The Story Sisters (24 page)

When Claire went upstairs, the dog followed. She kept him locked out for two nights but on the third night, she let him in. Dr. Steiner was soon proven right. Claire seemed less agitated. Annie no longer heard pacing at night. Now it was the dog she heard, keeping watch.

Shiloh proved his worth on the night someone broke in to their house. He immediately began to bark, and whoever had been there fled through the bathroom window, leaving blood on the windowsill. In the morning, Annie found long black hairs on the floor. She swept them up, then called in the glazier to replace the broken glass. She went to examine the footprints crisscrossing the yard. They weren’t evidence of anything, but she knew. She went to the back of the garden, then searched the woods behind the house. No one was there. When she called out “Hello” the sound echoed back at her. It made her feel lost even though she had been this way a thousand times or more.

T
HEY LIVED IN
an apartment in a small brick building not far from Astoria Boulevard. The old lady who owned the place rented it to them, and in return, Lorry collected the garbage, shoveled snow, patrolled the laundry room. It was beneath him, but he didn’t complain. He knew all the old ladies in the neighborhood. They embraced him and shouted in various languages
for him to get a job. They treated him like a grandson, one who attracted trouble. They all saw the girl in the bloody clothes looking for him that night in the spring. They took note of her long dark hair. They observed the way she held on to him when at last he appeared. It was easy for them to spot heartbreak from a third-floor window, despite their bad eyesight and the darkness of the street.

Lorry had taken her to the ER, but they couldn’t run any scans because Elv didn’t have insurance. She refused to give them her name or apply for Medicaid, even though the intake nurse told her it was possible that her liver had been damaged. Elv came out and told Lorry she was fine. She had pain, but she could cope with it. She deserved any punishment she might get.

When Lorry was forced to leave Elv alone, he worried. She didn’t bother to get dressed. Instead she stayed in bed all day. She hadn’t been eating. He limited her drug usage, portioning it out for her, but she’d sneak more whenever he went out. She was afraid of the needle, but after a while she got used to it. She fell in love with it a little at a time. She thought Lorry didn’t know. She’d be in a dream, naked on the bed, and he’d come to lie down beside her and stroke her hair and tell her it would be all right when it clearly wouldn’t be. She knew what she’d done. She had killed her sister.

Lorry told her he’d had a blood brother he’d lost in the otherworld. He’d known tragedy too, and he’d been responsible in a similar way. Elv had heard that those who lived underground were called the Mole People, but Lorry told her never to use that term. It was an insult, another way to reduce them to nonhumans. Kill a mole, and what did it matter? Slit one’s throat and who would care?

He’d met Hector when they both were seventeen, soon after the death of his dog. He was a loner to the nth degree, wary at
first, but they became fast friends when Hector came to tell him one of the worst offenders living underground had decided he wanted Lorry’s platform space. Together they’d waited for their adversary in the dark. The interloper was a man whose wife had left him, moving up into the world. He was out of his mind on drugs. To chase him off they had tied sheets to the metal ladders that led to the world above and set up a fan. When they switched on the fan, the white sheets blew out like apparitions in the dark. Their enemy raced off screaming of ghosts. He’d never returned, and their brotherhood had begun. A friend who had your back in a world of cons and thievery was truly a brother. They had a perfect, easy scam they ran in Penn Station. They helped tourists with their luggage, taking them down a staircase that descended three stories to an abandoned platform. Once the tourist was disoriented, unable to find his way back, they would shake him down, asking for a twenty to lead him back up to the street. It had worked fine until the night when it all went wrong. They were sitting on the floor of the train terminal, drinking cups of black coffee the counter girl at Dunkin’ Donuts gave them for free just for being such cute boys, when they spied a confused-looking man.

“You take him.” Lorry was feeling lazy, so he stretched out his legs. Let Hector have some fun.

“Back in a flash.” Hector grinned, leaped up, and went to the tourist’s aid.

Lorry felt a chill. That happened to him sometimes, along his back and neck. He usually knew whom to trust and who was disloyal, who was an easy mark and who was nothing but trouble. On this night he convinced himself that his radar was off. He shook off his fear. He chatted up some girls, hung around with some buddies. An hour later he knew something was wrong. His brother in the world of mayhem still hadn’t returned.

