The Story Sisters

  After the funeral, she stopped speaking. Her mother and grandmother thought the muteness would pass with time. It was the immediacy of her grief, the double loss of two sisters—the one gone forever, the other disappeared. Once several weeks had passed, they knew the situation wasn’t temporary. When she was forced to communicate, Claire wrote on a small notepad she kept in her pocket. As it turned out, she had very little to say. Sometimes, when it grew late and all the houses in North Point Harbor were dark, she would walk to the end of the street to wait by the stop sign. But no one came to steal her away. No one was there for her at all.

  Claire had thought that time would stop, but people went on living, and before long summer had come and gone. Then it was fall. Claire was allowed to have her schoolwork sent home. No one expected her to face her peers. They were all still talking about the accident. Some of the girls who had been in English honors with Meg had set up a shrine on the spot where it happened, where Route 25A turned so quickly it could take you by surprise. A coffee can filled with plastic flowers and several teddy bears of various hues had been arranged on the embankment. Claire went there one night and threw it all into the woods. These girls had never even really known Meg. Claire was breathing hard by the time she was done getting rid of everything. She thought she might be sick right there by the side of the road. Meg had hated teddy bears. She hated false flowers. The local news paper had a small article about the defacement of the memorial. The authorities never discovered who had done it, but Annie knew. She parked there every day, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes longer. Frankly, it was a relief to be rid of that make shift shrine, to see only the grass, so plain and tall.

  Claire was still an excellent student. Elise came by with her homework twice a week, then took it back to the high school. Mary was away at Yale, and Elise had time on her hands. She didn’t mind helping out. She wasn’t offended that Annie never invited her in for a cup of coffee or tea. She was a doctor and used to the effects of grief.

  “Call me the minute you need something,” she told Annie and Claire, but neither one of them could think of a single thing they might need that anyone could possibly give them.

  Annie never answered the phone. She didn’t want the neighbors’ gifts of casseroles or homemade soups. Late one night the phone rang and wouldn’t let up. Annie suddenly thought, What if it’s Meg? Maybe her girl was trying to reach her. Maybe such things really happened, the way they did in horror movies, when the afterlife wasn’t as far away as everyone thought, when it was as close as the next room. Annie grabbed the phone, but no one answered. “Meg?” she said tentatively. She heard someone breathing and realized her mistake. “Elv?” she said, but the phone had gone dead.

  Leaves piled up in the backyard. Newspapers were delivered and unread, left to disintegrate on the concrete walkway. The only birds gathering on the lawn were blackbirds that made a racket and wouldn’t be chased away. In the mornings, Claire and Annie woke expecting to hear Meg getting ready for school, calling everyone down to breakfast. But there was nothing, only the blackbirds. Meg had always been the one to make sure everyone was on time. Now they overslept, missed entire days. The house was so quiet they could hear crickets that had wandered inside when the weather grew chilly, their calls growing fainter as time went by. Annie and Claire tried their best not to think about Elv or wonder where she might be. Sometimes one went to stand in the doorway of her bedroom, sometimes it was the other. One wept, but the other went through the bureau drawers and destroyed every single thing she could find.

  THEY STAYED HOME all winter. They didn’t shovel the snow on the walkway. After a while, Elise had to galumph through the drifts to deliver Claire’s schoolwork along with basic groceries: bread and milk, coffee and potatoes. Natalia came and turned up the heat, made the beds with clean sheets, replaced the lightbulbs in the darkened rooms. Claire and Annie didn’t bother to eat meals. They wandered into the kitchen and grabbed a bite of cheese or a cracker. They didn’t trouble to use dishes anymore, only ate standing up, crouched over the sink or using a paper napkin. They reminded Natalia of the dogs one sometimes saw in certain neighborhoods in Paris, wild and uncared for, dangerous to the touch.

