The Story Sisters

“Jealous?” Meg laughed. She didn’t sound very happy.

“It started in Paris and you know it. You couldn’t stand that you didn’t have the guts to do what I did.”

“You mean sleep all day? Or be a whore?”

Elv reached over and slapped her sister. “You’re a jealous bitch and you know it.”

Meg clutched at her burning cheek.

“You wanted to blame me for cutting your hair, but that was your decision. It’s not my fault you’re ugly.”

“Stop it!” Claire said.

“I told you,” Meg said to Claire. “This is who she is.”

Elv went to the open window and slipped outside. Claire got up, grabbed the shoebox, and replaced it in the closet. “Mom can’t find this.”

“Are you taking her side?” Meg said.

“No.” Claire slipped on a pair of flip-flops. She wished Meg had never poked around in the closet. She wished she had left things alone.

“You are. You always do.”

“That’s not true.”

“You’re no better than Justin Levy. Another one of her slaves.”

“You don’t even know her,” Claire said coldly. “You just think you do.”

CLAIRE WENT DOWNSTAIRS, then out the back door to the garden. Behind her the house was quiet. There was the muffled sound of the TV as their mother watched the news. The evening was pale, the air unmoving. There was Elv, sitting beneath the arbor, smoking a cigarette. Her white T-shirt clung to her. She was barefoot, and the soles of her feet were dark with soil. Her black hair hung to her waist. She didn’t look anything like them anymore. She looked like the queen of a country that was too far away to visit. There were moths in the garden, fluttering about blindly. The bedroom light was turned off now. Meg had probably slipped into bed, crying the way she did, quietly, so as not to disturb anyone.

“You shouldn’t have been so mean to her,” Claire told Elv.

“That wasn’t mean. It was honest. She is a bitch.”

“She said I was like Justin Levy.”

“Yeah, right. Justin is pathetic and you’re brave. If anything, you’re opposites. Meg doesn’t have a clue.” Elv suddenly threw up her hands. “Don’t come any closer,” she warned.

Claire stopped where she was.

There was a tiny bird in her path. Both sisters knelt. “He fell out of his nest.” Elv picked up the fledgling. “He’s a robin.”

Claire was startled by how fragile the baby bird was. She could see through its skin to its beating heart. There were only a few stray, luminous feathers.

The girls went in search of the nest, but they couldn’t find it in the dark. There were spiderwebs that were frightening to walk through. Claire kept brushing them away, even when they were no longer there. The crickets were calling. Elv sat down in the wet grass. She looked so sad and beautiful. She was everything Claire wanted to be.

“It’s too late anyway,” Elv decided. “Even if we did find the nest, he’s hardly alive. Do you want to hold him?” The Queen of Arnelle had decreed this was to be. Water, sex, death. This was number three. There was no way to save him.

Claire sat beside her and Elv slipped a hand atop hers. She let the bird settle into Claire’s palm. Claire could feel it shudder. Its heart was beating so fast it reminded her of a moth’s wings.

“Maybe we should say a prayer,” she suggested.

“You do it, Gigi. You’re good at that kind of thing.”

Claire felt emboldened by Elv’s praise. “Your life has been short,” she began in a serious voice, “but it has been as important as any other life.”

Claire heard something then. It was Elv, crying.

“Don’t look at me,” Elv said. She tried to think about the way time could go backward, far back, to the time when she was in the tent with her mother in the garden. There had been twelve princesses who had danced the night away in one of the stories her mother had told her. Twelve brothers had turned into swans.

“Okay.” Claire lowered her eyes, stunned.

“Go ahead,” Elv urged. “Finish.”

“We hope you find peace.” Claire was thrown by Elv’s show of emotion. She ended the prayer as quickly as she could. She was probably doing it all wrong. She wasn’t as good as Elv thought she was. “We hope you’re blessed.”

The sisters could hear one another breathing and the whir of the crickets. There was the tangled thrum of traffic from Main Street. Sound echoed for blocks on a clear night.

“Close your eyes,” Elv said now.

“Why?”

The whole world seemed alive. The air was filled with gnats and mosquitoes and moths.

