The Story Sisters

SOMETIMES WHEN LORRY was asleep Elv lay awake just to watch him. She watched to make certain he wouldn’t disappear. He reminded her of the invisible ink she’d once used to make maps of Arnelle. You had to hold it up to the light to see it; otherwise it appeared that you had only a blank page. She still had that one painting she’d done of the Seine, black wash on heavy white paper. She’d kept it all this time, hoping she would one day have a home where she could hang artwork on the walls. Now that time had come. She couldn’t believe her luck. She started to think about the future and what it might bring. When she wrote to her ama, she told her they were planning to come to Paris. She would make amends. She had already decided she would never go back to using drugs. It was a different them, but when she woke in the night Elv sometimes feared their old selves were sewn to their skins with black thread, like shadows. Once she found someone’s works in the bathroom, in the cabinet under the sink, wrapped in cloth and tied up with a black shoelace. Lorry was in the shower and she waited there in the steamy bathroom till he came out. He grabbed her and pulled her to him. His dark hair was slicked back. He was wet and dripping water onto her clothes. She showed him what she’d found.

“God damn that Michael,” Lorry said, disgusted, quickly admitting that he’d let his brother come over one day when Elv was out. Michael had led a life of bouncing in and out of jail, but he was Lorry’s brother, after all, flesh and blood. He must have left his works behind. He could tell because Michael always tied them together with a shoelace.

They ran into Michael only a few days later. He was a man now, not some punk kid, and she barely recognized him. She and Lorry were in a bar and Michael waved them over. “Stay here,” Lorry told her. “You don’t need to spend time with that lowlife.” They’d fallen out years ago and now they argued. Lorry grabbed Michael and pulled him off his bar stool. “Don’t you ever,” Elv had heard him say. When Lorry stalked back to her, Michael put his fingers out and made a shooting motion at his brother’s head, then he looked at Elv and grinned.

They decided Michael wouldn’t be allowed up to the apartment. Soon after, Elv found some packets of heroin. She was writing a letter, and she went to the kitchen searching for an envelope and found it hidden in a box behind the cans of soup and the sugar. She sat down and looked out the window. The urge to get high rose into her mouth. The desire had a cool, rusty taste. She licked her lips. She felt confused and knotted up. She thought about how easy it would be to set the witch in lines and snort it. She was distraught to think Lorry was lying to her, but she understood. She wanted to get high too. It didn’t matter, she couldn’t. It was out of her hands. She thought she might be pregnant. She was convinced it had happened the first time they were together, when it was raining and they had been so desperate for each other. She didn’t say anything to Lorry right away, but she watched him more carefully. She wondered if this was how Pete Smith observed the world, putting pieces together, seeing everyday life as a puzzle, examining the smallest details.

So she watched and remembered. How he pushed his plate away and wasn’t hungry, how he came in exhausted and fell into bed when usually all he’d want to do was fuck her, how he was gone more often, working, he said, although at what she didn’t know, how he seemed distracted, how when she wanted to go for a walk or to the movies, he’d say later, baby, as if going to sleep or lying around dreaming on the couch in the middle of the day was perfectly normal. Then he’d go out and she wouldn’t know where he was. He said he played poker, had business deals, he said, Come on, you know it’s you and me. And it was.

She took the home pregnancy test and it was positive. Her grandmother wrote that the only way to be sure was to see a doctor. She went to a nearby clinic and saw a doctor, who congratulated her. Elv took the bus home. She couldn’t stop smiling. She stopped on a corner and called her grandmother. “You’re going to be a great-grandmère!” she cried into the phone. Her ama was overjoyed. They chatted excitedly about names, and whether the child would be a boy or a girl. “Oh, a girl,” Elv assured her. “It has to be. The Storys only have girls.” When Natalia asked, “And what does Lorry say?” Elv said, “He’s over the moon.” But she hadn’t told him yet. She had a sinking feeling. He was there when she got to the apartment, pacing. She still didn’t say anything.

“Where the hell were you?” he said. When he couldn’t find her, he flashed back to the day when she was picked up by the police.

“Walking,” Elv told him. She felt like a liar even when she told the truth. Suspicion somehow made you an accomplice. “Where were you last night?” He hadn’t gotten home till late, then had crawled into bed without even talking to her.

“This isn’t about where I was,” Lorry said. “Don’t try to shift things around.”

Elv went into the kitchen and took the heroin out of the cabinet. Lorry had followed, expecting to continue their fight. When he saw he’d been found out, he folded himself into a kitchen chair. He always said that when caught red-handed it was best to come clean. “My fatal flaw,” he said sadly.

Elv opened a can of soup and began heating it up in a saucepan. She was starving.

“I’m having a baby,” she said.

Lorry stared at her, thinking he’d heard wrong.

“I think it’s a girl,” Elv told him.