The Story Sisters

The old horse rubbed his big head against her. His back was swayed but he looked beautiful against the sky. The woman who’d bought him waved and came down the driveway. She was an animal lover and couldn’t have poor Jack taken away for horsemeat. The other horses had all been sold to riding stables around the state, but no one had wanted Jack because he was so old.

“I think he remembers you,” she said to Elv. Jack was eating out of Elv’s hands. She’d brought along a package of oatmeal cookies she’d purchased at the general store in town. Claire had said that cookies were what the horses at the stable in North Point Harbor liked best.

“Nah,” Elv said. “He wouldn’t remember me. My sister was a rider. Not me. I just liked horses. He looks happy here.”

The woman gave Elv a lift back to town. She waited in the shade for the bus and thought about the pond where she and Lorry had swam, how he had fucked her in the car and in the water, how she hadn’t wanted to go back to school, how she’d been so young and stupid and so unlucky and lucky all at the same time. When the bus came, she got on slowly. Her ankles were enormously swollen, and she was tired. She wouldn’t return to this town. She was never going to ride down dirt roads searching for that pond. She was never going to see Jack again, or climb the fence to explore the grounds of the school, or find the bones of the bird necklace she’d made that night when she sat with Claire at the kitchen table. She got a seat and looked out at the trees and thought what a long way it seemed to New York, and how her mother had driven here once in a blinding snowstorm and she had refused to see her. How she’d watched from the window, too prideful to call out to her mother, too young to know how few chances there would be to do so.

SHE SPENT THE Fourth of July going from one hardware store to another in Forest Hills, searching for an air conditioner she might buy on time. Nobody trusted anybody and everything was sold out anyway. She wound up with a lousy fan that merely spread the heat around. She put cold compresses on her head and drank OJ with ice and broke out in a heat rash. Then Pete arrived with an air conditioner in his car. She said he’d done enough, she didn’t want to trouble him any more, but he’d said, “That’s what kids are for. To cause you trouble.” So when the time came, she phoned him. It was embarrassing, but she didn’t have anyone else to call. He’d waited in the hallway at Queens County, pacing, as though he were her father rather than a stranger. When they came to tell him the baby was a girl, he shouted “Hurray!” and clapped a few other men waiting in the lounge on the back, then went to phone Natalia.

“Six pounds, six ounces,” he told her. “Perfect in every way.” It was the middle of the night in Paris and Natalia had been asleep, but she was grateful for Pete’s call. She took out all the photographs Elv had sent her over the years. She especially loved the pregnant ones—there was one in which Elv had lifted up her shirt to show off her enormous belly. She had a beautiful grin on her face. Tell me it won’t stay this way, she’d written to her ama. Promise me this baby will come out.

At first Natalia didn’t tell Claire about the baby. If she tried to bring up Elv’s name, Claire would shrug off the conversation or make an excuse to leave the room. Natalia hadn’t pressed her, but now things had changed. She knocked on the bedroom door and Claire answered wearing a T-shirt and underwear. Her hair was knotted and she looked rumpled, but she hadn’t been asleep. She’d been reading Kafka, the master of unhappiness and self-punishment, a genius when it came to revealing the many ways in which people were unable to see the fundamental nature of those closest to them. Just as Claire suspected: human beings were mysterious creatures who hid their true centers, like onions with layer after layer of translucent skin. Claire liked to read the same book over and over again until it was familiar and there were no surprises.

“Sit down,” Natalia suggested after Claire had let her into the bedroom.

“I just got up,” Claire said. She was pale, out of sorts, a true insomniac. She had grown bored at the shop. She knew the other salesgirls pitied her. Lucie and Jeanne both had boyfriends and social lives. They brought her more and more hand-me-downs, as if that would change her fate. Sometimes she left the bundles of clothes they brought in the bin in the courtyard without even checking to see what was inside.

The fact that her grandmother had come to talk to her now made her anxious. Claire expected bad news. It was the middle of the night, after all. She was convinced to perch at the foot of her bed and listen. Though it was July she kept the windows closed. The room was airless and hot. She didn’t mind.

Natalia explained that she hadn’t wanted to upset Claire by bringing up her sister’s name but there was a time and a place for everything, and this was the time to tell Claire that her sister had had a child.

“She’s still with him?” Claire fleetingly thought about the night she’d opened the door to find them in bed when she’d had such a terrible fever. Her face flushed.

Natalia shook her head. No, that man was gone. Dead.

“I pity the child,” Claire said.

“Claire!”

“Well, I do! What do you want me to say? That I’m happy for her? That I wish her all the luck in the world?”

“You can say what you want.” Natalia’s face was ashen. She had never been more concerned about Claire than she was at that moment, or more ashamed. “But Elv knows how to love someone. Can you say the same for yourself?”