My twin sister vanished in the sunflower sweater our mom knitted the night we turned 16 — 40 years later my granddaughter wore it home and said the woman who cleans her school had handed it to her.
Chapter 1 - The Sweater That Came Home
My twin sister vanished in her sunflower sweater on the night we turned sixteen. Forty years later, my granddaughter walked through my front door wearing it and said, "Our school cleaning lady gave it to me."
Diane disappeared on what should have been the best night of our lives.
It was our sixteenth birthday, the summer of 1986. Mom taped streamers to every doorway and blew up so many balloons her face went pink. Dad stood over the grill in the backyard flipping burgers he burned on one side. Aunts, uncles, cousins — they kept arriving until we ran out of chairs and people were eating off paper plates on the porch steps.
Mom had been working on our presents for months, in secret, after we went to bed. Matching sweaters, hand-knit. Mine had a row of daisies across the chest. Diane's had one enormous yellow sunflower — and right in the middle of it, one petal she'd knitted in brown by accident.
"Leave it," Diane said, laughing, when Mom offered to pick it out and redo it. "Now nobody can say it's not mine."
Around nine, she leaned over and kissed Mom on the cheek. She dragged her finger through the frosting on the cake one more time and stuck it in her mouth. Then she headed for the back door.
"Just getting some air," she said. "Save me another piece."
That was the last thing I ever heard my sister say.
She didn't come back.
No note. No suitcase missing from our room. Not a single thread of that sunflower sweater. For years afterward, my whole body would seize up every time the phone rang.
Mom looked for her until the day she died. Church bulletins, flyers stapled to telephone poles, calls to police departments three states over. She never stopped.
Dad stopped.
Within a few months he quit going out on the searches. He boxed up every photo of Diane and carried them down to the basement. And then he simply stopped talking about her. Not on her birthday, which was also mine. Not ever.
Dad is ninety now. He lives at a place called Ridgeline Care Center, about twenty minutes from my house. His hands shake and his hearing is going, but his mind is still a steel trap.
He still won't say Diane's name. For forty years I told myself that was just grief — that losing her had broken something in him that never set right.
Last Tuesday was exactly forty years to the day since she walked out that door.
That afternoon my granddaughter Maddie — she's eight — came in from school swallowed up in a huge knitted sweater that hung past her knees.
"Grandma! Look what the cleaning lady gave me!"
The plate I was drying slipped out of my hand and shattered on the kitchen floor.
There was a yellow sunflower spread across my granddaughter's chest.
And one of the petals was brown.
I got down on my knees in front of her and folded the collar back with my thumb.
Stitched into the inside seam, in red thread gone pink with age, were two letters my mother had sewn there forty years ago.
D. E.
I had to grab the counter to keep from going down.
"Maddie. Honey. Who gave you this?"
"The cleaning lady at school, Grandma. I already told you."
My hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Then Maddie's face lit up like she'd forgotten something important. "Oh — she said if you knew what it was, I should look inside."
"Inside where?"
She twisted around and pointed at a little puckered seam under the sunflower, low on the front. A seam that didn't match any of the others.
I'd never seen it before in my life.
I worked the threads apart with my fingernail and slid two fingers into the gap.
Something hard.
I pulled it out, and the sound that came out of me made Maddie step back.
"Grandma? What is it?"
May you like
I couldn't get a word out.
Because I'd only ever seen that little object one time before — in my father's hand, the night my sister disappeared.
