The Story Sisters

A Novel

Alice Hoffman

To Elaine Markson

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Follow

Gone

Swan

Iron

Rose

Part Two

Snow

Thief

Changeling

Confession

Faithful

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

Follow

Once a year there was a knock at the door. Two times, then nothing. No one else heard, only me. Even when I was a baby in my cradle. My mother didn’t hear. My father didn’t hear. My sisters continued sleeping. But the cat looked up.

When I was old enough I opened the door. There she was. A lady wearing a gray coat. She had a branch from a hawthorn tree, the one that grew outside my window. She spoke, but I didn’t know her language. A big wind had come up and the door slammed shut. When I opened it again, she was gone.

But I knew what she wanted.

Me.

The one word I’d understood was daughter.

I asked my mother to tell me about the day I was born. She couldn’t remember. I asked my father. He had no idea. My sisters were too young to know where I’d come from. When the gray lady next came, I asked the same question. I could tell from the look on her face. She knew the answer. She went down to the marsh, where the tall reeds grew, where the river began. I ran to keep up. She slipped into the water, all gray and murky. She waited for me to follow. I didn’t think twice. I took off my boots. The water was cold. I went under fast.

IT WAS APRIL IN NEW YORK CITY AND FROM THE WINDOW OF their room at the Plaza Hotel everything looked bright and green. The Story sisters were sharing a room on the evening of their grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary party. Their mother trusted them completely. They were not the sort of teenagers who would steal from the minibar only to wind up drunk in the hallway, sprawled out on the carpet or nodding off in a doorway, embarrassing themselves and their families. They would never hang out the window to wave away cigarette smoke or toss water balloons onto unsuspecting pedestrians below. They were diligent, beautiful girls, well behaved, thoughtful. Most people were charmed to discover that the girls had a private, shared language. It was lovely to hear, musical. When they spoke to each other, they sounded like birds.

The eldest girl was Elisabeth, called Elv, now fifteen. Meg was only a year younger, and Claire had just turned twelve. Each had long dark hair and pale eyes, a startling combination. Elv was a disciplined dancer, the most beautiful in many people’s opinions, the one who had invented the Story sisters’ secret world. Meg was a great reader and was never without a book; while walking to school she often had one open in her hands, so engrossed she would sometimes trip while navigating familiar streets. Claire was diligent, kindhearted, never one to shirk chores. Her bed was made before her sisters opened their sleepy eyes. She raked the lawn and watered the garden and always went to sleep on time. All were self-reliant and practical, honor students any parents would be proud to claim as their own. But when the girls’ mother came upon them chattering away in that language no one else could understand, when she spied maps and graphs that meant nothing to her, that defined another world, her daughters made her think of clouds, something far away and inaccessible.

Annie and the girls’ father had divorced four years earlier, the summer of the gypsy moths when all of the trees in their yard were bare, the leaves chewed by caterpillars. You could hear crunching in the night. You could see silvery cocoon webbing in porch rafters and strung across stop signs. People said there were bound to be hard times ahead for the Storys. Alan was a high school principal, his schedule too full for many visits. He’d been the one who’d wanted out of the marriage, and after the split he’d all but disappeared. At the age of forty-seven, he’d become a ladies’ man, or maybe it was simply that there weren’t many men around at that stage of the game. Suddenly he was in demand. There was another woman in the background during the breakup. She’d quickly been replaced by a second girlfriend the Story sisters had yet to meet. But so far there had been no great disasters despite the divorce and all of the possible minefields that accompanied adolescence. Annie and her daughters still lived in the same house in North Point Harbor, where a big hawthorn tree grew outside the girls’ bedroom window. People said it had been there before Long Island was settled and that it was the oldest tree for miles around. In the summertime much of the Storys’ yard was taken up with a large garden filled with rows of tomato plants. There was a stone birdbath at the center and a latticework trellis that was heavy with climbing sweet peas and tremulous, prickly cucumber vines. The Story sisters could have had small separate bedrooms on the first floor, but they chose to share the attic. They preferred one another’s company to rooms of their own. When Annie heard them behind the closed door, whispering conspiratorially to each other in that secret vocabulary of theirs, she felt left out in some deep, hurtful way. Her oldest girl sat up in the hawthorn tree late at night; she said she was looking at stars, but she was there even on cloudy nights, her black hair even blacker against the sky. Annie was certain that people who said daughters were easy had never had girls of their own.

TODAY THE STORY sisters were all in blue. Teal and azure and sapphire. They liked to wear similar clothes and confuse people as to who was who. Usually they wore jeans and T-shirts, but this was a special occasion. They adored their grandmother Natalia, whom they called Ama, a name Elv had bestowed upon her as a toddler. Their ama was Russian and elegant and wonderful. She’d fallen in love with their grandfather in France. Although the Rosens lived on Eighty-ninth Street, they kept their apartment where Natalia had lived as a young woman in the Marais district of Paris, near the Place du Marché-Sainte-Catherine, and as far as the Story sisters were concerned, it was the most wonderful spot in the world.

Annie and the girls visited once a year. They were infatuated with Paris. They had dreams of long days filled with creamy light and meals that lasted long into the hazy blur of evening. They loved French ice cream and the glasses of blue-white milk. They studied beautiful women and tried to imitate the way they walked, the way they tied their scarves so prettily. They always traveled to France for spring vacation. The chestnut tree in the courtyard was in bloom then, with its scented white flowers.

The Plaza was probably the second-best place in the world. Annie went to the girls’ room to find her daughters clustered around the window, gazing at the horse-drawn carriages down below. From a certain point of view the sisters looked like women, tall and beautiful and poised, but they were still children in many ways, the younger girls especially. Meg said that when she got married she wanted to ride in one of those carriages. She would wear a white dress and carry a hundred roses. The girls’ secret world was called Arnelle. Arnish for rose was minta. It was the single word Annie understood. Alana me sora minta, Meg was saying. Roses wherever you looked.

“How can you think about that now?” Elv gestured out the window. She was easily outraged and hated mistreatment of any sort. “Those carriage horses are malnourished,” she informed her sister.

Elv had always been an animal fanatic. Years ago she’d found a rabbit, mortally wounded by a lawn mower’s blades, left to bleed to death in the velvety grass of the Weinsteins’ lawn. She’d tried her best to nurse it to health, but in the end the rabbit had died in a shoebox, covered up with a doll’s blanket. Afterward she and Meg and Claire had held a funeral, burying the shoebox beneath the back porch, but Elv had been inconsolable. If we don’t take care of the creatures who have no voice, she’d whispered to her sisters, then who will? She tried to do exactly that. She left out seeds for the mourning doves, opened cans of tuna fish for stray cats, set out packets of sugar for the garden moths. She had begged for a dog, but her mother had neither the time nor the patience for a pet. Annie wasn’t about to disrupt their home life. She had no desire to add another personality to the mix, not even that of a terrier or a spaniel.

ELV WAS WEARING the darkest of the dresses, a deep sapphire, the one her sisters coveted. They wanted to be everything she was and traipsed after her faithfully. The younger girls were rapt as she ranted on about the carriage horses. “They’re made to ride around without food or water all day long. They’re worked until they’re nothing but skin and bones.”

“Skin and bones” was a favorite phrase of Elv’s. It got to the brutal point. The secret universe she had created was a faery realm where women had wings and it was possible to read thoughts. Arnelle was everything the human world was not. Speech was unnecessary, treachery out of the question. It was a world where no one could take you by surprise or tell you a mouthful of lies. You could see someone’s heart through his chest and know if he was a goblin, a mortal, or a true hero. You could divine a word’s essence by a halo of color—red was false, white was true, yellow was the foulest of lies. There were no ropes to tie you, no iron bars, no stale bread, no one to shut and lock the door.

Elv had begun to whisper Arnelle stories to her sisters during the bad summer when she was eleven. It was hot that August; the grass had turned brown. In other years summer had been Elv’s favorite season—no school, long days, the bay only a bicycle ride away from their house on Nightingale Lane. But that summer all she’d wanted was to lock herself away with her sisters. They hid in their mother’s garden, beneath the trailing pea vines. The tomato plants were veiled by a glinting canopy of bottle-green leaves. The younger girls were eight and ten. They didn’t know there were demons on earth, and Elv didn’t have the heart to tell them. She brushed the leaves out of her sisters’ hair. She would never let anyone hurt them. The worst had already happened, and she was still alive. She couldn’t even say the words for what had happened, not even to Claire, who’d been with her that day, who’d managed to get away because Elv had implored her to run.

When she first started to tell her sisters stories, she asked for them to close their eyes and pretend they were in the otherworld. It was easy, she said. Just let go of this world. They’d been stolen by mortals, she whispered, given a false family. They’d been stripped of their magic by the charms humans used against faeries: bread, metal, rope. The younger girls didn’t complain when their clothes became dusted with dark earth as they lay in the garden, although Meg, always so tidy, stood in the shower afterward and soaped herself clean. In the real world, Elv confided, there were pins, spindles, beasts, fur, claws. It was a fairy tale in reverse. The good and the kind lived in the otherworld, down twisted lanes, in the woods where trout lilies grew. True evil could be found walking down Nightingale Lane. That’s where it happened.

They were coming home from the bay. Meg had been sick, so she’d stayed home. It was just the two of them. When the man in the car told Claire to get in the backseat, she did. She recognized him from school. He was one of the teachers. She was wearing her bathing suit. It was about to rain and she thought he was doing them a favor. But he started driving away before her sister got into the car. Elv ran alongside and banged on the car door, yelling for him to let her sister out. He stopped long enough to grab her and drag her inside, too. He stepped on the gas, still holding on to Elv. “Reunina lee,” Elv said. It was the first time she spoke Arnish. The words came to her as if by magic. By magic, Claire understood. I came to rescue you.

At the next stop sign, Claire opened the door and ran.

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.

Elv didn’t pay them the least bit of attention, not even when they stole the cakes off her plate. In the faerie world, the old Queen was dying; she was a thousand years old. She had summoned Elv to her side. Which of the three is the bravest? She who has no fear of what is wicked is the only one who is worthy. She alone will follow me and be our Queen.

