by Mary Hogan
“You?” Logan broke the silence.
“Me?”
“Wife? Kids? Husband? Dog?”
Muriel chuckled. “No. No. No. No. And certainly not a cat. Mama would go berserk. As it is she thinks I’m destined to become the crazy old spinster on the fourth floor.” Looking down, Muriel added, “As it was, that is. We haven’t spoken in a while.”
Smiling sadly, Logan brushed plaster dust off the top of his work boots. He then sipped his own tea and waited. The stillness in his home was striking. Behind the sliding glass door at the rear of the house was endless desert. Dirt the color of oxidation and patches of sun-bleached vegetation. It was so utterly quiet you could probably hear the slithering of the snake Logan relocated so very near his back door. Surely he would clamp his hands over his ears in Times Square. The sound of the express train alone would probably send him running home. Even in Muriel’s sleepy uptown neighborhood, the ambient noise of rubber tires on asphalt, helicopter blades thup, thupping over the river, dogs yipping at one another, two children racing each other to the corner, would upset someone who lived in such peace. Only when Muriel heard the sound of absolute stillness did she understand why she loved New York City. The noisiness of its very air balanced the cacophony in her head.
“What is it you wanted to tell me, Muriel?”
She looked up. Ah, yes. No more stalling. Sucking in a breath, Muriel set her mug down on the table and opened her mouth. In her head, questions flattened up against one another like an interstate pileup, all twisted wreckage and bursts of gassy flames. Why did you leave and never come back? Did you know Pia was sick? Do you know about Mama and Father Camilo? Does Dad know? What exactly happened to our family anyway? Did we ever even have one? Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she managed to sputter, “You’re the only sibling I have left.”
“Yes,” he said, softly.
“I, um, need to stop all the lying. The hiding. I don’t know how much you know.”
“Some.”
As Muriel contemplated where to begin, Logan startled her by reaching over and taking both of her hands in his. His palms were rough, as expected. But the gentleness of his touch disarmed her. Her hands were like two baby birds in the safety of their mother’s nest. He held them so gingerly her defenses melted away. Without warning, tears rose up and spilled over her eyelashes. “I saw them,” she said in a whispery burst of breath. “Mama and Father Camilo. In a doorway. A Broadway kiss. He wasn’t wearing his collar. Her hair was uncombed. I saw them trying to hide. It ended our matinee Saturdays. She was only using me. Mama made me promise not to tell. I never did. Never, ever. Not once. Not to anyone. Until now.”
Saliva pooled behind her lips. Snot ran from her nose. Logan let go of her hands to stand up and walk into the bathroom. He returned with a roll of toilet paper and held it out to his sister. The gesture derailed her. The fact that it wasn’t Kleenex made her dissolve in love for her older brother—this man who lived alone with snakes and cacti and no tissues and square houses that looked like cake. This grown man who was her big brother, a person she barely knew.
Between nose blows, Muriel released the secrets she’d been carting around like a sack of slugs. How Lidia’s diary had shamed her for years. How unloved she always felt. She described the cold way their mother looked at her after she saw what she was never meant to see, as if her very existence was an accusation. As if her own mother wanted her to disappear.
“I wanted to disappear. I wanted so much to grow up so I could get out. Like you did.”
Logan sat still, facing his sister. In a wobbly voice she recounted her lunch with Pia, the vomiting in the bathroom, her skeletal back when she zipped up Pia’s gray satin dress.
“I spent a whole day with her and didn’t see her at all. How could I have been so blind? So selfish? But I kept Pia’s secret, too. I never told Mama. Not until Pia was already gone and Will asked me to. I kept my promise to her. At least I can say that much.”
Muriel pressed the damp ball of toilet tissue to her eyes and let her sorrow flow.
“What I don’t understand is how a person you love and one who maybe loved you back a little wouldn’t want to say good-bye? Even a quick one over the phone. Nothing dramatic. One word. Good-bye. Flat out, so I could really hear it and understand that it’s real. Not waving on her way into a cab or hugging me in a dressing room. Not telling me everything was going to be okay when it wasn’t. Why, Logan, when she knew it was close to the end, why didn’t she give me one last chance to tell her how sorry I was, that there was never one single day, not one moment, that I didn’t wish things were different between us? How I wanted so much to be the kind of sister she could love but I kept messing things up. Honestly, I didn’t know how to fix it.”
