It had been a few years and her head still spun when she spoke of him. Why did she keep lying? Worse, why was she still there? It surpassed her. How could she love him? He wasn't even “hers,” and he didn’t even want to be.

During that night drive up the hills of the pacific coast they both screamed at each other as they usually did when his name came up. He fostered an impotence in Paulette, that loss of control felt asphyxiating to her.

The humid heat coming through the windows consumed her patience, as did Jade. Judging him was one thing, but bringing in his kids and his wife; that was fucked up. What a lack of solidarity. P thought about her daughter, she thought about her past relationship, she remembered the disgust she felt when she had found out he was cheating, how he hurt her, how he hurt their daughter.

And here was Jade in the car, making fun of his wife, claiming he didn't really care for her, how they barely even talked and their kids were probably insufferable. To Jade they had to be overall unhappy, she had no other way of justifying her affair.

Whatever happened to female empathy? Nowadays, Paulette thought a lot about the way women criticize each other, something she had forced herself to despise, despite the way we all grew up. But back then, in that car, she would fail to acknowledge the same flaw in herself.

They drove the rest of the way in silence after he had swallowed the sisters' will to speak to each other. Paulette looked out the window pretending to gaze into the starlit sky  hiding her tears.

P always knew when her sister lied about her relationship with him. She recognized how Jade’s mood would change when they were back together; her body language, smoking habits and even the changes in her schedule. It became so easy to know when they were back together that Paulette no longer bothered to ask. 

She wouldn't support a relationship with a man who hurts her sister, verbally abuses her, and manipulates her. She would have spat on him if she could, hit him. Sometimes she thought she might have even been capable of killing him. P believed he had devoured her sister; he took her piece by piece. Slowly Jade started to rot, she looked rotten too. She wasn’t healthy, she couldn't be healthy.

It became harder and harder for Paulette to trust Jade. If she was capable of that relationship, then what did that say about her as a person? She didn't even leave her daughter with Jade on weekends anymore, what if her baby saw him? She hoped this served Jade as a punishment, maybe if she lost everyone she loved she would leave him.

"That's not love." P would always tell her, "there's a difference between love and obsession Jade, you should know that, you've seen our mother. To be loved is to be seen. And it's like you're completely invisible to him."

First, it was their grandmother Emma, scabbed –and never healed– by a him. She ended up grieving him through cigarettes that ended up killing her. Paulette wondered if in her tomb her grandmother still thought of her him. And then Ale, the sisters' mother. She was even worse. Jade herself was a product of a toxic affair had Jade and Paulette never even knew her father, and neither does he know her.

Paulette would never never become what those women were. She had hoped Jade wouldn't have either.

"You are just like Mom Jade."

How could she not realize? She simply didn't want to. Sometimes Paulette wondered if she hated him or Jade more. In fact, she loved her sister to the point of hatred. Or more so panic and a desperate sense of exasperation. It haunted Paulette to a point of amnesia, now she could barely remember his name and a gap in her memory chose to forget those troubling years.

Time vanished after it happened. He merged into a single speck in Paulette's life. Both sisters experienced it completely differently, but they shared a trauma that changed both of them for good.

Jade called her sister the night after New years, confused and somewhat frightened, but excited. She was nervous, but she wanted this. Everything would be okay, her sister was there for her, she would help her, she would find her a good gyno, one that would take good care of her. Paulette would help her; she was a mom herself and she did it all alone, she never needed anyone, And if she didn't want to keep it, that was okay too. Paulette would support her; she would go through it with her, and find a good hospital. One had to be careful with abortions, they were newly legal, but her sister would help her find a "good place”.

"This is finally it," P thought, "it's over, Jade will be a mom and he will finally disappear." Despite her sister's fears Paulette would show her she didn't need a partner to have the baby.

Somehow when they hung up, P had a bad feeling. One of those she could never truly reason but simply felt. She wanted to be wrong so she ignored it. Paulette prayed to a god she did not yet believe in and hoped Jade would just fall asleep and that would be it.

