The Story Sisters

ARNELLE WAS so deep under the ground you had to descend more than a thousand steps. There were three sisters there, Elv had told Claire. They were beautiful and loyal, with pale eyes and long black hair.

“Like us,” Claire always said, delighted.

If they concentrated, if they closed their eyes, they could always find their way back to the otherworld. It was beneath the tall hawthorn tree in the yard, beneath the chestnut tree in Paris. Two doorways no one else could get past. No one could hurt you there or tear you into pieces. No one could put a curse on you or lock you away. Once you went down the underground stairs and went through the gate there were roses even when snow fell in the real world, when the drifts were three feet deep.

MOST PEOPLE WERE seized by the urgency of Elv’s stories, and her sisters were no exception. At school, classmates gathered round her at lunchtime. She never spoke about Arnelle to anyone but her dear sisters, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have stories to tell. For her school friends she had tales of life on earth, stories of demons she didn’t want her sisters to hear. A demon usually said three words to put a curse on you. He cut you three times with a knife. Elv could see what the rest of them never could. She had “the sight,” she said. She predicted futures for girls in her history and math classes. She scared the hell out of some of them and told others exactly what they wanted to hear. Even in Paris when she went to visit her grandparents, the city was filled with demons. They prowled the streets and watched you as you slept. They came in through the window like black insects drawn to the light. They put a hand over your mouth, kept your head under water if you screamed. They came to get you if you ever dared tell and turned you to ash with one touch.

Each day, the number of girls who gathered around Elv in the cafeteria increased. They circled around to hear her intoxicating tales, told with utter conviction. Demons wore black coats and thick-soled boots. The worst sort of goblin was the kind that could eat you alive. Just a kiss, miss. Just a bite.

“Don’t eat bread,” Elv warned these girls, who quickly tossed out their sandwiches. “Stay away from metal,” she whispered, and the girls who had mouthfuls of braces went home and begged for them to be taken off. “Be careful of ropes,” she warned, and in gym classes there were now troupes of girls who refused to climb the ropes, even if that meant detention or a call home to their mothers.

THAT HOT AUGUST four years ago when Arnelle began, late one inky blue night, the girls went into the garden after their mother went to bed. They drew a blanket over their heads. They cut themselves with a razor blade and held the wounds together so their blood would mix and their word would be true. Ever since, the girls had traded blood in August, including Meg, even though they never told her why they’d begun the ritual. They would creep out through the back door when their mother was asleep. That first time, Claire had cried at the sting of the razor. Elv had given her gumdrops and told her how brave she was, perhaps the bravest of all. Claire knew she wasn’t the brave one, but the next time she didn’t shed a tear. It had been Meg, always so rational, who suggested they stop cutting themselves and put forth the notion that what they were doing was nonsense. Besides, they might get an infection from this procedure, perhaps even blood poisoning. But she hadn’t been there when the demon pulled them into his car. She didn’t know what you might be forced to do to save your sister.

“Don’t worry,” Elv had said. “We’ll protect each other.”

NOW, AT THE window of the Plaza, as they brooded over the fate of the horses, Elv was telling her sisters about love. The Arnish were appalled at mortal love. It was a weak brew compared to true Arnish passion. Your beloved in Arnelle would do anything to save you. He’d be willing to be slashed by knives, tied to trees, torn into a bloody heap.

“What if you’re in love like Ama and Grandpa?” Meg asked when the rules of love were recounted. They had the comfortable sort of love where they finished each other’s sentences. It was impossible to imagine their grandfather tied to a tree.

“Then you’re doomed to be human,” Elv said sadly.

“Well, maybe I’d prefer that,” Meg offered. She was getting fed up with Arnelle. If she wanted to enter an otherworld, all she had to do was open a novel. “I don’t want to be among demons.”

Elv shook her head. There were some things her practical middle sister would never understand. Meg had no idea what human beings were really like. Elv hoped she never found out.

As for Claire, she couldn’t look away from the street. Now all she could see were the carriage horses’ ribs sticking out, the foam around their mouths, the way they limped as they trotted off. There was a spell Elv had taught her one night. Meg was up in their room reading, so it was just the two of them in the garden. Ever since the gypsy moth summer they’d left Meg out of their most intimate plans. The spell Elv taught Claire that night was to call for protection. You were only to use it when it was absolutely necessary. Elv took a trowel from their mother’s garden shed, where there were spiders and bags of mulch, and drew the sharp edge across the palm of her hand. She let her blood drip into the soil. “Nom brava gig,” she whispered. “Reuna malin.”

