Twins Separated as Infants Reunite Later in Life

Oct. 5, 2007 — -- Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein knew they were adopted; what they didn't know until recently was that they were identical twin sisters who were separated and had, for a time, been part of a confidential study on separated twins.

When Elyse and Paula reunite, they begin to explore the puzzle of their early lives and find out more about their birth mother.

As the women get to know each other and build a relationship, they discover fascinating similarities between them but also must cope with the challenges and frustrations of getting to know an identical twin later in life.

Their co-written memoir, "Identical Strangers," details their fascinating story. You can read an excerpt below.

Identical Stranger: Chapter 1

ELYSE: My mother, my adoptive mother, my real mother, diedwhen I was six, but throughout my childhood I believed shewatched over me from above. I held the few images that remainedof her in my mind like precious photographs I could animate at will.In one, she sat before her dressing table, lining her charcoal eyes,preparing to go out with my dad one Saturday night. The scent ofher Chanel No. 5 is enchanting.

I can still see her. She catches a glimpse of me in the mirror andsmiles at me, standing in the doorway in my pajamas. With herraven hair, she looks like Snow White. Then, after her death, sheseemed to simply disappear, like a princess banished to some farawaykingdom. I believed that from that kingdom, she granted memagical powers.

When I jumped rope better than the other girls in my Long Islandneighborhood, I knew it was because my mother was with me.When I went out fishing with my dad and brother, my motherhelped me haul in the catch of the day. By sheer concentration, Icould summon her force so that my frog won the neighborhoodrace.

Since I wasn't allowed to attend my mother's funeral, her deathremained a mystery to me. When other kids asked how she haddied, I confidently announced that she had had a backache. I laterlearned that her back problems had been caused by the cancer invadingher spine.

Along with my mother's absence came an awareness of my ownpresence. I remember standing in complete darkness in front of thebay windows in our house shortly after her death. Alone, except formy reflection, I became aware of my own being. As I pulled awayfrom the glass, my image disappeared. I asked myself, Why am I meand not someone else?

Until autumn of 2002, I had never searched for my birth parents.I was proud to be my own invention, having created myself outof several cities and cultures. In my ignorance surrounding mymother's death, I amplified the importance of the few facts I hadaccumulated -- she was thirty-three when she died, which I somehowlinked to our new home address at 33 Granada Circle. It wasprobably no coincidence that when I reached the age of thirty-three,after one year in Paris, the urge to know the truth of my originsgrew stronger. Turning thirty-three felt the way other people describedturning thirty. I felt that I should automatically transforminto an adult.

I had recently starting wearing glasses to correct my severe caseof astigmatism, which had allowed me to see the world in a beautifulblur for several years. All the minute details I had been obliviousto were suddenly focused and magnified. But even if it meant abandoningmy own blissful vision of the world, I was ready to face thetruth.

I was working in the unlikeliest of places, as a temporary receptionistin a French venture capital firm in the heart of Paris'sbusiness district. Of course, the desire to eat something other thancanned ratatouille for dinner had played a part. I assured myselfthat I wasn't like the suburbanites who commuted every day inorder to pay for a satellite dish and a yearly six-week vacation to thesouth of France.

Initially I had amused myself by observing French business deco-rum. As the novelty wore off, I entertained myself with the frontdesk computer. Assuming a businesslike pose, I sat for hours alternatingbetween answering the phone and plugging words and topicsinto various search engines. I typed in old friends' names and discoveredthat my classmates from SUNY Stony Brook were now philosophyprofessors and documentary directors. One had even editedthe latest Jacques Cousteau film.

Meanwhile, bringing espressos to hotshots in suits, I was beginningto doubt that my particular path would somehow lead me torealize my own dream of directing a cinematic masterpiece. Aftercollege graduation, I had migrated to Paris, leaving New York andmy boyfriend behind to pursue the life I imagined to be that of anauteur film director. My Parisian film education consisted of regularscreenings at the cinémathèque and the small theaters lining thestreets near the Sorbonne. Sitting in a dark cinema, I returned to thesafety of the womb, united with an international family of strangers.I wanted to go far away, to become someone else. In the Frenchtongue, my name, "Stacie," sounded like "Stasi," the word for theEast German secret police. Wanting a name that could be pronouncedin any language, I took Elyse, my middle name. I couldn'tchange my name entirely, though, for as far away as I wanted towander, I always wanted to be easily found.

My family still called me Stacie, but not in person because Ihadn't seen them in four years. My schizophrenic brother couldbarely leave his house, much less get on a plane. My absence wasconvenient for them. I criticized their überconsumerism, while theycouldn't understand my reluctance to join them in civilization.Though they would have bailed me out if I couldn't pay my$215/month rent, I wouldn't ask them to. My relationship with myfather and my stepmother, Toni, consisted of a biweekly call to Oklahoma,where we had moved when I was eleven.

