by Mary Hogan
“Cool,” Muriel said quietly. Alive insulation.
In her thin-soled loafers, she felt the gravel crunch beneath her feet as she walked up the driveway to the path. The hems of her blue jeans were quickly coated in dust. A lizard darted in front of her, freezing in place briefly, before wriggling into the agave shade. The closer Muriel got to the front door, the more nervous she felt. Honestly, she hadn’t planned further than this, certain that some sort of master plan would materialize on the spot. At the moment, however, her heartbeat drowned out all intelligent thought. The best she could muster was a zippy knock on the door, one that casually said, “Yoo-hoo! You have a visitor!”
No one answered. Muriel knocked again. Tap, tap, tap. Yoo-hoo-hoo.
Still, no one. Pushing her wide-brimmed hat to the back of her head, she pressed her ear to the door. She heard not a sound. Fully aware she’d hate it if someone did the same to her, she nonetheless walked over to the uncurtained window and peered through. Inside was spare and bright with white furniture set almost randomly on the dark hardwood floor. A kiva fireplace in the corner had faint soot marks above the arched opening. In front of it was a small rectangle of red Navajo rug. Muriel was surprised by the ordinariness of the room. She’d expected something less, well, Santa Fe.
“Don’t move.”
Muriel froze. The male voice behind her had the rasp of a smoker. She felt the blood drain out of her face. “I’m, uh—”
“Quiet.”
She swallowed her words. Slowly, the man said, “Never turn your back on a snake.”
Snake? Muriel whipped her head around. Standing at the bottom of the porch steps, holding a long metal pole with a claw at the end of it, was her brother, Logan. As she opened her mouth to speak he said, “Shhh.”
Brown skinned and creased around the eyes, the sandy hair Muriel remembered was now slightly gray, surprisingly thick given Owen’s flyaway fluff. Logan pointed to a pile of firewood a few feet away from his sister. He said, “Don’t give him a reason to attack you.”
“It’s me, Logan. Your sister,” she whispered, shakily.
“I know who you are.”
The knees of her older brother’s Levi’s were chalky with plaster dust. His hands were callused and veined. Within his man’s face, Muriel saw the boy she’d once known. Barely known, really. He left home after high school. The few times she saw him after that were little more than dinners with a sullen stranger. Grunting answers to their mother’s counterfeit concern.
In one swift motion, Logan climbed the stairs and lunged his pole into the woodpile. Up came a wiggling brown snake frantically flicking its pink tongue. “Only a bull snake,” he said calmly. “Nothing to worry about.”
With that, Logan Sullivant turned on the heels of his paint-splattered work boots and ambled into the brush.
Chapter 33
LOGAN SULLIVANT HAD always been a riddle to his little sister. Seven years older, he treated her much the same way Pia did: a gnat, always buzzing about his head, returning to circle around him no matter how many times he swatted her away. Like their father, Logan rarely said much. From the beginning, conversations with him were shadowed in subtext.
“What’s that?” Muriel would ask, sitting on the basement steps (hiding from Lidia, usually) as she watched her brother fashion something out of white tubing.
“What do you want it to be?”
“How should I know?”
“Precisely the point.”
She never understood him. Like a lucid dreamer Logan lived within his own head, conjuring images no one else saw. “Flamingos,” he once said to a pile of discarded wire hangers in the recycling bin.
No one was surprised when Logan grew up to become an artist. From the start, he saw beauty in trash. A broken pencil was painted white to become a picket in a tiny fence for a school project, a crumpled newspaper was shaped into a wilted rose. On a sketch pad at the dinner table he’d silently draw the tilt of a fork against a plate or the way his milk coated the side of the glass. The walls of his room were one big collage of magazine photos, curlicued scraps of metal, scribbled poetry, ticket stubs—floor-to-ceiling canvases that offered the clearest view into his original mind.
Muriel was in awe. Mostly because her brother’s creativity was encouraged. “Be anything,” Lidia said to him. “But be something.”
To her she said, “Are you sure you want to eat that?”
