The Story Sisters

The next morning a famine began. In the afternoon the roads were filled with frogs. By suppertime there was lightning. By early evening the birds all fell out of the trees.

They sent me to her because I was nothing, a cleaning girl.

I collected frogs in a jar as I went along. I took the charred wood from a tree hit by lightning and tied the twigs together in my shawl. I gathered the birds’ bones and kept them in my pocket.

At the well, I stopped and looked down into the black water. Nothing was reflected back. Only the rising moon.

It was night and the streets were empty. Everyone had locked their doors.

What do you have for me? the witch asked.

I gave her the frogs, the charred wood, the bones. She made a soup and offered me some. All over the county people were starving. My poor sisters were nothing but flesh and bone. I sat down to dinner. When the witch packed up to leave, I was already at the door.

HEALING TOOK TIME, EIGHT TO TEN WEEKS AT LEAST. CLAIRE had to undergo an intricate surgery. A metal rod was inserted into her left arm, and several pins were needed to repair her shattered elbow. She wore two heavy casts, from her wrists all the way up to her shoulders. She never once complained. She’d done what she had to, and now she bore the marks of her bravery. She didn’t say a word when she couldn’t feed herself or turn the pages of a book. She wasn’t even able to take a shower without first being wrapped in plastic. The most she could do was look out over Nightingale Lane from her window. She wanted to be as she imagined Elv would have been had she been the one to be injured: a girl who couldn’t be broken, who refused to feel pain. But Claire’s arms still hurt and she couldn’t get comfortable. Sometimes she cried in her sleep.

Claire never told Elv that she still dreamed about Central Park. It seemed so babyish and silly. Her dreams were nightmares of grass and blood. She urged the horse to leap, but he stumbled and tilted over. Sometimes Claire startled in the middle of the night, awakened by her own soft sobs. As the world came into focus and her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could make out Meg’s sleeping form and the outlines of their room. There was the pale wallpaper with its cream and lemon stripes, and the three white bureaus with their glass knobs, and the tall shelf filled with books. On some nights Elv was gone, her bed empty. Perhaps she could drift in and out of Arnelle, disappearing down the secret staircase at will, leaving her sisters behind.

When Claire heard the dusty leaves of the hawthorn hit against each other in the dark, she knew Elv was out there, perched in one of the highest branches. You had to look through the dark to see her, but she was there, breathing in the cool night air. That man wasn’t a teacher at their school when they went back in the fall, but Elv whispered that you could never be too careful. She was looking out at the pavement, the asphalt, the trees with their swelling branches. It was so quiet Nightingale Lane seemed like the gateway to the otherworld.

Claire couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened on the afternoon of their grandparents’ anniversary party if Elv hadn’t told her about the horses in the park. How would the day have ended if there’d been no mention of skin and bones and bravery? Perhaps the horse would still be alive. Claire got a shivery feeling thinking about it. She’d felt the same when she was eight and her parents got divorced. All the trees in the yard were covered with gypsy moth cocoons. The whole world seemed spun up in gray thread. People said they wanted to help you, then they did exactly the opposite. She felt safer with Elv out there in the tree.

In the afternoons, when she returned home from school, Elv always brought Claire a cup of soft vanilla ice cream. She fed her with a plastic spoon. She’d get into bed and tell stories about the three sisters of Arnelle. Each had a special task: one to find love, one to find peace, one to find herself. The sisters had a bond no one could break. That was something Claire understood. She and Elv spent more time together after the accident. Meg was busy with after-school activities—the school newspaper, painting lessons, the French club—but Elv came home early, skipping dance class. She murmured to their mother that she was quitting dance in order to help out with Claire, but there was another reason as well. She didn’t like to look at herself in the mirror at the dance studio. She didn’t think she was as graceful as the other girls. She was too tall, too clumsy. Her teacher, Mrs. Keen, insisted she had real talent. She’d come into the locker room while the other girls went in to warm up and told Elv it was time for her to be serious about her work. All Elv had to do was make the commitment. A dancer’s life was one of both commitment and sacrifice. She was such a beautiful girl, she could have whatever she wanted. Elv had sat in the locker room afterward. Things echoed in there. The air was heavy and smelled of sweat. She could feel the beginnings of her black wings. She was from Arnelle, a stolen girl. Mrs. Keen hadn’t seen who she was. She didn’t know the first thing about her. That was when she’d begun skipping classes.

