder the pain.

 To her surprise and dismay, she had inherited the house and was appointed the executor of her parents' will. No documents were found in the home below her, so she had come up here to look, dreading the weight of sadness it would bring.

A black spider scurried by her foot, and she instinctively crushed it under her foot. “If they don’t live, neither do you, mister spider.” She regretted her actions just a bit, being naturally kind to all living creatures.

This box, she thought, open this one.

Sarah opened the box, raising a small cloud of dust, making her sneeze. Her hands waved and blew it away. Her first glance in the box revealed piles of papers and photographs. Old school, her parents. She had tried to bring them into 2025, but they had little interest in changing the things that had always worked for them. Most of the furniture and some of the appliances in the house were more than thirty years old, except for the TV and an Amazon Echo. Sarah would miss trying to show them how a new cellphone worked

She picked up a random pile of photographs bound with elastic bands and a note that read 1995-1996. There were other wads of pictures with different dates right up until last year.

She pulled the elastic binding from the pictures in her shaking right hand. The first was a road sign, Knoxville exit 1 mile, and the next photo was of her mother, smiling, her blue eyes scrunched up against the sun. Her dad had hazel eyes, and Sarah’s were a bright emerald green peppered with blue.

Next, after her mother’s picture, was of a very young girl, perhaps no more than seventeen years old, laying in a hospital bed, cradling two babies in pink blankets. She turned the photo over. There was writing on the back, faded but still readable. Sarah read it out loud

“Birth mother Nancy Grace with her twin baby girls, Sarah and Emily, June 12, 1995.”

Sarah's hands were very still, holding the photo, and then they began to shake. Sarah’s birthday was June 12, 1995. She put that photo aside and then went through the remaining ones in her hand. The next one showed her parents and, Nancy Grace and a one-year-old girl with a face covered in white icing from a cake on the table in front of them. On the cake was a candle number 1. Birthday after birthday followed, each picture an accusation “I am not their child” Only the first birthday had Nancy Grace in it, Sarah now having morphed into the child of Jim and Judy Jameson.  Sarah put aside the photographs and rummaged further in the box

Her chest tightened as she found her birth certificate. She held it in her hands, unable to take a deep breath. The gloom in the attic was bearing down, and what little light there was seemed to vanish. She put the paper in the box, got up, took the box with her, and left the attic.

Spreading the pictures on the living room table, she went over them one more time, comparing the child there to the one in framed enlargements on the shelves next to the fireplace. She was cold, so she flipped the fireplace remote on, then sat and watched the flames.

Finally, she picked up the birth certificate and turned it over to read.

“Sarah Grace, born June 12, 1995

 Mother Nancy Grace, Father unknown.”

Sarah did not cry, just stayed statue still, letting the birth certificate drop from a now nerveless hand. Long minutes passed as she stared with dry desert eyes into the fire. Finally, she became aware that she was breathing and still a living creature, but she was not the one alive before going into the attic. That girl had died; what remained was a rudderless boat, buffeted by the winds of the storm, so far from the harbor that she might never get home.

She turned off the fire and went upstairs to the bedroom she had used as a child until her life had moved on. She pulled back the pink covers on the bed, got in, and pulled them over her head until she drifted off to sleep.

She awoke the next day transformed, like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, into a creature that she was unfamiliar with and mostly unknown to. Sarah Jameson was gone, perhaps dead or lost forever. She was Sarah Grace, her parents unknown, and her twin, a picture set free in the world, waiting to be discovered.

She brewed a large cup of Earl Grey tea and took it to the bay window overlooking the Jameson gardens, row on row of flowers, reds, whites, yellow roses, pink and purple hydrangeas, and a multitude of other blooms and plants. Mrs. Jameson had spent years working on the gardens, never to be seen by her again.

Sarah Grace sat, bathed in the morning sun, sipping her tea, basking in the vision of the garden, mourning the loss of Sarah Jameson. A strange sound filled the room, and Sarah realized, to her shock, that it was her own voice, keening in violent waves, the death of Sarah Jameson. She held her knees and rocked until the keening relented and went away.

“I have a sister,” the thought exploded to fill her, “a sister, a twin, Emily," that she had never met. Sarah realized that she had an unfulfilled purpose after all. She would find her. None of this could be put aside until that girl was found.

“I will find you, Emily Grace, I will find you,” and thus, a new journey was begun.