The Story Sisters

by Alice Hoffman

  “What’s wrong with you?” Elv asked her sister. In Arnelle, everyone understood that it was possible to cry without tears, to be brave even when riddled with fear. But Meg didn’t understand anything. “Cat got your tongue?”

  In Arnish, cat was pillar. Said aloud it sounded vicious.

  “Nothing’s wrong with me,” Meg said.

  Elv knew what she meant. It’s you. Always you.

  THE WEATHER WAS changing. It was September and school had begun. In the evenings, Elv began to smoke a white powder. She used a glass pipe that looked as if it would catch on fire when she inhaled. Claire sat out in the hall on the third floor, guarding the bedroom door. “Thanks, Gigi,” Elv would say when Claire came back into the room. “Now I can breathe.”

  When Claire asked what was in the pipe, Elv said, “The antidote to humanity” and laughed. “Seriously, it’s nothing. It’s chalk dust.”

  Even though school was in session, Elv often didn’t come home until dawn. She didn’t mind getting wet as she ran across the damp lawn; she was burning up under her skin despite the change in the weather. At the hour when her sisters got ready for school, she would creep into bed, naked and wet. If you shook her, she didn’t budge. If you talked to her, she didn’t answer. She was exhausted most of the time, but agitated. When she managed to go grab some sleep, she talked through her dreams, always in Arnish.

  Claire would perch at the foot of her sister’s bed on these school-day mornings, worried. She had begun to dread the future. Elv was being swallowed up. Claire wondered if the door to Arnelle could close when a person least expected it to, shutting her into that underground world. She whispered Elv’s name, but there wasn’t an answer. She traced a finger over the scars Elv had left on her own skin. Would she know how to rescue Elv if the time ever came? Would she stand there mutely and watch her sister be carried away or would she dare to be brave?

  MEG BEGAN TO hide everything she cared about. She kept it all in the guest room closet, which she secured with a lock she bought at the hardware store, keeping the small key in her backpack. Things had been disappearing: headbands, jewelry, clothes. Elv had burned her own belongings, and now she was taking whatever she wanted. Elise phoned Annie to say that Mary had come home to find Elv going through her closet. Elv had pried open a window and managed to climb into Mary’s bedroom. When Mary walked in to find her cousin loaded down with her belongings, Elv threatened to burn down the house if she told. Mary had had such a bad asthma attack afterward that Elise had rushed her to the hospital.

  After that, Annie stopped seeing her cousin, just as she avoided most people in town. She didn’t want to hear about anyone else’s children, their high SAT scores, their good grades, their bright futures. She didn’t want to see the looks of pity when they asked after Elv. People in town talked about Elv endlessly. Her antics provided for a steady stream of conversation. She was seen sitting in the graveyard, barefoot, smoking, haunting the plot where Jason Levy was buried. She’d talked back to the history teacher all the other students feared, and now Mrs. Hill was out on medical leave. She stole handfuls of prize roses from Mrs. Weinstein’s yard and hung them over her bed on a string, a charm of mintas for protection, she said. “So the goblins don’t eat us alive,” she explained when Mrs. Weinstein came knocking on the door. “Or would you like that to happen to us? Would you like us to die the way Pretzel did?” Pretzel the basset hound had been hit by a speeding car earlier in the month. He was too old and blind to stay outside, but Mrs. Weinstein had kept him out of the house anyway. Elv had egged Mrs. Weinstein’s Honda, a crime Mrs. Weinstein hadn’t unraveled. When people on the street turned to look at Elv’s black outfits, her pointy boots, she shouted out, “What the hell are you staring at?”

  “People in this town are so stupid,” she confided to Claire, who was beginning to wonder if there was such a thing as being too fearless. She had begun to have nightmares, about the horse in Central Park, the boy on Elv’s bed, the dog down the street. “Trust me, you have to watch out for yourself,” Elv assured her little sister. “Otherwise you’ll just get dragged down by all their asinine rules.”