“Which sister am I?” Claire wanted to know when she was told that the old Queen was looking for someone to take her place. The next in line must be able to place her hand inside the mouth of a lion, her arm inside the jaws of a snake, her entire body into a nest of red fire ants. She must be able to tell the true from the false with her eyes closed. The scent of a lie was the stench of turpentine, dirty wash-water, green soap. She must be able to escape from ropes and metal boxes, to spy treachery from a distance.

“You’re the best sister, Gigi.” That was Elv’s nickname for Claire, taken from gig, the Arnish word for sister. Elv’s long black hair was pinned up. She stroked Claire’s head, which was filled with knots from spending so much time in bed and from sleeping so fitfully.

“No,” Claire said. “That’s you.”

Elv curled up closer. She spoke in a whisper. “Once upon a time I saw a demon on the road. I ran away, but then I realized I’d left you behind.”

“You came back for me,” Claire said.

Elv linked her arms around her sister. They both laughed when one of Claire’s casts bonked against the side of the bed.

“Le kilka lastil,” Elv said. You could kill someone with that.

“Je ne je hailil,” Claire said. I would if I had to.

“No, you wouldn’t.” Elv smiled. “You’re the good-hearted sister.”

Meg came home, her backpack overflowing. She sat at the foot of the bed. She knew her sisters stopped their conversations whenever she was around. “Everyone’s talking about you at school,” she told Claire. “You’re famous.”

“No,” Claire said. “I’m not.”

“Oh, yes,” Meg insisted. “Über famous. ‘Page Six’ famous.”

Evidently there had been an article in the New York Post about the mistreatment of carriage horses. The reporter had mentioned the girl from North Point Harbor who’d done her best to control a runaway horse. There were animal rights activists who had built a shrine to her and the fallen horse in Central Park, on the Great Lawn. It was made out of horseshoes and stones. People brought flowers and left them strewn about the grass.

“Se breka dell minta,” Elv said solemnly.

We should all bring you roses.

“Well, I brought homework instead.” Meg brought forth the papers and books she’d picked up in Claire’s homeroom. “I’ll read the questions, then you answer and I’ll write them down.”

“Why don’t you just do it for her?” Elv said. “It would be much easier.”

“Because I don’t know how she would answer.” Meg had the habit of chewing on pencils, even though she was afraid it might give her lead poisoning. She had recently found she had a lot of nervous habits. More and more often, she wanted to be alone. She wished she could move into one of the smaller bedrooms downstairs, but she didn’t want to hurt her sisters’ feelings. She couldn’t wait to go to college. She went to the school library to sift through college catalogs whenever she had a free period at school.

“Well, I do,” Elv said. “I know her inside out.”

Elv grabbed the homework assignment. It was a report on a European capital. Elv began to write about Paris. She wrote about the Louvre, where the girls had spent hours on their last visit. Later, when Elv read the report out loud, Claire told her not to change a thing. She had gotten it all right, even Claire’s stop after the museum at her favorite ice cream shop, Berthillon. “Favorite flavor?” Elv had asked. All three sisters had shouted out “Vanilla” at the same time. Even Meg knew the answer to that. Claire never varied from her one and only choice. She refused to try a new flavor. For some reason, answering in unison made them feel happy, as if nothing would ever change, and they would always know one another completely, even if no one else did.

ANNIE HADN’T PUNISHED Claire after the incident with the horse. People said her girls would become sullen and spoiled if she weren’t stricter. They said that adolescence was the time when girls flirted with destiny. But Annie was convinced there was no need for Claire to pay any further for her mistake. At the end of the month Claire understood why: spending spring vacation locked away was punishment enough. They were all supposed to go to Paris to visit their grandparents, but when school let out, only Meg and Elv went to France. The sisters had never been separated before. For the first time Claire was alone in their attic bedroom. At night when the leaves of the hawthorn tree rustled, she covered her head with her blanket. She didn’t like being twelve. It was someplace between who she’d been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all. She had to count to a thousand in order to fall asleep. She missed having Elv out in the tree, keeping watch. She missed Meg’s sleepy, even breathing.