“Just for a minute,” Elv said. “Trust me.”

Claire closed her eyes. After a time the robin didn’t move anymore.

“Okay. It’s over,” Elv said. “You can open them now.”

The robin seemed even smaller, nothing but skin and bones. Elv went to the garage and got a shovel. She had faced the third fear on her list. Tonight she could tear up the postcard with the green ink. She came back and dug a hole beneath the privet hedge. Her face was streaked with tears. She shoveled dirt so fast she seemed more angry than upset. Claire was too much in awe to offer to help. When Elv was done, she tore off the bottom of her favorite T-shirt from Paris and carefully wrapped up the robin. Claire had never loved anyone more than she loved Elv at that moment. She felt something in the back of her throat that hurt. She felt lucky to have come outside, to have found her sister in the garden, to be with her in the dark.

After the burial they went back to the garden. They ducked under a net of vines and sat down cross-legged beside a row of cabbages. Nobody liked cabbages, not even their mother. They were a total waste of time. Elv lit a cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. The night was so dark the smoke looked green. The rest of the world seemed far away. Without warning, Elv lurched forward. At first Claire thought she was about to be slapped, like Meg, but instead Elv threw her arms around her. She hugged her tightly, then backed way. When she lifted her T-shirt to wipe her tearstained face Claire saw she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She looked like a creature who belonged in the garden, who slept beneath leaves and spoke to earthworms and threaded white moths through her long black hair. She didn’t seem quite human. Claire got a funny feeling then, the way Elv must have felt when she saw the bag with the other cat floating away. The one she hadn’t been able to rescue.

In the summer of the gypsy moths when everything changed, when Elv was eleven and Claire was eight and Meg had stayed home sick, they had walked home from the stop sign in the dark. Elv had been gone for ten hours. She was still wearing her bathing suit, but no shoes. They were gone. They held hands and went along the empty lane. Their mother scolded them when they got home. She told them to go upstairs and they would talk about their disappearance in the morning. Elv said it was her fault, and that Claire couldn’t find her way home without her. Elv was going to be punished for coming home so late, but she didn’t care. When she and Claire went upstairs, she got into bed, her knees drawn up. Meg was sprawled out on her own bed, reading Great Expectations.

“Have you ever read this?” she called to Elv.

Elv turned to the wall. Arnelle was like a black seed in the center of her chest.

Claire got into bed beside her. Elv smelled like ashes and garden soil. There were leaves in her beautiful long hair.

“It’s about a boy who thinks he has no future, but then it turns out he does,” Meg said. “It’s a complicated mystery about fate and love.”

Elv felt cold. Claire wrapped her arms around her. There was no way for her to ever thank her sister, no words that would ever do. Something bad had happened to Elv instead of to her. Elv’s bathing suit was still damp but she hadn’t bothered to take it off.

That was when Claire knew they would never tell.

IN THE GARDEN, on this night when the robin had died in their hands, June bugs flitted overhead. Elv shooed them away. The sisters were sitting beside the row of cabbages. No one knew where they were. They might have been a hundred miles away; they might have slipped down the steps that led underground. It would be August before they knew it. Elv bent forward to whisper. Her face was hot and tearstained. In the human world you had to choose your loyalties carefully. You had to see through to someone’s heart. Elv’s long hair grazed Claire’s face. “You’re nothing like her, you know.” The garden was so dark they could only see each other’s faces. That and nothing more. “You’re much more like me.”

Swan

My sister stayed in her room, hiding. She gazed at the sky and cried. You’d think she’d be happy to be human, but she kept talking about needing her freedom. I had lost sister after sister; was I supposed to lose her, too? She stood on the ledge outside the window. She had only one arm; if she started to fall she would dash to pieces on the rocks below.

I went out at midnight to gather the reeds, though there were wild dogs and men who thought of murder. I carried sharp needles and sticks. At night I wove the reeds together while my sister cried. When I was done, I threw the cape over her. She changed into a bird and flew away.

I watched until she looked like a cloud. Now she was free. Well, so was I. I walked to the city and got a job. I had a talent after all. When people asked if I had a family I didn’t mention that once I’d had twelve sisters. I said I took care of myself. I said I liked it that way, and after a while I meant it.

