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"I'm not lying," lashed out Bart, disregarding the pain he was inflicting on Jory, on me and Chris. "While you lay on your hospital bed, inside your cast, your wife and I shared one bed, and eagerly enough she spread her legs for me."

Chris jumped to his feet, his face angrier than I'd ever seen it. "Bart, how dare you say such things to your brother? Apologize to Jory and Melodic, immediately! How can you hurt him like this, when already he's hurt enough? Do you hear me? You tell him every word you just said is a lie! A damned lie!"

"It's not a lie," raged Bart. "If you never believe anything I say again, believe me when I say that Melodic was a very cooperative bed companion."

Cindy squealed, then jumped up to slap Melodie's stricken white face. "How dare you do that to Jory?" she screamed. "You know how much he loves you!"

Then Bart was laughing, hysterically laughing. Chris thundered, "STOP THAT! Face up to this situation, Bart--the loss of the clipper ship is not a good excuse for trying to destroy your brother's marriage. Where is your honor, your integrity?"

Almost instantly Ba'rt's laughter faded. His eyes turned crystal hard and cold as they surveyed Chris from head to toe. "Don't you talk to me about honor and integrity. Where was yours when it came to your sister? Where is it now when you continue to sleep with her? Don't you realize yet that your relationship with her has warped me so that I don't care about anything but seeing the two of you separated? I want my mother to finish out her life as a decent, respectable woman . . . and it's you who keeps her from that! You, Christopher, you!"

His face full of disgust and no remorse, Bart spun on his heel and left the room.

Left us all in the shambles of our Christmas joy.

Eager to do the same, Melodie rose awkwardly, stood trembling with her head bowed, before Cindy yelled, "Did you sleep with Bart? Did you? It isn't fair for you to just say nothing when Jory's heart is breaking."

Melodie's darkly shadowed eyes seemed to sink deeper into her skull even as they grew larger and larger, her pupils dilating as if with fear. "Why can't you leave me alone?" she cried pitifully. "I'm not made of the same iron as the rest of you! I can't take one tragedy after another. Jory lay stricken in the hospital, unable to ever walk or dance again, and Bart was here. I needed someone. He

held me, comforted me. I closed my eyes and pretended he was Jory."

Jory fell forward in his chair. I ran to hold him, only to find him gasping so rackingly he couldn't even control his shaking hands. I held him in my arms as Chris tried to stop Melodie from running up the stairs. "Be careful!" he called. "You could fall and lose your baby!"

"I don't care," came back her pitiful wail before she disappeared from sight.

By this time Jory had gained enough control to wipe away his tears and find a weak smile. "Well, now I know," he said in a cracked voice. "I guessed a long time ago that she and Bart had something going on, but I hoped it was only my suspicions working overtime. But I should have known better. Mel can't live without a man beside her, especially in bed ... and I can hardly blame her, can I?"

Stricken to the bone, I began to pick up the wrappings that had been so carefully applied and so ruthlessly ripped off. Like life, and how carefully we tried to maintain our illusions when things were seldom what they had appeared to be.

Soon Jory excused himself, saying he needed to be alone.

"Who could have smashed that wonderful ship?" I whispered. "Cindy helped Jory wrap that gift the last time he touched up the paint, and I was there watching. The ship was carefully put in a special plastic foam shell to hold it upright. It shouldn't have had one crack, one thing broken.

"How can I ever explain what goes on in this house?" answered Chris in a throaty voice full of pain. He looked up to see Bart standing in the doorway, his long legs spread wide, his fists on his hips as he glared at me. In a louder tone Chris addressed Bart. "What's done is done, and I'm sure it's not Jory's fault the clipper ship was broken. He meant well. All along he told us he was putting that ship together for your office mantel."

"I'm sure Jory did mean well," said Bart evenly, his control regained. "But there is my dear little adopted sister who hates me and no doubt wants to punish me for giving her boyfriend what he deserved. Next time it will be her I punish."

"Maybe Jory dropped the box," said Joel in a saintly way. I stared at that old man with his glittering weak eyes and waited my opportunity to say what I had to when no one else was around.

"No," denied Bart. "It had to be Cindy. I have to admit my brother has always given me fair treatment, even when I didn't deserve it."

And all the while he said this, I was staring at Joel with his smirky face, his glittery, satisfied eyes.

Just before retiring, I had my chance. We were in a back second-floor hallway. "Joel, Cindy wouldn't have destroyed all Jory's work and ruined Bart's gift. But you like to drive wedges between members of our family. I believe it was you who smashed the ship, then rewrapped it."

He said nothing, only put more hatred in his unrelenting stare.

"Why did you come back, Joel?" I shouted. "You claim you hated your father and were happy in your Italian monastery. Why didn't you stay there? Certainly in all those years you made a few friends. You must have known you wouldn't find any here. My mother told me you always hated this house. Now you walk through it as if you owned it."

Still he said nothing.

I followed him into his room and looked around for the first time. Biblical illustrations on his walls. Quotes from the Bible put in cheap frames.

He moved so that he was behind me. I felt his wheezy warm breath on my neck, smelling old and faintly sick. I sensed when he moved his arms he meant to choke me. Startled, I whirled about to find him inches away.

How silently and quickly he could move. "My father's mother was named Corrine," he said in the sweetest possible voice, enough to make me doubt my reasoning. "My sister had the same name, given to her as a form of punishment, a constant reminder to my father of his unfaithful mother, proving to him again and again that no beautiful woman could be trusted-- how right he was."

He was an old man, in his eighties, yet I slapped him, slapped him hard. He staggered backward, then lost his balance and fell to the floor.