he will come.

it's because she looks like him that my mother beat her more and harder than me. my fraternal twin, whose face turned out just like our father's and mine completely opposite. she inherited an oblong shape with a slight protrude at the chin that rounds out with a smooth shiny spot on its edge. this shine goes with the one off the tip of her nose. the nose that tells exactly who her father is--narrow at the bridge yet widened at the nostrils, a defined steeple on her face that sits nicely under a set of complimentary angular eyes. she came through the vaginal canal and i was pulled down from underneath my mother's ribs and out her sliced open stomach. we even arrived in different ways to here, now, 31 years old, with Tami sitting on my couch telling me how her 4 year old walked out of my house on her own while i stand at the door holding boxes of pizza.

"She was curled up on the mat outside of your front door, on that gray mat Pam! lying on the floor saying to me mommy i want to go home.'

'wait, where was Kevin?" my sister's husband Kevin and my husband Jullien are building a shed in our backyard. The girls have been prancing around the men with Abigail wearing my hot pink 4 inch high heels with the open toe and Isabelle the satin champagne ones with a flower on the top. I return from the pizza run to Isabelle bare foot and nestled under her mother's arm pit bowing her head and Tami staring out the window. She watches me park the car and then greets me with "I'm upset." The pizza boxes still in my hand, I blurt, "What happened? Jullien messed up?" Both my sister and he have been known to go to war out of refusal to say 'I was wrong'. I assume another war happened while I was gone. "No, both of them" i hear her say. I want to ask where was she but I say "everyone" instead.

"Kevin was in the back. I asked him, ‘were you looking for her?!’"

"Wait..."

"I come from out back looking for her and I dont find her so I assume she's playing hide and go seek. But I still don't see her. Then something told me to look outside your front door. And there she was Pam, curled up in a ball on that gray mat, in front of the building door, saying to me Mommy I want to go home."

Tami snugs Isabelle closer and i place the pizzas down on the desk in the living room.

"oh wow." I sink and look down at Isabelle.

"Yeah!"

"I see, so you're mad at Kevin because he did not know where she was?"

"I told you guys to fix that door, Pam."

"Huh?"

"Now with this no-shoes-in-the-house policy the kids place their shoes outside the door so they think outside is a part of your home."

I live in on the ground floor of a building in New York city, where at least 6-8 other adults have keys, and one floor of the building is dedicated as a hotel for guests to drop in and out, each person having their own set of keys. My apartment door here on the ground level has a lock that turns but as soon as the handle is pulled down the lock, without being touched, releases.

"Oh man, I see."

"Yes Pam. Now I feel like her, I want to go home too."

I try to keep my face from scrunching up. It is my embarrassment for Tami over referencing a child as an exact mirror of how she feels. I look down at Isabelle who looks up at me with a round vanilla face that always appears dampened, a turn of grayish-black, just around and underneath her eyelids. She looks up as if being cued in a save the children commercial to stare right into the camera's lens at this moment.

"So you're mad at..."

"Why do you keep questioning this to death?! If this was your child you..."

"You told me you were upset when I walked in! You said 'they both messed up.' I'm trying to..."

"No," she glares. "I said you both messed up."

“Oh...what? Wait!"

"I already told you about that door.” She says with a firm calm.

"Wait. You're mad at me and jullien because we didn't fix the door yet?"

"Children can just leave when they want to Pam! the lock basically doesn't lock! If this was your child you wouldn't be asking me all these questions!"

"If this was my child I wouldn't come at you like this!"

"This would not happen with me!"

"You're not perfect Tami! You're going to do things with my child I do not like but I'm not going to attack you. You can't be mad because we did not fix the door in your timeline. You're just looking for someone to blame!"

I'm six months pregnant and in six more months my sister will be the daytime caretaker of my first child as i go back to teaching English at a community college here in the city. my daughter will be tucked under her as Isabelle is now along with Abigail and Parker, all under the age of 8. she is mother hen, the stay at home parent in her relationship for the last 7 years with a portfolio of her work to show in her children's dinner table manners, "how was your day today Pam?", their pleases and thank yous, their smiles instead of tears when mommy leaves them with someone because of the confidence they have that she has left them with someone to trust and that she will return.

But now Tami appears to be tucked under something, and by the look in her eyes it seems she is trapped and clawing to get out of it. and she is losing breath as if she were drowning in a tumultuous sea but there is no water. it is a very dark and heavy air that is her only source for breath yet every intake of this air presses her down underneath it, suffocates her, loses more of a breath that rejuvenates deeper breaths in her. i see her hand reaching out high, five fingers spread in hopes to clasp a hand that reaches back. and now, it is clear to me, she is clinging to Isabelle more than Isabelle is clinging to her on the couch, in the air sea.

my mother told Tami shortly after our father died that she was his favorite. Tami told me this many years later. i did not mind. i was glad she was given this. she has mourned for him since she was 16 when one morning we learned his pancreas had burst. i began only at 26. i did not understand what was happening then mainly because we had not lived with him in over 10 years and had not seen him in 5. but she instantly understood what was occurring. another way, an option, a possibility for a different life later, after this one, a life instead of this one was ending. 

