The Story Sisters

THE FOLLOWING SPRING, the flowers on the chestnut tree were in such abundance that tourists came to take photographs. It was the season the family had always dreaded, but this year was different. When spring arrived, Natalia and Claire welcomed it. They washed the windows in Natalia’s apartment, ordered heirloom tomato seeds, went walking by the river in the glassy afternoons. This year upon her return from visiting Mimi and Elv, Natalia was sewing Claire’s wedding dress. She had gotten special magnifying glasses in order to see the stitches. She had arthritis in her hands, but she had worked all winter and now she was getting close to completion. She would need to persevere in order to finish by the coming summer. Her fingers bled from the delicacy of the stitches, and she had to soak her hands in warm olive oil, but she felt certain this would be the last dress she would ever attempt, so she put everything into it. She had been in love twice and all that she’d felt went into the dress, with stitches set so close together it was nearly impossible to see them with the naked eye. In Natalia’s opinion, that was the way love was, invisible, there whether or not you wanted to see it or admit to it.

On the day the package arrived, Claire was in a hurry to get home. She’d forgotten her umbrella and the rains had begun. She avoided puddles as best she could, leaping across gutters. She had on a raincoat over black jeans and a sweater, but was soon drenched to the skin. She always wore the lapis necklace with the ancient bell, which she half believed had brought Philippe to her. Well, maybe it had and maybe it hadn’t, but she wasn’t taking any chances. When she got home, she quickly shrugged off her raincoat, then toweled her sopping hair dry. She slipped off her boots and pulled off her jeans. To her surprise, Madame Cohen and her grandmother were in her kitchen, a pot of tea on the table between them. They glanced up at Claire when she walked in.

“Now what?” Claire only had on underwear and a black sweater. She was pale and long-legged and serious. Love had made her more approachable. People often came up to her on the street and asked for directions or begged a few euros to tide them over until their luck changed.

“Is someone dead?”

“Not at all,” her ama assured her.

Though her amulets were more in demand than ever, the only jewelry Claire wore, other than the love talisman, was her engagement ring. Madame Cohen had given Philippe her own ring to present to Claire, the one her grandmother had brought from Russia. Everyone in the family was talking about this. It was something of a scandal. Madame Cohen hadn’t offered it to anyone else, and there had been plenty of engagements throughout the years. She’d been waiting for the right person, and that person was Claire. She’d known it when she caught the first demon on the flypaper. She’d known when Claire had cried in the kitchen during her job interview. Madame Cohen had arranged this marriage when she sent Philippe to bury the dog. In a world of sorrow, love was an act of will. All you needed were the right ingredients. Not even her own daughters knew the circumstances of how she’d lost her sisters, that’s how long ago it had been. She knew that sometimes when you were supposed to feel lucky, all you felt was despair. You were guilty just because you had managed to live. For reasons you couldn’t understand, that made no sense whatsoever, you were the one left unscathed.

The package that had arrived by post that day had been addressed in Mimi’s girlish handwriting. The postmark was North Point Harbor.

“Open it,” Madame Cohen urged.

Inside was a painting in a cheap frame. It was all black. A watercolor. It was a young girl’s painting of the Seine with a starless night sky up above. It was the painting Claire had always wanted. She read her niece’s note. She thought about girls with long black hair, about the bottle-green leaves of the sweet pea vines and the white-throated squash blooms. She thought about a robin in the grass, and the sprinklers being turned on, and about the hot pavement on the corner where she had waited all day. She thought about the tomatoes in the garden. Cherokee chocolates, Golden Jubilees, Green Zebras, Rainbows. She felt a surge of grief, not for everything she’d lost, but for everything that had never been. She hadn’t even known how much she’d missed Elv.

“They want to come to Paris,” she said.

THE WEDDING WAS held in the Bois de Boulogne, at the Chalet des Îles, set in the center of the lake. The family had rented out the restaurant and invited sixty people. The Cohens had such a big family and so many friends that several had to be cut from the invitation list to ensure they didn’t go over the lucky number of sixty. There were some hard feelings, but there had already been a huge engagement party several months before, at Philippe’s brother Émile’s house, with too many guests to keep track of. That evened things out a bit.

Sixty was a lucky number, Madame Cohen had decreed, and she had been right too many times for them to ignore her. It would bring them happiness, they would see. Indeed, the weather was perfect, just as she’d predicted. The hot summer’s day had faded into a warm blue evening. It would stay light until after ten. No one worried about the silly rumors about creatures that could be found in the Bois after dark, vicious dogs, wolves, lost souls. This was not the weather or the time for such things. Guests were ferried across the water in little boats, disembarking on a dock strung with white lights. A trio played in the garden and music drifted across the island. The bees were moving slowly through the thin blue light, drawn by the sweet glasses of champagne and kir, making themselves drunk with the scent and the taste.