Winter Sisters

by Robin Oliveira

  From his lofty perch on the roof of Van der Veer Lumber, Jakob shifted uncomfortably in his oiled boots. His pants were soaked to the knees, and the cooling breeze that rippled the surface of the muddy, littered sea chilled him to the bone. He’d spent the night huddled in a corner of the roof up against the chimney. From time to time, the moon had come out from behind a cloud, but the silvery light had been insufficient to pinpoint the rise of the river. Chopping through the ceiling into the attic and then onto the roof itself, he’d worked up a good sweat, but in the freezing hours of the early morning his perspiration had evaporated, leaving him wet and chilled through. In the cold, his thinking had sometimes grown confused, and he had to remember not to pace to warm himself, because he didn’t want to risk forgetting that there was a hole in the roof. Occasionally he stood and swung his arms and stamped his feet, but for the most part there was nothing to do but to stare into the darkness and wait, terrified and impotent. Fearing that he might lose consciousness in the bitter cold, he relived sitting with Elizabeth on the neighbor’s stoop as she revealed her heartache to him about her time in Paris. As she talked he had discovered that she was not as fragile as her delicate beauty made her appear. From time to time, flashes of steely resolve had emerged, rendering her even more attractive to him.

  Now he swept his gaze 360 degrees, taking in his watery view.

  The world had turned upside down.

  The river and its vast cargo of broken ice surged a few feet below him, skirting his father’s sturdy building that had so far refused to give way. Only a few of the better-built lumber offices still stood, their steep roofs holding firm against the deluge. The saloon had disappeared. The telegraph polls were all toppled and tangled together, roped by the silver wires still strung between them. The chapel steeple bobbed on its side. The overwintered stacks of milled lumber that had filled the hundred-acre district had vanished, even the board feet that had been rushed last night onto packet boats in hopes of salvaging at least some of the stock. Not a single island of lumber protruded from the river’s sunlit surface. Van der Veer & Son—indeed, every lumber merchant—had just lost a great deal of money.

  Jakob thought back to Sunday, the night his father had returned late from somewhere and woken him, malt liquor and Scotch mingling on his breath, a vague satisfaction playing across his weathered features. He’d perched tipsily on the edge of Jakob’s bed and gone on and on about his plans for the coming year, the money they would make. As gaslight hissed from the wall sconce, Jakob nodded, barely listening, because his father sought not approval but an audience, a function Jakob had performed for him ever since returning from Harvard. He knew his father regarded these sessions as Jakob’s real education, which Jakob did not dispute out of a fervent wish to keep the peace, because any conflict only meant more misery for his mother. Jakob recalled that before his father had left, he’d leaned in confidingly, the stale smell of the liquor mingling with the perpetual pinesap. “Just so you know, son—love, regard—these are the most important things in the world. Not even money matters as much.” His father had steadied himself at the doorjamb before radiating a beatifying smile of contentedness, which Jakob was certain was not reflective of amorous feelings for his mother. Jakob had only recently become aware of his father’s adulterous inclinations. A week ago, at a gathering at his father’s club—to which Jakob had recently been admitted on the strength of his father’s money—he’d watched his father ogle a young barmaid and remark to a fellow member, “Wouldn’t you like to get her up against a wall?” The man had shrugged a half smile, then walked away as Gerritt hitched up his pants. Gerritt turned to his son, a sly grin of defiance blooming across his face when he noticed Jakob watching. In his confusion and revulsion, Jakob had not said anything, but now, facing the possibility of death, he felt ashamed that he hadn’t confronted his father.

  Jakob shook off the sordid memory. His mother would be frantic, wondering where he was. He searched the shore for any indication that help was on its way; it stood now perhaps three hundred yards distant—double its true length. He shouted and waved his arms, but he knew no one would hear him. The river was too loud. Unbuttoning his dinner jacket, he yanked it off and waved it overhead. He was cold, but the exertion hardly warmed him. He was hungry, too, but that problem could not be solved. He went on like this for a while, pushing away the obvious perils involved in any attempted rescue, but finally he acknowledged with a shiver that the river was too fast, the water too high. Defeated, he wrapped himself in his coat and huddled back against the chimney, his desperate ruminations distracting him enough that he missed the great shudder of yet another icehouse giving way in the basin. The river was a shifting demon. It was impossible to tell what it would do next.

  And then, with breathtaking rapidity, great slabs of ice groaned to a stop, then climbed over one another, effectively stoppering all the ice behind it. As Jakob watched, a frozen crust formed suddenly between him and the shore. What had moments before been a raging river was now an ice dam, a dam with incredible weight and force behind it, but solid all the same. He knew at once that it could crush the building he was standing on. Crush him, too. But it might yield passage if he could summon the courage to cross it. Terror rocketed through him, recalling his summers of dislodging logjams, the leaping from one floating log to another, the jabbing at bottlenecks with pikes, all of it a dangerous gamble where one misstep could prove fatal. Those dams broke suddenly, and occasionally men were carried away and drowned. A dangerous business, that.

