The Story Sisters

When Madame Cohen came to dinner and asked how Elv was, the Story sisters fell silent. Claire had written letters and cards but hadn’t heard back. Meg was actually dreading the time when her sister returned. Natalia had fixed a sun-dried tomato rice pilaf to accompany the roast chicken she served. Madame Cohen offered the bowl to the girls but they said they weren’t hungry. “Here in this country, herbalists thought tomatoes were bad for you well into the nineteenth century,” she told them. “It was considered an act of bravery simply to eat one.”

Meg excused herself to help their ama carry out the drinks, homemade lemonade and a bottle of local white wine.

“You can’t always believe what everyone tells you,” Madame Cohen told Claire, whom she found to be the most sensitive and emotional of the Story sisters. She pointed to their dinner. “We’d think this was as deadly as mandrake if we did.” She ate a forkful of the pilaf. “I had two sisters,” she said. “I was the youngest. Much like you.”

Claire had always been a little afraid of her grandmother’s friend, wary of her black clothes and stern appearance. Madame Cohen wore her white hair up, neatly held in place with tortoise-shell combs. She always had sensible shoes and often carried an umbrella, even on sunny days. Claire didn’t know if her French was good enough to speak to Madame Cohen. “What happened to them?” she asked.

“Exactly what your sister Elv wanted to know,” Madame Cohen told her. “They’ve been gone for a very long time. For other people, that is. Not for me.”

“What do you think happened to Madame Cohen’s sisters?” Claire asked Meg as they were getting ready for bed. Meg had recently made a vow to read all of Dickens. She had just begun Oliver Twist.

“Madame Cohen had sisters?” Meg got into bed and reached for her book. Claire got in beside her. She didn’t mind if Meg stayed up reading. She liked sleeping with the light on. But even with the lamp’s yellow glow, even though she heard the rustling of pages and the familiar sound of traffic on the streets nearby, even though she knew Meg was right there beside her, she still felt alone.

THAT SPRING THE girls’ grandmother gave them much more freedom than their mother ever would have, considering what had happened with Elv. Natalia believed freedom was never a problem, only those who didn’t know how to handle the responsibilities that went along with it. In the afternoons, while she took her nap, the girls walked toward the Île Saint-Louis, stopping at Berthillon. Meg liked to try something new each time, blood orange, for instance, or caramel-ginger, but Claire stuck with vanilla. She was loyal to her favorite things. The Story sisters would then go to gaze into the green water of the Seine as they ate their ice cream. Sometimes they sat in front of Notre Dame and watched tourists. They liked to guess which families were happy and which ones were only pretending. They figured they were right 99 percent of the time.

Many people thought the girls were twins. Their hair was styled exactly the same, falling straight to the jawbone, angled in front. They explored the Left Bank, spending hours at Shakespeare and Co. searching through old volumes, reading the dedications scrawled on the frontispieces, wondering who had truly been in love and who was just offering up an insincere gift. They could speak enough French to order well in cafés. They loved the ones on Saint-Germain where they ordered espressos or cafés au lait and sometimes had the nerve to ask for glasses of kir, which the waiters always brought without question. They flirted with boys, but never divulged their real names or where they lived. They didn’t trust anyone except each other.

They no longer believed in Arnelle. They were far too old for stories about faeries. They never spoke Arnish. It made them think of things they didn’t want to remember. Red leaves, rain, New Hampshire. They were already forgetting the words Elv had taught them and they could no longer recall if henaj meant wolf or dog, if nejimi meant hero or coward. In dire circumstances, however, their private vocabulary sometimes surfaced in a rush, surprising them. They had fleetingly whispered to each other in Arnish when they’d become lost at the airport upon arrival. And then again when Claire had stomach pains and thought she might be dying of appendicitis. They’d had a tearful panicked conversation in Arnish then, though what had befallen her turned out to be severe indigestion, nothing more.

Although there were two beds in their grandmother’s spare bedroom, the sisters slept together. They were too old for this, but they didn’t care. They didn’t talk about the reason they shared a bed nor did they discuss their dreams. Each had her reasons. The tiger at the door. The boy on the edge of the bed. The shower of red leaves. The man saying, You know me; get in the car.

In the last days of their vacation, their mother came to Paris to retrieve them and also to check in on her mother. Perhaps someone should have been checking on Annie. She didn’t look like herself anymore. She had lost more weight and wore her dark glasses most of the time to hide the circles under her eyes. While the girls were away, she’d suffered terrible bouts of insomnia, sitting up until morning, gazing into the backyard and wondering when it had gone wrong. She thought it was that day at the Plaza. The way Elv had looked at her when she’d been accused of masterminding the theft of the carriage horse.

After Annie arrived in Paris, she was so tired she crawled into the second bed in the girls’ room and slept for seventeen hours. She curled up beneath a snowy linen coverlet, the same she’d used during summers here in Paris when she was a girl. There had been some talk about staying on in France when she was twelve or thirteen, but her father’s business was in New York and so they’d returned to Manhattan. Lately, Annie had become obsessed with the different life she might have had if they’d remained in Paris. The man she might have loved, the apartment where she might have lived, the daughters whose only language would have been French.