The girls’ mothers were enjoying martinis while discussing their divorces. Why not be brave, indeed. It was the perfect time to sneak out. The city was waiting, and the Story sisters had the chance to be on their own in Manhattan, a rare circumstance. They let Mary tag along. She was their cousin, after all, even though she was so serious and dour. Now she endeared herself to them by saying, “Let’s split like pea soup.” She was so corny and honest, they laughed and grabbed her and brought her along.

Once they got past the doorman, the girls made a mad dash for the park. They were all giggling, even Mary, who had apparently never jaywalked before. “We’re going to get arrested!” she cried, but she galloped across the street without bothering to look both ways. They all loved New York. The pale afternoon light, the stone walls around the park, the radiant freedom. They threw their arms into the air and turned in circles until they were dizzy. They shouted “Hallelujah!” at the top of their lungs, even Mary, who’d been an atheist from the age of five.

When they settled down, the girls noticed that Elv had wandered off. She was walking toward the horses. Some of them had garlands of fake flowers around their heads. They wore blinders, and heavy woolen blankets were draped over their backs. They seemed dusty, as if they’d been housed in a garage at night rather than in a stable. The air smelled like horseflesh and gasoline. The other girls would have been happy to dart down the stairs and head for the zoo or the fountain, but Elv lingered, eyeing the horses. She had thoughts no one else had. She alone could see what they could not. When she narrowed her eyes, all that was wicked in the world appeared, exactly as the Queen had predicted. It was like a scrim of black ink spread across the earth and sky.

Elv saw past the luminous now into the murky center of the what could be. Would anyone else at the party have seen how tired and beaten down the horses were? Most people looked at what was right in front of them. A glass of champagne. A dance floor. A piece of cake. That was all they knew, the confines of the everyday world.

A couple got into the first carriage in line. They were on their honeymoon, arms draped over each other. The driver whistled, then clucked his tongue. He tugged on the reins. The horse, resigned, began to move. One of his legs seemed wobbly.

“This is animal cruelty,” Elv said. Her voice sounded far away. She had the desire to cut off the hansom driver’s hands and nail them to a tree. That was what happened in fairy tales. Evil men were punished. The good and the true were set free. But sometimes the hero was disguised or disfigured. He wore a mask, a cloak, a lion’s face. You had to see inside, to his beating heart. You had to see what no one else could.

The next horse on line looked the worst, old and dilapidated. He kept lifting one hoof and then the other, as if the asphalt of the city street caused him pain. He wore a straw hat, and somehow that was the saddest thing of all.

“I don’t see why you’re so concerned about a bunch of fleabags,” Mary Fox huffed. “There are human beings starving to death all over the world. There are homeless people who wish they had as much to eat as these horses.”

Elv’s beautiful face was indignant. She flushed. She spoke to her sisters in Arnish, something she rarely did in front of outsiders. “Ca bell na.” She knows nothing.

“Amicus verus est rara avis,” Mary shot back. She was vaguely insulted that she hadn’t been included in the invention of Arnish. “That’s Latin,” she added. “FYI.”

The old horse on line was foaming at the mouth. There was a river of noise on Central Park South. The driver snapped his whip.

“Ca brava me seen arra?” Elv said softly. Who among us has the courage to do the right thing? “Alla reuna monte?” How can we save him?

Elv was the dancer, Meg was the student, but Claire was the one who knew how to ride. She had been attending classes at a stable not far from their house. Her instructor had said she was a natural. Elv and Claire exchanged a look. They could communicate without speaking. Exactly as they had in the horrible man’s car. In Arnelle, it was possible to read each other’s thoughts, especially if the other person was your sister. Your own flesh and blood.

The owner of the hansom was busy talking to the driver behind him. They were both lighting up cigarettes. There was blue-black exhaust in the air as taxis and cars sped by.

Elv went up to the men.

“Excuse me,” she said.

Both men turned and looked her up and down. She was gorgeous, a peach.

“Did you ever hear the story about a princess the enemy tried to capture?” Elv said. Her voice sounded funny—but she went on. “The princess got away, but they captured her horse instead.” This was the way all the best stories started, in a country nearby, a world full of human treachery.

“Oh yeah?” The driver of the hansom drawn by the old horse with the straw hat signaled her over. “Why don’t you come closer and tell me about it.”

The men laughed. Elv took three steps nearer. Three was a safe number. There were three sisters, three beds in their room, three coats in their closet, three pairs of boots on the floor. The smell of horseflesh made her feel sick. Her throat was dry. The second driver had his lunch in front of him. A hero sandwich wrapped in brown paper. Elv’s mother had been the one to tell her the story of the loyal horse in their garden one night. It was one of the old Russian stories that never shied away from cruelty. Are you sure you want to hear it? Annie had asked. It’s such a sad story. There had been white moths fluttering around the tent they’d set up. The other little girls were upstairs, asleep in their beds. Oh yes, please, Elv had said.

“They burned him and stripped him of his flesh,” Elv went on. “They cooked him in a cauldron. Then they nailed his skull to a wall.”

“That’s not a very nice story.” The second driver clucked his tongue.

“Come on closer. I’ll tell you a story,” the driver of the bad hansom urged. “I’ve got a much better story for you.”

Elv looked at them coolly, even though she felt a wave of dread. If they knew she was nervous, she’d be at their mercy. But if they thought she was ice, they’d be afraid to touch her. “Later, they tricked the princess and trapped her in a garden maze. But she made her escape because the skull spoke to her. Run away, it told her. Run as fast as you can.”

No one noticed that Claire had gone up to the carriage horse. The horse snorted, surprised to have been approached by a stranger, skittish until Claire opened the napkin filled with petits fours she’d taken from the party. At the stable down the road in North Point Harbor, the horses crowded around for carrots, but Claire knew they preferred the oatmeal cookies she often had in her pockets. The old carriage horse seemed to appreciate the French pastries he was offered.

The driver’s attention was still diverted, so Claire went around to the steps and climbed into the carriage. She didn’t know what she was doing, but that didn’t stop her. She was thinking about animal cruelty, and ribs showing under the skin, and the way those men were looking at her sister. She had never been brave in all her life. Now she had the definite sense that something was ending, and something was beginning. Maybe that’s why her hands were shaking. Maybe that was why she felt she had already become a different person than she’d been that morning.

Claire had never even been in a hansom cab, although she’d ridden in a horse-drawn sleigh in Vermont. Last winter, their mother had taken them to an inn where there was a cider festival. It was supposed to be a fun getaway, but the local teenagers mocked them. The ringleader, a skinny boy who was nearly six feet tall, had called Meg an ugly bitch. He’d gone to grab her hat, but Elv had come up behind him. She kicked him so hard he’d squealed in pain and doubled over. “Now who’s the bitch!” she had cried. They’d had to run back to the barn where their mother was waiting, wondering where they’d disappeared to. They’d been laughing and gasping, exhilarated and terrified by Elv’s daring.

Claire thought it would be difficult, maybe even impossible, to figure out the particulars of the carriage, and she’d have to struggle to get it to work, but as soon as she picked up the reins, the horse started off. Maybe it was her light touch, or perhaps the old horse knew he was being rescued; either way he took the opportunity to flee, not slowly clip-clopping like the previous horse and carriage. He took off at a trot. Claire felt light-headed. Horns honked and the carriage jostled up and down precariously, wooden wheels clacking.

The driver turned from Elv to see his carriage disappearing down the road. He took off running, even though it was impossible to catch up. On the sidewalk, Elv leaped up and down, applauding. “Yes!” she cried out. She wanted the horse to run as fast as it could. She felt alive and free and powerful. They had made their plan in absolute silence, that was how deeply she and Claire knew each other.

Meg and Mary Fox watched, stunned. The horse was at a full gallop now. Runners and cyclists scattered. The carriage was shaking, as though it might spring apart into a pile of wood and nails.

It took all of Claire’s strength to hold on to the reins. She remembered the number one rule her riding instructor had told her. Never let go, not under any circumstances. She could feel the leather straps cutting into her hands as she was tossed up and down on the seat. There was an upholstered pillow, but underneath there was only a plank of wood that hit against her tailbone. Maybe she should have been more frightened, but she had the impression the horse knew where he was going. He’d probably been along this same route a thousand times. Everything was a blur. There were sirens in the distance, blending together into a single stream of noise. Claire had never felt so calm. She had the sensation of floating, of following destiny in some way.

“Good boy,” Claire called, although she doubted the horse could hear her. Everything was so noisy. He was running and the air was rushing by. The horse had kept to the asphalt path, but he suddenly veered onto the grass. There was a big bump as they went over the curb. Claire could barely breathe, but she held tight to the reins. It was quieter on the grass. Everything smelled fresh and green. Now Elv would be proud of her. Now she would be the one to make the sacrifice, save the day.

Se nom brava gig, Elv would say. You are my brave sister.

Slats from the carriage were falling off, leaving a trail in the grass. They had almost reached the reservoir. That’s where the horse seemed to be heading. When they arrived, Claire hoped he would stop and drink. Everything would be fine then. She was certain of it. Maybe they could take him home, to the stables out on Long Island. She could bring him special treats every day, and he could be happy, and they could be too.

Mary Fox dashed back to the Plaza to look for her mother. She ran so fast that she began to have an asthma attack. She stopped when at last she reached the ballroom door. By then she was gasping. Tears were steaming down her face and she was shaking. Seeing Mary in such a state was shocking. Everyone knew her as logical Mary who read medical journals for fun. Now she seemed transformed. Her hair was straggly, her face ashen.

“Hurry!” she cried. Her voice sounded childlike, reedy. “It’s life or death!”

The girls’ grandfather, so recently ill, was taken home by Elise, who also had Mary in tow, her inhaler already in use. Madame Cohen was taken to her hotel by their uncle Nat so that she wouldn’t get the wrong impression of Americans and their dramas. Still, Madame Cohen worried about the Story sisters, especially the eldest, who had the misfortune of being too beautiful and had a far-off look in her eyes. Madame Cohen had seen what could happen to girls like that; they were picked off like fruit on a tree, devoured by blackbirds. No one liked to hear bad news, but she would have to warn Natalia. She would have to tell her to look more carefully at her eldest granddaughter. She would tell her to look inside.

