The Story Sisters

  After they had their tea, Claire went off to her room.

  “What do you think?” Natalia asked her old friend.

  A good deed was never as simple as it looked; Madame Cohen knew that. There were ripples, effects no one expected. Still, after one cup of tea she had made up her mind.

  “I’ll hire her,” she agreed.

  BEHIND CLAIRE’S BACK the other employees called her la fille au chien—the dog girl. She was never without the wolfish creature, who followed at her heels. Claire didn’t mind the shop because she was allowed to bring Shiloh along. As for Madame Cohen, she considered a big dog a good deterrent against robbers and thieves. She had reason to fear intruders. There was the bin of diamonds in the back room kitchenette, right next to the potatoes and onions, and gems scattered about, hidden in drawers, stuffed into pairs of boots, stored in cabinets and closets.

  The other employees thought Madame Cohen should be the one to be paid for having agreed to hire such a strange girl. They were kind to Claire nonetheless. The salesgirls, Lucie and Jeanne, befriended her, suggesting style changes that might improve her appearance. Claire seemed wounded, lost, someone to take care of, and she brought out the best in Lucie and Jeanne. They gave her their castoffs, scarves, cashmere sweaters, wool skirts, and dresses. They treated her delicately, explaining the workings of the shop as they would to a child who had never before had a job. Here is the cash register. Here is the broom. Here is the brass polish and the rags with which to clean the hardware on cabinets and doors.

  It wasn’t hard to clean up after misfortune. It was, however, extremely difficult to chase it away for good. Something tapped on the glass windows of the jewelry shop once Claire came to work there. Something was trying to get in. Anyone else would have thought it was a blackbird and ignored it. Perhaps a child throwing stones. Madame Cohen knew better. She set out fly paper and salt.

  Soon enough, she found a huge moth attached to the flypaper. It had managed to get in through the door with the deliveryman. Evil always did that, appeared when you least expected it. That was why a person had to remain alert at all times. Madame Cohen phoned her dear friend Natalia, who already had reasons enough to be grateful. I think I have caught the problem afflicting your granddaughter. She had crushed the demon between her fingers and tossed it into the bin with the apple cores and onion skins.

  MADAME COHEN HAD taken a special liking to Claire and doled out brusque, worthwhile advice every day. Don’t slump over. Look people in the eye when they speak to you. Brush your hair a hundred times a night. Bathe your face in milk. Sleep with the windows closed. Madame Cohen had three grown sons and six grandsons. One of them had been so wild as a boy that he’d been banned from the store for his antics after inventing a crude flyswatter using a rubber band and marbles, nothing you’d want tested in a shop filled with glass cases and mirrors. Claire, on the other hand, was a pleasure to have around.

  Madame Cohen taught her how to look through a loupe to gauge the clarity and depth of a stone. The best gems had a light inside, as if they were alive. Claire had found several old books on the subject of gemology in the bookstalls along the river. Some of the volumes had jewelers’ wax dripped onto the pages. Others were one-of-a-kind editions, handwritten in black ink. When Jeanne and Lucie closed the shop and went home, Claire stayed on, studying. She trained herself to tell the difference between gems with her eyes closed, aware of that inner light of which Madame Cohen had spoken. A ruby gave off heat. An aqua marine was like water in the palm of her hand. Only a few lucky people had such an extraordinary feel for gemstones, Madame Cohen was proud to say. Her mitzvah had paid off, as good deeds often do. Customers listened to Claire’s opinion. Her small sulky voice forced them to lean close in order to catch her advice. In the end they all understood what she was telling them: Stones were the one thing that lasted.

  Claire no longer found herself drawn to windows or river-banks. She didn’t sleep her days away. Sometimes she arrived at the shop before it opened, waiting outside on a bench, gazing at the slanted sunlight. There’s a new girl who works in the Cohens’ jewelry shop, Natalia wrote in her letters to Elv. The other salesgirls have taken her up, taught her what to wear, they drag her along when they go out to lunch, especially on days when the light is orange, when the sky is the color blue it was when you were children, like a china plate, unbroken, luminous if you half-close your eyes.