Clearly Owen’s genetic offspring, Logan had scruffy dust-colored hair that stuck up more on one side than the other, exactly the way his dad’s did. It grew in a similar pinwheel at the crown. Both men’s bodies were Popsicle sticks. From the back, their outlines were identical. Together they explored the dunes in Narragansett and Long Island, bending over at the same moment to pick up the same shard of sand glass. They watched birds nesting through shared binoculars, dismantled engines and old radios and discarded kitchen appliances down in the basement to see how they worked. In the same way Pia was a miniature Lidia, Logan was a pint-size Owen. Perhaps that’s why Muriel always felt so lost. When you’re number five in a family of four, who’s your mirror image?
But Logan never saw his sister Muriel grow up. He left home a few months after his high school graduation and rarely came back. Like so many other things in the Sullivant family, his absence was unspoken.
“Where’s Logan?” young Muriel asked one Christmas during the traditional wigilia on Christmas Eve. The family sat in the living room, on the good furniture, awaiting the arrival of Christ.
“Don’t tear the pająki, Muriel, with your flapping clumsy hands.”
After sunset, as Muriel was sent to the window to watch for the first star, she asked, “Will Logan be here by dinnertime?”
“Light the star supper candles, Pia,” Lidia had replied behind her.
Once the opłatek wafer was broken and passed around to all, Lidia placed a jagged piece of it on an empty plate. “Is that Logan’s opłatek?” Muriel asked, but Lidia said nothing and Owen turned away. The next morning, when Muriel noticed there were no presents under the tree for her brother she quietly asked Pia, “Has Logan run away?”
Pia said, “Pass me that big shiny box, will you? The one with the silver bow?”
On New Year’s Eve, when Pia was at a friend’s house and her parents were at a cocktail party and Muriel was left with an elderly babysitter who slept on the couch with her mouth hanging open and her bent, panty-hose-covered toes smelling like sweat and old shoe, Muriel thought she saw a shadow pass beneath the light in the entryway and slither up the stairs.
“Logan?” she called out. But no one answered. Too scared to investigate, she huddled near the babysitter and watched an old black-and-white movie with her heart pumping wildly, praying that the sitter would be able to wake up if an ax murderer was on his way into the den to split open their skulls like cantaloupes.
The next morning, when the aroma in their home turned into roasted turkey and Lidia wore her apron over her crème-colored slacks, Muriel sat at the kitchen table and asked her mother, “Will Logan be here for supper tonight?” Turning her back, Lidia said, testily, “Those sweet potatoes aren’t going to peel themselves.”
Eventually Muriel stopped asking. One thing she knew for sure about her mother: if she didn’t want to discuss something, it didn’t get discussed. Pia barely spoke to her pesky little sister about anything. And after Logan left, her father bundled himself more tightly into his silence. Often it felt like he was a visitor, as if it was only polite to keep himself and his possessions contained. Don’t make a fuss. Logan was gone. That was that.
AFTER DEPOSITING THE bull snake beneath a boulder behind his house, Logan flicked his head at his sister and said, “I’m in here.” Then he silently walked into the adobe building next to his house. Muriel followed. Inside, she looked left and right and up and down and said, “Wow.”
Logan’s art studio was a wonderland of color and light. The exact opposite of the dank Queens basement in which Muriel
had always seen him. Her memory of her brother was a film noir movie, nighttime coloring even when the sun was out. Mystery around every dingy corner. In Galisteo, he was in plain view. Within the thick adobe walls, creamy sunlight streamed in from the huge windows. A smooth gray cement floor felt cool beneath the soles of Muriel’s shoes.
In the far corner of the studio, an autopsy-style sink with a handheld sprayer and long stainless-steel ledge was scrubbed and shiny. Along the far wall was a row of narrow cubbies, each holding upright its own mounted canvas. Bins of things were organized by color and content: green shards of desert glass, multicolored bottle caps, newspaper inserts, sun-bleached animal bones, bits of foil and crinkled cellophane, dried plants, smooth stones. A pristine recycling center. Her arms at her sides, Muriel looked around in awe.
“Sorry to hear about Pia,” Logan said abruptly. He positioned himself behind a large marble-topped island in the center of the room, tools hanging from the sides like boat fenders off a bow.
“So you know?”
“Yes, I know.”
“How did you find out?”
“Dad.”
