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“Do I have to call you Mom?” Elisa asked me once, about six weeks into the transition, sitting stiffly at our kitchen table during a supervised visit that was slowly becoming less supervised as the court grew more comfortable with the arrangement.
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“Not until you actually want to,” I told her. “You can call me Adele for as long as you need to. I’m not going anywhere either way.”
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Paige’s trial concluded ten months later, ending in a plea agreement that kept her out of the harshest possible sentencing in exchange for full cooperation and testimony against Diane, along with a permanent restriction on any future contact with Elisa without direct court approval.
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I’ve thought more than once about whether I could have found some version of forgiveness for my sister, given enough time and distance from that sidewalk outside Wren’s school. I haven’t found it yet. I’m not certain I will. Six years of grief I never needed to carry sits somewhere considerably harder to release than most other things I’ve survived.
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Elisa calls me Mom now, almost eighteen months later, easily and without hesitation, the way children eventually settle into whatever version of family finally makes sense to them once enough time and patience have been spent building it properly.
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She and Wren share a room now, both of them insisting on it despite having plenty of space for separate ones, twin beds pushed close enough together that I sometimes find them asleep in the same one most mornings anyway.
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May you like
I pack two lunchboxes every single school morning now, the way Wren originally asked me to that very first day, though these days, neither of us needs the reminder anymore.
I think about that morning outside the school sometimes, the exact moment I looked up and saw my sister holding the hand of a daughter I’d buried an empty casket for six years earlier. Some truths, it turns out, don’t stay buried nearly as long as the people hiding them hope they will — they simply wait, patiently, for a five-year-old with a pink plastic camera to notice what everyone else had spent six years too afraid to see.