PEOPLE GATHERED IN ragged groups outside the Plaza, hailing cabs, wondering how the day had gone so wrong. Annie and the girls’ grandmother raced to the line of carriage horses. When they explained to a policeman what had happened, he quickly called for a squad car. Everything seemed to be going at a different speed. Time was in fast-forward. At least the other girls were safe, running over to their mother and grandmother at the entrance into the park. Meg looked pale, but there was bright color in Elv’s cheeks.

When the police cruiser pulled up, Meg got in alongside her grandmother. She felt irresponsible and scared. She should have watched over Claire. Something had gone terribly wrong and she hadn’t done a thing to help.

Elv came to stand beside the squad car. There was green pollen in her hair. She looked shimmery and hot. Everything she touched smelled burned, like marshmallows held too long over a bonfire. “I hope that driver gets put in jail for a thousand years,” she said. Her voice was powerful, as though she were reciting a curse.

Annie felt a chill. Elv was always at the center of things, gathering the other girls around her. “Whose idea was this? Yours?”

Elv narrowed her green eyes. “It was animal cruelty.”

“Get in the car,” Annie told her. “We don’t have time to discuss it.”

Elv climbed into the back of the police car, sitting in the middle beside her sister, so crammed in she was practically on Meg’s lap. The cruiser took off through the park, siren blaring. All the windows were rolled down. The wind whipped through with such force that it stung. Elv wished they could go even faster. She liked the way her heart felt, thumping against her chest. As for Meg, she kept her fingers crossed and held her head down. She said a silent prayer. She couldn’t bear for anything bad to happen to Claire, who always put others first, even an old horse she’d never seen before.

Midway through the park they spied the horse, galloping at full speed. He didn’t look old, like skin and bones. He looked as if nothing could stop him. A patrol car was racing alongside of him, keeping pace. An officer who was a marksman took a shot from the window of the car. One shot and the horse stumbled. Another, and he fell with a crash. The carriage went up and nearly vaulted over him before it stopped, shuddering. For Claire, it was like a ride at an amusement park, one where your heart is in your throat, only this time it stayed there. She was afraid that if she opened her mouth her heart would fall onto the grass. She was still holding the reins. Both of her arms were broken. She didn’t know that yet. She was in shock. She didn’t see the horse anymore. Maybe he had gone on running. Perhaps he’d had made it to the reservoir and was drinking cool green water. But when Claire pulled herself up, she glimpsed the heap on the ground in front of her. She was fairly certain she could see his chest moving up and down. She thought he might still be alive, but she was mistaken.

The officers from three squad cars came racing over. Claire still wouldn’t let go of the reins. An ambulance had pulled up and one of the EMT crew members came to talk to her. “Just let me unwrap them,” he said. He would be careful, he promised, and it wouldn’t hurt. But Claire shook her head. She knew it would hurt. She could still hear the clattering sound of the racing carriage through the quiet. She would hear it for a long time. A dappled light came through the trees and spread like lace along the ground. She smelled something hot and thick. Even though she’d never breathed in that scent before, she knew it was blood.

The girls’ mother and grandmother were ushered from the police cruiser to the fallen carriage. The other Story sisters were told to stay where they were. They were too young to see what was before them. Death, broken bones, a trail of blood. But as soon as Annie and Natalia were across the lawn, Elv darted out.

“Come on,” she urged Meg.

“We’re supposed to stay here,” Meg reminded her.

“It’s Claire. She’s hurt.”

“They said not to.” Meg’s face was set. She had already decided. She was not going to listen to Elv anymore.

“Okay. Fine.” Elv was disgusted. Those who could not be brave were condemned to the human world. “Stay.”

Elv ran across the lawn. Her dress looked as though it had been made of blue jay feathers. Of course she would have the loveliest of them all. Meg had an odd feeling in her stomach as she watched her sister approach the horse. It was resentment, a pit she had swallowed that was already sending out tendrils, twisting through a tangle of her innermost self.

In the green bower of the park, Elv knelt down beside the horse. Snippets of grass clung to its black hide. There was blood seeping into the lawn, staining the hem of her dress. The blue fabric turned red, then black. Elv didn’t care. She leaned close to whisper into the horse’s ear. She had always believed that dead things could understand you if you spoke their language. Arnish was close enough to the lexicon of death. It was spoken underground, after all, by those who had known the cruelty of the human world. Surely, the horse would be able to hear her. Another girl might have shrunk from the bitter odor of blood and shit and straw, but not Elv. She wished the horse well on his journey to the other side. People in the park stopped to stare. They had never seen a more beautiful girl. Several passersby took photographs. Others got down on their knees right there in the grass as if they’d seen an angel. Looking out the back window of the squad car, Meg wasn’t surprised by what she saw. Of course Elv’s dress would be covered with blood and people would pity her, when she wasn’t even the one who’d been hurt.

CLAIRE REFUSED TO speak to her mother. She wouldn’t even look at her beloved ama. She closed her eyes so tightly she saw sunspots beneath the lids. If she let go, if she failed in any way, the horse’s spirit might wander, miserable, panicked and in pain. It would all be her fault. Everything seemed to be her fault. She might have held on forever, but then she heard Elv’s voice.

“Nom brava gig.” My brave sister.

Claire felt comforted by the sound of Arnish. It made her think of birdsong and of their bedroom at home, things that were safe and comforting and lasting. Elv was never afraid of anything. She wouldn’t compromise; she was stubborn and beautiful. There was no one Claire admired more.

The men from the ambulance continued to beg Claire to drop the reins.

“Go back to the car,” Annie told Elv. Today the whole world had been turned upside down.

“Har lest levee,” Elv said to her sister. You can let go.

Claire opened her eyes. It was a relief to finally drop the reins. Her mother unwound them and then the emergency technicians hurried to lift her and carry her to the ambulance. Claire realized there was excruciating pain in both her arms. The pain was terrible and growing worse. It felt hot, as though lit matches had been placed inside her bones. She didn’t want her mother in the ambulance with her, she wanted Elv. She called for her sister, but the EMTs said no one under eighteen could accompany her. Claire started screaming, and when she did all the birds flew out of the trees, all the moths rose up from the grass in a curtain of white.

Elv’s shoes were streaked with blood and grass stains. “I’m the one she wants,” she told her mother. “I don’t care what you say. I’m going.”

Elv got into the ambulance while Annie begged the EMTs to make an exception this one time. Elv was already perched on the bench beside Claire. Meg and the girls’ grandmother had come to wave, but you couldn’t see a thing through the ambulance doors. Elv leaned in close.

“Se brina lorna,” she whispered.

Claire couldn’t make sense out of anything that was happening. She was dizzy and confused. Her mother was there now too, telling her she would be just fine. The siren they’d switched on was so loud it was impossible to hear anything more. But she’d understood what her sister said.

We rescued him.

Gone

The witch came to the village at noon. She moved into a cottage in the middle of town, got a fire burning, put up her pot.

The next morning a famine began. In the afternoon the roads were filled with frogs. By suppertime there was lightning. By early evening the birds all fell out of the trees.

They sent me to her because I was nothing, a cleaning girl.

I collected frogs in a jar as I went along. I took the charred wood from a tree hit by lightning and tied the twigs together in my shawl. I gathered the birds’ bones and kept them in my pocket.

At the well, I stopped and looked down into the black water. Nothing was reflected back. Only the rising moon.

It was night and the streets were empty. Everyone had locked their doors.

What do you have for me? the witch asked.

I gave her the frogs, the charred wood, the bones. She made a soup and offered me some. All over the county people were starving. My poor sisters were nothing but flesh and bone. I sat down to dinner. When the witch packed up to leave, I was already at the door.

HEALING TOOK TIME, EIGHT TO TEN WEEKS AT LEAST. CLAIRE had to undergo an intricate surgery. A metal rod was inserted into her left arm, and several pins were needed to repair her shattered elbow. She wore two heavy casts, from her wrists all the way up to her shoulders. She never once complained. She’d done what she had to, and now she bore the marks of her bravery. She didn’t say a word when she couldn’t feed herself or turn the pages of a book. She wasn’t even able to take a shower without first being wrapped in plastic. The most she could do was look out over Nightingale Lane from her window. She wanted to be as she imagined Elv would have been had she been the one to be injured: a girl who couldn’t be broken, who refused to feel pain. But Claire’s arms still hurt and she couldn’t get comfortable. Sometimes she cried in her sleep.

Claire never told Elv that she still dreamed about Central Park. It seemed so babyish and silly. Her dreams were nightmares of grass and blood. She urged the horse to leap, but he stumbled and tilted over. Sometimes Claire startled in the middle of the night, awakened by her own soft sobs. As the world came into focus and her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could make out Meg’s sleeping form and the outlines of their room. There was the pale wallpaper with its cream and lemon stripes, and the three white bureaus with their glass knobs, and the tall shelf filled with books. On some nights Elv was gone, her bed empty. Perhaps she could drift in and out of Arnelle, disappearing down the secret staircase at will, leaving her sisters behind.

When Claire heard the dusty leaves of the hawthorn hit against each other in the dark, she knew Elv was out there, perched in one of the highest branches. You had to look through the dark to see her, but she was there, breathing in the cool night air. That man wasn’t a teacher at their school when they went back in the fall, but Elv whispered that you could never be too careful. She was looking out at the pavement, the asphalt, the trees with their swelling branches. It was so quiet Nightingale Lane seemed like the gateway to the otherworld.

Claire couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened on the afternoon of their grandparents’ anniversary party if Elv hadn’t told her about the horses in the park. How would the day have ended if there’d been no mention of skin and bones and bravery? Perhaps the horse would still be alive. Claire got a shivery feeling thinking about it. She’d felt the same when she was eight and her parents got divorced. All the trees in the yard were covered with gypsy moth cocoons. The whole world seemed spun up in gray thread. People said they wanted to help you, then they did exactly the opposite. She felt safer with Elv out there in the tree.

