The Story Sisters (36 page)

“Miss Featherstone is a dancer,” Elv told Pete.

“A ballerina,” Mimi corrected her.

“I see,” Pete said.

They all ordered ice cream. Mimi always ordered vanilla.

“Just like Claire,” Pete said.

“Claire, my momma’s sister?” Mimi asked.

“That’s the one,” Pete said.

“Finish up,” Elv suggested to the child, who had begun to color on the back of her place mat with the crayons the tea shop provided.

Mimi drew a scoop of ice cream in a silver cup. There were stars all over the ice cream.

“Here,” she said, handing it to Pete. “This is for Claire.”

Pete looked at Elv, who nodded her okay.

“She lives far away, but I’ll mail it to her,” Pete said.

“She lives on the other side of the ocean,” Elv told Mimi, “where they all speak a different language and the light is a different color every day.”

Elv went to North Point Harbor on her own sometimes, when Mimi was at school. She still visited Lorry every Sunday, bringing their daughter along. But she didn’t want Mimi to think their world was made up only of the departed, that all there was in this life was something more to lose. She went to the other cemetery with Pete, who had arranged the stones from Paris quite beautifully and who still cut the grass and tended to the lilacs nearby. Elv noticed some spindly green things growing as well.

“Tomato plants!”

“I put them in every year,” Pete admitted. “I get different varieties, ones I think your mom would have appreciated. This year I planted Black Krim, from the Ukraine.”

Elv ducked her head so Pete wouldn’t see that she was crying. Pete handed her a handkerchief and she blew her nose. Before Elv took the train back to Queens, they went to the new diner that had just opened and ordered grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches in honor of Annie. They had strong cups of coffee.

“Remember the Cherokee chocolates?” Elv said. “Those were my favorites. One year I said I was allergic, just to be difficult, but I’d sneak out and eat some when no one was looking.”

“I never knew a tomato could be brown and still be edible.” Pete chuckled. “Remember the Golden Jubilees? They were huge. They didn’t even taste like the same species as what you get in the grocery store.”

Pete wanted to say something more, but instead he just started talking about the library project. Annie had left funds for him to oversee a reading room in the new elementary school on Highland Road.

“Is there something else?” Elv asked. “Are you sick of me and Mimi coming out and bothering you?”

“Oh, no,” Pete assured her. “I was just thinking of how things used to be.”

One day when they were visiting, Mimi went to play in the yard and Pete suggested they have a cup of coffee in the kitchen. They could watch from the window, make sure Mimi was safe.

“I found him,” Pete Smith said. He was gazing out at Mimi, thinking how delighted Annie would be if she could see her grandchild dancing around, shoes kicked off. She was picking up leaves, then letting them rain down. Her long black hair was down her back in one neat braid.

“Who’s that?” Elv worked hard. She was tired, but she was still beautiful. Not that it mattered. She was far more concerned with the fact that Mimi hated all vegetables. She wouldn’t even try broccoli. The only thing she could be coaxed to eat was a tomato, and that was only because Elv had sworn it was actually a fruit.

“The man who was a teacher. The one in the car. He’s never going to hurt anyone again.”

Elv went to the sink. Mimi had made a bit of a mess while giving Miss Featherstone a bath. Elv took a paper towel and sopped up the spilled water. She felt a shiver inside her, but she kept cleaning up.

“I got rid of him,” Pete said.

Elv laughed, then turned from the sink and saw the look on his face.

“That’s what Lorry wanted to do,” Pete told her. “He told me that the day he came here with the letter. I did it for him.”

Elv’s eyes were burning. She never cried when there was the slightest chance that Mimi might walk in on her, but Mimi was out in the yard. She’d found a watering can and was pretending to water the garden.

“I wasn’t sure I could find the right person. I started to ask around, in town, at the school. I fished around online. I came to think it might be a fellow who had taught at the elementary school years ago. He’d retired suddenly, and there weren’t many people who remembered him. But there was one teacher, Ellen Hayward, second grade, who did. She hadn’t liked him. She said he’d been fired for some inappropriate actions; children and parents had complained. It had been hushed up. No one would file a legal complaint. Mrs. Hayward said that most children know their parents will be upset if they find out they’ve been molested. They want to protect them.”

Elv sat down at the table. She herself couldn’t remember his face, just his voice and what he did to her.

“I went to his house—he lived out past Huntington. He hadn’t worked for years. He wasn’t well. He had an oxygen tank because of his emphysema. I told him I was researching a book and that his sister suggested I speak to him. He had a sister who lived in New Jersey, but when I called she refused to speak to me. She told me her brother was dead to her.”

Perhaps he was lonely, or his interest was piqued in having a writer coming to call. He invited Pete in and gave him a cup of coffee, which Pete didn’t drink. It had been cold this past winter. Pete wore his overcoat, his gloves; he brought along a briefcase of what appeared to be notes and, hidden at the bottom, a sealed plastic bag containing two ounces of heroin. Enough to put Grimin away for life. Pete didn’t touch anything in the house. When the detectives came later on, he wanted it to be an open-and-shut case.

