The Story Sisters

  ELV HAD HEARD about the worst Westfield technique from her one and only ally, Michael. Michael came from Astoria, Queens; he’d dodged jail time for car theft in exchange for a year at the school. For those students who didn’t improve and continually refused to cooperate he told Elv they did something called blanketing. They wrapped you up and wouldn’t let you move for hours, no matter how you might struggle, until at last you were reborn with a fresh, compliant ego. It was meant to be a rebirthing, but it was total control. Sometimes they held you immobilized for hours. If Elv had thought the straitjacket was bad, Michael said, this was a thousand times worse. When you could barely breathe, when you were choking on your own fury and bile, you had no choice but to give in. That was the way in which you were converted to their world.

  Demons were said to be cruel, but a demon would never have been so brutal as this. A demon merely called you by name, threw his arms around you, whispered his plight, understood yours, then took you for his own. The extent of human cruelty continued to amaze Elv. If you wanted to survive in this place, you had to let them think you had given in. The harder you fought, the harder they broke you. You had to hide yourself away. She understood that. She had once talked a goblin into setting her free. She had spoken so sweetly he had untied the ropes, turned his back on her, left her alone to fetch her a cup of water. The window was open. Even at the age of eleven she had known that there were no second chances.

  FOR THE FIRST three months Elv had level-one privileges—no phone calls or visits. She was given latrine duty, meant to break her down. It was filthy, disgusting work. She didn’t complain. She wasn’t going back to solitary under any circumstances. Every day she took a mop and a pail of soapy water and did her job. There were beetles in the bathrooms. Elv was supposed to kill them with bug spray, but she let them live. She wished she could slip them into envelopes and mail them to Meg. Thank you for betraying me, she would write on her note. She was a fairy-tale girl, scrubbing away at the first break of light, but she had fur and teeth and wings. She didn’t mind getting up at five thirty. She loved the dark blue color of the sky at that hour. She treasured the feeling of being alone in the world. You’ll be repaid for what you’ve done to me.

  The girls at Westfield didn’t like Elv. She wasn’t surprised. People were jealous and petty and mean. She didn’t care what they thought. She was already alone. When a volatile girl named Katy came after her, calling her names, shoving her, it was hard for Elv not to fight back, but she stuck to her plan. Play them all and you had a better chance of getting what you wanted. Let the person in power think you were on their side.

  “Did anyone ever tell you you were a bitch?” Katy said. She’d had it in for Elv ever since Elv had suggested she had an anger management issue during group therapy.

  Elv had already decided that the more trouble Katy made, the better off she herself would be. When Elv turned to walk away, Katy grabbed a glass vase on the reception table and slammed it into Elv’s head. There would only be plastic vases allowed after that. The glass shattered into hundreds of jagged pieces. For weeks afterward tiny star-shaped bits of glass were swept up.

  When the counselors ran into the room to separate the girls, anyone could clearly see Elv was the victim. Shards from the vase were threaded through her hair, where they shimmered like beads of ice in a thin trail of blood. Her face was pale. Her eyes closed. She was in the garden in Arnelle as they carried her to the nurse’s office. Reveal nothing, say nothing, and you’ll get what you want in the end.

  Katy was immediately transferred to solitary. Elv, on the other hand, was released from latrine duty. She wanted to jump up and cheer. Instead she said “Thank you” in a solemn, soft voice. “I’m grateful for your trust and support.” She had the language of self-help down pat. In group therapy, she told sorrowful stories that shocked everyone. It felt as if she was lying even if it was the truth, how she’d been fed bread and water, how he’d tied her down. When she cried, her tears were made of glass. They broke in half when they fell to the floor. No one noticed; they thought they were real. As if she would ever cry over what had happened.