"Is everything okay?" they would ask.

"Yeah. Is everything okay?" I would echo back.

"Everything's okay. The same." The same meant that mynephew was still causing mayhem. My family adopted my nephewTyler as an infant, when my brother, Jay, and his then girlfriendabandoned him. Struggling with the onset of schizophrenia, Jay andDarla, a seventeen-year-old high school dropout, were in no positionto raise a baby. Though I never saw them do drugs, I'd heardrumors that Darla sniffed paint while she was pregnant.

Since the moment I snuck into the hospital room and watchedTyler enter the world, I have felt like his guardian angel. I even consideredsmuggling him into Canada to raise him as my own. Nowthe child in whom I had put so much hope had become an orneryteenager. The apple had not fallen far from the tree: Tyler had begunto use drugs. Disagreeing with my parents on how to handle him, Iwas excluded from his life.

***

The hum of the computer filled the silent office. Monsieur Grangehad ordered me not to disturb him in his important meeting, so Iwas able to hide behind my polite mask while making contact withthe outside world via the Internet.

On a whim, I typed in "adoption search" and the die was cast.Countless sites appeared. I sorted through them until I foundwhat seemed to be the most reputable, the New York State AdoptionInformation Registry. Unlike some states and other countrieswhere adoption records are open to adoptees, New York seals adoptionrecords; they can only be opened by petitioning the court. TheAdoption Registry allows biological parents, children, and siblingsto be put in contact, if all parties have registered.

Maybe my birth parents were simply waiting for me to registerand I would soon be reunited with the mysterious and formidablecharacters who had shadowed my life. Perhaps, after searching formany years, they had been unable to find me. On the other hand, asa temp, I certainly was not at the pinnacle of my minor artisticsuccess, and the thought of disappointing these imaginary figureswas daunting. Maybe they would reject me again. Or perhaps theywouldn't be fazed at all, having come to peace with their decisionyears ago. I would be a hiccup in their reality. The scenarios and possiblerepercussions of my inquiry multiplied infinitely in my mind, amillion possible futures.

I filled in a form requesting identifying and nonidentifying informationabout my birth parents and sent it to the registry in Albany.

PAULA: In one of my earliest memories, I am sitting on the brickstoop in front of my grandma's row house in the East Flatbush sectionof Brooklyn. My pale, skinny legs crossed Indian-style, I peckaway at a black manual typewriter. Doing my best to sit up straightand look grown-up, I practice "playing piano." When I press toomany keys at once, the metal spokes of the typewriter jam togetherand I fear that I've broken it.

I like to think that my childhood fascination with the typewriterwas an early indication of my eventual career as a writer. Morelikely, it was simply the closest thing to a toy that I could find in mygrandma's house that balmy summer afternoon. No doubt, I alsodwell on the memory because it is one of the few that involve mygrandmother, who died two years later.

She was the only grandparent I had the chance to meet; the othershad died before I was born. Growing up, I grilled my parents withquestions about these phantoms and envied friends with grandparentswho showered them with attention, not to mention gifts.

I now see that there was another element of my grandparent obsession:they were a link to a past that did not include me. The onlyevidence I had that they had ever existed were the photos my parentspreserved in musty old scrapbooks in the attic. Since all of theirpictures were in black and white, I reasoned that my dead grandparentshad lived in a time before the world had turned to color. Unlikemost kids, I couldn't study these grainy old photos looking to find aresemblance to myself.

How were these antiquated strangers related to me? Just because I considered my adopted parents my "real parents," did that automaticallymake their parents my grandparents?

Despite the conventional wisdom that "blood is thicker thanwater," I had always believed that family is something you createrather than something you are born into. "Never forget for a singleminute,/You didn't grow under my heart -- but in it," read part of apoem my mother clipped from a "Dear Abby" column and pastedinto the inside cover of my baby book.

One fall afternoon, soon before my sixth birthday, I snuggledclose to Grandma on her stiff twin bed at the nursing home whereshe spent the last year of her life. By today's standards, she was relativelyyoung at seventy-one, but at the time, she seemed ancient.Calmly, she cupped my tiny hand in her bony one as we sat there insilence for what felt like an eternity. Although we didn't exchangewords, her eyes said good-bye.

Since my mother didn't have biological children and my auntnever married or had children, my grandmother's genes would diewith my mother and her sister. Still, I am certain that my grandmanever felt any less connected to me because I wasn't her genetic descendant.

