Our courthouse looks like what you’d expect in a small Ohio town; someone started with ambition and then ran out of energy. Or money. Or both.
The front does everything a courthouse should. It looks serious, imposing, like a brick bastion of justice that fell from the sky. But once I walk through the double doors on Wednesday after school, all the trappings of glory fall away. I’m hit with a mix of mildew and ancient cigarette smoke that only a demolition is going to address. The plaster walls have cracks like varicose veins, small explosions of age. One last holdout of nobility—a grand old wooden staircase—is stripped of its dignity by the orange traffic cone on the landing, draped with caution tape of no specific nature. I can only assume I’m supposed to watch out for the water dripping from the ceiling.
There’s a directory mounted on the wall, white peg letters canted at angles that make me want to reach out and straighten them. The office of vital statistics is in the addition, a polite word for the pressboard square attached to the back of the building. I walk in, worried that my feet might punch right through the linoleum floor, or that my voice will blow the wood paneling from the studs. The waiting room looks sick, badly lit by fluorescent lights, the mismatched set of chairs all clear castoffs. The lady behind the counter glances up at me, her fingers still moving across her keyboard.
“What do you need?”
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–
I don’t like all the possibilities encapsulated after the dash, an endless stream of deaths with no definitive cutoff point.
“If she died at birth, she’ll be in here,” Jane says, finger once again slicing through columns of ink. I wonder if she has calluses on her fingertips like I do, mine from making music, hers from trailing over lives begun and ended.
“She’s not here,” Jane announces.
My hand goes back to my pocket to reassure myself that the ultrasound is still there, the only thing in the world that says I have—or had—a sister.
A sister who wasn’t born and never died.
When I see Isaac in the hallway I take an impulsive step backward, the heels of my shoes knocking against the door of the vital records office. He looks up from the bench he’s sitting on, a solid expanse of wood that belongs in a church, not a common hall with pictures of child-support nonpayers posted above it. Still, he looks comfortable, arms spread across the rolled back like he belongs here. Our eyes meet and he smiles like there’s nothing surprising about the situation.
I look away quickly, to the words on the door next to him. Parole Officer. So I guess he does belong here.
“I’m starting to think you might be following me,” Isaac says.
“You wish,” I say, anything more cutting than that lost to me. I’ve been demoted to monosyllabic words.
He smiles again, gaze traveling over me in a way I definitely don’t like . . . except I feel a subtle shift, muscles loosening or tensing ever so slightly, and somehow I’m angled toward him, like Lilly was with Cole, one shoulder dropped just enough that my shirt gapes a little. Isaac senses it, rising from the bench to cut the space between us, his body a knife that mine wants to be cut by. Because I’m moving forward too, and soon we’re indecently close, my heart hammering so hard I’ve got spots in my vision again.
“I got your text,” he says.
“I didn’t text you,” I shoot back, my mouth the only thing I still have control of. But even that feels slippery, as if it might jump the last few inches between mine and his without permission.
“Huh . . . ,” he says. “That’s funny ’cause . . .” and he holds up his phone, showing me a text that came in early this morning at three fifteen—
What r u doing?
“One”—I hold up an index finger, hoping it’s an effective barrier between us—“I was asleep at three. Two”—another finger goes up, adding a board to the wall I’m building—“I use real words when I text. And three”—last one, to hold it all in place—“that text came from someone named Lady, not me.”
He flips it back open, pulls up his contacts and shows me the entry for “Lady.” It’s my number, sure and true, a dark rendering of facts as concrete as the books in Jane’s office.
“You’re a lady, all right,” Isaac says, his voice husky in my ear as he leans closer.
“I . . .” My voice fails me, my hand trailing up to his neck to touch the tattoo there rather than push him back like I told it to.
“Something’s wrong,” I say, sidestepping away from him, my hand leaving his chest and going to mine to feel the pace of my heart. Very allegro.
“Yep,” he agrees. “And I know what it is. You like me . . . but you don’t like that you like me.”
“Based only on that sentence, you’re an idiot,” I say just as the parole officer’s door opens and a man sticks his head out.
“Sounds like she’s got your number, Harver,” he says, gesturing for Isaac to come inside.
“Uh-huh . . . ,” Isaac says. “And I’ve got hers.”
And then he winks at me.
And I like it.