Читать книгу The Story Sisters - Элис Хоффман, Alice Hoffman - Страница 7

The witch came to the village at noon. She moved into a cottage in the middle of town, got a fire burning, put up her pot.

The next morning a famine began. In the afternoon the roads were filled with frogs. By suppertime there was lightning. By early evening the birds all fell out of the trees.

They sent me to her because I was nothing, a cleaning girl.

I collected frogs in a jar as I went along. I took the charred wood from a tree hit by lightning and tied the twigs together in my shawl. I gathered the birds’ bones and kept them in my pocket.

At the well, I stopped and looked down into the black water. Nothing was reflected back. Only the rising moon.

It was night and the streets were empty. Everyone had locked their doors.

What do you have for me? the witch asked.

I gave her the frogs, the charred wood, the bones. She made a soup and offered me some. All over the county people were starving. My poor sisters were nothing but flesh and bone. I sat down to dinner. When the witch packed up to leave, I was already at the door.

HEALING TOOK TIME, EIGHT TO TEN WEEKS AT LEAST. CLAIRE had to undergo an intricate surgery. A metal rod was inserted into her left arm, and several pins were needed to repair her shattered elbow. She wore two heavy casts, from her wrists all the way up to her shoulders. She never once complained. She’d done what she had to, and now she bore the marks of her bravery. She didn’t say a word when she couldn’t feed herself or turn the pages of a book. She wasn’t even able to take a shower without first being wrapped in plastic. The most she could do was look out over Nightingale Lane from her window. She wanted to be as she imagined Elv would have been had she been the one to be injured: a girl who couldn’t be broken, who refused to feel pain. But Claire’s arms still hurt and she couldn’t get comfortable. Sometimes she cried in her sleep.

Claire never told Elv that she still dreamed about Central Park. It seemed so babyish and silly. Her dreams were nightmares of grass and blood. She urged the horse to leap, but he stumbled and tilted over. Sometimes Claire startled in the middle of the night, awakened by her own soft sobs. As the world came into focus and her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could make out Meg’s sleeping form and the outlines of their room. There was the pale wallpaper with its cream and lemon stripes, and the three white bureaus with their glass knobs, and the tall shelf filled with books. On some nights Elv was gone, her bed empty. Perhaps she could drift in and out of Arnelle, disappearing down the secret staircase at will, leaving her sisters behind.

When Claire heard the dusty leaves of the hawthorn hit against each other in the dark, she knew Elv was out there, perched in one of the highest branches. You had to look through the dark to see her, but she was there, breathing in the cool night air. That man wasn’t a teacher at their school when they went back in the fall, but Elv whispered that you could never be too careful. She was looking out at the pavement, the asphalt, the trees with their swelling branches. It was so quiet Nightingale Lane seemed like the gateway to the otherworld.

Claire couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened on the afternoon of their grandparents’ anniversary party if Elv hadn’t told her about the horses in the park. How would the day have ended if there’d been no mention of skin and bones and bravery? Perhaps the horse would still be alive. Claire got a shivery feeling thinking about it. She’d felt the same when she was eight and her parents got divorced. All the trees in the yard were covered with gypsy moth cocoons. The whole world seemed spun up in gray thread. People said they wanted to help you, then they did exactly the opposite. She felt safer with Elv out there in the tree.

In the afternoons, when she returned home from school, Elv always brought Claire a cup of soft vanilla ice cream. She fed her with a plastic spoon. She’d get into bed and tell stories about the three sisters of Arnelle. Each had a special task: one to find love, one to find peace, one to find herself. The sisters had a bond no one could break. That was something Claire understood. She and Elv spent more time together after the accident. Meg was busy with after-school activities—the school newspaper, painting lessons, the French club—but Elv came home early, skipping dance class. She murmured to their mother that she was quitting dance in order to help out with Claire, but there was another reason as well. She didn’t like to look at herself in the mirror at the dance studio. She didn’t think she was as graceful as the other girls. She was too tall, too clumsy. Her teacher, Mrs. Keen, insisted she had real talent. She’d come into the locker room while the other girls went in to warm up and told Elv it was time for her to be serious about her work. All Elv had to do was make the commitment. A dancer’s life was one of both commitment and sacrifice. She was such a beautiful girl, she could have whatever she wanted. Elv had sat in the locker room afterward. Things echoed in there. The air was heavy and smelled of sweat. She could feel the beginnings of her black wings. She was from Arnelle, a stolen girl. Mrs. Keen hadn’t seen who she was. She didn’t know the first thing about her. That was when she’d begun skipping classes.

“Which sister am I?” Claire wanted to know when she was told that the old Queen was looking for someone to take her place. The next in line must be able to place her hand inside the mouth of a lion, her arm inside the jaws of a snake, her entire body into a nest of red fire ants. She must be able to tell the true from the false with her eyes closed. The scent of a lie was the stench of turpentine, dirty wash-water, green soap. She must be able to escape from ropes and metal boxes, to spy treachery from a distance.

“You’re the best sister, Gigi.” That was Elv’s nickname for Claire, taken from gig, the Arnish word for sister. Elv’s long black hair was pinned up. She stroked Claire’s head, which was filled with knots from spending so much time in bed and from sleeping so fitfully.

“No,” Claire said. “That’s you.”

Elv curled up closer. She spoke in a whisper. “Once upon a time I saw a demon on the road. I ran away, but then I realized I’d left you behind.”

“You came back for me,” Claire said.

Elv linked her arms around her sister. They both laughed when one of Claire’s casts bonked against the side of the bed.

“Le kilka lastil,” Elv said. You could kill someone with that.

“Je ne je hailil,” Claire said. I would if I had to.

“No, you wouldn’t.” Elv smiled. “You’re the good-hearted sister.”

Meg came home, her backpack overflowing. She sat at the foot of the bed. She knew her sisters stopped their conversations whenever she was around. “Everyone’s talking about you at school,” she told Claire. “You’re famous.”

“No,” Claire said. “I’m not.”

“Oh, yes,” Meg insisted. “Über famous. ‘Page Six’ famous.”