  A girl Meg knew named Heidi Preston said her brother boasted that he could have sex with Elv whenever he wanted in exchange for drugs. He had access to methamphetamine and OxyContin and Ritalin. Heidi didn’t seem judgmental about this; she told Meg as if she were a newscaster, merely reporting the facts. For a couple of weeks Meg let Heidi be her best friend. She found Heidi’s knowledge about drugs and sex to be fascinating and quite unexpected. Then Elv spied them together. Outraged, she pulled Meg aside that afternoon when she got home from school. “Stay out of my life,” she snapped. “And keep the hell away from Brian’s sister.”

  They were up in the bedroom, the door locked. Elv had flown at Meg, pushing her against the wall, pinching her. To Claire, the third floor felt as if it was part of the otherworld, not quite connected to the rest of the human realm. Elv had written on the walls with green ink. The floor around her bed was littered with crumpled paper and used cups and glasses.

  “I’m serious,” Elv said. “Don’t ever talk to that girl again.”

  “Stop it!” Meg said. She tried to pull away but couldn’t. She was crying, and trying not to let her sisters see. Red welts were rising on her skin where Elv had pinched her.

  “You’re like a stupid cow, butting into everyone’s business. That’s why Claire and I hate you. You’re such a nothing, Meg.”

  Meg looked down at the floor and made a sobbing sound.

  Claire felt her blood rise. “Don’t talk to her like that!”

  Elv turned to stare at her, stunned.

  “Meg can do as she pleases,” Claire told Elv, surprising even herself. She and Elv had been each other’s so completely. But since Elv had started smoking that white powder she was different. You have to be mean sometimes, she’d whispered to Claire. You have to protect yourself at all costs. “Meg can be friends with whoever she wants,” Claire said.

  Meg got into bed. She pulled up the covers. She did that whenever she cried, thinking no one would know.

  “Fine.” Elv’s face was flushed. “I don’t care about Meg.”

  “I do,” Claire said hotly.

  “Really?” Elv said. “Would she have rescued you?”

  That was the end of Meg’s friendship with Heidi. She and Claire walked home from school together. The September light was incandescent: the lawns were brown. People in the neighborhood looked out their windows and thought the two Story sisters looked like twins. In the evenings they did their homework in the kitchen while Elv prowled around town. It didn’t matter to Meg if she ever talked to Heidi again. She wasn’t really interested in friends anymore. She had Claire now. That was enough.

  THE WEATHER BECAME chilly at night. You had to wear a sweater or a light jacket. The edges of the leaves were already turning. Autumn was early this year, especially welcome after the hot, humid summer. Annie had dug up most of her garden, tossing away the spent lettuce and the squash vines with their yellow-white blossoms and the singed pea pods. Meg helped, and soon Claire decided to lend a hand as well. They worked well together, in a steady rhythm, pulling weeds, turning the soil, gathering the last of the vegetables. They stepped on the fallen tomatoes and heard them squish and laughed till they nearly fell down.

  “Do you think your past stays with you forever?” Claire asked Meg one day. They were removing the wooden stakes used to tie up the heaviest of the vines. “Do you think you can ever escape it?”

  There was a slight drizzle, and the two Story sisters were wearing raincoats. Their mother was collecting the cabbages that no one liked. She would take them to the town hall, where there was a food pantry for the needy.

  Meg shrugged. “I think you are who you are.”

  “But what if you’re attacked by sharks or kidnapped? Those things change you, you know. You can’t be the same after that.”

  “There are no sharks in North Point Harbor,”
Meg said.

  “There was one once.” Annie had overheard and now came over to join in. She loved spending time with the two girls. “It came around the tip of Montauk.”

  “No, it didn’t!” Meg and Claire laughed.

  “It was ten feet long,” Annie vowed, a grin on her face. She felt the way she used to, when her daughters were young and she was young, too. Even before the divorce, Alan was never around. It was just the four of them, all in it together.

  “It had a thousand teeth,” Meg added to the story. “It could swallow an entire horse. A whole cow.”

  “It could eat an entire town,” Annie said. “Houses, stores. And then one day it went away. It went to sea where it belonged, and never thought about the town called North Point Harbor.”