Now, as an adult, I'm back in Brooklyn, not far from where mymother was born and raised and my grandfather owned a kosherbutcher shop. But, along with my grandmother, the rest of mymother's family has long since died or moved South. "You're movingto Brooklyn?" my mom asked incredulously when I informedher of our plans to move to Park Slope. For her, the suburbs werethe Promised Land. Why would we want to settle in the place shehad worked so hard to leave?

ELYSE: Six months after I wrote to the adoption registry, I receivedthe only information about my birth mother I ever expectedto have. The registry wrote me that they had contacted Louise WiseServices, the adoption agency I knew had handled my case, and re-quested that they send nonidentifying information to me. As a consolationprize, they enclosed a form listing my birth mother's variousattributes, of which only nationality (American) and age (28)are filled in.

I quickly calculated the years: my birth mother would now be inher mid-sixties rather than in her early fifties. I had envisioned herin my mind's eye as a pregnant teenager living on the fringes of NewYork's subterranean society when she'd given me up. So I couldsafely eliminate the majority of my fantasy birth mother candidates:She wasn't Edie Sedgwick, who was rumored to have had a flingwith Bob Dylan at the Factory in 1967... a possibility that had alwaysleft me wondering. And since, at age twenty-eight, my birthmother would presumably have been old enough to raise a child, extraordinarycircumstances must have caused her to give me up.

Returning to America after a three-year stint as a film student inPrague, I myself had experienced the first pangs of nature's call toprocreate, at the age of twenty-eight. Before then, I had convincedmyself that as an artist, I was required to choose between family andfilm. I chose the illusory world of film. In the fairy-tale city of Praguemy dream to turn colored lights into images finally came true. I hadbeen selected to study in the international program at the prestigiousfilm school FAMU. I packed my bags convinced that there wasno return.

When my 16mm short film, Je Vole Le Bonheur (I Steal Happiness),was received with acclaim and accepted to the Telluride FilmFestival in 1996, I felt my choice had been vindicated. I was as satisfiedas a proud mother, having given birth to the creation insideme. But the satisfaction was not complete.

Though I espoused my theory of sacrifice, inwardly I longed fora partner and a child. I also suspected that even if I never conceived,someday a wayward and abandoned child would somehow entermy life. I imagined that my gay best friend, John, would help meraise it.

In 1968, my birth mother was obviously unprepared to raise achild. No matter what noble intentions she may have had in providingme with nurturing parents, my birth mother gave me up. The letterwas proof that she was clearly not looking for me now.I resign myself to the fact that even such basic characteristics asher height, weight, and eye color would always remain a mystery.

***

I am shocked to arrive home one wintry day in February, six monthsafter the adoption agency had been asked to provide me with information,to find a certified letter from Louise Wise Services. Is theresome new revelation they suddenly want to share? Is my birthmother looking for me? Wanting to linger over the moment, I pourmyself a drink and light a cigarette while staring at the envelope.I savor the last minutes of expectation and then delicately openthe letter. Impatiently scanning it, I immediately zero in on the thirdsentence, the words "You were born at 12:51 p.m. as the 'younger'of twin girls born to a 28-year-old Jewish single woman."

The sentence seems totally unreal, yet at the same time confirmsmy deepest suspicions. It is as if past and present converge and resonatewith meaning. Elation buzzes through my body.

Breathless, I grab for the phone to call a close friend to meet. Myfirst instinct is to share the news. I want to show Jean-Claude the letterto confirm that I am not dreaming.

Over a beer at our local Belgian pub on Boulevard Montparnasse,empty the middle of this winter afternoon, Jean-Claude, afifty-five-year-old literary aficionado, shares my amazement at thenovelistic elements of my discovery. Though we usually drink winetogether on evenings after I tutor him in English, he is equally atease at the pub, overdressed in an elegant suit, guzzling down a pintof rich Belgian amber. His eyes widen in childlike wonderment as Idescribe the details of the letter to him.

My twin dwells in the abstract. There are still so many questionsto be answered: Are we fraternal or identical twins? What would itbe like to look at myself? Is that why I have always gazed at my reflectionin mirrors and shop windows? Jean-Claude and I laugh atthe prospect of her living a parallel life, just down the street fromme in Paris, perfecting French, just like me. How many times havewe crossed each other's path? I am reminded of one of my favoritefilms, Krzysztof Kieslowski's La Double Vie de Véronique, where,on a visit to Poland, a young French woman coincidentally encountersher double.

"Why were we separated?" I ask rhetorically. The particularlyvibrant winter afternoon light illuminates Jean-Claude's puzzled expression.He looks at me as if this is a riddle he cannot fathom, a philosophical conundrum he is left to ponder.

"It's like The Two Orphans, the nineteenth-century serial byAdolphe d'Ennery!" he exclaims, making one of his usual esotericreferences. "They are looking to unravel the mystery of their origin."

