Comfort & Joy

She’s come to tell you it’s over with Thom. It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for, but now that it’s here, I don’t know what to do. Without forgiveness, there’s no future between Stacey and me, but how can I forgive a sister who slept with my husband?

I ease my foot back onto the accelerator and pull into the driveway. Then I get out of the car.

Stacey stands there, looking at me, clutching her ski coat around her. Tears glisten on her cheeks.

It’s the first time we’ve really looked at each other since this nightmare began, and instead of anger, I feel an unexpected longing. I remember a dozen things about her, about us, just then, like our famous family road trip through the desert states. Hell in a Volkswagen bus with my mom singing Helen Reddy songs at the top of her lungs and smoking Eve cigarettes one after another.

I approach her slowly. As always, looking at my younger sister is like looking in a mirror. Irish twins; that’s what our mom called us. We’re less than twelve months apart in age and have the same curly copper-red hair, pale, freckled skin, and blue eyes. No wonder Thom fell for her; she’s the younger, smiling version of me.

She takes one step toward me and starts to talk.

I’m leaving him.

It’s a moment before I realize that that’s not what she said. “What?” I say, stepping back, frowning.

“We can’t go on like this,” she says. “Not now. It’s Christmas. ”

I feel upended somehow, confused. “I should forgive you because it’s Christmas?”

“I know you won’t forgive me, but it was over between you and Thom . . . ”

“We were having problems . . . ” I don’t even know how to finish, what to say. None of this feels right.

Stacey bites her lower lip—a sign of nervousness from way back—then hands me a piece of thick white paper. I can tell instantly what it is.

A wedding invitation. The blessed event is set to take place on June sixth.

It hits me like a right hook to the jaw. “Y-you’re kidding me, right? You should be breaking up with him . . . not marrying him. ”

Slowly, she opens her coat. She is dressed for the holidays in red velvet pants and a white knit top with Rudolph stitched in sequins on the front. “I’m pregnant,” she says, touching a belly that’s flatter than mine.

And there it is, finally, after months of pretending to be okay, the thing I can’t handle. For five years, I have dreamed of having a baby; I used to beg Thom to start our family. He was never “ready. ” Now I know why. It was me. He didn’t want to have a child with me.

She’s crying harder now. “I’m sorry, Joy. I know how much you want a baby. ”

I want to scream at her, to shriek my pain, maybe even smack her, but I can’t seem to breathe. Tears are blurring my vision; they’re not ordinary tears, either. They actually hurt. I can’t believe she’d do this to me. To us. How can two girls who used to be peas in a pod have come to this?

“I never wanted to hurt you . . . ”

I can’t listen anymore. One more blow and I’m afraid I’ll go to my knees, right here in my driveway, and I’ve spent every day of the last year just trying to stand. I turn away from my sister and run to my car. A part of me can hear her yelling my name, calling out to me, but I don’t care. The words are elongated somehow, stretched into meaningless sounds and syllables. Nothing makes sense.

I get into my car, start the engine and barrel backward, into the empty street.

I have no idea where I’m going and I don’t care. All that matters is putting miles between me and that wedding invitation in my driveway and the baby growing in my sister’s womb.

When I see the exit for the airport, it seems natural to turn off. Maybe even a destiny-at-work kind of thing. I park and go into the terminal.

It’s small, but busy on this Friday. Lots of people obviously want to put miles between the heres and theres of their lives in the holiday season.

I look up at the departures board.

Hope.

A shiver goes through me; the word looks so out of place on the list, tucked as it is between ordinary cities like Spokane and Portland. I blink and look again, just in case I’ve gone slightly mad and imagined it.

Hope remains. It’s in British Columbia, apparently. Canada.

There’s no line at the counter. I walk there slowly, still somehow waiting to wake up, but when I get there, a woman looks up at me.