The Story Sisters

THEY STAYED HOME all winter. They didn’t shovel the snow on the walkway. After a while, Elise had to galumph through the drifts to deliver Claire’s schoolwork along with basic groceries: bread and milk, coffee and potatoes. Natalia came and turned up the heat, made the beds with clean sheets, replaced the lightbulbs in the darkened rooms. Claire and Annie didn’t bother to eat meals. They wandered into the kitchen and grabbed a bite of cheese or a cracker. They didn’t trouble to use dishes anymore, only ate standing up, crouched over the sink or using a paper napkin. They reminded Natalia of the dogs one sometimes saw in certain neighborhoods in Paris, wild and uncared for, dangerous to the touch.

“Have you looked for her?” Natalia asked after months had passed and there was still no word from Elv. It was an especially cold night. She and Annie were in the kitchen with cups of steaming tea. Natalia had secretly put ads in all the New York papers begging Elv to phone her. She had informed her doorman that if a young woman happened to show up, even in the company of a dangerous-looking man, she should be let up, no matter the hour. Natalia had been taking taxis to neighborhoods she wasn’t familiar with, searching for Elv in Brooklyn and Queens, stopping total strangers to show them the photograph from the Plaza.

“She doesn’t want me to look for her.” Annie had often thought about the day of her parents’ party, when the horse got spooked and Elv knelt down in the grass with blood rimming the hem of her dress. Maybe it had all ended then, on that perfect afternoon when the light was so brilliant and everything had seemed so right.

Natalia banged her hands on the tabletop when she heard her daughter’s answer. “Do you think that would stop me if you were missing?” Natalia seemed much older in the past few months. She stayed up nights, gazing out her window. “I would never stop looking.”

IT WAS A year before Annie came to a decision. She sat under the hawthorn tree wearing her coat and her gloves. Sparrows and jays came to share the lawn with the blackbirds. On chilly days Annie hated to think of Meg alone in the cemetery. It made her feel colder too. She hated to think of Elv with that man, doing God knows what. And then, before she knew it, it was spring again. That year the garden was so overgrown, a person wouldn’t even notice it unless she knew it had been there. By summer, voles had made tunnels through the earth.

Annie had found a detective in the phone book and made an appointment. No references, nothing. Alan would have said she was crazy to put her trust in a stranger, but Alan would never have hired a detective. He was done with the whole situation. He said he had to save his own life, and maybe he was right. He’d come to the funeral and he’d cried for Meg. He’d tried to call Claire, but she wouldn’t speak to him, and after a while he’d given up.

Annie herself hadn’t believed Smith was the detective’s real name—it didn’t seem likely to be anyone’s real name—but it was. “Prove it,” she’d said when she arrived at his office. He’d taken out his driver’s license and shown it to her. He’d turned out to be not only a good detective but also a decent man, a retired Nassau County policeman who mostly did divorce cases. He was tall and rangy, in his forties. He didn’t talk much, but he had a sense of humor. He hated divorce cases, all the recriminations and vindictiveness, but runaways were even worse. With divorces the story was usually in the same ballpark—infidelity, family and money pressures. But people who disappeared of their own volition had stories that were more difficult to grasp. You never knew which ones wanted to be found, and which ones would do anything to escape; each history was unique and unexpected, with answers you sometimes didn’t want to know.

His office was across from the Roosevelt Field shopping center in Westbury, nothing fancy, just a desk and two chairs, a bit bare and depressing. It was Annie’s idea to go across the street to a diner. Anyone would have thought they were a good-looking married couple out to lunch, an attractive woman in a Burberry coat rubbing her hands together as though she couldn’t get warm, a rough-hewn man who seemed comfortable in his own skin. Smith ordered a Spanish omelet, home fries, and toast. “Let me guess,” the waitress said. “No butter.” He had the same thing every day. “Creature of habit,” he told Annie. Annie had coffee and a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich. It was the meal she and the girls always had whenever they went out for lunch.

“Me too,” she admitted.

They began by talking about sports—they were both serious Mets fans and secret admirers of the Red Sox. By the time they’d had their coffee she had told him about her runaway daughter.

“There’s one thing you have to understand,” Pete said. “If I look for her, I’m probably going to find her.”

Annie had left out the part about Meg. She hadn’t mentioned the accident or the drugs, but he knew. As soon as she’d called to set up the appointment, he’d started to poke around. He was a detective by instinct. He thought if there was a needle in a haystack, he’d probably find out everything there was to learn about hay before he started searching through it.

“That’s what I want,” Annie said.

“Just checking.”

He’d had a daughter who’d gone wrong too. Rebecca. She had been such a well-behaved child he couldn’t believe the way she’d turned out after she was on drugs. He never imagined that after being a cop and witnessing so much pain, one little girl could ruin his life so thoroughly. His marriage had been upended; his career had gone the same route. Rebecca had done everything she could to escape from his love. Love was often the last thing they wanted. If he’d known Annie better, he would have told her that just so she wouldn’t think it was all her fault. Love reminded them of everything they’d lost.