Miracle on Thanksgiving

Eight years apart and raised in separate boroughs, I never really felt as if my sister was actually that. Though, the proof was in the photographs. There she was holding me as a baby, there she was swinging me in the street, there she was playing with a dog that looked exactly like my own. Occasionally, I would glance at a picture and do a double-take. When did I go to Six Flags? I’d ask my mom, only to be told that it was my sister in the photo. Who’s my friend here? I don’t remember her. No, my dad would tell me. That’s not you playing with the girl, that’s your sister.

As a child, my sister had looked very much like me, despite the fact we shared only a mother. I knew her as a quiet teenager, I knew her kneecaps. My eyes would be too shy to make the entire climb. When she came over, and climbed onto the top bunk in my room, I’d watch her legs swing over the edge and talk to them. I don’t think I was entirely sure what she looked like above the waist.

She wasn’t my sister. She was a quiet stranger, a phantom occasionally haunting a corner of my room, a corner of my mind.

On Christmas and Thanksgiving, my parents would take me to her house. I sat and watched television. She might have been in the room. My memories place her nowhere definite. On the couch? In the armchair? Sitting in front of the computer? On the bed? Chasing the cats? I remember the cats. I remember my mom sneezing from allergies. I remember drinking ginger ale and eating slices of American cheese. I remember gently unfolding the plastic square seal. I remember the darkness, broken only by the flicker of television light. Pale blue interspersed with sporadic flashes of explosive red and orange.

But where my sister sat, I don’t remember.

As the years passed, I began to take more notice of her. Memories began to stick. I was hyper aware of where Christina sat, what few words she chose to say to me. Our relationship was cordial. Too polite for anyone on the outside to ever suspect we were siblings. I only had her number because dad once put us in a group chat. I only ever saw her because my parents invited her over, or brought me to her house. We hugged for hello and goodbye. Never out of joy, or sadness. Never because we were making up after a fight. There were no fights, no arguments. Only superficial banter for the sake of filling up the silence.

I remember the night that changed.

The day after Thanksgiving, only a year ago, Christina came to my parents’ leftovers party.

Was it the wine? I dunno. Was it that I’d dressed up, and didn’t look like the same loser kid she’d had no interest in? Perhaps. Was it that I’d seen just enough of Stranger Things to fake my way through a conversation about it with her? We’ll never know.

Whatever the reason, the conversations we had were great. Easy and fun, teasing and familiar. As if we’d talked like this before. To my friends, I giddily introduced her as my sister. That night, the description actually fit.

The best thing thing was, she got along really well with some of my friends and we all went out the following week together. It was the first time I had ever hung out with my sister without it being organized by my parents. And it only took twenty-two years to make happen.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as magic, such a thing as miracles. But maybe there’s something special about Thanksgiving.

This year, only a few days ago now, I connected with another family member.

A relatively new tradition my parents and I have, is going on Thanksgiving Day to my aunt’s new apartment. She has an amazing place on the Grand Concourse, one of those classic Art Deco buildings white billionaires probably lived in before the Great Depression.

In the apartment was a girl whose face I vaguely recognized from two funerals I’d attended on my mother’s side of the family. She seemed to be the only other person around the same age as me. Everyone else was a great-aunt something, or third cousin twenty times removed.

We made uncertain eye contact, and I asked what she was drinking.

“Moscato.”

“What’s that?”

“Here, try.”

It literally tasted like someone had left a bottle full of Jolly Ranchers to melt in the sun. Not wanting to offend her in any way, I kept drinking, and by my third glass it actually began to taste okay.

“So,” I asked, not even knowing her name. “How’re we related?”

It turns out, her grandmother was first cousins with my grandmother’s older half siblings.

“Um, wait what? My grandma had half siblings?”

It turns out, my great-grandmother had children by a first marriage – those kids were black. And then she’d had children by her second husband, a muslim man from India. This girl was related to those kids from the first marriage.

“But,” She told me. “My grandmother ended up moving only a couple blocks away from Auntie Francis, so I grew up knowing her really well.”

“You called my grandma Auntie Francis?”

“Yeah, she said Great-Aunt made her sound so old.”

First, it hit me that I hadn’t even known my grandmother had an aging complex. Then, that my grandmother had such a close relationship with a girl I’d never really met before.

“I guess that means you were close with Christina?”

Of course it did. My fingers pressed against the glass as my cousin’s dark eyes lit up. I imagined the curved texture giving way, as she excitedly told me of the sleepovers she would have at my sister’s house, doing each other’s hair and nails, how Christina taught her how to play video games. She told me about popping over randomly for breakfast, about going shopping with her Auntie Francis.

What did I have to tell her in return? I remember the television set. I remember the blue light. I remember the orange square cheese.

My cousin poured me more moscato. The jolly rancher river coursed down my throat. Candy droplets sweetening the acid churning in my gut. The truth was, her stories were a gift. Memories of my sister and grandmother I never could have attained otherwise.

And when we moved on from talking about family to talking about ourselves, I learned how much we had in common. We talked about both having taken time off after high school to work, to travel, the nerves raked across our scalps as we entered college a little later than felt normal.

We talked about science fiction novels, about Black Mirror, about having grown up on Twilight Zone. We joked about me always being mistaken on the street for being some kind of Spanish. Darker jokes about her father’s Dominican family being racist towards her, wouldn’t acknowledge her, even though their skin was an even richer brown than her own.

Hours after the party, too wired to go to sleep, I checked my phone and laughed to see a text she’d already sent me. A single night had made us family.