My brave sister. Rescue me.

All Claire had to do was say that and Elv would be there. Just like that terrible day.

“What if you’re too far away to hear me?” Claire had asked.

Their own garden seemed strange at night. There were white moths, and the soil looked black. Claire didn’t want to think about the things that lived under the weeds. They’d seen a creepy crawly there once that was as big as her hand. It had a thousand legs.

“I’ll hear you.” Elv’s hand was still bleeding, but it didn’t seem to hurt. “I’ll find you wherever you are.”

STANDING BEHIND HER daughters at the window at the Plaza, Annie had a sinking feeling. They were ten floors off the ground and yet the world was too close. Those horrible horses had captured her girls’ attention. She didn’t want her children to know sadness; she wanted to protect them as long as she could. She wasn’t the sort of woman whose marriage ended in divorce, but that’s what had happened. Now here she was, raising three teenaged girls on her own. She’d been especially close to them until this Arnelle nonsense had come up, a few months before the divorce. When the Story sisters were younger, Annie could recognize their forms in the dark. She could identify which one had entered a room, distinguishing them by their scents. Claire smelled like vanilla, Meg like apples. Elv’s skin gave off the scent of burning leaves.

It was time for the party. Their grandfather Martin was ailing with a serious heart condition, and the girls’ ama wanted to make him happy by gathering the family together for a joyous occasion. All their friends from New York and Paris were here. Annie and the girls went downstairs. Lately, Annie felt overwhelmed. She longed for the time when her daughters were young. When she was at work in her garden and heard their languid voices drifting out from the house, she wondered how she would manage it all: the household, the children, the art history classes she taught at several local colleges. She felt as if everything she did was in halves: half a mother, half a teacher, half a woman. Annie’s garden was her one successful creation, other than her children. She was on the town garden tour and often sold seedlings to people on the committee. This year, there had been a huge influx of ladybugs. That was a good sign. If Annie herself smelled like anything, it was most likely the fresh, bitter scent of tomato vines. Every spring she planted at least five heirloom varieties. This year there were Big Rainbows, yellow streaked with red; Black Krim, from an island in the Black Sea; Cherokee purples, a dusky reddish pink; and Cherokee chocolates, a deep cherry-tinged brown, along with Green Zebras, delicious when fried with butter and bread crumbs. People in the neighborhood asked Annie for her gardening secrets, but she had none. She was lucky, she told them. It was dumb, blind luck.

ON THE WAY DOWN to the ballroom, Annie noticed that Meg and Claire were wearing lipstick. Elv had on mascara and eyeliner as well. The other two girls had blue eyes, but Elv’s were a darting, light-filled green flecked with gold.

Elv noticed her mother staring and said, “What?” She sounded petulant and defensive. That was her tone of late. She was moody, and several times had run to her room and slammed the door shut over the most trivial argument. Then she would come out to sit in her mother’s lap, her long legs swung over Annie’s. The divorce seemed to have affected her more than the other girls. She had contempt for her father—That nitwit? Annie had heard her say to her sisters. We can’t depend on him for anything. He doesn’t know the first thing about us.

“You look pretty,” Annie told her.

Elv pursed her lips. She didn’t believe it.

“Seriously. I mean it. Gorgeous.”

Annie could see the remarkably stunning woman Elv would someday become. Even now men looked at her on the street, gazing at her as if she were already that woman, which was a worry. Annie shouldn’t have a favorite, she knew that. But even when the other two girls had come along, she’d made certain to make special time for her firstborn. She’d been a perfect baby, a perfect child. They would set up a tent in the garden, under the vines, while the other two girls were napping. Elv never napped, not even as a young child. Sometimes the two of them went out and watched fireflies careen through the dusk. When it was pitch-dark, they took flashlights and made their own moons on the canvas tent. Annie would tell fairy tales then, the old Russian stories her mother had told her, stories in which a girl could triumph in a cruel and terrible world.

“YEAH, RIGHT,” ELV grumbled as they headed toward the ballroom. She was silent for a while, considering. “Really?”