  The staff began to like her, she could tell. They pitied her. They thought she’d been treated unfairly at home, that she’d came from a dysfunctional family of divorce and shared secrets and was trying to reclaim her life. She was a model student and had soon won over her teachers. She attended all of her classes, even though they were a waste of time. All you had to do was show up and you’d pass. Westfield wanted to boast that 100 percent of enrolled students earned a high school diploma, even if no one learned anything. It was all a big show for the parents.

  Soon Elv was granted permission to walk around the grounds. She searched for the robin’s bones, those glinting opalescent shards, but too many leaves had fallen. She couldn’t find a single one. She lay down in the leaves and listened to her name being called by those below. She hated herself for crying, even if they had been false tears. Right here, right now, she intended to give up all of her human traits. They had gotten her nothing. They’d gotten her here. In Arnelle, she was the one who freed demons from the nets that trapped them. She was known as their savior. In their world, she mattered. In their world, she was a queen.

  ELV’S MOTHER SENT a present at Thanksgiving—a black cashmere sweater. Now that the weather is getting cold, Annie had written. Was she kidding? She never wanted to know the truth about anything. She wanted to believe everything was just fine—no skin and bones, no goblins, no rules. Students weren’t allowed to wear their own clothes at Westfield. Elv gave the sweater to Julie Hagen, the counselor in charge of job assignments. Elv couldn’t have anything but the ugly jeans and green T-shirt everyone was forced to wear. What did it matter? She might have been trapped in Westfield, but she was hiding out in Arnelle. She picked up the fragrance of hypnotic black roses as she walked down the corridor to the cafeteria. She could feel her wings emerging through her skin, feather by feather, bone by bone. She hadn’t expected it to hurt so much.

  IN DEEP WINTER, when the snow was three feet high and the white birch trees faded into the landscape, Elv earned the right to take care of the horses. She’d worked hard to get the job that would give her the most freedom. She swore that sugar made her hyper and brought her desserts to Julie Hagen, the counselor she’d presented with the black cashmere sweater. Miss Hagen was a soft touch, so Elv hung around her office on the pretext of being lonely. She began running errands and quickly became Miss Hagen’s pet and her success story. In the end, it paid off. When the snow covered everything and the days ended in darkness at four, Elv got the plum job that she coveted.

  Some of the other students might have been afraid of horses. They might have refused to shovel manure or resisted getting up so early, forced to tumble into the snowy field hours before breakfast. Elv was thrilled with her new position. She relished the time alone. She went to the stables early and stayed there most of the day, except for the few hours she had to spend in class. The glinting first light of morning was the perfect time to glimpse owls settling in the tall trees after a night of flight. Once there was a fox in the snow. Elv had stood there, quiet, breathing in the cold air, watching the scarlet color of the fox’s coat. She felt bewitched and lucky. She could have been anywhere, a heath, a moor, a garden.

  Annie phoned every week, but Elv never took her calls. When she had the flu, it was Miss Hagen who brought tea and a cold washcloth for her forehead. When the holidays came, the only one who sent a card was Claire. Elv sat on her bed to read it. It was in the shape of a bassett hound, resembling Pretzel, who’d lived down the street. The card read Doggone, I miss you.

  Come back, Claire had written. Nom brava gig.

  Claire wrote weekly letters, and although she read them hungrily, Elv didn’t answer them. If Elv had been the one in the car, she would have never sat there, paralyzed with fear, while they’d carried her sister into the school. She would have done anything to stop them. But Claire didn’t know what
Elv knew, and Elv was grateful for that. She didn’t know how to be vicious, how to bite back, how to fight for your life.

  Elv didn’t write to her, but she slipped the card under her pillow. It was the only thing she kept from home.

  WHEN ANNIE CAME to visit, it was unannounced and un expected. It was also unwanted. She thought it might be the only way she could get through to Elv. That if they sat down and talked they could work out what had gone wrong. All that week she had been dreaming of her daughter. Lately, she’d been afraid to fall asleep. Their lives had gone on as though everything was normal, or so it might appear. Annie and the girls had breakfast together, then Meg and Claire went off to school. Annie had stopped working. She had decided to focus on her family. She had savings and they would make do. She yearned to devote herself to something, even if that something was being a chauffeur. She cooked intricate dinners, learned how to make sushi, began to knit. She helped the girls to paint their bedroom a fresh eggy yellow in the hopes of brightening the third floor.

