The Story Sisters (6 page)

T
HE BEST PART
of the trip was the art classes the girls took with Madame Cohen, at least in Meg’s opinion. Elv only seemed interested in sleeping the days away so that she’d be refreshed when she sneaked out at night. The girls had been acquainted with their grandmother’s dearest friend since they were little and had often visited her jewelry store. Her stupid grandsons were sometimes there as well, but the Story sisters ignored them; the boys couldn’t even speak English. But they respected Madame Cohen. She had once been a watercolorist of some note. She had gone to art school in Paris and Vienna. She was a stern teacher who wore black even in the summer heat, still in mourning for her husband, who’d been gone nearly twenty years. The girls went to sit with her in the kitchenette behind the jewelry shop each day. Elv was sleepy from her wanderings. Sometimes she was so rude she actually put her head on the table and closed her eyes while they were supposed to
be painting. Instead of punishing her, Madame Cohen gave her a cup of espresso. Elv didn’t even try and her watercolors were beautiful. She only used shades of green. When asked why, she said, “I’ve been studying the river.” Once she made a black painting and when Meg said, “I thought you were only painting the river,” Elv laughed and said, “Can’t you see what that is?”

Madame Cohen had peered over. “It’s the Seine at night.”

Elv had nodded, surprised.

“I think it looks like a shoe,” Meg said.

“Sisters shouldn’t argue. I was one of three sisters myself,” Madame Cohen said ruefully. She knew there was evil in the world. She’d seen it with her own eyes. She never talked about the past and was surprised to find herself doing so now. She was older than the girls’ grandmother by several years. You didn’t see how old she was unless you looked very carefully. Her skin was patterned with very fine lines that made Elv think of the way leaves are veined, how beautiful they are when sunlight filters through.

“May I have more paper?” Meg asked.

“What happened to them?” Elv wanted to know.

Madame Cohen was well aware of the black scrim that stretched above parks and playgrounds. She saw it over her own roof sometimes. Just now, a black bug was trying to get in the window, bumping against the glass. You would think it was nothing, unless you knew better.

“They’re gone.” Madame Cohen clapped her hands together. That was enough of the past. “If you go out at night, I hope you’re careful,” she told Elv. Nearly everyone in the neighborhood had heard the stories of the girl who crept out of her grandparents’ apartment house, then slipped off her boots so no one would hear the clatter of her heels on the cobblestones. It was the sort of
neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else’s business, or at least tried to.

Elv smiled and said she certainly would try her best, even though they both knew that being careful was only good for so much.

“I have a bad feeling,” Madame Cohen told her dear friend Natalia that same week. It was late and no one knew where Elv had gone off to. She’d told her grandmother she was going to the bookshop, but Natalia had checked and she hadn’t been there. Plus, Elv had worn a short black dress, black boots, and she’d lined her eyes with kohl she’d found in her grandmother’s old makeup kit. That did not seem like bookstore attire.

“All girls need their secrets,” Natalia said. “It’s part of growing up. She’s about to turn sixteen, after all. Not a child.”

“They may need their secrets,” her friend replied. “But do they want them?”

M
EG SENT
C
LAIRE
a watercolor of the chestnut tree in the courtyard, which Claire taped to the wall above her bed. She stared at it every night, but it was difficult to tell whether there were white flowers on the tree’s branches, or dozens of doves, or if perhaps stars had fallen from the sky, only to be caught in a net of leaves. When Meg wrote about Elv’s black painting, Claire found herself wanting that one instead. She thought she would be able to see the river, even if Meg could not.

Claire lay on her bed in her dark room, feeling sorry for herself. She loved Paris and ice cream and art. She loved her grandmother’s parlor with its red-lacquered walls and the terrace where birds came to perch, begging for crumbs. She didn’t know how Meg could be miserable at their ama’s or how she could be lonely
when Elv was right there or why she didn’t dare go to see how many colors of green the river could be.

To cheer Claire, Annie spent huge amounts of time with her. She’d turn on the CD player and they’d sing along to Beatles songs and that was great fun. Or Annie would read from
Anne of Green Gables
or
Robin Hood
, or from old volumes of Nancy Drew that were hokey enough to make them both laugh. They watched movies for hours, all of Annie’s favorites,
Charade
and
Alfie
and
Four Weddings and a Funeral
. They watched
Two for the Road
so many times they could both repeat the dialogue by heart.

Claire had never had her mother all to herself and it was lovely to be the center of attention. She even taught her a few words of Arnish.
Melina
was summer.
Henaj
meant dog. But afterward Claire felt she’d betrayed her sisters. It was their secret, after all. Secrets were only good if you kept them; otherwise they were worthless. That was why Claire didn’t tell their mother when Meg wrote that there was a man who’d been hovering around Elv. He stood waiting for her out past the courtyard, besotted. He called out Elv’s name while they were all seated at the dinner table. Their grandfather, Martin, asked if anyone heard anything and Elv smiled and said, no, she hadn’t heard anything at all. Later, when Meg had asked who he was, Elv had merely shrugged. “Nacree,” she’d said in Arnish.
Nobody
.

“There’s a man following your granddaughter around town,” Madame Cohen told Madame Rosen one day when they were playing cards out on the balcony. The weather had cleared. The girls were going home the following afternoon.

“She’s beautiful. Lots of men will be showing up.”

But Madame Cohen could see accidents before they happened. She saw one now. “Your granddaughter may not be looking for trouble, but trouble is looking for her.”

“She’s high-spirited,” Natalia said. “Girls her age are meant to have adventures.”

“He works in a bar, Natalia, dear.” Madame Cohen sighed. “This is not some first love. He’s thirty years old. I hear he’s married.”

“We’ll take the girls to the airport first thing in the morning,” Natalia decided.

