For sixty-eight years, I lived with a hollow space in my chest where a sister should have been. The story my mother told was simple, brutal, and final: Ella had wandered off into the woods behind our farmhouse when we were five. The police searched for three days. They found her red rubber ball near the edge of the creek, but nothing else. “The current was too strong,” they told us.
My mother never spoke her name again. She buried Ella’s clothes, silenced my questions with a sharp look, and moved us across the state within the month. I grew up, married, and eventually grew old, always wondering if my sister had been scared in those final moments.
Now, at seventy-three, I was on a vacation I didn’t want. My daughter had dragged me to a bustling boardwalk on the opposite coast to “get some salt air.” The crowd was thick, a sea of tourists and noise.
Then, I heard it.
“I’ll have the peppermint, please.”
The voice wasn’t just familiar; it was the vibration of my own vocal cords. It was the sound I heard when I spoke to myself in an empty house. I turned, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
I froze. Standing at the ice cream kiosk was a woman. She wasn’t an old woman like me. She was me. Not as I am now, but as I was decades ago. She had the same splash of freckles across her nose, the same slight chip in her front tooth, and the same inquisitive arch in her left eyebrow. It was like staring into a mirror that showed the past.
My knees buckled. I reached out, my hand trembling, and tapped her shoulder. When she turned, her eyes—my eyes—went wide with a shock so profound it looked like pain.
“Oh my God…” I whispered, my voice cracking. “Ella?!“
The woman didn’t embrace me. She didn’t cry. Instead, she backed away, her face turning a ghastly shade of grey. The answer she gave me shattered my world into a thousand jagged pieces.
“I’m not Ella,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Ella was my mother. And she told me never to come to this state… because of the woman who stole her life.”
I spent the next four hours in a cramped coffee shop, staring at the woman who was my niece—though she looked like my sister’s ghost. Her name was Sarah. As she spoke, the “tragedy” of my childhood began to dissolve, replaced by a much darker reality.
Ella hadn’t drowned. She hadn’t wandered off.
“My mother told me the story every year on her birthday,” Sarah said, clutching a napkin. “She said she remembered being five years old. She remembered her mother—our grandmother—taking her to a bus station in the middle of the night. She said Grandmother gave her to a woman she didn’t know, a woman who had lost her own child and was ‘broken.’ Grandmother told Ella that if she ever came back, or ever told anyone who she really was, the ‘bad men’ would come for the rest of the family.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. My mother hadn’t lost a daughter to a creek. She had sold one.
As Sarah talked, the pieces of my mother’s “grief” took on a sinister light. The way she had silenced my questions wasn’t out of pain, but out of fear that I’d remember something incriminating. The sudden move across the country wasn’t to escape memories; it was to escape the paper trail.
“Where is she?” I asked, my voice barely a breath. “Where is Ella?”
Sarah’s eyes filled with tears. “She passed away three years ago. She spent her whole life looking at photos of you in the newspapers—she tracked your wedding, your children. She had a scrapbook of a life she was never allowed to live. She was terrified of you, but she loved you.”
Sarah reached into her purse and pulled out a small, weathered object. She placed it on the table between us.
It was a small, red rubber ball. Faded, cracked with age, but unmistakable.
“She kept this,” Sarah said. “She said it was the only thing she had left of ‘the other half of her soul.'”
I picked up the ball. It was light, almost weightless, yet it felt like it weighed a ton. My mother had told the police she found this by the creek to prove Ella was dead. In reality, she must have tucked it into Ella’s small hand as she handed her off to a stranger, a final, cruel souvenir of a life discarded for a payout or a secret I would never truly know.
I looked at Sarah—this young version of myself, a living reminder of sixty-eight stolen years. We were strangers bound by a crime committed by a woman I had called “Saint” for my entire life.
“I have her journals,” Sarah said softly. “Would you like to read them? Would you like to know her?”
I looked out at the ocean, the same water I had feared for seven decades because I thought it had taken my sister. The water wasn’t the monster. The monster had tucked me into bed every night.
“Yes,” I said, reaching across the table to take my niece’s hand. “Tell me everything.”
I didn’t tap her shoulder. I couldn’t. I simply stood there, a seventy-three-year-old woman paralyzed by the sight of a ghost. The woman at the counter turned, holding a napkin, and our eyes locked.
The world around us—the screaming children, the crashing waves, the smell of fried dough—simply vanished. It was as if a physical cord, stretched thin for sixty-eight years, had suddenly snapped back into place.
She didn’t look young. She looked like me. She had the same silver hair tucked behind her ears, the same map of wrinkles carved by time, and the same heavy lidded eyes.
“Ella?” the name left my throat as a ragged sob.
The woman’s hand flew to her mouth. The napkin fluttered to the sand. She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She took one step toward me, her cane thumping softly against the wooden planks of the boardwalk.
“Ruthie,” she whispered.
The use of my childhood nickname, a name I hadn’t heard since Eisenhower was in office, broke the dam. We fell into each other’s arms, two old women weeping in the middle of a tourist trap, clinging to each other as if we might dissolve if we let go.
Later, sitting on a quiet bench overlooking the Pacific, the sun began to dip toward the horizon, casting long, golden shadows. We sat close, our shoulders touching.
“How?” I asked, wiping my eyes. “The creek… the ball… Mother said you were gone.”
Ella took a deep breath, her gaze fixed on the water. “Mother didn’t find that ball by the creek, Ruthie. She placed it there. She gave me to the man in the black car.”
I felt a cold chill that had nothing to do with the ocean breeze. “She gave you away?”
“She traded me,” Ella said, her voice hollow. “Father had gambling debts we never knew about. Men were coming to the house. Mother told me years later—after she’d had too much to drink—that they gave her a choice: they take the house, or they take a ‘gift’ for a wealthy couple in California who couldn’t have children. She chose the house. She chose you. She told me if I ever tried to write to you, the ‘bad men’ would come back for you, too.”
The answer shattered my heart. My entire life—my birthdays, my graduation, my wedding—had been bought with the currency of my sister’s exile. I had lived a life of comfort because she had been sold like a piece of furniture.
“I waited until she died,” Ella said, turning to look at me. “Our ‘other’ mother. I spent my life in this state, watching the news from back home, waiting for a glimpse of you. I moved to this town because I knew your daughter lived nearby. I’ve sat on this bench every Monday for five years, hoping you’d eventually come to visit her.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, worn photograph. It was a picture of us at age four, sitting on the porch steps, sharing a piece of watermelon.
“I’m not angry anymore, Ruthie,” she said softly, taking my hand. “We’re old women now. We don’t have sixty-eight years left, but we have today. And we have tomorrow.”
I looked at our joined hands—spotted with age, trembling slightly, but identical. The mystery of the creek was solved, replaced by a darker truth about the woman who raised me, but as the sun sank below the line of the sea, the hollow space in my chest finally began to fill.
“Then let’s go,” I said, standing up and helping her to her feet. “I have three children and six grandchildren who have no idea they have an Aunt Ella. We have a lot of time to make up for.”