Evidently there had been an article in the New York Post about the mistreatment of carriage horses. The reporter had mentioned the girl from North Point Harbor who’d done her best to control a runaway horse. There were animal rights activists who had built a shrine to her and the fallen horse in Central Park, on the Great Lawn. It was made out of horseshoes and stones. People brought flowers and left them strewn about the grass.

“Se breka dell minta,” Elv said solemnly.

We should all bring you roses.

“Well, I brought homework instead.” Meg brought forth the papers and books she’d picked up in Claire’s homeroom. “I’ll read the questions, then you answer and I’ll write them down.”

“Why don’t you just do it for her?” Elv said. “It would be much easier.”

“Because I don’t know how she would answer.” Meg had the habit of chewing on pencils, even though she was afraid it might give her lead poisoning. She had recently found she had a lot of nervous habits. More and more often, she wanted to be alone. She wished she could move into one of the smaller bedrooms downstairs, but she didn’t want to hurt her sisters’ feelings. She couldn’t wait to go to college. She went to the school library to sift through college catalogs whenever she had a free period at school.

“Well, I do,” Elv said. “I know her inside out.”

Elv grabbed the homework assignment. It was a report on a European capital. Elv began to write about Paris. She wrote about the Louvre, where the girls had spent hours on their last visit. Later, when Elv read the report out loud, Claire told her not to change a thing. She had gotten it all right, even Claire’s stop after the museum at her favorite ice cream shop, Berthillon. “Favorite flavor?” Elv had asked. All three sisters had shouted out “Vanilla” at the same time. Even Meg knew the answer to that. Claire never varied from her one and only choice. She refused to try a new flavor. For some reason, answering in unison made them feel happy, as if nothing would ever change, and they would always know one another completely, even if no one else did.

ANNIE HADN’T PUNISHED Claire after the incident with the horse. People said her girls would become sullen and spoiled if she weren’t stricter. They said that adolescence was the time when girls flirted with destiny. But Annie was convinced there was no need for Claire to pay any further for her mistake. At the end of the month Claire understood why: spending spring vacation locked away was punishment enough. They were all supposed to go to Paris to visit their grandparents, but when school let out, only Meg and Elv went to France. The sisters had never been separated before. For the first time Claire was alone in their attic bedroom. At night when the leaves of the hawthorn tree rustled, she covered her head with her blanket. She didn’t like being twelve. It was someplace between who she’d been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all. She had to count to a thousand in order to fall asleep. She missed having Elv out in the tree, keeping watch. She missed Meg’s sleepy, even breathing.

In Paris, Meg curled up out on the couch in the red-lacquered parlor of her grandparents’ home and wrote postcards to Claire. Meg was lonely and bored. Books didn’t comfort her and even the ice cream at Berthillon wasn’t as good this year. There should have been three of them, three was the right number. Paris wasn’t the same, she complained. The weather was cold and rainy. A warm sweater and wool socks were necessary at all times. There was an old stone trough in the courtyard that had once been used to water horses but this year it had filled with ice, then cracked. The season had been so cold the buds on the chestnut tree never opened; the white buds were pasty and waterlogged around the edges, the glossy leaves more black than green. Plus, Meg and Elv weren’t getting along. They got on each other’s nerves and disagreed over everything.

“Let’s not stay cooped up,” Elv had said to Meg one evening. Recently it had crossed her mind that if she didn’t know the human world, she couldn’t defend herself against it. She had to experience everything. Go behind enemy lines. “We should go out after Ama and Grandpa are asleep.”

When Meg had refused, unable or unwilling to break the rules, Elv had taken to sneaking out alone at night, tiptoeing down the back staircase, slipping through the cobbled courtyard. Each excursion was the work of a daring anthropologist: Where do lovers meet? Where can peril be found, and how is it best avoided? Where do squatters live? Can demons be avoided if you don’t have the strength or the time to turn and run?

When she read Meg’s cards, Claire couldn’t help but wonder if Elv was going off to Arnelle, if she’d found the gate under the chestnut tree, if she knocked three times, then whispered a faerie greeting. When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you’re with me always.

That was what Elv had written on her postcard to Claire. She sat on a bench on the quay, overlooking the Seine while she wrote. She was barefoot, hunched over, scribbling furiously with a pen filled with pale green ink that she’d bought at a stationery store on the Rue de Rivoli. Paris had never been more beautiful, she told her sister, writing in Arnish. I feel free here. Me sura di falin. No one will hurt us now.

Elv had come to believe that if she did whatever she was most afraid of, its power over her would evaporate. She held on to metal railings. She went into boulangeries and looked at loaves of bread, and she didn’t disappear the way most faeries would have. She tied her ankles together with rope, then slit the knots with a knife. If she had known these tricks, she might have been able to escape after she rescued Claire. She had come to believe that evil repelled evil, while good collected it. She could see it happening in the parks. The dark lacelike scrim, the goblins astride the billowy trees, the demons drawn to purity, unnoticed by women on the benches, children at play. A clever girl met evil on its own terms. She didn’t get caught unawares. Elv bought a pair of black pointy boots at the flea market. She took up smoking, even though it made her choke. She kept at it until she stopped coughing. She could get used to anything. That’s what she had decided. She perfected a look that said Go away in every language, most especially in Arnish. It was as though she now possessed her own arsenal of weapons. She didn’t mind that men looked at her. Their attraction to her only added to her power.

All the while Meg lay in her bed reading novels, writing her whiny postcards, Elv was exploring the human world. She could feel herself growing stronger. She no longer panicked if the wind came up, if a stranger walked by. She wasn’t the least bit spooked when the leaves on the trees rattled, always a sign of rain. The rain in Paris was beautiful, anyway, cold and clean and green. The Queen had told her that if she faced whatever she feared most, she would win the right to sit on the Arnish throne. Water, sex, death. Elv wrote the words in green ink on the back of a postcard. She folded the card into threes and kept it under her pillowcase.

One night Elv woke Meg from a deep sleep. It was late at night. Their ama’s guest room with its two twin beds was bathed in blue light. Elv had brought home a kitten someone had tried to drown. She’d had to wade far into the water to save it. All the while she had a fluttery feeling in her chest. She imagined the water rising over her. She imagined she could no longer breathe. He had done that to her when she started screaming. She thought about her vow to the Queen of Arnelle. Water, sex, death. In an instant, her fear was gone. It was only green water, dirty and cold. She reached out and grabbed.

