Alice Hoffman - The Story Sisters

Claire helped to toss away any incriminating evidence. They got rid of the needles and ink Elv kept for her homemade tattoos, the hash pipe, the rolling papers, the empty packets of birth control pills, the razor blades she used to cut herself. She said her blood was green, but it looked red to Claire when she watched the razor go into Elv’s flesh. Several times Claire had found her sister in their bedroom standing naked in front of the mirror, gazing at herself. They both stared at her body, which seemed perfect to Claire. But Elv seemed disappointed in herself. She turned to gaze at her back, searching for the beginnings of black wings. There was nothing there but skin and bones.

One morning, Claire awoke in the middle of the night to see a boy in a black coat sitting on Elv’s bed. He seemed like a dream. Claire closed her eyes and wished him away. In a little while he was gone, out the window, across the garden. It was Justin. Claire had seen him hanging around Nightingale Lane before. Once she thought she saw him in the woods nearby, crying.

AT THE END of the summer Justin Levy hanged himself in his bedroom. Elv didn’t go to the funeral, which was held in a chapel in Huntington. That night, Claire looked out the window to see her sister digging up the robin’s skeleton. Elv carefully placed the bones in a clean dish, then brought them inside. Claire crept down the stairs and joined her sister at the kitchen table. Elv had their mother’s sewing kit. There was a spool of black thread and a long needle. She was making a necklace out of the bones that had been buried under the hedge. It would be an amulet in memory of the dead.

Elv’s fingers were bleeding from her work. She had drilled little holes in the bones with a safety pin.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Claire asked.

Elv laughed. Something caught in her throat. That happened when she thought about Justin. He was so susceptible to pain. She should have taught him how to walk through this world. She should have showed him how to lock it all away. “I can hurt myself more than anyone else can,” she told her sister. “I can do it with my eyes closed.”

People in town said Elv was a witch after she took to wearing the bone necklace. But Claire thought the necklace was sad and beautiful. Elv let her try it on once. They stood together in front of the big mirror in their bedroom. Even with her short hair, Claire was pleased to see how much alike they looked.

As for Meg, she thought the necklace was a travesty. “She can’t even let the dead rest in peace,” she murmured to Claire once after Elv had left the room. Their older sister released so much energy and turmoil, it was as if a storm had been trapped in a jar, then set free on the third floor every time she was around. When Elv drifted back into their bedroom, Meg fell silent.

“What’s wrong with you?” Elv asked her sister. In Arnelle, everyone understood that it was possible to cry without tears, to be brave even when riddled with fear. But Meg didn’t understand anything. “Cat got your tongue?”

In Arnish, cat was pillar. Said aloud it sounded vicious.

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Meg said.

Elv knew what she meant. It’s you. Always you.

THE WEATHER WAS changing. It was September and school had begun. In the evenings, Elv began to smoke a white powder. She used a glass pipe that looked as if it would catch on fire when she inhaled. Claire sat out in the hall on the third floor, guarding the bedroom door. “Thanks, Gigi,” Elv would say when Claire came back into the room. “Now I can breathe.”

When Claire asked what was in the pipe, Elv said, “The antidote to humanity” and laughed. “Seriously, it’s nothing. It’s chalk dust.”

Even though school was in session, Elv often didn’t come home until dawn. She didn’t mind getting wet as she ran across the damp lawn; she was burning up under her skin despite the change in the weather. At the hour when her sisters got ready for school, she would creep into bed, naked and wet. If you shook her, she didn’t budge. If you talked to her, she didn’t answer. She was exhausted most of the time, but agitated. When she managed to go grab some sleep, she talked through her dreams, always in Arnish.

Claire would perch at the foot of her sister’s bed on these school-day mornings, worried. She had begun to dread the future. Elv was being swallowed up. Claire wondered if the door to Arnelle could close when a person least expected it to, shutting her into that underground world. She whispered Elv’s name, but there wasn’t an answer. She traced a finger over the scars Elv had left on her own skin. Would she know how to rescue Elv if the time ever came? Would she stand there mutely and watch her sister be carried away or would she dare to be brave?

MEG BEGAN TO hide everything she cared about. She kept it all in the guest room closet, which she secured with a lock she bought at the hardware store, keeping the small key in her backpack. Things had been disappearing: headbands, jewelry, clothes. Elv had burned her own belongings, and now she was taking whatever she wanted. Elise phoned Annie to say that Mary had come home to find Elv going through her closet. Elv had pried open a window and managed to climb into Mary’s bedroom. When Mary walked in to find her cousin loaded down with her belongings, Elv threatened to burn down the house if she told. Mary had had such a bad asthma attack afterward that Elise had rushed her to the hospital.

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