The Story Sisters

“They tied you up?” Elv was mesmerized. She put her hand up to her chest to try to stop her heart from pounding. Her secret incantation had somehow been revealed. Rope, Iron, Water, Bread.

“People who are weak do that. It’s the only way they can get power. They don’t have anything within themselves, so they try to tie you up, hold you captive. That wasn’t going to happen to me.”

He climbed out the window and never looked back. One cold night when he thought he’d freeze to death, he found a hidden staircase on Thirty-third Street behind an iron gate. It was the way all treasures were found, when you weren’t even looking for them. Like today, for instance, seeing her across the field.

Elv thought about the word treasure and told him to keep going. He pulled her down and they sat close together. The sun came through the trees with pinpricks of light.

He opened the iron gate, then went down so many steps that before long the subway ran above him. He could not believe what he’d found.

There were gnats circling in the air, but Elv barely noticed. Her breath came fast.

“You lived underground?”

“I’ll tell you about it sometime.” Lorry shrugged. “It’s a long story.”

“No.” Elv’s tone was urgent. “Tell me now.”

He had her and he knew it. He said it would have to wait until next time. The dinner bell had been ringing, Elv just hadn’t heard it. She’d miss dinner if she didn’t hurry. Then there would be one of the Westfield punishments, either isolation or humiliation. They had been in the woods for hours. It was the time when the field mice ventured out, after the hawks had settled in the trees but before the owls came to hunt. The sky was now the color Elv liked best—a tender dark blue, falling to earth like ashes.

“I don’t want you to find yourself in trouble,” Lorry said. He walked her back, stopping to light a cigarette. He had bad habits, but he could control his excesses, unlike most of the fools he knew. “I can quit anytime I want,” he told Elv. “I’m not a slave to anything or anyone.”

He’d taken off his gloves to strike the match, revealing the black stars, the roses and the thorns. Something dropped in the pit of Elv’s stomach. These were the images from her own stories, skin and bones, flesh and blood. She thought, Is this how it happens? When she looked at him, a shiver went through her. She had talked about being turned inside out by love. Now for the first time she had an idea of what that meant. She had the same feeling she’d always had before she jumped off a dock into deep, cold water. Half wanting it, half terrified.

Lorry came close. She thought he was going to kiss her, but instead he wrapped his arms around her. Sheltered by his embrace, she could scarcely breathe. Before she could contain herself, she started to cry. She knew she was about to surrender to him. She didn’t even try to stop herself.

She didn’t care about time. Lorry walked her back in the fading light. When he left, Elv went to the window of the dining hall and gazed out. She had become a sky expert. She could tell the hour by the position of the sun and the stars. She made a wish, the way she used to, when her mother took her into the garden to tell stories, to watch the white moths, to see the moon rise above North Point Harbor.

“Where the hell have you been?” Michael asked when she had grabbed a dinner tray—meat loaf, soggy green beans, and a sad-looking ice cream sundae.

Elv sat down at the long metal table, across from him. She wasn’t sure herself, so she merely shrugged and asked if he wanted her dessert. Greedy as always, he grabbed it. Not that she wasn’t greedy as well. When Lorry’s next visit came around, she was waiting by the gate.

HE VISITED WESTFIELD every other week. It was some time before he even kissed her, but when he did, she felt her world fall away. She fell in love feetfirst, as though dropped from a bridge. Headfirst was too rational for what happened to her. By then she knew more of the story. He had lived underground for seven years after fleeing his last foster home. He set up camp on a platform eight stories below Penn Station. You wouldn’t think the world was that deep, but it was. He had a tent, a lantern, a canteen. It was homey, if you didn’t notice the trains screaming past at all hours. He was a Boy Scout, only in reverse, not in it for fun and games, merely trying to survive. The others there called themselves the People, but they were nothing like the human beings aboveground. They were kinder, braver, stronger. Some were so dangerous they were combustible—one wrong word could be the match that set them aflame. Some were lost. There was a giant who was so difficult to find you had to write his name on a piece of wood and leave it beside the train tracks and a week later he might show up to sell you weed or mushrooms. The best of the People took pity on Lorry. They taught him to get fresh water from the restrooms in subway stations built decades ago by the city, but never used. They showed him how to pick pockets, how to bind a wound with a spiderweb to keep away infection, how to chase away rats, how to wait outside bakeries aboveground till closing time when what was day-old to them was a treasure to him.

He was ten, but hardly easy prey. He had a knife, the ability to sleep with his eyes open, and a talent for hiding. He had enemies underground, but he had friends as well, people who saw him through such tough times anyone else would have died.

The giant took a liking to him and so did the giant’s wife, who worked at a restaurant aboveground and often left Lorry a cooked dinner. “You don’t belong here,” she told him. “I want to see the day when you leave here and go back up to the world.”