The Story Sisters

by Alice Hoffman

  Elv sat down at the table. She herself couldn’t remember his face, just his voice and what he did to her.

  “I went to his house—he lived out past Huntington. He hadn’t worked for years. He wasn’t well. He had an oxygen tank because of his emphysema. I told him I was researching a book and that his sister suggested I speak to him. He had a sister who lived in New Jersey, but when I called she refused to speak to me. She told me her brother was dead to her.”

  Perhaps he was lonely, or his interest was piqued in having a writer coming to call. He invited Pete in and gave him a cup of coffee, which Pete didn’t drink. It had been cold this past winter. Pete wore his overcoat, his gloves; he brought along a briefcase of what appeared to be notes and, hidden at the bottom, a sealed plastic bag containing two ounces of heroin. Enough to put Grimin away for life. Pete didn’t touch anything in the house. When the detectives came later on, he wanted it to be an open-and-shut case.

  He said he was gathering stories and that his book was entitled The Best Advice from the Best Teachers. Pete was only interviewing the best of the best. The man was flattered. His advice was simple, but vital. Don’t think you know the person in front of you. Everyone has their secrets.

  For instance? Pete asked. He felt lucky. The guy wanted to impress him. Worst secret you’ve ever heard?

  I’ve got a good one, the man said. He was ready to talk. Loneliness and flattery did that.

  I’ll bet you do, Pete answered.

  It was a small house and chilly. The heat was turned down low. There were no pets. No family. There was a clock on the mantel, ticking. Pete had parked several blocks away. It was early evening and dark.

  The man told his story slowly, with pauses for effect. He said he’d heard it from a friend of a friend. A girl had been on the corner and looked lost. This fellow had pulled up and offered her a ride. He’d wanted the little girl. No one would have expected that of this man—a secret life, just like he’d said. The man had been watching her at her house and now here she was, but another girl had pushed her out of the way and gotten into his car instead. What are you going to do about it, she had said. She was a bad girl, you could see it. That’s what the friend of a friend had said. She had green eyes, which was always a sign of evil within, so he took her home and kept her there all day and he’d had to punish her and teach her a lesson. That was the worst story of a secret life he’d ever heard. He’d laughed then. He wasn’t even sure whether or not to believe it.

  Pete told the fellow he’d heard a story like that too. The world was a small place and stories got around. He thought it had taken place on Nightingale Street.

  Lane, the man had said. It was Nightingale Lane.

  “Lorry told me you called him Grimin,” Pete told Elv. “When I got to his house, I saw why. The letters on his license plate were still the same.”

  Pete noticed this as he jimmied the lock, then hid the heroin in the trunk. As soon as he drove away, he phoned an old friend in the Suffolk County Police Department. The amount of heroin he’d left behind equaled a life sentence, less for good behavior, but Grimin would be dead by then.

  Mimi was putting the watering can away. She dusted off Miss Featherstone, who had leaves in her hair and some dirt on her dress. Miss Featherstone was very persnickety about her appearance. Pete took a sip of coffee. It was cold. He’d gotten rid of Grimin because he’d made a promise to Annie that he’d always take care of Elv. On the way back to the train station, Elv asked Pete if they could stop at Nightingale Lane.

  They sat parked there in the Volvo, the engine running.

  “Is this where you lived?” Mimi said in a hushed tone when she saw the house. It was a perfectly good house, three stories, white with black shutters and a lovely wide porch. It had two chimneys and hollyhocks by the door. “It’s a castle.”

  There was the hawthorn tree, there was the garden. Another family lived here now. There were lights on in the rooms and they could see inside. Bookshelves, couches, paintings on the wall. There was a cat in the kitchen.

  “Which one was your bedroom with your sisters?” Mimi asked.

  Elv pointed out the attic windows.

  “It was the tower,” Mimi said, awed.

  “We had the best garden. There were all different-colored tomatoes,” Elv told her.

  “Tomatoes are red,” Mimi said.

  “Well, we had pink and yellow and brown and purple and green.”

  “It’s true,” Pete said. “They were like candy.”

  “Unlikely,” Mimi said.

  Pete and Elv exchanged an amused look over Mimi’s head. Claire used to sound like that. So matter-of-fact.

  Elv and Mimi got out and stood by the side of the road across from the house. Dusk spread across the lawn in waves of velvet. So often Elv found herself saying the same things to her daughter that Annie had said to her. She felt a flood of love for the small solemn face upturned in the dark, listening to every word. Here is a story about a boy who had the most loyal dog in the world, about three sisters who danced in the garden, about a mother who would do anything for her child.

  Maybe some love was guaranteed. Maybe it fit inside you and around you like skin and bones. This is what she remembered and always would: the sisters who sat with her in the garden, the grandmother who stitched her a dress the color of the sky, the man who spied her in the grass and loved her beyond all measure, the mother who set up a tent in the garden to tell her a story when she was a child, neither good nor bad, selfish nor strong, only a girl who wanted to hear a familiar voice as the dark fell down, and the moths rose, and the night was sure to come.

  Faithful

  I waited in the place where I last saw you.

  It was night and then morning, then night once more.

