The Story Sisters

by Alice Hoffman

  When she woke the next morning, he was gone. She stayed where she was. She felt her love for him in a place that was so deep she was sure most people wouldn’t understand it. By the time it had grown light, he was back. He shook the snow off, took off his clothes, got back in beside her. He had brought her a bunch of roses wrapped in brown paper, the kind they sold outside the market. She told herself that was the reason he had left their bed, to walk through the snow in the pale light, to bring her roses, despite the weather, to come back to her when she needed him most.

  HE WAS LATE one Friday night. It was cold, the middle of February, and she was three months pregnant. They had painted the second bedroom a creamy yellow that reminded Elv of the heirloom tomatoes her mother used to have in the garden. She remembered all of their names: Livingston’s Golden Queen, Jubilees, yellow Brandywine. Elv had found a cookbook in a junk shop that included the first written recipe for tomato sauce, published in Naples in 1692, a Spanish-style concoction made with thyme. Her mother would have gotten a kick out of that. Elv was fixing the sauce for dinner, to be served with homemade pasta. She had been surprised to discover she could cook; it came to her naturally. She added tomatoes to just about everything. It had become a joke between her and Lorry—her new addiction, her fatal flaw. “Oh no, baby,” she teased him and said what she always told him, “that would be you.” She thought it was sunny enough on their little terrace to start a container garden in the spring; tomatoes and nothing else. She’d eaten so many already that she wondered if their baby would have red hair, if she’d have a preference for that color and if they’d have to repaint the nursery.

  It was 1:00 A.M., then it was 2:00. Elv didn’t eat the dinner she’d prepared. Her nerves were shot. She wished she still smoked. She wished she could sleep. She wished he hadn’t left in the first place, kissing her, telling her he’d be back for supper. Lorry didn’t answer his cell phone, so she bundled up and went down to the closest bar, a place called MacDougal’s that was open after hours. No one had seen him, so she went back home. Snow had begun to fall. It was a bleak, cold winter. The sky was always black. The roads were probably bad. She called around and woke up several of his friends, men she didn’t like or trust. Most of them didn’t answer the phone. The one who did told her not to worry.

  At 3:00 A.M. she phoned Pete Smith, hauling him out of bed to answer.

  “I was stupid to call. Go back to sleep,” she told him.

  Pete was already pulling on his clothes, his socks and shoes. He’d been dreaming about Annie and then all at once her daughter had called.

  “Let me check around,” he said.

  “No, forget it. I’m sure he’s fine.” Elv had bitten her nails to the quick; rims of blood circled each one. They had both disappointed people, but never each other. He didn’t just disappear. But that wasn’t true, not really, it was only that he always came back. Elv thought of the three years he’d been gone, and all the things they’d agreed never to talk about. Her dread intensified. Pete phoned after an hour. He’d called around to a couple of people he’d worked with in the department and also to some local hospitals and hadn’t found out anything. He was sure to know something soon. Certainly by morning.

  But in the morning, there was still no news. Elv went out looking. She asked one of the old ladies on the street who had known Lorry forever and she said, “Try Marguerite’s.” Elv stared. “You know, Mimi.” Elv felt shaken to think there was another woman, until the old lady added, “His grandmother’s grave. You know—Our Lady of Sorrow.”

  Elv walked through the snow. It was a small cemetery behind a churchyard. She asked the caretaker where she could find Lorry’s grandmother’s grave. It was fairly new; his grandmother had only died the previous winter. There was a holly plant someone had left, the pot wrapped in bright foil. Elv hadn’t even known Lorry had a grandmother. She felt undone and confused. She wished she could call her mother, ask her what to do. She had phoned his pals, gone to his haunts, come up with nothing. When she went to the bars, the way the men had looked at her, then glanced away, made her know they wouldn’t have told her anything if they had known where he was. Her suspicions were confirmed by their casual replies, their clear desire to be rid of her. So that was it. He’d been using drugs, they all had. Not a single one would have told her the truth.

