The Power of Two

When she was 10 months old, Meredith Grace moved into her new home in suburban Chicago with Jim and Susan Rittenhouse, one a science-fiction buff and the other a dog lover, and now, together, parents. Meredith Grace was an early talker, and like her father, an enthusiastic one. Bubbly and smart, she developed a passion for geography and soon was drawing maps of the continents and begging for a globe. She adjusted to her American life well, but she was obsessed with the idea of sisters. She used to tell her preschool teacher about the one she had in China; her parents took this to mean that she wanted one. Asked to complete the sentence, "When I grow up I want to be a```," a 3-year-old Meredith's answer was "sister."

One month before the Rittenhouses adopted Meredith Grace, Leigh Anne and Mike Harrington had named their little girl Meredith Ellen and taken her home to Birmingham, Ala. Soon after, Meredith Ellen spoke her first words. When she was 2, she asked for a globe and started studying the continents. Meredith Ellen was quieter than the sister she didn't yet know about in Chicago, and she went through periods of melancholy. When she was 2 she told her parents, "I'm so lonely. I wish I had a sister." Leigh Anne and Mike decided to give her one-they adopted Ally when Meredith was 2 and a half, but the gloom didn't fade.

In Chicago, the Rittenhouses were getting ready to adopt a sister for their Meredith when a Yahoo group posting caught Jim's eye. He was skimming over a listserv connecting parents who'd adopted kids from the Jiangmen Social Welfare Institute at the same time. He rarely bothered to read messages anymore, now that it was almost four years on, but one posting was from a family he'd once exchanged a few friendly messages with during the lead-up to their adoptions. He remembered that they'd chosen the same name for their daughters. Now the other family was posting a recent photograph. Jim moved his mouse and clicked. That little click turned out to be a kaboom. There on his screen was what looked like his own daughter's face. His wife was in the next room. "Honey?" he said.

Soon the families were swapping photos and stories. One picture of Meredith Grace in front of the dollhouse she'd gotten for Christmas that year, her head slightly cocked into an apostrophe, was the clincher. Leigh Anne thought the girls looked exactly alike and asked Meredith Ellen, who tended to tilt her head in a similar way, what she thought of the picture. "That's me, but I don't have that dollhouse or the dress," the 4-year-old said. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Susan Rittenhouse's casual observation "Wow, they could be sisters" had acquired new punctuation: "Wow, they could be sisters!" A DNA test eventually told them what they already knew.