AT THIS TIME OF YEAR THE STORY SISTERS HAD TOMATOES at every meal. Fried tomatoes battered with bread crumbs, rich tomato soup with celery and basil and cream, salads of yellow tomatoes drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Once a pot of simmering preserves were left on the stove and forgotten; the girls dubbed the remaining mixture Black Death Tomatoes, delicious when spooned onto toast. They told tomato jokes: Why did the tomato turn red? Because he saw the salad dressing! How do you fix a broken tomato? Tomato paste! They tried crazy recipes that took hours to complete: tomato mousse, tomato sherbet, green tomato cake. But this summer Elv declared she was allergic to tomatoes. She insisted they gave her hives. She wouldn’t eat a single one. She pushed her plate away, no matter how much work or effort their mother had put into the meal. Elv didn’t care. She would eat what she pleased. She would do as she wanted. She said it quietly, but everyone heard.

The scent of the sultry vines in the garden in August always reminded the Story sisters of their mother, who they sometimes saw crying as she weeded between the rows. They wondered if she was still in love with their father or if it was something else that made her cry. Elv guessed she was feeling sorry for herself. Claire thought it best not to pester her with questions. Meg went out to ask if she needed anything, perhaps some help with the weeding. Annie gave her middle daughter a hug. After that they often worked together, late in the day, when the sun was low but the mosquitoes weren’t yet out. The quiet and the company were a tonic to them both.

Meg was fifteen now, a studious, lovely girl. She wore glasses and spent a great deal of time on her own. Of all the Story sisters, she more than anyone reminded Annie of herself at that age: shy, serious, a fanatical reader. Meg had a job as a counselor-in-training at a summer camp. She was beloved by her campers. Every afternoon she had a book club, which quickly became the summer’s favorite activity. The little girls tried to sit next to her so that they could have the honor of turning pages. They all began to wear velvet headbands, just like Meg, and several campers went home and asked their mothers if they could have their hair cut short.

Yet Meg remained a bit of a mystery to Annie. She was something of an outsider, even with her sisters. Well, all the girls were enigmatic, secretive. Elv and Claire still chattered in that language of theirs and laughed over private jokes. But they kept quiet when Meg entered the room. There was some bad blood between them that Annie didn’t understand.

“I wish I knew what they were saying,” Annie blurted to Meg one day as they worked in the garden, filling a barrel with the dusty weeds they had gathered.

“It’s nothing worth hearing. They think they’re better than everyone, that’s all.”

Arnelle no longer held any interest for Meg. Privately, she denounced not only the language but the world. There was a war going on there—faeries were set against demons and human beings. The stories Elv told were filled with brutal atrocities, some so awful they made Meg wince and cover her ears. Swans were murdered, their bloody feathers plucked out. Roses were hexed, turned into thorns that pierced hands and eyes and hearts. The more vivid and alarming the stories were, the more engaged Elv was in their telling. There was a man named Grimin she wanted to murder. Together she and Claire plotted the ways that would cause the most lingering pain: boiled in oil, pecked at by ravens, locked into an iron box with a swarm of bees.

Bees, Claire had decided. Thousands of them, the killer kind, from South America.

In the evenings, Annie and Meg sat out on the porch, reading novels in the fading August light. As for Elv, she’d found a job at the ice cream shop. It was a far cry from Berthillon, just a crummy stand that offered soft custard. Elv felt humiliated being in such a second-rate place. But she wanted her own money, her own timetable. When she came in at night she smelled of hot fudge and sulfur. She never told the truth about anything. Not to her mother, not to people in town, not to her customers, whom she often shortchanged, not even to herself. What people called the truth seemed worthless to her; what was it but a furtive, bruised story to convince yourself life was worth living.

ELV WENT OUT every night, the door slamming behind her. She was barefoot, sullen, in a rush. “See you,” she would call over her shoulder to Claire, the only one she bothered to speak to, the only one who knew who she was.

“Later, alligator,” Claire would call back, wishing she was old enough to go with her.

Annie always asked when Elv would be back, even though she knew what the answer would be.

