The Story Sisters (5 page)

Claire never told Elv that she still dreamed about Central Park. It seemed so babyish and silly. Her dreams were nightmares of grass and blood. She urged the horse to leap, but he stumbled and tilted over. Sometimes Claire startled in the middle of the night, awakened by her own soft sobs. As the world came into focus and her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could make out Meg’s sleeping form and the outlines of their room. There was
the pale wallpaper with its cream and lemon stripes, and the three white bureaus with their glass knobs, and the tall shelf filled with books. On some nights Elv was gone, her bed empty. Perhaps she could drift in and out of Arnelle, disappearing down the secret staircase at will, leaving her sisters behind.

When Claire heard the dusty leaves of the hawthorn hit against each other in the dark, she knew Elv was out there, perched in one of the highest branches. You had to look through the dark to see her, but she was there, breathing in the cool night air. That man wasn’t a teacher at their school when they went back in the fall, but Elv whispered that you could never be too careful. She was looking out at the pavement, the asphalt, the trees with their swelling branches. It was so quiet Nightingale Lane seemed like the gateway to the otherworld.

Claire couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened on the afternoon of their grandparents’ anniversary party if Elv hadn’t told her about the horses in the park. How would the day have ended if there’d been no mention of skin and bones and bravery? Perhaps the horse would still be alive. Claire got a shivery feeling thinking about it. She’d felt the same when she was eight and her parents got divorced. All the trees in the yard were covered with gypsy moth cocoons. The whole world seemed spun up in gray thread. People said they wanted to help you, then they did exactly the opposite. She felt safer with Elv out there in the tree.

In the afternoons, when she returned home from school, Elv always brought Claire a cup of soft vanilla ice cream. She fed her with a plastic spoon. She’d get into bed and tell stories about the three sisters of Arnelle. Each had a special task: one to find love, one to find peace, one to find herself. The sisters had a bond no one could break. That was something Claire understood. She and Elv spent more time together after the accident. Meg was busy
with after-school activities—the school newspaper, painting lessons, the French club—but Elv came home early, skipping dance class. She murmured to their mother that she was quitting dance in order to help out with Claire, but there was another reason as well. She didn’t like to look at herself in the mirror at the dance studio. She didn’t think she was as graceful as the other girls. She was too tall, too clumsy. Her teacher, Mrs. Keen, insisted she had real talent. She’d come into the locker room while the other girls went in to warm up and told Elv it was time for her to be serious about her work. All Elv had to do was make the commitment. A dancer’s life was one of both commitment and sacrifice. She was such a beautiful girl, she could have whatever she wanted. Elv had sat in the locker room afterward. Things echoed in there. The air was heavy and smelled of sweat. She could feel the beginnings of her black wings. She was from Arnelle, a stolen girl. Mrs. Keen hadn’t seen who she was. She didn’t know the first thing about her. That was when she’d begun skipping classes.

“Which sister am I?” Claire wanted to know when she was told that the old Queen was looking for someone to take her place. The next in line must be able to place her hand inside the mouth of a lion, her arm inside the jaws of a snake, her entire body into a nest of red fire ants. She must be able to tell the true from the false with her eyes closed. The scent of a lie was the stench of turpentine, dirty wash-water, green soap. She must be able to escape from ropes and metal boxes, to spy treachery from a distance.

“You’re the best sister, Gigi.” That was Elv’s nickname for Claire, taken
from gig
, the Arnish word for sister. Elv’s long black hair was pinned up. She stroked Claire’s head, which was filled with knots from spending so much time in bed and from sleeping so fitfully.

“No,” Claire said. “That’s you.”

Elv curled up closer. She spoke in a whisper. “Once upon a time I saw a demon on the road. I ran away, but then I realized I’d left you behind.”

“You came back for me,” Claire said.

Elv linked her arms around her sister. They both laughed when one of Claire’s casts bonked against the side of the bed.

“Le kilka lastil,” Elv said.
You could kill someone with that
.

“Je ne je hailil,” Claire said.
I would if I had to
.

“No, you wouldn’t.” Elv smiled. “You’re the good-hearted sister.”