He was the one who found Hector’s body, sprawled on the platform, his throat cut. A black pool of blood slid beneath him like oil seeping down to the tracks below.

Elv covered her ears, but Lorry made her listen.

In memory of his friend, Lorry set a rosebush on the platform; it bloomed, but the roses were black. He used heroin for the first time that night. He turned to the witch and she brought him comfort. It was easy enough to find in the tunnels; it was another gate, into another world. It didn’t mean you forgot those you lost. That was why he had the rose and thorns tattooed on his hands, a memorial that would last. There wasn’t a day that went by when he didn’t regret sending Hector to do a job he should have done himself. Lorry was bigger, stronger; he could have fought the assailant off. In the end, their intended victim had been the better, more merciless thief. As a final insult, he’d taken Hector’s gold ring, the only thing Hector had inherited from his father. Lorry still looked at people’s hands, searching for the person who wore that stolen ring. He kept a knife with him at all times in case he found him. But even if he got his revenge, he was the real culprit. He would have to live with the guilt, and so would she.

Elv told him she couldn’t. It was too much. He kissed her ardently, but she was listless, a gorgeous rag doll. She saw the accident whenever she closed her eyes, unless she was high. She wouldn’t get hooked on anything. She just needed to stop thinking. She roped her arms around Lorry, begging him for it, and although he shook his head, she knew he’d give her whatever she wanted.

After some time, Elv got out of bed. She brushed her hair, washed her face. But she never looked in the mirror and she didn’t let Lorry know how much junk she was shooting. Sometimes she went down past Twenty-first Street and bought it herself from a dealer she’d become acquainted with. Life was but a
dream, wasn’t it? It was the way black roses grew in the dark, searching for sunlight when there wasn’t any. The old ladies in the neighborhood clucked their tongues when Elv went by, on her way to score, then to sit on a bench, where she nodded out while the buses roared by.

Once she glanced up to see Lorry walking along. He looked menacing, a man most people would want to avoid. He was carrying a TV and was clearly in a rush. He spied her and for a moment it seemed that he might turn and walk away. Instead he came over, leaned down to kiss her, then wedged the TV between his body and the bench.

“Someone was throwing this away,” he said.

There was a price tag still on it. Elv hadn’t thought about where their money was coming from. It didn’t surprise her that Lorry had schemes. He was cagey and smart; he had to be.

“Okay,” Elv said.

“This is what I do,” Lorry reluctantly admitted.

People had to live, didn’t they? If a lion took a lamb for its supper, did anyone complain or say it was unnatural? She went with him sometimes when he drove out to Long Island, to wealthy neighborhoods where the people were so rich they wouldn’t miss a few things. And if they did, all they had to do was phone their insurance companies and everything would be replaced within the week. Elv sat behind the wheel of the car, the engine running, the headlights low, chewing on her lip while Lorry robbed houses. She thought of herself as an accomplice, and she savored the word.

She felt alive in the car as the scent of exhaust filtered in through the window and the sky was so perfect and black. It made her think of Hector and the pool of blood and the black roses. In neighborhoods where people slept through the night, Lorry climbed through windows that were left open. He rattled
locks and slipped through doors. He carried a crowbar, but rarely used it. He wanted to be invisible. He often found valuables in unexpected places. In shoes, for instance, in vegetable bins, in kitchen cabinets.

It seemed that Elv too had a knack for crime. They realized this the first time someone came home unexpectedly. Elv got out of the car when a Mercedes pulled into the driveway. She ran over and breathlessly explained that she was searching for her dog, who was old and ill and needed special medication. Elv was in tears, lost in a neighborhood she didn’t know. The man was tenderhearted; many men were when faced with a beautiful, distraught young woman. He helped her search the neighborhood, looking through the well-manicured yards. Some had trellises of pale roses, others had large brick patios, swimming pools, greenhouses. In one, a little poodle tied to a tree barked when they entered the yard, then sat and stared at them. Elv had the urge to cut the rope and steal him.

