Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited (11 page)

Now, it was time to get serious about planning the trip. We found a short-term rental in Shoreditch big enough for the entire crew. The final itinerary would include a day at the Harry Potter studios. After all, Anaïs and I both love Harry Potter.

Just as everything was falling perfectly into place, I got
a message from a professor of psychology at California State University–Fullerton, who was a world leader in twin studies. Dr. Nancy Segal was also the director of the Twin Studies Center there. She had written several books on the subject of twins separated at birth, including
Born Together—Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study
, published by Harvard University Press in July 2012, and
Someone Else’s Twin: The True Story of Babies Switched at Birth
, released in August 2011 by Prometheus Books.

Not long after Dr. Segal contacted me, I went to meet with her on the Fullerton campus, which was only thirty minutes south of L.A. She has been studying twins for a long time. She was a fraternal twin, which made her interest and passion in the subject that much more personal. Her library was massive and had hundreds of books that could shed an enormous amount of light on all the possibilities of my situation with Anaïs. She was also doing a huge study on unrelated look-alikes, which was really fascinating, but fear-provoking in a certain way. It made me realize that although it was improbable that Anaïs and I were not twins, it was a possibility.

I was thrilled when Dr. Segal offered to lend her expertise to us. She even said she would coordinate a DNA test for us. Anaïs and I had been talking about doing this since our early communications, but we didn’t know the best way to go about it, so Dr. Segal’s offer was fantastic. She had a relationship with Affiliated Genetics, a laboratory in Salt Lake City, Utah, that provides a range of DNA tests for government agencies and private clients. The DNA result was the crucial piece of information still outstanding. Anaïs and I were already convinced we were sisters, but the truth lay in the test. We wanted to be together through the whole DNA testing
process. We’d allow ourselves to be filmed receiving the results, but we weren’t sure if we would be alone or have our families with us. We’d work out those details later. Dr. Segal would also do testing on each of us to discover our psychological and physiological similarities and differences. She even offered to let us film her lectures and do an on-camera interview, and all her contributions would be free. Anaïs and I gratefully took her up on her offer.

Dr. Segal reviewed Anaïs’s and my birth records. She appreciated the similarities, that we were born on the same date and in the same city, and that we looked so much alike. The only doubt in her mind, she said, was that we had been managed by different adoption agencies, which is unusual for twins. Dr. Segal gave me two DNA test packets, one for me and one for Anaïs. She told me the test generally took three to four weeks to complete. However, when she explained our situation to the lab, they agreed to rush it for us.

Anaïs and I had originally wanted to both take the test and see the results together in London. Because the timing wasn’t going to work out, we changed the plan to collecting the samples together on Skype and then getting the results together in London. Dr. Segal agreed to keep the results confidential until Anaïs and I were together. She would give us the results live over Skype.

Until the genetic testing was complete, Anaïs and I were only hypothetically twin sisters—two girls born on the same day, in the same place, who looked almost exactly alike. However, I never imagined we weren’t sisters, not from the moment I saw Anaïs’s picture. If it came down to that we weren’t siblings, it was going to be even stranger. Everything up to this moment had been perfectly aligned, had perfectly fallen into place. There was no way that it couldn’t be true. I
didn’t know true love yet, but I was certain this was what true love must feel like. When you know, you just know, right? By this time, we had decided if it turned out that we were not twins, we would still be friends. Anaïs was the only other person who understood what this particular experience had been like. The hopes, dreams, thrills, and even wary calm about the entire situation was only known by the person who was so often staring back at me through my laptop screen, Anaïs. It’s like being in a race. You know what to expect; you know the track; you know the rules; you know where the finish line is; you know the spectators are there; and you know you are not only hoping to win, you are absolutely going to. You’ve pictured it in your mind, and you focus on that alone. You hear the crowd cheering you on. There will be glory when the ribbon hits your chest, and you throw your arms in the air, but at the moment, you are just anticipating it, just breathing. You can’t plan for the worst. You have to keep your eyes forward, be there in that moment, and when the gun goes off, run full speed ahead.

And I did.

DNA test

On Tuesday, April 23, at ten p.m. London time, two p.m. L.A. time, Sam and I were going to simultaneously, via Skype, swab our cheeks to collect our samples for the DNA test, which would prove or disprove we were twins. If we were twins, the test would even reveal if we were identical or fraternal. A DNA test performed on monozygotic twins will return results with 99.99 percent similarity. However, DNA from non-identical (fraternal or dizygotic) twins will generally be about 50–75 percent similar. For many twins, or families with twins, the only way to know for sure whether they are identical or fraternal is through DNA testing. By now Sam and I fully believed we were identical, but why not prove it within 99.99 percent probability, just to silence the doubters, although, in truth, there really were no known doubters left.

Ten p.m. was about the right time for dinner in Europe. We eat our last meal of the day much later than Americans do, but we usually keep it quite simple if we are eating in—a small plate of something, a little wine, a little dessert, and we are satisfied. Marie and Lucas were with me the night of the
simultaneous swab, so they were right there in it with us, making it festive and fun. Right on schedule, Sam Skyped me saying she was ready.