  In the night, however, nothing seemed normal. The house echoed. Branches hit against the roof in a strange melody. Sometimes she dreamed about taking Elv to Westfield, the same turns on the highway, the same falling leaves, that dreadful moment when Elv glanced out the window and realized where they were. Everyone said to wait. Elv would contact her when she was ready. They said her oldest daughter would turn around and come back to her. But she had waited long enough.

  One day, after Claire and Meg had left for school, Annie got in the car and started for New Hampshire. She’d felt such urgency she hadn’t bothered to listen to the weather report. By the time she’d made it to the New Hampshire state line, it was snowing so hard the road didn’t look the same. She stopped at a market and put together a care package of food, then headed on. She grew confused and had to stop several times to ask directions. The area around Westfield was a mystery. The roads were badly marked and turns came up suddenly. Everything was white and the woods were endless. Fir and oak and crumbling stone walls zigzagged through places where there were once farmers’ fields. Annie pulled over to the side of the road, completely lost. The terrain was wild and hilly and she had mistakenly run over some felled logs. Somehow, she’d missed the turnoff to the Westfield School.

  A police car came up behind her. Annie knew she was about to cry. She slipped on her sunglasses. The officer came around and tapped on the glass.

  “Everything okay?” he asked when Annie buzzed down the window. He looked at her curiously.

  “I missed the Westfield School. I didn’t see it. My daughter’s there.”

  “You can make a U-turn,” the officer allowed. “I’ll make sure the road stays clear.”

  He pitied her. She could tell. She saw that same look from neighbors and friends.

  “It’s about a quarter of a mile on the left. Why don’t you stay here until you’re ready to drive,” the officer suggested. “I’ll wait. No rush.”

  Annie sat there parked for a while, then turned and headed back down the blacktop. The officer waved to her. She felt as though he was the only person on earth who knew she was alive. The snow was coming down harder. As she edged along, Annie still couldn’t see a thing. She drove slowly. When she squinted through the large fluffy flakes, the Westfield gates appeared in side a white fog. This time she didn’t miss the turnoff.

  The care package was perched on the backseat. Fruit and cookies and a plant. Annie parked and retrieved her offering. She kept on her sunglasses and tied a scarf around her head. The school looked different in the falling snow, as though it had been caught in a snow globe. The campus seemed so far away it might as well have been in the Russian steppes. Annie’s mother always said that her childhood in Moscow was a childhood spent in winter. The first thing Natalia’s parents had done when they’d reached Paris was to buy fruit, something they’d rarely had beyond a few brown apples at most. It was Natalia who had started Elv on her love of apricots. Fruit is always a gift, Natalia always said to the girls. No one knows that better than those who’ve never tasted it.

  Annie could hear the crunch of her boots and the sound of her own breathing as she walked the icy path to the administration building. She thought she saw something in the tall, plumy weeds, an opossum or a raccoon. Whatever it was, it was watching her as she tried her best not to slip on the ice. Inside, two guards were at the front desk, chatting. They stopped talking when Annie approached.

  “I’m here to see my daughter,” she told them.

  When neither responded, Annie had a wash of panic. Didn’t they know their own students?

  “My daughter,” she insisted. “Elisabeth Story. Elv. She’s a student here.”

  “Did you have an appointment?” one of the guards asked.

  “Do I need an appointment to see my own child?”

  Apparently she did. The guard called down to the administration office. All Annie could do was wait as the care package was examined. Only the fruit was acceptable. The plant would have to be confiscated. They handed her a list of dos and don’ts for the future. Annie thought about the cashmere sweater she’d sent at Thanksgiving. She’d taken hours choosing the right one, nothing too fancy or frilly.

