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  “Why don’t you relax? You just got home. And why don’t you come out here for a visit before they ship you out?” She had already asked Ginny to spend the holidays with them, but she had said no, yet again.

  “Yeah,” Ginny said, sounding noncommittal, as she pulled the rubber band out of her hair, and her long blonde hair cascaded down her back. She was much prettier than she knew, and didn’t care. Her looks were no longer important in her life, although they had been before, in a distant faraway time that had ceased to exist three years before.

  “You should come out before Dad gets more confused,” Becky reminded her. Ginny hadn’t seen the slow but steady deterioration and didn’t realize how bad it had gotten in the last few months. “He got lost two blocks from the house the other day—one of my neighbors brought him home. He couldn’t remember where he lives. The kids try to keep an eye on him, but they forget, and we can’t watch him all the time.” Becky hadn’t worked since her second child was born. She’d had a promising career in public relations, which she gave up to raise her kids. Ginny was never sure she’d done the right thing, but Becky seemed to have no regrets. Her son and two daughters were teenagers now, and were keeping her busier than ever, although Alan was always helpful to her, and with their dad. He worked in electronics, and was an engineer, and provided Becky and their kids a solid, stable life.

  “Should we get Dad a nurse, so it puts less burden on you?” Ginny asked, sounding concerned.

  “He’d hate that. He still wants to feel independent. I don’t let him walk the dog anymore, though—he lost him twice. I guess it’s going to get a lot worse, and the medication isn’t helping as much as it was.” The doctors had warned them that the medication would only slow things down for a while, and after that there was nothing they could do. Ginny tried not to think about it, which was easier when she was far away. Becky lived with the realities of his situation every day, which made Ginny feel guilty, but she did try to sympathize with Becky when she called. She couldn’t go back to L.A. It would have killed her to move back. She hadn’t even been there for a visit since she left, and Becky had been amazingly understanding about it, in spite of having to deal with their father by herself. All Becky wanted now was for her sister to visit him before it was too late. She tried to convey that to Ginny without making her feel guilty or terrifying her. But the prognosis for their father was poor, the disease was progressive, and Becky could see changes in him every day, particularly in the last year.

  “I’ll visit one of these days,” Ginny promised, and meant it when she said it, but they both knew it wouldn’t happen before she left on her next trip. “What about you? Are you okay?” Ginny asked her. She could hear the kids in the background—Becky didn’t have a moment to herself all day.

  “I’m fine. It’s nuts right before Christmas, the kids are all over the place. We wanted to take them skiing, but I don’t want to leave Dad, so the girls are going with friends, and Charlie has a new girlfriend he can’t tear himself away from, so he’s thrilled we’re not going away. He has to finish his college applications, so I’ll be riding his ass all through the holidays.” The thought of her nephew going to college woke Ginny out of her stupor and made her realize how fast time had flown.

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “Neither can I. Margie will be sixteen in January, and Lizzie is turning thirteen. Where the hell did my life go while I was driving car pool? Alan and I will be married twenty years in June. Scary, isn’t it?” Ginny nodded, thinking about it. She remembered their wedding as though it were yesterday. She’d been their maid of honor at sixteen.

  “Yes, it is. I can’t believe you’re forty, and I’m thirty-six. Last time I looked you were fourteen and had braces, and I was ten.” They both smiled at the memory. Then Alan walked in from work, and Becky said she had to go.

  “I have to burn him something for dinner. Some things don’t change, I’m still a lousy cook. Thank God we’re having dinner at Alan’s mother’s on Christmas Eve. I couldn’t deal with the turkey again. Thanksgiving nearly did me in.” They were the all-American family, and everything Ginny had never been.

  Becky had always done everything that was expected of her. She had married her high school boyfriend while they were still in college. After they graduated, with their parents’ help, they bought a house in Pasadena. They had three terrific kids, and she was the perfect mom. She was head of the PTA and had done Cub Scouts with their son, she got the girls to all their after-school classes and helped them with their homework, kept a beautiful home, and was a great wife to Alan. They had a solid marriage, and now she took care of their father, while Ginny trotted around the world to war zones and desolate places, trying to cure the ills of the world.

  The contrast between the two sisters seemed more marked than ever before, and yet they respected and loved each other. Still, the path Ginny had chosen in recent years was hard for her older sister to understand. She knew the reasons for it, but it seemed too extreme a reaction to her, and Alan agreed with her. They both hoped Ginny would come home and settle down, and start living a normal life again. In spite of everything that had happened, they thought it was time, before she became too different, to the point of strange. Becky was afraid that Ginny was getting there, although she admired what she did. But they felt she should give up her travels and the risks she took every day, before she got herself killed. Becky was convinced that Ginny was punishing herself, but enough was enough. It all sounded very noble, but two and a half years in the wilds of places like Afghanistan was just too much. It was hard for her and Alan to imagine what she did there. And Becky never said it, so as not to put pressure on her younger sister, but she needed help with their dad. With Ginny gone so much and so far away, all the hard decisions and difficult moments rested on Becky. Ginny had left before their father started to decline, and now with the work she did, she wasn’t around to participate.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Becky promised before she hung up. They both knew it would be a bad day. It always was—it was the anniversary of the day Ginny’s life had changed forever, and everything she cherished and held dear had disappeared. It was a day she would have liked to forget or sleep through every year, but she never could. Ginny lay in bed that night wide awake, running the film over and over again in her head, as she always did, thinking of all the ways it could have been different, and why it should have been, and what she should have done and didn’t. But it always turned out the same way. She was alone, and Mark and Chris were dead.