In the afternoons, when she returned home from school, Elv always brought Claire a cup of soft vanilla ice cream. She fed her with a plastic spoon. She’d get into bed and tell stories about the three sisters of Arnelle. Each had a special task: one to find love, one to find peace, one to find herself. The sisters had a bond no one could break. That was something Claire understood. She and Elv spent more time together after the accident. Meg was busy with after-school activities—the school newspaper, painting lessons, the French club—but Elv came home early, skipping dance class. She murmured to their mother that she was quitting dance in order to help out with Claire, but there was another reason as well. She didn’t like to look at herself in the mirror at the dance studio. She didn’t think she was as graceful as the other girls. She was too tall, too clumsy. Her teacher, Mrs. Keen, insisted she had real talent. She’d come into the locker room while the other girls went in to warm up and told Elv it was time for her to be serious about her work. All Elv had to do was make the commitment. A dancer’s life was one of both commitment and sacrifice. She was such a beautiful girl, she could have whatever she wanted. Elv had sat in the locker room afterward. Things echoed in there. The air was heavy and smelled of sweat. She could feel the beginnings of her black wings. She was from Arnelle, a stolen girl. Mrs. Keen hadn’t seen who she was. She didn’t know the first thing about her. That was when she’d begun skipping classes.

“Which sister am I?” Claire wanted to know when she was told that the old Queen was looking for someone to take her place. The next in line must be able to place her hand inside the mouth of a lion, her arm inside the jaws of a snake, her entire body into a nest of red fire ants. She must be able to tell the true from the false with her eyes closed. The scent of a lie was the stench of turpentine, dirty wash-water, green soap. She must be able to escape from ropes and metal boxes, to spy treachery from a distance.

“You’re the best sister, Gigi.” That was Elv’s nickname for Claire, taken from gig, the Arnish word for sister. Elv’s long black hair was pinned up. She stroked Claire’s head, which was filled with knots from spending so much time in bed and from sleeping so fitfully.

“No,” Claire said. “That’s you.”

Elv curled up closer. She spoke in a whisper. “Once upon a time I saw a demon on the road. I ran away, but then I realized I’d left you behind.”

“You came back for me,” Claire said.

Elv linked her arms around her sister. They both laughed when one of Claire’s casts bonked against the side of the bed.

“Le kilka lastil,” Elv said. You could kill someone with that.

“Je ne je hailil,” Claire said. I would if I had to.

“No, you wouldn’t.” Elv smiled. “You’re the good-hearted sister.”

Meg came home, her backpack overflowing. She sat at the foot of the bed. She knew her sisters stopped their conversations whenever she was around. “Everyone’s talking about you at school,” she told Claire. “You’re famous.”

“No,” Claire said. “I’m not.”

“Oh, yes,” Meg insisted. “Über famous. ‘Page Six’ famous.”

Evidently there had been an article in the New York Post about the mistreatment of carriage horses. The reporter had mentioned the girl from North Point Harbor who’d done her best to control a runaway horse. There were animal rights activists who had built a shrine to her and the fallen horse in Central Park, on the Great Lawn. It was made out of horseshoes and stones. People brought flowers and left them strewn about the grass.

“Se breka dell minta,” Elv said solemnly.

We should all bring you roses.

“Well, I brought homework instead.” Meg brought forth the papers and books she’d picked up in Claire’s homeroom. “I’ll read the questions, then you answer and I’ll write them down.”

“Why don’t you just do it for her?” Elv said. “It would be much easier.”

“Because I don’t know how she would answer.” Meg had the habit of chewing on pencils, even though she was afraid it might give her lead poisoning. She had recently found she had a lot of nervous habits. More and more often, she wanted to be alone. She wished she could move into one of the smaller bedrooms downstairs, but she didn’t want to hurt her sisters’ feelings. She couldn’t wait to go to college. She went to the school library to sift through college catalogs whenever she had a free period at school.

“Well, I do,” Elv said. “I know her inside out.”

Elv grabbed the homework assignment. It was a report on a European capital. Elv began to write about Paris. She wrote about the Louvre, where the girls had spent hours on their last visit. Later, when Elv read the report out loud, Claire told her not to change a thing. She had gotten it all right, even Claire’s stop after the museum at her favorite ice cream shop, Berthillon. “Favorite flavor?” Elv had asked. All three sisters had shouted out “Vanilla” at the same time. Even Meg knew the answer to that. Claire never varied from her one and only choice. She refused to try a new flavor. For some reason, answering in unison made them feel happy, as if nothing would ever change, and they would always know one another completely, even if no one else did.

ANNIE HADN’T PUNISHED Claire after the incident with the horse. People said her girls would become sullen and spoiled if she weren’t stricter. They said that adolescence was the time when girls flirted with destiny. But Annie was convinced there was no need for Claire to pay any further for her mistake. At the end of the month Claire understood why: spending spring vacation locked away was punishment enough. They were all supposed to go to Paris to visit their grandparents, but when school let out, only Meg and Elv went to France. The sisters had never been separated before. For the first time Claire was alone in their attic bedroom. At night when the leaves of the hawthorn tree rustled, she covered her head with her blanket. She didn’t like being twelve. It was someplace between who she’d been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all. She had to count to a thousand in order to fall asleep. She missed having Elv out in the tree, keeping watch. She missed Meg’s sleepy, even breathing.

In Paris, Meg curled up out on the couch in the red-lacquered parlor of her grandparents’ home and wrote postcards to Claire. Meg was lonely and bored. Books didn’t comfort her and even the ice cream at Berthillon wasn’t as good this year. There should have been three of them, three was the right number. Paris wasn’t the same, she complained. The weather was cold and rainy. A warm sweater and wool socks were necessary at all times. There was an old stone trough in the courtyard that had once been used to water horses but this year it had filled with ice, then cracked. The season had been so cold the buds on the chestnut tree never opened; the white buds were pasty and waterlogged around the edges, the glossy leaves more black than green. Plus, Meg and Elv weren’t getting along. They got on each other’s nerves and disagreed over everything.

“Let’s not stay cooped up,” Elv had said to Meg one evening. Recently it had crossed her mind that if she didn’t know the human world, she couldn’t defend herself against it. She had to experience everything. Go behind enemy lines. “We should go out after Ama and Grandpa are asleep.”

When Meg had refused, unable or unwilling to break the rules, Elv had taken to sneaking out alone at night, tiptoeing down the back staircase, slipping through the cobbled courtyard. Each excursion was the work of a daring anthropologist: Where do lovers meet? Where can peril be found, and how is it best avoided? Where do squatters live? Can demons be avoided if you don’t have the strength or the time to turn and run?

When she read Meg’s cards, Claire couldn’t help but wonder if Elv was going off to Arnelle, if she’d found the gate under the chestnut tree, if she knocked three times, then whispered a faerie greeting. When I walk, I walk with you. Where I go, you’re with me always.

That was what Elv had written on her postcard to Claire. She sat on a bench on the quay, overlooking the Seine while she wrote. She was barefoot, hunched over, scribbling furiously with a pen filled with pale green ink that she’d bought at a stationery store on the Rue de Rivoli. Paris had never been more beautiful, she told her sister, writing in Arnish. I feel free here. Me sura di falin. No one will hurt us now.

Elv had come to believe that if she did whatever she was most afraid of, its power over her would evaporate. She held on to metal railings. She went into boulangeries and looked at loaves of bread, and she didn’t disappear the way most faeries would have. She tied her ankles together with rope, then slit the knots with a knife. If she had known these tricks, she might have been able to escape after she rescued Claire. She had come to believe that evil repelled evil, while good collected it. She could see it happening in the parks. The dark lacelike scrim, the goblins astride the billowy trees, the demons drawn to purity, unnoticed by women on the benches, children at play. A clever girl met evil on its own terms. She didn’t get caught unawares. Elv bought a pair of black pointy boots at the flea market. She took up smoking, even though it made her choke. She kept at it until she stopped coughing. She could get used to anything. That’s what she had decided. She perfected a look that said Go away in every language, most especially in Arnish. It was as though she now possessed her own arsenal of weapons. She didn’t mind that men looked at her. Their attraction to her only added to her power.

All the while Meg lay in her bed reading novels, writing her whiny postcards, Elv was exploring the human world. She could feel herself growing stronger. She no longer panicked if the wind came up, if a stranger walked by. She wasn’t the least bit spooked when the leaves on the trees rattled, always a sign of rain. The rain in Paris was beautiful, anyway, cold and clean and green. The Queen had told her that if she faced whatever she feared most, she would win the right to sit on the Arnish throne. Water, sex, death. Elv wrote the words in green ink on the back of a postcard. She folded the card into threes and kept it under her pillowcase.

One night Elv woke Meg from a deep sleep. It was late at night. Their ama’s guest room with its two twin beds was bathed in blue light. Elv had brought home a kitten someone had tried to drown. She’d had to wade far into the water to save it. All the while she had a fluttery feeling in her chest. She imagined the water rising over her. She imagined she could no longer breathe. He had done that to her when she started screaming. She thought about her vow to the Queen of Arnelle. Water, sex, death. In an instant, her fear was gone. It was only green water, dirty and cold. She reached out and grabbed.

“It’s tiny,” Meg said of the kitten when Elv brought it out of the sopping burlap sack it had been tossed into. “Poor thing. It will probably die.”

“It’s not going to die,” Elv said firmly. Why was it that Meg had to try and ruin everything?

The kitten was indeed starving and soon began yowling so loudly their ama came running into the guest bedroom, convinced one of the girls had been struck by appendicitis. Elv should have been in trouble for being out at night, but instead she talked Natalia into letting the cat stay. They named it Sadie and gave it a bowl of cream.

“We won’t tell your grandpa,” Natalia said. “One day he’ll look down and he’ll notice a cat and he’ll think it has always been here. Anyway, she’s a darling creature. Who would mind a little thing like her.”

