The Story Sisters (32 page)

“Where the hell were you?” he said. When he couldn’t find her, he flashed back to the day when she was picked up by the police.

“Walking,” Elv told him. She felt like a liar even when she told the truth. Suspicion somehow made you an accomplice. “Where
were you last night?” He hadn’t gotten home till late, then had crawled into bed without even talking to her.

“This isn’t about where I was,” Lorry said. “Don’t try to shift things around.”

Elv went into the kitchen and took the heroin out of the cabinet. Lorry had followed, expecting to continue their fight. When he saw he’d been found out, he folded himself into a kitchen chair. He always said that when caught red-handed it was best to come clean. “My fatal flaw,” he said sadly.

Elv opened a can of soup and began heating it up in a saucepan. She was starving.

“I’m having a baby,” she said.

Lorry stared at her, thinking he’d heard wrong.

“I think it’s a girl,” Elv told him.

He went to the stove and wrapped his arms around her. “Elv,” he said, his voice broken in a way that surprised her.

“I don’t want her to have a father with a fatal flaw,” Elv said reasonably.

“Got it.”

“Seriously.”

H
E SERIOUSLY TRIED
. He stopped going to bars, stopped seeing old friends with whom he had only one thing in common. But one day Elv went down to the laundry room and there he was with his brother. He and Michael had only one thing in common as well. She knew what they were doing down there.

“You’re kidding me,” she said.

“It’s not what you think. I’m just lending him some money because he happens to be broke. Anyway, he’s still my brother, right?”

Elv had other things to think about. Natalia had sent two tiny, beautiful sweaters, one white and one yellow, both made of fine merino wool, dotted with mother-of-pearl buttons. Soon after, Natalia sent a blanket she’d knitted out of a marmalade-colored cashmere. She was knitting like a madwoman, out on the bench under the chestnut tree, in the red parlor during a rainy afternoon, in her bedroom late at night. It had been so long since there had been a baby to be overjoyed about. Elv sent photos of herself pregnant and glowing. They wrote back and forth, considering names. Elv wanted a strong name, but something unique. Natalia suggested choosing a name that would work for the rest of a child’s life, not too girlish, but not too grown-up. The baby would be born in the summer, and Elv vowed they would come to Paris soon after. Maybe then Claire could forgive her.

Natalia had written in one of her letters that she was worried for Claire. She wrote that she had seen a demon in the hallway hovering near Claire’s bedroom and perhaps that was the cause of Claire’s great unhappiness. It sounded silly. The superstitions of an old woman with poor eyesight. Other people might have thought she was crazy, but Madame Cohen had believed her, and Elv did as well. She herself had often spied something in her own kitchen when she came for a glass of water in the middle of the night. It was probably a moth, like the onerous thing her grandmother said Madame Cohen had caught with flypaper. These stories made Elv nervous. She feared bad luck might be tapping at her window. She decided to set out salt in the corners of the room, as her grandmother said Madame Cohen advised. She dragged over a chair in order to reach the cabinet above the refrigerator. That was where the salt was kept, but she found more than that. She found everything he was hiding from her. She took it all down the hall to the incinerator.

She heard him rumbling around in the kitchen that night. But he never said a word about what she had done. He took a shower and came to bed. If he was back to his King Kong habit, he’d be sick and she’d know and they’d have to deal with it together.

“You wouldn’t lie to me, right?” Elv asked him. It was snowing. All the lights were turned off, but the world outside was bright.

He took up more than his share of the bed, but Elv didn’t care.

“Define lie,” he said.

They both laughed.

“I’m not stupid,” Lorry told her. “I heard what you said.”

“Repeat it.”

“No fatal flaws.”

“And you’ll tell me the truth.”

“I’m madly in love with you.”

“Very good,” Elv said. “I knew you were smart.”

When she woke the next morning, he was gone. She stayed where she was. She felt her love for him in a place that was so deep she was sure most people wouldn’t understand it. By the time it had grown light, he was back. He shook the snow off, took off his clothes, got back in beside her. He had brought her a bunch of roses wrapped in brown paper, the kind they sold outside the market. She told herself that was the reason he had left their bed, to walk through the snow in the pale light, to bring her roses, despite the weather, to come back to her when she needed him most.

H
E WAS LATE
one Friday night. It was cold, the middle of February, and she was three months pregnant. They had painted the second bedroom a creamy yellow that reminded Elv of the
heirloom tomatoes her mother used to have in the garden. She remembered all of their names: Livingston’s Golden Queen, Jubilees, yellow Brandywine. Elv had found a cookbook in a junk shop that included the first written recipe for tomato sauce, published in Naples in 1692, a Spanish-style concoction made with thyme. Her mother would have gotten a kick out of that. Elv was fixing the sauce for dinner, to be served with homemade pasta. She had been surprised to discover she could cook; it came to her naturally. She added tomatoes to just about everything. It had become a joke between her and Lorry—her new addiction, her fatal flaw. “Oh no, baby,” she teased him and said what she always told him, “that would be you.” She thought it was sunny enough on their little terrace to start a container garden in the spring; tomatoes and nothing else. She’d eaten so many already that she wondered if their baby would have red hair, if she’d have a preference for that color and if they’d have to repaint the nursery.

It was 1:00
A.M.
, then it was 2:00. Elv didn’t eat the dinner she’d prepared. Her nerves were shot. She wished she still smoked. She wished she could sleep. She wished he hadn’t left in the first place, kissing her, telling her he’d be back for supper. Lorry didn’t answer his cell phone, so she bundled up and went down to the closest bar, a place called MacDougal’s that was open after hours. No one had seen him, so she went back home. Snow had begun to fall. It was a bleak, cold winter. The sky was always black. The roads were probably bad. She called around and woke up several of his friends, men she didn’t like or trust. Most of them didn’t answer the phone. The one who did told her not to worry.

