Olivia (Logan 5)

Prologue

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Spring on the Cape always had a way of

surprising me. It was almost as if I never expected it would return. Winters could be long and dreary with days shaved down by the sharp-edge of night, but I never minded the gray skies and colder winds as much as other people did, especially my younger sister Belinda. For as long as I could remember, our schoolmates believed winter suited me better anyway. I don't recall exactly when or how it started, but one day someone referred to me as Miss Cold and Belinda as Miss Hot, and those labels followed us even to this day.

When she was a little girl, Belinda loved to burst out of the house, rush into the open air, catch the wind in her hair, and spin and laugh until she grew dizzy and fell on the sand, hysterical, excited, her eyes nearly as luminous as two birthday candles. Everything she did was an explosion. She never talked slowly, but always spoke as if she had the words crushing her lungs and had to get them out before she died. No matter what she did or said, it was usually punctuated at the end with her gasping, "I just had to tell you before I die!"

By twelve she was walking with a mature woman's swing in her hips, turning and dipping her shoulders, resembling a trained courtesan. She waved her hands about her like the fans of a geisha girl, pretending to hide her flirtatious eyes and beguiling smile between her small fingers. I saw grown men turn their heads and stare until they realized how young she was and then, almost always, take a second look just to confirm it, their faces dark with disappointment.

Her laughter was contagious. Whoever was around her at the time invariably broke into a wide smile as though she touched them with a magic wand to drive away the doldrums, their sadness or depression. People, especially boys, became blubbering amnesiacs in her presence, forgetting their responsibilities, their duties, their appointments and most of all, their own reputations. They would do the silliest things at her beck and call.

"You look like a frog, Tommy Carter. Let's hear you croak. Come on," she would taunt, and Tommy Carter, two years older, nearly a high-school senior, would crouch like a toad and go "Ribbet, ribbet," to a chorus of laughter and applause. A moment later Belinda was off, driving someone else to the precarious edge of sanity and dignity.

I always knew she would get into trouble. I just never realized how deep the pool of disaster would go. I tried to correct her behavior, teach her how to be more of a lady, and most of all, how to tread around boys and men with caution. They were always giving her gifts and she always accepted them, no matter how emphatically I warned her against it.

"It creates an obligation," I said. "Give these things back, Belinda. The most dangerous thing you can do is fill a young man's heart with false

promises."

"I don't ask them to give me things," she protested. "Well, maybe I hint at it, but I don't twist their arms. So I don't owe them a thing. Unless I want to owe them," she would add with a mischievous smile.

For some reason it was left mostly to me to give Belinda the guidance she so desperately needed.

Our mother eschewed the responsibility and obligations. She hated to hear anything nasty or see anything ugly. Her vocabulary was filled with euphemisms, words to hide the dark truths in our world. People didn't die, they "went away for good." Daddy was never mean to her. He was just "out of spirits." She made it sound as if spirits were something you could get at the gas station when your tank indicated empty. Whenever any of us were sick, she treated us as if it was our own fault. We caught colds out of carelessness and got bellyaches from eating the wrong foods. It was always the result of a poor choice we had made and if we would just try, it would all go away and everyone would be happy again.

"Close your eyes real tight and wish it away. That's what I do," she would say.

For me the worst thing was the way she viewed everything Belinda did. Her failures were never anything more than "just a temporary setback." Her pranks and little acts of mischief were always due to the "youth in her having its way. She'll grow out of it soon."

"Soon will never come, Mother," I would say with the authority of a clairvoyant.

But Mother never listened. She waved the air around her ears as if my words were nothing more than annoying flies. Any time I complained, I had "just risen from the wrong side of the bed."

Blink and it would all go away: the storms, the sickness, Belinda's bad behavior, Daddy's poor temperament, economic downswings, wars, pestilence, crime, all of it, would just go away along with anything else that was in the slightest way unpleasant.

Our mother's room was always filled with flowers. She hated dampness, musty odors. She filled her day with music-box tunes and actually wore rosetinted glasses because she hated "the dull colors, the way things faded, the annoying dark clouds that poked their bruised faces in our way."

Belinda, I decided, was far more like her than she was like our daddy. Both of us favored Mother's petite build, and it was clear early on that neither of us was ever going to be much more than five feet one or two. Mother was five feet one in her bare feet. Belinda was even smaller than I was, and, I would have to admit, had the most perfect face. Her eyes were bluer. Mine were more gray. She had a smaller nose, and her mouth was in perfect proportion. Her lips were always set in a soft twist that put a tiny dimple in her left cheek. When she was very little, Daddy would touch it with his finger and pretend it was a button. Belinda was then supposed to dance, and dance she did, flamboyant even at ages two and three.

Daddy would beam a smile so deep it went right to his heart as she turned and did pirouettes in the living room, always with her right forefinger pressed to the top of her head. Mother laughed and clapped as did any guests we had at the time.

"Can't Olivia dance, too?" Colonel Childs, one of Daddy's close friends, once asked. I'd look up and Daddy would stare at me a moment and then shake his head slowly, his eyes intense and firm on my face.

"No, Olivia doesn't dance. Olivia thinks," he said with an approving nod. "She plans and organizes. She's my little general."