Two Sisters: A Novel

by Mary Hogan

  “Oh my God,” Muriel said out loud, flabbergasted to see that this version of creation was stated as fact. Not “Prepare to hear our theory or a fairy tale” but “Prepare to believe.” She thought back to the one word Pia used to explain it all: faith.

  “Never let anyone tell you that you came from an ape,” the man with the hatchet hair part said to his impressionable son. “You came from God.”

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” Muriel said, tugging Joanie’s sleeve.

  “Right behind you, sister.”

  On fast-forward, they snaked through the biblical maze—past a replica of Noah’s ark, past more animatronic dinosaurs (who themselves couldn’t fit into the ark), past Corruption Valley and a display of a porn-obsessed teen who obviously let the evils of secular society into his hormone-ravaged life—and emerged just as the planetarium show was scheduled to start. A brief one, apparently, since the entire universe was formed the instant God decreed, “Let there be light.” Furious, Muriel sputtered, “Do they simply ignore the fact that God gave humanity a brain and common sense? Does no one care that our teens rank among the lowest in math and science?”

  They couldn’t leave the Creation Museum fast enough. In the car, Muriel set the GPS for the quickest route back to the sanity of the interstate. On the way, through the idyllic landscape of northern Kentucky, all she could think about was her mother and her sister and their God and Father Camilo and sin and lying and secrets and the depressing truth that there were none so blind as those who would not, under any circumstances, allow themselves to see.

  Chapter 31

  MEERS, OKLAHOMA, WAS the town where they spent night two. Well, near it anyway. Meers itself was in the middle of nowhere. Muriel had selected it because she’d seen an America’s Best episode on the Food Network about a restaurant there that served one of the best burgers in the country. Seven inches around, no frills like onions or relish, made from cattle grazing a few feet out the back window. How could they resist? They didn’t.

  “Seriously off the hook!” Muriel said, biting into the best burger she’d ever eaten. The only thing better was the homemade peach cobbler they had for dessert.

  On the way to the car, stuffed and drowsy, Muriel tossed Joanie the keys. “You’re up,” she said, so tired she was nearly asleep on her feet. Joanie gripped the keys in her cushioned palm and said, “I guess this is as good a time as any to mention that I don’t have a driver’s license.”

  Muriel blinked. “You lost it?”

  “By definition, to lose something, you need to have something.”

  A quote mark formed on Muriel’s forehead. The sun was setting on the vast field of vegetation on either side of the dusty country road. She still felt the bumpy tire suspension in her arms. “You never had a driver’s license?”

  “Who needs to drive in New York?”

  Her mouth hanging open, Muriel slowly asked, “You know how to drive a car, right?”

  Joanie replied, “I hear it’s like riding a bike.”

  Muriel couldn’t believe her ears. “It’s nothing like riding a bike!” Then she stopped. “Wait a minute. I’ve never once seen you ride a bike.”

  “I hear it’s like driving a car.”

  After a muted moment, both women burst into laughter. “Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t drive before we left on our road trip?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t want to drive the whole way by yourself.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “And if you knew I couldn’t drive, you wouldn’t want me to come. You would have flown. Which would have meant changing planes and standing in your socks in those interminable security lines and feeling as graceful as a caught lover sneaking out the bathroom window.

  “In the waiting area—like you were a magnet—a harried young mom with her crusty-nosed kid and his phlegmy cough would sit next to you and ask, ‘Could you please watch little Johnny for one second while I run into the restroom?’ Before you had a chance to say no—not that you ever would—Johnny would sneeze in that all-out, open-your-face sort of way that kids do and you would want to barf because you’d be quite sure his snot should be quarantined by the EPA.”

