Daddy Had a Little Lamb

(I chose as a prompt the Florida Weekly challenge of a young girl surrounded by two sets of twins. Since I will enter my story in the contest, I welcome constructive criticism.)

Born without a double in a family of twins, I am Oona. The One, Mother would coo. Little Lamb, Daddy would drawl. Princess, two sets of sisters would scoff. As if imbued with a special dispensation, I wore nothing twinish, like a matching dress or a distinguishing ribbon. Yet I always sensed a missing indulgence.

Until today.

As the remaining responsible child of five girls, I was cleaning out my parents’ house. Daddy and three sisters—Agnes, Grace, and Annie—had already died. Elsie, the eldest, allegedly was helping me. Though physically able, dementia was claiming her brain. I resented only that Mother hadn’t moved years ago.

“Please,” I had begged. “Let’s find you a smaller place. You can socialize, play cards, eat dinner with your old friends.”

“This is where I belong, where I raised my babies.” Obstinate if nothing else, she would kiss me on the forehead. “Every last Oona of them.”

Thomas and Mary had moved into this early twentieth-century Victorian the day they married. Here they raised five daughters. I think my father always wanted a son, but he basked in the adoration of his girls. I was his favorite.

“Mary had a little lamb,” he would sing as I trailed my mother far and wide. “And everywhere that Mary went her lamb was sure to go.”

Last month, though, at 95, Mother stopping going anywhere.

Brushing away cobwebs, I redirected my attention to the attic, the last stop in my journey through my parents’ lives. Into three piles I had divvied their  remains—take away, give away, throw away. Mother had neatly labeled everything, as if to facilitate her life’s disassembly. That was so like her, always placing everyone’s needs before her own.

But she hadn’t labeled the one thing I needed. And I didn’t even know what that was. Something unknown and untouchable tugged at the edges of my brain like soapsuds clinging to a basin.

“Lookie here!” Elsie squealed. Pointing to a small stack of colored boxes, she animated this otherwise dreary chore. “Christmas!”

“No, Elsie. Not Christmas.” Looking over the boxes, I noticed that each was labeled with names and dates of birth. Brushing away dust, I sat on a small window seat and patted the space next to me. “It’s a birthday party, Elsie. Let’s look together.”

Inside each were souvenirs related to birth. I smiled at Mother’s sentimentality. If only I had found these before she died, I could have given them to her.

“Look, Elsie.” I handed her a yellowed card. To Elsie and Agnes, it read. “Gramma sent this card when you were born.” It  disintegrated when she ripped it open, prompting tears. I quickly pulled another from the stack, a sturdier one. “Be careful. These are very old.”

As Elsie pored over the collection, I skipped the stack labeled Grace and Annie. I dug further to find pink and blue ribbons bundling the last one. Oona. I gasped. And Thomas.

“You had a twin,” Elsie leaned in. She couldn’t always remember my name, yet she knew what I didn’t. “A boy. You killed him. I heard Mother and Daddy talk.”

I killed him? I tore through the documents for answers. According to a certificate of stillbirth, Thomas died of umbilical cord asphyxia, minutes after my birth. Beneath that was a letter to Mother in Daddy’s unmistakable writing. An interloper, I opened it.

“Our bittersweet secret,” he wrote. “Oona must never know that it was her cord that strangled her twin. She is but an innocent lamb.”

In a dank attic, two sisters sat consumed by tears—Elsie for having torn a birth card, me for discovering a death one. I wrapped my arm around my big sister, pretending that it was my baby brother. If he had lived, would he have been Daddy’s favorite? If I had died and he had lived, would he be disassembling his parents’ lives? Would he be consoling Elsie?

Mother often called Daddy Doubting Thomas, referring to the biblical story of the disciple who didn’t believe in Jesus’s resurrection until instructed to touch the wounds of his master. In that moment, I realized that far from being a skeptic, Daddy was a believer.

Hope and faith are opposing forces. I had hoped to find meaning. But Daddy put his whole being into his son and drew the faith to unburden me of a truth I didn’t need to know. Holding Elsie closer, I thanked my parents for the deeper meaning of my life as The One.