With her head hanging, Muriel wept. “I know you don’t know me very well, but I was wondering if maybe you could tell me, maybe Mama or Pia told you, or Dad did, or you overheard at some point when I wasn’t there. I need to know the honest truth, so I can move on. Do you happen to know why no one loved me?”
The words broke Logan’s heart. He gently cupped his sister’s chin in his coarse hand and lifted her head. In her damp eyes, he saw the vulnerability of a child. A black hole of hurt. For the first time, he understood the impact of his own choices. “Ah, baby,” he said, encircling her in his strong arms. “I loved you. Love you. Always have.”
Delicately, he kissed the top of Muriel’s head. A remembered scent filled her lungs—glue and mud and motor oil—the smell of her big brother. His worn flannel shirt felt like silk against her face. In Logan’s embrace, Muriel felt like a girl again, standing behind the swinging dining room door in their Queens row house, staring through the crack, watching her family exist around her. Each on his or her own planet. Muriel, barely a moon.
“Put that burden down now,” Logan whispered into her hair. “You’ve carried it long enough.”
With his rough thumb Logan wiped the tears off Muriel’s pulpy lips. So softly she could barely hear it, he said, “I should have told you years ago. It’s my fault. I didn’t consider you at all. I should have. Instead, I got out of there as soon as I could. You were right. I wanted to disappear. But it should have occurred to me that I wasn’t just leaving, I was leaving you behind.”
“Told me what?” Muriel sniffed.
“Father Camilo. Pia was his daughter.”
Chapter 35
BUG SPLATS ON a windshield are an art form. Tiny fireworks displays. Reds, of course. But greens and surprising turquoise blues, too. A lavender swath here and there. Veiny flapping wings. Segmented legs. That’s what Muriel was thinking as she sat behind the wheel in the Santa Fe Car Wash line.
“How did I see the road this morning through all these guts?”
Joanie shrugged. “Hershey’s Kiss?”
She, too, was ready to head home.
Home. Where mosquitoes occasionally interrupted sleep with an ear flyby. Where snakes didn’t sneak up on a person while she was peering through her brother’s front window.
Joanie knew better than to ask Muriel what had happened at her brother’s house. They had a long drive ahead. She would tell her when she was ready. Instead, Joanie had located the nearest power wash and suggested a fresh start. Though she wouldn’t be awake much on the road, when she was, she’d rather see more of America, less arthropod anatomy.
The plan was a northerly route starting that very afternoon, if anything could be considered “north” so far south. Mostly, Muriel was determined to escape anything near the bloated belly of Texas. So, as soon as the car was cleaned of insect residue, they aimed for Kansas, clipping only the corners of both panhandles in Texas and Oklahoma. Muriel drove for hours in silence, stopping only for gas, food, snacks, restrooms, and—after dark—their hotel for the night. As expected, Joanie dozed most of the way. Which suited Muriel perfectly. She needed the monotony of asphalt to process what Logan had told her. Once again, she couldn’t believe how blind she’d been.
“REMEMBER THAT MONTH in Pawtucket?” Logan had asked his sister as she sat on his grimy sofa sipping the still-steaming tea. “When Lidia decided we needed to know our roots?”
Muriel nodded. She remembered it vividly. It was the summer after her matinee Saturdays were guillotined, after Pia had read Lidia’s diary and believed her to be a liar. “Do I have to go?” she had whined to her father. A summer in bed felt like the most she could muster. Besides, Papa Czerwinski scared her. He was mean. Even as an aging man his arms were as thick as legs. His mustache made him look like a walrus and the fine dusting of flour on his skin gave him a ghostly hue. Plus their grandmother Babcia Jula—despite her rounded edges—clearly preferred her sister. Why leave home to feel left out?