  ELV READ HER grandmother’s letters in the prison library, at a desk by the window. Afterward, she kept them stored in a shoebox beneath her cot, taking them out from time to time, savoring the descriptions of life in the Marais, the stories of the people in the neighborhood. Lorry sent her letters as well, and those she devoured. She read them standing up outside the mail room. He was always on the move, looking for the fortune he assured her he’d find. His letters were brief, but they tore her apart. She destroyed them after they’d been read. She didn’t want anyone else to gets their hands on them. They were intimate, erotic, desperate. They weren’t something a woman in prison should read while trying to get through each day without feeling anything.

  SHE’D HAD THE good fortune to be sent to Bedford Hills but the bad luck of being assigned to the laundry, a job she hated. It was worse than latrine duty at Westfield. It was noisy, with so many inmates working that there was never an end to the chatter and bickering. The room was steamy hot and made her feel faint. The other women called her Missy and made fun of her. They thought she was stuck-up because she kept to herself. They assumed she was well educated when in fact she’d never finished high school. Women who were illiterate secretly came to her to ask if she would read the letters their children wrote. The letters moved her in ways she wouldn’t have imagined. She missed her mother. She was glad Annie couldn’t see where she’d ended up.

  Pete Smith came to visit her sometimes. It was awkward because they didn’t know each other and there wasn’t much to say. Pete had moved into an apartment on the second floor of a two-family house in North Point Harbor. He’d come to think of the town as his home, the one he’d shared with Annie. He was a fixture at the cemetery, leaving flowers, cutting the tall grass with a scythe. Some kids in town called him Cemetery Man and ran away when they saw him on the street.

  “They used to call me a witch,” Elv said. “I had long black hair, and I wore a necklace made of bones.”

  “Gee, I wonder why they thought that,” Pete said, and they had both laughed. “Bones?” he remarked.

  “To ward off evil.”

  “I see that worked real well,” Pete said dryly.

  Most of his neighbors in North Point Harbor were kind; they knew what had happened to Annie. Several had invited him to holiday dinners, but he’d graciously declined. Once in a while a neighbor came to him with concerns over a divorce or a teenager who’d run away. He tried to help, but he never took on their cases. He wasn’t in the business anymore. Except for Elv.

  “Do you hear from Claire?” she asked him. “How is she?”

  Each week Elv began a letter to Claire, and every time she tore it in two. She had even tried writing in Arnish, but she couldn’t remember the words, or if she did, she no longer knew what they meant.

  Though he wasn’t much of a traveler, Pete had recently been for a visit. He’d stayed at a hotel around the corner from the apartment and other than seeing Claire, whom he’d gone to see on the occasion of her most recent birthday, he didn’t like anything about France. The food was complicated and expensive. He couldn’t speak the language and make himself understood. He sat on a bench across from Notre Dame and thought about Annie and how different Paris would be if she was there with him. In the end Claire had made him a hamburger and dumpling dinner in Natalia’s kitchen to celebrate her birthday and they’d all had a grand time. When she showed him all the rocks she’d collected, he bought a suitcase at a shop around the corner, where he’d had to pantomime what he wanted in order to be understood. He paid extra freight so he could bring the suitcase with him t
o the cemetery. He swore he would come back and visit again and Claire had laughed and said, “When? When hell freezes over?”

  “When there are decent hamburgers,” he’d joked. Pete had spent an entire day setting down those rocks from Paris, half on Annie’s grave, the other half on Meg’s.

  “She works in a jewelry store. She still has that dog.”

  “The wolf,” Elv remarked, and when Pete seemed puzzled she added, “I just wanted to see my house. I saw the dog in the yard. I’m glad she has someone to protect her.”