  “Have you looked for her?” Natalia asked after months had passed and there was still no word from Elv. It was an especially cold night. She and Annie were in the kitchen with cups of steaming tea. Natalia had secretly put ads in all the New York papers begging Elv to phone her. She had informed her doorman that if a young woman happened to show up, even in the company of a dangerous-looking man, she should be let up, no matter the hour. Natalia had been taking taxis to neighborhoods she wasn’t familiar with, searching for Elv in Brooklyn and Queens, stopping total strangers to show them the photograph from the Plaza.

  “She doesn’t want me to look for her.” Annie had often thought about the day of her parents’ party, when the horse got spooked and Elv knelt down in the grass with blood rimming the hem of her dress. Maybe it had all ended then, on that perfect afternoon when the light was so brilliant and everything had seemed so right.

  Natalia banged her hands on the tabletop when she heard her daughter’s answer. “Do you think that would stop me if you were missing?” Natalia seemed much older in the past few months. She stayed up nights, gazing out her window. “I would never stop looking.”

  IT WAS A year before Annie came to a decision. She sat under the hawthorn tree wearing her coat and her gloves. Sparrows and jays came to share the lawn with the blackbirds. On chilly days Annie hated to think of Meg alone in the cemetery. It made her feel colder too. She hated to think of Elv with that man, doing God knows what. And then, before she knew it, it was spring again. That year the garden was so overgrown, a person wouldn’t even notice it unless she knew it had been there. By summer, voles had made tunnels through the earth.

  Annie had found a detective in the phone book and made an appointment. No references, nothing. Alan would have said she was crazy to put her trust in a stranger, but Alan would never have hired a detective. He was done with the whole situation. He said he had to save his own life, and maybe he was right. He’d come to the funeral and he’d cried for Meg. He’d tried to call Claire, but she wouldn’t speak to him, and after a while he’d given up.

  Annie herself hadn’t believed Smith was the detective’s real name—it didn’t seem likely to be anyone’s real name—but it was. “Prove it,” she’d said when she arrived at his office. He’d taken out his driver’s license and shown it to her. He’d turned out to be not only a good detective but also a decent man, a retired Nassau County policeman who mostly did divorce cases. He was tall and rangy, in his forties. He didn’t talk much, but he had a sense of humor. He hated divorce cases, all the recriminations and vindictiveness, but runaways were even worse. With divorces the story was usually in the same ballpark—infidelity, family and money pressures. But people who disappeared of their own volition had stories that were more difficult to grasp. You never knew which ones wanted to be found, and which ones would do anything to escape; each history was unique and unexpected, with answers you sometimes didn’t want to know.

  His office was across from the Roosevelt Field shopping center in Westbury, nothing fancy, just a desk and two chairs, a bit bare and depressing. It was Annie’s idea to go across the street to a diner. Anyone would have thought they were a good-looking married couple out to lunch, an attractive woman in a Burberry coat rubbing her hands together as though she couldn’t get warm, a rough-hewn man who seemed comfortable in his own skin. Smith ordered a Spanish omelet, home fries, and toast. “Let me guess,” the waitress said. “No butter.” He had the same thing every day. “Creature of habit,” he told Annie. Annie had coffee and a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich. It was the meal she and the girls always had whenever they went out for lunch.

  “Me too,” she admitted.

  They began by talking about sports—they were both serious Mets fans and secret admirers of the Red Sox. By the time they??
?d had their coffee she had told him about her runaway daughter.

  “There’s one thing you have to understand,” Pete said. “If I look for her, I’m probably going to find her.”

  Annie had left out the part about Meg. She hadn’t mentioned the accident or the drugs, but he knew. As soon as she’d called to set up the appointment, he’d started to poke around. He was a detective by instinct. He thought if there was a needle in a haystack, he’d probably find out everything there was to learn about hay before he started searching through it.

  “That’s what I want,” Annie said.

  “Just checking.”

