“I told you I’d be right back,” Elv said.
They were about three hours outside of New York. They hadn’t spoken more than a handful of words for nearly a year. All at once, Annie felt she had made a terrible mistake. She had no idea how Westfield might have affected Elv, for better or for worse. She had an almost uncontrollable desire to run, just leave the car for Elv and take off into the countryside. She could live among the deer, in the deep, dark woods. She could drink from a cold spring, clear New Hampshire water. At night there would be an endless sky filled with stars.
Elv tossed her empty coffee cup in the trash. She couldn’t wait to see what happened next.
“Ready?” she said.
Rose
Everything was red, the air, the sun, whatever I looked at. Except for him. I fell in love with someone who was human. I watched him walk through the hills and come back in the evening when his work was through. I saw things no woman would see: that he knew how to cry, that he was alone.
I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn’t see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn’t care that I was dying until I actually was.
MEG LOCKED THE BEDROOM EVERY NIGHT. ELV HAD HER OWN room now, one of the bedrooms on the first floor. She said she needed privacy and that at seventeen she was too old to share a room with the younger girls. But Meg knew the truth. Elv didn’t want to be up in the attic with them. In her little bedroom she could talk on the phone all night. She could sneak out the window and no one would be the wiser. She could cook up a potion of drugs, dreaming her way through her entrapment at home until at last she turned eighteen and could be free. Their mother had given her everything any girl could have wanted—her own TV, her own telephone. Still she wasn’t happy. She pouted and ran off to the city every chance she got. She told their mother she was seeing friends, spending nights with them. But anyone with half a brain could tell that was a lie. Elv had never had a friend in her life.
Sometimes Meg thought she was the only one who saw her sister for who she really was. She certainly wasn’t someone you wanted wandering around your house. Meg was reluctant to be in the same room as her sister. You could never trust a tiger, someone out for blood, convinced you had betrayed them. Meg waited until Claire fell asleep, then eased out of bed and tiptoed over to turn the key and lock their door. Sometimes she took out the worn piece of paper on which she’d written orange that she kept in her wallet, along with her school ID. Once or twice she’d fallen asleep holding it. She was glad she’d thought to write it down when they were in Paris.
Their mother had gone for a visit to New Hampshire and returned with their older sister, won over by her lies and pleas.
“Are you happy now?” Elv had remarked to Meg soon after she came home. That was when Meg knew nothing had changed for the better. “My hair’s shorter than yours. Does it make your day?”
Meg felt wounded that her sister would think her so vindictive. But in fact she had noticed that her hair was now much longer. Elv wasn’t as luminous or as obviously pretty as she used to be. She had a darker beauty now; she was thinner, edgier—even her eyes seemed a deeper green. The first week after she’d come home, Meg had spied her with some man in a parked car in the lot by the beach. Elv was sitting in his lap, kissing him—the kind of kisses Meg was embarrassed to see. It was daylight and many of the children Meg knew from the camp where she was once again a counselor were running around the playground. She hurried past, shamed, head down, but Elv had glanced up and spied her. That evening Elv had come up to Meg in the kitchen while their mother was out in the garden and Claire was in the living room, threading a strand of beads as a gift for their ama.
“Don’t tell Mom.” Elv grabbed Meg, the way she used to. She seemed stronger now.
“I told you, I don’t care what you do.” Meg’s heart was pounding hard. She pried herself out of Elv’s grasp.
“Seriously. If you open your mouth, I will make your life miserable.” Elv’s voice was matter-of-fact. Meg had no reason to believe that she wouldn’t do exactly as she threatened. She was already making things miserable without even trying.
“I’m not stopping you.” Meg shrugged. “You can take off all your clothes right in public if that’s what you want.”
Elv laughed. “You’re jealous. You always want what I have. Don’t think I don’t know it. And don’t think I don’t know you were the one who had me put away. Pretend all you want,” Elv told her. “I know it was you.”
Sometimes Meg couldn’t believe how much she hated her own sister.
Recently, she had run into Heidi Preston, who reported that her sources had told her Elv was using heroin.
“I doubt that,” Meg said, still defending her sister. But she thought about how Elv stumbled out in the mornings and late at night, about how thin she’d become. She thought about the bruised marks on her skin.
“Okay. Fine.” Heidi shrugged. “Some people are saying her boyfriend is a movie star.”
“Equally questionable.”
Meg didn’t want to think about the handsome man in the car or the kiss she’d seen. There was something illicit in it, something that suggested how little she knew about men and women. She asked Heidi about her brother, Brian. Heidi said she thought he was somewhere out west because he had once told her that a man could always make a living on a ranch. Meg wished the same thing would happen to them. Maybe once Elv turned eighteen she would take off the way Brian Preston had. She’d send them postcards from mysterious locations in California and Oregon. She’d promise she was never coming back.
Until that time came, Meg tried her best to avoid her. She was glad there were only two of them up in the attic now. Elv did as she pleased and took what she wanted. That was why Meg had recently taken a hammer and nails and permanently shut their bedroom window as a precaution. No one could get in now.
