The Story Sisters

by Alice Hoffman

  “Want to live with me?” he asked Pollo. “I’ll order us a pepperoni pizza. And we’ll hang out on the couch.”

  Adrian Bean had come up behind them. “He’d love it. We’ll go over the training rules with you. No sitting on the furniture. No table scraps.”

  “No pizza? Not even the crusts? What kind of life is that?”

  Adrian laughed and ignored Elv’s reproachful glances. “We want him to stay the well-behaved gentleman that he is. Right, Missy?” she said to Elv.

  The record store owner went with Adrian to fill out all the paperwork, then came back, leash in hand. “I want to thank you for doing such a great job training him,” he said to Elv. “Right, Raleigh?” he said to Pollo. When Elv gave him a look, he went on to explain. “I thought he deserved a better name, so I’m naming him after my grandfather. They kind of look alike.”

  Elv laughed in spite of herself.

  “Don’t worry. Raleigh’s going to love being at the store. He’ll be my buddy.”

  After the leash was clipped on, the dog continued to watch Elv. He didn’t move.

  “Go with him,” she told Pollo.

  He kept staring.

  “Go on,” Elv said. She looked away. “Go.”

  Pollo did as he was told. That’s what she’d trained him to do. Elv went back to her cell. She was sick to her stomach, too anxious to sit still. She picked a fight with Miracle and they didn’t speak for weeks, until Elv at last apologized.

  “You got attached to that stupid dog,” Miracle said with understanding. “That’s your whole problem, Missy. You get attached to things.” She had heard Elv crying over Lorry in the night. “The dog took the place of your man and now you’re back to square one. Brokenhearted.”

  Elv decided she wasn’t going to participate in the training program again. She hadn’t even thought she had a heart anymore, but it kept getting broken. She asked to be reassigned to the laundry. But Adrian entered her as a candidate for the next training program without consulting her. Elv went to the first session to tell Adrian to mind her own business, then she saw the dog that was supposed to be hers. Once again, it was the ugliest. A standard poodle that had been scalded with boiling water, tied up in a dark room for months.

  “I don’t know about this one,” Adrian told her. “In all honesty, it might be better to put it out of its misery.”

  The poodle was hiding under a chair, shaking. Its teeth were chattering.

  Elv sat on the chair where the poodle was hiding. She didn’t know why she was allowed to be alive. Maybe that was her fate, to know she wasn’t worthy of anything and yet be given another chance. “Fine,” she said to Adrian. “I’ll stay.”

  IT WAS RAINING on the day of her release, a bleak November. More than three years had passed and she hadn’t seen him—she hadn’t even heard from him this past year—but when she spied him it was as if she had seen him the day before. He was outside waiting in the rain. He didn’t have an umbrella or that black hat he used to wear. “Hey, baby,” he called just when she feared he might not recognize her. Elv felt embarrassed over what she must look like and what she had become. When you worked in the laundry, they made you cut your hair to chin length so it wouldn’t get caught in the pressing machines, and hers was still growing out. She was wearing the dumpy clothes they’d given her, a skirt and blouse made of some miserable wrinkly fabric and a lightweight coat. He came to kiss her and didn’t stop. He told her he’d tried to get over her, but it had been impossible. All he had to do was think about the first time he’d seen her, the look on her face, the tall grass, her hair flying out behind her and he fell for her all over again.

  The rain was coming down harder. They backed away from each other at last and laughed at how drenched they were. They got into the car, a much better one than the one he’d had before, a BMW.

  “You’re rich,” Elv said.

  “I keep my promises,” he told her. “You know that.”

  Rain splattered the windshield. He pulled her onto his lap and reached under her skirt, slid off her underwear and fucked her right there, their clothes rain-soaked, the windows of the car foggy. Three years had passed and it was still the same between them. Miracle had warned Elv that he probably wouldn’t wait for her, or if he did, she’d be the one to want someone new, but Miracle had been wrong. If Elv believed in friendship, she would have written and said So there to Miracle. Love does exist, she would have told her. Believe it or not. Elv didn’t ask where he’d been or if there had been anyone else. She didn’t need to know those things. She and Lorry were beyond that.

