The box arrived on a Thursday afternoon in late October, delivered by a postal worker, who seemed relieved to hand it off, as though the package had grown heavier, with each mile of its journey from the small town in Vermont, where it had been sent to my apartment in Chicago.
The return address was unfamiliar, the handwriting shaky and uneven, the kind of script that belongs to the very old or the very ill.
Inside, beneath layers of tissue paper that crumbled at my touch, was a photograph mounted on heavy card stock, a letter written on stationery so thin I could see my fingers through it, and a lock of hair tied with a ribbon that had once been white, but had yellowed with age into the color of old bones.
The letter was brief.
Dear Ms.
Holloway.
You don’t know me, but I knew your great grandmother, Miriam, when we were girls together in Asheford.
I am the last one left who remembers what happened, and I cannot carry this secret to my grave without passing it to someone who has the right to know.
The photograph will explain what words cannot.
Look closely at the twins.
Look at their chests.
One rises and falls.
The other does not.
Your great-g grandandmother loved both her daughters.
What she did, she did for love.
I hope you can understand even if you cannot forgive.
Sincerely, Constance Marsh.
I did not know anyone named Constance Marsh.
I had never heard of a town called Ashford.
And until that moment, I had not known that my great-g grandandmother Miriam had ever had twins.
The photograph showed a woman in her mid20s, dark-haired and holloweyed, seated in a wooden chair with a baby cradled in each arm.
She wore a white blouse with a high collar and a dark skirt that pulled around her feet, the kind of modest, practical clothing that workingclass women wore in rural New England at the turn of the century.
Her face was turned slightly away from the camera, her gaze directed downward at the infant she held, her expression impossible to read.
The babies were dressed identically in long white christening gowns that covered them from neck to toe, their small heads crowned with matching bonnets trimmed in lace.
They lay in the crooks of their mother’s arms, their faces peaceful, their eyes closed, their tiny hands curled into fists that rested against their chests.
They were, to all appearances, simply sleeping, captured in a moment of peaceful rest, by a photographer who had posed them with care and skill.
The image was beautiful in the way that photographs of mothers and infants are often beautiful, soft and tender, and filled with the promise of lives just beginning.
But Constance Marsh had told me to look closely.
She had told me to look at their chests.
I held the photograph up to the light, tilting it to catch the illumination from my window, searching for whatever detail had prompted the old woman to send this image across a thousand miles to a stranger who shared her blood but not her memories.
And then I saw it.
The infant on the left lay with her chest slightly elevated, the white fabric of her gown rising and falling in the subtle indication of breath that even a still photograph can sometimes capture.
Her lips were parted, her face flushed with the pink of living circulation.
Her body relaxed in the boneless way of sleeping babies who trust completely in the arms that hold them.
The infant on the right was different.
Her chest did not rise.
Her lips were not parted, but pressed together, pale and still.
Her face had a waxy quality that was barely perceptible, but unmistakable once noticed.
the absence of color that distinguishes the living from the dead.
And her hands, those tiny fists that rested against her chest, were not curled in the natural way of sleeping infants, but arranged, positioned with deliberate care to create the illusion of peaceful rest.
The baby on the right was not sleeping.
The baby on the right was not breathing.
The baby on the right was dead.
I sat with the photograph for hours that first day, unable to look away, unable to process what I was seeing.
I had heard of post-mortem photography, the Victorian and Eduwardian practice of photographing the recently deceased, posing them as though sleeping or sometimes as though still alive, preserving their images for families who might otherwise have no record of their existence.
I had seen examples in museums and archives, had studied them with the detached curiosity of someone examining artifacts from a distant era.
But this was not an artifact.
This was my family.
This was my great grandmother holding her dead daughter in one arm and her living daughter in the other, posing for a photograph that collapsed the boundary between life and death into a single frame.
I needed to understand what had happened.
I needed to know who these babies were, which one had lived and which one had died, what had led to this moment, and what had followed it.
I needed to find Constance Marsh and ask her the questions that her letter had raised but not answered.
