Shadow Baby by Alison McGhee Page A

sixth-grade fake book report that my teachers would give me an A on.
    It was the dead of winter, a February blizzard. Tamar couldn’t get to the hospital, that was the whole problem. Her father was driving her in his truck. This was in the days before four-wheel drive. That’s what Tamar said the one time I heard her talking to the choir director about it on the phone. She said, “Now there’s four-wheel drive. That would have made all the difference.” She had me and my twin sister in a ditch halfway to the hospital in Utica. Tamar couldn’t hold us in. When babies want to be born they will be born. Nothing can stop them.
    “We were born before four-wheel drive,” I said.
    The old man nodded.
    “The problem is that they never should have taken Glass Factory,” I said. “In a blizzard you never take Glass Factory. You take Route 12. You get to the hospital sooner. You don’t wait until the last minute. You don’t take Glass Factory hopingto save half a mile, hoping that some midwife will just happen to be passing by in the middle of a blizzard.”
    I had a twin sister. I think about her all the time.
    If she were alive, people would talk about us in a different way. It would be “Tamar and her girls,” “Miss Winter and the twins,” “Tamar Winter and her daughters.” Tamar refused to name my sister when she was born dead. Bad luck, she said. But what I believe to be true is that all babies should have a name. When I think about my sister, there is no name attached to my thoughts. She is nameless. All I see in my mind is ________, which I have changed to Baby Girl.
    Tamar never told me about my sister. If it had not been for the choir director, I would still be living my life knowing that something was missing but not knowing that something was my twin sister.
    “Your mother has a beautiful voice,” the choir director said to me when I was nine years old, before I met the old man, when I used to have to sit in the sanctuary listening to the choir practice.
    “Do you have a beautiful voice, too?” she asked me.
    “Mediocre,” I said, which is true.
    “Imagine if you had a beautiful voice and your poor dead twin had had a beautiful voice,” the choir director said. “The Twin Churches would have soared with the angelic voices of the three Winter women.”
    That’s how the choir director talks.
    “That poor baby,” the choir director said. “She never had a chance, did she?”
    I shook my head. I said nothing. I waited for more, but none was forthcoming. Even though I was only nine at thetime and Tamar had never mentioned a word, I knew that what the choir director said was true. I had a twin. I could feel it in my bones.
    M y baby sister was dead, my chickens wanted to kill me, and the old man came from a country that doesn’t exist anymore. Those were the kinds of secrets that I used to write down on my spool of green adding-machine paper, on Wednesday night when I visited the old man in his trailer. Soon I had unspooled enough paper to make several curls. Enough to hang to the floor.
    I wish now that I had told the old man about CJ Wilson and the other boys and Tiny and the chickens. I wish that one cold night when my chickens were just beginning to be mean, and Tamar was at choir practice, and I had made the old man his coffee and me my hot chocolate, and we were sitting at his kitchen table and I was eating my toast spread with an inordinate amount of margarine and he was stirring his coffee with the handle of his spoon, I had told the old man everything.
    Tamar says I’m crazy. Tamar says, That baby was dead before she was born. Tamar says, Give up.
    But my sister was alive before she was dead, wasn’t she? She grew the same as me, swimming around in a little water world. We knew each other. We touched each other. We would have been together forever.
    Winter killed my baby sister. Not only was she my twin sister; she was my identical twin. I can feel that in my bones, too. If it hadn’t