Elv looked elated, though her shoes were sloshy with river water and her clothes were soaked. “You have a good heart,” Natalia said to her. Before she went out, she kissed Elv’s forehead. Meg had felt herself burning.

Elv was singing to herself. She ripped off all of her clothes and left them in a dank pile in the corner. She was a woman and beautiful and fearless and the queen-to-be. She struck her fear of water off her list.

“You’re going to get in trouble if you keep going out at night,” Meg told her.

“I don’t care,” Elv shot back. “Anyway, trouble can find you anywhere. It’s probably under your bed right now.”

THE BEST PART of the trip was the art classes the girls took with Madame Cohen, at least in Meg’s opinion. Elv only seemed interested in sleeping the days away so that she’d be refreshed when she sneaked out at night. The girls had been acquainted with their grandmother’s dearest friend since they were little and had often visited her jewelry store. Her stupid grandsons were sometimes there as well, but the Story sisters ignored them; the boys couldn’t even speak English. But they respected Madame Cohen. She had once been a watercolorist of some note. She had gone to art school in Paris and Vienna. She was a stern teacher who wore black even in the summer heat, still in mourning for her husband, who’d been gone nearly twenty years. The girls went to sit with her in the kitchenette behind the jewelry shop each day. Elv was sleepy from her wanderings. Sometimes she was so rude she actually put her head on the table and closed her eyes 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, but in a hot, careless way. Boys she’d known since kindergarten begged for kisses. They telephoned late at night and threw pebbles at her bedroom window. She ignored them completely. For her sixteenth birthday Elv didn’t want a party. Her sisters were friends enough. Alan showed up with his new girlfriend, who taught biology at the same high school. Annie noticed how young she was, how she was trying to make a difficult situation less strained.

“Alan talks about the girls all the time,” the girlfriend said. Her name was Cheryl Henry and she yearned for children of her own. “They’re his pride and joy.”

“Really,” Annie said. “How nice.” She offered Cheryl a piece of cake. It was chocolate, with mocha frosting, Elv’s favorite. Not that Elv had eaten a bite. They were in the kitchen and Alan had arrived too late for the actual birthday dinner. Elv had been waiting for him, but once he was there, she didn’t even say hello.

Alan kissed her on the forehead and gave her a hundred dollars. That was her birthday present.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” he’d said to her. Elv watched her father as he fixed himself a cup of coffee, then she disappeared while the others were having their cake. She got into bed and pulled up the covers. Sixteen was nothing. It was meaningless. Elv heard her mother come upstairs, open the door, see that she was in bed, then carefully close the door once more. Her mother was just as blind as her father. What had she thought that summer when Elv wept as the gardeners swept away the cocoons? “It’s not a bad thing. It’s necessary. Otherwise the moths will eat all the trees,” Annie had assured her.

“I don’t care,” Elv had said. “I couldn’t care less.”

THE MORNING AFTER her birthday, Elv took the hundred dollars her father had given her and hitchhiked to Hempstead. The guy who picked her up kept looking at her, as though she was a mirage, a faerie who’d appeared in his passenger seat. “Do you have a problem?” she said coolly. She had a paring knife in her pocket, taken from the silverware drawer. “Maybe,” the guy had answered. He looked at her as if he expected something to happen, so she got out at a red light and walked the rest of the way. She found the tattoo shop. Patrons were supposed to be eighteen, but Elv looked old enough, as if she knew what she wanted, so no one asked for ID. She had two black stars tattooed above each shoulder, in the place where her wings would be. She found the pain soothing in a strange way, a gateway out of her body, into Arnelle. There was an army gathering there: the Queen had posted them at the doorway. Anyone residing in the human world was suspect, including Elv. Prove yourself, one of the guards said to her. She was wearing a black dress. Black ballet shoes. She could smell jasmine. The tattoo artist was a bit leery now that her shirt was off. He said, “This might hurt.” As if she cared about that. He covered the tattoos with white bandages. “There might be some blood seeping through,” he told her. As if that mattered.

She waited for the bus, then, once she was home, she walked along Main Street, her shoulder blades burning. She felt free in the dark. When she got to Nightingale Lane, she walked more slowly. She stationed herself across from her house and watched the family inside. Her mother and Meg and Claire and their cousin Mary Fox and Mary’s mother, Elise, were all having dinner together. Elv wished she was inside with them, pouring the spaghetti into a colander, cutting up cucumbers, setting the table. She wished she was laughing at Mary’s stories of how stupid her classmates were. But she was beside a hedge at the end of Nightingale Lane, and she could barely understand what they were saying, even though the windows were open and their laughter filtered outside.

She heard a rustling. She thought there might be a demon there. She put her hand on the knife in her pocket, but when she turned she spied a boy from school creeping out of the Wein-steins’ yard. He was wearing a black sweatshirt and jeans. He saw Elv, hesitated, then came over. His name was Justin Levy and he was madly in love with her.

“Hey,” he said, sitting down next to her beneath the hedge.

“Robbing the Weinsteins?” Elv asked.

Justin pulled two vials of pills from his pockets. “OxyContin. Mr. Weinstein has cancer.”

He took one of the pills and offered Elv one. She swallowed it, then they lay back in the grass. Elv didn’t feel a thing. She just felt quiet. She felt like she could stay under the hedge forever. Her tattoos didn’t even sting.

“What kind of cancer?” she said.

“Pancreatic. My dad works with him. My dad said he doesn’t have a chance. They’re over at my house, having dinner, not that Mr. Weinstein can eat much.”

“How’d you get in and out of the house? I thought they had a dog.”

“I brought a hot dog with me,” Justin Levy said.

Elv laughed. “I’ll bet you did.”

“He’s a nice dog.”

The Weinsteins had an old basset hound named Pretzel that woofed when anyone passed by. But if you bent down and patted his head, he instantly became your best friend. For some reason Elv felt like crying when she thought about the Weinsteins’ dog. Justin Levy must have known she was upset. He took her hand. When she glared at him, he let go. “Just so you know, I’m not interested in you,” Elv told him. “I’m never going to be your girlfriend.”

“Okay.” Justin Levy was stoned and taken aback. He’d never in his wildest dreams imagined that she would be. Every guy he knew was terrified of her and wanted to fuck her. He was happy just to lie beside her in the grass.

Elv sat up and took off her blouse. Justin Levy watched her, stunned. When she told him to remove the bandages on her shoulders, he did. There was hardly any blood, and underneath, the black stars.

“You know what it means?” Elv asked him.

“That you’re beautiful?” Justin ventured.

Elv laughed. That was too funny. People saw with their eyes and nothing else. The day she met a man who knew her for who she was would be the day she would be rescued from this pathetic human world. “That I’m invisible,” she said. There, she said to the Queen of Arnelle. There’s your proof.

AT NIGHT, AFTER Meg was asleep, Claire got into bed with Elv to hear stories about Paris. She heard about the different shades of green the river could be, about the way the rain had fallen in sheets. Claire asked for the black painting, but Elv said she couldn’t remember what she had done with it. It was ugly, any-how. When Claire wanted to know about the man Meg had told her about, Elv said he was nothing to her.

“That Meg,” she said. “What a bigmouth. She couldn’t keep a secret if you paid her.”

“Tell me something,” Claire begged. “Tell me a secret.”

“You have to swear you’ll never tell.”

“You know I won’t.”

Elv whispered to Claire that on the night she found the cat, stuffed and mewling in a burlap bag, thrown into the water like so much garbage, there had actually been two bags. She hadn’t told Meg or their ama. Elv hadn’t been able to reach the second kitten. That haunted her. She couldn’t let it go.

“You saved one,” Claire said.

“But not the other.”

She showed Claire the black stars on her shoulders. Claire was hushed and impressed. “Mom will kill you,” she said admiringly.

“She’ll never know.” Their mother was an optimist, which in Elv’s opinion meant she was a fool. “She never knows anything.”

They were whispering. They could hear the hawthorn tree and Meg’s sleepy breathing and the wind outside. Claire had a lump in her throat. They had secrets they couldn’t say aloud. “Where did he take you?” she asked. She had wanted to ask this question for four years. It had taken that long for the words to come out. Some words drew blood, they cut your tongue, they made you know things you couldn’t unknow. Elv had been missing for an entire day. Claire had run back and waited at the stop sign. She’d stayed there until it grew dark, until the fireflies appeared in the woods. Until Elv came back. She wouldn’t tell her then, and she wouldn’t tell now.

“Go to sleep, Gigi,” Elv said. “Close your eyes.”

IN THE FIRST week of June, there was an unexpected heat wave, with temperatures reaching into the nineties. It was the kind of weather in which people did stupid things, such as throwing themselves off a dock into the cool water, only to break their necks on the rocks. Elderly residents were warned not to go outside. Birds died in their nests. On impulse, Claire decided to have her hair cut short. She usually was a follower and she thrilled herself with her own fierce determination to make a change. She was broiling in her casts, nearly fainting with the heat. Her scalp itched and there was no way for her to scratch it. Annie took her to the hair salon on Main Street, where a young woman named Denise fastened a smock around her shoulders.

“Are you sure? You have such beautiful hair. It seems a shame.”

Claire was sure. Denise cut her mane of heavy black hair to just below her chin. They would donate what had been shorn to Locks of Love and a wig would be made for a cancer patient. Claire loved her hair short—it was so much cooler—but when her sisters saw her they were horrified. The older girls were at home watching an old black-and-white movie about a werewolf. They had been captivated by the poor werewolf’s plight, enough so that they actually didn’t argue the way they usually did. When they saw Claire’s haircut, each let out a shriek. Elv said, “Who did that to you? I’ll bet it was Mom’s idea.” Meg, near tears, cried, “Oh, Claire. Now we don’t look alike.”

Meg’s own long black hair was braided and clipped atop her head. She didn’t like anything to change. She favored long, involved books like Great Expectations, wherein the villains turned out to be heroes and there was always someone who would save the day just when it seemed all had been lost.

“Now we’ll never look alike,” Meg said sadly.