“It’s tiny,” Meg said of the kitten when Elv brought it out of the sopping burlap sack it had been tossed into. “Poor thing. It will probably die.”

“It’s not going to die,” Elv said firmly. Why was it that Meg had to try and ruin everything?

The kitten was indeed starving and soon began yowling so loudly their ama came running into the guest bedroom, convinced one of the girls had been struck by appendicitis. Elv should have been in trouble for being out at night, but instead she talked Natalia into letting the cat stay. They named it Sadie and gave it a bowl of cream.

“We won’t tell your grandpa,” Natalia said. “One day he’ll look down and he’ll notice a cat and he’ll think it has always been here. Anyway, she’s a darling creature. Who would mind a little thing like her.”

Elv looked elated, though her shoes were sloshy with river water and her clothes were soaked. “You have a good heart,” Natalia said to her. Before she went out, she kissed Elv’s forehead. Meg had felt herself burning.

Elv was singing to herself. She ripped off all of her clothes and left them in a dank pile in the corner. She was a woman and beautiful and fearless and the queen-to-be. She struck her fear of water off her list.

“You’re going to get in trouble if you keep going out at night,” Meg told her.

“I don’t care,” Elv shot back. “Anyway, trouble can find you anywhere. It’s probably under your bed right now.”

THE BEST PART of the trip was the art classes the girls took with Madame Cohen, at least in Meg’s opinion. Elv only seemed interested in sleeping the days away so that she’d be refreshed when she sneaked out at night. The girls had been acquainted with their grandmother’s dearest friend since they were little and had often visited her jewelry store. Her stupid grandsons were sometimes there as well, but the Story sisters ignored them; the boys couldn’t even speak English. But they respected Madame Cohen. She had once been a watercolorist of some note. She had gone to art school in Paris and Vienna. She was a stern teacher who wore black even in the summer heat, still in mourning for her husband, who’d been gone nearly twenty years. The girls went to sit with her in the kitchenette behind the jewelry shop each day. Elv was sleepy from her wanderings. Sometimes she was so rude she actually put her head on the table and closed her eyes while they were supposed to be painting. Instead of punishing her, Madame Cohen gave her a cup of espresso. Elv didn’t even try and her watercolors were beautiful. She only used shades of green. When asked why, she said, “I’ve been studying the river.” Once she made a black painting and when Meg said, “I thought you were only painting the river,” Elv laughed and said, “Can’t you see what that is?”

Madame Cohen had peered over. “It’s the Seine at night.”

Elv had nodded, surprised.

“I think it looks like a shoe,” Meg said.

“Sisters shouldn’t argue. I was one of three sisters myself,” Madame Cohen said ruefully. She knew there was evil in the world. She’d seen it with her own eyes. She never talked about the past and was surprised to find herself doing so now. She was older than the girls’ grandmother by several years. You didn’t see how old she was unless you looked very carefully. Her skin was patterned with very fine lines that made Elv think of the way leaves are veined, how beautiful they are when sunlight filters through.

“May I have more paper?” Meg asked.

“What happened to them?” Elv wanted to know.

Madame Cohen was well aware of the black scrim that stretched above parks and playgrounds. She saw it over her own roof sometimes. Just now, a black bug was trying to get in the window, bumping against the glass. You would think it was nothing, unless you knew better.

“They’re gone.” Madame Cohen clapped her hands together. That was enough of the past. “If you go out at night, I hope you’re careful,” she told Elv. Nearly everyone in the neighborhood had heard the stories of the girl who crept out of her grandparents’ apartment house, then slipped off her boots so no one would hear the clatter of her heels on the cobblestones. It was the sort of neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else’s business, or at least tried to.

Elv smiled and said she certainly would try her best, even though they both knew that being careful was only good for so much.

“I have a bad feeling,” Madame Cohen told her dear friend Natalia that same week. It was late and no one knew where Elv had gone off to. She’d told her grandmother she was going to the bookshop, but Natalia had checked and she hadn’t been there. Plus, Elv had worn a short black dress, black boots, and she’d lined her eyes with kohl she’d found in her grandmother’s old makeup kit. That did not seem like bookstore attire.

“All girls need their secrets,” Natalia said. “It’s part of growing up. She’s about to turn sixteen, after all. Not a child.”

“They may need their secrets,” her friend replied. “But do they want them?”

MEG SENT CLAIRE a watercolor of the chestnut tree in the courtyard, which Claire taped to the wall above her bed. She stared at it every night, but it was difficult to tell whether there were white flowers on the tree’s branches, or dozens of doves, or if perhaps stars had fallen from the sky, only to be caught in a net of leaves. When Meg wrote about Elv’s black painting, Claire found herself wanting that one instead. She thought she would be able to see the river, even if Meg could not.

Claire lay on her bed in her dark room, feeling sorry for herself. She loved Paris and ice cream and art. She loved her grandmother’s parlor with its red-lacquered walls and the terrace where birds came to perch, begging for crumbs. She didn’t know how Meg could be miserable at their ama’s or how she could be lonely when Elv was right there or why she didn’t dare go to see how many colors of green the river could be.

To cheer Claire, Annie spent huge amounts of time with her. She’d turn on the CD player and they’d sing along to Beatles songs and that was great fun. Or Annie would read from Anne of Green Gables or Robin Hood, or from old volumes of Nancy Drew that were hokey enough to make them both laugh. They watched movies for hours, all of Annie’s favorites, Charade and Alfie and Four Weddings and a Funeral. They watched Two for the Road so many times they could both repeat the dialogue by heart.

Claire had never had her mother all to herself and it was lovely to be the center of attention. She even taught her a few words of Arnish. Melina was summer. Henaj meant dog. But afterward Claire felt she’d betrayed her sisters. It was their secret, after all. Secrets were only good if you kept them; otherwise they were worthless. That was why Claire didn’t tell their mother when Meg wrote that there was a man who’d been hovering around Elv. He stood waiting for her out past the courtyard, besotted. He called out Elv’s name while they were all seated at the dinner table. Their grandfather, Martin, asked if anyone heard anything and Elv smiled and said, no, she hadn’t heard anything at all. Later, when Meg had asked who he was, Elv had merely shrugged. “Nacree,” she’d said in Arnish. Nobody.

