The Story Sisters (33 page)

T
HE SEASON HAD BEEN COLDER THAN USUAL AND THERE WERE
many deaths in the city. The cold crept inside rooms, and Paris filled with people wearing long black coats. Tourists could not believe this was the city they had dreamed of visiting. They locked
themselves in their hotel rooms and drank hot coffee, wishing they were back in New Jersey or Idaho. It was a season of grief and broken hearts, and in many apartments the heat gave out altogether. Children were covered with layers of wool blankets at night; in the mornings, they held steaming cups of cocoa to warm their hands. Several sparrows froze solid on the branches of the chestnut tree in Natalia’s courtyard and had to be shaken from their perches with the swipe of a broom handle.

Shiloh died in his sleep one morning as the dark was lifting. Claire woke suddenly. Clouds of her breath formed in the chilly air. Nothing felt alive. Usually the birds were chattering at this hour, waking in the dreamy silver light. But now they had all been swept up into a dustpan, deposited in the bin in the courtyard along with potato peelings and newspapers.

Though he’d grown old, Shiloh had insisted on following Claire until the end. When his feet began to drag on the sidewalks, Natalia fashioned boots for him out of leather. For a while he was steadier. People in the neighborhood applauded when he managed to haul himself down the street. Shiloh struggled, but his downfall was imminent. In the end, his hips and legs gave out. It became difficult to wake him in the mornings. His breathing rattled, his eyes were milky. Soon he’d stopped eating his supper. Now he was gone. Claire wrenched herself out of bed and went to lie beside him on the carpet. She had been fifteen when her mother brought him home. She remembered writing
Take him back
.

In the kitchen, where she was fixing a pot of coffee, Natalia heard a plaintive sound. She thought it was a bird, then remembered they were all gone. As she went along the hallway the cry grew louder. She was led to the bedroom door. It was locked. When Claire at last came out, she was wearing boots and the jacket her mother used to wear in the garden. Her face was pale and grim.

“Where are you going?” Natalia followed along behind her granddaughter. She had suspected Claire might do something rash when this time came, something on impulse. She had already phoned Leah to ask her advice. Madame Cohen had assured her that help was on the way.

“I’m going to bury him,” Claire told her grandmother.

“We don’t have a shovel,” Natalia said, hoping to dissuade her. This was what grave diggers were for, to take grief into their capable hands. Surely there was such a service for animals.

“There are shovels in the shed,” Claire said.

The landlord kept tools locked up in a little wooden lean-to in the courtyard; tenants were forbidden from using them, but Claire didn’t care. She went downstairs, picked up a rock, and smashed the lock on the shed until it yielded. Stringy cobwebs and rusted garden implements greeted her. A few frozen carcasses still littered the courtyard: wren, sparrow, pigeon, dove. Claire grabbed one of the old shovels and slammed the shed door shut. Icicles fell and shattered into blue sparks.

When Claire turned, three young men were standing behind her. They were so unexpected she took a step back. They were tall and all three had shovels. They weren’t there by accident. Madame Cohen had sent over her younger grandsons. All were in medical school. The older grandsons were already doctors and unavailable for dog burials, but these three would do. Claire had not seen any of them since they were children, so the eldest introduced himself and his brothers.

“Where do you want it?” Émile, the first grandson, asked. He was known to be the serious one. He said what he meant. People thought he might be a psychiatrist one day.

“Not ‘it,’” Claire said. “He.”

Claire decided the first grandson was an idiot. She pointed to the chestnut tree. There was a patch of soil between the tree trunk
and the cobbled courtyard. Émile and the second brother, Gérald, began to dig. Gérald hummed. People thought he would work in the lab. He was a fool as well. The third of Madame Cohen’s grandsons followed Claire upstairs to help bring Shiloh down. He was the youngest, the tallest, and the most awkward. He nodded a hello to Madame Rosen, banging his head on the low kitchen doorway as he followed Claire to the bedroom to retrieve Shiloh. The German shepherd looked crumpled and much smaller than he had in life. It took all of Claire’s restraint not to throw herself down beside him.

“I’ll take care of this,” the third grandson said. This was Philippe, who had once balanced china cups on top of one another in the back room of the shop, carefully constructing a tower, until they’d all come crashing down. He’d made the flyswatter out of a rubber band and marbles. He was full of ideas. People thought he would someday invent a cure for some terrible and debilitating disease. Madame Cohen had specifically told him to carry the dog downstairs for Claire.

The entrance to the room was narrow and Philippe hit his elbows getting in the door. Claire worried that he wouldn’t be able to carry the dog downstairs, but he seemed sure of himself. He carefully picked up the body, which he hoisted over his shoulder. His actions were surprisingly tender for someone so uncoordinated.

“You go first,” Philippe told Claire, not wanting her to see the way a body looked after death, the hardening of the jaw and limbs. “I’ll follow.”

The three brothers buried Shiloh. As medical students they’d seen worse and done worse, but it was still a sad business. Claire’s tears fell down onto the cobblestones. She seemed fierce and unreachable. When the grandsons were done, they stood there
uncomfortably for a while, clothes splattered with dirt. They all had lectures to attend, yet they stared at one another, lingering. Their grandmother had forbidden them to be rude, and because they were rude by nature they didn’t know whether or not it was now a proper time to leave. Philippe had been told in no uncertain terms to watch his manners. Natalia came down with glasses and a pitcher of water, which the brothers gulped down, then she discreetly told them they could go.

Philippe went up to Claire, though her silence seemed fearsome. His grandmother had told him not to be tricked by how standoffish she might seem. Claire’s hands were stuffed in her pockets. She had slipped on a pair of dark glasses so no one could see that her eyes were red.