“There’s only one way to do it,” Elv advised, once their mother had left the room. “If that’s what you want,” she said to Meg. “But you’re probably all talk.”

Meg tilted her chin. She knew her sisters had secrets. She could hear them whispering in bed. “You think so?” she said. “I’ll go first. Then we’ll see if you have the nerve.”

They went upstairs and sat on the floor. Elv lit a black candle she had brought home from Paris. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt she’d found at a shop on the Rue de Tournon. It had been hideously expensive, but she’d wanted it so. She slipped it into her purse when the shop owner wasn’t looking. You could see right through the fabric but Elv didn’t care. She went to get the scissors and a towel to drape around Meg’s shoulders. Then she locked the bedroom door.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she pressed. “A thousand percent sure? This isn’t something you can change your mind about later.”

Meg nodded. She was very calm. She hadn’t had her hair cut since she was ten years old. She thought of it as her only good feature. She was just as beautiful as Elv, but she didn’t realize it. Now she unplaited her hair. Perhaps she was even more beautiful than her sister when she wore her hair down.

Claire sat on the edge of Meg’s bed. She felt guilty and responsible. “I only cut mine because I’m so hot in my casts and I can’t braid my own hair. I can’t even wash it. Maybe you shouldn’t, Meg. You don’t have to.”

It was a surprise when Meg was suddenly decisive, as she was now. They had always looked alike and that was what she wanted. She firmly ignored Claire’s protests.

“There’s no other way. Cut it.”

Elv unclasped Meg’s braid and began to cut. It took a while because the scissors were old and hadn’t been sharpened. She handed Meg the braid when she finally managed to saw through. She kept cutting after that, to even out the edges. Hair continued to fall on the towel and the wooden floorboards.

“You can donate it to Locks of Love,” Claire suggested. “For a sick child.”

“Or you can burn it and put a hex on someone,” Elv recommended as she clipped some more. She was concentrating hard. She’d never cut someone’s hair before. At last, Meg went to look in the mirror. Elv had cut her hair very short. Too short. The ends were raggedy from the dull scissors. She looked like a boy.

“It just has to grow out a little,” Claire said. “Right?”

“I need a break,” Elv said. Once things were changed you couldn’t go back. She knew that. Now Meg would know it too. She went out through the window. The leaves outside their window were rattling. Claire could hear her climbing down the hawthorn tree. Meg was still looking at herself in the mirror. She seemed in shock. “She did this on purpose.” Meg’s face was blotchy, as though she might cry. She ran a hand through her hair. It stuck straight up. “She’s not going to cut hers.”

“Of course she will,” Claire assured Meg. “We always look the same.”

They waited, but Elv didn’t return. She didn’t come home until it was almost morning, climbing in through the window, exhausted. She’d spent the night in Justin Levy’s bedroom. She’d made him sleep on the floor. He did whatever she told him, which was pathetic, really. They smoked weed, which didn’t affect her in the least, and then she told him to get on the floor. She dreamed of black stars, black water, a black sun in the center of the sky. When the other girls woke up, Elv was finally asleep in her own bed, her long hair knotted, still in her clothes, as if she’d been out dancing in Arnelle all night long.

Annie took Meg to the salon. Denise did the best she could, but Meg’s hair wound up being even shorter. She looked like an Olympic swimmer wearing a boy’s haircut. When they got back home, she locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out. Annie and Claire waited in the kitchen. They could hear her quietly sobbing.

“What made her do that to herself?” Annie wondered.

It was ninety-nine degrees, utterly sweltering, and the meteo-rologists were predicting triple digits and thunderstorms. True summer wasn’t even here and it was already unbearable. Annie began phoning around to see if she could have central air-conditioning put in. There were fans set up all over the house. Some folks were paying double for air conditioners being sold out of the back of vans on Northern Boulevard.

Annie felt panic-stricken. Three teenaged girls took up a lot of space in a house. They grumbled and were moody; they kept secrets and cried for no apparent reason. They were moving further away from her. She could not remember the last time they’d all sat down for a meal together, had a discussion, watched a movie. Claire was trying to get Meg to come out of the bathroom, speaking that awful Arnish. The panic spread into Annie’s chest. She called around for air conditioners, but there were no air conditioners to be had on all of Long Island. Everyone was hot and dissatisfied and out of sorts. If she wanted an air conditoner she’d have to buy it from one of the scam artists, who were over-charging like mad, and she wasn’t about to do that.

“It’s a good thing we cut our hair,” Claire said when Meg finally emerged from the bathroom, her face splotchy, eyes red.

Claire was getting her casts off at the end of the week. Maybe she’d be happy then. Maybe everything would finally be set right, the way it used to be when she didn’t always feel she had to choose between her sisters. “At least we’ll be cool during the heat wave,” she said to Meg. “And you-know-who won’t be.”

Their mother was still busy on the phone in her search for an air conditioner. Meg leaned in close. She didn’t want Annie to overhear. She didn’t even want it to be true, but it was, and it was her duty to let Claire know.

“Elv isn’t who you think she is,” Meg said in a strange, small voice. “Watch out for her.”

ON THE DAY Claire had her casts taken off, the heat finally broke. It was wonderful and odd to suddenly have her arms back. She felt spidery and ill at ease. She was awkward doing the simplest tasks—pouring a glass of orange juice, brushing her teeth. She’d cut her hair, and now Meg and Elv weren’t speaking. When they passed each other in the hall, they looked away, as if a shadow was passing by, one they needn’t recognize. School would soon be over. Next year everything would be better. They would all go to Paris in the spring; it would be the three of them, the way it was supposed to be. In every fairy tale there were always three sisters: the eldest was brave, the middle one was trustworthy, and the youngest had the biggest heart of all. Elv had hung a map of Arnelle in their closet. Sometimes Claire sat in the closet with a flashlight and tried to memorize it. The rose gardens, the thorn-bushes, the huts made of stone and straw, the paths to the castle, the lake where the water was so deep no one could ever reach the bottom, the meadow where the horse that had been rescued wandered freely, without a saddle or reins.

AS THE SCHOOL term neared its end, Annie was called in to the principal’s office. Elv was barely passing her classes. She fell asleep in Latin. She talked back to teachers. Annie could see her through the glass door, out in the waiting room. Just last week Elv had refused to take the SATs. She didn’t want to go to college. She wanted something different. Maybe she’d live in Paris and work for Madame Cohen and sit in cafés in the evening and walk along the river.

The principal called Elv into his office when he and Annie were done with their meeting. “Did you have anything you wanted to say?”

“Ni hamplig, suit ne henaj.” Elv looked at the floor. You’re a pig and a dog, she had told him. A little smile played around her lips.

“I think you see what I’m talking about,” the principal remarked to Annie.

“Can’t you just go along with things and be polite?” Annie said as they walked out to the car.

“Is that what you want? For me to be polite?” Elv yanked the door open and folded herself into the passenger seat. She flipped down the visor so she could look into the mirror as she applied green eyeliner. In Arnelle, members of the royal family all had green eyes. She hadn’t had the heart to tell Claire that she was not included in the top echelon, although she would have loved to let Meg know. Meg who was so perfect, who didn’t know the first thing about real life.

“Are you upset about something?” Annie said. “You can talk to me. You used to talk to me.”

Elv laughed. “A hundred years ago.” In Arnelle, a hundred years went by in an instant. Time was transparent. You could see right through it. Look through the glass, the Queen had told her. See how simple it is to walk back in time?

Elv leaned forward to get a better look in the mirror. As she did, her sleeveless T-shirt pulled back. You could see her flesh through the fabric. Annie saw a flash of one of the black stars.

“What is that?” she asked. She had a tumbling feeling. She’d been shy as a girl and had felt a sort of desperation whenever she’d had to speak in public. She felt a wave of desperation now.

Elv gazed at her shoulder and pulled her shirt over her skin. “I’ve had it for a long time,” she said coolly. “You just never noticed.”

“Elv. Please. Talk to me.”

“I’m not going to be polite, if that’s what you want to talk about. You can forget about that. “ Elv had a strange feeling in her throat. If she wasn’t careful, she might say something. She turned to look out the window. Everything looked the same in North Point Harbor, everything was green. It was a relief to be invisible, to be marked by stars. She didn’t have to listen to another word her mother said, even if she begged Elv to talk to her, even if she was crying.

“Can we just go?” Elv said.

Her mother started the car.

MEG WAS THE one who found the marijuana in the closet. It was in a shoebox, along with matches and some rolling papers. She pulled Claire inside and they sat there under the green map of Arnelle in the dark. Meg flipped on a flashlight. Claire had grown and was now as tall as her sisters. If only there hadn’t been that stupid disaster with the haircuts, people would have thought they were triplets. They would have had great fun in school, tricking teachers and classmates alike.

“It probably belongs to Justin Levy,” Claire said. “She spends a lot of time with him.”

Meg grimaced. “I doubt that. Justin’s not her friend. He’s more like her slave. Everyone knows she’s just using him.”

Justin had his own car and would drive Elv anywhere she wanted to go. She didn’t even walk to school with her sisters anymore.

Claire held the baggie up to her nose. “It smells like feet,” she said.

“The question is—do we tell Mom?”

“No,” Claire said. “Definitely not.”

“We have to say something,” Meg insisted.

“Why?”

“If you keep someone’s secret, you’re just as guilty as they are. You’re an accomplice.”

Claire felt hot in the closet. There really wasn’t any air.

“Fine,” she said. “We’ll talk to Elv tonight.”

ELV DIDN’T COME home for dinner. Annie and Claire and Meg had pizza and a salad. The sisters exchanged a glance when Annie asked if they knew where Elv was. They shrugged and said they had no idea.

“Is that Justin Levy her boyfriend?” Annie wanted to know.

“Hardly,” Meg said. “He’s just madly in love with her.”

“Meg!” Claire said.

“Well, everyone knows he is. He spray-painted that thing on the wall.”

“What wall?” Annie said.

He had spray-painted I would tear out my heart for you on the side of the old Whaling Museum in town. Everybody was talking about it.