In Paris, Meg curled up out on the couch in the red-lacquered parlor of her grandparents’ home and wrote postcards to Claire. Meg was lonely and bored. Books didn’t comfort her and even the ice cream at Berthillon wasn’t as good this year. There should have been three of them, three was the right number. Paris wasn’t the same, she complained. The weather was cold and rainy. A warm sweater and wool socks were necessary at all times. There was an old stone trough in the courtyard that had once been used to water horses but this year it had filled with ice, then cracked. The season had been so cold the buds on the chestnut tree never opened; the white buds were pasty and waterlogged around the edges, the glossy leaves more black than green. Plus, Meg and Elv weren’t getting along. They got on each other’s nerves and disagreed over everything.

“Let’s not stay cooped up,” Elv had said to Meg one evening. Recently it had crossed her mind that if she didn’t know the human world, she couldn’t defend herself against it. She had to experience everything. Go behind enemy lines. “We should go out after Ama and Grandpa are asleep.”

When Meg had refused, unable or unwilling to break the rules, Elv had taken to sneaking out alone at night, tiptoeing down the back staircase, slipping through the cobbled courtyard. Each excursion was the work of a daring anthropologist: Where do lovers meet? Where can peril be found, and how is it best avoided? Where do squatters live? Can demons be avoided if you don’t have the strength or the time to turn and run?

When she read Meg’s cards, Claire couldn’t help but wonder if Elv was going off to Arnelle, if she’d found the gate under the chestnut tree, if she knocked three times, then whispered a faerie greeting. When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you’re with me always.

That was what Elv had written on her postcard to Claire. She sat on a bench on the quay, overlooking the Seine while she wrote. She was barefoot, hunched over, scribbling furiously with a pen filled with pale green ink that she’d bought at a stationery store on the Rue de Rivoli. Paris had never been more beautiful, she told her sister, writing in Arnish. I feel free here. Me sura di falin. No one will hurt us now.

Elv had come to believe that if she did whatever she was most afraid of, its power over her would evaporate. She held on to metal railings. She went into boulangeries and looked at loaves of bread, and she didn’t disappear the way most faeries would have. She tied her ankles together with rope, then slit the knots with a knife. If she had known these tricks, she might have been able to escape after she rescued Claire. She had come to believe that evil repelled evil, while good collected it. She could see it happening in the parks. The dark lacelike scrim, the goblins astride the billowy trees, the demons drawn to purity, unnoticed by women on the benches, children at play. A clever girl met evil on its own terms. She didn’t get caught unawares. Elv bought a pair of black pointy boots at the flea market. She took up smoking, even though it made her choke. She kept at it until she stopped coughing. She could get used to anything. That’s what she had decided. She perfected a look that said Go away in every language, most especially in Arnish. It was as though she now possessed her own arsenal of weapons. She didn’t mind that men looked at her. Their attraction to her only added to her power.

All the while Meg lay in her bed reading novels, writing her whiny postcards, Elv was exploring the human world. She could feel herself growing stronger. She no longer panicked if the wind came up, if a stranger walked by. She wasn’t the least bit spooked when the leaves on the trees rattled, always a sign of rain. The rain in Paris was beautiful, anyway, cold and clean and green. The Queen had told her that if she faced whatever she feared most, she would win the right to sit on the Arnish throne. Water, sex, death. Elv wrote the words in green ink on the back of a postcard. She folded the card into threes and kept it under her pillowcase.

One night Elv woke Meg from a deep sleep. It was late at night. Their ama’s guest room with its two twin beds was bathed in blue light. Elv had brought home a kitten someone had tried to drown. She’d had to wade far into the water to save it. All the while she had a fluttery feeling in her chest. She imagined the water rising over her. She imagined she could no longer breathe. He had done that to her when she started screaming. She thought about her vow to the Queen of Arnelle. Water, sex, death. In an instant, her fear was gone. It was only green water, dirty and cold. She reached out and grabbed.