But when I tried to contact her, I discovered that she had died 3 days after mailing the package, passing away in her sleep at the age of 102, the last keeper of a secret that she had carried for nearly a century.
The research that followed consumed the next two years of my life.
I began with what I knew.
My great-g grandandmother’s name was Miriam.
She had lived in Vermont at some point in her life, and she had apparently given birth to twins around 1903.
My family’s records were sparse.
My grandmother having died when my mother was young.
My mother having been raised by relatives who knew little of the family history and cared less.
The past had been lost through neglect and indifference.
The stories that should have been passed down from generation to generation simply forgotten.
But the past, I discovered, has a way of persisting even when no one is trying to preserve it.
It survives in census records and birth certificates, in church registries and property deeds, in the archives of small town newspapers and the collections of local historical societies.
It survives in the memories of people like Constance Marsh who carry what they know until they can carry it no longer and then pass it on to someone who might be willing to listen.
Ashford, Vermont was a town that no longer existed on any map, having been abandoned in the 1940s when the mill that had sustained its economy finally closed and the last residents drifted away to find work elsewhere.
But it had existed in 1903.
A small community of perhaps 200 people nestled in a valley in the Green Mountains, far from the railroad lines and the cities where modern life was beginning to transform America into something unrecognizable to those who had known it before.
The town’s records had been transferred to the county seat when Ashford was officially dissolved.
And it was there, in a basement archive that smelled of mold and mouse droppings that I found the first documentary evidence of my greatg grandmother’s life.
Miriam Holay had been born in Asheford in 1878, the daughter of a farmer named Ezekiel Holloway and his wife Ruth.
She had grown up in the valley, attended the local school, married a man named Thomas Cartwright in 1901 when she was 23 years old.
Thomas was a carpenter, skilled with his hands, respected in the community, a good match for a farmer’s daughter who had little to offer except her youth and her willingness to work.
They had built a small house on the edge of town within sight of the mill where Thomas sometimes found employment during the slow seasons when there was no building work to be done.
They had planted a garden and kept chickens and settled into the rhythm of rural life, the cycle of seasons that had governed existence in places like Asheford for generations.
And in the spring of 1903, Miriam had given birth to twin daughters.
The birth was recorded in the town registry, a single line in the careful handwriting of the cler, who had documented the vital events of Ashford’s residence.
April 14th, 1903.
Twin daughters born to Thomas and Miriam Cartrite.
Names: Elellanena Ruth and Evangelene Grace.
Elellanena and Evangelene.
I had never heard either name in connection with my family.
My grandmother, Miriam’s daughter, had been named Helen, and I had always assumed she was an only child, the sole heir to whatever modest legacy her parents had left behind.
But the registry proved that Helen had not been Miriam’s only child.
There had been twins before her, two baby girls born on an April morning in a small house on the edge of a dying town, named for grandmothers and virtues, welcomed into a world that would not let them stay.
The death record I found next explained what had happened, though not in enough detail to satisfy my growing need to understand.
April 22nd, 1903.
Evangelene Grace Cartwrite, aged 8 days.
Cause of death, failure to thrive.
8 days.
Evangelene had lived for only 8 days before her small body had given up its struggle.
Before whatever was wrong with her, whatever deficiency or illness had been present from the moment of her birth, had finally claimed her.
She had been buried in the town cemetery in a plot next to the graves of other infants who had died too young, their stones worn by weather and time until the names were barely legible.
I drove to Vermont to find that cemetery.
To stand at Evangelene’s grave and pay my respects to the great aunt I had never known existed.
The town of Asheford was gone, its buildings collapsed or reclaimed by the forest, its streets reduced to faint traces beneath the undergrowth.
But the cemetery remained, fenced [clears throat] and maintained by the county, a small island of memory in a landscape that had otherwise been swallowed by forgetting.
Evangelene’s grave was marked by a small stone just large enough to hold her name and the dates that bookended her brief existence.
Someone had planted flowers there.
once decades ago, and they had gone wild, spreading beyond the boundaries of the grave to create a small garden of purple and white among the gray stones and brown leaves.
