The Story Sisters (37 page)

He’d been around town long enough that people had stopped calling him Cemetery Man, even though he still went every week to cut the grass, trim the lilacs, sit on a bench, bringing along his shovel when the path to the graves was heaped with snow. He was known as Mimi’s grandfather now, and even if there was no blood connection, that was who he was. Elv and Mimi had moved into the top-floor apartment in his house in North Point Harbor. Elv worked at another animal shelter in a nearby town, where she was hired as assistant director. Mimi was in third grade at the same school the Story sisters had attended. It had been completely remodeled and the teachers seemed so young. It looked different,
but when Elv walked inside, it felt the same. Pete went with her for the first parent-teacher conference. Elv still had trouble with official meetings and authority figures. She got fidgety and self-conscious, all the more so for having to walk down hallways she had taken with her sisters.

Part of the newly remodeled school library was called the Meg Story Reading Room. There had been a celebration when it first opened. Elv shook hands with the mayor and the librarians and the members of the town council. Elise and Mary Fox had come, and Elise cried when Pete got up and said a few words about how books had mattered so much to Meg, and how Annie had wanted to honor her memory by sharing her love of books with the town. When the speakers and the guests were directed to the buffet table set up in the hallway, Elv went to explore the reading room. Meg’s name was on a brass plate above the door. Elv drifted over to the fiction section and found the row of Dickens novels, the books by Hawthorne.

“It’s beautiful. Perfect,” she told Pete later. “It’s just what my mother would have wanted for Meg. You did everything right.”

On afternoons when Elv got out of work early, she went to the reading room while she waited for the three o’clock bell. If you sat by the window, you could see the bay when the trees were bare. When the trees were in full leaf, all you could see was green. The town felt different to her now that she knew she wouldn’t see that bad man again. She had seen his car a second time, long ago, when she was hanging out with the kids who smoked dope under the bridge and that poor Justin Levy was still traipsing after her. It was the same one he’d had when Claire had slipped into the backseat and he was pulling away and Elv had to yank the car door open and jump inside while it was moving so he couldn’t take Claire. When she recognized the license plate, she
should have called the police, had him arrested, but she was panic-stricken. She remembered that was the day she told Justin he should find someone better, someone who could really love him. But he hadn’t known how to do that.

Mimi knew where to look for her mom when school let out. Sometimes Mimi told people the reading room had been named after her, even though she knew it wasn’t true. It made for a good story. It made the other girls’ mouths drop open, even the ones who were rich and lived in big houses and weren’t so sure about Mimi. A couple of the girls whispered that she didn’t have a father. Maybe she didn’t care what they thought about her or whether or not they believed her when she said the reading room belonged to her family. She had become a fanatical reader, so she felt a special connection to the library anyway, and Story was her name too, so the reading room did belong to her in that way. She liked to think that if her aunt was still alive they would talk about books. Her mother didn’t have time to read, although she told the best stories. She’d said that when she was young she had invented an entire world with its own language, although she didn’t remember any of it now.

“You should have written it down,” Mimi told her. “When you write things down, they’re harder to forget.”

Mimi had been writing down the stories her mother told her about her father. They weren’t true stories; they were better than that. She had a diary full of them in a collection she’d titled
The Most Loyal Dog in the World
, which was all about her father’s adventures with his dog named Mother. Mimi thought it was a hilarious name. She had glued a photograph of her father inside the cover. He was smiling. There weren’t that many of him like that, when he looked as if he’d take all the time in the world to tell you a story and walk in the woods with you and clomp
through the snow in Central Park, which were all things her mother said he loved to do. Mimi liked to study his face. She felt she knew him even though she didn’t. It was his grave they visited in Queens, but he was here, too, in her book.