he was the gift of imagination we gave ourselves after we were disciplined by our mother. or simply after we witnessed her being someone who we preferred not to be a part of-- cussing out the cashier or the woman behind her in a grocery store line, telling the Spanish men in our neighborhood they were nasty pedophile freaks for looking at her 11 year old girls, aggressions we wished to be invisible to, even if they protected us somehow. but Tami received more than aggression. it appeared the discipline given to her was not mere protection from herself or the ills she could slip into in this world but instead my mother's own protection from the face of my father, her abuser, her first love, her biggest embarrassment. one day, on a very sunny clear sky afternoon, while we were walking home down the hill from the grocery store at the crossroads of Ivahar Street and Judson Road my mother began to hit Tami for something she had done. as she spoke she struck her with each word. "you stupid ass! how many times do i have to tell you?!! I'm so sick of this shit. I'm so sick of you, you hard head ass child!" by the mailbox, with the sun beaming, she beat her until a woman across the street stopped and watched. i believe the woman waited until she felt this moment was now beyond a boundary that seems difficult to name around a mother reprimanding her child. she told my mother she would call the police if she did not stop. my mother yelled back and proceeded to take us up the next hill to grandma's house. i remember thinking, this stranger saved Tami from our mom and that a child should never need saving from their parent. that a stranger should not be saving us if indeed we needed to be saved from a parent. and that this maybe is what the other parent is for.

my father had given us 2 solid years of pouncing on daddy's knee. of birthdays from ages 5-7 with a montage of images from our strawberry shortcake and big bird themed party, with two cakes in the shape of these characters; cinnamon the dog crouched in the back seat of our white pinto being pulled out by our dad to give to us as a bday present; the Christmas tree falling because i caused it to tip and my father wiping my tears telling me i had not ruined Christmas; him flying out onto the highway after Tami toyed with the lock on the back seat car door where she sat as he drove, and then suddenly tumbled out the car into 6 lane traffic--my father retrieving her from lane 3 and bringing her into the arms of her mother who i would never see hold her so closely again in this way.  he was daddy then, and once my mother left him, once he was out of reach, he was the savior. his intermittent presence sprinkled into our lives, phone calls from the rehab centers in Atlanta Georgia where we left him came to us in Maryland with soft weeping as he uttered 'you know daddy loves you?" just enough of these moments to compel us to believe there was something better we possessed out there that was just a matter of getting a hold of, to keep reaching for it. there was someone out there with a softer voice, a gentler way, with whom days were sunny and cleared skied without any beatings. he had appeared in our lives shortly enough and then disappeared long enough to be a dream, the solace we could imagine somewhere our family had (had).

i walk away from Tami in my living room because she has turned her head to the window and i know she has said all she is going to say about it. and over the years i have learned to give her the silence she seems to prefer after a fight. i go into my bedroom but leave the door wide open. i hope my thoughts reach her with what i wasn't finished saying: who do you think you are?! you're crazy! psycho! my twin sister is CRAZY!! what 31 year old woman jumps to the conclusion that because we haven't fixed the lock this happened, instead of asking herself where was she when the child was walking out the door, why isn't the child obeying the rule that she already knows which is to not touch the door handle?!! STUPID! THAT IS SO DUMB. OUT OF HER MIND! CRAAAAZZZYY! MY sister is PSYCHOOO! She's PSYCHOO. 

I begin to do a sing songy tune to My Sister is CRAZY in my head until i hear the sounds of a tranquil waterfall flowing off from a mountaintop. I walk into the living room acting as if I'm getting something and i see Tami at the dining table hovered over her phone where the waterfall sounds come. i return to the bedroom answering my own questions: who does this? who thinks like this? i know who.

Later that night when they have left, i tell jullien we have to fix the lock sooner than later. he says it costs 500 dollars to do it. i tell him,

"you know what happens right? the lock opens up as soon as the kid pulls down the handle. and they walk out. and you know what happens, right? if they want to get back in they can't because the door locks behind them. so she could have been out there wanting to get back in but couldn't for who knows how long? those are traumatic seconds for a child Jullien." i stop talking and visualize Isabelle choosing to lie on the floor and possibly being picked up by a random adult who opened the door. then i see Tami, a little girl, staring at the front door to my home, to her home, to my mother's home and trying to find a way back in. she is surrounded in dark gray because there is no light in the halls. because my mother has told her she is STUPID. DUMB. JUST LIKE YOUR FATHER. Has told her GET OUT OF MY FACE I CAN'T STAND LOOKING AT YOU, and made her believe there was another home where she was meant to be, where since we were little she has gone in search for and in part has found it in her children and the home she makes for them, and in part in her belief that i will hear her for what she is really asking when she is asking for the locks to be changed, and maybe in part from the quiet ways she has found to mother the little girl inside of her who is still looking for the other parent, for her real twin, for him whom she was told in so many ways is where she belongs.