Two Sisters: A Novel (33 page)

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.

L
IKE 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
extra
terrestrial, 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.

“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

L
OGAN
S
ULLIVANT 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?”