She had been writing to her aunt in Paris. She liked having a pen pal who was so far away. Every time there was a letter for her in the mailbox, it was as if a secret message had been waiting there all day while she’d been in school. She had started out sending her artwork, then had begun to add messages on the back. After a while, she began to get letters back. Her aunt was funny. She sent jokes: Why did the tomato go out with a prune? Because he couldn’t get a date! How do you fix a broken tomato? Tomato paste! She drew little sketches of Paris—a streetlight, the pet crow that lived in the workshop where she made jewelry, a bridge over the river with a curlicue railing, a rosebush in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

“What was the name for aunt in your language?” Mimi asked her mother one day as they were headed home from school. They usually took the long way around, but on warm days they went along the bay. Her mother seemed to like to walk there. She would stop in certain places and gaze into the woods and then they would keep going again.

“I don’t remember any of the words,” her mother said.

Mimi’s mother was beautiful and sad. She wasn’t friends with any of the other mothers at school. Whenever there was a potluck dinner, Mimi’s grandfather Gogi would make a dish for them to bring and he’d go with her because her mother was too nervous about school gatherings. Sometimes their cousin Mary would come over and the two women would sit on the couch and drink wine and laugh and then Elv didn’t even sound like Mimi’s mother. She sounded like someone who was happy.

“You must remember something,” Mimi insisted.

Mimi was the best student in her third-grade class not only because she was a fanatical reader but because she was persistent.

Her mother thought it over. If sister was
gig
, then aunt was most likely
gigi
. That’s what she had called Claire when it was just the two of them and the rest of the world had been so far away.

Dear Gigi
, Mimi wrote from then on. Mimi’s bedroom overlooked the garden, where her mother often worked on warm days. The garden wasn’t very sunny, so they’d had to cut down some little willow trees where Miss Featherstone had liked to perch and peer out at the world. Mimi still had Miss Featherstone, the doll who had accompanied her everywhere when she was younger. But now that Mimi was in third grade and would be turning eight in July, Miss Featherstone was left at home most times. She was still a good listener when it came to the stories Mimi told at night before she fell asleep. Her mother’s stories always began
Once upon a time
, even though that meant everything in them had already happened and everyone in them was already gone.

Every year her aunt in Paris sent something special on her birthday. It had begun when she was three, the year Mimi sent the first picture. Her aunt had mailed the birthday gifts to Mimi’s grandpa, but now his address was their address, too. The presents came in pink boxes, Mimi’s favorite color, and were tied with black silk ribbon. She couldn’t have been more excited over the charms her aunt made especially for her. Her mother thought they were beautiful, too. She handled them tenderly when Mimi showed her, then gave them back.

The charms were Mimi’s favorite things in the world, except for books and Miss Featherstone and her grandparents and her mother and the photograph of her father. She kept them in their
pink boxes in her top dresser drawer. Each one had arrived with a message.
So you’re always fast
. A gold horse with a moonstone saddle.
So you can fly
. A tiny gold and turquoise robin with a silver beak.
So you never get lost
. A firefly with citrine eyes and an orange opal at its center that glowed like a beacon. That one had looked so real Mimi had taken it to school to show off when the term began. She said it was a real firefly from Paris, and that in France all the insects were made out of gold. Everyone believed her and wanted to touch it for good luck. Then she almost lost the charm when Patti Weinstein dropped it. She quickly wrapped the firefly in a tissue and stuck it in her backpack, and she never brought the charms to school again.

So you are always sheltered
. That was the next one, a gold tree with a shower of jade in its branches. “It’s a hawthorn tree,” her mother had said, and when Mimi asked, “What’s a hawthorn?” they walked over to Nightingale Lane. Mimi looked at the big tree on the lawn of the house where the Story sisters used to live and she understood why her mother said she had liked to sit in its branches. She would have loved to have climbed it herself, only it belonged to another family now and she had her own yard in Gogi’s house on the other side of town, which was sunny ever since the willow trees had been cut down.

