Читать книгу The Story Sisters - Элис Хоффман, Alice Hoffman - Страница 8

My sister stayed in her room, hiding. She gazed at the sky and cried. You’d think she’d be happy to be human, but she kept talking about needing her freedom. I had lost sister after sister; was I supposed to lose her, too? She stood on the ledge outside the window. She had only one arm; if she started to fall she would dash to pieces on the rocks below.

I went out at midnight to gather the reeds, though there were wild dogs and men who thought of murder. I carried sharp needles and sticks. At night I wove the reeds together while my sister cried. When I was done, I threw the cape over her. She changed into a bird and flew away.

I watched until she looked like a cloud. Now she was free. Well, so was I. I walked to the city and got a job. I had a talent after all. When people asked if I had a family I didn’t mention that once I’d had twelve sisters. I said I took care of myself. I said I liked it that way, and after a while I meant it.

AT THIS TIME OF YEAR THE STORY SISTERS HAD TOMATOES at every meal. Fried tomatoes battered with bread crumbs, rich tomato soup with celery and basil and cream, salads of yellow tomatoes drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Once a pot of simmering preserves were left on the stove and forgotten; the girls dubbed the remaining mixture Black Death Tomatoes, delicious when spooned onto toast. They told tomato jokes: Why did the tomato turn red? Because he saw the salad dressing! How do you fix a broken tomato? Tomato paste! They tried crazy recipes that took hours to complete: tomato mousse, tomato sherbet, green tomato cake. But this summer Elv declared she was allergic to tomatoes. She insisted they gave her hives. She wouldn’t eat a single one. She pushed her plate away, no matter how much work or effort their mother had put into the meal. Elv didn’t care. She would eat what she pleased. She would do as she wanted. She said it quietly, but everyone heard.

The scent of the sultry vines in the garden in August always reminded the Story sisters of their mother, who they sometimes saw crying as she weeded between the rows. They wondered if she was still in love with their father or if it was something else that made her cry. Elv guessed she was feeling sorry for herself. Claire thought it best not to pester her with questions. Meg went out to ask if she needed anything, perhaps some help with the weeding. Annie gave her middle daughter a hug. After that they often worked together, late in the day, when the sun was low but the mosquitoes weren’t yet out. The quiet and the company were a tonic to them both.

Meg was fifteen now, a studious, lovely girl. She wore glasses and spent a great deal of time on her own. Of all the Story sisters, she more than anyone reminded Annie of herself at that age: shy, serious, a fanatical reader. Meg had a job as a counselor-in-training at a summer camp. She was beloved by her campers. Every afternoon she had a book club, which quickly became the summer’s favorite activity. The little girls tried to sit next to her so that they could have the honor of turning pages. They all began to wear velvet headbands, just like Meg, and several campers went home and asked their mothers if they could have their hair cut short.

Yet Meg remained a bit of a mystery to Annie. She was something of an outsider, even with her sisters. Well, all the girls were enigmatic, secretive. Elv and Claire still chattered in that language of theirs and laughed over private jokes. But they kept quiet when Meg entered the room. There was some bad blood between them that Annie didn’t understand.

“I wish I knew what they were saying,” Annie blurted to Meg one day as they worked in the garden, filling a barrel with the dusty weeds they had gathered.

“It’s nothing worth hearing. They think they’re better than everyone, that’s all.”

Arnelle no longer held any interest for Meg. Privately, she denounced not only the language but the world. There was a war going on there—faeries were set against demons and human beings. The stories Elv told were filled with brutal atrocities, some so awful they made Meg wince and cover her ears. Swans were murdered, their bloody feathers plucked out. Roses were hexed, turned into thorns that pierced hands and eyes and hearts. The more vivid and alarming the stories were, the more engaged Elv was in their telling. There was a man named Grimin she wanted to murder. Together she and Claire plotted the ways that would cause the most lingering pain: boiled in oil, pecked at by ravens, locked into an iron box with a swarm of bees.

Bees, Claire had decided. Thousands of them, the killer kind, from South America.

In the evenings, Annie and Meg sat out on the porch, reading novels in the fading August light. As for Elv, she’d found a job at the ice cream shop. It was a far cry from Berthillon, just a crummy stand that offered soft custard. Elv felt humiliated being in such a second-rate place. But she wanted her own money, her own timetable. When she came in at night she smelled of hot fudge and sulfur. She never told the truth about anything. Not to her mother, not to people in town, not to her customers, whom she often shortchanged, not even to herself. What people called the truth seemed worthless to her; what was it but a furtive, bruised story to convince yourself life was worth living.

