Like Sisters
Part One: The House Next Door
My name is Sarah Lindell. I’m thirty-two years old.
I never expected the happiest chapter of my life to lead to a medical appointment that would leave me terrified for my unborn child.
And I never expected that appointment to answer a question I didn’t even know I’d been asking my whole life.
My best friend, Emily Carver, is thirty-one.
We’ve been inseparable for twenty-five years.
We grew up in neighboring houses on Sycamore Lane in Westbrook, Ohio. A small town east of Columbus with one high school, one Dairy Queen, and a water tower painted like a giant baseball.
My house was yellow with white shutters. Hers was blue with a red door. There was a gap in the hedge between our backyards that our fathers never fixed, because by the time they noticed it, we’d worn a dirt path through it.
We met when I was seven and she was six.
She was sitting on her back steps crying because her goldfish had died. I came through the hedge with a shoebox and a garden trowel and said, “We should have a funeral.”
We buried him under her mother’s rose bush. I said a prayer. She sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” because it was the only song she knew all the words to.
After that, we were never apart.
We attended the same schools. Westbrook Elementary, Westbrook Middle, Westbrook High.
We shared countless adventures. Building forts in the woods behind the Methodist church. Sneaking into the community pool after closing. Driving to Columbus at sixteen to see a concert we’d lied to our parents about.
We supported each other through our first crushes, our first kisses, our first heartbreaks. When Tommy Reinhart dumped me at the junior prom, Emily poured a cup of red punch down the back of his tuxedo.
When Emily’s father had his heart attack our senior year, I slept on her bedroom floor for two weeks.
Our mothers frequently joked that we behaved more like sisters than best friends.
“Look at you two,” my mother, Marie, would say. Watching us lie on the trampoline in the backyard, finishing each other’s sentences. “Peas in a pod.”
“Same nose,” Emily’s mother, Barbara, would say. Laughing. “Same stubborn chin. Are you sure the hospital didn’t mix them up?”
They’d laugh.
Then sometimes they’d look at each other.
And stop laughing.
I never thought anything of it.
