The Christmas after Jo’s mom died was bad. Her older sister Jules showed up the evening before Christ’s birth, driving the 13-hour stretch from Chicago to Western Pennsylvania in one go. Jo and her dad watched on the front porch as Jules’ Prius rattled down the driveway, Brittany Spears blasting from open windows, tires crunching against the snow. The car was in poor shape, salt-covered, and trembling like a racing dog whipped past its limits.
Jo’s dad shifted nervously as his eldest daughter climbed from the car and trudged toward them. His hands were folded down the front of his apron, which read: “My Spawn R The Coolest.”
“Greetings, family,” Jules said. “The season is upon us.”
Jo had seen her sister worse off, but not by much. Jules’ Boston University sweatshirt was covered in dark stains. There were raccoon circles where her eyes should’ve been. Her duffel bag was half-unzipped, a tumbleweed of cords dragging in the snow.
“Jesus, kiddo,” her dad said. “Did you drive the whole way straight?”
“I dozed off some in Ohio,” Jules said, wiping the back of her wrist across her nostrils. “And I’ve been banging down lines every ten minutes, which helps with the concentration.”
Her dad made a face. “I hope that’s a joke.”
“Fine, don’t believe me.” Jules pushed past him, hugged Jo, and took her bags inside.
Her dad turned, bewildered. “She was kidding, right? About the drugs?”
Jo lifted and lowered her shoulders.
Her sister was skinnier than she remembered (“Soul Cycle,” she said dismissively), but Jo knew it was the cocaine. She figured that was why Tom, her husband, hadn’t joined her. Jules only did drugs when she felt insecure about her weight. She didn’t care enough about Tom to watch her figure when he was around. It must have been a new lover.
“Don’t ask me about Tom,” Jules said. “Don’t ask me about my job. Don’t ask me about going back to school or having kids or anything that might ever come within the fucking realm of my personal life.”
“Fine by me,” Jo said.
Christmas Eve dinner was bottles of wine, plates of pasta as an accessory. In years past, they’d have something unique– sushi or kebabs, Mediterranean. Jo’s mom never liked typicality. The pasta was a deliberate choice, both in its blandness and the family’s ability to ignore it even as the food filled their bellies. The girls quickly finished a bottle and then another. When they drained the good stuff, they broke into the cellar and found a few old cabernets that had never been opened. They were questionably sealed, some rodents had gnawed little holes in the wax. But Jo thought it was excellent, well-aged, like drinking buried history. (This is what mummy semen tastes like,” Jules said). Jo drank until she felt sick, scarfing down breadsticks and trying not to cry when her dad started talking about the semester at school, which had been rougher than the ones previously.
“Don’t worry about your major,” her dad said. He held up his smudged glass and tipped it towards her. “Explore your interests. That’s what college is about– shedding your old self and becoming the person you’re meant to be.”
“I appreciate that, Dad, but I have to pick one by the spring,” Jo said. “Or else I can’t graduate on time.”
Her dad was already tipsy. He waved his hand. “ You’ll find the right path, trust me.”
Jules frowned into her pasta. “Jesus, Dad,” she said. “Pull it together.”
“What?”
“I’m just saying, don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Go all Mr. Rogers on our asses. Just admit it– your kids are fuck-ups.”
“Hey,” Jo said. “Don’t lump me in with you.”
“I’m so proud of you two,” Her dad said, teary-eyed. “You both are perfect. Perfect angels.”
“No, I’m not,” Jules said.
“Yes,” he said. “You are.”
“Please stop talking.”
“Guys,” Jo said.
“Let’s just have a nice dinner.” Her dad let out a low sigh and rotated his eyes toward the ceiling. “Can we agree on that?’
“I have to make a phone call.” Jules stood and drained her glass. “I have people who are relying on me. Business and associates and important things.”
“Okay, honey,” Her dad said. “I’ll put your leftovers in the fridge.”
“Whatever.”
Jo and her dad sat in silence, clinking their forks against porcelain. On television, Ralphie from A Christmas Story demanded his parents purchase him a Red Ryder air rifle for the holiday. Shortly after, he beat the shit out of that hillbilly kid and betrayed his best friend for saying the F-word, nearly blinded himself with a stray BB shot. Ralphie was kind of a psycho, Jo realized. In modern days he would’ve fit the profile of a school shooter. Or a Republican candidate.
Jo asked, “Can I have more wine?”
“Sure, babe.” Her dad refilled the glass and looked up at the overhead fan, its blades shaking from the force of Jules marching back and forth in her room. “But you have to watch your consumption. Alcohol can be a gateway to a more–ah–complicated life.”
After dinner, Jo helped with the dishes and poured herself another drink. She thought about school– whether she would major in dance or writing or maybe something useful in the real world– economics or whatever. In high school, she took Advanced Calc, and the patterns revealed themselves to her easily enough. But the idea of tabulating figures and sums for the rest of her life put a sour taste in her mouth. Being 20, being without a mother, she knew that life wasn’t as simple as all that. You removed something or someone from the equation and the results weren’t linear, or predictable, they were something else entirely.