  A decade passed and then a hundred years. Green leaves became red, then green again. The tree that had sheltered me was pushed down by the wind. I saw lightning in the sky, stars that were burning out in the heavens. I saw men tell women they loved them, then turn away. I saw men who were true but were never able to speak their minds. I saw lives begin, graves dug, snow falling. I was there for so long that time went backward. There was the nightingale. There was the hawthorn tree. I was a girl with long black hair watching you come across the grass toward me. When you recognized me, only an hour had passed.

  WHENEVER PETE SMITH TOOK THEM SHOPPING HE ALWAYS bought Mimi too much. It didn’t matter if the store was Target or Saks Fifth Avenue, by the age of seven Mimi could manage to talk him into whatever she wanted. She called him Gogi, which was her version of Grandpa. She was a big fan of nicknames, and books, and ballet. Her hair was black and her eyes were darker than Lorry’s. “She’ll be spoiled,” Elv would remind Pete, thinking that her daughter’s charm was so like Lorry’s as well. All the girls at school wanted to sit with her at lunch to hear the stories she told. They hovered around her, wanting to be her best friend. When she came into school wearing pink cowgirl boots, her classmates went home and begged their mothers for the same. Pete didn’t think that a few shopping sprees every now and then would have a bad effect. It was nice to spoil someone. He’d been the first person other than Elv and the nurses at the hospital to see Mimi when she’d come into this world, so he reserved the right to be proud.

  He’d been around town long enough that people had stopped calling him Cemetery Man, even though he still went every week to cut the grass, trim the lilacs, sit on a bench, bringing along his shovel when the path to the graves was heaped with snow. He was known as Mimi’s grandfather now, and even if there was no blood connection, that was who he was. Elv and Mimi had moved into the top-floor apartment in his house in North Point Harbor. Elv worked at another animal shelter in a nearby town, where she was hired as assistant director. Mimi was in third grade at the same school the Story sisters had attended. It had been completely remodeled and the teachers seemed so young. It looked different, but when Elv walked inside, it felt the same. Pete went with her for the first parent-tea
cher conference. Elv still had trouble with official meetings and authority figures. She got fidgety and self-conscious, all the more so for having to walk down hallways she had taken with her sisters.

  Part of the newly remodeled school library was called the Meg Story Reading Room. There had been a celebration when it first opened. Elv shook hands with the mayor and the librarians and the members of the town council. Elise and Mary Fox had come, and Elise cried when Pete got up and said a few words about how books had mattered so much to Meg, and how Annie had wanted to honor her memory by sharing her love of books with the town. When the speakers and the guests were directed to the buffet table set up in the hallway, Elv went to explore the reading room. Meg’s name was on a brass plate above the door. Elv drifted over to the fiction section and found the row of Dickens novels, the books by Hawthorne.

  “It’s beautiful. Perfect,” she told Pete later. “It’s just what my mother would have wanted for Meg. You did everything right.”

  On afternoons when Elv got out of work early, she went to the reading room while she waited for the three o’clock bell. If you sat by the window, you could see the bay when the trees were bare. When the trees were in full leaf, all you could see was green. The town felt different to her now that she knew she wouldn’t see that bad man again. She had seen his car a second time, long ago, when she was hanging out with the kids who smoked dope under the bridge and that poor Justin Levy was still traipsing after her. It was the same one he’d had when Claire had slipped into the backseat and he was pulling away and Elv had to yank the car door open and jump inside while it was moving so he couldn’t take Claire. When she recognized the license plate, she should have called the police, had him arrested, but she was panic-stricken. She remembered that was the day she told Justin he should find someone better, someone who could really love him. But he hadn’t known how to do that.

  Mimi knew where to look for her mom when school let out. Sometimes Mimi told people the reading room had been named after her, even though she knew it wasn’t true. It made for a good story. It made the other girls’ mouths drop open, even the ones who were rich and lived in big houses and weren’t so sure about Mimi. A couple of the girls whispered that she didn’t have a father. Maybe she didn’t care what they thought about her or whether or not they believed her when she said the reading room belonged to her family. She had become a fanatical reader, so she felt a special connection to the library anyway, and Story was her name too, so the reading room did belong to her in that way. She liked to think that if her aunt was still alive they would talk about books. Her mother didn’t have time to read, although she told the best stories. She’d said that when she was young she had invented an entire world with its own language, although she didn’t remember any of it now.

  “You should have written it down,” Mimi told her. “When you write things down, they’re harder to forget.”

  Mimi had been writing down the stories her mother told her about her father. They weren’t true stories; they were better than that. She had a diary full of them in a collection she’d titled The Most Loyal Dog in the World, which was all about her father’s adventures with his dog named Mother. Mimi thought it was a hilarious name. She had glued a photograph of her father inside the cover. He was smiling. There weren’t that many of him like that, when he looked as if he’d take all the time in the world to tell you a story and walk in the woods with you and clomp through the snow in Central Park, which were all things her mother said he loved to do. Mimi liked to study his face. She felt she knew him even though she didn’t. It was his grave they visited in Queens, but he was here, too, in her book.

