The Story Sisters

It seemed that Elv too had a knack for crime. They realized this the first time someone came home unexpectedly. Elv got out of the car when a Mercedes pulled into the driveway. She ran over and breathlessly explained that she was searching for her dog, who was old and ill and needed special medication. Elv was in tears, lost in a neighborhood she didn’t know. The man was tenderhearted; many men were when faced with a beautiful, distraught young woman. He helped her search the neighborhood, looking through the well-manicured yards. Some had trellises of pale roses, others had large brick patios, swimming pools, greenhouses. In one, a little poodle tied to a tree barked when they entered the yard, then sat and stared at them. Elv had the urge to cut the rope and steal him.

“Bingo,” the man exclaimed. “There’s your dog.”

“That isn’t him,” Elv said sadly.

When she heard the car horn honk, she knew Lorry was finished and the job was done. She thanked the man who’d tried to help her find her dog, surprising him by kissing his cheek before she took off running. Once she and Lorry were home, they looked through the jewelry. There were some good pieces, diamonds, pearls, 22-karat gold earrings and bracelets. Their victim had been a nice man. Elv thought of how he’d waited for her when she lingered at the gate in the yard where the dog was tied up. He’d buy his wife something far better when all was said and done, maybe rubies this time.

Lorry was delighted with Elv’s acumen. She was beautiful and smart and she belonged to him. They went out to dinner to celebrate. They ordered a bottle of wine. They felt lucky and rich, despite their fatal flaws. They went home and got high, then fell into bed, arms around each other, fiercely in love. Lorry told her in no uncertain terms that if she ever saw the police, she was to run. He wasn’t about to have her be apprehended. She was an accomplice, that was all. It was fun, a lark. And then, it wasn’t.

She was the one who said they should go to her house. She knew where everything was; it would be an easy in-and-out job. It was a time when they needed more cash. Lorry had been questioned when one tenant’s savings disappeared from his night table drawer. There was no proof, although it was true that Lorry had a key and had been in the apartment when the tenant was out, checking on a complaint of a ceiling leak from the apartment below. They let him go, but there’d been a lawyer’s fee. They needed cash fast, so they drove out to North Point Harbor.

THEY PASSED THE convenience store, the ice cream stand, the high school. Everything looked exactly the same, only smaller, like pieces set up in a child’s game. Elv began to feel apprehensive.

“Go the other way,” she told Lorry as he was about to turn onto the road that wound along the bay. “Stay on Main Street.”

They parked around the corner from Nightingale Lane, near the stop sign. Elv’s chest felt heavy. She felt like a stranger in her own life. She told him about what had happened to her. Not the details, just the way she’d stopped that man from taking Claire, how he’d taken Elv to his house and tied her up and done terrible things, and then how she convinced him she wouldn’t run away if he brought her a cup of water.

Lorry was enraged. He wanted to go after the horrible man right then and there, but Elv wouldn’t tell him any more.

“I want it to be over,” she said. “Being here reminds me.”

“We can go somewhere else,” Lorry said.

Elv shook her head. She knew where her mother kept her jewelry. Where there was a coffee can of cash. When Lorry started to get out of the car, she put her hand on his arm.

“I want to do it.”

There was the lawn where the Weinsteins’ dog had been tied up. There was the hawthorn tree. She knew this place far better than Lorry did. They argued and at last he gave in. She got out, closed the car door, made her way along the street. Had they even once come to look for her? Had they wondered where she might be? For all her mother and sister knew, she was locked up, the key thrown away, bleeding, falling, waiting for them. In fairy tales, people rescued each other. They made their way through brambles, trickery, witchery, spells.

Elv went through the yard, past the garden. It didn’t even look like a garden anymore, just a jumble no one bothered with. There were tufts of spent thistle, tangled black sweet pea vines. The downstairs bathroom window was never locked. It was small, but she could fit through. Elv pulled over a lawn chair, slid open the window, climbed inside. She wondered if time would shift, move backward. Maybe she would be ten again, before the bad thing happened, before everything changed. Elv felt such a deep longing, she was baffled by her own emotions. She dropped down from the window into the tub, then went to open the bathroom door.

She slipped into the hall, then stopped, heart pounding. At first she thought she spied a wolf. She imagined that at last she was to receive the fate she deserved. She would be devoured, piece by piece. The wolf-dog could have bitten her, but he just looked at her, then barked. She ran back into the bathroom, closed the door, crawled through the window, breaking the glass in her hurry. She heard it shatter, but she just kept on. She’d raced down the street so fast she went right past Lorry’s parked car. He’d driven after her, and when she threw herself into the passenger’s seat, he asked what had happened. She said he was right, it had been a mistake. Her hands were cut up and there was glass in her hair. She was never going there again.

FOR MONTHS ANNIE had been feeling exhausted and out of sorts. Elise insisted she go to the doctor. Tests were run, and she was diagnosed with leukemia, stage four. After her second treatment, her hair began to fall out. She went to a wig shop on Madison Avenue with her mother and cousin and decided to become a blonde. She and Elise and Natalia had laughed so hard everyone in the shop thought they were mad. It was an uncharacteristically wild decision. When Annie came home and presented herself, Claire too had laughed out loud. It was such a delight to hear Claire laugh again in the middle of her great silence that Annie almost felt being bald was worth the price of that glorious sound. Claire raced off to get a magazine. She returned with a photo of a Vogue model with the very same hairstyle. Annie laughed too. “Is that what I look like?” They couldn’t stop laughing. “Some bombshell,” Annie said of herself. Claire wrapped her arms around her mother. “Some blondes are tough, you know. They fight and they win,” Annie assured her, even though she knew from the lab reports that that was not likely to be true.