On our second beer, I move my ashtray and lay the letter out onthe wooden table so we can go over it together.

"It says that my, um, our birth mother -- it's strange to say'our'! -- was 'very intelligent with a high IQ who earned excellentgrades in an elite high school,' " I read aloud as Jean-Claude and Ipore over the letter together.

"She was very intelligent!" Jean-Claude says excitedly. "That'snot a surprise!"

"''She entered college on a merit scholarship but emotionalproblems interrupted her attendance,'" I continue. "'She had a historyof voluntary hospitalizations for emotional problems.'"

"Emotional problems?" Jean-Claude asks, "Like depression?"

"'Secondary sources noted that your mother's diagnosis wasschizophrenia, mixed type, which was successfully treated withmedication.'"

I look to Jean-Claude for consolation and he answers my silentquestion by saying "But you are okay," and takes my hand in his.The letter claims that my birth mother's schizophrenia was suc-cessfully treated. But, since my brother continues to struggle withthe disease, I know there is no miracle cure for schizophrenia -- andthere certainly wasn't one in 1968 -- so I am reluctant to accept herdiagnosis. Mixed-type schizophrenia would probably be more accuratelydiagnosed today as bipolar disorder or manic depression.

Even if she is a mad genius, I would still like to find her.I wonder about the hereditary factors in mental illness and howthey have affected my own emotional stability. Debilitated by depressionmy junior year of college, I could barely make it out of bedand considered dropping out. Had my twin sister suffered from thisillness? And if my twin had indeed succumbed to madness, could Itolerate seeing a deranged, exaggerated version of myself? I fear if Iconfronted a bleary-eyed stranger with my features. I could not faceseeing the life I had barely managed to escape.

Jean-Claude and I ruminate over these possible scenarios. Whatif my twin is dead? I almost died when I had an extreme allergic reactionto the antibiotic Bactrum, a sulfa drug, when I was fourteen.What if she hadn't survived after having a similar reaction to thedrug? Or what if looking at her was like looking at myself, but withoutthe mild, raised scars from the resulting chemical burn that havebecome so familiar to me? What if I find her, as I am driven to do,only to be rejected by a spoiled Jewish American Princess whofrowns upon my years of wandering bohemia?

The vision that scares me the most is that she has conquered hersolitude and has settled down with a soul mate and a child. If I witnessher domestic bliss, will I regret having opted for a liberated butsolitary existence? Considering these possibilities sometimes leadsJean-Claude and me to pensive silences. We also celebrate my enlightenmentabout the facts of my life. Though I anticipate that findingmy twin will be a long and arduous journey, I am tranquilknowing at last that the loneliness I have always felt is not of theusual existential kind; it has a name now."C'est le début d'une nouvelle vie," Jean Claude says. It is indeedthe beginning of a new life. And yet, I feel the knowledge that I havea twin had always been underneath the surface of things.

*** In a book at the library, I find an image of twins nestled together intheir mother's womb. As a fetus first opening my eyes at the gestationalage of six months, I must have encountered my twin lookingback at me.

In addition to the traumatic separation from their mother atbirth, psychologists believe, twins also experience a brutal rupturefrom their twin, with whom they have shared an intimate relationshipin the womb, negotiating for nutrients and space.

Though consciousness in the womb has not been scientificallyproven, many people claim to have a memory of a lost twin. Onereason may be that researchers estimate that 12 to 15 percent of usbegan life in the womb as a twin. Yet only one in eighty twin conceptionssurvive to full term.

Early in a pregnancy, a second or third embryonic sac may appearon ultrasound tests, only to disappear later. In such cases, theseembryos are partially reabsorbed by the mother or by the othertwin, or they are just shed entirely. Without complications in thepregnancy, these aptly named "vanishing twins" sometimes go unnoticed,often leaving no trace. Since twins are more likely to be lefthanded(20 percent of twins, compared to 10 to 12 percent of thetotal population), some twin experts speculate that many lefthanderscould be the remnants of a twin pregnancy.

In rare cases, two embryos merge and one twin incorporates theother; the result is called a chimera. In Greek mythology, theChimera possesses the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tailof a serpent. Unlike the gruesome creature for which it is named, thehuman chimera may only be detected through DNA or blood teststhat reveal two blood types in a single person.

And yet, since identical twins share a blood type, it is virtually impossible to determine in a singleton birth if there was originally an identical twin in the womb with her.

PAULA: Dwarfed by the maze of packed cardboard boxes thatsurround me, I wonder how my husband and I managed to amass somuch junk. Piles of books and garbage bags filled with old clothingbeckon to be rummaged through and sorted.