“I wanted to go,” Logan told Muriel. “It was my first summer out of art school and I didn’t want to go back to Middle Village.”
“You sound like Mama.”
“Couldn’t you feel it? When you walked through the front door it felt like you were walking into quicksand. There was so much negative energy. The only time I ever wanted to be home was when no one else was home, or when only Dad was there. I couldn’t wait to move out.”
The three Sullivant siblings were put on a train to Providence, Rhode Island. Even Pia, who was in community college then, though she still lived at home. To Muriel, it seemed as though their mother wanted them out of the way. Perhaps she was planning to spend a month in the city, hiding in doorways, stealing Broadway kisses?
During the four-hour train ride, Pia flipped through magazines while Muriel read a book. Logan sketched the different hair patterns he noted on the backs of passengers’ heads. Once they got under way, Muriel remembered feeling the knot in her stomach slowly unfurl. Perhaps Papa Czerwinski had mellowed in the months since she’d last seen him. She could tell him about Edna Turnblad, who was Tracy Turnblad’s mother in one of the funniest shows she had ever seen on Broadway, Hairspray. Papa would laugh because Edna Turnblad was really a man in a dress.
Papa and Babcia Jula still lived in Lidia’s childhood home, having updated little but the carpeting and the paint. The living room where Lidia first danced with Owen had the same maple end tables with the lamps sprouting out of the center. Babcia’s knitting rocker was nestled in the same cluttered corner. Papa still owned the bakery next door. Its cinnamon-butter aroma seeped through the walls. The thick air felt perpetually damp. Over the years, he’d come to accept the children his only daughter bore by that Irishman. (Had Pia not turned out so lovely, he might not have. Quite honestly, the other two he could do without.)
On Sundays when God was nitpicky, Papa would have to confess that the Czerwinskis and Sullivants could not honestly call themselves a “close” family. They lived in different states, after all. But Papa had done his duty. Over the years there were Christmases and Easters and those interminable poorly rehearsed school pageants. Why was one child always facing sideways? They had made sufficient effort. Enough, at least, to stop the meddlesome neighbors from questioning their commitment.
“Grandchildren can be such a blessing. Unless, of course, one is too busy to show love.”
An entire month with the grandchildren, Papa knew, would silence the yappy critics he needed to shut up and buy his babka.
“Let me look at you!”
At the Providence station, Muriel’s grandparents stood on the platform like a photograph in a history book. Papa, tall and stiff, held his felt hat in his hands. Babcia Jula wore a flowered short-sleeved dress and manly black shoes. She hugged Pia warmly as Papa shook Logan’s hand. To Muriel he said, “I knew you’d roll off the train.”
Instantly, she wanted to go home. Papa hadn’t changed one bit. Other kids went to camp. Why couldn’t she?
“Come, come,” said Babcia, always flitting around her husband trying to soften the shards of his personality. “We have pączki waiting at home.”
“This one needs more doughnuts?” Papa flicked his thumb at his youngest grandchild. Muriel crossed her arms over her blossoming chest and stared down at her shoes. Ever confident, Pia scooped up her suitcase and announced, “I, for one, am starving.” Then she linked arms with her grandmother and whispered, “How soon can we come back to Providence to go shopping?”
“Is tomorrow too soon?”
With their foreheads pressed together, giggling, Papa’s proud bald head erect and front facing, and Muriel’s chubby chin on her chest, no one noticed as Logan slipped a train schedule into the back pocket of his sagging blue jeans.
Three people lived in the Czerwinski’s Pawtucket, Rhode Island, home: Papa, Babcia Jula, and God. A wooden crucifix hung over every door and bed. Pious paintings of Jesus with his bloody palms facing outward adorned the walls. His eyes seemed to follow you wherever you went.
“Ach,” Babcia Jula scolded Muriel that first afternoon when she caught her reaching under a cake lid in the kitchen to swipe a fingerful of icing. “Thou shalt not steal.” Making the sign of the cross over her chest, she glanced up at the crucifix above the door frame and made an apologetic face for her granddaughter. Then, with her hand firmly on Muriel’s shoulder, she steered her to a three-legged wooden stool in the corner of the kitchen and said, “Kneel.”