  “It was lost and never found,” Claire said. She could see their bedroom window. The leaves on the hawthorn tree looked like black wings. She closed her eyes and wished that nothing bad would ever happen to Elv. She wished they could go back to who they had been before they’d become who they were now.

  THE FIRST SEMESTER of school was over. Elv had failed every one of her classes. She had been picked up by the police for shop lifting, but the charges were dropped in exchange for a promise that she would no longer frequent the local pharmacy. It was only nail polish and mints, she complained. Hardly a federal offense. At least Alan had gotten a decent lawyer and paid the bill, which was substantial. The tension in the house grew worse. Elv seemed to have a different boyfriend every week. They followed her like dogs, then disappeared, replaced by someone new. It had happened slowly, but she had become a stranger in their house. She barely spoke; she drifted in and out like a shadow. Ever since the fight over Heidi Preston she’d been standoffish even to her beloved Claire. She needed room to breathe, that’s what she told Claire when Claire got into bed beside her. She told her to go away, even though she was crying and her skin felt cold and she was so alone.

  Meg did the research about methamphetamine. She and Claire sat in the library and read about the effects: rashes, paranoia, violent outbursts, inability to sleep. It all seemed familiar. Meg ran into Heidi Preston, who said her brother, Brian, had been sent to school in Maine because of Elv. Heidi’s parents had found them getting high in the basement. Now Brian had run away from boarding school and they didn’t even know where he was. Meg and Claire went upstairs and searched through the shoebox. They studied the map on the wall of the closet. Claire had never before noticed that all of the roads in Arnelle were circles. Each one led to the same place.

  ONE NIGHT IN early October there was a sudden frost. Annie wanted to protect the last of her crop. She often continued to have fresh tomatoes at this time of year, which she used for spaghetti sauces long into the winter. She went out to lay plastic over the few tremulous vines that remained. When she looked up, she saw Elv climbing out of her window. She shinnied down the tree. Annie stayed perfectly still, hidden by leaves. She could hear the wind and the fluttering sound of the last few moths in the garden, luminous against the dark.

  Elv was wearing a thin black blouse that clung to her breasts. She had on her black jeans. Despite the frost, she was barefoot. She began to run as soon as she touched the ground. For some reason Annie ran after her. She didn’t think, she merely acted. It was as though someone had pressed a button that had activated a spring and Annie had no choice but to go. Elv’s footsteps were muffled and she was surprisingly fast. Annie was out of breath in no time, but she went on, following her daughter. It seemed as if everyone in the world was sleeping, unaware that time was hurtling forward. Dogs barked in backyards. Though the leaves had begun to turn color, in the dark everything looked black.

  Elv was headed to the parking lot of the convenience store. An old car was parked near a few locust trees that had grown up through the asphalt. The car engine was running and exhaust filtered into the dark. Annie stopped in a thicket of thorny briars. Her breath echoed inside her head. She was sweating even though the air was cold. She saw the car door open. A burst of loud music escaped. Once Elv climbed inside, the car pealed out, tires squealing. Annie stood in the brambles, breathing hard. She walked home slowly, a stitch in her side. There were boys inside the car. No one local. No one Annie recognized. She thought she’d heard Elv laugh.

  When she got home, the kitchen light was turned on. Annie had a surge of hope—maybe Elv had been dropped off and was already back—but when she went inside only Meg and Claire were waiting. They had made a pot of tea.

  “Did you find her?” Meg asked.

  Annie shook her head. She went to sit with the girls. Claire got her mother a wet paper towel. The brambles had left scratches. Her forehead and arms were bleeding.

  “Thank you,” Annie said.

  “She’s using ice,” Meg told their mother.

  “What?” Annie looked at her daughters. They had school in the morning. They shouldn’t be up in the middle of the night. Claire was only thirteen and Meg was fifteen.

  “It’s methamphetamine,” Meg explained. “Brian Preston’s sister Heidi told us. He used to go to our school till he got kicked out.”