  When Lorry still wasn’t home that afternoon, she went out and got on the subway to go to her scheduled doctor’s appointment. She went right past her stop, into Manhattan. She felt crazy and lost. She got off at Penn Station. She followed the trail he had told her about, wandering through the crowd, desperate to find him. At last there it was, the grated gate to the otherworld, just beyond the stairs leading up to Eighth Avenue. She went over, leaned hard against it, pushed. It swung open. There was a stair, a metal rung, just as he’d said.

  She slipped down onto the rusty ladder. The darkness smelled foul. Soil, shit, ash, flood, mold, smoke. She let her eyes adjust. The bustle of Penn Station was only inches away, but the darkness was endless. A person could slip into it and get lost. She felt a twinge inside her. Her stomach flip-flopped. How could anyone survive this? She held on to the ladder. Anything could be down below, a horde of demons. There might be rats, wild dogs, giants. “Lorry,” she called plaintively. Her voice came back to her, mocking her desperation with its echo. “Lorry,” she cried until her voice was wrecked.

  She went back up aboveground and found the public toilet. People were all but living there. An old woman had made a bed out of newspapers that she’d carefully laid out on the tiles. People stepped over her as though she wasn’t there. Elv washed her hands. In the mirror her face looked blotchy. Her eyes were rimmed red. A woman and her child were washing themselves thoroughly, as if the sink was their bathtub. “There you go, baby,” the woman said to her little girl as she dunked her face in the water. “Clean as can be.”

  When Elv got back to their street, she noticed police cars from the 114th Precinct. She went inside, then took the stairs. From the hallway she could see that the door to their apartment had been flung open. Two cops were inside and Michael was there as well, sitting on the couch, his coat thrown down beside him, as if he owned the place. Pete Smith was waiting for her. He took her by the arm before she could go inside and led her down the hall so he could have a word with her. He was still wearing his gray coat and his hat; the same middle-aged sad-looking guy she’d called and woken from a dead sleep even though he didn’t owe her a thing.

  “What the hell is this?” Elv said. “They can’t just be in there.”

  She couldn’t stop thinking about that little girl at Penn Station. She felt choked up and confused. Everything on the surface was flooding away. Everything seemed raw and brutal and immediate.

  “He was at an apartment around the corner,” Pete said. “His brother found him.”

  “Good,” Elv said. “That sounds close by.”

  “Elv.”

  “I’m going to kill him for worrying me. I went all the hell over the city. You wouldn’t believe the places I went.” She still had rust stains on her hands from the rungs of the ladder to the otherworld. She had ashes on the soles of her boots.

  “Are you listening to me, kiddo? It’s not good.”

  Elv looked at Pete, then glanced into the apartment. “He got busted, right? We have to get him out of jail.”

  Pete embraced her and then she knew what she’d already known last night when he didn’t show up, when the snow was falling and he hadn’t called to say Don’t worry, baby. “I’m sorry,” Pete said, which was the stupid remark people said when things were irrevocable, when you’d lost the only thing you cared about in this world.

  “You’re completely wrong,” Elv said. Lorry had to be somewhere.

  He had his coat on when they found him, Pete told her. He was ready to leave and go home when he overdosed. He had that black cap of his and a sack of groceries from the market and a dozen roses, the kind that were so resistant to cold weather they
were often kept on the sidewalk in plastic bins, the kind he’d brought her on the night when she knew the saucers of salt wouldn’t protect the two of them from evil. Pete held her while she sobbed. She had never sounded like that. She didn’t even know where the noise was coming from if not from the otherworld, the scream she would have cried so long ago if she hadn’t been tied up with ropes, her mouth stuffed with bread so no one could hear her.

  Everyone could hear her now.

  Confession

  The wolf came to me at midnight and stood below my window. He had chased the innocent, defiled the sacred, run after horses and carriages, caused the snow to turn red with blood. He had an arrow in his side. He was the one bleeding now.

  I told him it would hurt, and to shut his eyes. I took out the arrow, cleaned the wound, gave him supper. People in the village said he devoured me then, left only my boots in the snow. They said it would teach the other girls a lesson, and maybe it did. From where I lived in the woods I could hear them calling at night. I wondered what lesson they’d learned.