He said he was gathering stories and that his book was entitled
The Best Advice from the Best Teachers
. Pete was only interviewing the best of the best. The man was flattered. His advice was simple, but vital. Don’t think you know the person in front of you. Everyone has their secrets.

For instance? Pete asked. He felt lucky. The guy wanted to impress him. Worst secret you’ve ever heard?

I’ve got a good one, the man said. He was ready to talk. Loneliness and flattery did that.

I’ll bet you do, Pete answered.

It was a small house and chilly. The heat was turned down low. There were no pets. No family. There was a clock on the mantel, ticking. Pete had parked several blocks away. It was early evening and dark.

The man told his story slowly, with pauses for effect. He said he’d heard it from a friend of a friend. A girl had been on the corner and looked lost. This fellow had pulled up and offered her a ride. He’d wanted the little girl. No one would have expected that of this man—a secret life, just like he’d said. The man had been watching her at her house and now here she was, but another girl had pushed her out of the way and gotten into his car instead. What are you going to do about it, she had said. She was a bad girl, you could see it. That’s what the friend of a friend had said. She had green eyes, which was always a sign of evil within, so he took her home and kept her there all day and he’d had to punish her and teach her a lesson. That was the worst story of a secret life he’d ever heard. He’d laughed then. He wasn’t even sure whether or not to believe it.

Pete told the fellow he’d heard a story like that too. The world was a small place and stories got around. He thought it had taken place on Nightingale Street.

Lane, the man had said. It was Nightingale Lane.

“Lorry told me you called him Grimin,” Pete told Elv. “When I got to his house, I saw why. The letters on his license plate were still the same.”

Pete noticed this as he jimmied the lock, then hid the heroin in the trunk. As soon as he drove away, he phoned an old friend in the Suffolk County Police Department. The amount of heroin
he’d left behind equaled a life sentence, less for good behavior, but Grimin would be dead by then.

Mimi was putting the watering can away. She dusted off Miss Featherstone, who had leaves in her hair and some dirt on her dress. Miss Featherstone was very persnickety about her appearance. Pete took a sip of coffee. It was cold. He’d gotten rid of Grimin because he’d made a promise to Annie that he’d always take care of Elv. On the way back to the train station, Elv asked Pete if they could stop at Nightingale Lane.

They sat parked there in the Volvo, the engine running.

“Is this where you lived?” Mimi said in a hushed tone when she saw the house. It was a perfectly good house, three stories, white with black shutters and a lovely wide porch. It had two chimneys and hollyhocks by the door. “It’s a castle.”

There was the hawthorn tree, there was the garden. Another family lived here now. There were lights on in the rooms and they could see inside. Bookshelves, couches, paintings on the wall. There was a cat in the kitchen.

“Which one was your bedroom with your sisters?” Mimi asked.

Elv pointed out the attic windows.

“It was the tower,” Mimi said, awed.

“We had the best garden. There were all different-colored tomatoes,” Elv told her.

“Tomatoes are red,” Mimi said.

“Well, we had pink and yellow and brown and purple and green.”

“It’s true,” Pete said. “They were like candy.”

“Unlikely,” Mimi said.

Pete and Elv exchanged an amused look over Mimi’s head. Claire used to sound like that. So matter-of-fact.

Elv and Mimi got out and stood by the side of the road across from the house. Dusk spread across the lawn in waves of velvet.
So often Elv found herself saying the same things to her daughter that Annie had said to her. She felt a flood of love for the small solemn face upturned in the dark, listening to every word. Here is a story about a boy who had the most loyal dog in the world, about three sisters who danced in the garden, about a mother who would do anything for her child.

Maybe some love was guaranteed. Maybe it fit inside you and around you like skin and bones. This is what she remembered and always would: the sisters who sat with her in the garden, the grandmother who stitched her a dress the color of the sky, the man who spied her in the grass and loved her beyond all measure, the mother who set up a tent in the garden to tell her a story when she was a child, neither good nor bad, selfish nor strong, only a girl who wanted to hear a familiar voice as the dark fell down, and the moths rose, and the night was sure to come.

Faithful

W
HENEVER
P
ETE
S
MITH TOOK THEM SHOPPING HE ALWAYS
bought Mimi too much. It didn’t matter if the store was Target or Saks Fifth Avenue, by the age of seven Mimi could manage to talk him into whatever she wanted. She called him Gogi, which was her version of Grandpa. She was a big fan of nicknames, and books, and ballet. Her hair was black and her eyes were darker than Lorry’s. “She’ll be spoiled,” Elv would remind Pete, thinking that her daughter’s charm was so like Lorry’s as well. All the girls at school wanted to sit with her at lunch to hear the stories she told. They hovered around her, wanting to be her best friend. When she came into school wearing pink cowgirl boots, her classmates went home and begged their mothers for the same. Pete didn’t think that a few shopping sprees every now and then would have a bad effect. It was nice to spoil someone. He’d been the first person other than Elv and the nurses at the hospital to see Mimi when she’d come into this world, so he reserved the right to be proud.