  He’d had a daughter who’d gone wrong too. Rebecca. She had been such a well-behaved child he couldn’t believe the way she’d turned out after she was on drugs. He never imagined that after being a cop and witnessing so much pain, one little girl could ruin his life so thoroughly. His marriage had been upended; his career had gone the same route. Rebecca had done everything she could to escape from his love. Love was often the last thing they wanted. If he’d known Annie better, he would have told her that just so she wouldn’t think it was all her fault. Love reminded them of everything they’d lost.

  “She may not be the same girl she once was,” Smith warned.

  Annie leaned in. “You don’t forget the people you love,” she told him. “That’s what I’ve realized. They just get farther away. Like a spyglass turned around.”

  “All right.” Something happened to Smith at that moment. Despite the circumstances, he felt his heart lift. “I’ll find her for you.”

  FOR HER JUNIOR year, Claire was sent to the Graves Academy, a private girls’ school. Natalia and her friend Madame Cohen, who was visiting from Paris, had checked the schools in the area until they found one that met with their approval. “She can’t sit home all alone,” Madame Cohen told Annie. “She’s a quiet girl, but even quiet girls need noise sometimes.”

  Many of the students at Graves came from overseas and were uncertain about their English, so Claire’s silence was not completely out of the ordinary. The fact that she didn’t speak didn’t impact her grades. She was diligent and completed her studies on time, hunched over her books for hours each day. There was a school uniform: blue pleated skirt, white shirt, blue sweater, maroon sweatshirt. Just as well. Claire paid little attention to her appearance. She closed her eyes whenever she walked past a mirror, hoping to avoid her reflection. At night Annie could hear her fluttering around, like a bird trapped in the attic, where there were still two beds side by side.

  Natalia and Madame Cohen had asked Elise to find a therapist for the poor girl. She recommended a Dr. Steiner, whose office was within walking distance. In her sessions with him, Claire communed in writing or not at all. Dr. Steiner suggested Meg’s belongings be boxed up and moved. Claire wrote Fuck you on her notepad and shoved it across the coffee table toward the doctor. She still carried the piece of paper on which her sister had written orange. She had it with her at all times. Meg’s books remained arranged alphabetically by author on the shelf. Her clothes filled the closet, the boots and shoes stowed in a neat line. But Dr. Steiner was right. None of these keepsakes kept Meg alive.

  The psychiatrist also suggested bringing a dog into the house. In times of trauma a dog could often reach a person in crisis. Annie decided she didn’t have the energy to deal with a floppy, undisciplined puppy. On impulse she bought a fully trained German shepherd. Shiloh had been raised in a kennel on a farm in Connecticut and had spent his days traipsing after boys and girls who did dangerous stunts, diving into ponds, jumping into stacks of straw. When Annie brought him home, he padded right over to Claire, who gazed at him and frowned. She took out her notepad and wrote Take him back.

  When Claire went upstairs, the dog followed. She kept him locked out for two nights but on the third night, she let him in. Dr. Steiner was soon proven right. Claire seemed less agitated. Annie no longer heard pacing at night. Now it was the dog she heard, keeping watch.

  Shiloh proved his worth on the night someone broke in to their house. He immediately began to bark, and whoever had been there fled through the bathroom window, leaving blood on the windowsill. In the morning, Annie found long black hairs on the floor. She swept them up, then called in the glazier to replace the broken glass. She went to examine the footprints crisscrossing the yard. They weren’t evidence of anything, but she knew. She went to the back of the garden, then searched the woods behind the house. No one was there. When she called out “Hello” the sound echoed back at her. It made her feel lost even though she had been this way a thousand times or more.

  THEY LIVED IN an apartment in a small brick building not far from Astoria Boulevard. The old lady who owned the place rented it to them, and in return, Lorry collected the garbage, shoveled snow, patrolled the laundry room. It was beneath him, but he didn’t complain. He knew all the old ladies in the neighborhood. They embraced him and shouted in various languages for him to get a job. They treated him like a grandson, one who attracted trouble. They all saw the girl in the bloody clothes looking for him that night in the spring. They took note of her long dark hair. They observed the way she held on to him when at last he appeared. It was easy for them to spot heartbreak from a third-floor window, despite their bad eyesight and the darkness of the street.

