The Story Sisters. Alice Hoffman

is who she is.”

      Elv went to the open window and slipped outside. Claire got up, grabbed the shoebox, and replaced it in the closet. “Mom can’t find this.”

      “Are you taking her side?” Meg said.

      “No.” Claire slipped on a pair of flip-flops. She wished Meg had never poked around in the closet. She wished she had left things alone.

      “You are. You always do.”

      “That’s not true.”

      “You’re no better than Justin Levy. Another one of her slaves.”

      “You don’t even know her,” Claire said coldly. “You just think you do.”

      

      CLAIRE WENT DOWNSTAIRS, then out the back door to the garden. Behind her the house was quiet. There was the muffled sound of the TV as their mother watched the news. The evening was pale, the air unmoving. There was Elv, sitting beneath the arbor, smoking a cigarette. Her white T-shirt clung to her. She was barefoot, and the soles of her feet were dark with soil. Her black hair hung to her waist. She didn’t look anything like them anymore. She looked like the queen of a country that was too far away to visit. There were moths in the garden, fluttering about blindly. The bedroom light was turned off now. Meg had probably slipped into bed, crying the way she did, quietly, so as not to disturb anyone.

      “You shouldn’t have been so mean to her,” Claire told Elv.

      “That wasn’t mean. It was honest. She is a bitch.”

      “She said I was like Justin Levy.”

      “Yeah, right. Justin is pathetic and you’re brave. If anything, you’re opposites. Meg doesn’t have a clue.” Elv suddenly threw up her hands. “Don’t come any closer,” she warned.

      Claire stopped where she was.

      There was a tiny bird in her path. Both sisters knelt. “He fell out of his nest.” Elv picked up the fledgling. “He’s a robin.”

      Claire was startled by how fragile the baby bird was. She could see through its skin to its beating heart. There were only a few stray, luminous feathers.

      The girls went in search of the nest, but they couldn’t find it in the dark. There were spiderwebs that were frightening to walk through. Claire kept brushing them away, even when they were no longer there. The crickets were calling. Elv sat down in the wet grass. She looked so sad and beautiful. She was everything Claire wanted to be.

      “It’s too late anyway,” Elv decided. “Even if we did find the nest, he’s hardly alive. Do you want to hold him?” The Queen of Arnelle had decreed this was to be. Water, sex, death. This was number three. There was no way to save him.

      Claire sat beside her and Elv slipped a hand atop hers. She let the bird settle into Claire’s palm. Claire could feel it shudder. Its heart was beating so fast it reminded her of a moth’s wings.

      “Maybe we should say a prayer,” she suggested.

      “You do it, Gigi. You’re good at that kind of thing.”

      Claire felt emboldened by Elv’s praise. “Your life has been short,” she began in a serious voice, “but it has been as important as any other life.”

      Claire heard something then. It was Elv, crying.

      “Don’t look at me,” Elv said. She tried to think about the way time could go backward, far back, to the time when she was in the tent with her mother in the garden. There had been twelve princesses who had danced the night away in one of the stories her mother had told her. Twelve brothers had turned into swans.

      “Okay.” Claire lowered her eyes, stunned.

      “Go ahead,” Elv urged. “Finish.”

      “We hope you find peace.” Claire was thrown by Elv’s show of emotion. She ended the prayer as quickly as she could. She was probably doing it all wrong. She wasn’t as good as Elv thought she was. “We hope you’re blessed.”

      The sisters could hear one another breathing and the whir of the crickets. There was the tangled thrum of traffic from Main Street. Sound echoed for blocks on a clear night.

      “Close your eyes,” Elv said now.

      “Why?”

      The whole world seemed alive. The air was filled with gnats and mosquitoes and moths.

      “Just for a minute,” Elv said. “Trust me.”

      Claire closed her eyes. After a time the robin didn’t move anymore.

      “Okay. It’s over,” Elv said. “You can open them now.”

      The robin seemed even smaller, nothing but skin and bones. Elv went to the garage and got a shovel. She had faced the third fear on her list. Tonight she could tear up the postcard with the green ink. She came back and dug a hole beneath the privet hedge. Her face was streaked with tears. She shoveled dirt so fast she seemed more angry than upset. Claire was too much in awe to offer to help. When Elv was done, she tore off the bottom of her favorite T-shirt from Paris and carefully wrapped up the robin. Claire had never loved anyone more than she loved Elv at that moment. She felt something in the back of her throat that hurt. She felt lucky to have come outside, to have found her sister in the garden, to be with her in the dark.

      After the burial they went back to the garden. They ducked under a net of vines and sat down cross-legged beside a row of cabbages. Nobody liked cabbages, not even their mother. They were a total waste of time. Elv lit a cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. The night was so dark the smoke looked green. The rest of the world seemed far away. Without warning, Elv lurched forward. At first Claire thought she was about to be slapped, like Meg, but instead Elv threw her arms around her. She hugged her tightly, then backed way. When she lifted her T-shirt to wipe her tearstained face Claire saw she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She looked like a creature who belonged in the garden, who slept beneath leaves and spoke to earthworms and threaded white moths through her long black hair. She didn’t seem quite human. Claire got a funny feeling then, the way Elv must have felt when she saw the bag with the other cat floating away. The one she hadn’t been able to rescue.

      In the summer of the gypsy moths when everything changed, when Elv was eleven and Claire was eight and Meg had stayed home sick, they had walked home from the stop sign in the dark. Elv had been gone for ten hours. She was still wearing her bathing suit, but no shoes. They were gone. They held hands and went along the empty lane. Their mother scolded them when they got home. She told them to go upstairs and they would talk about their disappearance in the morning. Elv said it was her fault, and that Claire couldn’t find her way home without her. Elv was going to be punished for coming home so late, but she didn’t care. When she and Claire went upstairs, she got into bed, her knees drawn up. Meg was sprawled out on her own bed, reading Great Expectations.

      “Have you ever read this?” she called to Elv.

      Elv turned to the wall. Arnelle was like a black seed in the center of her chest.

      Claire got into bed beside her. Elv smelled like ashes and garden soil. There were leaves in her beautiful long hair.

      “It’s about a boy who thinks he has no future, but then it turns out he does,” Meg said. “It’s a complicated mystery about fate and love.”

      Elv felt cold. Claire wrapped her arms around her. There was no way for her to ever thank her sister, no words that would ever do. Something bad had happened to Elv instead of to her. Elv’s bathing suit was still damp but she hadn’t bothered to take it off.

      That was when Claire knew they would never tell.

      

      IN THE GARDEN, on this night when the robin had died in their hands, June bugs flitted overhead. Elv shooed them away. The sisters were sitting beside the row of cabbages. No one knew where they were. They might have been a hundred miles away; they might have