I’m going to attempt to give some backstory so that this makes a bit more sense, sorry if it’s rushed.
I ran away from an abusive household with my then-boyfriend when I was 18. I haven’t spoken to my family since, I have no idea what became of my parents or siblings, but none of them were good people, so I never cared about what their lives were now like and still don’t. I married my boyfriend, and after months of sleeping in our car and saving up, we eventually got a small apartment, and then a house.
Our lives were almost perfect, with a perfect-sized house in the city decorated exactly to our tastes, our dream jobs, and a brand new car. All we needed was a baby.
It didn’t take long at all for me to fall pregnant, and when I did we were both ecstatic. We immediately began shopping for our baby girl and decorated the nursery. We even picked out her name straight away; Penny. All of our life together we’d relied on the money we saved, luck, and our love. This baby was going to be our new lucky charm.
Words can’t possibly describe the heartache we both felt when I miscarried. It was the one thing mine and my husband’s love couldn’t fix. I had hope that we’d get through it together, but unfortunately he didn’t.
I suppose he felt that without Penny, he’d never feel whole - that he would never be able to shake the grief and the feeling that something was missing. I couldn’t console him no matter how hard I tried, and my own grief made it even more difficult. I lost track of how many times I woke up late at night after crying myself to sleep and walked out into the hall to see him staring at the empty nursery.
I’ll never forget the day I came home from a walk my husband had suggested I take to, well, nothing. Just charred remnants of the house we’d bought together a year before.
“I’m so sorry, Miss, but we found what was left of your husband’s body inside. He left a letter with a neighbour addressed to you.”
I wailed as my knees buckled and the firemen held me up. Although I remember that day -that moment- so vividly, I’m terrible at recalling it to other people. I tried to write it down, I described it to therapy groups countless times, but it never seemed to make sense, so I apologise if my recount was a bit confusing.
I slept in my car from then on and imagined him sleeping across from me in the driver’s seat every night. With group therapy of all sorts -for widowers, for those who lost someone to suicide, for mothers that miscarried, for people struggling in general- I managed to find a light at the end of the tunnel. I got back my will to live. I wanted to make Anthony proud of me, keeping some of his ashes in a locket that constantly stayed close to my heart.
Despite this, though, I still went through life in a daze. I felt like I was constantly dreaming, a sort of robot all alone. Therapy, the people there, the thought of my husband watching over me as he held Penny in his arms, was what motivated me to keep going, but I couldn’t shake the empty, lonely feeling I had. It was crazy to me that everything that happened after his death and before I had the twins was within months. Living out of our car, going to therapy, moving into an apartment, having our babies; all within a year.
But that’s the thing. I never really had Lizzie and Addie. I was in such a daze all that time and suffered so much memory loss, confusion, shock, grief, and happiness that somehow it never occurred to me that I never gave birth to my babies. I never took a pregnancy test, I never went to the hospital, I never named them. They just sort of showed up one day and I knew they were mine.
The first week of living in my apartment, crying myself to sleep every night, staring into the empty spaces around me and imagining what it’d be like to have my Anthony and Penny there with me - and suddenly, I had twin girls.
Elizabeth Daisy Taylor and Adelaide Violet Taylor.
I raised them, I love them, we are a happy family. They are both so smart and beautiful, and drawn to vintage things, gorgeous detailed clothes as girly as you could get, and everything beautiful about the world. They love hearing of their father, they love looking at Penny’s sonograms and incomplete baby books, and have always been proud to call me their mum.
Except, I’m not their mum.
I don’t know who I am to them.
What really made all of this apparent to me was when (whilst clearing out my loft) I found their birth certificates, their baby books, everything from before they were born to a few months afterward. On their birth certificates it states their names, their sex, and their birthdays. No mother or father. No place of birth.
The only thing that’s not too odd about the birth certificates are their names and sex, although everything is written in pencil and if I look closely I can see their names have been erased and written over. Their birthday, however, is something quite unsettling. February 5th 1908. This looks as if someone tried to erase it but stopped or maybe ran out of time.
Their baby books seem like regular baby books at first, but all the pictures have been torn out, and everything appears to have been written hurriedly, but it’s all accurate. There are also some tear stains on many of the pages.
I don’t know what to do now. I’m sitting in their bedroom as I write this, they’re sleeping peacefully in their beds, and I’m both frightened and confused.