  Muriel laughed out loud. In a gentle voice Joanie said, “I know you so well, baby girl. You’d suck it up and wipe the toxic waste off that kid’s face even if it meant using all the Sani-Cloths in your carry-on bag. The wipes you had slated for the headrest on the plane and the latch releasing the food tray. You would have to sit upright the whole flight, certain that the previous passenger had head lice. A migraine would develop toward the end of the flight when the only air in that sealed metal tube was recirculated farts and exhalations from strangers. Several of whom you smelled firsthand when nachos were unwrapped on the tarmac. The only blessed relief you might—might—possibly have is if you missed your connecting flight and had time to run to the snack store to buy more Sani-Cloths for twenty dollars a pack.”

  Circling around the front of the rental car, Joanie put the keys back in Muriel’s hand, then squeezed them lovingly.

  “You’re welcome,” she said, kissing her best friend’s cheek. “Besides, we’re practically there, right? Just a quick drive tomorrow through Texas.”

  TEXAS MIGHT AS well have been the entire United States. It felt so endless, they gave up seeing a border sign halfway through the state. And they were driving across the thin part! For miles, they saw not an animal, not a tree, not a house, not a country store. Simply flat brown nothingness interrupted by an occasional rusty ranch gate leading nowhere. Both women were stunned into silence. Instantly and permanently, they understood that Texas was like no other place on earth. The moon, perhaps, but nothing remotely resembling the blue planet on which they lived.

  “That explains it,” Joanie said, finally, shaking her head. Muriel knew what she meant. A politician from Texas had to view the world differently. How could he or she not? For one thing, the state is so huge it would be impossible not to feel like the biggest badass on the block. And with so much open space, how could Texans develop any real sense that they shared the country—the world—with others?

  “There are cities somewhere in this state,” Muriel offered. “Beautiful cities like Austin and Dallas.”

  Joanie scoffed. “Every member of Congress—from Texas to Alaska—should be required to live at least one year in a small Lower East Side co-op conversion. If you can amicably deal with a neighbor who leaves wet laundry sitting in the only washing machine all day, another who stinks up the building with cigarette smoke (moi), one who freaks out if you change your doormat, another who considers a bake sale a viable way to raise money for tax increases, and still another who lets her dog bark incessantly day and night—not to mention a prissy spinster who wants to fine everyone for every little infraction—well, you can pass any bill and broker any peace.”

  Muriel snuffled up a laugh as Joanie lit her third cigarette of the day. She inhaled luxuriantly and blew the smoke sideways out the open window, where, of course, it immediately blew back in. Into the billow she said, “That bitch sends me one more fine notice and she can smoke my ass.”

  As it had in the first long stretch through Pennsylvania, the second through Ohio, and the third from Kentucky to southern Oklahoma, a road trance overtook Muriel. Not sleepy, she nonetheless felt a deep calm descend on her, like hot fudge over warm pound cake. As soon as Joanie settled into sleep, she stared out the windshield and watched the gray asphalt disappear beneath the wheels of the rental car. The lines in the highway passed her peripheral vision in flashes of white. As always, her mind wandered to Pia and the surreal fact that she would never grow any older. One day Muriel would out-age her. Never would Pia meet the man who would take Emma’s breath away or the child who would become her child’s heart.

  Tears rose in Muriel’s eyes as they always did when she thought about the ordinary life her sister would miss: Christmas dinners, Will’s New Year’s Eve cruise around the Statue of Liberty, the scent of the la
wn as the mower passed below her bedroom window, Emma’s next birthday and all the birthdays to follow. The simplicity of connection. Was is possible therein lay the meaning of life?

  THEY ARRIVED IN the midst of a thunderstorm unlike anything Muriel had ever seen. The heavens exploded in a deafening kitchen fight. Pots banging, dishes crashing to the floor, glasses hurled against a wall. The two women ran into the lobby of the hotel, but Muriel stood just inside the door and watched the sky, mesmerized. Lightning cracked the gray-black darkness and shook the air. It looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. The rain fell so hard, the lightning illuminated shiny cellophane sheets. Thunder rattled the windows and rumbled through her entire body. It was terrifyingly beautiful. Muriel couldn’t turn away even if she’d wanted to.