This year’s charm had come early from Paris in their ama’s suitcase. It was a big occasion to finally have their ama visit and they had spent days fixing up their apartment, making sure there were flowers in her room. They swept away the dust bunnies under the couch and made certain the hall closet wasn’t in a shambles with hats and gloves and ice skates and purses falling out when you opened the door. They wanted everything to be perfect. Natalia appreciated it all. She brought along French candies in the shape of violets, silk scarves, cheese for Pete, and the birthday gift from Claire. Mimi hopped around in a circle, clomping in her
cowgirl boots, until it was handed over. This one was perhaps the most charming and unusual:
So you never go hungry
. A little tomato plant, with one ruby, one citrine, one brown diamond, and one tiny emerald. Elv laughed when it was unwrapped.

“Are there really truly brown tomatoes?” Mimi asked.

“Cherokee chocolates,” her mother told her. “I’ll see if I can plant some this year.”

Now that she would be turning eight and was responsible, Mimi’s grandpa was getting her a gold bracelet so she could attach all the charms and wear them, but only on special occasions. She had learned her lesson about showing off. This year she had made a plan for her birthday. She had already told Miss Featherstone all about it.

Dear Gigi
, she wrote.
I know exactly what I’d like this year
.

She knew she shouldn’t count on it, because sometimes things didn’t turn out the way you expected in this world, or at least that’s what her mother always told her. Still, Mimi had a feeling this would turn out just fine. She asked her gigi for what she most wanted for her birthday, and in return she had sent her something special, not her own artwork, but something better—a painting her mother had framed and let her keep in her room, one she had done when she was much younger. It was black and watery and her mother had said it was the river in Paris at night, and that it was called the Seine, and that her sister lived so very close by to it that she probably walked along the banks at night, looking for stones, watching the inky sky fall down like ashes.

C
LAIRE HAD BEEN
surprised to receive that first crayoned picture that had arrived folded in two, addressed in Pete’s blocky handwriting. The next was of their house on Nightingale Lane. Their bedroom looked like a tower in a castle. On impulse, she went to
the workshop and made the little gold horse charm and sent it off. She thought that would be the end of it, a single exchange, but Mimi kept sending pictures, and when she learned how to write there was no stopping her. Printed missives arrived on blue lined paper, chock-full of misspellings. She wrote about her adventures, giving each one a title.
The Day I Started Kindergarten. The Day We Bought a Swing Set. The Day a Sparrow Fell Out of Its Nest and We Had to Take It to Wild Care, Which Rescues Birds
. Once Pete had slipped in a photo of the child and her doll sitting under a willow tree. Claire thought that was unfair. He’d written
Mimi and Miss Featherstone
on the back of the photo, which made Claire smile despite herself. She kept the photo, and sometimes she took it out and gazed at it, the child with long black hair and a serious expression in her eyes, the willow tree, the doll in a white dress, the yard in North Point Harbor.

She began to make other charms, ones for grown-ups, and these had gained her a large following. People were crazy for her one-of-a-kind amulets. There were those who swore they could help to find the lost, heal the sick, help the wearer tell the difference between a liar and an honest man. If you held one in your hand, it would point you toward your future—a decision to be made, a move to a new town, the love of your life. The charms had become a trend—for some, an obsession—and many Parisians owned at least one, while yearning for more. They were swapped at parties and clubs, like expensive and glorious trading cards. The few that had been stolen were said to have found their way back to their rightful owners, returned by post, or simply turned up at the original owner’s door, wrapped in brown paper and string.

Many of Claire’s charms began with objects found in Monsieur Abetan’s antiquities shop, which also sold cigarettes and magazines at the counter. It was just around the corner. Claire
and Monsieur Abetan often had tea in the afternoons, after she left Monsieur Cohen’s workshop. Sometimes she brought macaroons and dates or a paper bag filled with sugared almonds. She told the
deuxième
Monsieur Cohen all about Monsieur Abetan’s collection of relics, hidden beside the drawers of junk, just as she described Monsieur Cohen’s fabulous gemstone creations to Monsieur Abetan. In this way the two men became friends without ever meeting. They liked to hear about each other’s opinions through Claire, and they often vehemently disagreed, especially when it came to politics. Both, however, were students of human nature; that was what made for a great teacher.