A Worser Way

The night her sister came home, the moon looked like a fingernail paring.

So white.

She paused, looking and looking up. She didn't think of herself as someone who noticed things like that.

"Is it you, Beatrice?" her sister asked, at the arrivals gate, silhouetted against the giant plate glass windows. The windows went all the way up, from floor to ceiling, curving in a gentle arc so that the moon surprised Bea—a discarded white disk of moon, sitting there on the glass.

"Call me Bea. You're Bora?"

"OK. Bea. I'm Bora."

At work one afternoon, eight months previously, Bea had received an email from an address of all numbers. A domain name she didn't recognize: Daum.co.kr. She suspected spam but, by nature, had never been terribly suspicious.

"Hello, you don't know me," the email said. "I'm Bora. My friend helped me write this. But you're my sister. I found you. Weren't you adopted? I'm sick. I want you to know that now, before we talk. I'm sick, and I need help."

After that, Bea had sat stunned in the restaurant office for too long. She had gone in there just to hide out a little, taking an unsanctioned break from the line. The kitchen was so slow in mid-afternoon anyway, and lately she had begun to notice herself beginning to grow old. Her fingers hurt sometimes. Pressure seemed to accumulate in her lower back and in her knees, making kneeling for the prep fridge difficult. And she was always kneeling for the prep fridge, in charge of eggs in a brunch place.

"Yes, I was adopted. In 1972. I was five years old," she wrote back. "How do I know that you are really my sister?"

The next day, "I have the papers. Your adoption agency was very apologetic, because no information about our mother. They are not like an adoption agency. Like a broker. Here are the papers. Here is my baby picture, and here is me, too."

A picture of Bea herself, sitting on an unfamiliar tile floor. No, a twin. Big eyes that she grew into as she grew taller. Velvety black irises and wispy hair clipped with a plastic barrette so it stood straight up, like a horn. The slightly too big mouth, in a gummy grin. A brown giraffe toy Bea had never owned. Thick, callused hands ready to catch Baby if she fell back. Tear trails on Baby's cheeks, as if she had come to joy from squalling. A white dog's nose and Baby's hands, with clean fingernails.

A picture of a cautiously smiling woman, pleased but hiding bad teeth. Her skin turning that watered tobacco color of older Korean ladies, spotted but still charming. Laugh lines around the eyes. The hair long, tied back in a braid, like a single girl from the old days.

"Sorry that I am not beautiful. I lived in the countryside. It was not an easy life. But do not feel badly! It is so nice here. Maybe sometime we can come here together. I have hopes. We are twins. Do you think you can like someone like me?"

Bea sat in the restaurant office, looking and looking at the two pictures. Every detail. The smallest line. She had touched the space between her eyes, and a place on the back of her head, which always hurt in times of strain. She had taken off her sneakers and sat in the office chair barefoot, looking and looking at the pictures.

"Do you think you can like someone like me?"

That night, Bea had gone into the bathroom at home and looked in the mirror. On the crowded vanity, a few skin care products shared space with various tubes and bottles, ghosts of old ex-girlfriends whose things had become part of the scenery. She picked up a few things, put them in the trash bin.

Her face was very white. Other people tended to comment upon it, how pale she was and how her freckles stood out, orange freckles like...