Part Seven: The Resemblance
She was approximately eighteen years old.
She had dark eyes. She had the particular set of the jaw that I recognized not from mirrors — I had been looking at myself for forty years, you grew accustomed to your own face — but from photographs. From the photograph I had of my daughter at one year old, which I had looked at so many times the image had become almost abstract.
She had a face that was not my face but was built from the same materials.
I could not speak.
“Who are you looking for?” she asked.
Her voice was polite, curious, the voice of a young woman who had answered a door and found a stranger.
I heard movement inside. My parents appeared in the hallway behind her.
My mother. My father.
Twenty years older, both of them — smaller, somehow, or perhaps I was simply larger than I had been, more present in my own body. My mother’s hand went to her mouth. My father’s color changed.
I produced the cold smile. I had prepared it.
“Now you regret it, don’t you?” I said.
And then the girl beside my mother did something that rearranged everything.
She grabbed my mother’s hand. She said: She’s lying. She’s not who you think she is.