  THE SEASON HAD BEEN COLDER THAN USUAL AND THERE WERE many deaths in the city. The cold crept inside rooms, and Paris filled with people wearing long black coats. Tourists could not believe this was the city they had dreamed of visiting. They locked themselves in their hotel rooms and drank hot coffee, wishing they were back in New Jersey or Idaho. It was a season of grief and broken hearts, and in many apartments the heat gave out altogether. Children were covered with layers of wool blankets at night; in the mornings, they held steaming cups of cocoa to warm their hands. Several sparrows froze solid on the branches of the chestnut tree in Natalia’s courtyard and had to be shaken from their perches with the swipe of a broom handle.

  Shiloh died in his sleep one morning as the dark was lifting. Claire woke suddenly. Clouds of her breath formed in the chilly air. Nothing felt alive. Usually the birds were chattering at this hour, waking in the dreamy silver light. But now they had all been swept up into a dustpan, deposited in the bin in the courtyard along with potato peelings and newspapers.

  Though he’d grown old, Shiloh had insisted on following Claire until the end. When his feet began to drag on the sidewalks, Natalia fashioned boots for him out of leather. For a while he was steadier. People in the neighborhood applauded when he managed to haul himself down the street. Shiloh struggled, but his downfall was imminent. In the end, his hips and legs gave out. It became difficult to wake him in the mornings. His breathing rattled, his eyes were milky. Soon he’d stopped eating his supper. Now he was gone. Claire wrenched herself out of bed and went to lie beside him on the carpet. She had been fifteen when her mother brought him home. She remembered writing Take him back.

  In the kitchen, where she was fixing a pot of coffee, Natalia heard a plaintive sound. She thought it was a bird, then remembered they were all gone. As she went along the hallway the cry grew louder. She was led to the bedroom door. It was locked. When Claire at last came out, she was wearing boots and the jacket her mother used to wear in the garden. Her face was pale and grim.

  “Where are you going?” Natalia followed along behind her granddaughter. She had suspected Claire might do something rash when this time came, something on impulse. She had already phoned Leah to ask her advice. Madame Cohen had assured her that help was on the way.

  “I’m going to bury him,” Claire told her grandmother.

  “We don’t have a shovel,” Natalia said, hoping to dissuade her. This was what grave diggers were for, to take grief into their capable hands. Surely there was such a service for animals.

  “There are shovels in the shed,” Claire said.

  The landlord kept tools locked up in a little wooden lean-to in the courtyard; tenants were forbidden from using them, but Claire didn’t care. She went downstairs, picked up a rock, and smashed the lock on the shed until it yielded. Stringy cobwebs and rusted garden implements greeted her. A few frozen carcasses still littered the courtyard: wren, sparrow, pigeon, dove. Claire grabbed one of the old shovels and slammed the shed door shut. Icicles fell and shattered into blue sparks.

  When Claire turned, three young men were standing behind her. They were so unexpected she took a step back. They were tall and all three had shovels. They weren’t there by accident. Madame Cohen had sent over her younger grandsons. All were in medical school. The older grandsons were already doctors and unavailable for dog burials, but these three would do. Claire had not seen any of them since they were children, so the eldest introduced himself and his brothers.

  “Where do you want it?” Émile, the first grandson, asked. He was known to be the serious one. He said what he meant. People thought he might be a psychiatrist one day.

  “Not ‘it,’” Claire said. “He.”

  Claire decided the first grandson was an idiot. She pointed to the chestnut tree. There was a patch of soil between the tree trunk and the cobbled courtyard. Émile and the second brother, Gérald, began to dig. Gérald hummed. People thought he would work in the lab. He was a fool as well. The third of Madame Cohen’s grandsons followed Claire upstairs to help bring Shiloh down. He was the youngest, the tallest, and the most awkward. He nodded a hello to Madame Rosen, banging his head on the low kitchen doorway as he followed Claire to the bedroom to retrieve Shiloh. The German shepherd looked crumpled and much smaller than he had in life. It took all of Claire’s restraint not to throw herself down beside him.