  Meg and Claire sat close together, knees touching. They had united and were turning Elv in even though they knew they would surely pay for their disloyalty. Elv wasn’t the forgiving type. “Je ne sprech suit ne rellal har,” Claire had overheard Elv say when Meg found the glass pipe and the packet of chalky powder. Say one word and I’ll make you regret it.

  She had made them both promise, but they’d kept their fingers crossed behind their backs. They’d always learned their lessons from Elv, and that was how they’d learned to lie. Meg brought Elv’s backpack to their mother. If they didn’t stop her, she wouldn’t stop herself.

  Meg had convinced Claire it was the right thing to do, but even now Claire wasn’t certain. She’d had trouble sleeping of late. She was afraid that Justin Levy’s ghost would appear at their window, still searching for Elv. She thought about demons and women with black wings. On the terrible day, she had waited at the corner by the stop sign for hours. She had been covered with blackfly bites. She would have waited a thousand years before she went home without her sister.

  If we don’t help her, no one will, Meg had whispered tonight. It’s now or never.

  Claire imagined that Elv was calling for her, unable to speak or form words, but summoning her in silence, using the spell meant for the most desperate of times. Reuna malin. Rescue me. There was no other choice. That’s why they were waiting when their mother came home. They had come to tell her the truth about Elv, even though they knew that once they did, nothing would ever be the same.

  Iron

  We only wanted to look at him. We set the trap in the meadow. It had metal bars and a gate that slammed shut whenever footsteps crossed the threshold. People barely believed in him anymore, but we did. We’d seen his shadow.

  We caught him the first time out.

  We thought it was luck. We thought it was fate. We were proud of ourselves.

  There he was, hiding from the sunlight. Crows circled overhead.

  He didn’t move, so we poked him with sticks. We were afraid that if we opened the gate he would run, so we watched him all through the day.

  Tell us your name, we said. We knew if he did he’d be ours forever.

  He said nothing. Perhaps he couldn’t speak.

  He was growing paler. He looked like moonlight. He was so beautiful we couldn’t stop looking at him. We watched him all day long.

  Tell us, we asked, again and again.

  He said nothing until he disappeared, curled up like a leaf, gone. We heard clearly that his name was sorrow, and now it was ours forevermore.

  THEY WENT ON A SUNDAY. IT WAS THE HEIGHT OF THE FALL foliage season, and they were driving to New Hampshire. Everything was red and yellow. The whole world was shimmering. The other girls were brought along so that nothing would seem amiss. Family time. Nothing more. An adventure into the countryside. It was rare for Alan to sp
end even an hour with his ex and the girls, let alone an entire day. It was a stab at a new, more civilized approach to the divorce, that’s what Elv was told. In truth, Annie had to force Alan’s involvement—she’d fought and begged until at last he’d given in. Still, they must have been convincing, because there Elv was, in the backseat, sleeping. Every once in a while Annie could hear Claire and Meg whisper to each other in Arnish. They were worried, two anxious doves. Se sure gave ne? How much longer till we get there? Sela se befora. What if we’re wrong? Quell me mora. Don’t ask questions.

  Annie was quick when it came to languages. She’d learned French by eavesdropping on her parents, and now, because of the bits Claire had taught during her recovery, she understood a little Arnish. Recently she had gone to see a therapist, who had in formed her that she should have never allowed a separate reality to be constructed, especially one that excluded parents. The Story sisters had isolated themselves from the rest of the world, as though they were mere travelers in the here and now, meant for some other time and place. Such activities caused nonattachment, delusions, disloyalty. The world they lived in should have been enough.

  Elv was stretched out, wearing the clothes in which she’d slept. They’d woken her early. She had grumbled and complained, but when she saw that her father was visiting, she’d pulled on her boots, grabbed a sweatshirt, and thrown herself into the car, where she quickly fell back asleep. She was dreaming while Meg looked out the window and Claire bit her nails and her father navigated and her mother sat in the front seat wearing sunglasses even though there was no sun that day. Annie had brought along a cooler of drinks and sandwiches, not that anyone was interested in eating. The trees were so red by the time they reached New Hampshire that the leaves looked like flames. Elv yawned and sprawled across Claire’s legs.