Finished cleaning, Jo grabbed her coat and decided to go for a walk while her dad wrapped presents. She cut a path across the yard, boots kicking up shallow tufts of snow in the late December light. Beneath the darkened tree line, she paused, bowing her head in reverence. The family pets were buried in the frozen dirt here– Toby the Dog, Sam the Cat, and Garfield, the defenestrated guinea pig, who met his maker via a leap of faith from the girls’ jungle gym.
On nights like these– cold, forlorn, biting– Jo was grateful that her mother had chosen cremation. It didn’t seem right to put someone in the ground and forget about them, to have their only memory as a headstone, half-buried, collecting snow in the wintertime, a bunch of wilted flowers in the summer. Was that love? Paying tribute to something that wasn’t there, that had– as far as anyone knew– moved on to another plane of being? Fuck, Jo thought. The wine was making her philosophical. That happened sometimes when she drank; she felt a flash of wisdom that disappeared just as quickly as it arrived.
Upstairs, Jo flopped on her bed, definitely drunk now, listening to Jules talk in serious undertones with her lover through their shared wall. It was easy enough to imagine him: older, flabby, likely with a kid in high school he never saw. The guy thought Jules touched something deep inside him– something “he never knew was there.” Jules had a type. Not a good one, but a type, certainly. In high school, Jo had found herself the unwilling recipient of many a lurid tale. Jules complained about her life, her teachers and boyfriends, varsity sports, the “hoes” talking shit. Back then it had irked Jo, her beautiful, do-no-wrong sister, bitching about the cosmic forces out to get her. Now that they were both older, Jo figured Jules had simply been ahead of her time.
But here, on this night over eight years later, Jules vented to someone else. Jo heard the dry-nostril snort of her sister bumping a line and talking to this new guy, Kirk.
“Kirk– no, shut up, this is serious. Okay, listen– and then my mom died. And my dad is a fucking weirdo–snort!– and I think Tom secretly had a vasectomy and is planning on moving out. Hold on a second– Jo, are you there?”
Jo didn’t say anything. She was counting the watermarks on the ceiling, trying to recall what it was like to be a child, how life looked endless, rhythmic, inescapable.
“I’ll call you back.”
Click.
“Jo.” Jules’ mattress creaked. “Were you listening to me?”
Jo didn’t respond.
Jules knocked on the wall. “Jo? Are you still up?”
After a long time– too long– Jo said, “No.”
There was a pause, and then Jules said, “Do you want to do a bump with me?”
That night was the first time Jo did cocaine. She and Jules kneeled like Catholic schoolgirls on the fuzzy carpet, snorting messy lines off their Sleeping Beauty mirror. They giggled at this, the mixture of adult life and childhood sweetness, their sloppy handling of the drugs as they passed the rolled-up dollar bill back and forth. With each line, Jo felt increasingly lit up, like a candle was burning inside her chest.
Overtop their frantic sniffling, the Irish Christmas song played from the living room below. It was their dad’s favorite– that duet about the NYPD Choir and Galway Bay. The drunk couple calling each other every slur imaginable as they poured out their fucking hearts and prepared for the new year.
“Tell me about school,” Jules said. “Any boys?”
“A few,” Jo said. “But it’s whatever.”
“Want to talk about it?
She shook her head, “I’m good.”
It was nice of Jules to ask, but Jo didn’t feel like delving into the events of her love life– disastrous as they were. There had been a fight over a boy, in particular, at a frat formal. Jo threw a drink at a girl and then the two of them were tangled together on the dance floor, swearing and shouting and hitting. Jo had been afraid of expulsion, but the school showed leniency, let her off with a warning. It was like that with her other faux pas, too– the late homework and passing out drunk in the communal bathroom. There was no shortage of sympathy from the administration or her group of friends. No matter how badly she acted, she was forgiven. After all, her mom had died. All roads led back to that. It was all anyone ever talked about. Sometimes, she thought, it was all she was.
She didn’t even realize she was crying until Jules reached over and patted her softly on the head.
“There there,” Jules said. “Do another line, kitten.”
She decided to take Jules’ advice, dropping her face to the mirror. Immediately, she felt better. She liked the cocaine. The forcefulness of it. It was like a locomotive pushing all the bad thoughts from her head, clearing a path through the snow in her brain, the residual slush and soot. With a providential foresight, she could almost sense how tomorrow would go– Jules sleeping in late, vomiting in their joint bathroom, refusing to come downstairs for presents. Her dad, harried and emotionally drained, playing cheerful music to drown out the awkwardness. And there was Jo, stuck in the middle, feeling the cave walls of her heart collapse on itself. But that was tomorrow, and today was today. You had to deal with these things accordingly. You had to take them one step at a time.
“Promise me you won’t make the same mistakes I did,” Jules said. Her eyes swiveled and popped in their sockets. Jo noticed for the first time how red and thick her capillaries were, like hard candy. “Promise me you’ll do something fucking important with your life.”
Jo did another line and looked at her sister. “Yeah,” she said. “I promise.”
“Good,” Jules said. “Good.
She held out her hand, and Jo took it. Together, they sat with their backs against the wall, closed their eyes, and listened to the music.