  They drove away quickly. Elv asked how he’d known she was getting out and he grinned. He said, “I called your old friend.” When Elv looked puzzled, he added, “Pete Smith. He said he’d look out for you, and he did.” Pete had gotten her into Bedford Hills rather than an upstate prison; he’d been the one who had recommended her for the dog training program, plus he’d taken Lorry’s calls so that he could report about her situation even though he thought she’d be better off without him. She supposed he had been a friend to her. Her only one. The last time he came to see her, in the week before the release, she’d thanked him for visiting her so faithfully. She hadn’t expected him to. He’d enjoyed their visits. And then right out of the blue he said, “She knew it was an accident. Your mother didn’t blame you.” Elv had been taken aback. He always did that, in the middle of a normal conversation he’d bring up something that had broken your heart. She wondered if he’d done that in the diner, on his first date with her mother, if he’d won her over because he could see through people to their core.

  “Yeah, well, Claire does,” Elv had reminded him.

  “Oh, no,” Pete told her. “You couldn’t be more wrong. She blames herself.”

  THEY WENT BACK to Astoria, but Astoria was someplace completely different now that Lorry had made his fortune. “Are you for real?” Elv cried when they went upstairs to his apartment. “You really are rich!”

  Two bedrooms, a brand-new kitchen, a terrace. It turned out the entire building was his. He owned it. He was the landlord now. She didn’t ask Lorry how he’d managed it. All she knew was that he had traveled all over the country, from California up to Alaska, then back east through Canada and the Midwest looking to make things right. No more scams, no more con games, no robberies. In three years, all he’d done was work at jobs he hated. He’d lived in cheap hotels, talked to no one, went it alone. He got through it by thinking about her. It was funny what stayed with you and what you most remembered: the day she broke the window in her mother’s bathroom and he’d taken the slivers of glass out of her hand with tweezers while she told him about the man who had abducted her and the things he’d done; the evening when he came and found her on his stoop, her clothes bloody, after the accident; the time they came upon a pond out in the woods in New Hampshire with water so cold that they screamed after they’d jumped in, then grasped at each other laughing, then found each other, not laughing at all.

  Just when it seemed he wouldn’t fulfill his promise to set their lives on track, he’d arrived back in New York and his luck had changed. He got off the train from Chicago, where he’d lost what was left of his money gambling on a series of sure things, and there he was at Thirty-third Street. Home sweet home. Exactly where he’d been at the age of ten, on his own. The old routes he and Hector had used had been sealed up. The gates to the lower platforms beneath the subway were mostly unreachable now. The city had decided to block off the entrances because of complaints of drugs and crime from commuters and shop owners. He stood there, jostled by the bustling crowds, dressed in the only clothes he owned. He said a prayer for his old dog and for his best friend, Hector, and for all of the others he’d known who hadn’t managed to survive the rigors and grief of a life underground. He had little more than he’d had when he first arrived here. It seemed a cruel joke.

  Then he saw the gate near the exit to Eighth Avenue. He had memorized all the entrances and exits long ag
o. This gateway was entirely new. At that moment he had nothing more to lose.

  “But you did,” Elv said to him. “You had me.” They were in bed, entwined, spent and hot and naked. This was her favorite time to hear his story, when it was late and it seemed the rest of the world had dropped far away.

  There was always more to lose, Lorry admitted. But at that moment, surrounded by his own failure, he was convinced otherwise. Three years and nothing to show for it. He should have been the one who’d gone to jail if this was all he’d managed to accomplish. He reached down, fiddled with the grating, then slid open the gate. Without thinking further, he climbed down beneath the train station. He entered that world just as he had when he was a ten-year-old runaway with so little to lay claim to in the world it seemed he had everything to gain.

