The Virgin Suicides

Cecilia’s bedroom—when we finally obtained a description from Lucy Brock—confirmed this assessment of her character. In addition to a zodiac mobile, Lucy found a collection of potent amethysts, as well as a pack of Tarot cards under Cecilia’s pillow that still smelled of her incense and hair. Lucy checked—because we asked her to—to see if the sheets had been cleaned, but she said they hadn’t. The room had been left intact as an exhibit. The window from which Cecilia jumped was still open. In the top bureau drawer, Lucy found seven pairs of underpants, each dyed black with Rit. She also found two pairs of immaculate high-tops in the closet. Neither of these things surprised us. We had long known about Cecilia’s black underwear because whenever she’d stood up on her bicycle pedals to gain speed we had looked up her dress. We’d also often seen her on the back steps, scrubbing her high-tops with a toothbrush and cup of Ivory Liquid.

Cecilia’s diary begins a year and a half before her suicide. Many people felt the illuminated pages constituted a hieroglyphics of unreadable despair, though the pictures looked cheerful for the most part. The diary had a lock, but David Barker, who got it from Skip Ortega, the plumber’s assistant, told us that Skip had found the diary next to the toilet in the master bathroom, its lock already jimmied as though Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon had been reading it themselves. Tim Winer, the brain, insisted on examining the diary. We carried it to the study his parents had built for him, with its green desk lamps, contour globe, and gilt-edged encyclopedias. “Emotional instability,” he said, analyzing the handwriting. “Look at the dots on these i’s. All over the place.” And then, leaning forward, showing the blue veins beneath his weakling’s skin, he added: “Basically, what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.”

We know portions of the diary by heart now. After we got it up to Chase Buell’s attic, we read portions out loud. We passed the diary around, fingering pages and looking anxiously for our names. Gradually, however, we learned that although Cecilia had stared at everybody all the time, she hadn’t thought about any of us. Nor did she think about herself. The diary is an unusual document of adolescence in that it rarely depicts the emergence of an unformed ego. The standard insecurities, laments, crushes, and daydreams are nowhere in evidence. Instead, Cecilia writes of her sisters and herself as a single entity. It’s often difficult to identify which sister she’s talking about, and many strange sentences conjure in the reader’s mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads, lying in bed eating junk food, or suffering visits from affectionate aunts. Most of the diary told us more about how the girls came to be than why they killed themselves. We got tired of hearing about what they ate (“Monday, February 13. Today we had frozen pizza …”), or what they wore, or which colors they favored. They all detested creamed corn. Mary had chipped her tooth on the monkey bars and had a cap. (“I told you,” Kevin Head said, reading that.) And so we learned about their lives, came to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced, harbored private images of Lux leaning over the side of a ship to stroke her first whale, and saying, “I didn’t think they would stink so much,” while Therese answered, “It’s the kelp in their baleens rotting.” We became acquainted with starry skies the girls had gazed at while camping years before, and the boredom of summers traipsing from back yard to front to back again, and even a certain indefinable smell that arose from toilets on rainy nights, which the girls called “sewery.” We knew what it felt like to see a boy with his shirt off, and why it made Lux write the name Kevin in purple Magic Marker all over her three-ring binder and even on her bras and panties, and we understood her rage coming home one day to find that Mrs. Lisbon had soaked her things in Clorox, bleaching all the “Kevins” out. We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another or to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

As the diary progresses, Cecilia begins to recede from her sisters and, in fact, from personal narrative of any kind. The first person singular ceases almost entirely, the effect akin to a camera’s pulling away from the characters at the end of a movie, to show, in a series of dissolves, their house, street, city, country, and finally planet, which not only dwarfs but obliterates them. Her precocious prose turns to impersonal subjects, the commercial of the weeping Indian paddling his canoe along a polluted stream, or the body counts from the evening war. In its last third the diary shows two rotating moods. In romantic passages Cecilia despairs over the demise of our elm trees. In cynical entries she suggests the trees aren’t sick at all, and that the deforesting is a plot “to make everything flat.” Occasional references to this or that conspiracy theory crop up—the Illuminati, the Military-Industrial complex—but she only feints in that direction, as though the names are so many vague chemical pollutants. From invective she shifts without pause into her poetic reveries again. A couplet about summer from a poem she never finished, is quite nice, we think:

The trees like lungs filling with air My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair

The fragment is dated June 26, three days after she returned from the hospital, when we used to see her lying in the front-yard grass.