I knelt beside the grave and thought about the photograph that had brought me here, the image of my greatg grandmother holding her daughters, one living and one dead, cradling them both with equal tenderness, as the camera captured a moment that should have been impossible, but was not, and I wondered for the first time which daughter had survived.
The question haunted me on the drive back to Chicago through the long weeks that followed as I continued my research through sleepless nights when I stared at the photograph and tried to read the secrets hidden in its shadows.
Constance Marsh had said that one of the twins was not breathing.
She had not said which one.
I had assumed when I first examined the photograph that the dead twin was Evangelene, the one whose death had been recorded 8 days after her birth.
But the more I looked at the image, the more I studied the positioning of the bodies and the subtle differences in their coloring and the arrangement of their hands, the more uncertain I became.
The church records from Asheford, which I obtained through a genealogical service that specialized in Vermont history, deepened my confusion rather than resolving it.
The baptismal registry showed that both Elellanena Ruth and Evangelene Grace had been baptized on April 16th, 1903, 2 days after their birth in a ceremony conducted by the town’s minister at the Cartwright home.
This was not unusual for the era.
Infant mortality was high, and parents often arranged for baptism as quickly as possible to ensure that their children’s souls would be saved if death came early.
But the registry also contained a notation that I did not understand, a marginal comment added in a different hand, presumably at a later date.
C special circumstances file.
I spent weeks trying to locate this file, writing to archives and historical societies, searching through digitized records and microfilm collections, following leads that went nowhere, and asking questions that no one could answer.
The file, if it still existed, had been separated from the main records at some point in the past century, lost or misfiled or deliberately hidden.
It was not until I found the diary of the minister who had baptized the twins that I began to understand what had happened in that small house on the edge of Asheford in the spring of 1903.
The Reverend Josiah Blackwood had served the congregational church in Asheford from 1889 until his death in 1918.
His papers had been donated to a theological seminary in Massachusetts, where they had sat in storage for decades, uncataloged and unexamined until a graduate student had inventoried them as part of a research project on rural New England religion.
The inventory had been published online, and it was there that I found a reference to a diary covering the year 1903.
The seminary allowed me to examine the diary in their reading room under the supervision of an archivist who seemed puzzled by my interest in such an obscure document.
I did not explain my reasons.
I simply sat at the wooden table, turned the fragile pages with gloved hands, and read the words that Reverend Blackwood had written more than a century ago.
His entry for April 16th, 1903, the day of the baptism, was the longest in the entire volume.
I was called to the Cartrite home this morning to baptize their twin daughters born 2 days past.
The circumstances were unusual and deeply troubling.
and I record them here, not because I wish to remember, but because I feel I must have some record of what I witnessed, some evidence that what happened was real and not a fever dream brought on by the strain of my pastoral duties.
When I arrived at the house, I found Mrs.
Cartwright in a state of extreme agitation, her eyes red from weeping, her hands trembling as she led me to the room where the infants lay.
Mr.
Cartwright was not present.
I was told he’d gone to fetch the doctor, though I later learned this was not true.
The babies were lying in a single cradle, side by side, dressed in identical gowns.
At first glance, they appeared to be sleeping peacefully, their faces serene, their small bodies still.
But when I looked more closely, I saw that one of them was not merely sleeping, but was in fact already dead.
Her skin pale and waxy, her chest unmoving, her hands arranged in a position that suggested she had been posed rather than having come to rest naturally.
I asked Mrs.
Cartwright which child had died and when.
She did not answer.
She simply looked at me with eyes that held a grief so profound I felt I could not meet her gaze without being pulled into it myself.
Finally, in a whisper so faint I had to lean close to hear, she said, “I don’t know.” I did not understand her at first.
I asked her to explain, and what she told me was so strange, so disturbing that I hesitated to record it even in this private diary.
But I will set it down now as faithfully as I can remember because I believe that what happened in that house has a meaning that I do not yet comprehend.
Mrs.
Cartwright said that the twins had been born healthy, both of them crying and breathing as babies should, but from the first moments of their lives, she had been unable to tell them apart.