“There’s a man following your granddaughter around town,” Madame Cohen told Madame Rosen one day when they were playing cards out on the balcony. The weather had cleared. The girls were going home the following afternoon.

“She’s beautiful. Lots of men will be showing up.”

But Madame Cohen could see accidents before they happened. She saw one now. “Your granddaughter may not be looking for trouble, but trouble is looking for her.”

“She’s high-spirited,” Natalia said. “Girls her age are meant to have adventures.”

“He works in a bar, Natalia, dear.” Madame Cohen sighed. “This is not some first love. He’s thirty years old. I hear he’s married.”

“We’ll take the girls to the airport first thing in the morning,” Natalia decided.

“Good idea,” her friend agreed, even though she knew that it was quite possible for trouble to find a girl anywhere.

Meg was in the parlor. She couldn’t help but overhear. If her grandmother knew the half of it, she would have been shocked. When Elv sneaked in at night she was barefoot, holding her black boots in her hand, smelling like tobacco and perfume and something that Meg didn’t recognize, the scent of something burning. Meg always pretended to be asleep, but Elv knew better. One night she had sat on the edge of her sister’s bed. “He’ll do anything I tell him to. He’d die for me, he said.”

Meg had kept her eyes closed.

“I know you’re listening.” Elv had a rush of adrenaline when she broke rules. She wondered if that was what warriors experienced in the moments before battle. It was like jumping off a bridge. You had to do the thing you were afraid of; after a while you didn’t feel anything. That was how it was whenever she was with Louis. He was the fool who felt something, not her. Maybe that’s why she’d chosen him. He was a way for her to learn how to manage what life had brought her.

“I hope you never know the things I know,” Elv told her sister. “I hope you read your books and think that’s what life is.”

Meg had thought Elv might be tearing up, but she didn’t dare look. Elv slunk off to bed and then it was too late to ask why she went with that man if it only made her cry.

WHEN THE STORY sisters went back to school, people said Elv had changed. She seemed far away, an indifferent, elusive girl who painted her nails black and walked through the halls barefoot until the teachers threatened her with detention if she didn’t put her boots on. Not that the boots were any better; they were black, pointy-toed. They looked foreign and dangerous and they made the skirts she wore seem even shorter. Girls who used to sit at her lunch table were afraid of the stories she told, brutal, bloody tales in which hands and heads were cut off. People turned into frogs, ate poisonous bugs, were buried alive. No one wanted to hear stories like that anymore. The girls she’d grown up with wondered how she knew the things she knew. They kept their distance. After a while they didn’t even bother to say hello.

The boys in town were the opposite. They followed Elv around, and even the brashest among them seemed bewildered. They didn’t listen to her stories. They just stared. Elv seemed more beautiful than before, but in a hot, careless way. Boys she’d known since kindergarten begged for kisses. They telephoned late at night and threw pebbles at her bedroom window. She ignored them completely. For her sixteenth birthday Elv didn’t want a party. Her sisters were friends enough. Alan showed up with his new girlfriend, who taught biology at the same high school. Annie noticed how young she was, how she was trying to make a difficult situation less strained.

“Alan talks about the girls all the time,” the girlfriend said. Her name was Cheryl Henry and she yearned for children of her own. “They’re his pride and joy.”

“Really,” Annie said. “How nice.” She offered Cheryl a piece of cake. It was chocolate, with mocha frosting, Elv’s favorite. Not that Elv had eaten a bite. They were in the kitchen and Alan had arrived too late for the actual birthday dinner. Elv had been waiting for him, but once he was there, she didn’t even say hello.

Alan kissed her on the forehead and gave her a hundred dollars. That was her birthday present.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” he’d said to her. Elv watched her father as he fixed himself a cup of coffee, then she disappeared while the others were having their cake. She got into bed and pulled up the covers. Sixteen was nothing. It was meaningless. Elv heard her mother come upstairs, open the door, see that she was in bed, then carefully close the door once more. Her mother was just as blind as her father. What had she thought that summer when Elv wept as the gardeners swept away the cocoons? “It’s not a bad thing. It’s necessary. Otherwise the moths will eat all the trees,” Annie had assured her.

“I don’t care,” Elv had said. “I couldn’t care less.”

THE MORNING AFTER her birthday, Elv took the hundred dollars her father had given her and hitchhiked to Hempstead. The guy who picked her up kept looking at her, as though she was a mirage, a faerie who’d appeared in his passenger seat. “Do you have a problem?” she said coolly. She had a paring knife in her pocket, taken from the silverware drawer. “Maybe,” the guy had answered. He looked at her as if he expected something to happen, so she got out at a red light and walked the rest of the way. She found the tattoo shop. Patrons were supposed to be eighteen, but Elv looked old enough, as if she knew what she wanted, so no one asked for ID. She had two black stars tattooed above each shoulder, in the place where her wings would be. She found the pain soothing in a strange way, a gateway out of her body, into Arnelle. There was an army gathering there: the Queen had posted them at the doorway. Anyone residing in the human world was suspect, including Elv. Prove yourself, one of the guards said to her. She was wearing a black dress. Black ballet shoes. She could smell jasmine. The tattoo artist was a bit leery now that her shirt was off. He said, “This might hurt.” As if she cared about that. He covered the tattoos with white bandages. “There might be some blood seeping through,” he told her. As if that mattered.

She waited for the bus, then, once she was home, she walked along Main Street, her shoulder blades burning. She felt free in the dark. When she got to Nightingale Lane, she walked more slowly. She stationed herself across from her house and watched the family inside. Her mother and Meg and Claire and their cousin Mary Fox and Mary’s mother, Elise, were all having dinner together. Elv wished she was inside with them, pouring the spaghetti into a colander, cutting up cucumbers, setting the table. She wished she was laughing at Mary’s stories of how stupid her classmates were. But she was beside a hedge at the end of Nightingale Lane, and she could barely understand what they were saying, even though the windows were open and their laughter filtered outside.