ELV WENT OUT every night, the door slamming behind her. She was barefoot, sullen, in a rush. “See you,” she would call over her shoulder to Claire, the only one she bothered to speak to, the only one who knew who she was.

“Later, alligator,” Claire would call back, wishing she was old enough to go with her.

Annie always asked when Elv would be back, even though she knew what the answer would be.

“Whenever,” Elv would say, aloof, impatient.

“Do you want me to follow her?” Meg asked one evening when the trees on Nightingale Lane were so green they appeared black, melancholy in the darkening sky. There were bands of clouds swarming across the horizon.

Annie had shaken her head. “If anyone should follow her, it should be me.”

Annie slipped off her sandals. The soles of her feet were dusty. She marveled at the way Elv could ramble all over town without shoes. Nothing ever seemed to hurt her, not stones or glass or twigs. Their town was safer than most, with a nearly zero crime rate, but you never knew what could happen to a girl all alone. Down at the harbor there were said to be wild parties going on. The police regularly drove past on patrol, but the parties went on out on the sand-bars. No one knew how the local kids managed to get so many kegs of beer, but they did. No one knew where the drugs came from, but they were there as well. Once, on her way home from the market in the evening, Annie spied a group of teenagers down by the bay, huddled near the flagpole in the park. They didn’t look like bad kids. Annie stopped her car and got out to talk to them. Most of them scattered, but a few stayed, laughing and nervous to be approached by an adult. When Annie asked if Elv was around, they all looked away. One of the boys snickered. Annie heard some of the girls laughing as she walked back to the car.

Thinking of that group of kids and their reaction to Elv’s name, Annie suddenly grabbed for her shoes. “I’m going.”

“You can’t stop her from doing anything. She wouldn’t even get in the car with you.”

“I could ground her. Take away TV privileges. I could make her stay in for the rest of the summer.”

“Mom,” Meg said sadly.

“I could lock her in the bedroom.”

“She would climb out the window.”

They could still see Elv, disappearing down the lane, stopping to pat the old basset hound on the Weinsteins’ lawn before she disappeared into the gathering dark. She was like a shadow, something you imagined and couldn’t quite grasp. When she wasn’t at the ice cream shop, she was heading for the bridge. The group who banded together had bad reputations, but at least they knew how to have a good time. Yet even those girls stayed away from her, making sure to clutch their boyfriends when Elv was nearby. She seemed dangerous even to them, willing to try anything. Give her a pill and she’d take it, offer her a drink and she was always willing to accept. Her cool bravery was legendary. Justin Levy had seen her flustered, though. Once when they were down at the beach she saw a car in the parking lot and bolted. She was shivering by the time Justin caught up with her on Main Street.

“Is he still there?” she’d said to him. She was wearing her bathing suit, a damp towel wrapped around her. She didn’t even think about calling the police. All she thought of was running.

Justin shrugged, confused. She’d made him jog back to check.

“No cars in the parking lot,” he assured her when he returned, out of breath, her loyal messenger.

After that Elv continued to allow Justin to tag along until he foolishly proclaimed his love for her. He was getting tiresome. By the middle of August, she’d had enough.

“What’s wrong with me?” Justin had asked mournfully when she told him to stop stalking her.

If Elv was someone else, she would have said It’s not you, it’s me—that’s what everyone said to get out of someone’s grasp. Instead, she was honest with Justin.

“You’re not who I’m looking for,” she replied. She was looking for someone who had no fear of iron or ropes. An escape artist, that’s what she wanted. A man who could turn her inside out, make her feel something, because nothing else seemed to. She could sit in the bedroom closet and cut herself with a razor and still feel nothing at all. She could pass her hand above a candle and when it flamed up have no reaction. All she had to do was close her eyes.

Justin had actually cried when she dumped him, as if to prove her point.

“Oh my God, Justin. Find somebody nice. Someone better than me. I am the last person you should be with. You should thank me for giving you this advice.”

After that, whenever Justin saw her he didn’t say hello. He took to wearing a black coat even though it was August. He wore sunglasses at night. People started laughing at him.

“You look like an idiot,” Elv said when she next ran into him. It was at the tea shop and she was there with Brian Preston, who was known for his drug use and also for burning down his family’s summer house in the Berkshires. Brian was stupid and good-looking and entertaining. “At least take off your sunglasses,” Elv told Justin.

