Two Sisters: A Novel

by Mary Hogan

  “Mama?”

  The front door was unlocked, a carryover from their Rhode Island neighborhood days. Muriel stepped into the silent foyer. In a rush of feelings, her youth surged forward: the ache of not belonging, of being the fifth in a family of four. The third child to parents who wanted only two. She shut her eyes for a moment and pictured herself coming home from school, praying no one would be home so she could slide across the marble tile in her socks, eat peanut butter with a spoon, unsuck her stomach, turn on the TV as loud as she wanted, and watch daytime dramas that were more intense than her own. She could hide in plain sight.

  Strong coffee scented the air. Muriel set the shopping bag down beside the door. At the back of the house, Lidia appeared in the arched passageway to the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I—” Muriel stopped. Stunningly, she hadn’t planned this far ahead. It had taken all the energy she could amass to get her body this far. Her brain went completely blank. “I’ve come for a visit.”

  Lidia said, “Didn’t I just see you?”

  “Yes! And wasn’t it fun?” Muriel clamped down her back teeth in embarrassment. Lidia groaned. “You know I hate surprises,” she said flatly.

  Following her mother into the family kitchen—a room so familiar she could draw every inch of it with her eyes closed—Muriel noted the white Roman shade covering the window, the stainless-steel side-by-side refrigerator, the glass-topped table, the gleaming KitchenAid mixer in metallic pearl. Lidia had just cleaned up the breakfast dishes; the countertop was still wet from her sponge. Her pressed cream-colored slacks brushed lightly against the tips of her insignia-embossed velvet loafers.

  “Is Dad home?” Muriel asked.

  “If you’ve come to see him, you wasted a trip. He’s already at work.”

  “I came to see you.”

  Lidia’s impatient look was unmistakable. “Have a cup of coffee then.”

  Sipping her coffee, Muriel sat and stared at her mother as she busied herself shining her kitchen. She sprayed Windex on the glass-fronted cabinets, used her fingernail to scrape a fleck of food off the chrome toaster, then buffed the residue fingerprint with her damp paper towel. “Well?” she said, finally. “Are you going to make me beg you?”

  Though it had only been a week earlier, their dinner at Uvarara seemed ages ago. Lidia’s hard edges were back. With her heart thrumming, Muriel set her mug down on the table. She rested her hands flat on her lap and softly said, “I’m afraid I have bad news.”

  “You’ve lost your job.”

  Lidia’s response was so swift it startled Muriel into asking, “Why would you say that?”

  “I knew it was only a matter of time. That’s no job for a maturing woman. Your lesbian boss was sure to hire someone more age appropriate eventually. A teenage intern, perhaps.”

  Muriel stared at her mother and blinked.

  “No, I haven’t lost my job.”

  “You will. Mark my words. Matter of time.”

  Lidia leaned her back against the kitchen counter, one hand on her slim hip. “What is it then?” she asked, begrudgingly, as if Muriel’s bad news was an annoying waste of her time. As if she’d be required to muster motherly empathy for which she was in no mood. Not today when she had so many other things to do. Their mother/daughter night out had been a nice change of pace, but that was then. Today, she would have to reschedule her manicure if Muriel didn’t speed things up and get back on the train. The laundry wasn’t going to wash itself.

  “I don’t know how to say it, Mama.”

  Lidia sighed. “Just say it, Muriel.”

  “It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s Pia.”

  “What about Pia?” Lidia now stood erect. Muriel’s tongue seemed to swell like a waterlogged loaf of bread. She opened her mouth, but words couldn’t make their way around the squishy mass of flesh and taste buds.

  “Tell me.” Lidia’s face had turned to stone. “This instant.”

  She took a step forward. Muriel’s lips felt slimy. “Will called me this morning,” she sputtered. “Pia has been sick for a while, Mama. She didn’t want anyone to know. She made me promise. I noticed how pale she was, and thin, when I saw her. But I didn’t really see it. Know what I mean? I didn’t understand how bad it was.”

  Tight lipped, Lidia said, “You told me she was fine. I asked you if you’d seen her.”

