The Story Sisters

Claire no longer found herself drawn to windows or river-banks. She didn’t sleep her days away. Sometimes she arrived at the shop before it opened, waiting outside on a bench, gazing at the slanted sunlight. There’s a new girl who works in the Cohens’ jewelry shop, Natalia wrote in her letters to Elv. The other salesgirls have taken her up, taught her what to wear, they drag her along when they go out to lunch, especially on days when the light is orange, when the sky is the color blue it was when you were children, like a china plate, unbroken, luminous if you half-close your eyes.

ELV READ HER grandmother’s letters in the prison library, at a desk by the window. Afterward, she kept them stored in a shoebox beneath her cot, taking them out from time to time, savoring the descriptions of life in the Marais, the stories of the people in the neighborhood. Lorry sent her letters as well, and those she devoured. She read them standing up outside the mail room. He was always on the move, looking for the fortune he assured her he’d find. His letters were brief, but they tore her apart. She destroyed them after they’d been read. She didn’t want anyone else to gets their hands on them. They were intimate, erotic, desperate. They weren’t something a woman in prison should read while trying to get through each day without feeling anything.

SHE’D HAD THE good fortune to be sent to Bedford Hills but the bad luck of being assigned to the laundry, a job she hated. It was worse than latrine duty at Westfield. It was noisy, with so many inmates working that there was never an end to the chatter and bickering. The room was steamy hot and made her feel faint. The other women called her Missy and made fun of her. They thought she was stuck-up because she kept to herself. They assumed she was well educated when in fact she’d never finished high school. Women who were illiterate secretly came to her to ask if she would read the letters their children wrote. The letters moved her in ways she wouldn’t have imagined. She missed her mother. She was glad Annie couldn’t see where she’d ended up.

Pete Smith came to visit her sometimes. It was awkward because they didn’t know each other and there wasn’t much to say. Pete had moved into an apartment on the second floor of a two-family house in North Point Harbor. He’d come to think of the town as his home, the one he’d shared with Annie. He was a fixture at the cemetery, leaving flowers, cutting the tall grass with a scythe. Some kids in town called him Cemetery Man and ran away when they saw him on the street.

“They used to call me a witch,” Elv said. “I had long black hair, and I wore a necklace made of bones.”

“Gee, I wonder why they thought that,” Pete said, and they had both laughed. “Bones?” he remarked.

“To ward off evil.”

“I see that worked real well,” Pete said dryly.

Most of his neighbors in North Point Harbor were kind; they knew what had happened to Annie. Several had invited him to holiday dinners, but he’d graciously declined. Once in a while a neighbor came to him with concerns over a divorce or a teenager who’d run away. He tried to help, but he never took on their cases. He wasn’t in the business anymore. Except for Elv.

“Do you hear from Claire?” she asked him. “How is she?”

Each week Elv began a letter to Claire, and every time she tore it in two. She had even tried writing in Arnish, but she couldn’t remember the words, or if she did, she no longer knew what they meant.

Though he wasn’t much of a traveler, Pete had recently been for a visit. He’d stayed at a hotel around the corner from the apartment and other than seeing Claire, whom he’d gone to see on the occasion of her most recent birthday, he didn’t like anything about France. The food was complicated and expensive. He couldn’t speak the language and make himself understood. He sat on a bench across from Notre Dame and thought about Annie and how different Paris would be if she was there with him. In the end Claire had made him a hamburger and dumpling dinner in Natalia’s kitchen to celebrate her birthday and they’d all had a grand time. When she showed him all the rocks she’d collected, he bought a suitcase at a shop around the corner, where he’d had to pantomime what he wanted in order to be understood. He paid extra freight so he could bring the suitcase with him to the cemetery. He swore he would come back and visit again and Claire had laughed and said, “When? When hell freezes over?”

“When there are decent hamburgers,” he’d joked. Pete had spent an entire day setting down those rocks from Paris, half on Annie’s grave, the other half on Meg’s.

“She works in a jewelry store. She still has that dog.”

“The wolf,” Elv remarked, and when Pete seemed puzzled she added, “I just wanted to see my house. I saw the dog in the yard. I’m glad she has someone to protect her.”

“Maybe you were the one who needed to be protected,” Pete said. He was still trying to find that man Lorry had told him about, the one who had done such unspeakable things. Lorry said it had involved a teacher, and ever since, Pete had been trying to put the pieces together. Elv wasn’t much help. She just shook her head and acted as though she didn’t know what he was talking about. They were strangers, after all, thrown together because of their attachment to Annie.

“So tell me about your first date with my mother,” Elv said. “I want to hear all about it.”

“We went to a diner,” Pete told her.

“Big spender,” Elv joked.

“Actually, she paid.”