Two Sisters: A Novel (30 page)

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.

E
ARLY 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 words 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.

“May I help you?” A man buttoning his suit jacket appeared from the hallway.

“I know the Pia Winston viewing doesn’t start for a while,” Muriel said. “I’ve come from New York.”

The director opened his mouth to say no. “I’m the sister,” Muriel quickly added. “I’ve taken the train. Five minutes alone with her? Please?”

He seemed to sense that she wasn’t going to leave. Perhaps he’d seen the cab drive off from one of the upstairs windows? Tugging at the white cuffs peering out from his dark jacket, he said, “Wait here a moment, will you?”

Muriel waited. She stood in the center of the pretty room and noticed the beautifully camouflaged tissue boxes on every surface. She pictured Will and Emma sitting in the two armchairs, both reaching for a tissue at the exact moment they felt the vast aloneness of life without the woman who made their lives so livable.

“She happens to be ready,” the funeral director said, returning. “Because you’re family . . .” His voice faded into padded footsteps down a wide hallway. Muriel followed him. The same muted wallpaper lined the hall. Table lamps, instead of overhead lighting, added to the homey feel. More tissue boxes were discreetly placed on half-moon tables. The director stopped at the open door of Pia’s viewing room and said, kindly, “Take all the time you need.”

With a respectful step back, and a pious head bow, he turned and left Muriel alone in the hallway. She was startled. Shouldn’t he . . .
escort
her in? Make sure she didn’t scream or faint? What if she took one look at Pia’s dead body and vomited on their pristine carpet? It took a moment for Muriel to realize he’d given her exactly what she’d asked for: a few minutes alone with her sister.

All of a sudden it became clear that walking required a complex set of coordinated movements. There was leg lifting and balancing on one foot and kicking the knee forward and leaning the torso in just so. All for one step! How did people do it so effortlessly? Muriel wasn’t sure she could manage. Her legs felt like tree trunks, rooted to the carpeting below her feet. Perhaps the cabdriver was nearby reading the
Post
? Surely he didn’t just drive around wasting gas on the odd chance someone needed a ride? This was
Connecticut
, after all, the land of the hybrid SUV.

If she hadn’t worried about annoying the funeral director—almost certainly he’d donned his jacket for the express purpose of dealing with her early arrival—she might have turned her head and called out, “Sir? Excuse me. I seem to have changed my mind.” Instead, Muriel lifted one wooden leg and flung it out in front of her. Then the other.

The smell of roses struck her first. They strongly perfumed the air in a heavy greenish scent. Gold drapery lined the walls. White chairs were organized in neat rows. A wooden podium held an open guest book. Muriel hung back with her head down. Never before had she seen a dead body, certainly not one so previously full of life. She was scared. Would Pia look skeletal? Would she remember her sister forever as flat and still? Not bounding down the front steps of their house or gliding down the aisle like an angel in her wedding gown. The whole church had gasped at her beauty that day. Would Muriel now gasp again?

Sucking in a fortifying breath, she forced herself to step closer. Then she looked up and, yes, she gasped. Pia was—as Muriel should have assumed she would be—
gorgeous
. Surrounded by giant bouquets of bursting yellow roses, Pia was laid out in a gunmetal casket in her gray satin dress. The effect was stunning—a sunburst surrounding a storm cloud. Dramatic and magnificent. So very
her
. Muriel pressed both hands to her chest. Even in death, her sister took her breath away.

“My God,” she said, kneeling on the cushioned rail positioned in front of the casket. Pia’s wig was styled perfectly, the tiniest flip at her collarbone. Primrose pink lipstick softly colored her lips. The slightest hint of blush and foundation warmed her pale cheeks. Her face looked relaxed and unlined. Pain free. Somehow, she looked healthier than she had when Muriel had last seen her. As if cancer no longer enslaved her body. She was free. French-manicured nails tipped her fingers, not too long, not too square, exactly as Pia would have wanted. Her hands were folded into a dove on her torso. A pearl rosary was entwined in her slim fingers. The gray satin dress was ironed and smoothed. Muriel had feared she would burst into tears. Instead, she beamed. “Oh, Pia. You would be so happy. You look
perfect
.”

For a long time, Muriel knelt in place and silently stared. She marveled at the way Pia’s eyebrows arched into a sharp inverted V. The bridge of her nose was narrow and smooth, its tip a martini olive. Both cheekbones surfaced just under her eyes, as high as they could go, really, and her lips were fuller on the bottom than the top, ever so slightly tipped up at the corners. In close-up, the face she’d seen a thousand times looked entirely different. More human, somehow. Oddly, more alive.

Muriel reached her hand out to touch Pia’s face, but she stopped in midair, afraid that her sister’s skin might feel hard or cold. Would it be a mannequin’s cheek? That, she didn’t want to know. Forever she would rather remember Pia’s touch on the sunporch, her urgent grasp when she described having a child as seeing God on earth. Pulling her hand back, Muriel rested it on the soft railing of the kneeling pew. Then she continued to stare, struck by the privilege of time to memorize her sister’s face. No one was there to say, “God, Muriel. Take a picture, why don’t you?” No one could break the spell by pulling her away. For once, for the first time, Pia was all hers.

“It’s me,” she whispered, finally. “Muriel.”

Quickly, Muriel glanced behind her to make sure they were alone.

“I wanted to talk to you for a minute, Pia. Just us. One last time.”