Elv gazed at her shoulder and pulled her shirt over her skin. “I’ve had it for a long time,” she said coolly. “You just never noticed.”
“Elv. Please. Talk to me.”
“I’m not going to be polite, if that’s what you want to talk about. You can forget about that.” Elv had a strange feeling in her throat. If she wasn’t careful, she might say something. She turned to look out the window. Everything looked the same in North Point Harbor, everything was green. It was a relief to be invisible, to be marked by stars. She didn’t have to listen to another word her mother said, even if she begged Elv to talk to her, even if she was crying.
“Can we just go?” Elv said.
Her mother started the car.
MEG WAS THE one who found the marijuana in the closet. It was in a shoebox, along with matches and some rolling papers. She pulled Claire inside and they sat there under the green map of Arnelle in the dark. Meg flipped on a flashlight. Claire had grown and was now as tall as her sisters. If only there hadn’t been that stupid disaster with the haircuts, people would have thought they were triplets. They would have had great fun in school, tricking teachers and classmates alike.
“It probably belongs to Justin Levy,” Claire said. “She spends a lot of time with him.”
Meg grimaced. “I doubt that. Justin’s not her friend. He’s more like her slave. Everyone knows she’s just using him.”
Justin had his own car and would drive Elv anywhere she wanted to go. She didn’t even walk to school with her sisters anymore.
Claire held the baggie up to her nose. “It smells like feet,” she said.
“The question is—do we tell Mom?”
“No,” Claire said. “Definitely not.”
“We have to say something,” Meg insisted.
“Why?”
“If you keep someone’s secret, you’re just as guilty as they are. You’re an accomplice.”
Claire felt hot in the closet. There really wasn’t any air.
“Fine,” she said. “We’ll talk to Elv tonight.”
ELV DIDN’T COME home for dinner. Annie and Claire and Meg had pizza and a salad. The sisters exchanged a glance when Annie asked if they knew where Elv was. They shrugged and said they had no idea.
“Is that Justin Levy her boyfriend?” Annie wanted to know.
“Hardly,” Meg said. “He’s just madly in love with her.”
“Meg!” Claire said.
“Well, everyone knows he is. He spray-painted that thing on the wall.”
“What wall?” Annie said.
He had spray-painted I would tear out my heart for you on the side of the old Whaling Museum in town. Everybody was talking about it.
“The salad’s good,” Claire said.
“I would tear out my heart for you,” Meg said.
“That’s about Elv?” Annie had noticed the shaky writing, the yellow spray-painted declaration of love.
“Yep,” Meg said.
“We assume, but we don’t know,” Claire said. She gave Meg a look. “Justin Levy has emotional problems.”
“Major ones,” Meg agreed.
“For all we know, that graffiti could be about Mary Fox,” Claire ventured.
They all laughed.
“I would tear out my cerebellum for you,” Meg joked.
“I would conjugate Latin for you,” Claire piped in.
“I would love you all the days of my life,” Annie said to her daughters, glad that she wasn’t Justin Levy’s mother.
THEY WERE UPSTAIRS doing their homework when Elv finally came home. She smelled like burning leaves. “Hard at work?” she said. She picked up one of Meg’s books—The Scarlet Letter—and thumbed through. “Who would name someone Hester?”
Meg reached under her bed and brought out the shoebox.
“Well, well,” Elv said when she saw it. She put down the book. “Look what the little detective found.”
“We don’t want you to get in trouble,” Claire told her.
“Trouble with a capital T?” Elv sat down on Claire’s bed. She was sitting on Claire’s feet, but Claire didn’t complain. “I wish you wouldn’t look through my personal belongings,” she said to Meg. “Just because you’re jealous.”
“Jealous?” Meg laughed. She didn’t sound very happy.
“It started in Paris and you know it. You couldn’t stand that you didn’t have the guts to do what I did.”
“You mean sleep all day? Or be a whore?”
Elv reached over and slapped her sister. “You’re a jealous bitch and you know it.”
Meg clutched at her burning cheek.
