The Story Sisters (9 page)

A
T THIS TIME OF YEAR THE
S
TORY SISTERS HAD TOMATOES
at every meal. Fried tomatoes battered with bread crumbs, rich tomato soup with celery and basil and cream, salads of yellow tomatoes drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Once a pot of simmering preserves were left on the stove and forgotten; the girls dubbed the remaining mixture Black Death Tomatoes, delicious when spooned onto toast. They told tomato jokes: Why did the tomato turn red? Because he saw the salad dressing! How do you fix a broken tomato? Tomato paste! They tried crazy recipes that took hours to complete: tomato mousse, tomato sherbet, green tomato cake. But this summer Elv declared she was allergic to tomatoes. She insisted they gave her hives. She wouldn’t eat a single one. She pushed her plate away, no matter how much work or effort their mother had put into the meal. Elv didn’t care. She would eat what she pleased. She would do as she wanted. She said it quietly, but everyone heard.

The scent of the sultry vines in the garden in August always reminded the Story sisters of their mother, who they sometimes saw crying as she weeded between the rows. They wondered if she was still in love with their father or if it was something else that made her cry. Elv guessed she was feeling sorry for herself. Claire thought it best not to pester her with questions. Meg went out to ask if she needed anything, perhaps some help with the weeding. Annie gave her middle daughter a hug. After that they often worked together, late in the day, when the sun was low but the mosquitoes weren’t yet out. The quiet and the company were a tonic to them both.

Meg was fifteen now, a studious, lovely girl. She wore glasses and spent a great deal of time on her own. Of all the Story sisters, she more than anyone reminded Annie of herself at that age: shy, serious, a fanatical reader. Meg had a job as a counselor-in-training at a summer camp. She was beloved by her campers. Every afternoon she had a book club, which quickly became the summer’s favorite activity. The little girls tried to sit next to her so that they could have the honor of turning pages. They all began to wear velvet headbands, just like Meg, and several campers went home and asked their mothers if they could have their hair cut short.

Yet Meg remained a bit of a mystery to Annie. She was something of an outsider, even with her sisters. Well, all the girls were enigmatic, secretive. Elv and Claire still chattered in that language of theirs and laughed over private jokes. But they kept quiet when Meg entered the room. There was some bad blood between them that Annie didn’t understand.

“I wish I knew what they were saying,” Annie blurted to Meg one day as they worked in the garden, filling a barrel with the dusty weeds they had gathered.

“It’s nothing worth hearing. They think they’re better than everyone, that’s all.”

Arnelle no longer held any interest for Meg. Privately, she denounced not only the language but the world. There was a war going on there—faeries were set against demons and human beings. The stories Elv told were filled with brutal atrocities, some so awful they made Meg wince and cover her ears. Swans were murdered, their bloody feathers plucked out. Roses were hexed, turned into thorns that pierced hands and eyes and hearts. The more vivid and alarming the stories were, the more engaged Elv was in their telling. There was a man named Grimin she wanted to murder. Together she and Claire plotted the ways that
would cause the most lingering pain: boiled in oil, pecked at by ravens, locked into an iron box with a swarm of bees.

Bees, Claire had decided. Thousands of them, the killer kind, from South America.

In the evenings, Annie and Meg sat out on the porch, reading novels in the fading August light. As for Elv, she’d found a job at the ice cream shop. It was a far cry from Berthillon, just a crummy stand that offered soft custard. Elv felt humiliated being in such a second-rate place. But she wanted her own money, her own timetable. When she came in at night she smelled of hot fudge and sulfur. She never told the truth about anything. Not to her mother, not to people in town, not to her customers, whom she often shortchanged, not even to herself. What people called the truth seemed worthless to her; what was it but a furtive, bruised story to convince yourself life was worth living.

E
LV WENT OUT
every night, the door slamming behind her. She was barefoot, sullen, in a rush. “See you,” she would call over her shoulder to Claire, the only one she bothered to speak to, the only one who knew who she was.

“Later, alligator,” Claire would call back, wishing she was old enough to go with her.

Annie always asked when Elv would be back, even though she knew what the answer would be.

“Whenever,” Elv would say, aloof, impatient.

“Do you want me to follow her?” Meg asked one evening when the trees on Nightingale Lane were so green they appeared black, melancholy in the darkening sky. There were bands of clouds swarming across the horizon.

Annie had shaken her head. “If anyone should follow her, it should be me.”

Annie slipped off her sandals. The soles of her feet were dusty. She marveled at the way Elv could ramble all over town without shoes. Nothing ever seemed to hurt her, not stones or glass or twigs. Their town was safer than most, with a nearly zero crime rate, but you never knew what could happen to a girl all alone. Down at the harbor there were said to be wild parties going on. The police regularly drove past on patrol, but the parties went on out on the sandbars. No one knew how the local kids managed to get so many kegs of beer, but they did. No one knew where the drugs came from, but they were there as well. Once, on her way home from the market in the evening, Annie spied a group of teenagers down by the bay, huddled near the flagpole in the park. They didn’t look like bad kids. Annie stopped her car and got out to talk to them. Most of them scattered, but a few stayed, laughing and nervous to be approached by an adult. When Annie asked if Elv was around, they all looked away. One of the boys snickered. Annie heard some of the girls laughing as she walked back to the car.

Thinking of that group of kids and their reaction to Elv’s name, Annie suddenly grabbed for her shoes. “I’m going.”