When he did, she could tell he’d been crying again. Didn’t anybody see what the real world was like? She felt repulsed by his weakness. Mr. Weinstein down the street had died and now his bassett hound was on the lawn all the time. Mrs. Weinstein didn’t allow the dog in the house and whenever she passed him Elv felt like crying herself. She had to stop that. It was useless. It was like trying to win her place in the court of Arnelle, or trying to get rid of the black seed inside her, the taste of iron and of lye. She’d cried that day when the man in the car took her to his house and locked her in a room, until she realized it wouldn’t do any good. She had done everything the Queen had asked and had received nothing in return. Arnelle was pointless.

She had decided to change the story.

She was going over to the other side.

THE TOWN WAS thick with Virginia creeper, wisteria, weeds that suddenly grew three feet tall. It had been that kind of summer. There were thunderstorms and hail. The news reported a strange rain of live frogs one wet, humid night. Children ran out with mayonnaise jars to try to capture them the way they used to catch fireflies. The air felt electric, sultry; it pressed down on you and made you want to sleep, turn away from your troubles, tell yourself lies. Even smart people are easily tricked, especially by their own children. When everything smells like smoke, how do you know what’s burning? Things that should have added up for Annie seemed like mere coincidence: cigarettes found in the garden, doors slamming, boys throwing pebbles at the window, finding that neighborhood boy Justin Levy sitting in the hedges one evening in his black overcoat, crying. If she set the pieces side by side, she might have been able to interpret them.

When Annie visited her mother, she asked for her advice. She was worried about the Story sisters. One was quiet, one was standoffish, one seemed to be disappearing before her eyes, becoming someone else entirely. Perhaps they’d been more affected by the divorce and Alan’s defection than it had first appeared. Or maybe it was Annie’s fault—she’d been depressed, wrapped up in her souring marriage. She went to the garden for solace rather than to her girls. She’d cut herself off, didn’t date, rarely saw friends—a poor example of how to live in the world.

“Young girls are moody,” Natalia told her. The task of raising children was a difficult one.

“Was I like that?”

“Well, you were well behaved. I never had to punish you. But you used to cry for no reason. It’s an emotional time of life. You try things on, you put them away.”

“Was I like Elv?” Annie wanted to know.

“No.” Natalia shook her head. That man in Paris had skulked around long after the girls had gone home in the spring. Natalia had found a knife and a length of rope beneath the bed in the guest room later in the month when she was cleaning up. She’d brought the little rescued cat, Sadie, with her from Paris to New York. It sat in her lap in the afternoons while Martin took his nap. Natalia often thought back to that night when her granddaughter had sneaked back into the apartment, dripping with river water, managing to be both fierce and tenderhearted. “Not like Elv.”

The last time the Story sisters had visited her apartment, Natalia had found Elv in her closet, asleep on the floor, curled up like a little girl. The jewelry box had been open and a gold chain was missing. Natalia was sure Elv would wear it, then return it to its rightful place. But she never saw the necklace again.

Sometimes when she looked at her granddaughter—her black-painted fingernails, the expression on her face when she thought no one was looking, the marks on her skin that were so even it appeared as if she cut herself—Natalia felt afraid for the child. Her friend Leah Cohen had told her that demons preyed upon young girls. They came through windows and found ways to open doors. Natalia had always listened to these stories with half an ear; now she was hesitant to dismiss them. She found herself locking the doors whenever Elv came to visit so that no one could get out or in. She had grown convinced that you could lose someone, even if she was in the very next room. She remembered her friend’s warnings more clearly. Although Natalia didn’t believe in butting into her daughter’s business, she took Annie by the arm before she left for home.

“Look closely at Elv,” she advised. “Look inside.”

SHE STARTED BY searching the attic. It was one of the reasons they’d bought the house in the first place, the sloping eaves, the large space, the old hawthorn tree that cast shadows through the window. The perfect place to raise three girls. They had painted the woodwork antique white and papered the walls. Annie found the shoebox where the marijuana was hidden first, then a vial of pills—Demerol stolen from the grandparents’ medicine cabinet. Taped to the closet wall there was a series of photographs of Elv kissing various boys. There was a mysterious map as well. Inky green paths led through a garden of thorns. Demons were wound in a frantic, scandalous embrace.

A journal had been left in Elv’s night table. Annie took it down to the garden. Her hands were shaking. She felt like a witch in a fairy tale, raiding the castle, sifting through bones. There had been rain that morning, and the heat had broken. Birds were searching for worms and the tomatoes were covered with glistening drops. Most of the writing in the journal was in Arnish, with captions beneath green and black watercolor paintings. A girl with wings was held captive, abducted from her true parents. Roses died, iron bars were set around a beating heart torn whole from a now lifeless body, a man named Grimin tied up faeries and fucked them till they bled, goblins drifted through the trees ready for rape and destruction.

