The Story Sisters (17 page)

T
HEIR GRANDFATHER HAD
died of heart failure at the end of the winter. The funeral was in New York. It was a somber occasion, attended by a small circle. No one spoke about the fact that Elv wasn’t there, though everyone knew what had happened. She’d been sent off because of her erratic behavior; there’d been drugs involved and a series of boys. She’d been a charming child one minute, an out-of-control teenager the next. Of course the family was crushed. Annie looked ten years older, and the younger daughters were exceedingly quiet, their complexions pale. Not a single one of the relatives mentioned that only two of the Story sisters were in attendance, dressed in black coats, standing at the grave site beside their mother and their beloved ama. Mary Fox, always so serious and clever, cried her eyes out and needed to be comforted by her mother. She then went to try to compose herself beneath the hanging branches of the pine trees, turning her back so the others wouldn’t see her sobbing. Meg and Claire, however, had remained stoic, their faces expressionless, arms linked. Afterward, their grandmother went back to Paris. Once school had adjourned for spring vacation, Claire and Meg went to join her. They were still in love with the city. The sunlight was a thousand different colors in Paris. Every day it changed. But it was a time when everyone was lonely, even when they were together, even when they were in their favorite place in the world, their ama’s apartment in the Marais.

The chestnut tree was in flower, and the leaves were especially lustrous this year. Every morning the girls and their grandmother had soft-boiled eggs for breakfast. They drank bowls of hot milk laced with coffee. They did not talk about Elv. They tried not to think about her. But of course the cat that Elv had rescued was always underfoot. Natalia was terribly attached to her and brought her back and forth across the Atlantic in a carry-on case. Sadie had
grown to be a large, disagreeable tabby with green eyes. For some reason the cat took a dislike to Meg; as soon as she heard Meg’s voice, she skittered into the closet to nest among boots and umbrellas. Meg didn’t seem to mind. She said she was allergic to cats and avoided Sadie completely. But Claire often lay on the floor to play with the cat’s favorite toy—a crocheted mouse on a string—until Sadie came to halfheartedly bat at the mouse with a paw.

Claire and Meg seemed older than their ages. They were wary and never spoke to strangers. Sometimes Elv’s name tumbled out in conversation as they remembered other years in Paris, recalling how they would hide behind the old stone trough when their mother came looking to call them to dinner; they remembered the memory game they’d played on the day they’d taken the train to Versailles. They bit their lips then and looked at the ground. Meg thought about the way her sister had pinched her when she was angry. But Claire thought about the time that Elv had told her the story of Grimin, the most evil human in the world.
He thought I would drown, but I didn’t. He thought I would bleed to death, but I’m still here
. There wasn’t a day that went by when Claire didn’t regret not opening the car door at Westfield. She should have gotten out and rescued her sister. If they had run far enough, New Hampshire would have disappeared behind them. All the stories they’d ever known would have disappeared as well, the words falling down around them, letter by letter, down to the bottom of the deepest well.

When Madame Cohen came to dinner and asked how Elv was, the Story sisters fell silent. Claire had written letters and cards but hadn’t heard back. Meg was actually dreading the time when her sister returned. Natalia had fixed a sun-dried tomato rice pilaf to accompany the roast chicken she served. Madame Cohen offered the bowl to the girls but they said they weren’t hungry. “Here in this country, herbalists thought tomatoes were
bad for you well into the nineteenth century,” she told them. “It was considered an act of bravery simply to eat one.”

Meg excused herself to help their ama carry out the drinks, homemade lemonade and a bottle of local white wine.

“You can’t always believe what everyone tells you,” Madame Cohen told Claire, whom she found to be the most sensitive and emotional of the Story sisters. She pointed to their dinner. “We’d think this was as deadly as mandrake if we did.” She ate a forkful of the pilaf. “I had two sisters,” she said. “I was the youngest. Much like you.”

Claire had always been a little afraid of her grandmother’s friend, wary of her black clothes and stern appearance. Madame Cohen wore her white hair up, neatly held in place with tortoise-shell combs. She always had sensible shoes and often carried an umbrella, even on sunny days. Claire didn’t know if her French was good enough to speak to Madame Cohen. “What happened to them?” she asked.

“Exactly what your sister Elv wanted to know,” Madame Cohen told her. “They’ve been gone for a very long time. For other people, that is. Not for me.”

“What do you think happened to Madame Cohen’s sisters?” Claire asked Meg as they were getting ready for bed. Meg had recently made a vow to read all of Dickens. She had just begun
Oliver Twist
.

“Madame Cohen had sisters?” Meg got into bed and reached for her book. Claire got in beside her. She didn’t mind if Meg stayed up reading. She liked sleeping with the light on. But even with the lamp’s yellow glow, even though she heard the rustling of pages and the familiar sound of traffic on the streets nearby, even though she knew Meg was right there beside her, she still felt alone.

T
HAT SPRING THE
girls’ grandmother gave them much more freedom than their mother ever would have, considering what had happened with Elv. Natalia believed freedom was never a problem, only those who didn’t know how to handle the responsibilities that went along with it. In the afternoons, while she took her nap, the girls walked toward the Île Saint-Louis, stopping at Berthillon. Meg liked to try something new each time, blood orange, for instance, or caramel-ginger, but Claire stuck with vanilla. She was loyal to her favorite things. The Story sisters would then go to gaze into the green water of the Seine as they ate their ice cream. Sometimes they sat in front of Notre Dame and watched tourists. They liked to guess which families were happy and which ones were only pretending. They figured they were right 99 percent of the time.