“The salad’s good,” Claire said.

“I would tear out my heart for you,” Meg said.

“That’s about Elv?” Annie had noticed the shaky writing, the yellow spray-painted declaration of love.

“Yep,” Meg said.

“We assume, but we don’t know,” Claire said. She gave Meg a look. “Justin Levy has emotional problems.”

“Major ones,” Meg agreed.

“For all we know, that graffiti could be about Mary Fox,” Claire ventured.

They all laughed.

“I would tear out my cerebellum for you,” Meg joked.

“I would conjugate Latin for you,” Claire piped in.

“I would love you all the days of my life,” Annie said to her daughters, glad that she wasn’t Justin Levy’s mother.

THEY WERE UPSTAIRS doing their homework when Elv finally came home. She smelled like burning leaves. “Hard at work?” she said. She picked up one of Meg’s books—The Scarlet Letter—and thumbed through. “Who would name someone Hester?”

Meg reached under her bed and brought out the shoebox.

“Well, well,” Elv said when she saw it. She put down the book. “Look what the little detective found.”

“We don’t want you to get in trouble,” Claire told her.

“Trouble with a capital T?” Elv sat down on Claire’s bed. She was sitting on Claire’s feet, but Claire didn’t complain. “I wish you wouldn’t look through my personal belongings,” she said to Meg. “Just because you’re jealous.”

“Jealous?” Meg laughed. She didn’t sound very happy.

“It started in Paris and you know it. You couldn’t stand that you didn’t have the guts to do what I did.”

“You mean sleep all day? Or be a whore?”

Elv reached over and slapped her sister. “You’re a jealous bitch and you know it.”

Meg clutched at her burning cheek.

“You wanted to blame me for cutting your hair, but that was your decision. It’s not my fault you’re ugly.”

“Stop it!” Claire said.

“I told you,” Meg said to Claire. “This 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 slipped down the steps that led underground. It would be August before they knew it. Elv bent forward to whisper. Her face was hot and tearstained. In the human world you had to choose your loyalties carefully. You had to see through to someone’s heart. Elv’s long hair grazed Claire’s face. “You’re nothing like her, you know.” The garden was so dark they could only see each other’s faces. That and nothing more. “You’re much more like me.”

Swan

My sister stayed in her room, hiding. She gazed at the sky and cried. You’d think she’d be happy to be human, but she kept talking about needing her freedom. I had lost sister after sister; was I supposed to lose her, too? She stood on the ledge outside the window. She had only one arm; if she started to fall she would dash to pieces on the rocks below.

I went out at midnight to gather the reeds, though there were wild dogs and men who thought of murder. I carried sharp needles and sticks. At night I wove the reeds together while my sister cried. When I was done, I threw the cape over her. She changed into a bird and flew away.

I watched until she looked like a cloud. Now she was free. Well, so was I. I walked to the city and got a job. I had a talent after all. When people asked if I had a family I didn’t mention that once I’d had twelve sisters. I said I took care of myself. I said I liked it that way, and after a while I meant it.

AT THIS TIME OF YEAR THE STORY SISTERS HAD TOMATOES at every meal. Fried tomatoes battered with bread crumbs, rich tomato soup with celery and basil and cream, salads of yellow tomatoes drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Once a pot of simmering preserves were left on the stove and forgotten; the girls dubbed the remaining mixture Black Death Tomatoes, delicious when spooned onto toast. They told tomato jokes: Why did the tomato turn red? Because he saw the salad dressing! How do you fix a broken tomato? Tomato paste! They tried crazy recipes that took hours to complete: tomato mousse, tomato sherbet, green tomato cake. But this summer Elv declared she was allergic to tomatoes. She insisted they gave her hives. She wouldn’t eat a single one. She pushed her plate away, no matter how much work or effort their mother had put into the meal. Elv didn’t care. She would eat what she pleased. She would do as she wanted. She said it quietly, but everyone heard.

The scent of the sultry vines in the garden in August always reminded the Story sisters of their mother, who they sometimes saw crying as she weeded between the rows. They wondered if she was still in love with their father or if it was something else that made her cry. Elv guessed she was feeling sorry for herself. Claire thought it best not to pester her with questions. Meg went out to ask if she needed anything, perhaps some help with the weeding. Annie gave her middle daughter a hug. After that they often worked together, late in the day, when the sun was low but the mosquitoes weren’t yet out. The quiet and the company were a tonic to them both.

Meg was fifteen now, a studious, lovely girl. She wore glasses and spent a great deal of time on her own. Of all the Story sisters, she more than anyone reminded Annie of herself at that age: shy, serious, a fanatical reader. Meg had a job as a counselor-in-training at a summer camp. She was beloved by her campers. Every afternoon she had a book club, which quickly became the summer’s favorite activity. The little girls tried to sit next to her so that they could have the honor of turning pages. They all began to wear velvet headbands, just like Meg, and several campers went home and asked their mothers if they could have their hair cut short.

Yet Meg remained a bit of a mystery to Annie. She was something of an outsider, even with her sisters. Well, all the girls were enigmatic, secretive. Elv and Claire still chattered in that language of theirs and laughed over private jokes. But they kept quiet when Meg entered the room. There was some bad blood between them that Annie didn’t understand.

“I wish I knew what they were saying,” Annie blurted to Meg one day as they worked in the garden, filling a barrel with the dusty weeds they had gathered.

“It’s nothing worth hearing. They think they’re better than everyone, that’s all.”

Arnelle no longer held any interest for Meg. Privately, she denounced not only the language but the world. There was a war going on there—faeries were set against demons and human beings. The stories Elv told were filled with brutal atrocities, some so awful they made Meg wince and cover her ears. Swans were murdered, their bloody feathers plucked out. Roses were hexed, turned into thorns that pierced hands and eyes and hearts. The more vivid and alarming the stories were, the more engaged Elv was in their telling. There was a man named Grimin she wanted to murder. Together she and Claire plotted the ways that would cause the most lingering pain: boiled in oil, pecked at by ravens, locked into an iron box with a swarm of bees.

Bees, Claire had decided. Thousands of them, the killer kind, from South America.

In the evenings, Annie and Meg sat out on the porch, reading novels in the fading August light. As for Elv, she’d found a job at the ice cream shop. It was a far cry from Berthillon, just a crummy stand that offered soft custard. Elv felt humiliated being in such a second-rate place. But she wanted her own money, her own timetable. When she came in at night she smelled of hot fudge and sulfur. She never told the truth about anything. Not to her mother, not to people in town, not to her customers, whom she often shortchanged, not even to herself. What people called the truth seemed worthless to her; what was it but a furtive, bruised story to convince yourself life was worth living.

ELV WENT OUT every night, the door slamming behind her. She was barefoot, sullen, in a rush. “See you,” she would call over her shoulder to Claire, the only one she bothered to speak to, the only one who knew who she was.

“Later, alligator,” Claire would call back, wishing she was old enough to go with her.

Annie always asked when Elv would be back, even though she knew what the answer would be.

“Whenever,” Elv would say, aloof, impatient.

“Do you want me to follow her?” Meg asked one evening when the trees on Nightingale Lane were so green they appeared black, melancholy in the darkening sky. There were bands of clouds swarming across the horizon.

Annie had shaken her head. “If anyone should follow her, it should be me.”

Annie slipped off her sandals. The soles of her feet were dusty. She marveled at the way Elv could ramble all over town without shoes. Nothing ever seemed to hurt her, not stones or glass or twigs. Their town was safer than most, with a nearly zero crime rate, but you never knew what could happen to a girl all alone. Down at the harbor there were said to be wild parties going on. The police regularly drove past on patrol, but the parties went on out on the sand-bars. No one knew how the local kids managed to get so many kegs of beer, but they did. No one knew where the drugs came from, but they were there as well. Once, on her way home from the market in the evening, Annie spied a group of teenagers down by the bay, huddled near the flagpole in the park. They didn’t look like bad kids. Annie stopped her car and got out to talk to them. Most of them scattered, but a few stayed, laughing and nervous to be approached by an adult. When Annie asked if Elv was around, they all looked away. One of the boys snickered. Annie heard some of the girls laughing as she walked back to the car.

Thinking of that group of kids and their reaction to Elv’s name, Annie suddenly grabbed for her shoes. “I’m going.”

“You can’t stop her from doing anything. She wouldn’t even get in the car with you.”

“I could ground her. Take away TV privileges. I could make her stay in for the rest of the summer.”

“Mom,” Meg said sadly.

“I could lock her in the bedroom.”

“She would climb out the window.”

They could still see Elv, disappearing down the lane, stopping to pat the old basset hound on the Weinsteins’ lawn before she disappeared into the gathering dark. She was like a shadow, something you imagined and couldn’t quite grasp. When she wasn’t at the ice cream shop, she was heading for the bridge. The group who banded together had bad reputations, but at least they knew how to have a good time. Yet even those girls stayed away from her, making sure to clutch their boyfriends when Elv was nearby. She seemed dangerous even to them, willing to try anything. Give her a pill and she’d take it, offer her a drink and she was always willing to accept. Her cool bravery was legendary. Justin Levy had seen her flustered, though. Once when they were down at the beach she saw a car in the parking lot and bolted. She was shivering by the time Justin caught up with her on Main Street.

“Is he still there?” she’d said to him. She was wearing her bathing suit, a damp towel wrapped around her. She didn’t even think about calling the police. All she thought of was running.

Justin shrugged, confused. She’d made him jog back to check.

“No cars in the parking lot,” he assured her when he returned, out of breath, her loyal messenger.

After that Elv continued to allow Justin to tag along until he foolishly proclaimed his love for her. He was getting tiresome. By the middle of August, she’d had enough.

“What’s wrong with me?” Justin had asked mournfully when she told him to stop stalking her.

If Elv was someone else, she would have said It’s not you, it’s me—that’s what everyone said to get out of someone’s grasp. Instead, she was honest with Justin.