At 3:00
A.M.
she phoned Pete Smith, hauling him out of bed to answer.

“I was stupid to call. Go back to sleep,” she told him.

Pete was already pulling on his clothes, his socks and shoes.
He’d been dreaming about Annie and then all at once her daughter had called.

“Let me check around,” he said.

“No, forget it. I’m sure he’s fine.” Elv had bitten her nails to the quick; rims of blood circled each one. They had both disappointed people, but never each other. He didn’t just disappear. But that wasn’t true, not really, it was only that he always came back. Elv thought of the three years he’d been gone, and all the things they’d agreed never to talk about. Her dread intensified. Pete phoned after an hour. He’d called around to a couple of people he’d worked with in the department and also to some local hospitals and hadn’t found out anything. He was sure to know something soon. Certainly by morning.

But in the morning, there was still no news. Elv went out looking. She asked one of the old ladies on the street who had known Lorry forever and she said, “Try Marguerite’s.” Elv stared. “You know, Mimi.” Elv felt shaken to think there was another woman, until the old lady added, “His grandmother’s grave. You know—Our Lady of Sorrow.”

Elv walked through the snow. It was a small cemetery behind a churchyard. She asked the caretaker where she could find Lorry’s grandmother’s grave. It was fairly new; his grandmother had only died the previous winter. There was a holly plant someone had left, the pot wrapped in bright foil. Elv hadn’t even known Lorry had a grandmother. She felt undone and confused. She wished she could call her mother, ask her what to do. She had phoned his pals, gone to his haunts, come up with nothing. When she went to the bars, the way the men had looked at her, then glanced away, made her know they wouldn’t have told her anything if they had known where he was. Her suspicions were confirmed by their casual replies, their clear desire to be rid of her. So
that was it. He’d been using drugs, they all had. Not a single one would have told her the truth.

When Lorry still wasn’t home that afternoon, she went out and got on the subway to go to her scheduled doctor’s appointment. She went right past her stop, into Manhattan. She felt crazy and lost. She got off at Penn Station. She followed the trail he had told her about, wandering through the crowd, desperate to find him. At last there it was, the grated gate to the otherworld, just beyond the stairs leading up to Eighth Avenue. She went over, leaned hard against it, pushed. It swung open. There was a stair, a metal rung, just as he’d said.

She slipped down onto the rusty ladder. The darkness smelled foul. Soil, shit, ash, flood, mold, smoke. She let her eyes adjust. The bustle of Penn Station was only inches away, but the darkness was endless. A person could slip into it and get lost. She felt a twinge inside her. Her stomach flip-flopped. How could anyone survive this? She held on to the ladder. Anything could be down below, a horde of demons. There might be rats, wild dogs, giants. “Lorry,” she called plaintively. Her voice came back to her, mocking her desperation with its echo. “Lorry,” she cried until her voice was wrecked.

She went back up aboveground and found the public toilet. People were all but living there. An old woman had made a bed out of newspapers that she’d carefully laid out on the tiles. People stepped over her as though she wasn’t there. Elv washed her hands. In the mirror her face looked blotchy. Her eyes were rimmed red. A woman and her child were washing themselves thoroughly, as if the sink was their bathtub. “There you go, baby,” the woman said to her little girl as she dunked her face in the water. “Clean as can be.”

When Elv got back to their street, she noticed police cars from the 114th Precinct. She went inside, then took the stairs. From the
hallway she could see that the door to their apartment had been flung open. Two cops were inside and Michael was there as well, sitting on the couch, his coat thrown down beside him, as if he owned the place. Pete Smith was waiting for her. He took her by the arm before she could go inside and led her down the hall so he could have a word with her. He was still wearing his gray coat and his hat; the same middle-aged sad-looking guy she’d called and woken from a dead sleep even though he didn’t owe her a thing.

“What the hell is this?” Elv said. “They can’t just be in there.”

She couldn’t stop thinking about that little girl at Penn Station. She felt choked up and confused. Everything on the surface was flooding away. Everything seemed raw and brutal and immediate.

“He was at an apartment around the corner,” Pete said. “His brother found him.”

“Good,” Elv said. “That sounds close by.”

“Elv.”

“I’m going to kill him for worrying me. I went all the hell over the city. You wouldn’t believe the places I went.” She still had rust stains on her hands from the rungs of the ladder to the otherworld. She had ashes on the soles of her boots.

“Are you listening to me, kiddo? It’s not good.”

Elv looked at Pete, then glanced into the apartment. “He got busted, right? We have to get him out of jail.”

Pete embraced her and then she knew what she’d already known last night when he didn’t show up, when the snow was falling and he hadn’t called to say
Don’t worry, baby
. “I’m sorry,” Pete said, which was the stupid remark people said when things were irrevocable, when you’d lost the only thing you cared about in this world.

“You’re completely wrong,” Elv said. Lorry had to be somewhere.

He had his coat on when they found him, Pete told her. He was ready to leave and go home when he overdosed. He had that black cap of his and a sack of groceries from the market and a dozen roses, the kind that were so resistant to cold weather they were often kept on the sidewalk in plastic bins, the kind he’d brought her on the night when she knew the saucers of salt wouldn’t protect the two of them from evil. Pete held her while she sobbed. She had never sounded like that. She didn’t even know where the noise was coming from if not from the otherworld, the scream she would have cried so long ago if she hadn’t been tied up with ropes, her mouth stuffed with bread so no one could hear her.

Everyone could hear her now.

Confession