The Vanishing Twin

Sometimes I hear the echo of my son’s laughter. I never bore a son; I should have, but I had a miscarriage. He was a twin to my daughter, and it is a loss no one acknowledged at the time because everyone was focused on trying to save Jessica. 

I can only grieve it years later, as I am grieving the lost promise of other lives, my daughter’s, my own.

I dreamed about my son again last night; in the dream, he is tall and quiet with sandy brown hair like his father. We’re at a table at a friend’s house, eating a meal. I’m so glad he’s here.

Barely before we’ve had a chance to take a bite, he gets up from the table.

“Do you have to go so soon?” I ask him.

This is the question I have always asked him. He never answers. He smiles and is gone.

Even outside my dreams, I can see him sometimes, the son I never had; I catch a glimpse just outside the corner of my eye. He is twenty-eight now, tall, like in the dream, with that gentle smile. I think he plays the guitar. I think I have sometimes heard him.

They call a child like him the vanishing twin and that is what happened to him, he vanished one day, between one heart beat and the next.

No one talked about it to me, not after the first discovery that he once existed. I never named him.

He was my son.