We've been in our new apartment in Brooklyn for just over amonth and today is the day I have set aside to create some order outof the chaos. The ascetic life is looking good as I envision a sleek,Zen-like apartment with minimal furniture. But reality -- especiallywith a toddler -- is a lot messier.

It's the sort of brutally cold early February day when you can seeyour breath. Despite the weather, my husband, Avo, has bundled upour daughter, Jesse, and carted her off to the nearby playground soI can focus on the task ahead of me. I've declared Jesse's secondbirthday, just two weeks away, as my unofficial deadline for clearingout the moving boxes.

In addition to showing off Jesse's newfound skills of walking andtalking, the event will also serve as an unofficial judgment day.When Avo and I decided to flee the funky East Village for family orientedPark Slope, Brooklyn, we knew our more eccentric friendsmight not get it. Jesse's party will be the first opportunity for ourVillage friends to inspect our new digs and to give us an earful abouthow we'd sold out.

I had pretty much had my fill of the bohemian life. As a journalistand film critic, I regularly attended film premieres, art openings,and late-night parties. Before I got married, my roommate and I hadearned a reputation for throwing raucous parties, which attractedan eclectic mix of indie filmmakers, aspiring photographers, andgrunge musicians. I remember one particularly lively bash where aprominent German film director and his drag queen date made theirdramatic entrance just as a troupe of fully costumed Shakespeareanactors were exiting.

Avo and I had viewed raising a kid in the East Village as a badgeof coolness. Unlike other parents who wimped out by bringing theirchildren up in the suburbs (where I had grown up), we were proudto be living on the edge. Rather than cart Jesse around in a minivan,we traveled by bus or subway. Instead of a backyard, Jesse relied onseedy Tompkins Square Park for her fresh air.

But, however much we cherished our lifestyle, we had now beenforced to come to terms with the fact that we were on the verge ofoutgrowing our six-hundred-square-foot walk-up apartment. Sincewe planned to start work on producing a little sister or brother forJesse sometime soon, we would need more space. Known for its Victoriantown houses and liberal denizens, Park Slope, we rationalized,would be the East Village but with less graffiti and more greenery.After moving on Christmas Eve, we rang in the New Year eatingtake-out pizza by the fireplace. Now that we're here, my greatestfear is that I'm going to become a New York City cliché: the ParkSlope mom. In the East Village, parenthood made us seem brave. InPark Slope, we are soldiers in an army of parents each marching toorders barked by minisergeants in strollers. Children are the unofficialentry ticket to this neighborhood, where double strollers bottleneckthe sidewalks and nursing moms and haggard dads wearingBabyBjörns dominate the cafés.

I've tried hard to balance the stay-at-home-mom life with freelancewriting, but switching gears is more challenging than Ithought it would be. Occasionally, I manage to put aside the dirtydiapers to write articles for various newspapers and magazines.Aside from making some extra cash, it's also an insurance policythat I won't lose my mind entirely to mommy stuff.

As I line Jesse's bookshelves with her favorite Winnie-the-Poohand Maurice Sendak books, it strikes me that we are creating thehome where Jesse will form her first memories. I hope we can giveher the stability that my parents provided for me. As a teenager, Ifound their normality oppressive, but while I was growing up, it wascomforting to know that I could rely on them to behave like the supportive parents I saw on my favorite TV show, The Brady Bunch. Icould always count on my mother to contribute to the school bakesale, conjure up creative Halloween costumes, and volunteer to bethe Brownie leader. Dad always caught his commuter train andmade it home in time for dinner with the family, which my mom dutifullyhad on the table promptly at six p.m.

Since I can't cook or sew and don't have much interest in being aden leader, I'm resigned to the fact that I won't live up to BradyBunch standards of motherhood. The only thing I hope to emulateis the unflagging sense that my parents would always be there formy brother and me when we needed them.

ELYSE: "I feel like I've lost a twin," I had often said to friends,after film school, out in San Francisco, whenever I faced a particularlydifficult bout of depression. I had always assumed that my profoundloneliness stemmed from the early death of my mother andthe loss, in some sense, of my older brother to schizophrenia. Myfriends thought it was just the potent Humboldt County weedspeaking. But my stoned suspicions had been right?literally. Thoseother later losses echoed a first and most dramatic separation froma twin sister.

I am grappling not only with the realization that I have been separatedfrom my twin, but also with the fact that I was, as the letterclearly stated, adopted at six months rather than shortly after birth,as I had always thought. My parents had lovingly recounted thestory of my adoption without ever getting into the exact details. Itdidn't help that my mom was no longer around to repeat the story,and my dad's memory is rather spotty.

In fact, I had assumed that my brother's late adoption, at sixmonths, had contributed to his schizophrenia. The knowledge that Ihad also languished in parentless limbo for months makes me pitythe orphaned infant I once was. My vision of the past is slowly shifting,this new fact making the others fall like dominoes.