And so the sun rose as it did every morning, completely indifferent to last night. P gained consciousness after a sleepless night but it was already too late.

"It's done, it's over, I did it", Jade told her over the phone.

"What's done, what do you mean ‘it's done’ what did you do?" Paulette played dumb and freaked out, but deep down she knew what had happened.

She hated herself for not staying awake for Jade, for not following her gut and staying with her sister when she should have. And yet, the guilt didn't drown out the anger she felt towards her Jade.

Why did she do that if she told her she wouldn't? Why did she always lie? Why did she go to him? What did he make her do?

She had horrible thoughts, she began to suspect her sister had gotten pregnant just to tie him down, and when she realized that he would never want her... She always did this. She was so selfish, she never considered how this would affect the family, she didn't even consider how it affected herself. What about the baby? This would ruin her. It would ruin her, it would ruin her. It did ruin her. He must have forced her, manipulated her somehow so horribly that she completely gave up her autonomy.

"WHAT DID HE DO JADE? WHAT DID HE MAKE YOU DO? Where did he take her? Where did he take you, Jade?"

“Don't worry about it, I'm fine."

"No, you're not." Paulette's voice got louder and louder, her face was wet with tears of frustration and resentment.

Jade began to regret having told her sister about the baby, about the abortion, about it all. She thought she would have her sister's support, but she didn’t. She had gone through it all completely alone. Her sister didn’t call her all week. She didn't look for her; she knew she was judging her. Her boyfriend, if she could even call him that, pushed her to take a blood test as if the four pregnancy tests she had taken weren't enough proof.

"He's a child", she thought, "how am I going to have a baby with a baby? I tell him I'm pregnant, and what does he do? He tells me he's getting food for me, and I find him hours later, drunk, crying in the pub next door."

"What will I tell my wife?", he had said to her. The smell of alcohol drowned out Jade’s attention span.

Jade had called him after she got home from Ixtapa. It had been a few days since that sweaty, tense car ride with her sister, back when she didn't even know about the thing inside her. She didn't want to call him, she knew she would end up doing it anyway. A part of her wondered if she was playing victim, using this pregnancy to draw him back into her life. Maybe this time he'd finally leave his wife.

She called him after her blood test and he went to her in a heartbeat. Jade regained hope for their relationship when he told her, “they would do this together.” Of course, that was a few hours before the terrifying sight of nine shot glasses lined up on the bar. Hours before he suddenly remembered he was already a “family man.”

Jade had no money, she had no emotional stability, she felt like she had no family and the only person whom she longed for was right there, looking through her. She was still invisible.

They used to be so in love. She even looked over the fact that he was from Aguascalientes; Jade didn't know anyone who was actually from Aguascalientes. It was moments like this when she couldn't help but think about how different their worlds were. She was pregnant now. Her life was about to change no matter the choice she made, and she couldn't spend her time dating a broke married man, from another state, who can't get over his own mommy issues and spends his time skating with people half his age.

That night she held on to a memory of the strength that came with the New Year and those 3 positive tests. A precious feeling vesseled only in a mother accepting her solitude in this loveless world. In that memory she felt on top of the world, she felt all the mothers in her lineage pricking away her guilt and giving her permission to keep it.

But the feeling became harder to channel as she stood in the bar ashamed and discouraged in her own alienation.

It wasn't going to happen. That life wasn't for her. Not now. Jade's heart hardened and opted for a defensive rational detachment. Much like her sister P, she had learned to obliviate her feelings when they threatened her.

There was a clinic in La Narvarte; it was really just an old house, the type you go to when you're looking for non-Western treatments in the city. He sat with her in the waiting room. The place depressed her. She went to the bathroom and came across a middle-aged woman. She told Jade she didn't want to do this, but she had no freedom of choice, she had no money. She wanted her baby more than anything but had no way of affording another child. The woman was distraught.

