Five Seats for Five Siblings

By midnight, Leo had finally drifted back to sleep in my arms, and I had carefully carried him back up to his bunk, tucking the flannel quilt securely around his chin. I sat back down at my desk, but the sleep had completely vanished from my eyes.

The quiet of the workshop hummed around me. I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk, reaching past my old tax returns and wood-carving tools until my fingers brushed against a small, dusty shoebox.

I pulled it out and set it under the desk lamp.

Inside were fading polaroid photographs taken thirty-three years ago. I pulled one out: five children standing outside a brick county courthouse in the freezing rain.

The oldest boy in the picture was me—thin, hollow-eyed, wearing an oversized winter coat that didn't belong to me, holding my four younger siblings in a desperate huddle. Minutes after that photo was snapped, a pair of state caseworkers had pulled us apart. My twin sisters went to a family in Dayton; my two younger brothers went to a farm two counties over. And I was dropped off at a group home fifty miles away.

For two decades, I searched for them. I tracked down marriage certificates, death records, adoption amendments, and closed social service files. I found my sister Clara in Seattle, living a life she had built entirely from scratch. I found my brother Julian working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. We met for coffee once, ten years ago, awkwardly staring across a table at each other like ghosts trying to remember how to speak a language we had forgotten.

We never managed to get all five of us into the same room again. The distance—not just physical, but emotional—was simply too wide to bridge. The system hadn't just separated us; it had dissolved our family tree into five isolated root systems.