  “I’ll take care of this,” the third grandson said. This was Philippe, who had once balanced china cups on top of one another in the back room of the shop, carefully constructing a tower, until they’d all come crashing down. He’d made the flyswatter out of a rubber band and marbles. He was full of ideas. People thought he would someday invent a cure for some terrible and debilitating disease. Madame Cohen had specifically told him to carry the dog downstairs for Claire.

  The entrance to the room was narrow and Philippe hit his elbows getting in the door. Claire worried that he wouldn’t be able to carry the dog downstairs, but he seemed sure of himself. He carefully picked up the body, which he hoisted over his shoulder. His actions were surprisingly tender for someone so uncoordinated.

  “You go first,” Philippe told Claire, not wanting her to see the way a body looked after death, the hardening of the jaw and limbs. “I’ll follow.”

  The three brothers buried Shiloh. As medical students they’d seen worse and done worse, but it was still a sad business. Claire’s tears fell down onto the cobblestones. She seemed fierce and unreachable. When the grandsons were done, they stood there uncomfortably for a while, clothes splattered with dirt. They all had lectures to attend, yet they stared at one another, lingering. Their grandmother had forbidden them to be rude, and because they were rude by nature they didn’t know whether or not it was now a proper time to leave. Philippe had been told in no uncertain terms to watch his manners. Natalia came down with glasses and a pitcher of water, which the brothers gulped down, then she discreetly told them they could go.

  Philippe went up to Claire, though her silence seemed fearsome. His grandmother had told him not to be tricked by how standoffish she might seem. Claire’s hands were stuffed in her pockets. She had slipped on a pair of dark glasses so no one could see that her eyes were red.

  “Heart failure doesn’t feel like anything,” Philippe told her. “Just so you know. He went to sleep and didn’t wake up. No sensation. No pain.”

  Claire nodded, grateful for the explanation. When Madame Cohen’s grandsons left, having returned the shovel to the garden shed and repaired the lock, Claire remained in the courtyard. She sat vigil beside the grave until the end of the day, when her grandmother coaxed her back inside.

  She returned to work the next day. She didn’t speak much, but she did her job. Then she had tea with Madame Cohen in the back room.

  “What did you think of my grandsons?” Madame Cohen asked.

  “They were helpful.”

  “A pot holder is helpful,” Madame Cohen replied. “O
therwise you’d burn your hand. None of them impressed you?”

  “I thought one of them might not manage to carry Shiloh downstairs, but he did.”

  “Philippe,” Madame Cohen said. She was glad that he’d done a good job. “Would you like to see him again?”

  “Not really.” Claire was always honest with her employer.

  Frankly, she didn’t wish to see anyone. After Shiloh’s death, people in the neighborhood became accustomed to seeing her alone. Even the coldest among them worried for her. In the markets, they offered bargains meant only for the best customers. Vendors sent her home with bunches of flowers for her grandmother. In the spice shop, she was plied with candied fruits. A Monsieur Abetan, who had an antiquities shop filled with knick-knacks and junk, gave her an amulet he vowed would bring her luck, but she only stuck the talisman in the top drawer of the bureau in the parlor, where it sat alongside the mints and the toothpicks.

  People wondered if Claire had ever fallen in love or walked arm in arm with a friend. She had become a cautionary tale, pitied, whispered about. Some of the older women kept butterfly nets in their shopping bags, ready and able to defend her should a demon happen to appear as she went walking by.

  When spring arrived, Claire continued to wear her coat and boots. She was the one person in Paris who dreaded the end of winter. The white flowers blooming on the chestnut tree in her grandmother’s courtyard were anathema to her. They made her think of the lost and the dead. They no longer carried the scent of almonds. Instead, when she breathed in there was the stink of bitterroot, sulfur. She wished for snow, rain, turtle-green skies. She had the feeling children sometimes do when they’re awakened by a nightmare and desperately yearn for someone to tell them their dreamworld doesn’t exist in real life. Claire had always crept into bed with Elv to beg for a story when that happened to her. Once upon a time there was a little girl who needed to go to sleep, Elv would begin, no matter how sleepy she herself was. Nothing could harm her and no one could find her and she was always safe.