Muriel nodded. Logan picked up a mini blowtorch, the kind Muriel had seen TV chefs use to caramelize a crème brûlée. Bent over a painted blue canvas he went back to work. He ignited the torch and burned small round holes at the edges of the frame. Clumped together, they looked like black balloons.
“So,” Muriel sputtered, her mind suddenly full of tumbleweeds. Logan didn’t look up. As he always had, he went about his work as if Muriel wasn’t there. As she always had, Muriel silently watched him. Her hanging arms soon felt like wads of chewed gum, stretched, seeming to grow longer and thinner by the minute. Her feet also felt pliant and sticky. No longer foot shaped. If she looked down, she was afraid she’d discover they’d turned webbed and orange. All she could think was, Now that I’m here, what the hell am I doing here? Two thousand miles and she was speechless?
Muriel let her head dangle forward. Her memory cast back to one particular Sunday morning in Queens when she sat on the top basement step watching her father and brother at the workbench below, necks bent in quiet concentration, a caged lightbulb gently swaying from a wire in the rafters. She was hiding from her mother. It was after their matinee Saturdays had abruptly stopped, before Pia had found and read Lidia’s diary.
Overhead, Muriel heard high heels scrape angrily across the linoleum kitchen floor. “Muriel? Are you deliberately trying to make us late?”
In a superior way, Pia said, “I’ll wait in the car, Mama.”
Barely daring to breathe, Muriel said nothing. The dirty basement step left patches of gray dust on her pink Sunday dress. A dress too young for her, too tight. In the musty darkness, she hugged the two-by-four baluster and stared at the backs of her brother and father as they stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the worktable.
“Hand me that copper tubing, will you, son?”
“Whole coil?”
“We’ll cut as need be.”
That Sunday, Logan was home from art school for a rare weekend. He spent most of it right where he was—in the basement beside his dad. In case she never saw him again, Muriel memorized the way his hair curlicued into the divot at the base of his neck, the easy way his shoulder bumped his father’s shoulder, not unlike the way hers used to bump Lidia’s when they rode the subway into the city together on matinee Saturdays. Sitting there, Muriel watched her brother and father as if they were animals in a zoo. A rare species of family in which communication was cellular. Words weren’t necessary. When they were spoken, they weren’t misunderstood. Their conversations weren’t two semis passing on a midnight highway.
Without warning, the basement door swung open, blowing dust onto Muriel’s Sunday dress. “For heaven’s sake, Muriel, get off that filthy stair.”
Head tilted up, young Muriel looked at her perfectly coiffed mother in her flesh-toned pumps and tasteful wool dress the color of mashed potatoes. “I’m not going to church today,” she said. “Logan doesn’t have to go. Dad doesn’t have to go. Why do I?”
“Muriel, get up.”
“Do I have to go, Dad? Do I?”
Owen said nothing. He pretended he didn’t hear even as Muriel knew perfectly well he did.
“Get up off that floor this instant,” Lidia said.
“No.”
“Now.”
“No.”
Lidia’s nostrils flared like an angry bull’s. Muriel set her jaw. In a flash of white, Lidia reached her hand back to slap Muriel’s face.
“Will Father Camilo be at church?” Muriel asked, defiantly.
Lidia stopped. Her breath hitched. Quivering, her hand hovered in midair. Like a rubber band in a slingshot, her gaze bulleted down the stairs to her husband’s hunched shoulders, then shot back up to her daughter. Aside from her trembling, Muriel remained still. She clung to the stair post with white knuckles. Steely eyed, she didn’t back down, only fixated on the jet plume of red smeared across her mother’s lips and the bloodshot bulging of her eyeballs. For the first time, she saw hatred in those eyes. Where before she’d seen indifference, impatience, even disgust, she now recognized the unmistakable blackness of a contempt so deep it had probably been there all along. Muriel wished she’d quietly stood up and gone to church. Once you see darkness like that in a mother’s eyes, it’s hard to ever again find light.
“Fine,” Lidia spat at her. “Go to hell if that’s what you want.”
