Page 8 of This Darkness Mine

Mom would call her rude. I call it efficient. This woman speaks my language.

“Birth certificate,” I say.

Her eyes go back to her screen. “Yours or someone else’s?”

“Someone else’s.”

She doesn’t glance back at me. “Birth certificates can only be issued to the parent or spouse. I’m betting you’re neither of those.”

“What about a sister?”

The word feels weird on my tongue, one I’m not sure I’ve said before.

“Sure,” she says, still looking at the screen. “What’s her name?”

I pause too long, and she prompts me. “Your sister’s name?”

“I’m not sure,” I admit, and she looks up at me. I only have her attention for a split second before she’s back on the computer again, our business together finished.

“Adoption records are sealed,” she says.

“Look”—I scan the piles of papers on her desk and finally locate a name plaque—“Jane, I don’t think she was adopted. I don’t even know if she was born.”

The keys stop clicking and I’ve got her. I don’t think Jane gets a lot of high excitement or mystery here in the addition, so I whip out the ultrasound.

“This is me . . . well, one of them is,” I tell her.

“So you’re a twin,” Jane says. “Or you were supposed to be, anyway.” She takes it from me, unfurling the thin paper and holding it up to the light. “Don’t want to ask Mom?”

“No.”

“What about Dad?”

I let silence answer that one.

She sighs and hands the ultrasound back to me. “Like I said, birth certificates can be issued only to parents.” I’m about to argue when she puts her hand up to stop me. “But vital statistics are public record.”

Jane motions me to follow her as she pulls open a flimsy door, a puff of stale air greeting us. She flips a switch and the lights bubble to life, flickering as if they resent it. Racks of heavy books surround us, but Jane goes right for the one she wants, tossing it onto a wide wooden table in the center of the room.

“Name?”

“Mine?”

“Yeah. She’s your twin. She’ll have the same last name and birthdate.”

“Sasha Stone,” I say, more than a little embarrassed I didn’t think of that on my own. My brain has always been a sharp instrument, a pencil with lead that tears through paper. But on this subject I’ve been dull, barely leaving a mark behind.

“Birthdate?”

I tell her, and Jane’s finger trails down a column of Ss. “There,” she taps my name. “Found you.”

I lean over the table, fascinated by this stark representation of my existence. There I am, Sasha Stone, daughter of Patricia (Hall) Stone and Mark Stone. I feel a ridiculous bloom of relief in my chest to see that information, as if I needed proof that I was indeed born.

“No sister, though,” Jane says, her finger moving over to the birthdate column. “See? No other Stones born on November twenty-first of that year.”

“So she was stillborn?”

“Maybe,” Jane says, disappearing in the racks of books for a second, and returning with one titled Deaths 2000–