I had been so focused on getting Maya back that I had treated Sophie as a witness. As a source of information. Not as a child who had also lost her sister and was now, quietly, losing her mother.
I had looked right through her.
“I thought if I accepted that Maya was gone,” I said slowly, “then she’d really be gone. Like saying it out loud would make it real.”
“I know,” Sophie said.
“So I just kept…”
“I know, Mom.”
I had been so focused on getting Maya back.
She leaned her head against my shoulder. I felt the weight of it, real and warm, and something in my chest cracked open.
“Every time I said her name,” Sophie whispered, “you cried. So I stopped saying it. And then I had nobody to talk to about her. I had nobody at all, Mom.”
“I’m so sorry, baby,” I said. “I am so sorry I made you feel alone in this.”
“I just wanted my twin sister back,” Sophie added. Her voice was very steady, the way it gets when someone has been rehearsing something for a long time. “But I wanted my mom back, too.”
“I had nobody at all, Mom.”
We sat on the stairs until the light outside turned gray.
I had spent a year trying desperately to save the daughter I had lost. I had not noticed I was losing the daughter I still had.
I almost lost both of them.
I had not noticed I was losing the daughter I still had.
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