The Story Sisters

They sat parked there in the Volvo, the engine running.

“Is this where you lived?” Mimi said in a hushed tone when she saw the house. It was a perfectly good house, three stories, white with black shutters and a lovely wide porch. It had two chimneys and hollyhocks by the door. “It’s a castle.”

There was the hawthorn tree, there was the garden. Another family lived here now. There were lights on in the rooms and they could see inside. Bookshelves, couches, paintings on the wall. There was a cat in the kitchen.

“Which one was your bedroom with your sisters?” Mimi asked.

Elv pointed out the attic windows.

“It was the tower,” Mimi said, awed.

“We had the best garden. There were all different-colored tomatoes,” Elv told her.

“Tomatoes are red,” Mimi said.

“Well, we had pink and yellow and brown and purple and green.”

“It’s true,” Pete said. “They were like candy.”

“Unlikely,” Mimi said.

Pete and Elv exchanged an amused look over Mimi’s head. Claire used to sound like that. So matter-of-fact.

Elv and Mimi got out and stood by the side of the road across from the house. Dusk spread across the lawn in waves of velvet. So often Elv found herself saying the same things to her daughter that Annie had said to her. She felt a flood of love for the small solemn face upturned in the dark, listening to every word. Here is a story about a boy who had the most loyal dog in the world, about three sisters who danced in the garden, about a mother who would do anything for her child.

Maybe some love was guaranteed. Maybe it fit inside you and around you like skin and bones. This is what she remembered and always would: the sisters who sat with her in the garden, the grandmother who stitched her a dress the color of the sky, the man who spied her in the grass and loved her beyond all measure, the mother who set up a tent in the garden to tell her a story when she was a child, neither good nor bad, selfish nor strong, only a girl who wanted to hear a familiar voice as the dark fell down, and the moths rose, and the night was sure to come.

Faithful

I waited in the place where I last saw you.

It was night and then morning, then night once more.

A decade passed and then a hundred years. Green leaves became red, then green again. The tree that had sheltered me was pushed down by the wind. I saw lightning in the sky, stars that were burning out in the heavens. I saw men tell women they loved them, then turn away. I saw men who were true but were never able to speak their minds. I saw lives begin, graves dug, snow falling. I was there for so long that time went backward. There was the nightingale. There was the hawthorn tree. I was a girl with long black hair watching you come across the grass toward me. When you recognized me, only an hour had passed.

WHENEVER PETE SMITH TOOK THEM SHOPPING HE ALWAYS bought Mimi too much. It didn’t matter if the store was Target or Saks Fifth Avenue, by the age of seven Mimi could manage to talk him into whatever she wanted. She called him Gogi, which was her version of Grandpa. She was a big fan of nicknames, and books, and ballet. Her hair was black and her eyes were darker than Lorry’s. “She’ll be spoiled,” Elv would remind Pete, thinking that her daughter’s charm was so like Lorry’s as well. All the girls at school wanted to sit with her at lunch to hear the stories she told. They hovered around her, wanting to be her best friend. When she came into school wearing pink cowgirl boots, her classmates went home and begged their mothers for the same. Pete didn’t think that a few shopping sprees every now and then would have a bad effect. It was nice to spoil someone. He’d been the first person other than Elv and the nurses at the hospital to see Mimi when she’d come into this world, so he reserved the right to be proud.

He’d been around town long enough that people had stopped calling him Cemetery Man, even though he still went every week to cut the grass, trim the lilacs, sit on a bench, bringing along his shovel when the path to the graves was heaped with snow. He was known as Mimi’s grandfather now, and even if there was no blood connection, that was who he was. Elv and Mimi had moved into the top-floor apartment in his house in North Point Harbor. Elv worked at another animal shelter in a nearby town, where she was hired as assistant director. Mimi was in third grade at the same school the Story sisters had attended. It had been completely remodeled and the teachers seemed so young. It looked different, but when Elv walked inside, it felt the same. Pete went with her for the first parent-teacher conference. Elv still had trouble with official meetings and authority figures. She got fidgety and self-conscious, all the more so for having to walk down hallways she had taken with her sisters.

Part of the newly remodeled school library was called the Meg Story Reading Room. There had been a celebration when it first opened. Elv shook hands with the mayor and the librarians and the members of the town council. Elise and Mary Fox had come, and Elise cried when Pete got up and said a few words about how books had mattered so much to Meg, and how Annie had wanted to honor her memory by sharing her love of books with the town. When the speakers and the guests were directed to the buffet table set up in the hallway, Elv went to explore the reading room. Meg’s name was on a brass plate above the door. Elv drifted over to the fiction section and found the row of Dickens novels, the books by Hawthorne.

“It’s beautiful. Perfect,” she told Pete later. “It’s just what my mother would have wanted for Meg. You did everything right.”

On afternoons when Elv got out of work early, she went to the reading room while she waited for the three o’clock bell. If you sat by the window, you could see the bay when the trees were bare. When the trees were in full leaf, all you could see was green. The town felt different to her now that she knew she wouldn’t see that bad man again. She had seen his car a second time, long ago, when she was hanging out with the kids who smoked dope under the bridge and that poor Justin Levy was still traipsing after her. It was the same one he’d had when Claire had slipped into the backseat and he was pulling away and Elv had to yank the car door open and jump inside while it was moving so he couldn’t take Claire. When she recognized the license plate, she should have called the police, had him arrested, but she was panic-stricken. She remembered that was the day she told Justin he should find someone better, someone who could really love him. But he hadn’t known how to do that.