“Whenever,” Elv would say, aloof, impatient.

“Do you want me to follow her?” Meg asked one evening when the trees on Nightingale Lane were so green they appeared black, melancholy in the darkening sky. There were bands of clouds swarming across the horizon.

Annie had shaken her head. “If anyone should follow her, it should be me.”

Annie slipped off her sandals. The soles of her feet were dusty. She marveled at the way Elv could ramble all over town without shoes. Nothing ever seemed to hurt her, not stones or glass or twigs. Their town was safer than most, with a nearly zero crime rate, but you never knew what could happen to a girl all alone. Down at the harbor there were said to be wild parties going on. The police regularly drove past on patrol, but the parties went on out on the sand-bars. No one knew how the local kids managed to get so many kegs of beer, but they did. No one knew where the drugs came from, but they were there as well. Once, on her way home from the market in the evening, Annie spied a group of teenagers down by the bay, huddled near the flagpole in the park. They didn’t look like bad kids. Annie stopped her car and got out to talk to them. Most of them scattered, but a few stayed, laughing and nervous to be approached by an adult. When Annie asked if Elv was around, they all looked away. One of the boys snickered. Annie heard some of the girls laughing as she walked back to the car.

Thinking of that group of kids and their reaction to Elv’s name, Annie suddenly grabbed for her shoes. “I’m going.”

“You can’t stop her from doing anything. She wouldn’t even get in the car with you.”

“I could ground her. Take away TV privileges. I could make her stay in for the rest of the summer.”

“Mom,” Meg said sadly.

“I could lock her in the bedroom.”

“She would climb out the window.”

They could still see Elv, disappearing down the lane, stopping to pat the old basset hound on the Weinsteins’ lawn before she disappeared into the gathering dark. She was like a shadow, something you imagined and couldn’t quite grasp. When she wasn’t at the ice cream shop, she was heading for the bridge. The group who banded together had bad reputations, but at least they knew how to have a good time. Yet even those girls stayed away from her, making sure to clutch their boyfriends when Elv was nearby. She seemed dangerous even to them, willing to try anything. Give her a pill and she’d take it, offer her a drink and she was always willing to accept. Her cool bravery was legendary. Justin Levy had seen her flustered, though. Once when they were down at the beach she saw a car in the parking lot and bolted. She was shivering by the time Justin caught up with her on Main Street.

“Is he still there?” she’d said to him. She was wearing her bathing suit, a damp towel wrapped around her. She didn’t even think about calling the police. All she thought of was running.

Justin shrugged, confused. She’d made him jog back to check.

“No cars in the parking lot,” he assured her when he returned, out of breath, her loyal messenger.

After that Elv continued to allow Justin to tag along until he foolishly proclaimed his love for her. He was getting tiresome. By the middle of August, she’d had enough.

“What’s wrong with me?” Justin had asked mournfully when she told him to stop stalking her.

If Elv was someone else, she would have said It’s not you, it’s me—that’s what everyone said to get out of someone’s grasp. Instead, she was honest with Justin.

“You’re not who I’m looking for,” she replied. She was looking for someone who had no fear of iron or ropes. An escape artist, that’s what she wanted. A man who could turn her inside out, make her feel something, because nothing else seemed to. She could sit in the bedroom closet and cut herself with a razor and still feel nothing at all. She could pass her hand above a candle and when it flamed up have no reaction. All she had to do was close her eyes.

Justin had actually cried when she dumped him, as if to prove her point.

“Oh my God, Justin. Find somebody nice. Someone better than me. I am the last person you should be with. You should thank me for giving you this advice.”

After that, whenever Justin saw her he didn’t say hello. He took to wearing a black coat even though it was August. He wore sunglasses at night. People started laughing at him.

“You look like an idiot,” Elv said when she next ran into him. It was at the tea shop and she was there with Brian Preston, who was known for his drug use and also for burning down his family’s summer house in the Berkshires. Brian was stupid and good-looking and entertaining. “At least take off your sunglasses,” Elv told Justin.