Meg came home, her backpack overflowing. She sat at the foot of the bed. She knew her sisters stopped their conversations when ever she was around. “Everyone’s talking about you at school,” she told Claire. “You’re famous.”

“No,” Claire said. “I’m not.”

“Oh, yes,” Meg insisted. “Über famous. ‘Page Six’ famous.”

Evidently there had been an article in the
New York Post
about the mistreatment of carriage horses. The reporter had mentioned the girl from North Point Harbor who’d done her best to control a runaway horse. There were animal rights activists who had built a shrine to her and the fallen horse in Central Park, on the Great Lawn. It was made out of horseshoes and stones. People brought flowers and left them strewn about the grass.

“Se breka dell minta,” Elv said solemnly.

We should all bring you roses
.

“Well, I brought homework instead.” Meg brought forth the papers and books she’d picked up in Claire’s homeroom. “I’ll read the questions, then you answer and I’ll write them down.”

“Why don’t you just do it for her?” Elv said. “It would be much easier.”

“Because I don’t know how she would answer.” Meg had the habit of chewing on pencils, even though she was afraid it might
give her lead poisoning. She had recently found she had a lot of nervous habits. More and more often, she wanted to be alone. She wished she could move into one of the smaller bedrooms downstairs, but she didn’t want to hurt her sisters’ feelings. She couldn’t wait to go to college. She went to the school library to sift through college catalogs whenever she had a free period at school.

“Well, I do,” Elv said. “I know her inside out.”

Elv grabbed the homework assignment. It was a report on a European capital. Elv began to write about Paris. She wrote about the Louvre, where the girls had spent hours on their last visit. Later, when Elv read the report out loud, Claire told her not to change a thing. She had gotten it all right, even Claire’s stop after the museum at her favorite ice cream shop, Berthillon. “Favorite flavor?” Elv had asked. All three sisters had shouted out “Vanilla” at the same time. Even Meg knew the answer to that. Claire never varied from her one and only choice. She refused to try a new flavor. For some reason, answering in unison made them feel happy, as if nothing would ever change, and they would always know one another completely, even if no one else did.

A
NNIE HADN’T PUNISHED
Claire after the incident with the horse. People said her girls would become sullen and spoiled if she weren’t stricter. They said that adolescence was the time when girls flirted with destiny. But Annie was convinced there was no need for Claire to pay any further for her mistake. At the end of the month Claire understood why: spending spring vacation locked away was punishment enough. They were all supposed to go to Paris to visit their grandparents, but when school let out, only Meg and Elv went to France. The sisters had never been separated before. For the first time Claire was alone in their attic bedroom. At night when the leaves of the hawthorn tree rustled, she
covered her head with her blanket. She didn’t like being twelve. It was someplace between who she’d been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all. She had to count to a thousand in order to fall asleep. She missed having Elv out in the tree, keeping watch. She missed Meg’s sleepy, even breathing.

In Paris, Meg curled up out on the couch in the red-lacquered parlor of her grandparents’ home and wrote postcards to Claire. Meg was lonely and bored. Books didn’t comfort her and even the ice cream at Berthillon wasn’t as good this year. There should have been three of them, three was the right number. Paris wasn’t the same, she complained. The weather was cold and rainy. A warm sweater and wool socks were necessary at all times. There was an old stone trough in the courtyard that had once been used to water horses but this year it had filled with ice, then cracked. The season had been so cold the buds on the chestnut tree never opened; the white buds were pasty and waterlogged around the edges, the glossy leaves more black than green. Plus, Meg and Elv weren’t getting along. They got on each other’s nerves and disagreed over everything.

“Let’s not stay cooped up,” Elv had said to Meg one evening. Recently it had crossed her mind that if she didn’t know the human world, she couldn’t defend herself against it. She had to experience everything. Go behind enemy lines. “We should go out after Ama and Grandpa are asleep.”

When Meg had refused, unable or unwilling to break the rules, Elv had taken to sneaking out alone at night, tiptoeing down the back staircase, slipping through the cobbled courtyard. Each excursion was the work of a daring anthropologist: Where do lovers meet? Where can peril be found, and how is it best avoided? Where do squatters live? Can demons be avoided if you don’t have the strength or the time to turn and run?

