Keely
In moments of complete weakness, sometimes I had talks with Roisin in my head. After the accident, when she was ripped from my side, I cried nonstop. I couldn’t stop crying. I was five, and my best friend in the entire world had left me all alone with a house full of boys.
Harrison, Lachlan, Declan, and Owen.
Only twelve months after Owen was born, the twins, also known as RoKe, made our arrival into the world. If anything, Roisin and I had always irritated the boys, but it was alwaysusdoing whatever it was againstthem.
My sister’s death came, and even at five years old, I knew that half of me had died with her. And I desperately wanted it back. I wanted to feel whole again. So I started having conversations with her.
I refused to let anyone else hear me, so I carried the chats on in my head.
It was about that time my Mam said that I stopped talking. I didn’t remember not talking. Maybe because the conversations in my head with Roisin were enough. But I did remember asking her to send me another sister, another her, so the hurt in my heart would go away.
The spring after Roisin left me, I knew she had heard me. I had been outside with Harrison when I saw a little girl with a blue butterfly clip in her hair standing in our next-door neighbor’s yard. I had no idea they had kids, but Harrison told me they had adopted her. The little girl had been there since December, but she rarely came out of the house.
Jocelyn, who was our next-door neighbor, stood next to her and introduced us. She called the girl Mariposa, and she told us that in Spanishmariposameantbutterfly.
Mariposa shook her head and said, “My name is Mari.”
I’d refused to answer, but she kept looking at me anyway.
“When’s your birthday?” she tried again. Her words came out different from mine, and back then, I couldn’t place it. When I got older, I realized she had had an Italian accent, but she was trying not to. Jocelyn kept correcting her words when she said them in Italian, though she said Mariposa was fluent in Spanish. We never heard her speak a word in Spanish.
“September,” Harrison had answered for me. “When’s yours?”
“October,” Mari answered.
“Oh, that’s right! You’re only about two weeks apart!” Jocelyn had said, trying to push us closer together.
“You hear that, Kee?” Harrison nudged me. “You and Mari are only two weeks apart.”
Harrison told me that my eyes had lifted after, and I took Mari’s hand and dragged her inside of our house.
From that point forward, Mariposa Flores became my sister. And it was around that time that I started becoming what Mari called a “fixer.” Someone who had to fix all of the problems in the world, “the world” being my family. Mari included.
I never told Mari this, but the reason I started talking to her that day was because I knew Roisin had sent her to me. To be my sister of the heart. I was older than Roisin by two minutes. And when Jocelyn had announced that Mari and I were only two weeks apart, in my heart I knew Mari had come to live on Staten Island because I needed her.
Turned out, she needed me, too.
Her parents had died in a car accident when she was five, and she had gone to live with Jocelyn and her father, who everyone in the neighborhood called Old Man Gianelli. Old Man Gianelli died somewhere in that time, and then Jocelyn died when Mari was ten. After that, there was no one to care for her, so the state put her into foster care.
Again, half of me seemed to disappear. So I started holding my breath again. I refused to stop unless Mam found her.
I had held my breath and lost my sister. Maybe if I held my breath again, Mari would come back.
She did.
My Mam found her.
For the most part, though, my Mam tried to keep us apart. She was concerned that I was using Mari to replace Roisin, and she didn’t like it. She said it broke her heart that I’d found a replacement for my twin. Even as the years went on, Mam still kept Mari at arm’s length. She said Mari was trouble, and that she was going to bring it to our door. The tea leaves told her.
Trouble or not, and even if Mam could never understand, Mari would always be the sister of my heart.
None of us ever told Mari about Roisin, though. I didn’t want to. I worried that Mari would think I was trying to replace my sister, and then she would doubt what we shared was true.
Mari had issues with kindness, but somehow, she accepted it from me. For the most part. I knew there was a story there, about why she rejected it so fiercely, but the beautiful thing about Mari and me—we were good at keeping our secrets, but they never broke us apart.
For the longest time after Mari came into my life, the conversations with my sister came to an end, but every once in a while, when life felt extremely hard, we picked them up again.
