Sleight by Kirsten Kaschock

sleight, lived for color. And in spite—or because—of her occasional and embarrassingly typical bruises, their mother loved Marvel with an effort that made the love enviable.
    After Marvel effectively put an end to matinees at the theater, the art museum was the refuge of the mismatched trio. It was always just the three of them—there was no extended family, no chatty, cheek-pinching aunts to duck. Byrne sometimes wished there had been. Twice a week all summer long, once school was out, she’d take them on the bus into Milwaukee. Byrne’s father was at work; the museum lobby was free and air-conditioned, and only rarely were they approached by an apologetic docent and asked to either enter or leave. On those occasions they’d hang out at the edge of the lake, Marvel whipping rocks at gulls, Byrne writing his name back and forth across the sand with a stick. Sometimes, their mother would have money for admission to the museum proper. Byrne often brought books, but Marvel could sit inside the same painting for an hour or more. Byrne couldn’t remember what his mother did. Disappear into the art like Marvel? Nap upright on a far bench? He remembered how exhaustion strung her out like paper dolls—how thinly she held onto herself, to imitations of herself. Maybe she went to the restroom to cry noiselessly, like at the dishes. If so, she would’ve reapplied her makeup before coming out. She was always remarkably put together, considering. Her husband worked six days a week as a laundryman at the veterans’ hospital, plus Saturdays at a friend’s garage to get them by, to meet their ends. Didn’t she have lip gloss that smelled like apricots? Byrne thought he remembered that.
    Their father knew they sometimes went—the museum wasn’t forbidden, not like sleight. He’d gone himself, once or twice. There were things he’d done for her. Rare, small things. Byrne remembered his father had liked the illustrators Wyeth and Remington. Even the room with the Hopper was okay because you could see what he meant. Byrne would’ve liked to ridicule this, but Gil’s need for meaning had never seemed ridiculous to Byrne. His father cohered, having amputated the parts of himself that bled beyond the frame. Why shouldn’t he expect the same from art? Others? And because his father’s faults accrued with this truncated sort of logic, Byrne’s hatred of him had always remained clean. Surgical.
    His mother Byrne hated with less precision. The last time Byrne had been to visit her, at her suggestion they’d gone to the newly constructed monstrosity at the museum, and he’d worked to tune her out as she spoke not of his father’s death or Byrne’s own subsequent aimlessness, but of his brother’s untapped promise. Under the great vault and spine of Windhover Hall, Byrne had felt that he was inside the ribcage of a massive leviathan, an ancient creature washed up dead and fleshless out of the bowels of Lake Michigan. Failing to be uplifted by white columns or the vertical thrust of the hall’s backbone, he dwelled instead on how the opening of the brise-soleil, the structure above the building so reminiscent of a whale’s tail just before a long submersion, left those inside both exposed—and trapped.
    His mother had once given him words and Marvel color. She hadn’t been projecting her own artistic nature—she’d never shown any evidence of a nature. She’d moved them through realms banned by and merely unnerving to their father. But for what? She told her two boys over and over how extraordinary they were, until that—along with the statement, I don’t believe anymore, which Byrne had heard her say once in hushed vehemence over the phone—became to him the mantras of her identity. And his. Byrne’s mother had given birth to extraordinary sons. And he didn’t believe anymore.
    Even when Marvel started going terribly wrong—soon after Gil’s death—she would only say, “Your brother is not of the usual stuff,