Then a wave hit from the side, and I went under. Then a hand came through and grabbed my arm, and I came up gasping. It was Leila.
A door was floating nearby, painted green with a brass number four still nailed to it, as if it had come off a house two streets over. There was just enough surface for one person. Leila looked at the door.
Then at me. Before I understood, she lifted me out of the water and pushed me onto it. The current took me immediately.
I screamed her name until my voice gave out. “Leila! Leila!
Come back!”
The last thing I saw was my sister in the current, watching me go with the particular smile she used when I scraped my knee and tried not to cry. That “don’t-you-dare” smile. “Don’t cry, Kurt…
I love you. I always do,” Leila shouted. Then a surge came.
And she was gone. They searched the river for three weeks. They never found my sister.
For years, that moment stayed with me. I was the one Leila saved. I was the one who got to grow up.
And I made a promise: I was going to build something my sister would’ve been proud of.
The company took shape when I was 22. Our parents lived to see the business grow. My dad shook my hand at the opening of our first facility and didn’t say anything, just held on for a moment longer than usual.
They were gone six years ago. A crash on the highway coming home from visiting me at Christmas. The headstones in the cemetery read the same line on both of them, a line I chose: “Still waiting for Leila.”
***
Back to the wooden box.
Inside was a small wooden rabbit, about the size of a matchbox, with lopsided ears and a slightly crooked nose. I’d made it when I was five and felt embarrassed by how uneven it was, but Leila wore it on a cord around her neck every single day from the moment I gave it to her. She was wearing it the morning of the flood.
I sat very still and looked at it for a long time. The woman across from my desk waited. Then she said, “I didn’t know what it meant until recently.”
She introduced herself as Erin.
She told me she’d been found unconscious several hundred miles from home after the flood, with no identification and no memory of who she was. A couple had taken her in, moved her out of state, and given her a name, a school, and a life. All she had were fragments that surfaced at the wrong moments: a boy, water, and the feeling of letting go of something she should’ve held on to.
Erin told me she’d seen an interview I’d given a few months earlier. In it, I’d shown an old photo of my older sister holding me, taken just a week before the flood. I talked about how everything I built was for the sibling who saved my life and then simply vanished.
Something about that image stirred a faint recognition in Erin. Not a full memory, just the feeling of something half-buried trying to surface. The word Bunny had come with it.
Erin spent three months tracing the company before she applied for the position. I looked at the locket. Then I closed the box.
“That’s not enough,” I said. “Anyone could’ve found this. Anyone who knew the story… anyone who researched me carefully enough.
I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing. I’m saying I need to be certain before I can give this what it deserves.”
Erin looked at me steadily. And the fact that she didn’t argue felt either very honest or very practiced.
I told Erin I was going to pull flood records. I’d read them so many times that I could recite them. And I said we could do a DNA test.
The room was quiet for a moment. Then Erin nodded once. “Okay.”
“I’ll set it up,” I told her.
“In the meantime, I’d like to ask you some things.”
She folded her hands on the desk and waited as I asked her several questions. Specific ones. Childhood details I’d never written down or spoken about to anyone.
“I think… diagonally?” Erin said slowly. “Crusts off. And…” she frowned slightly, as if she were reaching for it.
“You used to put a napkin underneath so it wouldn’t get soggy.”
I just looked at her. I asked if she remembered any music from the house. Erin was quiet, then hummed something, and stopped abruptly.
She looked almost startled, as if the sound had come out before she could decide to let it. It was a song our mother used to play on Sunday mornings. Erin didn’t get everything right.
But the things she knew felt like they lived somewhere deeper than memory. “I’ll let you know when the records come through,” I said at the end of the week. Then, after a moment, I added, “Can you come with me somewhere on Sunday afternoon?”
Erin didn’t hesitate.
“Yeah. Of course.”
That Sunday, I drove her back to my old town. I hadn’t been back since the flood.
The neighborhood had been rebuilt so completely that almost nothing was recognizable. New houses. New streets.
A park where there had been a row of cottages. Erin walked beside me without speaking, and I watched her very carefully. Then she slowed.
We were standing on what had been our street, and there was nothing left of our house except a low concrete block where the front steps had been. And beside it, still standing for some reason, a rusted metal mailbox post with no box on top. Erin reached out and ran her fingertips over the rust, very lightly.
She didn’t say anything. I said nothing either. I just noted it and kept walking.
Then Erin stopped completely and stood very still, facing a direction that would’ve been the back of our house, the direction the water had come from. “We should go to the river,” she said. The river was lower than I remembered from that day, and slower.
We stood on the bank where the current had been strongest in 2005, and neither of us spoke for a while. I was thinking about the green door. The brass number four.
The “don’t-you-dare” smile. Then Erin went very still beside me. She was looking at the water with an expression I couldn’t read.
Not sadness exactly. More like recognition. The sound of the river moved between us.
Then she said, very softly: “I told you not to cry… that day.”
My breath stopped. Erin turned to look at me.
“I don’t remember being your sister. I don’t have that in any way I can show you or prove to you.” She paused. “But I remember choosing you.”
I stood there for a long time without saying anything.
We didn’t talk much on the drive back. Erin looked out the window. I kept both hands on the wheel, and I thought about what it meant to spend 25 years building a memorial for someone and then have to figure out how to make room for the same person.
It’s a stranger kind of adjustment than you might expect. I asked Erin if she wanted to make one more stop. She said yes before I told her where.
The cemetery is on the eastern edge of town, behind a low stone wall. I found the stones without looking for them. I’ve taken that path enough times that my feet know it.
Two headstones. Side by side. Erin knelt before I could say anything.
Her palm went flat against the stone with Mom’s name on it, and she stayed there. I crouched beside her. “They waited.
Every day. Until six years ago. They never stopped.”
Erin was quiet for a long time.
Then she said, just above a whisper, “I might not remember much. But I’m back.”
I put my hand over hers on the stone, and neither of us moved for a long time. The DNA results came back three days later.
I sat with them for nearly two hours, staring at the truth, trying to make sense of it. We were a match. Erin was my sister.
Leila. We are still figuring it out slowly, which is the only way you can figure out something like this. Leila still introduces herself as Erin in most situations because that name has 25 years of life in it, and you don’t set something like that down easily.
I understand that. I still call her Erin sometimes. And sometimes I call her Leila.
And she answers to both, and we don’t make a thing of it. She came to the office last Thursday and walked around the production floor for an hour, reading the names on each product line. Then she looked at me across the floor and smiled.
The “don’t-you-dare” smile. I looked away before she could see what it did to me. I spent 25 years trying to live a life worthy of my sister.