Since I received the letter, my mind has been so consumed withthe discovery of my twin that thoughts of finding my birth motherhave been relegated to the back burner. Back in 1988, when returningto Long Island for college, not far from where I had beenadopted, I wondered if without even knowing it I might somedaypass the woman who gave birth to me. I wished for a sign, hopingthat some imaginary spectators would call out to alert me, "That's her!"

Like the baby bird in the children's book, I cracked out of myshell in front of every kind woman wondering, "Are you mymother?" "'Yes, I know who you are,' said the baby bird. 'You area bird and you are my mother.'"

Or would I instinctively know her by her bushy hair and doelikeeyes? The concept of kin eluded me. Do people related by blood recognizeeach other on some basic primal level?

Returning home now to my small flat on boulevard Raspail, Istare at myself in the mirror and try to imagine that somewhere outin the world I have a sister who resembles me. In constantly lookingat my own reflection, have I been inadvertently looking for her -- mydoppelgänger?

The notion of the double had always fascinated me. At college, Ihad taken an entire class centered on self-reflexivity in cinema. Itwas this class that motivated me to become a director. WatchingIngmar Bergman's Persona, in which a mute actress and her nursefuse identities at a secluded seaside town, I was mesmerized. Myemotions were mirrored in the nurse's question "Is it possible to betwo people at the same time?"

Now that the concept of the doppelgänger has become strangelyrelevant, I start to read whatever I can find at the local library. Doppelgängercomes from the German words doppel, meaning "double,"and gänger, "goer" or "walker," but is commonly rendered inEnglish as "double" or "look-alike." I remembered reading Freud's1919 essay, "The Uncanny," in which he describes the phenomenonof the double as encountering something very familiar that becomesfrightening.

Seeing one's double is often construed as a bad omen, which portendsdeath. In fact, the poet Percy Shelley drowned in a river shortlyafter seeing his doppelgänger appear on his balcony. In folklore,doppelgängers are similar to vampires in that they cast no shadowand have no reflection in a mirror or in water. They provide adviceto the person they shadow, which can be misleading or malicious. Inmany cases, once someone has viewed his or her own doppelgängershe is doomed to be haunted by images of that ghostly counterpart.In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "William Wilson," written in1839, the eponymous protagonist encounters a classmate who eerilyshares his name and birth date. Tormented by his double, whom hebelieves to be a saboteur, Wilson kills him in a climactic duel. Likewise,in Dostoyevsky's novella The Double, the protagonist's doppelgängerthreatens to ruin his good name and usurp his position insociety.

As I daydream about my newfound twin somewhere out in theworld, I wonder why the idea of twinship has such a dark culturallegacy. Finding out I have a mysterious lost twin only exponentiallyincreases the gothic overtones.

Just last month, my friend Laurent had chanced upon a sculpturethat, he felt, bore an uncanny resemblance to me. While he waswandering through a small museum in Montparnasse, the sculptureThe Polish Woman, who appeared to be one of my ancestors, hadstartled him out of his Sunday reverie. On Laurent's insistence, I visitedher at the Bourdelle Museum the following Sunday. Expectingto see her at every turn, I walked with anticipation through thestately museum. As I passed through a gathering of monumentalGreek gods, she came into view. Though she was just a small bustmade of clay, the resemblance was remarkable; we had the samemane of thick hair and the same mischievous smile.

Until now, I had based my life on a fallacy: that I had been bornalone. Rocking myself to sleep at night, the stuffed bear I boughtmyself the first day of college nestled against my chest, I repeatedlike a mantra, "I am alone. We are all born alone." I could no longerbe lulled by that lie, though I would never be able to truly replacewhat I had lost. Was my twin the "we of me" that I had been unconsciouslysearching for all my life?

PAULA: Even after they learn the basics of how babies are made,most children remain incredulous that such an unseemly physicalact could have been responsible for their arrival into the world.Eventually, they come to terms with the fact that their parents musthave had sex at least once in order to procreate. But since I wasadopted, I had no proof that my parents had ever had intercourse.Perhaps, I reasoned as a child, they had adopted my brother and mebecause they were leading a celibate life and therefore were unableto produce children of their own.

I was caught off guard one night when I was nine years old andmy extended family had gathered in the dining room for a RoshHashanah dinner. Blithely ignorant of the adult conversation aroundme, I froze when one comment demanded my attention. "I rememberwhen you were pregnant," Aunt Marilyn, my father's sister, saidcasually to my mother. I studied my mom's face for a reaction, butfound none. Why didn't she correct Aunt Marilyn and remind herthat Steven and I were adopted? I fiddled with the kasha varnishkeson my plate, but couldn't bring myself to eat any more. My brainwas struggling to make sense of what Aunt Marilyn had said. I visualizeda younger version of my mother with a full belly and a pregnantglow. What had happened to the baby inside her?

