The Story Sisters

A journal had been left in Elv’s night table. Annie took it down to the garden. Her hands were shaking. She felt like a witch in a fairy tale, raiding the castle, sifting through bones. There had been rain that morning, and the heat had broken. Birds were searching for worms and the tomatoes were covered with glistening drops. Most of the writing in the journal was in Arnish, with captions beneath green and black watercolor paintings. A girl with wings was held captive, abducted from her true parents. Roses died, iron bars were set around a beating heart torn whole from a now lifeless body, a man named Grimin tied up faeries and fucked them till they bled, goblins drifted through the trees ready for rape and destruction.

Annie hadn’t imagined Elv knew about such things, let alone that she was filling a journal with erotic and dangerous drawings. She threw out the drugs, then went back upstairs. The house was quiet. It felt big when there was only one person in it. She thought about the year before she and Alan were divorced, how the fights they’d had must have reverberated up in the attic. Did the Story sisters place their hands over their ears? Did they all get under a blanket and wish they lived somewhere else? Annie replaced the journal, closed the bedroom door, then called her ex-husband. She was crying, so it was difficult for him to understand, but once he did, he insisted everything Elv had done was within the realm of normal teenage behavior. He was a school principal, after all. Minor drug use and a fantasy world. He’d seen far worse, and many of those students had gone on to graduate, been accepted to college, lived their lives. Annie was overreacting, as usual. But did he know Elv was going out at all hours? Elise had reported that Mary had seen Elv swimming naked in the bay with some high school boys. What about her refusal to follow the house rules, sneaking out at night? He said to wait, things would turn around.

The next morning a police officer came by to inform Annie that her daughter had stolen a tray of cupcakes from the bakery. She’d been seen giving them out to children in the playground before the tots’ agitated mothers swooped in to throw away the suspicious treats.

“They were only cupcakes,” Annie said, quick to defend her daughter.

“They were stolen property,” the officer said stiffly.

When he left, persuaded to let the incident go unreported, Annie went upstairs and knocked on the bedroom door. It was locked whenever Elv was at home. The locks clicked open and there she was, annoyed, half dressed, her hair in knots.

“The police were here,” Annie said.

No response.

“The cupcakes?”

Elv’s eyes had a yellow cast. She couldn’t even do something nice without people getting on her case. If Meg had given out the cupcakes, she probably would have gotten a medal. She’d be on the town honor roll. “I refuse to be who you people want me to be,” Elv said.

“What people?” Annie was confused. It crossed her mind that Elv might be high.

“The human race,” Elv said disdainfully.

That night Elv burned all her clothes in a trash can. It was one more leap away from the brutality of the human world. She scooped out armfuls from her closet, collecting bathing suits, shoes, purses, socks. She saved two black skirts, a pair of black jeans, a few T-shirts, and the pointy boots from Paris. At the last minute she grabbed the blue dress her grandmother had made for her. Everything else went up in flames, even her winter coat. She poured on lighter fluid and lit an entire pack of matches. The whole neighborhood smelled like burning wool. The fire department was called in by Mrs. Weinstein, worried when she saw flames beyond her crab apple tree. Her husband’s old dog set to howling.

Elv couldn’t have cared less if Nightingale Lane was rife with ashes. She was barefoot and defiant when the firemen arrived. They made sure the bonfire wasn’t out of control, then went away, sirens blaring. For hours afterward, Annie and Meg watered the garden, making certain the embers that had fallen weren’t still burning. That night there was still the stink of scorched weeds and the sharp scent of singed tomato vines; the last of the peas on the vine made popping noises as they burst open, like firecrackers set off one at a time.

Elise told Annie she should contact the police the next time Elv didn’t come home at her curfew. But Annie was afraid such a move would make Elv run away; she could easily become one of those mistreated, sullen girls you heard about on TV, the ones who disappeared and wound up murdered. Instead, when Elv didn’t come home, Annie pulled up a chair and waited at the back door. By the time Elv finally straggled in it was early morning. The lawn had been wet and her footprints flecked the kitchen floor. She was neither surprised nor nervous when she found her mother in the kitchen. She plopped herself down on one of the stools at the counter and asked for pancakes. “I’m starving,” she said. When her heart beat faster, she felt alive. When she was hungry, she was starving.

“You can’t run around like this. It’s dangerous to be out all night. Something terrible can happen to you.”

“It already has.” Ask me. See who I am.

“Elise thinks I should call the police. For your own safety.”

Elv gazed at her mother, chin raised. “I take it you’re not making pancakes.”

“No,” Annie said. “I’m not.” This wasn’t the child she’d told stories to in the garden, her darling, trustworthy girl. “If I find drugs again, Elv, I’m sending you to rehab. I mean it.” That was Elise’s other recommendation. Don’t play around. Take charge.

Elv wondered how she’d misplaced the shoebox. Now she understood. Her mother had been there. “You went through my private belongings?” she said.

“It’s my house,” Annie said. “My rules.”

“Okay,” Elv said coolly. She took the confrontation as a challenge that would spur her on to battle. “Look as much as you want. You won’t find anything.”

Claire helped to toss away any incriminating evidence. They got rid of the needles and ink Elv kept for her homemade tattoos, the hash pipe, the rolling papers, the empty packets of birth control pills, the razor blades she used to cut herself. She said her blood was green, but it looked red to Claire when she watched the razor go into Elv’s flesh. Several times Claire had found her sister in their bedroom standing naked in front of the mirror, gazing at herself. They both stared at her body, which seemed perfect to Claire. But Elv seemed disappointed in herself. She turned to gaze at her back, searching for the beginnings of black wings. There was nothing there but skin and bones.

One morning, Claire awoke in the middle of the night to see a boy in a black coat sitting on Elv’s bed. He seemed like a dream. Claire closed her eyes and wished him away. In a little while he was gone, out the window, across the garden. It was Justin. Claire had seen him hanging around Nightingale Lane before. Once she thought she saw him in the woods nearby, crying.

AT THE END of the summer Justin Levy hanged himself in his bedroom. Elv didn’t go to the funeral, which was held in a chapel in Huntington. That night, Claire looked out the window to see her sister digging up the robin’s skeleton. Elv carefully placed the bones in a clean dish, then brought them inside. Claire crept down the stairs and joined her sister at the kitchen table. Elv had their mother’s sewing kit. There was a spool of black thread and a long needle. She was making a necklace out of the bones that had been buried under the hedge. It would be an amulet in memory of the dead.

Elv’s fingers were bleeding from her work. She had drilled little holes in the bones with a safety pin.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Claire asked.

Elv laughed. Something caught in her throat. That happened when she thought about Justin. He was so susceptible to pain. She should have taught him how to walk through this world. She should have showed him how to lock it all away. “I can hurt myself more than anyone else can,” she told her sister. “I can do it with my eyes closed.”

People in town said Elv was a witch after she took to wearing the bone necklace. But Claire thought the necklace was sad and beautiful. Elv let her try it on once. They stood together in front of the big mirror in their bedroom. Even with her short hair, Claire was pleased to see how much alike they looked.

As for Meg, she thought the necklace was a travesty. “She can’t even let the dead rest in peace,” she murmured to Claire once after Elv had left the room. Their older sister released so much energy and turmoil, it was as if a storm had been trapped in a jar, then set free on the third floor every time she was around. When Elv drifted back into their bedroom, Meg fell silent.

“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.

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