They were identical in every respect, their faces mirror images, their cries indistinguishable, their movements so similar that even their mother could not say with certainty which was Elellanena and which was Evangelene.
She had tried to mark them, to tie a ribbon around the wrist of one, so that she would know which daughter she was holding.
But the ribbon had come loose during the night, and in the darkness and exhaustion of the first days of motherhood, she had been unable to remember which baby had worn it.
And then, on the morning of April 16th, she had woken to find that one of the babies was dead.
She did not know which one.
She could not tell, looking at their identical faces, which daughter had died in the night, and which one still lived.
The dead baby might have been Eleanor, or might have been Evangelene.
There was no way to know, no mark or characteristic that could distinguish between them.
She had dressed them both in their christening gowns, had laid them side by side in the cradle, had summoned me to baptize them before she had to face the terrible reality of burying a child whose name she could not be certain of.
I baptized them both.
I spoke the words over each infant in turn, giving the name Eleanor to one and Evangelene to the other, knowing that I might be giving the wrong name to each, that the living child might go through life with the name that was meant for her dead sister, that the dead child might be buried under a name that was never truly hers.
What else could I do? The mother was in anguish, unable to choose, unable to condemn one daughter to namelessness and the other to a name that might not belong to her.
The decision had to be made, and I made it.
Although I confess, I do not know if I made it rightly.
After the baptism, Mrs.
Cartwright asked me to pray with her.
She knelt beside the cradle, holding both babies in her arms, and she wept, as I had never seen a woman weep, as though her tears could somehow undo what had happened, could somehow restore the daughter she had lost, or at least restore the certainty of which daughter she still had, I prayed.
I did not know what else to do.
The Reverend Blackwood’s account explained the photograph in a way that I had not anticipated.
Miriam had not simply posed with her living daughter and her dead daughter to create a memorial image.
She had posed with both daughters because she did not know which was which.
Because the boundary between the living twin and the dead twin had become impossible to determine because the death of one had rendered the identity of the other permanently uncertain.
But the diary also raised questions that it did not answer.
what had happened after the baptism, which baby had been buried, and under which name, and what had become of the surviving twin, the daughter who had grown up not knowing whether she was Eleanor or Evangelene, carrying a name that might have belonged to her sister.
I found the answers in the final document that Constance Marsh had preserved, a document that had been tucked into the envelope with the photograph and the letter, but that I had not noticed until I examined the package again weeks after I had begun my research.
It was a confession written in Miriam’s own hand, dated 1952, the year she had died at the age of 74.
I have carried this burden for nearly 50 years and I cannot carry it any longer.
I write this now so that someone will know the truth even if that truth can never be spoken aloud.
When my daughters were born, I loved them equally, fiercely, with a love that felt like it would consume me.
They were identical in every way, so alike that even I could not tell them apart.
And I saw this as a gift, a sign that they were meant to be two halves of a single soul, connected in ways that other sisters could never be.
But one of them was weaker than the other.
I could see it from the first day.
The way she struggled to breathe, the way her cry was fainter, the way she fed less eagerly and tired more quickly.
I knew in the way that mothers sometimes know things they cannot explain, that she would not survive.
I prayed that I was wrong.
I was not wrong.
When I woke on that April morning and found one of my daughters dead, I did not know which one it was.
I had been too exhausted to remember which baby I had laid on which side of the cradle, and in death they looked exactly as they had in life, identical, indistinguishable, two faces that were mirrors of each other.
I should have chosen.
I should have looked at them and decided arbitrarily if necessary which one was Eleanor and which one was Evangeline.
But I could not.
To choose felt like a betrayal, felt like admitting that one daughter mattered more than the other.
Felt like condemning the dead one to anonymity and the living one to uncertainty.
So I kept them together.
I dressed them both, held them both, loved them both.
I called the minister and asked him to baptize them, both of them, as though they were both still alive.
And then before the burial, I did something that I have never told anyone, something that I have regretted and defended in equal measure for 50 years.
I switched them.
I do not know which baby died, but I know that when I buried one of them in the cemetery, I buried the one that I had been calling Eleanor that morning, and when I kept one of them, raised her, loved her, watched her grow into a woman and have children of her own, I kept the one I had been calling Evangeline.