Annie hadn’t imagined Elv knew about such things, let alone that she was filling a journal with erotic and dangerous drawings. She threw out the drugs, then went back upstairs. The house was quiet. It felt big when there was only one person in it. She thought about the year before she and Alan were divorced, how the fights they’d had must have reverberated up in the attic. Did the Story sisters place their hands over their ears? Did they all get under a blanket and wish they lived somewhere else? Annie replaced the journal, closed the bedroom door, then called her ex-husband. She was crying, so it was difficult for him to understand, but once he did, he insisted everything Elv had done was within the realm of normal teenage behavior. He was a school principal, after all. Minor drug use and a fantasy world. He’d seen far worse, and many of those students had gone on to graduate, been accepted to college, lived their lives. Annie was overreacting, as usual. But did he know Elv was going out at all hours? Elise had reported that Mary had seen Elv swimming naked in the bay with some high school boys. What about her refusal to follow the house rules, sneaking out at night? He said to wait, things would turn around.

The next morning a police officer came by to inform Annie that her daughter had stolen a tray of cupcakes from the bakery. She’d been seen giving them out to children in the playground before the tots’ agitated mothers swooped in to throw away the suspicious treats.

“They were only cupcakes,” Annie said, quick to defend her daughter.

“They were stolen property,” the officer said stiffly.

When he left, persuaded to let the incident go unreported, Annie went upstairs and knocked on the bedroom door. It was locked whenever Elv was at home. The locks clicked open and there she was, annoyed, half dressed, her hair in knots.

“The police were here,” Annie said.

No response.

“The cupcakes?”

Elv’s eyes had a yellow cast. She couldn’t even do something nice without people getting on her case. If Meg had given out the cupcakes, she probably would have gotten a medal. She’d be on the town honor roll. “I refuse to be who you people want me to be,” Elv said.

“What people?” Annie was confused. It crossed her mind that Elv might be high.

“The human race,” Elv said disdainfully.

That night Elv burned all her clothes in a trash can. It was one more leap away from the brutality of the human world. She scooped out armfuls from her closet, collecting bathing suits, shoes, purses, socks. She saved two black skirts, a pair of black jeans, a few T-shirts, and the pointy boots from Paris. At the last minute she grabbed the blue dress her grandmother had made for her. Everything else went up in flames, even her winter coat. She poured on lighter fluid and lit an entire pack of matches. The whole neighborhood smelled like burning wool. The fire department was called in by Mrs. Weinstein, worried when she saw flames beyond her crab apple tree. Her husband’s old dog set to howling.

Elv couldn’t have cared less if Nightingale Lane was rife with ashes. She was barefoot and defiant when the firemen arrived. They made sure the bonfire wasn’t out of control, then went away, sirens blaring. For hours afterward, Annie and Meg watered the garden, making certain the embers that had fallen weren’t still burning. That night there was still the stink of scorched weeds and the sharp scent of singed tomato vines; the last of the peas on the vine made popping noises as they burst open, like firecrackers set off one at a time.

Elise told Annie she should contact the police the next time Elv didn’t come home at her curfew. But Annie was afraid such a move would make Elv run away; she could easily become one of those mistreated, sullen girls you heard about on TV, the ones who disappeared and wound up murdered. Instead, when Elv didn’t come home, Annie pulled up a chair and waited at the back door. By the time Elv finally straggled in it was early morning. The lawn had been wet and her footprints flecked the kitchen floor. She was neither surprised nor nervous when she found her mother in the kitchen. She plopped herself down on one of the stools at the counter and asked for pancakes. “I’m starving,” she said. When her heart beat faster, she felt alive. When she was hungry, she was starving.

“You can’t run around like this. It’s dangerous to be out all night. Something terrible can happen to you.”

“It already has.” Ask me. See who I am.

“Elise thinks I should call the police. For your own safety.”

Elv gazed at her mother, chin raised. “I take it you’re not making pancakes.”

“No,” Annie said. “I’m not.” This wasn’t the child she’d told stories to in the garden, her darling, trustworthy girl. “If I find drugs again, Elv, I’m sending you to rehab. I mean it.” That was Elise’s other recommendation. Don’t play around. Take charge.

Elv wondered how she’d misplaced the shoebox. Now she understood. Her mother had been there. “You went through my private belongings?” she said.

“It’s my house,” Annie said. “My rules.”

“Okay,” Elv said coolly. She took the confrontation as a challenge that would spur her on to battle. “Look as much as you want. You won’t find anything.”