After dinner, I approached my mother as she was scraping thedinner plates clean.

"Mom, can you come to my room? I have something I want totalk to you about," I said in as mature a voice as I could muster.

I studied the bright, floral pattern on my bedspread as mymother made room for herself on my platform bed.

"Aunt Marilyn said something about your being pregnant. I didn't know you were ever pregnant," I said tentatively. I hugged my favorite stuffed animal, an oversized bunny rabbit who wore a goofy felt smile.

"Yes, I was pregnant a couple of times, but I had miscarriages."

My eyes welled up with tears, which I soaked up with the sleeveof my burgundy velvet dress. I wasn't sure exactly what a miscarriagewas, but I gathered that it wasn't good.

"The doctors couldn't find a medical reason for it, but I knew Icouldn't go through another miscarriage," my mom said softly."Your dad and I always felt comfortable with the idea of adopting.Now I'm glad that I had the miscarriages or else I might never havehad you."

It hurt to hear that if it weren't for my mother's miscarriages, myparents wouldn't have adopted me. Aside from my celibacy theory,I must have subconsciously wanted to believe that adoption wastheir first choice.

I don't remember a specific moment when I was told I wasadopted. I like to think that I always knew. It was never presented asa secret, just a fact. My older brother and my childhood best friendhad also been adopted, so it seemed commonplace to me. None ofmy classmates seemed to think that being adopted warranted muchof a reaction -- I was neither taunted, nor handled with kid gloves.Since it was such a banal topic, my adoption wasn't somethingmy family discussed much, with one notable exception. I routinelyegged my parents on to tell the sob story of my early days.

"When you were born, you weighed only four pounds andeleven ounces. By the time we brought you home at five months, youstill weighed less than ten pounds. You had a layer of dirt cakedonto the soles of your feet that we had to scrape off. Dad wouldproudly show your picture around his office, but people must havethought that you looked like a concentration camp survivor. To us,you were beautiful." My mom lovingly recited the tale, like a favoritebedtime story.

"What did the doctor say about me again?" I wanted every lastdetail, every time.

"The doctor who examined you surmised that your foster parentsboiled your formula for so long that it had lost all its nutrients,which explained your inability to digest food and your malnutrition.He told us, 'Don't get too used to her.'"

The pediatrician's flip dismissal of my chances for survival musthave devastated them at the time, but my parents' innate optimismwas apparently enough to fatten me up. They quickly managed tocompensate for my early months of neglect.

This heart-wrenching tale of a pathetic orphan and the parentswho rescued her from certain death and nursed her back to healthseemed so incongruous with my comfortable suburban upbringingthat I returned to it again and again. I was no longer that starvingabandoned baby, but I loved to romanticize my humble beginnings -- especially in the comfort of our four-bedroom house in manicuredWestchester County. I might have been wearing a Benetton sweaterand Calvin Klein jeans, but I came from dirt. I was tough.

It always seemed surreal to me that I had had another identitybefore my parents adopted me. The social worker at Louise Wisetold my parents that I had been called Jean at the foster home. Perhapsbecause it represented the time before I had a real family, I despisedthe name Jean, which sounded so homely to me. I wasgrateful my parents had decided to call me Paula.

However much I liked to imagine that my rocky start in lifemade me a more hard-edged person than my pampered peers, itsimply wasn't true. If anything, I was more sensitive, more prone tocry when a friend snubbed me for another playmate or when Ifailed to get a grade I felt I deserved. My parents rarely had to punishme, because most of the time I was harder on myself than theywould ever be.

Like most adoptees, I occasionally fantasized about my biologicalfamily. When I was seven, I sat glued to The Sonny and CherComedy Hour, convinced that the glamorous stars were my parentsand that their blond daughter, Chastity, who was about my age, hadstolen my birthright to be onstage.

I also felt a kinship with Little Orphan Annie, especially since shealso had curly red hair. At nine I barricaded myself in my room afterschool to sing along to my Annie record for hours, mouthing thewords to "Maybe." I studied my reflection in the mirror as I imaginedmy birth parents living a romantic life a world away frommine: "Betcha they're young,/ Betcha they're smart, / Bet they collectthings like ashtrays, and art!"

I dreamed that one day I would star in Annie on Broadway andthat my birth parents would come to see me perform and realizehow wrong they had been to give me up since I was clearly such aspecial, talented child.