“It’s tiny,” Meg said of the kitten when Elv brought it out of the sopping burlap sack it had been tossed into. “Poor thing. It will probably die.”

“It’s not going to die,” Elv said firmly. Why was it that Meg had to try and ruin everything?

The kitten was indeed starving and soon began yowling so loudly their ama came running into the guest bedroom, convinced one of the girls had been struck by appendicitis. Elv should have been in trouble for being out at night, but instead she talked Natalia into letting the cat stay. They named it Sadie and gave it a bowl of cream.

“We won’t tell your grandpa,” Natalia said. “One day he’ll look down and he’ll notice a cat and he’ll think it has always been here. Anyway, she’s a darling creature. Who would mind a little thing like her.”

Elv looked elated, though her shoes were sloshy with river water and her clothes were soaked. “You have a good heart,” Natalia said to her. Before she went out, she kissed Elv’s forehead. Meg had felt herself burning.

Elv was singing to herself. She ripped off all of her clothes and left them in a dank pile in the corner. She was a woman and beautiful and fearless and the queen-to-be. She struck her fear of water off her list.

“You’re going to get in trouble if you keep going out at night,” Meg told her.

“I don’t care,” Elv shot back. “Anyway, trouble can find you anywhere. It’s probably under your bed right now.”

THE BEST PART of the trip was the art classes the girls took with Madame Cohen, at least in Meg’s opinion. Elv only seemed interested in sleeping the days away so that she’d be refreshed when she sneaked out at night. The girls had been acquainted with their grandmother’s dearest friend since they were little and had often visited her jewelry store. Her stupid grandsons were sometimes there as well, but the Story sisters ignored them; the boys couldn’t even speak English. But they respected Madame Cohen. She had once been a watercolorist of some note. She had gone to art school in Paris and Vienna. She was a stern teacher who wore black even in the summer heat, still in mourning for her husband, who’d been gone nearly twenty years. The girls went to sit with her in the kitchenette behind the jewelry shop each day. Elv was sleepy from her wanderings. Sometimes she was so rude she actually put her head on the table and closed her eyes while they were supposed to be painting. Instead of punishing her, Madame Cohen gave her a cup of espresso. Elv didn’t even try and her watercolors were beautiful. She only used shades of green. When asked why, she said, “I’ve been studying the river.” Once she made a black painting and when Meg said, “I thought you were only painting the river,” Elv laughed and said, “Can’t you see what that is?”

Madame Cohen had peered over. “It’s the Seine at night.”

Elv had nodded, surprised.

“I think it looks like a shoe,” Meg said.

“Sisters shouldn’t argue. I was one of three sisters myself,” Madame Cohen said ruefully. She knew there was evil in the world. She’d seen it with her own eyes. She never talked about the past and was surprised to find herself doing so now. She was older than the girls’ grandmother by several years. You didn’t see how old she was unless you looked very carefully. Her skin was patterned with very fine lines that made Elv think of the way leaves are veined, how beautiful they are when sunlight filters through.

“May I have more paper?” Meg asked.

“What happened to them?” Elv wanted to know.

Madame Cohen was well aware of the black scrim that stretched above parks and playgrounds. She saw it over her own roof sometimes. Just now, a black bug was trying to get in the window, bumping against the glass. You would think it was nothing, unless you knew better.

“They’re gone.” Madame Cohen clapped her hands together. That was enough of the past. “If you go out at night, I hope you’re careful,” she told Elv. Nearly everyone in the neighborhood had heard the stories of the girl who crept out of her grandparents’ apartment house, then slipped off her boots so no one would hear the clatter of her heels on the cobblestones. It was the sort of neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else’s business, or at least tried to.

Elv smiled and said she certainly would try her best, even though they both knew that being careful was only good for so much.

“I have a bad feeling,” Madame Cohen told her dear friend Natalia that same week. It was late and no one knew where Elv had gone off to. She’d told her grandmother she was going to the bookshop, but Natalia had checked and she hadn’t been there. Plus, Elv had worn a short black dress, black boots, and she’d lined her eyes with kohl she’d found in her grandmother’s old makeup kit. That did not seem like bookstore attire.