  As abruptly as it had begun, the tyrannical storm stopped. Spent, its tantrum subsided. Calm descended into a silence so complete it felt as though Muriel’s ears were filled with cotton. “Sign from God,” she said quietly to herself. They had come a long way, but they were exactly where they were meant to be. She smiled. “Tomorrow, the sun will shine.”

  Chapter 32

  SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO, sparkled like a prom queen. In the distance, jagged mountain peaks encircled the town in a snow-topped tiara. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains—blood of Christ—were an aptly named reminder of the city’s violent past. Each evening at sunset, they flared a fiery red.

  Muriel awoke early, though it looked like midnight in the hotel room. Before she’d dozed off the night before, Joanie had shut the blackout drapes. In the dim light of the bedside lamp, Muriel could see her friend’s hazy outline in the next bed. She had the face of a pixie. The covers pulled tightly under her chin, she smiled in her sleep, looking impish, as if she was dreaming about romping through a forest full of chocolate trees.

  Soundlessly, Muriel lowered her bare feet to the nubby carpet and crept into the bathroom. Her reflection in the mirror was the first jolt of the day. Three days of road food and cigarette smoke had taken its toll. Her skin was pasty, her stomach pushed against the fabric of her pajama T-shirt. Since the first day’s barbecued ribs hadn’t yet fully left her system, she could feel them clinging to the insides of her arteries in quivering custardy blobs. The Meers cobbler, she could tell, was already nestled into the soft pockets of flesh at the top of both thighs.

  Turning away from the mirror, Muriel turned on the shower. This was no time to judge herself harshly. Not when she needed all the confidence she could muster for the day ahead.

  LIKE EVERY OTHER town in America—probably on earth—Santa Fe had its center, its outskirts, and its outlying neighborhoods. Unlike other towns, Santa Fe appeared to be made of gingerbread. The entire city was constructed of the same reddish brown adobe. Or so it seemed to Muriel as she set out from her outskirts hotel. Even the Walmart was shoe-box shaped and mud colored. Driving past it felt like she was at Disneyland, on the New Mexico ride.

  Old Town was altogether different. The central plaza—from which the rest of the city radiated—was the real deal. Its Spanish architecture and authentic pueblo style had a sprinkling of Victoriana, reflecting its history as the oldest European city west of the Mississippi. The previous night’s rain had washed the pueblo dust from the sidewalks; the midmorning air was as sharp as ultra high def.

  Alone, Muriel drove through Old Town where Native American artists spread their handcrafted wares on colorful blankets, chili peppers dried in the sun, and artists painted in the shade of old porticos. It was a beautiful combination of old and new. Living history on display. Before she left the hotel that morning, she’d gathered supplies from the lobby breakfast room and left them upstairs for Joanie. Mini muffins, a banana, a hard-boiled egg, orange juice. When she awoke, Joanie could get her own coffee. Muriel also left a note: “Wish me luck.” They both knew she had to make this leg of the journey alone. No more secrets. No more hiding.

  Armed only with an address and a GPS, Muriel wasn’t at all certain she would succeed. In fact, now that she was near, it felt ridiculous to be there at all. Certainly there were easier ways. Like calling, for one. But every instinct told her it had to be a face-to-face meeting. If not, as she well knew, it would be too easy to look the other way.

  “Nike it,” Joanie had advised her. “Just do it.”

  The plan in motion, Muriel gripped the steering wheel and circled around Old Town Square, the museum of art with its Georgia O’Keeffe collection, the Palace of the Governors—all of which seemed to rise out of the orange dirt itself. Yellow sunlight fell unimpeded to the still-damp earth. The cloudless sky was a stunning baby blanket blue. It was the kind of day that inspired people to tilt their heads back, close their eyes, and joyously stretch their arms into the sky. Muriel would have done just that if she was the type of person to do such a thing. As it was, she drove to the highway outside of town with her teeth pressed together.

  “You can do this,” she muttered, even as she questioned those four little words. Had she merely heard them on a stage once? A line of pure fantasy? Surely there were people who couldn’t do things, right? Failures, despite pep talks and best efforts?

