I smiled the way adults usually do when greeting small children. Then I froze as I looked closer.
They looked eerily like me when I was young.
They looked eerily like me when I was young.
Suddenly they ran directly toward me. They wrapped their arms around my waist, clinging tightly like children who had waited a long time for something.
“Mom!” the taller one shouted happily. “Mom, you finally came! We kept asking you to come get us!”
The entire room fell silent.
I glanced at the lead teacher, who gave an awkward laugh and silently mouthed “sorry.”
“Mom, you finally came!”
I couldn’t focus for the rest of the morning.
I carried on with the routine: snack time, circle time, outdoor play. But I kept watching the girls. Noticing things I shouldn’t have been noticing.
The way the shorter one tilted her head when thinking. The way the taller one pressed her lips together before speaking. They shared the exact same gestures.
But it was their eyes that kept breaking me.
Both girls had mismatched eyes: one blue and one brown.
My eyes are the same. They’ve been that way since birth. A rare heterochromia so distinct that my mother used to joke I’d been made from two different skies.
It was the eyes that undid me.
I excused myself to the bathroom and stood at the sink for several minutes, gripping the porcelain and telling myself to pull it together.
I looked up at the ceiling and let the memories surface: the eighteen-hour labor, the sudden emergency at the end, the surgeries that followed.
When I finally woke up after giving birth, a doctor I had never seen before told me both my daughters had died.
Both my girls had died.
I never saw my babies. I was told my husband, Pete, had handled the funeral while I was still unconscious, signing all the necessary paperwork.
Six weeks later he sat across from me with divorce papers and said he couldn’t stay. He said he couldn’t look at me without remembering what had happened. He said the girls were gone because of complications I had caused.
I was devastated. But I believed him. I believed every word. Because what other explanation could there be?
For five years, I dreamed of two babies crying in the dark.
I never saw my babies.
The sound of the girls’ laughter drifting down the hallway pulled me back to the present, and I stepped out again.
The taller girl looked up at me immediately, as if she had been waiting.
“Mom, will you take us home with you?”