Muriel looked up at her, confused.
“Kneel.”
She knelt on the hard stool.
“Pray.”
Pressing her palms together, her cheeks on fire, she prayed.
“I can’t hear you,” Babcia said.
“Dear God, please forgive me for taking a little bit of Babcia’s icin—”
“For stealing the icing.”
“For stealing Babcia’s icing. It looked so delicious I couldn’t resist.”
“Good. I’ll be back in a few minutes. God wants you to kneel here and think about what you’ve done. Don’t move until I get back. God is watching.”
Muriel didn’t move. She faced the wall and bit the flesh on the inside of her lip. Her knees ached. The bare wood pressed a grain pattern into her kneecaps. She felt God’s angry eyes burn two holes into the back of her head. Later, after dinner, when the cake was sliced and served to her on a plate, she felt so ashamed she could barely choke it down.
“We are witnessing a miracle, Lord!” Papa boomed at the table. “This one doesn’t like cake.” When Jula scolded him for his insensitivity, he lifted his keg of a chest and bellowed, “She’d better learn now how to take a joke.”
From the first moment of her arrival—to the last—Muriel’s time in Pawtucket was torture. God, she learned there, was a spiteful voyeur. He crouched behind sofa backs and hid in drapery folds waiting to catch you in a sin. “Aha! I knew your evil would show itself sooner or later.” The Lord clapped with enormous thundering hands. She was certain God kept His teeth in a glass of cloudy water at night the way Papa Czerwinski did.
Each morning in the shower Muriel hid her body in the steam so God couldn’t see her nakedness. After Pia called her “bovine” in her superior way, Muriel prayed that her sister would eat something poisonous at the bakery and die. Instantly she regretted it, certain that God was tut-tutting above her, His gnarled finger pointed accusingly. At night, she begged God for forgiveness. She pulled a hard chair into the corner of her dark bedroom and knelt on it until her knees hurt so badly she could barely hobble down. In bed she prayed that the month would end quickly so she could return to her own room in Queens with her Playbill collection. There, God wasn’t judging meanly when she pretended to be Jane Eyre singing, “If I leave this unhappy bliss where will my Eden be?”
God saw it all. He knew she wasn’t a liar. Still, He had also seen her mother and Father Camilo. If one parent goes to hell, Muriel worried, do you automatically have to go, too?
Surely the Lord noticed that Logan disappeared at some point in the middle of the second week. Though no one else did. He stuffed his clothes in his backpack and hitchhiked to the train station in Providence while Muriel and Pia worked in the bakery with their grand
parents.
“Why did you leave?” Muriel asked Logan from her perch on his couch in Galisteo.
“Have you ever thought something was going to be much better than it actually turned out to be?”
She nearly did a spit take with her tea. Remembering her fantasized mother/daughter Broadway relationship with Lidia, she said, “Why, yes. I believe I have some familiarity with the concept.”
“That house in Pawtucket was as oppressive—if not more so—than our parents’ house in Queens. All I wanted to do was get back to New York, pack the rest of my things, then quietly go back to school. Of course, that’s not quite what happened.”
As if reliving that day so many years ago, Logan leaned back on his sofa and stared into nothingness.
“I was so sure Papa was going to come booming up those stairs at the train station and drag me back.”
“He thought you were working on an art project in his woodshed!”
“Yeah. That’s what I told him. Still, I don’t think I took a full breath until I reached Penn Station.”
Once he was back in New York City, Logan took the A train to Fourteenth Street, then the L subway all the way to Wyckoff Avenue before transferring to the M line and riding it to the end. Metropolitan Avenue. A few short blocks from home.
“Owen and Lidia were yelling at each other when I came in. They didn’t hear me.”
It didn’t escape Muriel’s notice that her brother called their parents by their first names. Had he always? Had they let him?
“Honestly,” Logan said, “I didn’t sneak in. But I didn’t say anything, either. I walked upstairs and tried not to listen to their fight.”
