The Story Sisters

At 3:00 A.M. she phoned Pete Smith, hauling him out of bed to answer.

“I was stupid to call. Go back to sleep,” she told him.

Pete was already pulling on his clothes, his socks and shoes. He’d been dreaming about Annie and then all at once her daughter had called.

“Let me check around,” he said.

“No, forget it. I’m sure he’s fine.” Elv had bitten her nails to the quick; rims of blood circled each one. They had both disappointed people, but never each other. He didn’t just disappear. But that wasn’t true, not really, it was only that he always came back. Elv thought of the three years he’d been gone, and all the things they’d agreed never to talk about. Her dread intensified. Pete phoned after an hour. He’d called around to a couple of people he’d worked with in the department and also to some local hospitals and hadn’t found out anything. He was sure to know something soon. Certainly by morning.

But in the morning, there was still no news. Elv went out looking. She asked one of the old ladies on the street who had known Lorry forever and she said, “Try Marguerite’s.” Elv stared. “You know, Mimi.” Elv felt shaken to think there was another woman, until the old lady added, “His grandmother’s grave. You know—Our Lady of Sorrow.”

Elv walked through the snow. It was a small cemetery behind a churchyard. She asked the caretaker where she could find Lorry’s grandmother’s grave. It was fairly new; his grandmother had only died the previous winter. There was a holly plant someone had left, the pot wrapped in bright foil. Elv hadn’t even known Lorry had a grandmother. She felt undone and confused. She wished she could call her mother, ask her what to do. She had phoned his pals, gone to his haunts, come up with nothing. When she went to the bars, the way the men had looked at her, then glanced away, made her know they wouldn’t have told her anything if they had known where he was. Her suspicions were confirmed by their casual replies, their clear desire to be rid of her. So that was it. He’d been using drugs, they all had. Not a single one would have told her the truth.

When Lorry still wasn’t home that afternoon, she went out and got on the subway to go to her scheduled doctor’s appointment. She went right past her stop, into Manhattan. She felt crazy and lost. She got off at Penn Station. She followed the trail he had told her about, wandering through the crowd, desperate to find him. At last there it was, the grated gate to the otherworld, just beyond the stairs leading up to Eighth Avenue. She went over, leaned hard against it, pushed. It swung open. There was a stair, a metal rung, just as he’d said.

She slipped down onto the rusty ladder. The darkness smelled foul. Soil, shit, ash, flood, mold, smoke. She let her eyes adjust. The bustle of Penn Station was only inches away, but the darkness was endless. A person could slip into it and get lost. She felt a twinge inside her. Her stomach flip-flopped. How could anyone survive this? She held on to the ladder. Anything could be down below, a horde of demons. There might be rats, wild dogs, giants. “Lorry,” she called plaintively. Her voice came back to her, mocking her desperation with its echo. “Lorry,” she cried until her voice was wrecked.

She went back up aboveground and found the public toilet. People were all but living there. An old woman had made a bed out of newspapers that she’d carefully laid out on the tiles. People stepped over her as though she wasn’t there. Elv washed her hands. In the mirror her face looked blotchy. Her eyes were rimmed red. A woman and her child were washing themselves thoroughly, as if the sink was their bathtub. “There you go, baby,” the woman said to her little girl as she dunked her face in the water. “Clean as can be.”

When Elv got back to their street, she noticed police cars from the 114th Precinct. She went inside, then took the stairs. From the hallway she could see that the door to their apartment had been flung open. Two cops were inside and Michael was there as well, sitting on the couch, his coat thrown down beside him, as if he owned the place. Pete Smith was waiting for her. He took her by the arm before she could go inside and led her down the hall so he could have a word with her. He was still wearing his gray coat and his hat; the same middle-aged sad-looking guy she’d called and woken from a dead sleep even though he didn’t owe her a thing.

“What the hell is this?” Elv said. “They can’t just be in there.”

She couldn’t stop thinking about that little girl at Penn Station. She felt choked up and confused. Everything on the surface was flooding away. Everything seemed raw and brutal and immediate.

“He was at an apartment around the corner,” Pete said. “His brother found him.”

“Good,” Elv said. “That sounds close by.”

“Elv.”

“I’m going to kill him for worrying me. I went all the hell over the city. You wouldn’t believe the places I went.” She still had rust stains on her hands from the rungs of the ladder to the otherworld. She had ashes on the soles of her boots.

“Are you listening to me, kiddo? It’s not good.”

Elv looked at Pete, then glanced into the apartment. “He got busted, right? We have to get him out of jail.”

Pete embraced her and then she knew what she’d already known last night when he didn’t show up, when the snow was falling and he hadn’t called to say Don’t worry, baby. “I’m sorry,” Pete said, which was the stupid remark people said when things were irrevocable, when you’d lost the only thing you cared about in this world.