  She had been writing to her aunt in Paris. She liked having a pen pal who was so far away. Every time there was a letter for her in the mailbox, it was as if a secret message had been waiting there all day while she’d been in school. She had started out sending her artwork, then had begun to add messages on the back. After a while, she began to get letters back. Her aunt was funny. She sent jokes: Why did the tomato go out with a prune? Because he couldn’t get a date! How do you fix a broken tomato? Tomato paste! She drew little sketches of Paris—a streetlight, the pet crow that lived in the workshop where she made jewelry, a bridge over the river with a curlicue railing, a rosebush in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

  “What was the name for aunt in your language?” Mimi asked her mother one day as they were headed home from school. They usually took the long way around, but on warm days they went along the bay. Her mother seemed to like to walk there. She would stop in certain places and gaze into the woods and then they would keep going again.

  “I don’t remember any of the words,” her mother said.

  Mimi’s mother was beautiful and sad. She wasn’t friends with any of the other mothers at school. Whenever there was a potluck dinner, Mimi’s grandfather Gogi would make a dish for them to bring and he’d go with her because her mother was too nervous about school gatherings. Sometimes their cousin Mary would come over and the two women would sit on the couch and drink wine and laugh and then Elv didn’t even sound like Mimi’s mother. She sounded like someone who was happy.

  “You must remember something,” Mimi insisted.

  Mimi was the best student in her third-grade class not only because she was a fanatical reader but because she was persistent.

  Her mother thought it over. If sister was gig, then aunt was most likely gigi. That’s what she had called Claire when it was just the two of them and the rest of the world had been so far away.

  Dear Gigi, Mimi wrote from then on. Mimi’s bedroom overlooked the garden, where her mother often worked on warm days. The garden wasn’t very sunny, so they’d had to cut down some little willow trees where Miss Featherstone had liked to perch and peer out at the world. Mimi still had Miss Featherstone, the doll who had accompanied her everywhere when she was younger. But now that Mimi was in third grade and would be turning eight in July, Miss Featherstone was left at home most times. She was still a good listener when it came to the stories Mimi told at night before she fell asleep. Her mother’s stories always began Once upon a time, even though that meant everything in them had already happened and everyone in them was already gone.

  Every year her aunt in Paris sent something special on her birthday. It had begun when she was three, the year Mimi sent the first picture. Her aunt had mailed the birthday gifts to Mimi’s grandpa, but now his address was their address, too. The presents came in pink boxes, Mimi’s favorite color, and were tied with black silk ribbon. She couldn’t have been more excited over the charms her aunt made especially for her. Her mother thought they were beautiful, too. She handled them tenderly when Mimi showed her, then gave them back.

  The charms were Mimi’s favorite things in the world, except for books and Miss Featherstone and her grandparents and her mother and the photograph of her father. She kept them in their pink boxes in her top dresser drawer. Each one had arrived with a message. So you’re always fast. A gold horse with a moonstone saddle. So you can fly. A tiny gold and turquoise robin with a silver beak. So you never get lost. A firefly with citrine eyes and an orange opal at its center that glowed like a beacon. That one had looked so real Mimi had taken it to school to show off when the term began. She said it was a real firefly from Paris, and that in France all the insects were made out of gold. Everyone believed her and wanted to touch it for good luck. Then she almost lost the charm when Patti Weinstein dropped it. She quickly wrapped the firefly in a tissue and stuck it in her backpack, and she never brought the charms to school again.

  So you are always sheltered. That was the next one, a gold tree with a shower of jade in its branches. “It’s a hawthorn tree,” her mother had said, and when Mimi asked, “What’s a hawthorn?” they walked over to Nightingale Lane. Mimi looked at the big tree on the lawn of the house where the Story sisters used to live and she understood why her mother said she had liked to sit in its branches. She would have loved to have climbed it herself, only it belonged
to another family now and she had her own yard in Gogi’s house on the other side of town, which was sunny ever since the willow trees had been cut down.

  This year’s charm had come early from Paris in their ama’s suitcase. It was a big occasion to finally have their ama visit and they had spent days fixing up their apartment, making sure there were flowers in her room. They swept away the dust bunnies under the couch and made certain the hall closet wasn’t in a shambles with hats and gloves and ice skates and purses falling out when you opened the door. They wanted everything to be perfect. Natalia appreciated it all. She brought along French candies in the shape of violets, silk scarves, cheese for Pete, and the birthday gift from Claire. Mimi hopped around in a circle, clomping in her cowgirl boots, until it was handed over. This one was perhaps the most charming and unusual: So you never go hungry. A little tomato plant, with one ruby, one citrine, one brown diamond, and one tiny emerald. Elv laughed when it was unwrapped.

  “Are there really truly brown tomatoes?” Mimi asked.

  “Cherokee chocolates,” her mother told her. “I’ll see if I can plant some this year.”

  Now that she would be turning eight and was responsible, Mimi’s grandpa was getting her a gold bracelet so she could attach all the charms and wear them, but only on special occasions. She had learned her lesson about showing off. This year she had made a plan for her birthday. She had already told Miss Featherstone all about it.