Claire helped to toss away any incriminating evidence. They got rid of the needles and ink Elv kept for her homemade tattoos, the hash pipe, the rolling papers, the empty packets of birth control pills, the razor blades she used to cut herself. She said her blood was green, but it looked red to Claire when she watched the razor go into Elv’s flesh. Several times Claire had found her sister in their bedroom standing naked in front of the mirror, gazing at herself. They both stared at her body, which seemed perfect to Claire. But Elv seemed disappointed in herself. She turned to gaze at her back, searching for the beginnings of black wings. There was nothing there but skin and bones.

One morning, Claire awoke in the middle of the night to see a boy in a black coat sitting on Elv’s bed. He seemed like a dream. Claire closed her eyes and wished him away. In a little while he was gone, out the window, across the garden. It was Justin. Claire had seen him hanging around Nightingale Lane before. Once she thought she saw him in the woods nearby, crying.

AT THE END of the summer Justin Levy hanged himself in his bedroom. Elv didn’t go to the funeral, which was held in a chapel in Huntington. That night, Claire looked out the window to see her sister digging up the robin’s skeleton. Elv carefully placed the bones in a clean dish, then brought them inside. Claire crept down the stairs and joined her sister at the kitchen table. Elv had their mother’s sewing kit. There was a spool of black thread and a long needle. She was making a necklace out of the bones that had been buried under the hedge. It would be an amulet in memory of the dead.

Elv’s fingers were bleeding from her work. She had drilled little holes in the bones with a safety pin.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Claire asked.

Elv laughed. Something caught in her throat. That happened when she thought about Justin. He was so susceptible to pain. She should have taught him how to walk through this world. She should have showed him how to lock it all away. “I can hurt myself more than anyone else can,” she told her sister. “I can do it with my eyes closed.”

People in town said Elv was a witch after she took to wearing the bone necklace. But Claire thought the necklace was sad and beautiful. Elv let her try it on once. They stood together in front of the big mirror in their bedroom. Even with her short hair, Claire was pleased to see how much alike they looked.

As for Meg, she thought the necklace was a travesty. “She can’t even let the dead rest in peace,” she murmured to Claire once after Elv had left the room. Their older sister released so much energy and turmoil, it was as if a storm had been trapped in a jar, then set free on the third floor every time she was around. When Elv drifted back into their bedroom, Meg fell silent.

“What’s wrong with you?” Elv asked her sister. In Arnelle, everyone understood that it was possible to cry without tears, to be brave even when riddled with fear. But Meg didn’t understand anything. “Cat got your tongue?”

In Arnish, cat was pillar. Said aloud it sounded vicious.

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Meg said.

Elv knew what she meant. It’s you. Always you.

THE WEATHER WAS changing. It was September and school had begun. In the evenings, Elv began to smoke a white powder. She used a glass pipe that looked as if it would catch on fire when she inhaled. Claire sat out in the hall on the third floor, guarding the bedroom door. “Thanks, Gigi,” Elv would say when Claire came back into the room. “Now I can breathe.”

When Claire asked what was in the pipe, Elv said, “The antidote to humanity” and laughed. “Seriously, it’s nothing. It’s chalk dust.”

Even though school was in session, Elv often didn’t come home until dawn. She didn’t mind getting wet as she ran across the damp lawn; she was burning up under her skin despite the change in the weather. At the hour when her sisters got ready for school, she would creep into bed, naked and wet. If you shook her, she didn’t budge. If you talked to her, she didn’t answer. She was exhausted most of the time, but agitated. When she managed to go grab some sleep, she talked through her dreams, always in Arnish.

Claire would perch at the foot of her sister’s bed on these school-day mornings, worried. She had begun to dread the future. Elv was being swallowed up. Claire wondered if the door to Arnelle could close when a person least expected it to, shutting her into that underground world. She whispered Elv’s name, but there wasn’t an answer. She traced a finger over the scars Elv had left on her own skin. Would she know how to rescue Elv if the time ever came? Would she stand there mutely and watch her sister be carried away or would she dare to be brave?

MEG BEGAN TO hide everything she cared about. She kept it all in the guest room closet, which she secured with a lock she bought at the hardware store, keeping the small key in her backpack. Things had been disappearing: headbands, jewelry, clothes. Elv had burned her own belongings, and now she was taking whatever she wanted. Elise phoned Annie to say that Mary had come home to find Elv going through her closet. Elv had pried open a window and managed to climb into Mary’s bedroom. When Mary walked in to find her cousin loaded down with her belongings, Elv threatened to burn down the house if she told. Mary had had such a bad asthma attack afterward that Elise had rushed her to the hospital.