When she read Meg’s cards, Claire couldn’t help but wonder
if Elv was going off to Arnelle, if she’d found the gate under the chestnut tree, if she knocked three times, then whispered a faerie greeting.
When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you’re with me always
.

That was what Elv had written on her postcard to Claire. She sat on a bench on the quay, overlooking the Seine while she wrote. She was barefoot, hunched over, scribbling furiously with a pen filled with pale green ink that she’d bought at a stationery store on the Rue de Rivoli. Paris had never been more beautiful, she told her sister, writing in Arnish. I feel free here.
Me sura di falin
. No one will hurt us now.

Elv had come to believe that if she did whatever she was most afraid of, its power over her would evaporate. She held on to metal railings. She went into
boulangeries
and looked at loaves of bread, and she didn’t disappear the way most faeries would have. She tied her ankles together with rope, then slit the knots with a knife. If she had known these tricks, she might have been able to escape after she rescued Claire. She had come to believe that evil repelled evil, while good collected it. She could see it happening in the parks. The dark lacelike scrim, the goblins astride the billowy trees, the demons drawn to purity, unnoticed by women on the benches, children at play. A clever girl met evil on its own terms. She didn’t get caught unawares. Elv bought a pair of black pointy boots at the flea market. She took up smoking, even though it made her choke. She kept at it until she stopped coughing. She could get used to anything. That’s what she had decided. She perfected a look that said
Go away
in every language, most especially in Arnish. It was as though she now possessed her own arsenal of weapons. She didn’t mind that men looked at her. Their attraction to her only added to her power.

All the while Meg lay in her bed reading novels, writing her whiny postcards, Elv was exploring the human world. She could
feel herself growing stronger. She no longer panicked if the wind came up, if a stranger walked by. She wasn’t the least bit spooked when the leaves on the trees rattled, always a sign of rain. The rain in Paris was beautiful, anyway, cold and clean and green. The Queen had told her that if she faced whatever she feared most, she would win the right to sit on the Arnish throne.
Water, sex, death
. Elv wrote the words in green ink on the back of a postcard. She folded the card into threes and kept it under her pillowcase.

One night Elv woke Meg from a deep sleep. It was late at night. Their ama’s guest room with its two twin beds was bathed in blue light. Elv had brought home a kitten someone had tried to drown. She’d had to wade far into the water to save it. All the while she had a fluttery feeling in her chest. She imagined the water rising over her. She imagined she could no longer breathe. He had done that to her when she started screaming. She thought about her vow to the Queen of Arnelle.
Water, sex, death
. In an instant, her fear was gone. It was only green water, dirty and cold. She reached out and grabbed.

“It’s tiny,” Meg said of the kitten when Elv brought it out of the sopping burlap sack it had been tossed into. “Poor thing. It will probably die.”

“It’s not going to die,” Elv said firmly. Why was it that Meg had to try and ruin everything?

The kitten was indeed starving and soon began yowling so loudly their ama came running into the guest bedroom, convinced one of the girls had been struck by appendicitis. Elv should have been in trouble for being out at night, but instead she talked Natalia into letting the cat stay. They named it Sadie and gave it a bowl of cream.

“We won’t tell your grandpa,” Natalia said. “One day he’ll look down and he’ll notice a cat and he’ll think it has always been
here. Anyway, she’s a darling creature. Who would mind a little thing like her.”

Elv looked elated, though her shoes were sloshy with river water and her clothes were soaked. “You have a good heart,” Natalia said to her. Before she went out, she kissed Elv’s forehead. Meg had felt herself burning.

Elv was singing to herself. She ripped off all of her clothes and left them in a dank pile in the corner. She was a woman and beautiful and fearless and the queen-to-be. She struck her fear of water off her list.

“You’re going to get in trouble if you keep going out at night,” Meg told her.

“I don’t care,” Elv shot back. “Anyway, trouble can find you anywhere. It’s probably under your bed right now.”