  This dam, too, could break at any moment. But he could feel the mounting pressure of the ice forcing itself against the building. If he didn’t chance the river, he might be killed here anyway. Either choice might be suicide.

  His foot knocked against the heavy burlap bag stuffed with his father’s books, the reason he was stuck here. It would be foolish to take them, far easier to gain footing without them, but then what had this all been for? His father’s words: love is more important than money. Jakob wasn’t convinced his father believed that for a second.

  There was the terrible crunch of shattering window glass. Jakob scooped up the bag and hugged it to his chest. In a second, he dropped three feet from the mansard roof down onto the uneven, shifting surface of the temporary, frozen lake. The slab of ice rocked precariously. He sprang off it onto its neighbor then dashed pell-mell toward the city. The treacherous footing shifted from second to second. He juggled the heavy bag and grabbed for purchase here and there, taking hold of the odd protrusion to propel himself forward. At every moment, it felt as if the ice were about to give way. It happened like that: ice dammed, then shifted, and then dammed again, then broke through and became liquid once more. He was breathing hard. Small shards of ice coated his cheeks, making them rigid with cold. As he neared shore, he began to hear shouts of encouragement. From the top of Cammon’s Piano Factory, spectators were calling to him, urging him on. He was so close! With one last leap, he hurled himself forward, wrenched himself between two enormous upended slabs, handed the bag through the crevice, then squeezed into the crack just as the river ice broke behind him. One marooned mountain of ice to go. He scaled it and then clambered down the other side, into three feet of relatively still water on Rathbone Street, where he splashed into the arms of a waiting policeman who’d been alerted to his desperate status by the onlookers.

  “What daft idiot are you?” the policeman demanded, hauling him upright. “Out on the ice like that? And what the bloody hell is this?” he continued, snatching the burlap sack from Jakob’s hands. “Looted goods?”

  “No.” Jakob, his hands to his knees, was breathing hard. “Van der Veer Lumber’s books. My father’s books.”

  “Christ Almighty, boy. You Van der Veers really do like your money.”

  Jakob was too exhausted to explain. He let the policeman haul him and his bag through the knee-high water to Broadway, the officer shouting that they had been ousted from their o
wn precinct house by the flood and had their hands full without daredevils like Jakob testing themselves. He muttered that looting had broken out at the City Hotel, and that loiterers were taking to fisticuffs over food, apparently not having heard that City Hall had been flung open to the displaced, with mayoral orders to provide everything necessary for comfort. The policeman hailed an enterprising boatman rowing down the flooded thoroughfare and heaved Jakob and his sack into the boat with a hearty pat to his back. The oarsman bore Jakob around the Mattimore Coal and Wood Yard, over the submerged tracks of the NY Central railroad’s Tivoli Hollow Line, and past the No. 9 Police Station, then left him off at the base of State Street, across from the flooded post office, where a crowd had gathered, held back by a line of policemen. Jakob sloshed through a foot of freezing water and sank onto a dry square of pavement against the First National Bank building, shivering, with the company’s books pressed against his chest.

  He heard a shriek, and someone call his name. Then he sank into a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Elizabeth broke and ran toward the veranda, comprehending a second earlier than everyone else. Amelia gasped and followed, and Mary and William ran behind, their footsteps on the flagstone a warning drumbeat they would later remember as the herald of everything that followed.

  The girls.

  Anyone passing would think the family had lost their minds. And perhaps they had.

  Their dead had returned.

  The dead never return, and yet theirs had.

  They sank onto the veranda steps, surrounding the policeman and Emma and Claire. The girls sat up and rubbed their eyes, pulling away from the policeman, who did not relinquish his firm grip around their shoulders. They were still mirrors of one another, with those high cheekbones and wide blue eyes rimmed with thick lashes, like curtains, their long copper hair shimmering in the cold morning light. And they had been fed, clearly, though their hair was tangled. No one but the policeman wondered yet why they were wearing only nightgowns. No one noticed that their bare feet were mottled with cold.

  They were seeing only the girls, resurrected.

  “I stumbled across them in the alleyway behind Ferry Street,” the policeman said, his fair hair glinting in the early rays of the sun. “That’s in the Pastures. They were sleeping all alone up against a wooden fence. I’m glad I found ’em when I did. The Pastures is underwater now, most of the basements filled up. The sober citizens were already packing their wagons by the time I started knocking on doors—that was my job. Most got out. God help the others—though I think most folks got out when the bells started. But the Pastures always floods late cause the water gets dammed up under the South Bridge. It’s not like before the bridges were built, when the whole city went under at once.”

  They hardly heard him. Time had reversed itself, and all the rules of the world had been broken just for them. Amelia was petting Claire’s hair. It was a raft of tangle and dirt. Elizabeth had reached out and taken a hold of Emma’s hand. Mary, her eyes glassy with tears, wiped them away. It was a miracle, a mirage. Everyone was trying to catch their breath.

  “They’re skittish,” the policeman warned, though no one was paying any attention to him. “I woke them out of a sound sleep. The bells were ringing like no one’s business and they were sleeping. Then I couldn’t believe it when they told me their names. I asked them again and that’s when they ran.”