ELYSE: I have no idea how I will go about finding my twin. I startby looking up the Louise Wise adoption agency on the Internet.Though I've always known this was the agency I was adopted from,I never researched it until now. The first thing I find is the tragicstory of Michael Juman, who, like my brother and me, was alsoadopted from Louise Wise. Coincidentally, Michael was born thesame year as my brother and also suffered from schizophrenia.When Michael searched desperately for information about hisbirth mother in hopes of understanding the root of his malady, hispsychologist contacted Louise Wise, and was denied Michael's medicalhistory from his file. Finally able to locate his birth mother'sname in the 1965 birth registry at the New York Public Library,Michael set out to find her so that she could provide insight into hisillness and help him find a cure. Michael managed to track down abiological cousin, who informed him that his birth mother had beena lobotomized mental patient.

In 1991, the Juman family filed suit against Louise Wise forfraud and wrongful adoption. It's disturbing to read that MichaelJuman's severe schizophrenia led to his early demise -- in 1994, hedied from an accidental medication overdose at the age of twentynine.

Two years later, the court ordered Louise Wise to provideMichael's family with his file. It showed that his birth mother methis birth father, who was also schizophrenic, at a mental hospital.Unlike most people, adoptees have two birth certificates. One isissued at the time of their birth and lists their birth parents' names.A second birth certificate, which is issued at the time of their adoption,lists their adoptive parents' names. Only a handful of states(Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, Oregon, and New Hampshire) currentlyprovide adoptees who have reached the legal age access to theirbirth certificates. In the rest of America, an adoptee who would likethe original birth certificate must petition the court and plead extenuatingcircumstances; petitions are rarely granted.

Before the 1930s original birth certificates were available toadoptees and both sets of parents. But, in an effort to deter biologicalparents from interfering with adoptions during the postwaradoption boom, most states sealed the records. In doing so, theyalso denied adoptees access to their original birth certificates.If I manage to locate my original birth certificate, which is supposedlynumbered the same as the one I received at the time of myadoption, would my twin's certificate be filed just one page away?When I had applied for French citizenship last year, the certifiedbirth certificate I'd requested from the city's vital records departmentto accompany the application listed the hospital's name, alongwith the hour of my birth, a fact I had never previously known.Seeing my mother Lynn's swirled script on the birth certificatehad been a surprise. I felt comforted seeing her name on the officialdocument, as if she were accompanying me on my quest for a newnationality. Her death at thirty-three had circuitously led me to discoverthe truth about my twin. I long to share this revelation withher, my real mother. If only there were a registry that could reuniteme with her.

When she had written me, the director of postadoption servicesat Louise Wise had enclosed a sibling registration form to send in tothe New York State Registry, where I had made my initial request.As she provided me with no other feasible lead, I decide to beginthere, though I realize that the chance of a reunion is nearly zero unlessmy twin somehow also knows of my existence. Perhaps, I think,the agency can do no more than hint and they know that my twin,also looking for her birth parents, has registered. My mind is racing.Is it possible that my birth mother kept my twin and only abandonedme? Why were we separated?

As elation is overtaken by confusion, I call my dad in Oklahoma.Though we live thousands of miles apart and have differing ideas,especially about how to handle my nephew, we share a mutual respect.I find it unlikely that he would have known the truth all alongwithout revealing it to me, but I have to be sure.

"Hello?" By chance, I catch him at a rare moment when he is notbusy at work.

"Dad, I got a letter from Louise Wise."

Silence. Having offered to help me search for my birth motherwhen I turned eighteen, Dad knows the significance of this name.I continue. "Are you busy? Are you sitting down?"

"Yeah. What's up?"

"I have a twin." I can picture his clear baby-blue eyes on theother end of the line.

"We have to find her," Dad says, without a pause, as if this conversationhad been scripted thirty-five years ago. Though I can tellby his voice that it is a shock to him, I am taken aback by his lack ofhesitation. The fragile tenor of his voice speaks volumes. "It's wrongto separate twins."

My father is indignant that Louise Wise hadn't offered bothtwins to him and my mother. He had trusted the agency, which heheld in such high regard. Though Dad was not responsible for separatingme from my twin sister, an illogical feeling of guilt weighsupon him. He must realize the magnitude of my dual losses -- theloss of a twin, compounded by the death of my mother when I wasso young.

Even if my twin is alive and well, I know in my heart that I needto follow my own life's design. I can't renounce the first thirty-fiveyears of my life to live in a hypothetical tandem. I am reeling inreverie about my twin, but I will try to focus on my own path, whichat the moment means preparing for the CAPES, the notoriously difficultFrench teacher's exam.

My father and I decide to track down my twin and plan a trip toNew York, during my spring break, just two months away. It hasbeen a long time since we have been back to New York together.

Copyright © 2007 by Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein. All rights reserved.Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York.