The Story Sisters

Seeing Natalia in court made everything worse. Elv felt a burning inside her chest, behind her eyes. She had begun to dream about the garden at home, the trellis where the sweet peas twined. She longed for the stories her mother would tell. She wanted to go back to a place that didn’t exist anymore. Now she scanned the court for Lorry and was relieved to find he wasn’t there. He might have tried something foolish, rushed the bench, tried to carry her off. In his letter he’d written he was going out to make his fortune. For every day that she was away, he would be working toward their future together. He would come back for her then. All she had to do was wait and he’d be there.

Elv hung her head while the charges against her were read. Her lawyer pled guilty and asked for leniency on a charge of grand larceny that could potentially carry fifteen years. She was young, he told the judge. Just a girl. She had made a mistake, but she was a worthwhile, intelligent young woman from a good family. Look, Your Honor, there is her grandmother in the last row. Elv turned to glance over her shoulder. Her grandmother stood up. Elv recognized the black cashmere coat as one she had often tried on to model in front of the big gold-framed mirror on Eighty-ninth Street. It was the sort of coat Audrey Hepburn might have worn. When her grandmother waved, Elv waved back. She felt something in her breaking.

“Ama,” she called.

The bailiff asked Elv to be quiet and not to speak out of turn. Of course she complied. She turned to face the bench. She never looked at her grandmother again. Everyone could hear Natalia crying, and perhaps that was why the judge said he would consider Elv’s attorney’s request of leniency.

PETE KEPT IN touch with his old buddies in the system. He checked the newspaper every day. He and Natalia had decided to keep the situation not only from Annie, but from Claire as well. But Claire happened to spy Pete tossing the newspaper in the trash can on the day after the initial hearing. On her way to school, she went to ferret the paper out from the trash. She slipped it into her backpack, then ran for the school bus. Even nice days made Claire think about the cemetery. That’s why she usually wore a scarf. She’d visit Meg after school and it always seemed cold there. The trees along the cemetery paths had leaves that curled up and turned black at the edges. The grass was so tall Claire had the urge to lie down in it and gaze at the world from that position until at last she closed her eyes.

The bus to the Graves Academy stopped on the corner. When it arrived, Claire got on. She nodded to some of the girls she knew, then went to the back, where she always sat. She unfolded the paper and found the small article in the metro section. A suspect had been charged in a scam in Astoria that had tried to bilk people out of their life savings. There was a murky photograph of a woman with long dark hair. Claire had newsprint on her hands. The papers all referred to Elv as Elisabeth Story, so it didn’t even seem like the same person.

On the day the sentencing was announced, Claire got up early and went to collect the paper before Pete could. He came downstairs to fix the coffee and saw her out there on the porch, hunched over, reading. It was barely a paragraph; that was all the attention the crime warranted. The weather was warmer by then. It was the sort of spring day Claire hated. Bumblebees rumbled around what was left of the garden.

Pete came out to sit beside her. Annie had taken a turn for the worse, so he hadn’t kept up with the case the way he might have. “What did the judge give her?”

“Three to five years.” Claire threw the paper in the trash. “Meg’s the one who got the death penalty.”

“It was an accident,” Pete said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Claire had to collect herself. She wasn’t going to feel sorry for her sister. She wasn’t going to think of Elv going to jail, or the way those men had grabbed her at Westfield, or how fast she’d walked along Nightingale Lane on the bad day, as if a demon was right behind her. She’d slowed down once she’d grabbed Claire’s hand and they started home. She’d known Claire couldn’t keep up.

“Let’s make tomato soup,” Pete suggested. There were some store-bought tomatoes in the fridge and a container of cream. Annie had all but stopped eating. Maybe soup would bring back her appetite.

Claire nodded. “She’d like that.” As they went inside she blurted, “I’m glad you didn’t tell Mom about Elv. She would have felt bad for her.”

“Love is like a spyglass,” Pete said. “Your mom told me that.”

“Oh yeah?” Claire said. “Well, I think it’s like a pack of lies.”

“How do they get lies into a pack? Is there some kind of machine that does it?”

Claire laughed.

“You can look at it from a distance, that’s what your mother told me, and maybe it seems far away. But it’s still there. It’s still the same.”

HE BROUGHT LUNCH up on a tray when the soup was ready. Annie had been making a list inside her head of all the tasks that needed to be completed after she was gone. Someone had to sell the house, convince Claire to go to college, make a vet appointment for Shiloh to have his rabies shot. The gutters needed to be cleaned, the mail stopped, the taxes paid. She was too tired to write this all down, but she kept on thinking about all the things she wouldn’t have time to do. She thought and thought until she only cared about one last thing.

“I got the good rye bread,” Pete said of the toast he’d fixed to go along with the bowl of soup. “The kind you like. With seeds.”