“Bingo,” the man exclaimed. “There’s your dog.”

“That isn’t him,” Elv said sadly.

When she heard the car horn honk, she knew Lorry was finished and the job was done. She thanked the man who’d tried to help her find her dog, surprising him by kissing his cheek before she took off running. Once she and Lorry were home, they looked through the jewelry. There were some good pieces, diamonds, pearls, 22-karat gold earrings and bracelets. Their victim had been a nice man. Elv thought of how he’d waited for her when she lingered at the gate in the yard where the dog was tied up. He’d buy his wife something far better when all was said and done, maybe rubies this time.

Lorry was delighted with Elv’s acumen. She was beautiful and smart and she belonged to him. They went out to dinner to celebrate. They ordered a bottle of wine. They felt lucky and rich,
despite their fatal flaws. They went home and got high, then fell into bed, arms around each other, fiercely in love. Lorry told her in no uncertain terms that if she ever saw the police, she was to run. He wasn’t about to have her be apprehended. She was an accomplice, that was all. It was fun, a lark. And then, it wasn’t.

She was the one who said they should go to her house. She knew where everything was; it would be an easy in-and-out job. It was a time when they needed more cash. Lorry had been questioned when one tenant’s savings disappeared from his night table drawer. There was no proof, although it was true that Lorry had a key and had been in the apartment when the tenant was out, checking on a complaint of a ceiling leak from the apartment below. They let him go, but there’d been a lawyer’s fee. They needed cash fast, so they drove out to North Point Harbor.

T
HEY PASSED THE
convenience store, the ice cream stand, the high school. Everything looked exactly the same, only smaller, like pieces set up in a child’s game. Elv began to feel apprehensive.

“Go the other way,” she told Lorry as he was about to turn onto the road that wound along the bay. “Stay on Main Street.”

They parked around the corner from Nightingale Lane, near the stop sign. Elv’s chest felt heavy. She felt like a stranger in her own life. She told him about what had happened to her. Not the details, just the way she’d stopped that man from taking Claire, how he’d taken Elv to his house and tied her up and done terrible things, and then how she convinced him she wouldn’t run away if he brought her a cup of water.

Lorry was enraged. He wanted to go after the horrible man right then and there, but Elv wouldn’t tell him any more.

“I want it to be over,” she said. “Being here reminds me.”

“We can go somewhere else,” Lorry said.

Elv shook her head. She knew where her mother kept her jewelry. Where there was a coffee can of cash. When Lorry started to get out of the car, she put her hand on his arm.

“I want to do it.”

There was the lawn where the Weinsteins’ dog had been tied up. There was the hawthorn tree. She knew this place far better than Lorry did. They argued and at last he gave in. She got out, closed the car door, made her way along the street. Had they even once come to look for her? Had they wondered where she might be? For all her mother and sister knew, she was locked up, the key thrown away, bleeding, falling, waiting for them. In fairy tales, people rescued each other. They made their way through brambles, trickery, witchery, spells.

Elv went through the yard, past the garden. It didn’t even look like a garden anymore, just a jumble no one bothered with. There were tufts of spent thistle, tangled black sweet pea vines. The downstairs bathroom window was never locked. It was small, but she could fit through. Elv pulled over a lawn chair, slid open the window, climbed inside. She wondered if time would shift, move backward. Maybe she would be ten again, before the bad thing happened, before everything changed. Elv felt such a deep longing, she was baffled by her own emotions. She dropped down from the window into the tub, then went to open the bathroom door.

She slipped into the hall, then stopped, heart pounding. At first she thought she spied a wolf. She imagined that at last she was to receive the fate she deserved. She would be devoured, piece by piece. The wolf-dog could have bitten her, but he just looked at her, then barked. She ran back into the bathroom, closed the door, crawled through the window, breaking the glass in her hurry. She heard it shatter, but she just kept on. She’d raced down the street so fast she went right past Lorry’s parked car. He’d driven after her, and when she threw herself into the passenger’s seat, he asked
what had happened. She said he was right, it had been a mistake. Her hands were cut up and there was glass in her hair. She was never going there again.