Sandy, Mark and Helen Ch. 06

When Sandy got home Sunday, she found her husband and her dearest friend and sister (one and the same) bonded together - there's that word again - as if they had been together for years. In a different situation, that could have been the basis for some legitimate jealousy, but in this situation it made her happy to be even more certain that Helen would be completely accepted as a part of our family. Any other woman in the world would have been lucky to get out of the house unscathed, but she saw no threat in this case, just as I had seen no threat in her affair with Frank. We had sex that night, too, but it was three-way, loving sex and I slept with my real wife and was happy about it!

Not long after her return, another event occurred that, in a significant way, changed Sandy and Helen's relationship. The back bedroom, that was now Helen's had been used as a catchall space for things that had no particular place. That included a considerable amount of stuff about which Sandy always said, "I've got to get through all of that and get rid of a bunch of it." Of course, she never did and it just sat there, figuratively, at least, collecting dust. Having to move the things which she had stored for years finally was the spur to get her to actually go through them. Most of the things were papers, "collector's" items, pictures, etc. that had come down to her from her parents. They were the things that children always end up when their parents are gone, things they hate to just throw away, but all too often have no desire to keep, particularly pictures of people they hardly remember if they recognize them at all.

So, one of the tasks Sandy had put off for years was going through a large box of old photos of people she might, or might not, know. They were the types of pictures you can't just discard for fear that they might be valuable in some way, sometime - and, shockingly, this turned out to be one of those times.

They mostly were pictures her parents had taken of relatives and friends in the late 1970's, the 1980's and quite a few later before their deaths in an accident some years ago. Sandy hadn't wanted to face the task of going through them, along with piles of letters, documents, etc., but she forced herself to start. There were black and white and faded color prints, including many of Sandy growing up in the small western Pennsylvania, oddly named, city of Indiana, about fifty or so miles from Pittsburgh, where her father had been superintendent of schools. We all enjoyed those photos of her, of course, but there were far too many other pictures that were older than she, frequently with relatives she could hardly recall or total strangers that she had no way to identify.

However, many of the latter had first names and dates written on the back in her mother's neat handwriting and Sandy always tried to recall if she had heard of the people. She would sit there, repeating the names aloud, trying to see if they triggered a memory. That was particularly the case when she came across a quite large group of pictures of her parents with another couple, some of all four of them and some with just two or three. They obviously were close friends for several were taken in areas that Sandy didn't recognized, presumably when the four of them were out of town together.

Her mother was Sarah and her father went by Jim. The other couple was Jane and Elliot. There were pictures of Sarah and Elliot together, others of Jane and Jim plus other combinations. They were all taken from a few years before Sandy was born to one or two years afterwards. Obviously, Sandy never had met them - unless she was a year or so old - but she did have a faint memory of hearing their names sometime in the past. Attempting to jog that memory, she repeated the names, "Jane and Elliott, Jane and Elliot."

Helen, sitting across from her, reading, suddenly looked up and asked, "What did you say?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, dear, I ran across a whole bunch of pictures of another couple and I was trying to remember where I heard their names. Jane and Elliott."

"Those are my parent's names! Let me see one."

"Here's one of my mother with Elliott."

"My god, Sandy, that's my father! Give me another one!"

"This one is my father with Jane!"

"That's my mother! When were these taken?"

"Like you, I was born in 1984, so around then. What on earth is going on? They obviously knew each other and, apparently, from some of them, were quite close. I don't believe this."

"Do you know where these were taken?"

"Sure, my home town, Indiana, Pennsylvania. A few were other places, but mostly there."

At that point I came into the room, attracted by their excited voices. "What's going on? I heard you two all the way up in the study!

"I was going through all of these old pictures and read the names Jane and Elliott! Those are Helen's parents and they were friends with my parents back in the 1980's. They mostly were taken back in Indiana!"

Helen added, "I never made the connection with it being your home town! It just never came up! My father was an assistant dean at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania before he moved to Evanston and worked at Northwestern. He died in 2005, just after I graduated. Remember, that's why I couldn't be in your wedding. My mother was in bad shape afterwards and I had to stay with her when she moved to San Diego because she had relatives there. She died there eight years ago. So there's no one we can ask about their relationship. This is impossible!"

I quickly made the apparent connection. "No it isn't! What was impossible was for two girls, like you two, to be born at almost the same time and look as much like twins as you two do, without some connection. What this shows is that I'm not the only man to impregnate two women at almost the same time. The obvious fact is that one of your fathers screwed both of your mothers and knocked them both up. Which was the father that did it will likely remain a mystery, but he knocked them both up! It also shows that you two actually are sisters - well, half-sisters, if that matters! You have the same father, whichever one he was."

The two women were stunned by the shocking revelation. They just stared either at each other or just vacantly into space, I couldn't tell which. Finally, Helen blurted out "You've got to be right - it's the only rational explanation...but my father or my mother? It would have had to be one or the other! Either your father screwed your mother and mine, or my father screwed my mother and yours! And, as Mack said, knocked up both of them! And you and I were talking about both of us committing adultery!!"

"Well, there may be ways of discovering which combination it was, but I really don't want to know. One of our mothers got fucked by the wrong father, but I'm glad! It got me a sister that means the world to me, and, if it was your father fucking my mother, I'd say 'Thank you to him.' And, if it was my father fucking your mother, I'd say congratulations!"

At that point, the two of them embraced each other, crying as they shared the same sentiments. Wanting confirmation of their relationship, I got a kit the next day, swabbed their gums and, a week or so later, their DNA confirmed what logic told me - they were very closely related, i.e. sisters! There was the inevitable discussion about whose father was most likely to have transgressed and which mother was most likely to have been seduced, but the pictures remained silent.