Sam and I had been waiting to share this moment together for at least two weeks. The test itself was only going to take seconds, but we could make it bigger and better with some pasta and, of course, some wine! I might have had an American identical twin, but I am French!

It was funny that Sam and I were both using our kitchens as the test site. Looking at Sam’s from her laptop camera, I was impressed by how bright, yellow, and cheery it was. It seemed to me everything in L.A. was always drenched in sunlight and pastels, whereas everything in London was gray or darker, especially this time of year. Sam picked up her laptop and gave us a quick tour from her seat by rotating her webcam a wobbly 360 degrees. When we got to where the kitchen meets the living room, I could see the sun shining through the vertical blinds. Here in London, it had been pitch-black for a few hours now, although thankfully, the days were finally starting to get long enough to tell that spring was here.

Marie returned the favor of Sam’s laptop tour and took Sam around our kitchen with my laptop webcam. My kitchen is very functional and white, but we do have enough room for a fairly large white round table and four chairs for dining. As the camera panned by me, I was standing over the pasta pot making sure it didn’t cook longer than al dente. When I heard Sam calling out to me, I turned around, smiled, and said hello back. Lucas opened a bottle of white wine and poured each of us a glass . . . well, not Sam.

It almost seemed like she was at dinner with us, as we placed the laptop so it was pointing right at the table when
we finally sat down. We French take our dining very seriously, so if our need to have a sit-down dinner before the DNA test seemed strange, it really wasn’t. My only wish was that Sam could have actually, not virtually, been with us in person.

Sam wasn’t alone, either. Once in a while, I could see her turn away from her webcam to talk to Ryan, who was there to film. Sam looked so American in her green plaid shirt. I loved everything about her, especially her positive attitude. She is always smiling, happy, and bubbly. I was wearing a horizontally striped white-and-black sailor shirt, so she probably thought I looked really French. The two of us were much quieter than usual, and for the most part, Marie and Lucas did the talking. When Sam would talk, Lucas would say our voices were so similar that if Samantha spoke French, he wouldn’t be able to tell who was speaking.

“You should have cooked the same thing, and we could have eaten together,” Marie said to Sam into the webcam as she took a seat at the table. Marie also spoke English with a heavy French accent, although she was more fluent than me. Sam and Marie had seen each other on Skype before and seemed to get along really well, which made me feel very comfortable. I liked that my friends were into my potential sister. In fact, it was really important to me, as it kind of validated me that Sam would surround herself with the same kind of people I tended to choose.

Sam was watching us as we started eating our spaghetti topped with a perfect spoonful of red sauce and the Parmesan cheese I had just finished grating, complemented by a bottle of red wine chosen by Lucas. “It’s weird that French people eat with both hands,” she remarked, meaning that we
hold a utensil in each hand throughout the meal, not switching the fork, the way Americans do.

“OMG!” Sam exclaimed. “You guys are going to think we’re so rude when we’re eating together.” Marie joked that the American way wasn’t rude, it was all cultural. I thought the whole thing was pretty funny. We were all laughing when Marie made her observation about a similarity in our laughs, much like Lucas had pointed out the similarities in our speaking voices. “When you two laugh, it’s exactly the same. It’s crazy!” I had never thought about it before, but she was right.

We put out theories about how it would be possible for us to still be blood relatives in the event we weren’t twins. Neither of us had ever had contact with anyone in our birth families/family, so all bets were off. “Our biological dad slept with two women?” I put out there first, pouring myself another glass of wine.

Marie thought that was hysterical. “At the same time?” she chortled, but I told her not at the same time, although the same day.

Sam had the grossest idea of all. “Or, if two brothers and two sisters did it, and then they got pregnant and they each had a kid . . .” Sam and I always went off on crazy, weird tangents whenever we had the chance to muse about how we came to be related. If we weren’t twins, we were going to be related, no matter how much we had to use our imaginations. We meant that much to each other already.

The conversation turned to the intense media coverage our story had been getting. Marie said everybody in London was talking about us, and Sam and I knew it was getting coverage in South Korea. Since the launch of the Kickstarter
campaign, reporters from around the world had been trying to track us down. Lucas asked Sam how big the story was in the United States, and Sam said it was being talked about on all the major networks besides being all over the Internet. I really hadn’t anticipated this kind of attention when I had first contacted Sam. I still wasn’t any different than I had been on that day in February. It really was crazy.

At one point, the Skype call froze. I could hear Sam and Ryan talking, but I couldn’t see anything. Ryan was asking Sam, “Is it weird to see a French version of you?”

“Why’d she have to be French?” I heard Sam say as she broke out laughing. She was always teasing me like that, saying I was “soooo French!” She once told me that when she first heard from me, she had this image of me being totally stereotypically French—snobby accent, wearing a beret, and riding a clunky bicycle with a basket, a French baguette tucked under my arm. That’s okay! I thought she was sooooo American. I imagined her wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, and drinking one-liter cups of Starbucks coffee, walking in the streets with sunglasses on her way to the mall. I imagined her being super-easygoing, saying, “Heeeeey, guyyyys,” in an American accent, gossiping with her girlfriends at pajama parties, and talking about boys on a baseball field after she had finished cheerleading.

