The Story Sisters. Alice Hoffman

while they were supposed to be painting. Instead of punishing her, Madame Cohen gave her a cup of espresso. Elv didn’t even try and her watercolors were beautiful. She only used shades of green. When asked why, she said, “I’ve been studying the river.” Once she made a black painting and when Meg said, “I thought you were only painting the river,” Elv laughed and said, “Can’t you see what that is?”

      Madame Cohen had peered over. “It’s the Seine at night.”

      Elv had nodded, surprised.

      “I think it looks like a shoe,” Meg said.

      “Sisters shouldn’t argue. I was one of three sisters myself,” Madame Cohen said ruefully. She knew there was evil in the world. She’d seen it with her own eyes. She never talked about the past and was surprised to find herself doing so now. She was older than the girls’ grandmother by several years. You didn’t see how old she was unless you looked very carefully. Her skin was patterned with very fine lines that made Elv think of the way leaves are veined, how beautiful they are when sunlight filters through.

      “May I have more paper?” Meg asked.

      “What happened to them?” Elv wanted to know.

      Madame Cohen was well aware of the black scrim that stretched above parks and playgrounds. She saw it over her own roof sometimes. Just now, a black bug was trying to get in the window, bumping against the glass. You would think it was nothing, unless you knew better.

      “They’re gone.” Madame Cohen clapped her hands together. That was enough of the past. “If you go out at night, I hope you’re careful,” she told Elv. Nearly everyone in the neighborhood had heard the stories of the girl who crept out of her grandparents’ apartment house, then slipped off her boots so no one would hear the clatter of her heels on the cobblestones. It was the sort of neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else’s business, or at least tried to.

      Elv smiled and said she certainly would try her best, even though they both knew that being careful was only good for so much.

      “I have a bad feeling,” Madame Cohen told her dear friend Natalia that same week. It was late and no one knew where Elv had gone off to. She’d told her grandmother she was going to the bookshop, but Natalia had checked and she hadn’t been there. Plus, Elv had worn a short black dress, black boots, and she’d lined her eyes with kohl she’d found in her grandmother’s old makeup kit. That did not seem like bookstore attire.

      “All girls need their secrets,” Natalia said. “It’s part of growing up. She’s about to turn sixteen, after all. Not a child.”

      “They may need their secrets,” her friend replied. “But do they want them?”

      

      MEG SENT CLAIRE a watercolor of the chestnut tree in the courtyard, which Claire taped to the wall above her bed. She stared at it every night, but it was difficult to tell whether there were white flowers on the tree’s branches, or dozens of doves, or if perhaps stars had fallen from the sky, only to be caught in a net of leaves. When Meg wrote about Elv’s black painting, Claire found herself wanting that one instead. She thought she would be able to see the river, even if Meg could not.

      Claire lay on her bed in her dark room, feeling sorry for herself. She loved Paris and ice cream and art. She loved her grandmother’s parlor with its red-lacquered walls and the terrace where birds came to perch, begging for crumbs. She didn’t know how Meg could be miserable at their ama’s or how she could be lonely when Elv was right there or why she didn’t dare go to see how many colors of green the river could be.

      To cheer Claire, Annie spent huge amounts of time with her. She’d turn on the CD player and they’d sing along to Beatles songs and that was great fun. Or Annie would read from Anne of Green Gables or Robin Hood, or from old volumes of Nancy Drew that were hokey enough to make them both laugh. They watched movies for hours, all of Annie’s favorites, Charade and Alfie and Four Weddings and a Funeral. They watched Two for the Road so many times they could both repeat the dialogue by heart.

      Claire had never had her mother all to herself and it was lovely to be the center of attention. She even taught her a few words of Arnish. Melina was summer. Henaj meant dog. But afterward Claire felt she’d betrayed her sisters. It was their secret, after all. Secrets were only good if you kept them; otherwise they were worthless. That was why Claire didn’t tell their mother when Meg wrote that there was a man who’d been hovering around Elv. He stood waiting for her out past the courtyard, besotted. He called out Elv’s name while they were all seated at the dinner table. Their grandfather, Martin, asked if anyone heard anything and Elv smiled and said, no, she hadn’t heard anything at all. Later, when Meg had asked who he was, Elv had merely shrugged. “Nacree,” she’d said in Arnish. Nobody.

      “There’s a man following your granddaughter around town,” Madame Cohen told Madame Rosen one day when they were playing cards out on the balcony. The weather had cleared. The girls were going home the following afternoon.

      “She’s beautiful. Lots of men will be showing up.”

      But Madame Cohen could see accidents before they happened. She saw one now. “Your granddaughter may not be looking for trouble, but trouble is looking for her.”

      “She’s high-spirited,” Natalia said. “Girls her age are meant to have adventures.”

      “He works in a bar, Natalia, dear.” Madame Cohen sighed. “This is not some first love. He’s thirty years old. I hear he’s married.”

      “We’ll take the girls to the airport first thing in the morning,” Natalia decided.

      “Good idea,” her friend agreed, even though she knew that it was quite possible for trouble to find a girl anywhere.

      Meg was in the parlor. She couldn’t help but overhear. If her grandmother knew the half of it, she would have been shocked. When Elv sneaked in at night she was barefoot, holding her black boots in her hand, smelling like tobacco and perfume and something that Meg didn’t recognize, the scent of something burning. Meg always pretended to be asleep, but Elv knew better. One night she had sat on the edge of her sister’s bed. “He’ll do anything I tell him to. He’d die for me, he said.”

      Meg had kept her eyes closed.

      “I know you’re listening.” Elv had a rush of adrenaline when she broke rules. She wondered if that was what warriors experienced in the moments before battle. It was like jumping off a bridge. You had to do the thing you were afraid of; after a while you didn’t feel anything. That was how it was whenever she was with Louis. He was the fool who felt something, not her. Maybe that’s why she’d chosen him. He was a way for her to learn how to manage what life had brought her.

      “I hope you never know the things I know,” Elv told her sister. “I hope you read your books and think that’s what life is.”

      Meg had thought Elv might be tearing up, but she didn’t dare look. Elv slunk off to bed and then it was too late to ask why she went with that man if it only made her cry.

      

      WHEN THE STORY sisters went back to school, people said Elv had changed. She seemed far away, an indifferent, elusive girl who painted her nails black and walked through the halls barefoot until the teachers threatened her with detention if she didn’t put her boots on. Not that the boots were any better; they were black, pointy-toed. They looked foreign and dangerous and they made the skirts she wore seem even shorter. Girls who used to sit at her lunch table were afraid of the stories she told, brutal, bloody tales in which hands and heads were cut off. People turned into frogs, ate poisonous bugs, were buried alive. No one wanted to hear stories like that anymore. The girls she’d grown up with wondered how she knew the things she knew. They kept their distance. After a while they didn’t even bother to say hello.

      The boys in town were the opposite. They followed Elv around, and even the brashest among them seemed bewildered. They didn’t listen to her stories. They just stared. Elv seemed more beautiful than before,