  It had been a long time since he’d been back. It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the dark. He went down the rusty metal rungs of one of the old ladders once used to check the tracks. The trains hadn’t run here for many years. The ashy smell of the place came back to him in a rush. He felt like one of the coal miners he’d seen when he passed through Kentucky, men who’d been out in the clear air of the world but who’d never forgotten the cloying depths below.

  SOMETIMES WHEN LORRY was asleep Elv lay awake just to watch him. She watched to make certain he wouldn’t disappear. He reminded her of the invisible ink she’d once used to make maps of Arnelle. You had to hold it up to the light to see it; otherwise it appeared that you had only a blank page. She still had that one painting she’d done of the Seine, black wash on heavy white paper. She’d kept it all this time, hoping she would one day have a home where she could hang artwork on the walls. Now that time had come. She couldn’t believe her luck. She started to think about the future and what it might bring. When she wrote to her ama, she told her they were planning to come to Paris. She would make amends. She had already decided she would never go back to using drugs. It was a different them, but when she woke in the night Elv sometimes feared their old selves were sewn to their skins with black thread, like shadows. Once she found someone’s works in the bathroom, in the cabinet under the sink, wrapped in cloth and tied up with a black shoelace. Lorry was in the shower and she waited there in the steamy bathroom till he came out. He grabbed her and pulled her to him. His dark hair was slicked back. He was wet and dripping water onto her clothes. She showed him what she’d found.

  “God damn that Michael,” Lorry said, disgusted, quickly admitting that he’d let his brother come over one day when Elv was out. Michael had led a life of bouncing in and out of jail, but he was Lorry’s brother, after all, flesh and blood. He must have left his works behind. He could tell because Michael always tied them together with a shoelace.

  They ran into Michael only a few days later. He was a man now, not some punk kid, and she barely recognized him. She and Lorry were in a bar and Michael waved them over. “Stay here,” Lorry told her. “You don’t need to spend time with that lowlife.” They’d fallen out years ago and now they argued. Lorry grabbed Michael and pulled him off his bar stool. “Don’t you ever,” Elv had heard him say. When Lorry stalked back to her, Michael put his fingers out and made a shooting motion at his brother’s head, then he looked at Elv and grinned.

  They decided Michael wouldn’t be allowed up to the apartment. Soon after, Elv found some packets of heroin. She was writing a letter, and she went to the kitchen searching for an envelope and found it hidden in a box behind the cans of soup and the sugar. She sat down and looked out the window. The urge to get high rose into her mouth. The desire had a cool, rusty taste. She licked her lips. She felt confused and knotted up. She thought about how easy it would be to set the witch in lines and snort it. She was distraught to think Lorry was lying to her, but she understood. She wanted to get high too. It didn’t matter, she couldn’t. It was out of her hands. She thought she might be pregnant. She was convinced it had happened the first time they were together, when it was raining and they had been so desperate for each other. She didn’t say anything to Lorry right away, but she watched him more carefully. She wondered if this was how Pete Smith observed the world, putting pieces together, seeing everyday life as a puzzle, examining the smallest details.

  So she watched and remembered. How he pushed his plate away and wasn’t hungry, how he came in exhausted and fell into bed when usually all he’d want to do was fuck her, how he was gone more often, working, he said, although at what she didn’t know, how he seemed distracted, how when she wanted to go for a walk or to the movies, he’d say later, baby, as if going to sleep or lying around dreaming on the couch in the middle of the day was perfectly normal. Then he’d go out and she wouldn’t know where he was. He said he played poker, had business deals, he said, Come on, you know it’s you and me. And it was.

  She took the home pregnancy test and it was positive. Her grandmother wrote that the only way to be sure was to see a doctor. She went to a nearby clinic and saw a doctor, who congratulated her. Elv took the bus home. She couldn’t stop smiling. She stopped on a corner and called her grandmother. “You’re going to be a great-grandmère!” she cried into the phone. Her ama was overjoyed. They chatted excitedly about names, and whether the child would be a boy or a girl. “Oh, a girl,” Elv assured her. “It has to be. The Storys only have girls.” When Natalia asked, “And what does Lorry say?” Elv said, “He’s over the moon.” But she hadn’t told him yet. She had a sinking feeling. He was there when she got to the apartment, pacing. She still didn’t say anything.