She heard a rustling. She thought there might be a demon there. She put her hand on the knife in her pocket, but when she turned she spied a boy from school creeping out of the Wein-steins’ yard. He was wearing a black sweatshirt and jeans. He saw Elv, hesitated, then came over. His name was Justin Levy and he was madly in love with her.

“Hey,” he said, sitting down next to her beneath the hedge.

“Robbing the Weinsteins?” Elv asked.

Justin pulled two vials of pills from his pockets. “OxyContin. Mr. Weinstein has cancer.”

He took one of the pills and offered Elv one. She swallowed it, then they lay back in the grass. Elv didn’t feel a thing. She just felt quiet. She felt like she could stay under the hedge forever. Her tattoos didn’t even sting.

“What kind of cancer?” she said.

“Pancreatic. My dad works with him. My dad said he doesn’t have a chance. They’re over at my house, having dinner, not that Mr. Weinstein can eat much.”

“How’d you get in and out of the house? I thought they had a dog.”

“I brought a hot dog with me,” Justin Levy said.

Elv laughed. “I’ll bet you did.”

“He’s a nice dog.”

The Weinsteins had an old basset hound named Pretzel that woofed when anyone passed by. But if you bent down and patted his head, he instantly became your best friend. For some reason Elv felt like crying when she thought about the Weinsteins’ dog. Justin Levy must have known she was upset. He took her hand. When she glared at him, he let go. “Just so you know, I’m not interested in you,” Elv told him. “I’m never going to be your girlfriend.”

“Okay.” Justin Levy was stoned and taken aback. He’d never in his wildest dreams imagined that she would be. Every guy he knew was terrified of her and wanted to fuck her. He was happy just to lie beside her in the grass.

Elv sat up and took off her blouse. Justin Levy watched her, stunned. When she told him to remove the bandages on her shoulders, he did. There was hardly any blood, and underneath, the black stars.

“You know what it means?” Elv asked him.

“That you’re beautiful?” Justin ventured.

Elv laughed. That was too funny. People saw with their eyes and nothing else. The day she met a man who knew her for who she was would be the day she would be rescued from this pathetic human world. “That I’m invisible,” she said. There, she said to the Queen of Arnelle. There’s your proof.

AT NIGHT, AFTER Meg was asleep, Claire got into bed with Elv to hear stories about Paris. She heard about the different shades of green the river could be, about the way the rain had fallen in sheets. Claire asked for the black painting, but Elv said she couldn’t remember what she had done with it. It was ugly, any-how. When Claire wanted to know about the man Meg had told her about, Elv said he was nothing to her.

“That Meg,” she said. “What a bigmouth. She couldn’t keep a secret if you paid her.”

“Tell me something,” Claire begged. “Tell me a secret.”

“You have to swear you’ll never tell.”

“You know I won’t.”

Elv whispered to Claire that on the night she found the cat, stuffed and mewling in a burlap bag, thrown into the water like so much garbage, there had actually been two bags. She hadn’t told Meg or their ama. Elv hadn’t been able to reach the second kitten. That haunted her. She couldn’t let it go.

“You saved one,” Claire said.

“But not the other.”

She showed Claire the black stars on her shoulders. Claire was hushed and impressed. “Mom will kill you,” she said admiringly.

“She’ll never know.” Their mother was an optimist, which in Elv’s opinion meant she was a fool. “She never knows anything.”

They were whispering. They could hear the hawthorn tree and Meg’s sleepy breathing and the wind outside. Claire had a lump in her throat. They had secrets they couldn’t say aloud. “Where did he take you?” she asked. She had wanted to ask this question for four years. It had taken that long for the words to come out. Some words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn’t unknow. Elv had been missing for an entire day. Claire had run back and waited at the stop sign. She’d stayed there until it grew dark, until the fireflies appeared in the woods. Until Elv came back. She wouldn’t tell her then, and she wouldn’t tell now.

“Go to sleep, Gigi,” Elv said. “Close your eyes.”

IN THE FIRST week of June, there was an unexpected heat wave, with temperatures reaching into the nineties. It was the kind of weather in which people did stupid things, such as throwing themselves off a dock into the cool water, only to break their necks on the rocks. Elderly residents were warned not to go outside. Birds died in their nests. On impulse, Claire decided to have her hair cut short. She usually was a follower and she thrilled herself with her own fierce determination to make a change. She was broiling in her casts, nearly fainting with the heat. Her scalp itched and there was no way for her to scratch it. Annie took her to the hair salon on Main Street, where a young woman named Denise fastened a smock around her shoulders.

“Are you sure? You have such beautiful hair. It seems a shame.”

Claire was sure. Denise cut her mane of heavy black hair to just below her chin. They would donate what had been shorn to Locks of Love and a wig would be made for a cancer patient. Claire loved her hair short—it was so much cooler—but when her sisters saw her they were horrified. The older girls were at home watching an old black-and-white movie about a werewolf. They had been captivated by the poor werewolf’s plight, enough so that they actually didn’t argue the way they usually did. When they saw Claire’s haircut, each let out a shriek. Elv said, “Who did that to you? I’ll bet it was Mom’s idea.” Meg, near tears, cried, “Oh, Claire. Now we don’t look alike.”

Meg’s own long black hair was braided and clipped atop her head. She didn’t like anything to change. She favored long, involved books like Great Expectations, wherein the villains turned out to be heroes and there was always someone who would save the day just when it seemed all had been lost.

“Now we’ll never look alike,” Meg said sadly.

“There’s only one way to do it,” Elv advised, once their mother had left the room. “If that’s what you want,” she said to Meg. “But you’re probably all talk.”

Meg tilted her chin. She knew her sisters had secrets. She could hear them whispering in bed. “You think so?” she said. “I’ll go first. Then we’ll see if you have the nerve.”

