“This is filling me with sorrow,” she says slowly. “Any of these women could be my sister. Or, none of them could be my sister”
O
ne after the other, Hannah picks up each photograph. She looks, brings it up to her face and lets her eyes blur before the features: eyes, nose, mouth.
She should know. She should be automatically drawn to her own flesh and blood. Some deeply embedded instinct should cause her to lift her finger and, with certainty, point at a picture and say, “It’s her. This is Perla. This is my sister.”
But she simply does not know.
On the table in front of her is the picture Emmy borrowed from her parents. The three of them: Hannah and Perla and tiny Becca, still no more than a toddler.
She picks it up. She looks at the shape of Perla’s face, studies it. Her cheeks are slightly puffy. Is that because she was a child? Is it because she ate plenty of Mama’s porridge, made with the first squirts of creamy milk? Mama always gave Perla the best of the food, afraid that she hadn’t grown because she did not feed her enough when she was a baby. No matter how much Tatte tried to tell her that these things are from Hashem, and he had two uncles and a sister who also did not grow, she never stopped blaming herself.
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