  She and her husband had gone to a holiday party given by friends two days before Christmas. There were going to be children and a Santa Claus, so they had taken Christopher with them. Ginny had never seen the photographs of that night, but the pictures of him on Santa’s lap had been heartbreaking for Becky to look at when she packed them for her sister, along with all Chris’s baby albums and her wedding photographs with Mark. They were in the boxes Ginny had never opened that were stacked in the unused second bedroom of her New York apartment. She had no idea what Becky had sent her as souvenirs of her lost life, and had never been able to face them.

  Ginny and Mark had been the golden couple, network stars. She was an on-air reporter, and he was the most popular anchorman in the business. Handsome, beautiful, and madly in love, they had married when Ginny was twenty-nine, with a blossoming network career, and Mark was already a star. Chris had been born the following year. They had a gorgeous home in Beverly Hills and everything they had ever wanted, and a marriage and life that were the envy of their friends and all who knew them.

  They went to the party that night, with Chris in the back seat in a little red-velvet Christmas suit with a plaid bow tie. He was three, and couldn’t wait to get on Santa’s lap. While Ginny watched him, Mark had headed for the bar and had a glass of wine with some of the men. He’d had a long day, and Ginny had a glass of wine, too. Most of the parents had a glass in their hand and were in a festive holiday mood. None of them were
drunk, and Mark seemed fine to Ginny when they left the party to get Chris home to bed. She had said it a thousand times afterward, that Mark appeared sober to her, as though that would make a difference and would change everything, but it never did. The autopsy showed that his blood alcohol level was over the limit, not shockingly so, but just enough to affect his reflexes and slow his reactions. He’d obviously had more than one glass, while she had been watching Chris and talking to the other mothers. And knowing how responsible Mark was, Ginny was sure Mark hadn’t felt as though he drank too much that night, or he would have asked her to drive or call a cab.

  They took the freeway to get home, flipped over the divider when it started to rain, and had a head-on collision with a sixteen-wheeler, which crushed their car. Mark and Chris were killed instantly. Ginny had been in the hospital for a month with a broken vertebra in her neck and two broken arms. They had to use a Jaws of Life to pry her out of the car. Becky had gone to the hospital as soon as they called her, but they hadn’t told Ginny what had happened to Mark and Chris. Becky told her the next day. Three lives had ended in an instant, Ginny’s as well as theirs. She never went back to the house afterward, and had Becky get rid of everything, except the few things she packed up to save for her and later sent to New York.

  Ginny had stayed with Becky while her neck healed, and she had been incredibly lucky. The break was high enough that it didn’t paralyze her, although she wore a neck brace for six months. She resigned from her job at the network, avoided all their friends, and couldn’t face anyone. She was convinced that her letting Mark drive home that night was what had killed them, and that it was her fault that he drove. She had assumed they’d each had a single glass of wine, since Mark rarely drank more than that, and she didn’t like driving on the freeway at night. It had never occurred to her to ask him how many glasses he’d had, since he looked sober to her. If she’d asked him, she told herself later, she could have driven, and maybe Mark and Chris would still be alive. Becky knew that her sister would never forgive herself no matter what anyone said to her. And nothing would change the fact that Ginny’s husband and three-year-old son were dead.

  Ginny had moved to New York in April, without calling anyone to say goodbye, and spent a month looking for work with a human rights group. All she wanted to do was get as far away as she could from her old life. Becky never said it, but she was certain she had a death wish and was trying to get herself killed on the assignments she signed up for, at least for the first year. It broke Becky’s heart, knowing how she felt, and no one could help her. All she hoped for her sister was that time would ease her wounds and help her live with what had happened. She was no longer a wife or a mother, and had lost the two people she loved most in the world. And she had given up a career she had worked hard to build. Ginny had been a good reporter and done well at the network. She had been a happy, successful, totally fulfilled woman, and her life had turned into everyone’s worst nightmare overnight. Ginny never talked about it, but her sister knew and could sense how agonizing it all was for her. It was why Becky didn’t press her about their father. Ginny already had enough to deal with, with loss and tragedy. Becky didn’t have the heart to ask her to take on more, so she took care of their father, while Ginny risked her life around the world.

  But one day she would have to stop and face it, no matter how hard she ran, or how far, the two people she had lost were gone and always would be. Becky just hoped she didn’t get herself killed before then, and she was always relieved to know that she was back in New York, even for a short time. At least she was safe when she was home. It was hard for either of them to believe they hadn’t seen each other in almost three years, but the time had flown. Becky was busy with her family, and Ginny was always in some remote, troubled country, risking her life and atoning for her sins.