They went upstairs and sat on the floor. Elv lit a black candle she had brought home from Paris. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt she’d found at a shop on the Rue de Tournon. It had been hideously expensive, but she’d wanted it so. She slipped it into her purse when the shop owner wasn’t looking. You could see right through the fabric but Elv didn’t care. She went to get the scissors and a towel to drape around Meg’s shoulders. Then she locked the bedroom door.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she pressed. “A thousand percent sure? This isn’t something you can change your mind about later.”

Meg nodded. She was very calm. She hadn’t had her hair cut since she was ten years old. She thought of it as her only good feature. She was just as beautiful as Elv, but she didn’t realize it. Now she unplaited her hair. Perhaps she was even more beautiful than her sister when she wore her hair down.

Claire sat on the edge of Meg’s bed. She felt guilty and responsible. “I only cut mine because I’m so hot in my casts and I can’t braid my own hair. I can’t even wash it. Maybe you shouldn’t, Meg. You don’t have to.”

It was a surprise when Meg was suddenly decisive, as she was now. They had always looked alike and that was what she wanted. She firmly ignored Claire’s protests.

“There’s no other way. Cut it.”

Elv unclasped Meg’s braid and began to cut. It took a while because the scissors were old and hadn’t been sharpened. She handed Meg the braid when she finally managed to saw through. She kept cutting after that, to even out the edges. Hair continued to fall on the towel and the wooden floorboards.

“You can donate it to Locks of Love,” Claire suggested. “For a sick child.”

“Or you can burn it and put a hex on someone,” Elv recommended as she clipped some more. She was concentrating hard. She’d never cut someone’s hair before. At last, Meg went to look in the mirror. Elv had cut her hair very short. Too short. The ends were raggedy from the dull scissors. She looked like a boy.

“It just has to grow out a little,” Claire said. “Right?”

“I need a break,” Elv said. Once things were changed you couldn’t go back. She knew that. Now Meg would know it too. She went out through the window. The leaves outside their window were rattling. Claire could hear her climbing down the hawthorn tree. Meg was still looking at herself in the mirror. She seemed in shock. “She did this on purpose.” Meg’s face was blotchy, as though she might cry. She ran a hand through her hair. It stuck straight up. “She’s not going to cut hers.”

“Of course she will,” Claire assured Meg. “We always look the same.”

They waited, but Elv didn’t return. She didn’t come home until it was almost morning, climbing in through the window, exhausted. She’d spent the night in Justin Levy’s bedroom. She’d made him sleep on the floor. He did whatever she told him, which was pathetic, really. They smoked weed, which didn’t affect her in the least, and then she told him to get on the floor. She dreamed of black stars, black water, a black sun in the center of the sky. When the other girls woke up, Elv was finally asleep in her own bed, her long hair knotted, still in her clothes, as if she’d been out dancing in Arnelle all night long.

Annie took Meg to the salon. Denise did the best she could, but Meg’s hair wound up being even shorter. She looked like an Olympic swimmer wearing a boy’s haircut. When they got back home, she locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out. Annie and Claire waited in the kitchen. They could hear her quietly sobbing.

“What made her do that to herself?” Annie wondered.

It was ninety-nine degrees, utterly sweltering, and the meteo-rologists were predicting triple digits and thunderstorms. True summer wasn’t even here and it was already unbearable. Annie began phoning around to see if she could have central air-conditioning put in. There were fans set up all over the house. Some folks were paying double for air conditioners being sold out of the back of vans on Northern Boulevard.

Annie felt panic-stricken. Three teenaged girls took up a lot of space in a house. They grumbled and were moody; they kept secrets and cried for no apparent reason. They were moving further away from her. She could not remember the last time they’d all sat down for a meal together, had a discussion, watched a movie. Claire was trying to get Meg to come out of the bathroom, speaking that awful Arnish. The panic spread into Annie’s chest. She called around for air conditioners, but there were no air conditioners to be had on all of Long Island. Everyone was hot and dissatisfied and out of sorts. If she wanted an air conditoner she’d have to buy it from one of the scam artists, who were over-charging like mad, and she wasn’t about to do that.

“It’s a good thing we cut our hair,” Claire said when Meg finally emerged from the bathroom, her face splotchy, eyes red.

Claire was getting her casts off at the end of the week. Maybe she’d be happy then. Maybe everything would finally be set right, the way it used to be when she didn’t always feel she had to choose between her sisters. “At least we’ll be cool during the heat wave,” she said to Meg. “And you-know-who won’t be.”

Their mother was still busy on the phone in her search for an air conditioner. Meg leaned in close. She didn’t want Annie to overhear. She didn’t even want it to be true, but it was, and it was her duty to let Claire know.

“Elv isn’t who you think she is,” Meg said in a strange, small voice. “Watch out for her.”

ON THE DAY Claire had her casts taken off, the heat finally broke. It was wonderful and odd to suddenly have her arms back. She felt spidery and ill at ease. She was awkward doing the simplest tasks—pouring a glass of orange juice, brushing her teeth. She’d cut her hair, and now Meg and Elv weren’t speaking. When they passed each other in the hall, they looked away, as if a shadow was passing by, one they needn’t recognize. School would soon be over. Next year everything would be better. They would all go to Paris in the spring; it would be the three of them, the way it was supposed to be. In every fairy tale there were always three sisters: the eldest was brave, the middle one was trustworthy, and the youngest had the biggest heart of all. Elv had hung a map of Arnelle in their closet. Sometimes Claire sat in the closet with a flashlight and tried to memorize it. The rose gardens, the thorn-bushes, the huts made of stone and straw, the paths to the castle, the lake where the water was so deep no one could ever reach the bottom, the meadow where the horse that had been rescued wandered freely, without a saddle or reins.

AS THE SCHOOL term neared its end, Annie was called in to the principal’s office. Elv was barely passing her classes. She fell asleep in Latin. She talked back to teachers. Annie could see her through the glass door, out in the waiting room. Just last week Elv had refused to take the SATs. She didn’t want to go to college. She wanted something different. Maybe she’d live in Paris and work for Madame Cohen and sit in cafés in the evening and walk along the river.

The principal called Elv into his office when he and Annie were done with their meeting. “Did you have anything you wanted to say?”

“Ni hamplig, suit ne henaj.” Elv looked at the floor. You’re a pig and a dog, she had told him. A little smile played around her lips.