  “I did see her in Connecticut the same day I saw you. She said her treatments had worked. She was sure the worst was over. Will said it happens that way sometimes. One final rally. But last night, in her slee—”

  Without warning, Lidia reached her hand back, swung it around, and slapped Muriel hard across the face. “Liar!” she shouted. A shocked Muriel held her burning cheek.

  “How dare you.” Lidia’s voice was a carving knife.

  “I know you’re upset.”

  “This is low even for you.”

  “Mama, did you hear what I said? Pia passed away last night.”

  “Shut up! You’ve always been jealous of your sister. Did you think I didn’t see that? What, you thought I was blind?”

  Her mouth hanging open, Muriel didn’t know what to say. Her cheek was hot, her chest burned. Hatred flared red in her mother’s eyes. Lidia declared, “I might have expected something like this from you. You’ve always been a liar.”

  Muriel sucked in a breath. She closed her mouth, lowered her hand to her lap. “I’m not lying.”

  “Even as a child you couldn’t be trusted. Lies. Always lies. Trying to make me believe you saw things that you didn’t see. Trying to ruin my life with your lies. Who do you think you are? Special? You’re no one special, believe me. Pia is special. You’re as common as dirt. Look at you. Your fingernails, your hair. Or, I have a better idea. Look at yourself in a mirror, Muriel. Know what you’ll see? A liar.”

  Stone faced, Muriel said, “You think I want to be telling you this?”

  Lidia turned her back. The air in the kitchen was again misted with Windex as she furiously resprayed all the shiny surfaces around her. She ripped paper towels off the vertical roll on the counter and wiped so hard they balled into a damp wad of pulp. Muriel could still feel the imprint of her mother’s hand on her cheek, the sting of the slap. With the taste of ammonia on her tongue, she said slowly and carefully, “I never was a liar and you know it.”

  “That in itself is a lie.”

  Muriel stood up. The chair scraped across the floor. “Turn around, Mother.”

  In ever-larger circles, Lidia polished the countertops.

  “I said, ‘Turn around.’ ”

  Defiantly, Lidia spun around. Chin lifted, she said, “What are you going to do? Hit me?”

  Muriel wanted to. She longed to feel the tug in her rotator cuff as she reached back, then swung around and smacked that smug look off her mother’s face. She hungered to see Lidia’s neat hair spill over her eyes, feel the residue of wrinkle cream on the palm of her hand. The thrill of watching Lidia bite down on her lower lip, leaving a mauve rim of lipstick on the edge of her upper teeth, excited her. She pictured a handful of paper towels falling to the spotless floor as she waited, still as a stone, for a red welt to blossom on her mother’s cheek. She would watch it flower, bit by bit, like an opening rose. Yes, that’s what she wanted to do. Itched to do. But she didn’t. Controlling every syllable out of her mouth, Muriel said, “I saw you. You know I saw you. And you also know I never told anyone about you and Father Camilo.”

  “Shut up, Muriel.”

  “I won’t shut up. I’m sick of shutting up. I’m done shutting up. I won’t lie for you anymore. I don’t care if everyone knows the truth: Dad, Will, Emma, the church.”

  Lidia’s cheeks flushed hotter. “Damn you to hell.”

  “Damn me?” Muriel laughed. “That’s a joke, right? It wasn’t me having sex with a priest.”

  Lidia reached back to slap her daughter again, but this time, Murie
l was ready. She caught her mother’s wrist with her hand and squeezed it, both women shaking from head to toe.

  “No one will believe you,” Lidia said viciously. “I documented your past as a liar. It’s all written down.”

  “Ah, yes. Your journal.” She tossed her mother’s wrist back at her. “Very clever, Mama. The way you left that out for Pia to find. It kept me quiet for a long time. Hurt me for a long time. But not anymore. You know what? I don’t care if anyone believes me. Let them question me, hook me up to a lie detector test. I have nothing to hide. You want to take a lie detector test with me, Mama? Do you? A family outing! We’ll get our nails done first!