  “Maybe you were the one who needed to be protected,” Pete said. He was still trying to find that man Lorry had told him about, the one who had done such unspeakable things. Lorry said it had involved a teacher, and ever since, Pete had been trying to put the pieces together. Elv wasn’t much help. She just shook her head and acted as though she didn’t know what he was talking about. They were strangers, after all, thrown together because of their attachment to Annie.

  “So tell me about your first date with my mother,” Elv said. “I want to hear all about it.”

  “We went to a diner,” Pete told her.

  “Big spender,” Elv joked.

  “Actually, she paid.”

  They laughed again. “That was my mother.”

  “I was madly in love with her.”

  Pete turned away. He had stunned Elv with this admission and with his obvious grief. She felt herself soften toward him.

  “Well, good,” she said. “I’m glad. She deserved that.”

  AFTER A YEAR of working in the laundry, Elv’s hands were chapped and her fingernails were split from hot water and soap. She filled out the application for the canine training class because her arms ached from lifting heavy towels into the driers. She had a true aversion to the scent of bleach. She went to the basement exercise room for the first session thinking she’d managed to pull a scam to get out of real work, as she had at Westfield when she’d been assigned to the stables.

  The dog Elv was given was known as Pollo—they’d dubbed him Chicken on the street because he had to be forced to fight. But once provoked, he was a gladiator. If he bit down, he wouldn’t let go. He was white with dark scars across his body and face. His legs had been broken when his owner beat him after a loss. Even after surgery he limped. He was hugely bowlegged. Laughable if you didn’t know the reason why. He didn’t look at Elv when Adrian Bean, the trainer running the program, matched them up. Pollo was the only one with a quiet demeanor, which made him seem even more dangerous. The other dogs stayed away from him, as the women stayed away from Elv. He was the ugliest dog in the bunch. Just her luck. The other women had German shepherds or puppies or fluffy mixed breeds. The dogs had all been abused or abandoned, found wandering on highways or city streets. Most were terrified of thunder, footsteps, cars, human beings. Several were vicious. The slightest provocation could cause them to attack.

  Adrian told the women in the class that they were the alpha dogs and their students’ futures depended on their success. If rehabilitated, the dogs would be adopted. If not, they would be put down.

  “Fuck,” Elv muttered. She didn’t want to be responsible for some dog’s death because she’d failed him somehow. Pollo turned to glance at her when she spoke. He must have recognized the f-word. They looked at each other. For an instant Elv was shocked to see something she recognized. He had yellow-green eyes, like hers.

  When the training began everyone clipped a leash on her dog. Pollo refused to move. He wouldn’t even accept a biscuit set down on the floor. He ignored it until a hapless puppy approached, then he snarled and gobbled it so fast he began to choke. Without thinking, Elv patted his back. Pollo turned, lips drawn. He was about to bite, but Elv quickly withdrew her hand, more for his sake than hers. If he bit her, he’d be euthanized.

  “You are one stupid fuck,” she told him.

  Pollo looked up. That was the single word he seemed to recognize. Elv saw inside his yellow eyes. He wasn’t a chicken. He was broken. She put another biscuit down, even though they weren’t supposed to give their dogs treats unless a command was obeyed.

  “Don’t feel sorry for him,” Adrian told her when she spied the breach in training etiquette. “I’m serious, Missy. Anybody ever help you out by feeling sorry for you?”

  ELV SPENT SIX months working with Pollo, five hours a day. He’s the smartest of the dogs, she wrote to Natalia. When you talk to him, he really listens. Her loneliness abated when she worked with him. He had emerged from the savagery of his life with great dignity. Elv felt like weeping in his presence. When she looked at his scars, she was ashamed of the human race. She went to the library and found out everything she could about pit bulls and American Staffordshire terriers and bull terriers and the history of dogfighting. She researched wolves and their styles of communicating. She borrowed volumes of psychology, especially methods of behavioral training. She read B. F. Skinner and My Dog Tulip and Lad a Dog and Travels with Charlie and Lassie. She hadn’t read since Westfield. She’d forgotten how much she’d loved The Scarlet Letter, how it had given her such hope in the New Hampshire darkness.