Sometimes Annie worked in the garden at night, waiting for Elv to come home, worried that Alan had been right. Annie dodged the truth, trying to maintain her optimism. But who did she think was calling late at night? Who was parked at the end of the street, waiting for Elv to sneak out her window and run down Nightingale Lane? Perhaps she had brought Elv home too soon. Perhaps as a mother she simply wasn’t up to the task. There had been a drought, and the soil was dusty in the garden. The leaves on the hawthorn tree curled and rattled in the wind. No tomatoes appeared on the vines. The star-shaped blossoms had fallen off before they could bear fruit. Annie had planted seven varieties, two more than usual, adding Arkansas Travelers and a new variety of Cherokee, but she’d wound up with nothing. She discovered hornworms, so pretty when they were moths, so deadly to tomato plants in their larva form. As soon as the harvest season was upon them, she pulled on her gardening gloves and tore out the tomato plants. There were red and brown leaves everywhere. She hadn’t the budget to hire a gardener anymore. All over town there were bonfires of burning leaves. Black ash drifted through the air. Annie looked up and glimpsed Meg behind the locked attic window. There was still the pungent scent of tomato vines. The metal trash can was full of tendrils and leaves, all turning yellow in the dark. This was the way her garden grew now.
WHEN THE SCHOOL term began, people avoided Claire and Meg. Everyone was talking about the Story girls and their crazy sister. There were all sorts of rumors, some true, some too far-fetched for reasonable people to believe. Some of the girls’ classmates swore that Elv had been gone all that time because she’d had a baby. Others whispered that she’d robbed a bank, been to jail, that she now met her lover in the church in the town square, willing to defile the altar with black masses, sexual encounters, drug use. Many in town had spied Elv hitching to the train station. That was a fact. They’d glimpsed a car dropping her off in the center of town late at night. When she saw them gawking, she’d laugh and shout, “What the hell are you looking at!” Whoever was standing there staring would slink away, even if it
was a well-respected neighbor, someone’s father or mother.
Elv had lasted only two days before she announced she was dropping out of school. She vowed to attend night classes and earn a high school equivalency diploma. After Westfield and all she’d been through, she couldn’t be expected to sit in a classroom with a bunch of suburban kids who thought going to the mall was the high point of civilization. “They’re all talking about me,” she said. “You expect me to sit there and take that?” She begged and pleaded, promising her mother that she would study hard. She’d already read The Scarlet Letter, the book on the list for the GED English class, and had gotten an A on the paper she’d written. She crossed her heart and took a vow to be the best student she could be, but her fingers were also crossed behind her back to negate the lie she told. She hadn’t picked up a book since she’d returned home. There was only one story she was interested in, and only one storyteller.
Meg had read The Scarlet Letter when she was a freshman. This year she was in an advanced English seminar for juniors, assigned Virginia Woolf’s novels. She enjoyed reading To the Lighthouse. It took her mind off Elv and stopped her from obsessing about getting good enough grades to get into Wesleyan. She wanted to be accepted there more than anything. She was desperately afraid of failure, not that she made her fears public. She wished she was as smart as Mary Fox, who had already been accepted early decision to Yale. Everything came so easily to Mary, while Meg had to work for her grades.
The one bright spot was that she was now rid of Elv at school. Those two days when she’d been enrolled had been rough enough—Elv had worn a short black skirt, a shirt that was all but see-through, and her black pointy boots from Paris. Recently, someone had spray-painted a pentagram on Meg’s locker, as if the rumors were about her rather than her sister. Two janitors came down and repainted the locker. Sooner or later people would forget all about Elv. She’d disappear out of their consciousnesses as soon as she disappeared from town, which could not be soon enough, if you asked Meg. Now Meg had lunch with Claire every day in the cafeteria. Just the two of them. They usually had egg salad or peanut butter sandwiches. They had plenty of space. No one sat at their table.
MISS HAGEN SUGGESTED they try family therapy when Annie called to discuss how troubled Elv appeared. They went, but everyone was reticent and uncomfortable. Meg especially was too nervous to say anything. She worried about retaliation. She had to go home with the unfathomable person who glared at her from across the room. Even when asked a direct question, the most Meg would say was “I don’t know.” She didn’t even seem very sure about that. Meg and Claire looked at each other for assurance and sat close together on a couch. Sometimes they held hands without thinking. Then Claire would notice Elv staring. She’d quickly drop Meg’s hand.
The therapist suggested a game of trust in which you closed your eyes and fell back, letting another person catch you. They all refused to play. Only Claire thought it was a good idea.
“Let’s just try it,” Claire urged, but the others shook their heads. Elv rolled her eyes.
“If you’re not going to be involved, I don’t see what I can do for you,” the therapist said to Annie and the girls. Meg agreed. She didn’t believe therapy would do any good. It would never help them to reach a consensus on what their lives had become. She had taken up the premise of individual vision in To the Lighthouse. Everything depended upon a person’s point of view. Even the tiniest detail was subject to interpretation. The old hawthorn tree outside the bedroom window, for instance, was covered with ice early that fall, but sometimes Meg could look at it and imagine it was the chestnut tree in the courtyard of her grandmother’s apartment building. When she saw Claire sitting with Elv on the couch, chattering away as they made necklaces together, she wondered who it was Claire saw and who she imagined.
