Sophie grew up in Michigan. With Helen. In a house eleven hours from the house where her twin brother was growing up without her.
Nate told me he remembered Sophie. Not clearly. Not the way a person remembers a sibling they grew up beside. In the way a person remembers a presence that was removed before the memory had time to solidify. He remembered a shape beside him. A warmth in the bed. A voice that sounded like his own but higher. Fragments of a person who was there and then was not, and the absence was filled so gradually by his parents’ silence that by the time Nate was old enough to ask, asking felt like excavating something the family had agreed to leave buried.
He asked once. At seven. He asked his mother who the girl in the photograph was.
Carol told him Sophie was his cousin who had lived with them briefly when they were very young.