  “My days of keeping everybody’s secrets are over. The bats are out of the cave! Pia had cancer. You had an affair with Father Camilo. Dad was—is?—probably seeing someone, too. Your whole marriage is a joke. There’s never been any real love there. Did Logan find out? Is that why he escaped from our family the moment he could, and never came back? I don’t even know my own brother! Our family is nothing but lies. But not me. Not anymore. Hallelujah, Lord! The truth has set me free.”

  Sucking in a lungful of air, Muriel blew it out hard. “Ahhh,” she said, “I feel lighter already. Imagine that, Mama. Me. Feeling light.” With that, Muriel wheeled around and stomped out of the spotless kitchen to the front door, grabbing the shopping bag with Pia’s burial dress. She’d made a promise to her sister. A promise she was going to keep.

  Chapter 29

  DEATH IS A part of life. What a bullshit platitude. Death is so permanently entrenched in its own nonbeingness, the word “life” shouldn’t be uttered anywhere near it. It isn’t even the end of life. It’s the beginning of forever being gone. A journey for the deceased . . . maybe. Desertion for the living? Absolutely. Death is an abandoned child at the mall—in Times Square—all she can do is clutch at her shirt to contain her heartbeats while she scans each silhouette, waiting, until darkness comes.

  That’s what Muriel was thinking as her sister’s funeral unfolded around her. Death, she thought, needs its own vocabulary.

  “You’re the sister?”

  One by one, Pia’s friends and neighbors filed into the white clapboard church with the shiny red door, so quaint it was a country cliché.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  The pointed steeple rose into the blue Connecticut sky; the grass was so green it looked painted. Pia had selected this storybook church for her service, not their regular beige brick behemoth of a parish (that was down the street). A final nod to her impeccable style and taste.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  On the landing of the stone steps, Muriel stood to the right of Will and Emma. Will looked tired. Emma, as her mother always had, looked strikingly serene. Dressed in a navy blue skirt and crème-colored shirt, she looked fully grown. As if she’d become a woman overnight. Father and daughter held hands and greeted mourners with nods and sad smiles and the language of bereavement: Thank you for coming. Watching them, Muriel instantly understood their past several months. They had gone through Pia’s illness together. The only two people in on the secret from the start.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Pia will be missed.”

  Thank you for coming.

  To Will’s left, Lidia was dramatically draped in a black veil. She leaned heavily against a stoic Owen, sobbing quietly into a handkerchief. A flutter of white caught Muriel’s eye each time Lidia lowered the linen kerchief away from her teary eyes. That’s all she saw beneath that black veil. Not once did Lidia look in her daughter’s direction. In fact, Lidia hadn’t spoken a single word to Muriel since that morning in her kitchen in Queens.

  “What’s going on?” Owen had asked.

  “Ask her” was Muriel’s curt reply.

  “Grief,” he’d said, sadly. And he left it at that. Her father, like the whole family, was an expert at selective blindness, blurring the ugly reality in front of his face the way a cameraman softens the wrinkles of an aging actress. No one mentioned the fact that Pia’s brother, Logan, wasn’t there at all. Had he even been called? Inside the church, Papa Czerwinski and Babcia Jula—Pia’s grandparents who had once refused to let her inside their home—both kneeled and prayed with their heads burrowed in their hands. Over the years, they had come to accept the blond child with the Irish last name. Then the second, then the third. How could they not? Lidia’s offspring were their only hope of grandchildren. Time softened their rigidness. Especially since Lidia fled to Rhode Island often to escape the prison of Queens.

  On the day of the funeral, it was easy enough for Muriel to steer clear of her mother. Death’s aftermath, she noticed, was crowded. Hovering relatives with Pyrex dishes and friends with containers from Whole Foods had filled the Winston house the night before. The small church was packed to the rafters. Muriel’s one true family member—Joanie Frankel—was waiting for her inside the church. She’d come by herself on the train and made her way to the service even, as she’d once told Muriel, “Churches give me hives.” In spite of the spectacle—all those skinny women in their oddly angled hats—she resisted the urge to lean close to her friend’s ear and snidely compare Pia’s funeral to a royal wedding. She didn’t have to. Muriel saw it for herself. One friend of Pia’s showed up in a mink stole and spiked black heels. She air-kissed everyone and pasted a pouty expression on her cherry-red lips. Another wore white from head to toe—complete with wrist gloves—as if receiving first communion. This looks like a funeral scene more than a funeral, Muriel thought. So many well-cast extras.

