“It’s so nice to meet you!” the woman said. “I’m Diane, this is Bob.”
They were both smiling at Grace like they wanted to eat her.
Grace smiled back.
She followed her parents into the house, which shone and gleamed and had the vague air of a mausoleum, thanks to all the marble. There was a double spiral staircase that wound up to a second-floor landing, also marble, and along the staircase, Grace could see a large portrait wall covered in professionally framed pictures.
There was not a dust ball in sight.
“Your home is so lovely,” said Grace’s mother, who read Architectural Digest the way—well, Grace had never met anyone who consumed anything the way her mom read Architectural Digest. Anyway, Grace’s mother was dying. Grace could see her mentally ripping out the carpet in their living room, adding a second wing, or quite possibly abandoning Grace’s father and her to live in this house instead. “This is just magnificent.”
Grace had never heard her mother use the word magnificent before.
Her dad took over. “Yes, thanks so much for having us over. Grace has really been looking forward to it.”
Grace had, in a way, like the way she would look forward to a drop in a roller coaster. Only she wasn’t sure how good the seat belts were on this ride, or when was the last time anyone had done a safety inspection of the track.
Luckily, her manners snapped into place, and she stepped forward and offered her hand to Diane. “Hi, I’m Grace,” she said. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
Diane’s eyes looked wet as she shook her hand. “Grace,” she said, her voice cracking a little. “It is so, so lovely to meet you. I know Maya is looking forward to it, too. I think this’ll be really good for her.”
Good for her? Grace saw trouble just around the bend.
“She looks just like her,” Bob said. “Isn’t it uncanny, Di?”
Grace smiled again, not sure what to say. She had no idea if that was true or not. She and Maya still hadn’t exchanged pictures yet, and she had been scared to look her up on social media.
Grace wasn’t sure why.
Just then, a girl came around the corner, also a redhead. Grace took a deep breath without realizing it. Did Maya have red hair? Was this her? Bob had said she looked just like Maya, but this girl and Grace couldn’t have looked more different.
“Oh, this is our daughter Lauren,” Diane said, reaching an arm out to the girl and hugging her close. “She’s Maya’s sister.”
Lauren smiled and Grace smiled back. Lauren was so obviously biological that it was ridiculous. Grace wondered what that was like, living in a house where the other three inhabitants looked nothing like you, like you were in a forever game of One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.
“I thought Maya was on her way down,” Diane said, then took a step toward the stairs, Lauren still in tow. “Maya! Grace and her parents are here!”
After a beat or two, Maya appeared at the top of the stairs. She was wearing cutoff denim shorts and a loose tank top, and her hair was in one of those topknots that Grace had tried to create many times but had never succeeded at because her hair wasn’t long enough. Maya looked like someone had dropped her into a life with these three well-dressed, redheaded strangers.
And in a way, Grace realized, someone had.
“Hi,” she said, waving a little. “I’m Grace.”
“Hi,” Maya said. Her voice was oddly flat, but maybe she was playing it cool.
When she got down to the end of the stairs, they both stood there looking at each other. Grace could hear the quiet sniffles from all four of their parents behind them, watching their two children meet for the first time. Maya looked like Grace, that was for sure. Eye color, hair color, even the same weird, ski-slope nose. She was a little bit shorter than Grace, but give or take a few freckles, it was like looking in a mirror.
And Grace felt absolutely nothing.
“Hi,” she said again. “Sorry, I don’t know what to say.” She giggled nervously, which she hated, but the whole thing was starting to feel so bizarre. They were in a house that looked like a princess’s castle! She had a biological sister who was staring at her, and who looked just like her! The dad was wearing a suit!
Maya just looked at Grace, then turned to her dad. “Why are you wearing a suit?”
“Because we have company,” he said, taking her by the shoulders and steering her toward the living room. Grace got the feeling that he was used to steering Maya away from things, like a distraction technique people used on toddlers. Redirection, that’s what it was called. Grace had seen it once when she’d dared herself to pick up a parenting book, in a bookstore fifteen miles away, where no one would recognize her.
“Appetizers are this way!” Diane said, gesturing to Grace’s parents as she kept an arm around Lauren’s shoulders. Neither sister acknowledged the other, Grace noticed. As an only child, she had always studied how siblings interacted with one another. It was like watching one of those nature shows about weird animal species on TV that her dad always got obsessed with.
“After you,” Grace’s mom said, following them into the (also white, also flawless) living room. “C’mon,” she said to Grace, and she walked between her and her dad.
Grace’s dad leaned down to whisper in her ear as they walked. “You say the word,” he murmured, “and I’ll bring the car around. We’ll blow this fancy Popsicle stand.”
Grace smiled and kind of swatted at him before her mom heard.
Dinner was excruciating.
The food was fine, of course; it wasn’t like they served sweetbreads or anything. (Grace had tried sweetbreads exactly once, before she realized that the words sweet and bread were the two worst possible ones to describe that particular food.)
But they were basically seven strangers sitting in a dining room that was fancier than almost any restaurant Grace had ever set foot in, and two of them were related and had just met twenty minutes earlier. To make it even worse, the room had high ceilings, which seemed to make the silence echo around them, forks scraping against plates and sounding like someone yanking the needle off a record player over and over again.
“Well, we’re just so glad that the two of you could meet,” Diane said, her voice a bit louder than necessary.
Grace’s mom took the ball and ran with it, as moms often do.
“Oh, same here!” she said, smiling at both Maya and Grace. “You both look so alike, too. I know Grace has always wanted a sister.”
Grace looked at her mom, raising her eyebrow a little. Since when? But then she caught Maya glancing at her and quickly reset her face.
“If you’d like a sister, may I offer a suggestion?” Maya said, then gestured toward Lauren. “We’ll even throw in a set of free steak knives, but you have to act now. Operators are standing by.”
Lauren glared at Maya, and even though both Bob and Diane laughed, Grace could tell that they sort of wanted to murder Maya with their eyes. She laughed anyway, though. She couldn’t help it. Now she knew why Maya never wrote emails or texts like a normal human being: her humor was too dark.
“Maya and Lauren are either best friends or worst enemies,” Diane said, picking up her wineglass and then setting it down while Maya took a bite of chicken. “We actually found out that I was pregnant with Lauren three months after we brought Maya home. I mean, we tried for almost ten years to have a child, and then that? Two miracles in three months! We couldn’t believe our good luck.”