“I think you see what I’m talking about,” the principal remarked to Annie.

“Can’t you just go along with things and be polite?” Annie said as they walked out to the car.

“Is that what you want? For me to be polite?” Elv yanked the door open and folded herself into the passenger seat. She flipped down the visor so she could look into the mirror as she applied green eyeliner. In Arnelle, members of the royal family all had green eyes. She hadn’t had the heart to tell Claire that she was not included in the top echelon, although she would have loved to let Meg know. Meg who was so perfect, who didn’t know the first thing about real life.

“Are you upset about something?” Annie said. “You can talk to me. You used to talk to me.”

Elv laughed. “A hundred years ago.” In Arnelle, a hundred years went by in an instant. Time was transparent. You could see right through it. Look through the glass, the Queen had told her. See how simple it is to walk back in time?

Elv leaned forward to get a better look in the mirror. As she did, her sleeveless T-shirt pulled back. You could see her flesh through the fabric. Annie saw a flash of one of the black stars.

“What is that?” she asked. She had a tumbling feeling. She’d been shy as a girl and had felt a sort of desperation whenever she’d had to speak in public. She felt a wave of desperation now.

Elv gazed at her shoulder and pulled her shirt over her skin. “I’ve had it for a long time,” she said coolly. “You just never noticed.”

“Elv. Please. Talk to me.”

“I’m not going to be polite, if that’s what you want to talk about. You can forget about that. “ Elv had a strange feeling in her throat. If she wasn’t careful, she might say something. She turned to look out the window. Everything looked the same in North Point Harbor, everything was green. It was a relief to be invisible, to be marked by stars. She didn’t have to listen to another word her mother said, even if she begged Elv to talk to her, even if she was crying.

“Can we just go?” Elv said.

Her mother started the car.

MEG WAS THE one who found the marijuana in the closet. It was in a shoebox, along with matches and some rolling papers. She pulled Claire inside and they sat there under the green map of Arnelle in the dark. Meg flipped on a flashlight. Claire had grown and was now as tall as her sisters. If only there hadn’t been that stupid disaster with the haircuts, people would have thought they were triplets. They would have had great fun in school, tricking teachers and classmates alike.

“It probably belongs to Justin Levy,” Claire said. “She spends a lot of time with him.”

Meg grimaced. “I doubt that. Justin’s not her friend. He’s more like her slave. Everyone knows she’s just using him.”

Justin had his own car and would drive Elv anywhere she wanted to go. She didn’t even walk to school with her sisters anymore.

Claire held the baggie up to her nose. “It smells like feet,” she said.

“The question is—do we tell Mom?”

“No,” Claire said. “Definitely not.”

“We have to say something,” Meg insisted.

“Why?”

“If you keep someone’s secret, you’re just as guilty as they are. You’re an accomplice.”

Claire felt hot in the closet. There really wasn’t any air.

“Fine,” she said. “We’ll talk to Elv tonight.”

ELV DIDN’T COME home for dinner. Annie and Claire and Meg had pizza and a salad. The sisters exchanged a glance when Annie asked if they knew where Elv was. They shrugged and said they had no idea.

“Is that Justin Levy her boyfriend?” Annie wanted to know.

“Hardly,” Meg said. “He’s just madly in love with her.”

“Meg!” Claire said.

“Well, everyone knows he is. He spray-painted that thing on the wall.”

“What wall?” Annie said.

He had spray-painted I would tear out my heart for you on the side of the old Whaling Museum in town. Everybody was talking about it.

“The salad’s good,” Claire said.

“I would tear out my heart for you,” Meg said.

“That’s about Elv?” Annie had noticed the shaky writing, the yellow spray-painted declaration of love.

“Yep,” Meg said.

“We assume, but we don’t know,” Claire said. She gave Meg a look. “Justin Levy has emotional problems.”

“Major ones,” Meg agreed.

“For all we know, that graffiti could be about Mary Fox,” Claire ventured.

They all laughed.

“I would tear out my cerebellum for you,” Meg joked.

“I would conjugate Latin for you,” Claire piped in.

“I would love you all the days of my life,” Annie said to her daughters, glad that she wasn’t Justin Levy’s mother.

THEY WERE UPSTAIRS doing their homework when Elv finally came home. She smelled like burning leaves. “Hard at work?” she said. She picked up one of Meg’s books—The Scarlet Letter—and thumbed through. “Who would name someone Hester?”

Meg reached under her bed and brought out the shoebox.

“Well, well,” Elv said when she saw it. She put down the book. “Look what the little detective found.”

“We don’t want you to get in trouble,” Claire told her.

“Trouble with a capital T?” Elv sat down on Claire’s bed. She was sitting on Claire’s feet, but Claire didn’t complain. “I wish you wouldn’t look through my personal belongings,” she said to Meg. “Just because you’re jealous.”

“Jealous?” Meg laughed. She didn’t sound very happy.

“It started in Paris and you know it. You couldn’t stand that you didn’t have the guts to do what I did.”

“You mean sleep all day? Or be a whore?”

Elv reached over and slapped her sister. “You’re a jealous bitch and you know it.”

Meg clutched at her burning cheek.

“You wanted to blame me for cutting your hair, but that was your decision. It’s not my fault you’re ugly.”

“Stop it!” Claire said.

“I told you,” Meg said to Claire. “This is who she is.”

Elv went to the open window and slipped outside. Claire got up, grabbed the shoebox, and replaced it in the closet. “Mom can’t find this.”

“Are you taking her side?” Meg said.

“No.” Claire slipped on a pair of flip-flops. She wished Meg had never poked around in the closet. She wished she had left things alone.

“You are. You always do.”

“That’s not true.”

“You’re no better than Justin Levy. Another one of her slaves.”

“You don’t even know her,” Claire said coldly. “You just think you do.”

CLAIRE WENT DOWNSTAIRS, then out the back door to the garden. Behind her the house was quiet. There was the muffled sound of the TV as their mother watched the news. The evening was pale, the air unmoving. There was Elv, sitting beneath the arbor, smoking a cigarette. Her white T-shirt clung to her. She was barefoot, and the soles of her feet were dark with soil. Her black hair hung to her waist. She didn’t look anything like them anymore. She looked like the queen of a country that was too far away to visit. There were moths in the garden, fluttering about blindly. The bedroom light was turned off now. Meg had probably slipped into bed, crying the way she did, quietly, so as not to disturb anyone.