  Lorry had taken her to the ER, but they couldn’t run any scans because Elv didn’t have insurance. She refused to give them her name or apply for Medicaid, even though the intake nurse told her it was possible that her liver had been damaged. Elv came out and told Lorry she was fine. She had pain, but she could cope with it. She deserved any punishment she might get.

  When Lorry was forced to leave Elv alone, he worried. She didn’t bother to get dressed. Instead she stayed in bed all day. She hadn’t been eating. He limited her drug usage, portioning it out for her, but she’d sneak more whenever he went out. She was afraid of the needle, but after a while she got used to it. She fell in love with it a little at a time. She thought Lorry didn’t know. She’d be in a dream, naked on the bed, and he’d come to lie down beside her and stroke her hair and tell her it would be all right when it clearly wouldn’t be. She knew what she’d done. She had killed her sister.

  Lorry told her he’d had a blood brother he’d lost in the otherworld. He’d known tragedy too, and he’d been responsible in a similar way. Elv had heard that those who lived underground were called the Mole People, but Lorry told her never to use that term. It was an insult, another way to reduce them to nonhumans. Kill a mole, and what did it matter? Slit one’s throat and who would care?

  He’d met Hector when they both were seventeen, soon after the death of his dog. He was a loner to the nth degree, wary at first, but they became fast friends when Hector came to tell him one of the worst offenders living underground had decided he wanted Lorry’s platform space. Together they’d waited for their adversary in the dark. The interloper was a man whose wife had left him, moving up into the world. He was out of his mind on drugs. To chase him off they had tied sheets to the metal ladders that led to the world above and set up a fan. When they switched on the fan, the white sheets blew out like apparitions in the dark. Their enemy raced off screaming of ghosts. He’d never returned, and their brotherhood had begun. A friend who had your back in a world of cons and thievery was truly a brother. They had a perfect, easy scam they ran in Penn Station. They helped tourists with their luggage, taking them down a staircase that descended three stories to an abandoned platform. Once the tourist was disoriented, unable to find his way back, they would shake him down, asking for a twenty to lead him back up to the street. It had worked fine until the night when it all went wrong. They were sitting on the floor of the train terminal, drinking cups of black coffee the counter girl at Dunkin’ Donuts gave them for free just for being such cute boys, when they spied a confused-looking man.

  “You take him.” Lorry was feeling lazy, so he stretched out his legs. Let Hector have some fun.

  “Back
in a flash.” Hector grinned, leaped up, and went to the tourist’s aid.

  Lorry felt a chill. That happened to him sometimes, along his back and neck. He usually knew whom to trust and who was disloyal, who was an easy mark and who was nothing but trouble. On this night he convinced himself that his radar was off. He shook off his fear. He chatted up some girls, hung around with some buddies. An hour later he knew something was wrong. His brother in the world of mayhem still hadn’t returned.

  He was the one who found Hector’s body, sprawled on the platform, his throat cut. A black pool of blood slid beneath him like oil seeping down to the tracks below.

  Elv covered her ears, but Lorry made her listen.

  In memory of his friend, Lorry set a rosebush on the platform; it bloomed, but the roses were black. He used heroin for the first time that night. He turned to the witch and she brought him comfort. It was easy enough to find in the tunnels; it was another gate, into another world. It didn’t mean you forgot those you lost. That was why he had the rose and thorns tattooed on his hands, a memorial that would last. There wasn’t a day that went by when he didn’t regret sending Hector to do a job he should have done himself. Lorry was bigger, stronger; he could have fought the assailant off. In the end, their intended victim had been the better, more merciless thief. As a final insult, he’d taken Hector’s gold ring, the only thing Hector had inherited from his father. Lorry still looked at people’s hands, searching for the person who wore that stolen ring. He kept a knife with him at all times in case he found him. But even if he got his revenge, he was the real culprit. He would have to live with the guilt, and so would she.