“Really,” Annie assured her.

Their ama was waiting for them. Elv led the way as the girls ran to hug her. Natalia had made their dresses, stitching by hand, carefully choosing the yards of silk. They all wanted her to love them best and to take them to Paris for the rest of their lives. They vied for her attentions, though she vowed she loved them equally.

“My darling girls,” she said as they gathered around. She held them close and ran a hand over Elv’s hair.

The ballroom was white and gold, with huge windows overlooking the park. There was a five-piece band, and waiters were already serving hors d’oeuvres, salmon and crème fraîche, blini with sour cream, stuffed mushrooms, crab cakes, sturgeon on thin slices of pumpernickel bread. The girls were insulted to discover they’d been seated at the children’s table along with a troupe of poorly behaved little boy cousins from New Jersey and California. At least Mary Fox was there. She was their favorite cousin, also fifteen, a month older than Elv. Mary was so studious that she made even logical Meg seem frivolous. She planned to be a doctor, like her mother, Elise, who was Annie’s first cousin. Mary didn’t notice the sisters’ glamorous dresses; she didn’t care about appearances. She had no idea that she was pretty with her milky skin and pale hair. For this festive occasion, she had on a plaid dress and her everyday shoes. Because she wore glasses she assumed she was ugly. Mary was honest to a fault and never bothered to be polite. Maybe that was why the Story sisters liked her.

Natalia and Martin’s friends, including Natalia’s dearest old friend, Madame Cohen, who had flown in from Paris, were seated at the best tables, chattering away. They sipped mimosas and kir royales while at the children’s table root beer and Cokes were served. The boy cousins were slurping their sodas through straws.

“Can you believe these morons?” Mary said to Elv. Mary had neither a censor nor a fear of adults. She was particularly ticked off that they were sitting with a bunch of ill-behaved little boys who had no manners at all.

“They probably thought we’d have fun with all the cousins sitting together,” Meg said, reasonable as always. “There’s no one else here our age.”

“They’re not our age,” Mary said. “They’re infants. In two-thirds of the world we’d already be married. Well, maybe not Claire, but the rest of us. We’d have our own children by now.”

While the Story sisters thought that over, Elv asked the waiter to take the bread basket away. Mortals slipped slices of bread into their babies’ blankets to keep the faeries away. In most fairy tales it was the mortal child who had been stolen, but it had been the other way around on Nightingale Lane.

The boy cousins were now situated under the table playing poker, betting with toothpicks.

“Ugh. They are so gross,” Mary sighed. “And this party is such a waste of money.” She couldn’t tolerate the extravagance of the event. She’d spent her Christmas vacation working on a project in Costa Rica for Habitat for Humanity. “Your grandparents could have donated the money to the Red Cross or the American Cancer Society and saved lives, but instead everyone is dancing the cha-cha.”

“I think it’s romantic,” Meg said. “Fifty years of marriage.”

“I think it’s revolting,” Mary countered. “I’m never getting married.”

The girls looked to Elv.

“Love is what matters,” she said. “Real love. The kind that turns you inside out.”

That didn’t sound particularly appealing—it sounded painful, as if blood and bones and torture were involved—but no one had the courage to question Elv further, not even the cantanker-ous Mary Fox. They stared at Elv solemnly, each of them wishing they knew what it was like to be her, for a moment, or better still, for a day.

At the end of the meal, plates of iced petits fours were served in pastel colors, green and yellow and pink and a pale eggshell blue that was nearly the same shade as Claire’s dress.

Mary turned up her nose. “Fat and carbohydrates,” she said, opting for frozen yogurt instead.

Elv put her sweater on, even though the room was quite warm. The waiter had been skulking around, trying to get close to her, breathing on her hair, looking at her as if he knew her.

“Did you want something?” Mary Fox asked him.

“Don’t talk to him,” Elv said.

Claire was busily collecting cakes in a napkin. The grown-ups had started drinking and dancing in earnest. Even Madame Cohen, who was so refined and scared the Story sisters with her direct questions, danced with their grandpa Martin. The boy cousins had come out from under the table and were smashing the petits fours to smithereens, using their water tumblers as hammers. Each time one crumbled they called out “Hurray!” in the most annoying voices.