“Heart failure doesn’t feel like anything,” Philippe told her. “Just so you know. He went to sleep and didn’t wake up. No sensation. No pain.”

Claire nodded, grateful for the explanation. When Madame Cohen’s grandsons left, having returned the shovel to the garden shed and repaired the lock, Claire remained in the courtyard. She sat vigil beside the grave until the end of the day, when her grandmother coaxed her back inside.

She returned to work the next day. She didn’t speak much, but she did her job. Then she had tea with Madame Cohen in the back room.

“What did you think of my grandsons?” Madame Cohen asked.

“They were helpful.”

“A pot holder is helpful,” Madame Cohen replied. “Otherwise you’d burn your hand. None of them impressed you?”

“I thought one of them might not manage to carry Shiloh downstairs, but he did.”

“Philippe,” Madame Cohen said. She was glad that he’d done a good job. “Would you like to see him again?”

“Not really.” Claire was always honest with her employer.

Frankly, she didn’t wish to see anyone. After Shiloh’s death, people in the neighborhood became accustomed to seeing her alone. Even the coldest among them worried for her. In the markets, they offered bargains meant only for the best customers. Vendors sent her home with bunches of flowers for her grandmother. In the spice shop, she was plied with candied fruits. A Monsieur Abetan, who had an antiquities shop filled with knick-knacks and junk, gave her an amulet he vowed would bring her luck, but she only stuck the talisman in the top drawer of the bureau in the parlor, where it sat alongside the mints and the toothpicks.

People wondered if Claire had ever fallen in love or walked arm in arm with a friend. She had become a cautionary tale, pitied, whispered about. Some of the older women kept butterfly nets in their shopping bags, ready and able to defend her should a demon happen to appear as she went walking by.

When spring arrived, Claire continued to wear her coat and boots. She was the one person in Paris who dreaded the end of winter. The white flowers blooming on the chestnut tree in her grandmother’s courtyard were anathema to her. They made her think of the lost and the dead. They no longer carried the scent of almonds. Instead, when she breathed in there was the stink of bitterroot, sulfur. She wished for snow, rain, turtle-green skies. She had the feeling children sometimes do when they’re awakened by a nightmare and desperately yearn for someone to tell them their dreamworld doesn’t exist in real life. Claire had always crept into bed with Elv to beg for a story when that happened to her.
Once upon a time there was a little girl who needed to go to sleep
, Elv would begin, no matter how sleepy she herself
was.
Nothing could harm her and no one could find her and she was always safe
.

S
PRING IN
N
EW
York was exceptionally beautiful. The trees in Central Park were a liquid green. When the wind shook the branches, pockets of green showered the ground. There were splotches falling onto the pages of Elv’s book, a crisscross of pollen and print. She was sitting on a bench outside the zoo. She was noticeably pregnant by the end of the season. Women going past often stopped to congratulate her. She smiled, thanked them, then returned her attentions to her book. She was reading about children the same way she had once devoured information about dogs. She knew absolutely nothing about them. They were an utter mystery. How had her mother ever managed the three of them, so close in age? How had she known how to cure a fever, a bee sting, a spider’s bite? How to make a bed, fix a perfect grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, pour a glass of milk without spilling a drop?
You’ll understand everything you need to when your child is born
, Elv’s ama had written to her.
Don’t worry so much
. But she hadn’t understood how to be a daughter or a sister or the beloved of a man who couldn’t turn away from his fatal flaw. How could she ever understand a child?

She was in a bad way after Lorry. Her grief was immense, overpowering. It didn’t help that she had to leave their apartment. The building Lorry owned turned out to have been an inheritance from his grandmother, and it went directly to his brother upon his death. Michael sent a notarized letter asking Elv to move out, although he allowed her to stay until after the funeral. It was held at Our Lady of Sorrow. There was a surprisingly large crowd, all his hoodlum friends who had done nothing to save him, the old ladies who had adored him when he was a
boy, the cousins he’d never mentioned. One of those cousins had looked stunned when Elv mentioned foster homes. “Lorry and Michael were never in foster homes. Their grandmother raised them. I don’t know what you’re talking about! She was a saint. Their parents were in a house fire, and Mimi took them in. She did a great job. It was this neighborhood that got to them, all the drugs floating around.”

She heard another cousin talking about how good Lorry had been to his grandmother. He’d lived with her for the last three years of her life and had taken excellent care of the old lady, shoveling snow, maintaining the building, making certain she got to her doctor’s appointments. People said that on the last day of her life Mimi was seen on the street for the first time in months. Lorry had carried her downstairs so she could sit on a bench in the sunlight. She had waved at everyone who passed by. She was a good-natured, friendly woman who had butted into everyone’s business and wished everyone well. Lorry had been the light of her life. “Good-bye,” she had called in a small voice, until the sunlight began to fade and Lorry took her back to her top-floor apartment.

Elv wore a black coat and high boots and a black scarf to the funeral. The weather was dreadful and the church seemed unheated. She didn’t know the priest or the other mourners. Pete Smith had driven her and was waiting in his parked car on the street. She went up to Michael, one of many who waited in a long line to offer him their sympathies. Everyone acted as if Elv was a stranger. There’d been many women before her, and several of Lorry’s old flames were in attendance, weeping, gathering in sad little groups.

“I told you he was a mistake,” Michael said. “You should have listened.”

“I didn’t know about your grandmother,” Elv said.

“That was Lorry. You never knew what to believe.”

“Did he talk to you much about his life underground?” Elv asked.

Michael said something to a friend of Lorry’s who was standing nearby and they both laughed. Then Michael took Elv by the arm. It had been a long time since they had both been at Westfield, sneaking cigarettes behind the stable. They walked away from the crowd, stopping beneath one of the pine boughs that was drooping, snow-laden.