Many people thought the girls were twins. Their hair was styled exactly the same, falling straight to the jawbone, angled in front. They explored the Left Bank, spending hours at Shakespeare and Co. searching through old volumes, reading the dedications scrawled on the frontispieces, wondering who had truly been in love and who was just offering up an insincere gift. They could speak enough French to order well in cafés. They loved the ones on Saint-Germain where they ordered espressos or cafés au lait and sometimes had the nerve to ask for glasses of kir, which the waiters always brought without question. They flirted with boys, but never divulged their real names or where they lived. They didn’t trust anyone except each other.

They no longer believed in Arnelle. They were far too old for stories about faeries. They never spoke Arnish. It made them think of things they didn’t want to remember. Red leaves, rain, New Hampshire. They were already forgetting the words Elv had taught them and they could no longer recall if
henaj
meant
wolf or dog
, if
nejimi
meant
hero
or
coward
. In dire circumstances,
however, their private vocabulary sometimes surfaced in a rush, surprising them. They had fleetingly whispered to each other in Arnish when they’d become lost at the airport upon arrival. And then again when Claire had stomach pains and thought she might be dying of appendicitis. They’d had a tearful panicked conversation in Arnish then, though what had befallen her turned out to be severe indigestion, nothing more.

Although there were two beds in their grandmother’s spare bedroom, the sisters slept together. They were too old for this, but they didn’t care. They didn’t talk about the reason they shared a bed nor did they discuss their dreams. Each had her reasons. The tiger at the door. The boy on the edge of the bed. The shower of red leaves. The man saying,
You know me; get in the car
.

In the last days of their vacation, their mother came to Paris to retrieve them and also to check in on her mother. Perhaps someone should have been checking on Annie. She didn’t look like herself anymore. She had lost more weight and wore her dark glasses most of the time to hide the circles under her eyes. While the girls were away, she’d suffered terrible bouts of insomnia, sitting up until morning, gazing into the backyard and wondering when it had gone wrong. She thought it was that day at the Plaza. The way Elv had looked at her when she’d been accused of masterminding the theft of the carriage horse.

After Annie arrived in Paris, she was so tired she crawled into the second bed in the girls’ room and slept for seventeen hours. She curled up beneath a snowy linen coverlet, the same she’d used during summers here in Paris when she was a girl. There had been some talk about staying on in France when she was twelve or thirteen, but her father’s business was in New York and so they’d returned to Manhattan. Lately, Annie had become obsessed with the different life she might have had if they’d remained in Paris.
The man she might have loved, the apartment where she might have lived, the daughters whose only language would have been French.

The sisters sat by their mother’s bedside. Today, the light through the window was pink and clear. They were glad she was there. Ever since Elv went away, she had been too quiet. She forgot to go shopping or make dinner. The milk in the refrigerator was often sour, and Meg had taken to cleaning the house once a week. Sometimes Annie didn’t seem like their mother anymore. Now, for instance, she seemed like a little girl sleeping in the guest room bed. She was disappearing before their eyes. Meg made sure she was breathing; she held a mirror close to their mother’s mouth—she’d seen this done in an old movie. When the glass fogged up, the girls knew she was still alive.

Natalia finally woke Annie from her long sleep, shaking her, calling her name, bringing her a cup of hot tea. She insisted they all go out for the day. They went to the Musée d’Orsay, where they thought they were enjoying themselves until they noticed Annie standing in front of Van Gogh’s self-portrait, crying. Annie excused herself and went off to the restroom. Claire was reminded of the black river Elv had once painted. She wished she had begged for it. She wished she had it right now.

The rest of the weekend was better. The Story sisters took their mother to all the places they loved most: the ice cream stand, the bookstore, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the bench in front of Notre Dame, where they all sat together holding hands, and anyone who passed by would have thought they were happy. Annie slept through the night for the first time in ages under the white coverlet. She ate soft-boiled eggs. She painted her nails red, then polished the girls’ nails as well. On their last day in Paris, the sisters were in the kitchen cutting up pears for a tart. Their mother and grandmother were on the terrace having their morning coffee.
Below, in the courtyard, two elderly tenants were arguing over whether or not a third could tie his bicycle to the now broken stone trough. Their mother laughed when one tenant called the other a stupid boot. Meg and Claire looked at each other. They could hear the clock over the stove, ticking. They could hear doves in the courtyard. They wanted this moment to last forever. The sunlight was orange. They had to remember that. Meg would make certain they did. She fetched a piece of paper and wrote down the word
orange
, then folded the paper in half. They could cut up pears and write down all of the colors of the light and listen to people laugh and smell the blooms on the chestnut tree and forget about the rest of the world. They wanted to stay in their grandmother’s apartment always, but instead they would have this memory of sitting in the kitchen, being happy.

They flew home on Air France. They spoke French to the stewards, and their mother was proud of them and let them each have a glass of champagne. Claire felt dizzy and sick right before landing at JFK. She had to go to the restroom even though the seat belt signs were already switched on. Once there, she vomited into the horrible, messy toilet. She clung to the sink, stricken that she had imagined she was happy, or that she might even have a right to be. She must have been gone for a long time, because her mother came looking for her, worried.

Annie tapped on the door. “Claire? Are you all right?”

Claire opened the door.

Annie touched her forehead. Burning hot. “Claire,” she said. “Darling.”

“I’m fine,” Claire insisted. “Really. I am.” And then, before she could stop herself, she said, “Maybe I just miss her.”

Claire would certainly miss her beloved grandmother, but that wasn’t who she was talking about and they both knew it.

“I miss her too,” Annie said.

They went back to their seats. They were closer to home than they’d thought, all the way across the Atlantic. They put their seat belts on, and after that they didn’t think about Paris anymore.