  Elv was coming back from lunch in the cafeteria when she spied her mother in the lobby. She ran to her room and shut the door. Her heart was beating fast. Her mother looked like a stranger in her black winter coat. She’d been wearing sunglasses even though it was snowing outside. Elv felt a wave of sadness. She thought about being in the garden with her mother when the other girls were little, asleep in their cribs. Only Elv helped to gather tomatoes and peas. Her mother lifted her up so she could reach the highest of the climbing tendrils and pull down the sea green pods. There was pollen in the air, and the hawthorn tree sent the light through the slats of the trellis, and her mother laughed at how many pea pods Elv managed to gather at one time, dozens in a single handful.

  Elv went into the bathroom and forced her fingers down her throat so she could make herself sick. When Julie Hagen came to get her, having made a special allowance for a family meeting, Elv was on the bathroom floor vomiting. Miss Hagen went back to the lobby to tell Annie the visit would have to be postponed; her daughter was sick, not the optimum time for a first encounter. Nothing to worry about, probably a stomach virus. Nothing for Annie to do but leave despite her protests.

  Elv went to her window to watch her mother’s car cross the parking lot. It drove away slowly, as though caught in dreamtime. It stopped at the end of the long driveway, and Elv felt something flutter inside her chest. Then the car started off again. It went through the gates and was gone. There was no point in feeling anything. Elv was weirdly protected, as if she lived in an Arnish castle made of stones and sticks. As if the wire fence was there to protect her from evil. When they brought her the care package her mother had left, Elv let it sit on her dresser until the fruit rotted. There were yellow apples and blood oranges and tangerines, but soon enough they all turned black and poisonous. In the end, Elv threw the fruit out her window for the birds to peck.

  She curled up on her bed and thought about the otherworld. One of the demons tugged on her sleeve. A tiny lost creature with wings the color of blood. Human beings had been just as cruel to the demons as they had been to her. She pitied them and she pitied herself. If only she hadn’t been stolen from her true life, she could have been happy. She let the demon lie down beside her, the poor, sweet thing. She let it crawl under her skin.

  ELV HAD BEEN doing Michael’s schoolwork in exchange for cigarettes. Though at first she planned to skim the books, she’d actually begun to read the novels assigned. Recently she’d been making her way through The Scarlet Letter. It was surprisingly good. She remembered when Meg had been reading it, she’d thought her sister was wasting her time, but she liked the way Hawthorne seemed to take Hester Prynne’s side. She knew what it was like to be marked. When she gazed at her tattoos in the mirror, she felt set apart in the very same way as Hester did
, revealed and ruined, exposed for all to see.

  The only time when Elv didn’t slip into the otherworld was when she was taking care of the horses. She loved the job. That was why she didn’t dare tell anyone, not even Miss Hagen, who was usually on her side. She was afraid that if anyone knew she was happy, it would all be taken away. The horses were called Daisy and Cookie and Sammy and Jack. They’d been left behind when the person who owned the estate went bankrupt and sold his land to the school. He’d abandoned the horses along with the real estate and the furniture, as if they were nothing more than goldfish in a pond. Daisy and Cookie were young, high-spirited. But Sammy and Jack were her favorites. Sammy was a little palomino, skittish with anyone he didn’t know. Jack was old and huge and dignified with enormous hooves. The horses all knew her and were waiting for her no matter how early she arrived.

  Christmas had come and gone. There was a turkey dinner, and then Elv escaped out to the stables. Winter went on, darker, the days so short they passed by quickly. North Point Harbor was so far away it might as well have been on the other side of the world. Elv lost weight, but she got stronger working with the horses, hauling around bales of hay, mucking out the stalls. All through January and February the weather was so cold the horses had to wear wool blankets. When they breathed out, they looked like steam engines. Elv loved being with them; she loved the smell of hay. She thought about Central Park and the horse that had run away with her sister. Better to die than be a slave of men, tied up, an iron bit in your mouth.