THAT FALL, EVERY encounter with Elv was difficult for Meg. She realized she was clenching her teeth, that she had several nervous habits. She bit her nails, and she often found she was silently counting to a thousand in order to clear her mind of bad thoughts. She wanted Elv to disappear, be eaten by tigers, live on a ranch where there was no telephone service.
“You know, you really don’t have to study so hard,” Elv told Meg one morning when they happened to meet up in the kitchen. Meg looked up from the table. When she saw Elv, her heart sank. Meg had been eating an English muffin and studying for a Latin test. She’d almost convinced herself that Elv no longer existed. Now, face-to-face, she had no choice but to accept the fact that she was back. Elv was a lot skinnier than she used to be. In the murky light of this overcast morning, she somehow looked more beautiful than ever. She ran off to the city at every opportunity, but she’d also settled in, made the house her own. That still didn’t mean she was trustworthy.
“I don’t mind studying,” Meg said. “I like Latin.”
“How nice for you. In case you didn’t know, Latin is a dead language. Who do you think you are? Mary Fox? Don’t bother. I doubt you’ll get into Yale.”
“I’m not applying there.”
Claire had come into the room. She got a banana and some peanut butter. It was her favorite sandwich combination. Their mother was usually up late waiting up for Elv to come home, so Claire and Meg had made a vow to let her sleep in in the mornings.
“And here’s your shadow,” Elv announced as Claire got out the loaf of bread. Lately, she felt jealous of Meg. Elv sat down next to her. She made sure she was a little too close. Suddenly, she was famished. “Are there any more English muffins?” she asked Meg.
Claire laughed as she prepared two sandwiches.
Elv turned to her “What?”
“You’re mean to her, but you want her to make you breakfast.”
“You’ve just turned against me because you used to be my slave and now you’re hers,” Elv said smartly to Claire.
Claire stuck out her tongue and Elv laughed, amused. “Am I supposed to be insulted?”
“Claire is not a slave.” Meg said quietly. She packed up her books and got her coat.
“I guess you’re not eating that.” Elv grabbed what was left of Meg’s English muffin and stuffed it into her mouth. “Bye, slave,” she said to Claire, who was following Meg out of the room, carrying the two sandwiches in a lunch bag for later. “Bye, Curly Sue,” she chirped to Meg, who cringed, ever conscious of her hair.
“Bye, bitch,” Claire shot back.
Elv laughed out loud. Claire had spunk. “Ouch.” Elv clutched at her heart, grinning all the while. “That hurt.”
“I was kidding!” Claire protested.
“Come on,” Meg said, pulling on Claire’s arm. “I told you. Don’t talk to her.”
Claire thought about Elv all that day. She thought about her while she should have been paying attention in her classes, and again during soccer practice, which was held in the gym where Elv used to work on routines with the gymnastics team and the dance club, and then again at her piano lesson. Ever since the bad thing had happened, Elv had hid her true self away. People thought they knew her, but they didn’t know the first thing about her.
IT STARTED SNOWING late in the afternoon, big wet flakes, the first snow of the year. Everything smelled fresh, like clean laundry. Claire walked home because the bus had already left while she was at piano lessons in the music room. She was wearing sneakers and her feet were freezing. In some ways it was liberating not to have any friends. Ninth grade was rife with petty jealousies and cliques. Claire had nothing to do with any of it. The Story sisters were on the outside.
As she headed through town, Claire saw her father’s white Miata parked behind the grocery store, in the far lot that nobody used. He took such good care of that car, Claire was surprised he would drive it in the snow. He had a Jeep that was his everyday car. The Miata, their mother had said, was his midlife crisis car. Claire had seen Alan and Cheryl driving through town in the summer, the top down, looking like the couple in Two for the Road, her mother’s favorite movie. Maybe their re
lationship would fall apart for them the way it had in the film. Maybe they’d get what they deserved.
Claire walked around the market in the falling snow, past the trash barrels. It was already getting dark and the sky was inky. The snowflakes had taken on a blue cast. Claire went up to the car and knocked on the window. The glass was foggy and she couldn’t see inside. “Dad?”
The window rolled down and there was Elv. “I can’t get this fucking thing in gear.”
“Are you crazy?” Claire took a step back. She felt a wave of excitement. “What’d you do? Break into his house?”
“Get in,” Elv said. “I need you to help me.”
Claire stared at her sister. Elv wasn’t wearing a coat. Her hair was pushed back with a black velvet headband that Claire recognized as Meg’s.
“Get in! I just wanted to have some fun, so I borrowed it for a little while. But I can’t shift and drive at the same time. Hurry up.”
Claire went around and got into the car. It smelled like smoke. She and Elv looked at each other and laughed. They had missed each other.
“You are crazy,” Claire said.
“Crazy like a fox.” Elv grinned.
“Crazy like a loon,” Claire added.
“Crazy about you.” Elv got down to business. It would be so much easier getting back and forth to see Lorry if she could drive into the city. She needed to practice. “You see the picture on the gearshift? Follow that. Do what I tell you and we’ll be just fine. Okay?”
The Story Sisters Page 14