“You shouldn’t have been so mean to her,” Claire told Elv.

“That wasn’t mean. It was honest. She is a bitch.”

“She said I was like Justin Levy.”

“Yeah, right. Justin is pathetic and you’re brave. If anything, you’re opposites. Meg doesn’t have a clue.” Elv suddenly threw up her hands. “Don’t come any closer,” she warned.

Claire stopped where she was.

There was a tiny bird in her path. Both sisters knelt. “He fell out of his nest.” Elv picked up the fledgling. “He’s a robin.”

Claire was startled by how fragile the baby bird was. She could see through its skin to its beating heart. There were only a few stray, luminous feathers.

The girls went in search of the nest, but they couldn’t find it in the dark. There were spiderwebs that were frightening to walk through. Claire kept brushing them away, even when they were no longer there. The crickets were calling. Elv sat down in the wet grass. She looked so sad and beautiful. She was everything Claire wanted to be.

“It’s too late anyway,” Elv decided. “Even if we did find the nest, he’s hardly alive. Do you want to hold him?” The Queen of Arnelle had decreed this was to be. Water, sex, death. This was number three. There was no way to save him.

Claire sat beside her and Elv slipped a hand atop hers. She let the bird settle into Claire’s palm. Claire could feel it shudder. Its heart was beating so fast it reminded her of a moth’s wings.

“Maybe we should say a prayer,” she suggested.

“You do it, Gigi. You’re good at that kind of thing.”

Claire felt emboldened by Elv’s praise. “Your life has been short,” she began in a serious voice, “but it has been as important as any other life.”

Claire heard something then. It was Elv, crying.

“Don’t look at me,” Elv said. She tried to think about the way time could go backward, far back, to the time when she was in the tent with her mother in the garden. There had been twelve princesses who had danced the night away in one of the stories her mother had told her. Twelve brothers had turned into swans.

“Okay.” Claire lowered her eyes, stunned.

“Go ahead,” Elv urged. “Finish.”

“We hope you find peace.” Claire was thrown by Elv’s show of emotion. She ended the prayer as quickly as she could. She was probably doing it all wrong. She wasn’t as good as Elv thought she was. “We hope you’re blessed.”

The sisters could hear one another breathing and the whir of the crickets. There was the tangled thrum of traffic from Main Street. Sound echoed for blocks on a clear night.

“Close your eyes,” Elv said now.

“Why?”

The whole world seemed alive. The air was filled with gnats and mosquitoes and moths.

“Just for a minute,” Elv said. “Trust me.”

Claire closed her eyes. After a time the robin didn’t move anymore.

“Okay. It’s over,” Elv said. “You can open them now.”

The robin seemed even smaller, nothing but skin and bones. Elv went to the garage and got a shovel. She had faced the third fear on her list. Tonight she could tear up the postcard with the green ink. She came back and dug a hole beneath the privet hedge. Her face was streaked with tears. She shoveled dirt so fast she seemed more angry than upset. Claire was too much in awe to offer to help. When Elv was done, she tore off the bottom of her favorite T-shirt from Paris and carefully wrapped up the robin. Claire had never loved anyone more than she loved Elv at that moment. She felt something in the back of her throat that hurt. She felt lucky to have come outside, to have found her sister in the garden, to be with her in the dark.

After the burial they went back to the garden. They ducked under a net of vines and sat down cross-legged beside a row of cabbages. Nobody liked cabbages, not even their mother. They were a total waste of time. Elv lit a cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. The night was so dark the smoke looked green. The rest of the world seemed far away. Without warning, Elv lurched forward. At first Claire thought she was about to be slapped, like Meg, but instead Elv threw her arms around her. She hugged her tightly, then backed way. When she lifted her T-shirt to wipe her tearstained face Claire saw she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She looked like a creature who belonged in the garden, who slept beneath leaves and spoke to earthworms and threaded white moths through her long black hair. She didn’t seem quite human. Claire got a funny feeling then, the way Elv must have felt when she saw the bag with the other cat floating away. The one she hadn’t been able to rescue.

In the summer of the gypsy moths when everything changed, when Elv was eleven and Claire was eight and Meg had stayed home sick, they had walked home from the stop sign in the dark. Elv had been gone for ten hours. She was still wearing her bathing suit, but no shoes. They were gone. They held hands and went along the empty lane. Their mother scolded them when they got home. She told them to go upstairs and they would talk about their disappearance in the morning. Elv said it was her fault, and that Claire couldn’t find her way home without her. Elv was going to be punished for coming home so late, but she didn’t care. When she and Claire went upstairs, she got into bed, her knees drawn up. Meg was sprawled out on her own bed, reading Great Expectations.

“Have you ever read this?” she called to Elv.

Elv turned to the wall. Arnelle was like a black seed in the center of her chest.

Claire got into bed beside her. Elv smelled like ashes and garden soil. There were leaves in her beautiful long hair.

“It’s about a boy who thinks he has no future, but then it turns out he does,” Meg said. “It’s a complicated mystery about fate and love.”

Elv felt cold. Claire wrapped her arms around her. There was no way for her to ever thank her sister, no words that would ever do. Something bad had happened to Elv instead of to her. Elv’s bathing suit was still damp but she hadn’t bothered to take it off.

That was when Claire knew they would never tell.

IN THE GARDEN, on this night when the robin had died in their hands, June bugs flitted overhead. Elv shooed them away. The sisters were sitting beside the row of cabbages. No one knew where they were. They might have been a hundred miles away; they might have slipped down the steps that led underground. It would be August before they knew it. Elv bent forward to whisper. Her face was hot and tearstained. In the human world you had to choose your loyalties carefully. You had to see through to someone’s heart. Elv’s long hair grazed Claire’s face. “You’re nothing like her, you know.” The garden was so dark they could only see each other’s faces. That and nothing more. “You’re much more like me.”