  The librarian who came to deliver new books every two weeks began to set aside ones she thought Elv might like.

  “You’re a serious reader,” the librarian observed. Elv had grabbed a copy of Oliver Twist because there was a photo of a bull terrier on the cover. She recalled that Meg had read all of Dickens one year.

  “My sister was the reader,” Elv told the librarian. “Not me.”

  For the last two months of his training, Pollo slept beside Elv’s bunk. Elv’s cellmate at the time, who went by the name of Miracle, was in on charges of drug possession, prostitution, and forgery. She wasn’t afraid of much, but she had been terrified of Pollo at first.

  “You know I hate dogs, Missy,” she said to Elv. “I bet he’s going to give us fleas. And what if I step on him in the middle of the night?” Miracle wanted to know. “Maybe he’ll freak out and bite me. I don’t even know how he can be so ugly.”

  “I know he looks ugly,” Elv agreed. “But he’s not. His inside is different from his outside.”

  Miracle was overweight and had problems with her teeth. She knew what it was like to be called ugly. She gazed at Pollo and reconsidered. “Okay. But the first time he starts scratching, he goes. You know he’s just a substitute.” Miracle nodded to the wall where Elv had taped up several photos of Lorry.

  “No one’s a substitute for him,” Elv said.

  “Yeah. Right. Wait till you start talking baby talk to that dog.”

  Being together twenty-four hours a day was part of the bonding Adrian insisted was necessary for a dog’s rehabilitation. But perhaps it was too much for the human side of the equation. Elv would reach out at night and feel him there. “Hey, baby,” she whispered, not wanting to wake Miracle or prove her right. For the first time since she and Lorry had been apart, Elv felt consoled. She’d done such terrible things no one could forgive her, except perhaps for another sorrowful creature who understood the effects of human cruelty, who could lie down beside her and know she hadn’t meant any harm.

  AFTER EIGHT MONTHS there was an open house to find the dogs new homes. It was held outside in the yard, where the setting seemed more like a park than a prison. What I really want to do, Elv had written to her grandmother, is take him home with me. You can’t imagine how smart a dog can be. He senses what I feel before I do. He knows what I think. Natalia had written back that Claire’s dog and the cat Elv had rescued from the river had a strange alliance. When they thought no one was at home, they sat together on the couch by the window, peering out at the courtyard. As soon as the key turned in the door, they jumped off the couch so that no one would see their attachment. Dogs and cats had their secrets too.

  People came to watch the inmates put the dogs through their paces. Elv wanted to show off how clever Pollo was, but she also wanted him to fail. Some of the younger dogs refused to obey commands, and one German shepherd
barked the entire time, but Pollo never took his eyes off Elv. The better he was, the more brokenhearted she became. It was spring and the air was soft. That made things worse. It was a bad time for Elv. The audience applauded as though they were watching a real dog show. “Fuck,” Elv said to herself. Something else she would love and lose. Pollo looked at her, bewildered. She wanted to pluck him up, run like hell, jump into the back of one of the townspeople’s cars. Get us out of here, she would plead. Get us to Lorry. But she didn’t even know where he was. She hadn’t heard from him in a month. At this point she probably would just stand outside the prison door, unsure of which way to go.

  After the presentation, inmates and visitors had cookies and lemonade. Elv figured Pollo was so ugly no one would want him. She’d already plotted how she could present his case to Adrian. He could be a useful therapy dog with the inmates, then when Elv got out, she’d take him with her. But to her distress, a guest came over right away. He crouched down and petted Pollo as if he was a regular dog, one that hadn’t had his legs broken with a baseball bat, hadn’t experienced the treachery of men.

  Pollo tolerated the guy petting his head, keeping one eye fixed on Elv.

  “Nice dog,” he said. “Hey, poochie.”

  “You don’t want him,” Elv said.

  “His scars give him character.” The man stood and shook Elv’s hand. He owned a used record store in Ossining. He thought it would be fun to have a dog hanging out with him all day, plus it would be a great deterrent against robberies.