The Story Sisters

Not far away was the meadow where the horse had fallen on the runaway day so long ago. Elv had gotten out of the police car and walked across the lawn. She hadn’t felt afraid. That was the amazing thing. She’d usually been so scared, but when she was with Claire her fear abated. Her sister had been in the upended carriage, watching, sure of her. Claire had understood why Elv had fallen to her knees. She knew what it was like to carry the past wherever you went, sewn to your skin. Elv wished her sister was with her now, sprawled out in the grass, underneath the lace-work pattern of shadows. She was afraid, and she wanted to be with someone who loved her, but since she couldn’t think of who that might be, she lay down in the grass by herself and finished reading her book.

THE SUMMER WAS exceedingly hot. Elv still tried to get to the cemetery every day, but her ankles were swelling and the trip was getting more difficult. She had to take two buses from the apartment Pete had found for her in Forest Hills. It was a nice neighborhood. A nice building. Her grandmother helped with the rent, sending a check every month. Elv took photographs of herself pregnant and sent them to Natalia in return. She wrote to her grandmother each week, short, cheerful letters. She didn’t let on that she was exhausted or that she suffered from excruciating bouts of loneliness.

At the cemetery there were concrete benches along the narrow paths behind the rectory and very little sunlight. Hostas and ferns grew but not much else. It was the sort of dark garden where there were spiderwebs and peepers in the damp gulleys even though it was in the middle of the city, with buses rumbling by on the other side of the walls. Elv asked the grounds crew if she could pay to have a rosebush planted, but they said it would be a waste of time. There wasn’t any sun behind the church, and the high walls wouldn’t let in enough light.

Pete Smith had found her a job as well as an apartment, not an easy task to accomplish considering that she was a pregnant woman with no education or skills. She worked at an animal shelter. She did intakes and fed the dogs and took them for walks and checked references and referrals. Elv soon taught herself how to type and use the word processor. But she preferred to spend time with the dogs. She tried some of the training techniques she had learned from Adrian Bean, and several seemingly hopeless cases were adopted after she’d had a hand in their training. It was soothing not to be with people, to accomplish something on the dogs’ behalf. They watched her with their dark eyes, waiting patiently for her attention. When they whimpered, Elv crooned to them in a sweet, high voice. She sang to them when she took them out in the shelter’s small yard in the evenings before she went home. Sometimes the children who lived in the apartment house behind the shelter swore they heard faeries singing. They opened their windows and leaned their elbows on the sills, but all they could see were brick walls, a crisscross of telephone wires, the darkening sky, a woman tossing a ball for a few dogs.

When Elv thought about Pollo, the first dog she’d trained, she felt a sharp pang of loss. She guessed that if she had to write down the most important quality in a person or a dog, it would be loyalty. All the rest didn’t matter. That’s what she’d come to believe. It didn’t matter at all.

She thought a lot about Meg. She wished she could sit down and talk to her, knowing what she knew now. She wished she could trade places with her, that she could wake the dead, unwind time. One night she dreamed of Meg, who was exactly the same, only she couldn’t speak. Se nom brava gig, Elv said in the language she’d forgotten in her waking life. Dream talk should have worked in a dream, but Meg disappeared and no one answered her. Elv woke up in a sweat. It occurred to her then that she had invented Arnish because she couldn’t speak. She had accused Meg of being jealous, but she’d been the jealous one. She was jealous that Meg didn’t know what she knew, that some sins were unspeakable and unpardonable.

Pregnant women have urges, and Elv had the urge to go back to Westfield. She kept thinking about the red leaves, the way the snow had fallen as if she were in a snow globe, the rabbits she would see early in the morning, the hawks that perched in the trees. She took the bus from Forty-second Street one day, only a few weeks before her due date. It was a longer ride than she’d imagined, and once she’d had to ask the bus driver to pull over so she could get out and be sick by the side of the road. The bus was hot and stuffy, and the ride into the mountains was bumpy. She got out in the town, which was still just as small and as dead as it had been when she’d been trapped in New Hampshire. She went to the taxi stand and told the sole driver she wanted to go to the Westfield School. It had been closed for years, he said. Everything had been sold, including the horses; the buildings had been abandoned. There’d been a lawsuit and the state had stepped in, and no one had ever bought the property when it was put up at auction.

Elv walked over to the town hall and the clerk helped her track down the couple who’d taken Jack, the old horse she’d loved. They kept him in a field, and there was a small barn for him in the winter. The wife said it would be fine if she visited and gave her instructions on how to get to their farm. It wasn’t a far walk, down the road a mile and a half. When Elv got to the field she was transported back to the day when the grass was so green, when Lorry walked toward her and the rest of the world dropped away. She stood at the fence. There was Jack, his big head bowed, grazing on meadow grass.

“Hey,” Elv said. She got up onto the first rung of the fence and clucked her tongue. There were gnats and blackflies in the air. Everything smelled like grass. Jack came shambling over. “Hey there, buddy. It’s me. Elv.”