“All girls need their secrets,” Natalia said. “It’s part of growing up. She’s about to turn sixteen, after all. Not a child.”

“They may need their secrets,” her friend replied. “But do they want them?”

MEG SENT CLAIRE a watercolor of the chestnut tree in the courtyard, which Claire taped to the wall above her bed. She stared at it every night, but it was difficult to tell whether there were white flowers on the tree’s branches, or dozens of doves, or if perhaps stars had fallen from the sky, only to be caught in a net of leaves. When Meg wrote about Elv’s black painting, Claire found herself wanting that one instead. She thought she would be able to see the river, even if Meg could not.

Claire lay on her bed in her dark room, feeling sorry for herself. She loved Paris and ice cream and art. She loved her grandmother’s parlor with its red-lacquered walls and the terrace where birds came to perch, begging for crumbs. She didn’t know how Meg could be miserable at their ama’s or how she could be lonely when Elv was right there or why she didn’t dare go to see how many colors of green the river could be.

To cheer Claire, Annie spent huge amounts of time with her. She’d turn on the CD player and they’d sing along to Beatles songs and that was great fun. Or Annie would read from Anne of Green Gables or Robin Hood, or from old volumes of Nancy Drew that were hokey enough to make them both laugh. They watched movies for hours, all of Annie’s favorites, Charade and Alfie and Four Weddings and a Funeral. They watched Two for the Road so many times they could both repeat the dialogue by heart.

Claire had never had her mother all to herself and it was lovely to be the center of attention. She even taught her a few words of Arnish. Melina was summer. Henaj meant dog. But afterward Claire felt she’d betrayed her sisters. It was their secret, after all. Secrets were only good if you kept them; otherwise they were worthless. That was why Claire didn’t tell their mother when Meg wrote that there was a man who’d been hovering around Elv. He stood waiting for her out past the courtyard, besotted. He called out Elv’s name while they were all seated at the dinner table. Their grandfather, Martin, asked if anyone heard anything and Elv smiled and said, no, she hadn’t heard anything at all. Later, when Meg had asked who he was, Elv had merely shrugged. “Nacree,” she’d said in Arnish. Nobody.

“There’s a man following your granddaughter around town,” Madame Cohen told Madame Rosen one day when they were playing cards out on the balcony. The weather had cleared. The girls were going home the following afternoon.

“She’s beautiful. Lots of men will be showing up.”

But Madame Cohen could see accidents before they happened. She saw one now. “Your granddaughter may not be looking for trouble, but trouble is looking for her.”

“She’s high-spirited,” Natalia said. “Girls her age are meant to have adventures.”

“He works in a bar, Natalia, dear.” Madame Cohen sighed. “This is not some first love. He’s thirty years old. I hear he’s married.”

“We’ll take the girls to the airport first thing in the morning,” Natalia decided.

“Good idea,” her friend agreed, even though she knew that it was quite possible for trouble to find a girl anywhere.

Meg was in the parlor. She couldn’t help but overhear. If her grandmother knew the half of it, she would have been shocked. When Elv sneaked in at night she was barefoot, holding her black boots in her hand, smelling like tobacco and perfume and something that Meg didn’t recognize, the scent of something burning. Meg always pretended to be asleep, but Elv knew better. One night she had sat on the edge of her sister’s bed. “He’ll do anything I tell him to. He’d die for me, he said.”

Meg had kept her eyes closed.

“I know you’re listening.” Elv had a rush of adrenaline when she broke rules. She wondered if that was what warriors experienced in the moments before battle. It was like jumping off a bridge. You had to do the thing you were afraid of; after a while you didn’t feel anything. That was how it was whenever she was with Louis. He was the fool who felt something, not her. Maybe that’s why she’d chosen him. He was a way for her to learn how to manage what life had brought her.

“I hope you never know the things I know,” Elv told her sister. “I hope you read your books and think that’s what life is.”

Meg had thought Elv might be tearing up, but she didn’t dare look. Elv slunk off to bed and then it was too late to ask why she went with that man if it only made her cry.