The Story Sisters

ANNIE HADN’T STARTED HER TOMATO SEEDLINGS THAT SPRING. She hadn’t bothered to weed. The garden was filling with Virginia creeper and thistle. Goldfinches flocked to the weed, trilling over their good fortune. The weather was lovely, a lamblike March, nothing like the terrible year when there was a false spring and the roads were slick with hidden patches of ice. Annie still wore a coat. She was cold all the time. She sat in a wrought-iron chair under the hawthorn tree. On the day the accident happened, there had been bluebells. By the following morning, nearly twelve inches of wet snow had fallen. They had learned not to trust the weather.

Annie and Claire stayed in the chapel with the body for twenty-four hours, unable to leave her. At last, the funeral director pleaded with them to go. There were some things for which family members shouldn’t be present. Remember her as she was, he suggested. But Meg had never been wound up in white, her face so pale, her eyes closed. They were already remembering her the way she was in death rather than the way she had been in life.

Claire had to be escorted out. The door was bolted so the body could be prepared without interruption. When they wouldn’t let her in, she sank to the floor. Mourners had to step around her. Those who did lean down to try to embrace her were greeted with stony silence. Just before the service began Natalia insisted she come into the chapel. “Do this for Meg,” she said. Claire sat in the front row, between her mother and grandmother, head bowed. She wore the same clothes she’d had on when the accident occurred. Splinters of glass glittered in the seams.

At the cemetery Claire felt as if she were watching the burial from a great distance. Her head was bare, covered with snow. She didn’t feel anything, just a fluttering in her stomach, the same panicky feeling she’d had while waiting on the corner of Nightingale Lane all those years ago, heedless of the mosquitoes and the darkening sky. As she stood between her mother and grandmother, all she knew was that she should be the one being lowered into the ground. She looked up at the falling snow. She couldn’t see anything but spots of light. Meg had trusted her. She’d agreed to get into the car because Claire had told her to.

After the funeral, she stopped speaking. Her mother and grandmother thought the muteness would pass with time. It was the immediacy of her grief, the double loss of two sisters—the one gone forever, the other disappeared. Once several weeks had passed, they knew the situation wasn’t temporary. When she was forced to communicate, Claire wrote on a small notepad she kept in her pocket. As it turned out, she had very little to say. Sometimes, when it grew late and all the houses in North Point Harbor were dark, she would walk to the end of the street to wait by the stop sign. But no one came to steal her away. No one was there for her at all.

Claire had thought that time would stop, but people went on living, and before long summer had come and gone. Then it was fall. Claire was allowed to have her schoolwork sent home. No one expected her to face her peers. They were all still talking about the accident. Some of the girls who had been in English honors with Meg had set up a shrine on the spot where it happened, where Route 25A turned so quickly it could take you by surprise. A coffee can filled with plastic flowers and several teddy bears of various hues had been arranged on the embankment. Claire went there one night and threw it all into the woods. These girls had never even really known Meg. Claire was breathing hard by the time she was done getting rid of everything. She thought she might be sick right there by the side of the road. Meg had hated teddy bears. She hated false flowers. The local news paper had a small article about the defacement of the memorial. The authorities never discovered who had done it, but Annie knew. She parked there every day, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes longer. Frankly, it was a relief to be rid of that make shift shrine, to see only the grass, so plain and tall.

Claire was still an excellent student. Elise came by with her homework twice a week, then took it back to the high school. Mary was away at Yale, and Elise had time on her hands. She didn’t mind helping out. She wasn’t offended that Annie never invited her in for a cup of coffee or tea. She was a doctor and used to the effects of grief.

“Call me the minute you need something,” she told Annie and Claire, but neither one of them could think of a single thing they might need that anyone could possibly give them.

Annie never answered the phone. She didn’t want the neighbors’ gifts of casseroles or homemade soups. Late one night the phone rang and wouldn’t let up. Annie suddenly thought, What if it’s Meg? Maybe her girl was trying to reach her. Maybe such things really happened, the way they did in horror movies, when the afterlife wasn’t as far away as everyone thought, when it was as close as the next room. Annie grabbed the phone, but no one answered. “Meg?” she said tentatively. She heard someone breathing and realized her mistake. “Elv?” she said, but the phone had gone dead.

Leaves piled up in the backyard. Newspapers were delivered and unread, left to disintegrate on the concrete walkway. The only birds gathering on the lawn were blackbirds that made a racket and wouldn’t be chased away. In the mornings, Claire and Annie woke expecting to hear Meg getting ready for school, calling everyone down to breakfast. But there was nothing, only the blackbirds. Meg had always been the one to make sure everyone was on time. Now they overslept, missed entire days. The house was so quiet they could hear crickets that had wandered inside when the weather grew chilly, their calls growing fainter as time went by. Annie and Claire tried their best not to think about Elv or wonder where she might be. Sometimes one went to stand in the doorway of her bedroom, sometimes it was the other. One wept, but the other went through the bureau drawers and destroyed every single thing she could find.