But the names did not matter.
I had assigned them arbitrarily, and I switched them just as arbitrarily, and the daughter who grew up calling herself Eleanor might have been Elellanena, or might have been Evangelene, and I will never know which.
I named her Helen when she was older, gave her a new name, so that she would not have to carry the weight of this uncertainty.
I told her that her sister had died at birth, that there was nothing unusual about her history, that she was simply my daughter, loved and wanted and whole.
But she was always a twin.
She was always half of something that had been broken.
And I was always the mother who could not tell her daughters apart, who buried one without knowing her name, who raised the other without knowing who she really was.
The photograph was taken on the day of the baptism after the minister had gone but before the burial.
I wanted to have a record of them together, both of my daughters, one last image before they were separated forever.
I held them both, the living and the dead, and I tried to pretend that they were both still with me, that death had not yet come to claim the one whose name I could not say.
I have looked at that photograph every day for 50 years.
I have looked at their faces, searching for some difference, some sign that would tell me which one lived and which one died.
I have never found it.
They remain identical, indistinguishable.
Two halves of a hole that was broken before it ever had a chance to be complete.
This is my confession.
This is my burden.
I pass it now to whoever finds these words in the hope that confession will bring some measure of peace, even if forgiveness is beyond my reach.
My grandmother, Helen, who I had always known as Miriam’s only child, had been a twin.
She had been either Elellanena or Evangelene, one of two identical sisters born on an April morning in 1903, one of whom had died within days, and one of whom had lived to bear children and grandchildren and greatg grandandchildren who would never know the truth of her origins.
She had died without knowing which twin she was.
Miriam had died without knowing which daughter she had buried and which one she had raised.
The secret had been passed down not as knowledge but as absence as the unnamed uncertainty that had always surrounded my grandmother’s early life.
The questions that no one had ever thought to ask because no one had known there were questions to ask.
I have the photograph now.
I keep it in a frame on my desk where I can look at it every day as Miriam once did, searching for the difference that would tell me which twin was which, which baby was breathing and which was not.
I have never found it.
They lie in their mother’s arms, identical in death as they were in life.
Their faces peaceful, their hands curled, their white christening gowns indistinguishable.
One of them is breathing.
The subtle rise and fall of her chest barely visible in the old photograph.
One of them is not.
But which is which? Which daughter lived? And which daughter died? Which twin was buried in the cemetery in Asheford under a name that might not have been hers? And which twin grew up to become my grandmother, carrying an identity that was always uncertain, always incomplete.
I do not know.
I will never know.
And perhaps that is the point.
Perhaps that is what Miriam understood when she held her daughters for that final photograph.
When she refused to choose between them, when she switched them so that even the arbitrary distinction she had made would be erased.
They were twins.
They were identical.
They were two halves of a single soul.
And when one of them died, something was broken that could never be repaired.
The photograph captures that brokenness.
That moment when life and death existed side by side in a mother’s arms, indistinguishable, inseparable, forever intertwined.
Look closely at the twins.
Look at their chests.
One of them is breathing.
One of them is not.
But they are both there, both held, both loved.
And in the photograph at least, they are both still together.
the living and the dead, the named and the nameless, the daughter who survived and the daughter who did not.
That is the truth that Constance Marsh wanted me to know.
That is the secret that Miriam carried for 50 years.
That is the image of a mother who could not tell her daughters apart, who could not choose between them, who loved them both so fiercely that she refused to let death separate them entirely.
The photograph is my inheritance now.
The uncertainty is my burden.
And when I look at those two babies, those identical faces, those small bodies that might be sleeping or might be gone, I understand finally what Miriam must have understood on that April day in 1903.
Some questions have no answers.
Some grief has no resolution.
Some love is so complete that it cannot distinguish between the living and the dead.
Cannot accept that one must be lost while the other is saved.
One of them is not breathing.
But in the photograph they are both still there, and that in the end is all that Miriam could give them.
A moment frozen in time, a record of togetherness that death could interrupt but never quite destroy.
