Chapter 11: Everything After
Three months later, Anna had a different address.
It was a small apartment in Brooklyn, on the third floor of a building with a fire escape she had already planted herbs on, because Anna, it turned out, grew things wherever she was put.
I had helped her move in on a Saturday in October with two friends of mine and a rented van and an argument about which boxes were heavier than they looked.
The settlement from the Whitmore properties had given her time.
Not wealth — she hadn't asked for wealth — but time.
Enough to stop taking every shift offered, enough to sleep past six in the morning, enough to take the bookkeeping course she had been putting off for two years because there was never a spare hour.
I visited on a Wednesday evening in November.
She had made soup.
The apartment smelled like garlic and thyme and something baking.
"You didn't have to cook," I said.
"I wanted to." She handed me a glass of wine and pointed at the chair nearest the window.
"Sit.
Tell me about your week."
I sat.
I told her.
She stirred the soup and listened the way she had always listened — fully, without interrupting, with the occasional small sound that meant she was following.
"And Alexander?" she asked, when I had finished.
"He called again."
"What did you say?"
"I didn't answer." I looked at the wine in my glass.
"I'm not angry at him anymore.
I think that's the honest answer.
I just don't have anything left to say."
She nodded.
"That's its own kind of answer."
"Mrs.
Calloway sent a card," I said.
"She asked if she could visit sometime."
"I'd like that." Anna turned from the stove.
"She's a good woman who made a long mistake.
I don't think those people should be abandoned."
"No," I said.
"Neither do I."
She set two bowls on the small table by the window.
Outside, the city was doing what it always did — moving, lit up, indifferent to the specific weight of any one evening.
But the window framed it, and the lamp was on, and the soup was hot, and my sister was sitting across from me.
"I've been thinking about something," Anna said.
"Tell me."
"I want to find out what happened to the other children from St.
Catherine's.
The ones who were transferred after the storm.
Some of them must be findable." She looked at her bowl.
"I know it's a lot.
I know it might lead nowhere.
But I keep thinking — if I had found you, maybe others are still looking for someone too."
I looked at her across the small table.
"Then we look," I said.
She smiled.
It was the same smile from the photograph — the older girl with her arm around her sister's shoulders, protecting her from the entire world.
Except now she was sitting in her own apartment with herbs on the fire escape and soup on the table, and the world she was facing was one she had chosen.
"You know," she said, "I used to think the worst thing that ever happened to me was losing you."
"And now?"
She picked up her spoon.
"Now I think the worst thing was all the years I spent believing you didn't want to be found." She paused.
"Because you were looking the whole time.
And so was I.
And we were both carrying the same photograph."
I didn't say anything.
There was nothing to say that the moment hadn't already said better.
We ate our soup while the city moved outside the window, and the lamp held its small circle of light, and for the first time in fifteen years there was no distance between us that needed to be crossed.
The photograph was on her bookshelf.
Both copies, side by side in a single frame she had found at a market the week before.
Two little girls outside a redbrick orphanage.
Coats too large.
One arm around the other's shoulders.
Neither of them alone.
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Some things that are taken from us are taken quietly, by people who believed they had the right.
But the things that are truly ours — the love, the memory, the person who called you by your real name — those cannot be filed away or managed or kept in an apron pocket forever.
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