When he did, she could tell he’d been crying again. Didn’t anybody see what the real world was like? She felt repulsed by his weakness. Mr. Weinstein down the street had died and now his bassett hound was on the lawn all the time. Mrs. Weinstein didn’t allow the dog in the house and whenever she passed him Elv felt like crying herself. She had to stop that. It was useless. It was like trying to win her place in the court of Arnelle, or trying to get rid of the black seed inside her, the taste of iron and of lye. She’d cried that day when the man in the car took her to his house and locked her in a room, until she realized it wouldn’t do any good. She had done everything the Queen had asked and had received nothing in return. Arnelle was pointless.

She had decided to change the story.

She was going over to the other side.

THE TOWN WAS thick with Virginia creeper, wisteria, weeds that suddenly grew three feet tall. It had been that kind of summer. There were thunderstorms and hail. The news reported a strange rain of live frogs one wet, humid night. Children ran out with mayonnaise jars to try to capture them the way they used to catch fireflies. The air felt electric, sultry; it pressed down on you and made you want to sleep, turn away from your troubles, tell yourself lies. Even smart people are easily tricked, especially by their own children. When everything smells like smoke, how do you know what’s burning? Things that should have added up for Annie seemed like mere coincidence: cigarettes found in the garden, doors slamming, boys throwing pebbles at the window, finding that neighborhood boy Justin Levy sitting in the hedges one evening in his black overcoat, crying. If she set the pieces side by side, she might have been able to interpret them.

When Annie visited her mother, she asked for her advice. She was worried about the Story sisters. One was quiet, one was standoffish, one seemed to be disappearing before her eyes, becoming someone else entirely. Perhaps they’d been more affected by the divorce and Alan’s defection than it had first appeared. Or maybe it was Annie’s fault—she’d been depressed, wrapped up in her souring marriage. She went to the garden for solace rather than to her girls. She’d cut herself off, didn’t date, rarely saw friends—a poor example of how to live in the world.

“Young girls are moody,” Natalia told her. The task of raising children was a difficult one.

“Was I like that?”

“Well, you were well behaved. I never had to punish you. But you used to cry for no reason. It’s an emotional time of life. You try things on, you put them away.”

“Was I like Elv?” Annie wanted to know.

“No.” Natalia shook her head. That man in Paris had skulked around long after the girls had gone home in the spring. Natalia had found a knife and a length of rope beneath the bed in the guest room later in the month when she was cleaning up. She’d brought the little rescued cat, Sadie, with her from Paris to New York. It sat in her lap in the afternoons while Martin took his nap. Natalia often thought back to that night when her granddaughter had sneaked back into the apartment, dripping with river water, managing to be both fierce and tenderhearted. “Not like Elv.”

The last time the Story sisters had visited her apartment, Natalia had found Elv in her closet, asleep on the floor, curled up like a little girl. The jewelry box had been open and a gold chain was missing. Natalia was sure Elv would wear it, then return it to its rightful place. But she never saw the necklace again.

Sometimes when she looked at her granddaughter—her black-painted fingernails, the expression on her face when she thought no one was looking, the marks on her skin that were so even it appeared as if she cut herself—Natalia felt afraid for the child. Her friend Leah Cohen had told her that demons preyed upon young girls. They came through windows and found ways to open doors. Natalia had always listened to these stories with half an ear; now she was hesitant to dismiss them. She found herself locking the doors whenever Elv came to visit so that no one could get out or in. She had grown convinced that you could lose someone, even if she was in the very next room. She remembered her friend’s warnings more clearly. Although Natalia didn’t believe in butting into her daughter’s business, she took Annie by the arm before she left for home.

“Look closely at Elv,” she advised. “Look inside.”

SHE STARTED BY searching the attic. It was one of the reasons they’d bought the house in the first place, the sloping eaves, the large space, the old hawthorn tree that cast shadows through the window. The perfect place to raise three girls. They had painted the woodwork antique white and papered the walls. Annie found the shoebox where the marijuana was hidden first, then a vial of pills—Demerol stolen from the grandparents’ medicine cabinet. Taped to the closet wall there was a series of photographs of Elv kissing various boys. There was a mysterious map as well. Inky green paths led through a garden of thorns. Demons were wound in a frantic, scandalous embrace.