I promised myself I wouldn’t cry on my first day. During the car ride, I repeated it to myself like a mantra: this job was a new beginning, this city a new chapter. I would enter that professional nursery, composed and serene.
I was setting up art supplies on the table at the back of the room when the morning group arrived. Two little girls entered hand in hand: dark curls, chubby cheeks, the confident gait of those who feel they own every room they enter. They couldn’t have been more than five years old, the same age my twins would have been.
I smiled automatically, then froze. They looked uncannily like me as a young man.
And then they ran straight toward me. Wrapping themselves around my waist, they clung with the desperate grip of children who have waited too long.
“Mom!” the tallest one shouted with joy. “Mom, you’re finally here! We’ve been asking you to come get us!”
Silence fell in the room.
Just for illustration purposes,
I looked at the main teacher, who gave me an awkward laugh and muttered, “Sorry.”
I didn’t make it through the rest of the morning.
I followed the directions—snack time, circle time, outdoor games—but I kept observing them. Noticing things I shouldn’t have. The way the shorter girl tilted her head when she thought. The way the taller girl pursed her lips before speaking. Identical gestures.
But it was their eyes that lost me. Each girl had one blue eye and one brown eye.
My eyes are like this. From birth. A heterochromia so marked that my mother said I was born from two different skies.
I excused myself and went to the bathroom, clutching the porcelain sink for three whole minutes, struggling to breathe. Memories flooded back: eighteen hours of labor, the emergency at the end, the surgeries.
When I woke up, a doctor I had never seen before told me that both my daughters were dead.
I never saw my girls again. Pete, my husband, had taken care of the funeral arrangements while I was under anesthesia. Six weeks later, he sat across from me with the divorce papers. He said he couldn’t stay, that he couldn’t look at me without remembering what had happened. He told me the girls had passed away because of complications I had caused.
I believed him. What else could I do?