In another swirl of dust, Lidia slammed the basement door and stomped overhead. Muriel’s heart pounded in her ears. She felt the air suck out of the house when the front door opened, then heard silence after it whomped shut. At that moment, the house felt so vacant it was as if no one had ever lived there at all. Soundlessly, Logan handed his father a length of copper coil. Owen snipped a section off with a bolt cutter. The excess fell to the cement floor in a tinny bounce. Thin voiced, Muriel asked, “Whatcha making down there?”
“Stuff,” Logan replied, his back still to his sister, his focus on the job at hand. Exactly the way his father was and would always be.
“Like what?” Muriel asked, trying not to cry. No one answered her. Not that she expected them to.
ON THAT FRESHLY scrubbed day in New Mexico, Muriel lifted her head to watch her brother work, as she had so many years ago. Only this time she witnessed it from the front. He arranged bits of colored paper around the black holes he’d burned on the canvas. He rummaged through one of his recycling bins for God knows what. When she finally asked, “Whatcha making?” he answered, “Stuff,” precisely as she knew he would.
“I drove here from New York,” she said, eventually. “I don’t know if you know, but I live in the city now.”
“I know.”
“I wanted to see you.”
Without looking up he said, “Here I am.”
Muriel laughed unnaturally. Her arms still felt rubbery. “Aren’t you wondering why I’m here?”
“You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
Logan picked up the blowtorch again and lit it with a match. A blue and orange flame licked straight into the air. Why, Muriel wondered, isn’t he wearing protective goggles? Couldn’t that torch flare and burn his eyes? Some chemical reaction to paint, perhaps? An errant spark that ignites his hair? In the thrashing about, he’d fall into the bin of colored glass, unable to distinguish the sharp ends from the dull. Like a pincushion, he’d be stuck over and over, streams of red dribbling down his arms. She would stand there helpless, hapless, her rubbery limbs flapping.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” she blurted out.
Logan lifted his head and gazed at her squarely. “Yes, you do.” The blowtorch flame now flickered pink. Muriel felt her body soften like a butter sculpture in the last hour of the county fair. “Yes, I do,” she confessed, releasing all the air in her body.
Logan didn’t nod or shrug or do anything. He stood motionless and regarded her passively. Waiting. The way her fath
er would have.
“I need to tell,” she said, at last.
Shutting off the blowtorch and setting it in its metal cradle, Logan circled around the island in his studio and said, “I’ll make tea.”
Chapter 34
INSIDE LOGAN’S HOME, the bare walls were eggshell, the inoffensive color every landlord paints his rental. The white couch she’d seen through the window was actually grayish and frayed along the edges where passing grubby knees had rubbed against it. Same with the two slipcovered armchairs. All desperately in need of a bleach-laden wash. Muriel was surprised; she’d expected something more . . . artistic. The fantastical residence of a creative being instead of the grungy digs of a frat boy. Clearly there was no wife in the picture. No one, it seemed, at all.
Into two mismatched mugs, the kind you’d buy at a garage sale for a quarter, Logan poured boiling water that sent a steamy funnel cloud up to his face. He dunked the same tea bag into both mugs. “Had I known a New Yorker was visiting I would have bought coffee.”
Muriel laughed dutifully. “I should have called first.” She felt awkward and embarrassed. Primly seated on Logan’s couch, with both hands cupping her knees, she looked like a job applicant.
Carrying the mugs into the living room, Logan set them on the dormish coffee table. Stupidly, Muriel glanced around for a coaster. Only then did she notice the leaning pile of old newspapers in the corner, the dirty work shirt draped over the back of the dining room chair, the muddy shoes pulled off at the heel and left where he’d stepped out of them. How ironic, she thought, his pristine studio is full of trash, and his home is such a mess. It was the type of space a person used for eating and sleeping and showering and little else.
“No wife? No kids?” Muriel asked.
“No and no.”
She bent forward to reach her tea. She blew air on the hot surface. Sitting next to her on the couch, Logan turned his body in her direction and leaned on his elbows, fingers entwined, as if to ask, “How may I help you today?” Taking a gulp too large, Muriel singed her tongue and throat. Wincing, she wondered yet again if she had the right to burden her brother with what she knew. Why tell after all these years of silence? Other than freeing her, what good would it do? Certainly none if word got back to Owen and hurt him. He was, after all, still married to their mother.