“You wanted to blame me for cutting your hair, but that was your decision. It’s not my fault you’re ugly.”
“Stop it!” Claire said.
“I told you,” Meg said to Claire. “This is who she is.”
Elv went to the open window and slipped outside. Claire got up, grabbed the shoebox, and replaced it in the closet. “Mom can’t find this.”
“Are you taking her side?” Meg said.
“No.” Claire slipped on a pair of flip-flops. She wished Meg had never poked around in the closet. She wished she had left things alone.
“You are. You always do.”
“That’s not true.”
“You’re no better than Justin Levy. Another one of her slaves.”
“You don’t even know her,” Claire said coldly. “You just think you do.”
CLAIRE WENT DOWNSTAIRS, then out the back door to the garden. Behind her the house was quiet. There was the muffled sound of the TV as their mother watched the news. The evening was pale, the air unmoving. There was Elv, sitting beneath the arbor, smoking a cigarette. Her white T-shirt clung to her. She was barefoot, and the soles of her feet were dark with soil. Her black hair hung to her waist. She didn’t look anything like them anymore. She looked like the queen of a country that was too far away to visit. There were moths in the garden, fluttering about blindly. The bedroom light was turned off now. Meg had probably slipped into bed, crying the way she did, quietly, so as not to disturb anyone.
“You shouldn’t have been so mean to her,” Claire told Elv.
“That wasn’t mean. It was honest. She is a bitch.”
“She said I was like Justin Levy.”
“Yeah, right. Justin is pathetic and you’re brave. If anything, you’re opposites. Meg doesn’t have a clue.” Elv suddenly threw up her hands. “Don’t come any closer,” she warned.
Claire stopped where she was.
There was a tiny bird in her path. Both sisters knelt. “He fell out of his nest.” Elv picked up the fledgling. “He’s a robin.”
Claire was startled by how fragile the baby bird was. She could see through its skin to its beating heart. There were only a few stray, luminous feathers.
The girls went in search of the nest, but they couldn’t find it in the dark. There were spiderwebs that were frightening to walk through. Claire kept brushing them away, even when they were no longer there. The crickets were calling. Elv sat down in the wet grass. She looked so sad and beautiful. She was everything Claire wanted to be.
“It’s too late anyway,” Elv decided. “Even if we did find the nest, he’s hardly alive. Do you want to hold him?” The Queen of Arnelle had decreed this was to be. Water, sex, death. This was number three. There was no way to save him.
Claire sat beside her and Elv slipped a hand atop hers. She let the bird settle into Claire’s palm. Claire could feel it shudder. Its heart was beating so fast it reminded her of a moth’s wings.
“Maybe we should say a prayer,” she suggested.
“You do it, Gigi. You’re good at that kind of thing.”
Claire felt emboldened by Elv’s praise. “Your life has been short,” she began in a serious voice, “but it has been as important as any other life.”
Claire heard something then. It was Elv, crying.
“Don’t look at me,” Elv said. She tried to think about the way ti
me could go backward, far back, to the time when she was in the tent with her mother in the garden. There had been twelve princesses who had danced the night away in one of the stories her mother had told her. Twelve brothers had turned into swans.
“Okay.” Claire lowered her eyes, stunned.
“Go ahead,” Elv urged. “Finish.”
“We hope you find peace.” Claire was thrown by Elv’s show of emotion. She ended the prayer as quickly as she could. She was probably doing it all wrong. She wasn’t as good as Elv thought she was. “We hope you’re blessed.”
The sisters could hear one another breathing and the whir of the crickets. There was the tangled thrum of traffic from Main Street. Sound echoed for blocks on a clear night.
“Close your eyes,” Elv said now.
“Why?”
The whole world seemed alive. The air was filled with gnats and mosquitoes and moths.
“Just for a minute,” Elv said. “Trust me.”
Claire closed her eyes. After a time the robin didn’t move anymore.
“Okay. It’s over,” Elv said. “You can open them now.”