  “Please drive to highlighted route.” The GPS led the way. Swallowing her doubt, Muriel made a left onto the Old Santa Fe Trail, then a right onto the Old Pecos Trail, then another right onto Route 285, the straightaway out of town. Ready or not, she was on her way.

  The Mars comparison outside of Santa Fe was impossible to overstate. The main highway ran flat through a vast expanse of orange nothingness. Muriel saw not one other car. Her only companions were cabbage-head bobbles of gray-green desert scrub. Sitting upright in the driver’s seat, she was alert for jackrabbits and aliens.

  Soon enough, however, the barren landscape calmed her. She settled into the cushion of her seat and watched the speedometer rise. In her mind she imagined taking flight—the long highway a runway. First, the front tires would lift off, then the back. With a whump they would tuck themselves into the undercarriage of her car. She would feel the earth’s gravitational pull on her chest, marvel as she always did at air’s power to lift metal. A momentary wobble would cause her to catch her breath. But as the car straightened itself into the atmosphere, she’d hunger to open the window and taste a cloud. Metallic, certainly, in the same way an old ice cube, shrunken and forgotten in the back of the freezer, had the faint tang of copper.

  “In point three miles, turn right.”

  The GPS voice brought Muriel back to earth. Reducing her speed, she prepared herself to turn right a few yards beyond a hand-painted sign that welcomed her to a town called Galisteo.

  “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore,” she said out loud.

  In Galisteo, the entire landscape changed. More terrestrial than extraterrestrial, less eerie. Instantly, there were signs of life. Cacti reached their spiked arms up to the turquoise sky. Speckled horses flicked their tails in hay-filled paddocks. A weather-beaten home was set back from the road, its split-rail fence gray from sun and snow. The main artery into town was covered in swirling pinwheels of rust-colored dust. If it had rained there the night before, all evidence of it was gone. Car tires had orange veneers. In town, though the traditional adobe style was evident, Galisteo had a scrappy artist’s vibe that Muriel loved at once. It was a genuine desert beauty, the kind that needed no makeup.

  “Ahead, turn right.”

  Following the GPS instructions, Muriel took a right and drove up a hill on a gravelly dirt road. An orange cloud billowed up to the windows. The car’s suspension vibrated in her hands. She continued past a row of multicolored mailboxes—one painted in polka dots—that sat atop their weathered posts like unsold hammers in an old hardware store. On her left, an old church graveyard was dotted with headstones that bent every which way, their epitaphs long since blurred by wind. Beneath her tires, the unpaved earth sounded like sizzling bacon. Though the windshield was dirty, she could see small square clay houses—real adobe instead of colored cement—on either side of the
road. They were randomly spaced, like brown dice dropped from heaven. The concentration needed to drive through the thick dust eclipsed Muriel’s nerves. By the time her GPS announced, “Arriving at destination,” she was calm enough to face whatever might come her way.

  On the crest of a hill overlooking miles of desert, Muriel pulled over and cut the engine. The dust cloud settled around her. Set back from the road, she saw a small house made from adobe that was more pink than orange. It reminded her of one of Pia’s birthday cakes. Lidia had colored both the cake and the icing pink. Even as a toddler Muriel had marveled at the perfectly square slice she’d been given. Almost too pretty to eat.

  Opening the car door, Muriel stepped out and stretched her rib cage in the unfiltered sunlight. Then she reached back into the car for her sun hat. Her foray into America had shown her how very bright open spaces could be. There was no such thing as a shady side of the street.

  Outside was absolute silence. Not a dog barking or a television tuned to The Price Is Right. No Connecticut leaf blowers. At an angle from the pink house was a rectangular outbuilding of the same color. A stone path forked off to both front doors. Gray agave bushes and greenish tufts of Indian grass sprouted from the bases of several smooth boulders edging the raised porch of the house. Magenta succulents had been planted on top of both flat roofs.