  Extra. That’s what she’d been in her sister’s life. Immaterial to the central plot. Background. She glanced down at her shabby black shoes and wished she’d bought new ones that day with Pia, when she’d had the chance.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “We were so shocked.”

  “She never said a word. I sensed something was wrong, but I never dreamed . . .”

  “I’m going to miss her smile.”

  “You’re the sister?”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you for coming.”

  Perhaps death did have its own vocabulary after all.

  EARLY THAT MORNING, with the sun barely a promise, Muriel had taken the train alone into Westport. As before, the rails jostled her left and right. Her stomach felt more settled, though. Her entire being seemed to be elsewhere. Through the train window she absentmindedly watched the cities along the Sound pass in a blur of bobbing white boats. New Rochelle, Greenwich, Darien, South Norwalk, East Norwalk. At the Westport station, she stepped off the train into the warm air and found the same driver she’d had several days before sitting in his same cab. Parked in the shade of a white pine, the car’s hood was covered in fallen spiky needles. “Remember me?” Muriel said, stupidly, tapping on the passenger-side window. The driver stared blankly over his newspaper. He said, “Of course.” But, of course, he was lying.

  The viewing at the funeral home wasn’t scheduled to start for more than an hour. Still, Muriel gave the driver the mortuary address. With a furrowed brow he glanced sympathetically at her in his rearview mirror. Muriel looked out the side window. She didn’t want him to say a word. If he did, she’d have to comfort him, let him know she was okay when she didn’t feel okay the slightest bit.

  Truth was, along with sadness, Muriel was awash in guilt. If she’d been a better sister—more loving, more open, less awkward—Pia would have been unable to let her life slip away without saying good-bye. In her final week, nothing could have kept her away from a phone.

  Remember that Christmas morning when we awoke to the whole city blanketed in snow?

  Muriel wouldn’t remember, but she would say she did. “We thought it was magic,” she would say, and Pia would whisper, “It was.”

  She would know why her sister was calling, but she wouldn’t say. They would exchange “I love yous” and silences that were so filled with emotions word
s were not yet invented to adequately convey them.

  “I’m not sure what’s going to happen next,” Pia would finally utter, “but I couldn’t bear it if I left this world without acknowledging how important you’ve always been to me.” Coughing, she would laugh. “Even though I displayed it in the worst possible way. I was truly awful to you, Muriel, wasn’t I?”

  “Hideous.”

  Together, they would laugh harder than they could have as one.

  “I hope you’re sticking around to torture me more,” Muriel would say.

  “Me, too.”

  In Pia’s final silence Muriel would hear Pia’s promise to see her in heaven. She knew Muriel would resist if she said it out loud. So Pia would let her heart whisper the vow: “One day—without pain, or judgment or fear—you’ll feel a surge of love so strong it will nearly knock you over. Like nothing even close to an experience on earth, an intense sensation of love will overtake you. And there I will be. Waiting for you. So we can be reunited into the loving arms of a God so vast he can encircle the universe.”

  The mere thought of seeing her sister again soothed some of the aching in Muriel’s chest. Death felt so damned permanent. Still, she couldn’t shake the hurt and self-recrimination. How had she let herself fade so far from her own sister’s life that she was little more than a Connecticut extra?

  The parking lot at the funeral home was empty. Muriel paid the cabdriver and waited for him to drive off before she climbed the front steps and nervously turned the handle on the front door. Her heart was pounding. She’d never been in a funeral home before. Would it smell like putrid flesh? Formaldehyde?

  “Hello?” she called out, quietly stepping into the empty entrance room. It looked like an elegant home. And smelled like one, too. Muriel exhaled, relieved. A carved butler’s desk stood tall against one wall, sage green velvet chairs were circled around a brown leather ottoman. The wallpaper was muted fleur-de-lis. Pia would like this room, Muriel thought. Then it occurred to her that Pia had probably chosen it. A woman who buys her own final dress would never leave the funeral home up to chance.