The robin seemed even smaller, nothing but skin and bones. Elv went to the garage and got a shovel. She had faced the third fear on her list. Tonight she could tear up the postcard with the green ink. She came back and dug a hole beneath the privet hedge. Her face was streaked with tears. She shoveled dirt so fast she seemed more angry than upset. Claire was too much in awe to offer to help. When Elv was done, she tore off the bottom of her favorite T-shirt from Paris and carefully wrapped up the robin. Claire had never loved anyone more than she loved Elv at that moment. She felt something in the back of her throat that hurt. She felt lucky to have come outside, to have found her sister in the garden, to be with her in the dark.
After the burial they went back to the garden. They ducked under a net of vines and sat down cross-legged beside a row of cabbages. Nobody liked cabbages, not even their mother. They were a total waste of time. Elv lit a cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. The night was so dark the smoke looked green. The rest of the world seemed far away. Without warning, Elv lurched forward. At first Claire thought she was about to be slapped, like Meg, but instead Elv threw her arms around her. She hugged her tightly, then backed way. When she lifted her T-shirt to wipe her tearstained face Claire saw she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She looked like a creature who belonged in the garden, who slept beneath leaves and spoke to earthworms and threaded white moths through her long black hair. She didn’t seem quite human. Claire got a funny feeling then, the way Elv must have felt when she saw the bag with the other cat floating away. The one she hadn’t been able to rescue.
In the summer of the gypsy moths when everything changed, when Elv was eleven and Claire was eight and Meg had stayed home sick, they had walked home from the stop sign in the dark. Elv had been gone for ten hours. She was still wearing her bathing suit, but no shoes. They were gone. They held hands and went along the empty lane. Their mother scolded them when they got home. She told them to go upstairs and they would talk about their disappearance in the morning. Elv said it was her fault, and that Claire couldn’t find her way home without her. Elv was going to be punished for coming home so late, but she didn’t care. When she and Claire went upstairs, she got into bed, her knees drawn up. Meg was sprawled out on her own bed, reading Great Expectations.
“Have you ever read this?” she called to Elv.
Elv turned to the wall. Arnelle was like a black seed in the center of her chest.
Claire got into bed beside her. Elv smelled like ashes and garden soil. There were leaves in her beautiful long hair.
“It’s about a boy who thinks he has no future, but then it turns out he does,” Meg said. “It’s a complicated mystery about fate and love.”
Elv felt cold. Claire wrapped her arms around her. There was no way for her to ever thank her sister, no words that would ever do. Something bad had happened to Elv instead of to her. Elv’s bathing suit was still damp but she hadn’t bothered to take it off.
That was when Claire knew they would never tell.
IN THE GARDEN, on this night when the robin had died in their hands, June bugs flitted overhead. Elv shooed them away. The sisters were sitting beside the row of cabbages. No one knew where they were. They might have been a hundred miles away; they might have slipped down the steps that led underground. It would be August before they knew it. Elv bent forward to whisper. Her face was hot and tearstained. In the human world you had to choose your loyalties carefully. You had to see through to someone’s heart. Elv’s long hair grazed Claire’s face. “You’re nothing like her, you know.” The garden was so dark they could only see each other’s faces. That and nothing more. “You’re much more like me.”
Swan
My sister stayed in her room, hiding. She gazed at the sky and cried. You’d think shed be happy to be human, but she kept talking about needing her freedom. I had lost sister after sister; was I supposed to lose her, too? She stood on the ledge outside the window. She had only one arm; if she started to fall she would dash to pieces on the rocks below.
I went out at midnight to gather the reeds, though there were wild dogs and men who thought of murder. I carried sharp needles and sticks. At night I wove the reeds together while my sister cried. When I was done, I threw the cape over her. She changed into a bird and flew away.
I watched until she looked like a cloud. Now she was free. Well, so was I. I walked to the city and got a job. I had a talent after all. When people asked if I had a family I didn’t mention that once I’d had twelve sisters. I said I took care of myself. I said I liked it that way, and after a while I meant it.
AT THIS TIME OF YEAR THE STORY 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 priva
te 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.
ELV 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.