  Becky seemed sad when she hung up, as Alan bent down to kiss her. Becky was a pretty woman, but had never been as spectacular looking as her sister, particularly when Ginny was at the network getting her hair and makeup done every day. Even without it, Ginny had always been better-looking than Becky. Ginny was the showstopper, and Becky the girl next door.

  “Are you okay?” Alan asked his wife with a look of concern.

  “I just talked to Ginny. She’s in New York. Tomorrow is the anniversary,” she said with a meaningful look, and he nodded.

  “She should come out and see her father if she’s back in the States,” he said in a disapproving tone. He was tired of seeing Becky shouldering all the burden, and Ginny none. There was always some excuse why she couldn’t. Becky was more understanding about it than he was. It didn’t seem fair to him.

  “She said she will,” Becky said quietly. Alan said nothing, took off his jacket, sat down in his favorite chair, and turned on the TV to watch the news, while Becky went out to the kitchen to make their dinner, thinking about her sister. They had always had very divergent goals, but the differences between them had gotten more extreme in the past three years. Now they had nothing in common, except the same parents and their childhood history. Their lives were a million miles apart.

  Ginny was thinking the same thing as she walked into her bathroom in New York, turned on the shower, and took off her clothes. Becky had a husband, three teenagers, a house in Pasadena, and an orderly life, while she had no material possessions she cared about, an apartment filled with secondhand furniture, and no one in her life, except the people she took care of around the world. When the water was hot enough, she got into the shower and let it run down her long, lean body, and on her face as it washed away her tears. She knew how painful the next day would be for her. She’d live through it as she had every year, but sometimes she wondered why. Why did she fight to hang in and stay alive? For whom? Did it really matter? It was getting harder and harder to find an answer to that question as time went by, and nothing changed, and Mark and Chris were still gone. She found it difficult to believe that she had managed to live without them for three interminable years.

  Chapter 2

  The next day when Ginny woke up, it was bright and sunny, and she could tell from the chill of the room that it was bitter cold outside. It was the day before Christmas Eve, the day she hated most in the year, and she was dealing with culture shock and jet lag after her trip. She turned over and went back to sleep. When she woke again four hours later, the day had turned gray and it was snowing. She found some instant coffee in the cupboard and a can of stale peanuts, which she threw away. She was too lazy to go out into the cold to get something to eat. She wasn’t hungry anyway, she never was on this day, and she wandered into the living room in her pajamas and tried not to notice the photograph of Mark and Chris in a silver frame on her battered desk. She had only two photographs of them in the apartment. The one she was trying to avoid was of Mark with Chris at his second birthday party. She sat down in the recliner and closed her eyes, thinking inevitably of the day three years before when they had gone to the party, with Chris in his little red-velvet suit with short pants and the plaid bow tie. She tried to push the image out of her mind but couldn’t. The memories were just too strong, of the party, waking up in the hospital after the accident, and then Becky telling her what had happened. They both had sobbed and everything after that was a blur. They had held the memorial service after she got out of the hospital a month later, she could hardly remember it she had been so hysterical. She had stayed in bed at Becky’s afterward for weeks. The network had been wonderful about it and asked her to take a leave of absence instead of quitting, but she knew she could never go back without Mark. Working in network news without him made no sense and would have hurt too much.

  She lived on their savings, his life insurance, and the proceeds from the house sale ever since. She had enough to continue the kind of work she was doing for a long time, despite a meager salary from SOS/HR. She spent almost nothing and wanted no trappings of a fancy life. She had no needs, other than new hiking boots when hers wore out. All she needed now were rough
clothes for her trips. She didn’t care what she wore, how she dressed, what she ate, or how she lived. Everything that had mattered to her before was gone. Her life was an empty shell without Mark and Chris, except for the work she did, which was the only thing that gave meaning to her existence. She had no tolerance for the injustices she saw committed every day, in different cultures and countries around the world. She had become a freedom fighter, defending women and kids—perhaps, she realized, to assuage her own guilt for not having been more aware on that fateful night, and letting her husband put all three of them at risk. All she wished was that she had died with them, but instead, cruelly, she had survived. Her punishment was to live without them for the rest of her life. The thought was almost more than she could bear when she allowed herself to contemplate it, which she rarely did, but she could never avoid it on this day. The memories came rushing at her like ghosts.

  After dark, she stood at the window, watching the snow fall gently onto the streets of New York. There were already three or four inches sticking to the ground. It was beautiful, and made her suddenly want to go outside and take a walk. She needed to get some air and get away from her own thoughts. The visions in her head were oppressive, and she knew the cold and snow would distract her and clear her head. She could stop and get something to eat on the way back, since she hadn’t eaten all day. She wasn’t hungry but knew she had to eat. All she wanted now was to get out of the apartment and away from herself.

  Ginny put on two heavy sweaters, jeans, hiking boots with warm socks, a knitted cap, and her parka. She pulled the hood over the cap and grabbed a pair of mittens out of a drawer. Everything she owned now was functional and plain. She had put all her jewelry from Mark in a safe deposit box in the bank in California. She couldn’t imagine wearing it again.