After dinner, it was time for us to do the DNA test, “live” and together. “I’m gonna brush my teeth and be right back,” I told Sam. (Turns out Sam and I both have a penchant for brushing our teeth several times a day!)

“It’s like Christmas!” Sam said, unwrapping her envelope that had come from the lab. She started getting silly and put it on her head, and I did the same. I think we were both so anxious that we were trying to add some levity to the
business of proving we were twins. Spiritually and emotionally, we were already there.

Sam and I were both nervous. At least the task at hand was simple—all we had to do was each collect a small amount of saliva from the inside of our cheek with our swab, then put what we had collected on the card provided and wait until it dried.

The instructions weren’t complicated, but the results were so profoundly important that both us were very anxious about getting started. What if the slightest error in sample collecting made the whole trajectory from start to result go horribly wrong? I took it very seriously when Sam said, “Make sure you don’t touch the little circles, because it says in the instructions that you have to use the swab, and swab your mouth on both sides, and press it onto the circles for like twenty to thirty seconds . . .”

I was beginning to feel self-conscious with my friends staring at me, like when your parents are watching you at Christmas as they try to see your reaction to a gift they’ve given you. Four months earlier, I hadn’t known Sam existed. Now we were four swabs away from being long-lost sisters touched by a miracle. My friends still thought the swabbing was unnecessary.

“Honestly,” Marie said as Sam and I did our one-two-three-GO! “You guys really don’t need the test. You are just the same. You even make the same faces.”

Sam and I talked about a lot of other things we had in common. Both of us had had our wisdom teeth removed before they had even erupted, we could both raise one eyebrow, and we had the same fat big toe. We hated leaving the house without brushing our teeth, no matter how many times a day that might be, we had a phobia about being touched by the
shower curtain, and we both preferred Coke to Pepsi! We each had a Napoleon complex and needed to sleep ten hours to promote our creativity and eat the rest of the day. Also, when either of us gets overwhelmed, we take a nap. These things were not going to come up on our DNA test.

We absolutely had the same sense of humor, too, although Sam was even more of a prankster than I am. “What if on the space to mark ‘sex,’ I wrote ‘YES’?” she joked, borrowing from
Austin Powers
. We even goofed around about switching the names on the samples. Sam invented a scenario for us if we went onto one of those less-than-dignified American talk shows to get our results in front of a live audience. “The host comes out to the side, and he’s like, ‘And the results are . . . YOU ARE NOT TWINS’ and everyone is like ‘OHHHH!’” We both knew that wouldn’t be the case, but what if it was? I couldn’t even fathom the disappointment I would feel, and it would all be captured on camera.

The truth was that I really liked the idea of having a sister. I had grown up as an only child, and having a sibling was what I dreamed about most. Almost everybody I knew had brothers and sisters. I didn’t care which sex my sibling was, brother or sister. It was always changing. Sometimes, I wished I had an older brother, because he would protect me, or I could date his friends. But sometimes I wanted an older sister, so she could show me how to dress up and put on makeup. Or I wished for a little sister, so I could show those very things to her. I had a best friend, Jonathan, who is still one of my best friends. He is thirteen months younger than I, and he is my
frère de coeur
, “a brother of the heart,” like what Americans call a “blood brother.” He’s like my little brother, and has been for close to twenty years. He only had a mum—no brothers, sisters, or father. We were each other’s siblings at heart.

Most of the time in my childhood, I wasn’t that lonely without people my age at home. I had friends and activities, and hanging out with older family at holidays was fine, as I loved them all. But I was always expected to behave like an adult. Plus, old people just thought in very old ways. They didn’t think the way I did or relate to my point of view. Older people were always living in the past. With Sam, I had a sister and a comrade. And she came with brothers, but I would have to discover more about them later.

Now it was time to seal our packages and ready them for posting. We had just signed off on our witnesses—mine were Marie and Lucas, and Sam had Ryan—when all of a sudden, Sam stood up and put her hand over her heart. “Ready, Anaïs?” she asked me. She started to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States.

“
Nonnn!
” Marie shouted at her. “We don’t do that!” Marie, Lucas, and I began to sing “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France.

“Nooooo!” I could hear Sam shouting back, trying to do the Pledge louder than “La Marseillaise.” I think we won, because we were three against one, and we were singing really loudly. Lucas had to leave, so Sam, Marie, and I were left to discuss what would be a good place in London for us to get our results, now that our tests were sealed away. We were trying to think of someplace exotic or clever. Marie put forward someplace famous, like in front of Westminster Abbey, which made Sam think of Buckingham Palace. Marie topped that with her suggestion of the London Eye. “You get to the top, top, top, and when you can see all of London, that’s when you should get the results,” she said.

Sam and I nixed that idea. We didn’t like Ferris wheels—another thing we had in common. We didn’t care if
Marie thought our fear would be mitigated by the fact that the Eye went so slowly. What would really go slowly was waiting for the results of the DNA test. We had launched our sisterhood already, but everybody likes to have her proof. We left open where in London we’d do it. We still had a few weeks to decide that. It was just fun to run ideas, because it made everything seem that much more inevitable.