“You’re not who I’m looking for,” she replied. She was looking for someone who had no fear of iron or ropes. An escape artist, that’s what she wanted. A man who could turn her inside out, make her feel something, because nothing else seemed to. She could sit in the bedroom closet and cut herself with a razor and still feel nothing at all. She could pass her hand above a candle and when it flamed up have no reaction. All she had to do was close her eyes.

Justin had actually cried when she dumped him, as if to prove her point.

“Oh my God, Justin. Find somebody nice. Someone better than me. I am the last person you should be with. You should thank me for giving you this advice.”

After that, whenever Justin saw her he didn’t say hello. He took to wearing a black coat even though it was August. He wore sunglasses at night. People started laughing at him.

“You look like an idiot,” Elv said when she next ran into him. It was at the tea shop and she was there with Brian Preston, who was known for his drug use and also for burning down his family’s summer house in the Berkshires. Brian was stupid and good-looking and entertaining. “At least take off your sunglasses,” Elv told Justin.

When he did, she could tell he’d been crying again. Didn’t anybody see what the real world was like? She felt repulsed by his weakness. Mr. Weinstein down the street had died and now his bassett hound was on the lawn all the time. Mrs. Weinstein didn’t allow the dog in the house and whenever she passed him Elv felt like crying herself. She had to stop that. It was useless. It was like trying to win her place in the court of Arnelle, or trying to get rid of the black seed inside her, the taste of iron and of lye. She’d cried that day when the man in the car took her to his house and locked her in a room, until she realized it wouldn’t do any good. She had done everything the Queen had asked and had received nothing in return. Arnelle was pointless.

She had decided to change the story.

She was going over to the other side.

THE TOWN WAS thick with Virginia creeper, wisteria, weeds that suddenly grew three feet tall. It had been that kind of summer. There were thunderstorms and hail. The news reported a strange rain of live frogs one wet, humid night. Children ran out with mayonnaise jars to try to capture them the way they used to catch fireflies. The air felt electric, sultry; it pressed down on you and made you want to sleep, turn away from your troubles, tell yourself lies. Even smart people are easily tricked, especially by their own children. When everything smells like smoke, how do you know what’s burning? Things that should have added up for Annie seemed like mere coincidence: cigarettes found in the garden, doors slamming, boys throwing pebbles at the window, finding that neighborhood boy Justin Levy sitting in the hedges one evening in his black overcoat, crying. If she set the pieces side by side, she might have been able to interpret them.

When Annie visited her mother, she asked for her advice. She was worried about the Story sisters. One was quiet, one was standoffish, one seemed to be disappearing before her eyes, becoming someone else entirely. Perhaps they’d been more affected by the divorce and Alan’s defection than it had first appeared. Or maybe it was Annie’s fault—she’d been depressed, wrapped up in her souring marriage. She went to the garden for solace rather than to her girls. She’d cut herself off, didn’t date, rarely saw friends—a poor example of how to live in the world.

“Young girls are moody,” Natalia told her. The task of raising children was a difficult one.

“Was I like that?”

“Well, you were well behaved. I never had to punish you. But you used to cry for no reason. It’s an emotional time of life. You try things on, you put them away.”

“Was I like Elv?” Annie wanted to know.

“No.” Natalia shook her head. That man in Paris had skulked around long after the girls had gone home in the spring. Natalia had found a knife and a length of rope beneath the bed in the guest room later in the month when she was cleaning up. She’d brought the little rescued cat, Sadie, with her from Paris to New York. It sat in her lap in the afternoons while Martin took his nap. Natalia often thought back to that night when her granddaughter had sneaked back into the apartment, dripping with river water, managing to be both fierce and tenderhearted. “Not like Elv.”

The last time the Story sisters had visited her apartment, Natalia had found Elv in her closet, asleep on the floor, curled up like a little girl. The jewelry box had been open and a gold chain was missing. Natalia was sure Elv would wear it, then return it to its rightful place. But she never saw the necklace again.

Sometimes when she looked at her granddaughter—her black-painted fingernails, the expression on her face when she thought no one was looking, the marks on her skin that were so even it appeared as if she cut herself—Natalia felt afraid for the child. Her friend Leah Cohen had told her that demons preyed upon young girls. They came through windows and found ways to open doors. Natalia had always listened to these stories with half an ear; now she was hesitant to dismiss them. She found herself locking the doors whenever Elv came to visit so that no one could get out or in. She had grown convinced that you could lose someone, even if she was in the very next room. She remembered her friend’s warnings more clearly. Although Natalia didn’t believe in butting into her daughter’s business, she took Annie by the arm before she left for home.

“Look closely at Elv,” she advised. “Look inside.”

SHE STARTED BY searching the attic. It was one of the reasons they’d bought the house in the first place, the sloping eaves, the large space, the old hawthorn tree that cast shadows through the window. The perfect place to raise three girls. They had painted the woodwork antique white and papered the walls. Annie found the shoebox where the marijuana was hidden first, then a vial of pills—Demerol stolen from the grandparents’ medicine cabinet. Taped to the closet wall there was a series of photographs of Elv kissing various boys. There was a mysterious map as well. Inky green paths led through a garden of thorns. Demons were wound in a frantic, scandalous embrace.

A journal had been left in Elv’s night table. Annie took it down to the garden. Her hands were shaking. She felt like a witch in a fairy tale, raiding the castle, sifting through bones. There had been rain that morning, and the heat had broken. Birds were searching for worms and the tomatoes were covered with glistening drops. Most of the writing in the journal was in Arnish, with captions beneath green and black watercolor paintings. A girl with wings was held captive, abducted from her true parents. Roses died, iron bars were set around a beating heart torn whole from a now lifeless body, a man named Grimin tied up faeries and fucked them till they bled, goblins drifted through the trees ready for rape and destruction.

Annie hadn’t imagined Elv knew about such things, let alone that she was filling a journal with erotic and dangerous drawings. She threw out the drugs, then went back upstairs. The house was quiet. It felt big when there was only one person in it. She thought about the year before she and Alan were divorced, how the fights they’d had must have reverberated up in the attic. Did the Story sisters place their hands over their ears? Did they all get under a blanket and wish they lived somewhere else? Annie replaced the journal, closed the bedroom door, then called her ex-husband. She was crying, so it was difficult for him to understand, but once he did, he insisted everything Elv had done was within the realm of normal teenage behavior. He was a school principal, after all. Minor drug use and a fantasy world. He’d seen far worse, and many of those students had gone on to graduate, been accepted to college, lived their lives. Annie was overreacting, as usual. But did he know Elv was going out at all hours? Elise had reported that Mary had seen Elv swimming naked in the bay with some high school boys. What about her refusal to follow the house rules, sneaking out at night? He said to wait, things would turn around.

The next morning a police officer came by to inform Annie that her daughter had stolen a tray of cupcakes from the bakery. She’d been seen giving them out to children in the playground before the tots’ agitated mothers swooped in to throw away the suspicious treats.

“They were only cupcakes,” Annie said, quick to defend her daughter.

“They were stolen property,” the officer said stiffly.

When he left, persuaded to let the incident go unreported, Annie went upstairs and knocked on the bedroom door. It was locked whenever Elv was at home. The locks clicked open and there she was, annoyed, half dressed, her hair in knots.

“The police were here,” Annie said.

No response.

“The cupcakes?”

Elv’s eyes had a yellow cast. She couldn’t even do something nice without people getting on her case. If Meg had given out the cupcakes, she probably would have gotten a medal. She’d be on the town honor roll. “I refuse to be who you people want me to be,” Elv said.

“What people?” Annie was confused. It crossed her mind that Elv might be high.

“The human race,” Elv said disdainfully.

That night Elv burned all her clothes in a trash can. It was one more leap away from the brutality of the human world. She scooped out armfuls from her closet, collecting bathing suits, shoes, purses, socks. She saved two black skirts, a pair of black jeans, a few T-shirts, and the pointy boots from Paris. At the last minute she grabbed the blue dress her grandmother had made for her. Everything else went up in flames, even her winter coat. She poured on lighter fluid and lit an entire pack of matches. The whole neighborhood smelled like burning wool. The fire department was called in by Mrs. Weinstein, worried when she saw flames beyond her crab apple tree. Her husband’s old dog set to howling.

Elv couldn’t have cared less if Nightingale Lane was rife with ashes. She was barefoot and defiant when the firemen arrived. They made sure the bonfire wasn’t out of control, then went away, sirens blaring. For hours afterward, Annie and Meg watered the garden, making certain the embers that had fallen weren’t still burning. That night there was still the stink of scorched weeds and the sharp scent of singed tomato vines; the last of the peas on the vine made popping noises as they burst open, like firecrackers set off one at a time.

Elise told Annie she should contact the police the next time Elv didn’t come home at her curfew. But Annie was afraid such a move would make Elv run away; she could easily become one of those mistreated, sullen girls you heard about on TV, the ones who disappeared and wound up murdered. Instead, when Elv didn’t come home, Annie pulled up a chair and waited at the back door. By the time Elv finally straggled in it was early morning. The lawn had been wet and her footprints flecked the kitchen floor. She was neither surprised nor nervous when she found her mother in the kitchen. She plopped herself down on one of the stools at the counter and asked for pancakes. “I’m starving,” she said. When her heart beat faster, she felt alive. When she was hungry, she was starving.

“You can’t run around like this. It’s dangerous to be out all night. Something terrible can happen to you.”

“It already has.” Ask me. See who I am.

“Elise thinks I should call the police. For your own safety.”

Elv gazed at her mother, chin raised. “I take it you’re not making pancakes.”

“No,” Annie said. “I’m not.” This wasn’t the child she’d told stories to in the garden, her darling, trustworthy girl. “If I find drugs again, Elv, I’m sending you to rehab. I mean it.” That was Elise’s other recommendation. Don’t play around. Take charge.

Elv wondered how she’d misplaced the shoebox. Now she understood. Her mother had been there. “You went through my private belongings?” she said.

“It’s my house,” Annie said. “My rules.”

“Okay,” Elv said coolly. She took the confrontation as a challenge that would spur her on to battle. “Look as much as you want. You won’t find anything.”

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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