  “Where the hell were you?” he said. When he couldn’t find her, he flashed back to the day when she was picked up by the police.

  “Walking,” Elv told him. She felt like a liar even when she told the truth. Suspicion somehow made you an accomplice. “Where were you last night?” He hadn’t gotten home till late, then had crawled into bed without even talking to her.

  “This isn’t about where I was,” Lorry said. “Don’t try to shift things around.”

  Elv went into the kitchen and took the heroin out of the cabinet. Lorry had followed, expecting to continue their fight. When he saw he’d been found out, he folded himself into a kitchen chair. He always said that when caught red-handed it was best to come clean. “My fatal flaw,” he said sadly.

  Elv opened a can of soup and began heating it up in a saucepan. She was starving.

  “I’m having a baby,” she said.

  Lorry stared at her, thinking he’d heard wrong.

  “I think it’s a girl,” Elv told him.

  He went to the stove and wrapped his arms around her. “Elv,” he said, his voice broken in a way that surprised her.

  “I don’t want her to have a father with a fatal flaw,” Elv said reasonably.

  “Got it.”

  “Seriously.”

  HE SERIOUSLY TRIED. He stopped going to bars, stopped seeing old friends with whom he had only one thing in common. But one day Elv went down to the laundry room and there he was with his brother. He and Michael had only one thing in common as well. She knew what they were doing down there.

  “You’re kidding me,” she said.

  “It’s not what you think. I’m just lending him some money because he happens to be broke. Anyway, he’s still my brother, right?”

  Elv had other things to think about. Natalia had sent two tiny, beautiful sweaters, one white and one yellow, both made of fine merino wool, dotted with mother-of-pearl buttons. Soon after, Natalia sent a blanket she’d knitted out of a marmalade-colored cashmere. She was knitting like a madwoman, out on the bench under the chestnut tree, in the red parlor during a rainy afternoon, in her bedroom late at night. It had been so long since there had been a baby to be overjoyed about. Elv sent photos of herself pregnant and glowing. They wrote back and forth, considering names. Elv wanted a strong name, but something unique. Natalia suggested choosing a name that would work for the rest of a child’s life, not too girlish, but not too grown-up. The baby would be born in the
summer, and Elv vowed they would come to Paris soon after. Maybe then Claire could forgive her.

  Natalia had written in one of her letters that she was worried for Claire. She wrote that she had seen a demon in the hallway hovering near Claire’s bedroom and perhaps that was the cause of Claire’s great unhappiness. It sounded silly. The superstitions of an old woman with poor eyesight. Other people might have thought she was crazy, but Madame Cohen had believed her, and Elv did as well. She herself had often spied something in her own kitchen when she came for a glass of water in the middle of the night. It was probably a moth, like the onerous thing her grandmother said Madame Cohen had caught with flypaper. These stories made Elv nervous. She feared bad luck might be tapping at her window. She decided to set out salt in the corners of the room, as her grandmother said Madame Cohen advised. She dragged over a chair in order to reach the cabinet above the refrigerator. That was where the salt was kept, but she found more than that. She found everything he was hiding from her. She took it all down the hall to the incinerator.

  She heard him rumbling around in the kitchen that night. But he never said a word about what she had done. He took a shower and came to bed. If he was back to his King Kong habit, he’d be sick and she’d know and they’d have to deal with it together.

  “You wouldn’t lie to me, right?” Elv asked him. It was snowing. All the lights were turned off, but the world outside was bright.

  He took up more than his share of the bed, but Elv didn’t care.

  “Define lie,” he said.

  They both laughed.

  “I’m not stupid,” Lorry told her. “I heard what you said.”

  “Repeat it.”

  “No fatal flaws.”

  “And you’ll tell me the truth.”

  “I’m madly in love with you.”

  “Very good,” Elv said. “I knew you were smart.”