  They had torn away from him as if he were the devil himself, he said. He’d yelled over the din, Emma! Claire! We’ve been looking for you. He’d chased after them and swung them into his arms and pinned them there while he said how the whole world was worried about them and that people had been searching for them for a long time.

  The family was only half-listening; they were intoxicated: The girls are here. The girls are alive. The girls are back.

  The policeman talked on. “I can usually spot ’em, the little ones on their own who don’t like it out there? First, I thought maybe they belonged to somebody—everyone was out on the streets—but I got the picture soon enough.” He seemed to be spinning words, not wanting to come out with something, as if there was something they didn’t yet understand.

  The sleeve of Emma’s nightgown inched up her arm, and she seized it and tugged it back into place. It was a small gesture. Innocuous. The policeman buried her up to her shoulders under his great coat. No one was heeding the cold.

  “It was bedlam in the streets, you understand.” The policeman couldn’t get to the point. He was going around it and under it, backtracking, anything but saying it straight out.

  Mary noticed that the girls’ dazed expressions seemed not to be registering where they were. They were as silent as their granite statue. Vanished was any trace of Emma’s spirited confidence, Claire’s sparkling happiness. Flesh, yes, here, yes, but they exhibited no exultation. Their gaze focused on nothing and no one. They were blank. Blurred.

  “Grandmama?” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes, Lizzie. Isn’t it wonderful?” Amelia caressed Emma’s shoulder and wiped a smudge of dirt from her face.

  Emma flinched and pulled away.

  The policeman repeated his stories, Ferry Street, tried to get away, measuring every word while they all peered at Emma and Claire, studying them as they hadn’t before: Was that a bruise? What was that on Claire’s collar? It wasn’t blood, was it?

  “I asked them who they were and I couldn’t believe it. Not at first,” the policeman said. He was repeating himself. The sisters were saying nothing.

  “They talked to you?” William said, his eyes narrowing.

  “They did.”

  “Officer Farrell?” Mary said, finally recognizing him as the policeman from her visits to the precinct house, and then from the day Mantel had come to the clinic, the one who had remembered about Emma and Claire

  “Wondered when you’d notice.” Colm Farrell was less effusive now. “They knew their names. I couldn’t believe it. Had to ask them twice. When they told me, I thought what the hell, I’d let the drunks drown. I didn’t have a wagon with me so I carried them up the hill.”

  “From the Pastures?” William said, keen now to every detail. “All that way?”

  Officer Farrell still had Emma and Claire by their shoulders; it was clear now to everyone that he didn’t mean to let them go. “I stopped first by their house. They’d given me the address—46 Elm Street. That’s how I knew for sure it was them. ‘Cross the street from the brewery, up from that orphanage?” He was stalling. “Another family had already moved into the rooms. I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t know what to tell them. Then I remembered you.” He nodded at Mary. “That’s when I brought them here.”

  The story took sudden shape as they all studied the girls and really saw them for the first time. Their skin was sallow and sickeningly pale, their eyes were glazed and blank, and both girls seemed unreachable. Mary marked the dirt under their fingernails, the rigid way they held their arms tight to their sides.

  “I didn’t know what to tell them,” the policeman repeated.

  “What exactly did you say?” William said.

  “I said we had to come here first. That they needed to see a doctor.” Officer Farrell shifted. His voice grew raw. “There’s something not quite right. They were asleep when I found them. I’ve had a chance to study them here while they were sleeping and we were waiting for you.” He pulled back the great coat. “That isn’t all dirt spattered on their gowns. Something happened, and I’d like to know what, if you can pry it from their lips. I couldn’t get it out of them. But if you can . . .” He lowered his voice. “They look badly used to me, and I’ve seen some things.”

  Mary and William turned to one another. They had seen this lifeless look before, in the war. It was more than exhaustion. More than disorientation. It was shock.

  Mary said, “Officer Farrell, William, could you
bring Emma and Claire inside, please?”

  William and Farrell bent to pick them up. The girls arched their backs, pushing them away with balled fists and kicking so vigorously that William and Farrell released them. The girls scrambled into one another’s arms, silent as stones.

  Amelia reached out a hand to them, but Emma kicked her away.

  Without a word, Elizabeth turned on her heel and disappeared into the house. No one asked any more questions about where the girls had been since their disappearance, because the answer was obvious.

  Clearly, Emma and Claire O’Donnell had been residing in hell.

  A wavering melody, barely discernible, penetrated the shocked silence.

  Elizabeth was standing at the threshold, her violin tucked under her chin, eyes shut, arm drawing back and forth, her body yielding like a blade of grass, playing Pachelbel, the lyrical canon that Mademoiselle Urso had first played for Elizabeth and William.

  Emma and Claire both turned their wary gaze on Elizabeth.

  Time slowed. It happens that way, sometimes, when life rearranges itself.

  From despair to possibility within a hair’s breath.

  Amelia nodded to William to lift a becalmed Emma into his arms. William nodded to Farrell, who stooped over Claire like a crane, his long arms gathering her in. The girls allowed themselves to be lifted up, and Elizabeth, seeing this, led them all into the house like a Pied Piper.