“You can’t stop her from doing anything. She wouldn’t even get in the car with you.”

“I could ground her. Take away TV privileges. I could make her stay in for the rest of the summer.”

“Mom,” Meg said sadly.

“I could lock her in the bedroom.”

“She would climb out the window.”

They could still see Elv, disappearing down the lane, stopping to pat the old basset hound on the Weinsteins’ lawn before she disappeared into the gathering dark. She was like a shadow, something you imagined and couldn’t quite grasp. When she wasn’t at the ice cream shop, she was heading for the bridge. The group who banded together had bad reputations, but at least they knew
how to have a good time. Yet even those girls stayed away from her, making sure to clutch their boyfriends when Elv was nearby. She seemed dangerous even to them, willing to try anything. Give her a pill and she’d take it, offer her a drink and she was always willing to accept. Her cool bravery was legendary. Justin Levy had seen her flustered, though. Once when they were down at the beach she saw a car in the parking lot and bolted. She was shivering by the time Justin caught up with her on Main Street.

“Is he still there?” she’d said to him. She was wearing her bathing suit, a damp towel wrapped around her. She didn’t even think about calling the police. All she thought of was running.

Justin shrugged, confused. She’d made him jog back to check.

“No cars in the parking lot,” he assured her when he returned, out of breath, her loyal messenger.

After that Elv continued to allow Justin to tag along until he foolishly proclaimed his love for her. He was getting tiresome. By the middle of August, she’d had enough.

“What’s wrong with me?” Justin had asked mournfully when she told him to stop stalking her.

If Elv was someone else, she would have said
It’s not you, it’s me
—that’s what everyone said to get out of someone’s grasp. Instead, she was honest with Justin.

“You’re not who I’m looking for,” she replied. She was looking for someone who had no fear of iron or ropes. An escape artist, that’s what she wanted. A man who could turn her inside out, make her feel something, because nothing else seemed to. She could sit in the bedroom closet and cut herself with a razor and still feel nothing at all. She could pass her hand above a candle and when it flamed up have no reaction. All she had to do was close her eyes.

Justin had actually cried when she dumped him, as if to prove her point.

“Oh my God, Justin. Find somebody nice. Someone better than me. I am the last person you should be with. You should thank me for giving you this advice.”

After that, whenever Justin saw her he didn’t say hello. He took to wearing a black coat even though it was August. He wore sunglasses at night. People started laughing at him.

“You look like an idiot,” Elv said when she next ran into him. It was at the tea shop and she was there with Brian Preston, who was known for his drug use and also for burning down his family’s summer house in the Berkshires. Brian was stupid and good-looking and entertaining. “At least take off your sunglasses,” Elv told Justin.

When he did, she could tell he’d been crying again. Didn’t anybody see what the real world was like? She felt repulsed by his weakness. Mr. Weinstein down the street had died and now his bassett hound was on the lawn all the time. Mrs. Weinstein didn’t allow the dog in the house and whenever she passed him Elv felt like crying herself. She had to stop that. It was useless. It was like trying to win her place in the court of Arnelle, or trying to get rid of the black seed inside her, the taste of iron and of lye. She’d cried that day when the man in the car took her to his house and locked her in a room, until she realized it wouldn’t do any good. She had done everything the Queen had asked and had received nothing in return. Arnelle was pointless.

She had decided to change the story.

She was going over to the other side.

T
HE TOWN WAS
thick with Virginia creeper, wisteria, weeds that suddenly grew three feet tall. It had been that kind of summer. There were thunderstorms and hail. The news reported a strange rain of live frogs one wet, humid night. Children ran out with
mayonnaise jars to try to capture them the way they used to catch fireflies. The air felt electric, sultry; it pressed down on you and made you want to sleep, turn away from your troubles, tell yourself lies. Even smart people are easily tricked, especially by their own children. When everything smells like smoke, how do you know what’s burning? Things that should have added up for Annie seemed like mere coincidence: cigarettes found in the garden, doors slamming, boys throwing pebbles at the window, finding that neighborhood boy Justin Levy sitting in the hedges one evening in his black overcoat, crying. If she set the pieces side by side, she might have been able to interpret them.

When Annie visited her mother, she asked for her advice. She was worried about the Story sisters. One was quiet, one was standoffish, one seemed to be disappearing before her eyes, becoming someone else entirely. Perhaps they’d been more affected by the divorce and Alan’s defection than it had first appeared. Or maybe it was Annie’s fault—she’d been depressed, wrapped up in her souring marriage. She went to the garden for solace rather than to her girls. She’d cut herself off, didn’t date, rarely saw friends—a poor example of how to live in the world.

“Young girls are moody,” Natalia told her. The task of raising children was a difficult one.

“Was I like that?”

“Well, you were well behaved. I never had to punish you. But you used to cry for no reason. It’s an emotional time of life. You try things on, you put them away.”

“Was I like Elv?” Annie wanted to know.

“No.” Natalia shook her head. That man in Paris had skulked around long after the girls had gone home in the spring. Natalia had found a knife and a length of rope beneath the bed in the guest room later in the month when she was cleaning up. She’d
brought the little rescued cat, Sadie, with her from Paris to New York. It sat in her lap in the afternoons while Martin took his nap. Natalia often thought back to that night when her granddaughter had sneaked back into the apartment, dripping with river water, managing to be both fierce and tenderhearted. “Not like Elv.”