Sitting across from Jade was a couple; the girl was about 14 years old, and she had just gone through the procedure. Jade had never seen anyone shake as much as she was. The girl looked like she had been in pain for centuries and would be for centuries to come. The collective pain in the room brought some perspective into the sister. She found a new sense of gratitude for her own situation. 

She was only there to see what it would be like; it was just a hypothetical experience. She told herself that if the doctors found it had been more than 4 weeks, she would keep it.

Jade was exactly 4 weeks and a day pregnant.

She could feel her heart softening against her will. For a moment she suspected this would be the closest to a god she would ever be. Regardless of her atheism, this had to be a divine test; it was a sign, it had to be.

This glimmer of faith tried to force itself through her closed doors. Was one day everything, or nothing at all?

The place was about to close. The contraction pill they fed her failed to do its job. Despite the excruciating pain she was in, the doctors had had a long day so the procedure started.

Jade felt like her organs were being pulled out from inside her, unforgivingly. The pain was incomparable; it was as if she were being torn to pieces from within. She felt annihilated. She screamed senselessly like a child from what felt like torture. She begged  the doctors to stop, she begged them to let her go.

"There is too much tissue." This sentence would come back to haunt her.

Now, she thought back to that moment and wondered how they were capable of going through with it despite the lack of anesthesia.

For a while the trauma and guilt held so much power over her that she illogically questioned whether the  doctors lied to her; maybe it hurt so much because that tissue meant it was older than they had told her.

She knew something had gone wrong because she woke up confused in another clinic a few hours later. She had collapsed, bled out, "a pain shock,” they told her.

When she woke up, he had told her he was scared she was gone, he'd have to confront Paulette. This was what worried that coward of a man. It was almost comical how little he cared for her.

Jade spent a total of 23 days in solitary confinement. She had no appetite, and if she did, she didn't think she deserved to eat. She wished upon her death several times a day. Had she had a choice she would have preferred dying from that pain shock than feeling the way she did now. The guilt was everywhere. It became her aura, eating at her from places she couldn't even name. She was a murderer. She couldn't even externalize her pain and grief; she swore it would have been hypocritical.

“I don't want you to come over, I want to be alone.”

They hung up.

Paulette didn't look for her, although Jade would have wished she had even though she told her not to. She could have at least sent her food. Jade knew now that motherhood – in whatever shape or form – was a game of solitary, one she was not brave enough for.

Paulette eventually forced her into antidepressants. Jade found out he and his wife were pregnant. They would be having another kid, and he would be there for her.

The sister's relationship became fractured as weeks passed, then months and years. All Jade talked about was wanting to be a mother, and Paulette felt strangely guilty for being one herself.

Jade's body became afraid, and the opportunity ceased to be. Doctors told her her reproductive system was slowly rejecting her, and she neglected the "only" solution: getting rid of it. The idea of motherhood was all she had left; she couldn't give it away.

She is scarcely able to have sex now. Her body screeches in pain as if an alarm went off during penetration and reignited the pain she once experienced. She thought that maybe her abortion had caused her health problems. She wanted to love again, but wasn't sure what that would look like anymore. But she refused to pity herself; she was too arrogant to play victim nowadays, for better or worse.

Paulette feels a deep regret. She isn't sure she'll ever be capable of forgiving herself for the way she treated Jade. She learned to be a better sister, a better mother and a better woman overall. She would never allow her judgment to dictate over love. She changed out of fear that what made her sister what she is today wasn't him or the baby, but her. P feared herself; she feared what this meant for her daughter. How can a bad sister be a good mother? She was terribly sorry, she was, but she was still angry. She still is. Her anger masks her grief, not for the baby, but for her sister. She wondered if she'd ever get her back.

When we remember the story, our insides jumble from the vicarious experience of her pain, or maybe our own personal memory. We press our legs together as if the tongs were inside our bodies. It is a binding pain in which we find a collective comfort: a relief from the burden of speaking of an experience that transcends its very self.