“Good idea,” her friend agreed, even though she knew that it was quite possible for trouble to find a girl anywhere.

Meg was in the parlor. She couldn’t help but overhear. If her grandmother knew the half of it, she would have been shocked. When Elv sneaked in at night she was barefoot, holding her black boots in her hand, smelling like tobacco and perfume and something that Meg didn’t recognize, the scent of something burning. Meg always pretended to be asleep, but Elv knew better. One night she had sat on the edge of her sister’s bed. “He’ll do anything I tell him to. He’d die for me, he said.”

Meg had kept her eyes closed.

“I know you’re listening.” Elv had a rush of adrenaline when she broke rules. She wondered if that was what warriors experienced in the moments before battle. It was like jumping off a bridge. You had to do the thing you were afraid of; after a while you didn’t feel anything. That was how it was whenever she was with Louis. He was the fool who felt something, not her. Maybe that’s why she’d chosen him. He was a way for her to learn how to manage what life had brought her.

“I hope you never know the things I know,” Elv told her sister. “I hope you read your books and think that’s what life is.”

Meg had thought Elv might be tearing up, but she didn’t dare look. Elv slunk off to bed and then it was too late to ask why she went with that man if it only made her cry.

W
HEN THE
S
TORY
sisters went back to school, people said Elv had changed. She seemed far away, an indifferent, elusive girl who painted her nails black and walked through the halls barefoot until the teachers threatened her with detention if she didn’t put her boots on. Not that the boots were any better; they were black, pointy-toed. They looked foreign and dangerous and they made the skirts she wore seem even shorter. Girls who used to sit at her lunch table were afraid of the stories she told, brutal, bloody tales in which hands and heads were cut off. People turned into frogs, ate poisonous bugs, were buried alive. No one wanted to hear stories like that anymore. The girls she’d grown up with wondered how she knew the things she knew. They kept their distance. After a while they didn’t even bother to say hello.

The boys in town were the opposite. They followed Elv around, and even the brashest among them seemed bewildered. They didn’t listen to her stories. They just stared. Elv seemed more beautiful than before, but in a hot, careless way. Boys she’d known since kindergarten begged for kisses. They telephoned late at night and threw pebbles at her bedroom window. She ignored them completely. For her sixteenth birthday Elv didn’t want a party. Her sisters were friends enough. Alan showed up with his new girlfriend, who taught biology at the same high school. Annie noticed how young she was, how she was trying to make a difficult situation less strained.

“Alan talks about the girls all the time,” the girlfriend said. Her name was Cheryl Henry and she yearned for children of her own. “They’re his pride and joy.”

“Really,” Annie said. “How nice.” She offered Cheryl a piece of cake. It was chocolate, with mocha frosting, Elv’s favorite. Not
that Elv had eaten a bite. They were in the kitchen and Alan had arrived too late for the actual birthday dinner. Elv had been waiting for him, but once he was there, she didn’t even say hello.

Alan kissed her on the forehead and gave her a hundred dollars. That was her birthday present.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” he’d said to her. Elv watched her father as he fixed himself a cup of coffee, then she disappeared while the others were having their cake. She got into bed and pulled up the covers. Sixteen was nothing. It was meaningless. Elv heard her mother come upstairs, open the door, see that she was in bed, then carefully close the door once more. Her mother was just as blind as her father. What had she thought that summer when Elv wept as the gardeners swept away the cocoons? “It’s not a bad thing. It’s necessary. Otherwise the moths will eat all the trees,” Annie had assured her.

“I don’t care,” Elv had said. “I couldn’t care less.”

T
HE MORNING AFTER
her birthday, Elv took the hundred dollars her father had given her and hitchhiked to Hempstead. The guy who picked her up kept looking at her, as though she was a mirage, a faerie who’d appeared in his passenger seat. “Do you have a problem?” she said coolly. She had a paring knife in her pocket, taken from the silverware drawer. “Maybe,” the guy had answered. He looked at her as if he expected something to happen, so she got out at a red light and walked the rest of the way. She found the tattoo shop. Patrons were supposed to be eighteen, but Elv looked old enough, as if she knew what she wanted, so no one asked for ID. She had two black stars tattooed above each shoulder, in the place where her wings would be. She found the pain soothing in a strange way, a gateway out of her body, into Arnelle. There was an army gathering there: the Queen had posted them at the doorway.
Anyone residing in the human world was suspect, including Elv.
Prove yourself
, one of the guards said to her. She was wearing a black dress. Black ballet shoes. She could smell jasmine. The tattoo artist was a bit leery now that her shirt was off. He said, “This might hurt.” As if she cared about that. He covered the tattoos with white bandages. “There might be some blood seeping through,” he told her. As if that mattered.

She waited for the bus, then, once she was home, she walked along Main Street, her shoulder blades burning. She felt free in the dark. When she got to Nightingale Lane, she walked more slowly. She stationed herself across from her house and watched the family inside. Her mother and Meg and Claire and their cousin Mary Fox and Mary’s mother, Elise, were all having dinner together. Elv wished she was inside with them, pouring the spaghetti into a colander, cutting up cucumbers, setting the table. She wished she was laughing at Mary’s stories of how stupid her classmates were. But she was beside a hedge at the end of Nightingale Lane, and she could barely understand what they were saying, even though the windows were open and their laughter filtered outside.

She heard a rustling. She thought there might be a demon there. She put her hand on the knife in her pocket, but when she turned she spied a boy from school creeping out of the Weinsteins’ yard. He was wearing a black sweatshirt and jeans. He saw Elv, hesitated, then came over. His name was Justin Levy and he was madly in love with her.

“Hey,” he said, sitting down next to her beneath the hedge.

“Robbing the Weinsteins?” Elv asked.