•

Little is known of Cecilia’s state of mind on the last day of her life. According to Mr. Lisbon, she seemed pleased about her party. When he went downstairs to check on the preparations, he found Cecilia standing on a chair, tying balloons to the ceiling with red and blue ribbons. “I told her to get down. The doctor said she shouldn’t hold her hands over her head. Because of the stitches.” She did as commanded, and spent the rest of the day lying on the rug in her bedroom, staring up at her zodiac mobile and listening to the odd Celtic records she’d gotten through a mail-order house. “It was always some soprano singing about marshes and dead roses.” The melancholic music alarmed Mr. Lisbon, comparing it as he did to the optimistic tunes of his own youth, but, passing down the hall, he realized that it was certainly no worse than Lux’s howling rock music or even the inhuman screech of Therese’s ham radio.

From two in the afternoon on, Cecilia soaked in the bathtub. It wasn’t unusual for her to take marathon baths, but after what had happened the last time, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon took no chances. “We made her leave the door open a crack,” Mrs. Lisbon said. “She didn’t like it, of course. And now she had new ammunition. That psychiatrist had said Ceel was at the age where she needed a lot of privacy.” Throughout the afternoon, Mr. Lisbon kept coming up with excuses to pass by the bathroom. “I’d wait to hear a splash, then I’d go on past. We’d taken everything sharp out of there, of course.”

At four-thirty, Mrs. Lisbon sent Lux up to check on Cecilia. When she came back downstairs, she seemed unconcerned, and nothing about her demeanor suggested she had an inkling about what her sister would do later that day. “She’s fine,” Lux said. “She’s stinking up the place with those bath salts.”

At five-thirty, Cecilia got out of the bath and dressed for the party. Mrs. Lisbon heard her going back and forth between her sisters’ two bedrooms (Bonnie shared with Mary, Therese with Lux). The rattling of her bracelets comforted her parents because it allowed them to keep track of her movements like an animal with a bell on its collar. From time to time during the hours before we arrived, Mr. Lisbon heard the tinkling of Cecilia’s bracelets as she went up and down the stairs, trying on different shoes.

According to what they told us later on separate occasions and in separate states, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon didn’t find Cecilia’s behavior strange during the party. “She was always quiet with company,” Mrs. Lisbon said. And perhaps because of their lack of socializing, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon remembered the party as a successful event. Mrs. Lisbon, in fact, was surprised when Cecilia asked to be excused. “I thought she was having a nice time.” Even at this point, the other girls didn’t act as though they knew what was about to happen. Tom Faheem recalls Mary telling him about a jumper she wanted to buy at Penney’s. Therese and Tim Winer discussed their anxiety over getting into an Ivy League college.

From clues later discovered, it appears Cecilia’s ascent to her bedroom was not as quick as we remember it. She took time, for instance, between leaving us and reaching the upstairs to drink juice from a can of pears (she left the can on the counter, punctured with only one hole in disregard of Mrs. Lisbon’s prescribed method). Either before or after drinking the juice, she went to the back door. “I thought they were sending her on a trip,” Mrs. Pitzenberger said. “She was carrying a suitcase.”

No suitcase was ever found. We can only explain Mrs. Pitzenberger’s testimony as the hallucination of a bifocal wearer, or a prophecy of the later suicides where luggage played such a central motif. Whatever the truth, Mrs. Pitzenberger saw Cecilia close the back door, and it was only seconds later that she climbed the stairs, as we so distinctly heard from below. She flipped on the lights in her bedroom as she entered, though it was still light out. Across the street, Mr. Buell saw her open her bedroom window. “I waved to her, but she didn’t see me,” he told us. Just then his wife groaned from the other room. He didn’t hear about Cecilia until after the EMS truck had come and gone. “Unfortunately, we had problems of our own,” he said. He went to check on his sick spouse just as Cecilia stuck her head out the window, into the pink, humid, pillowing air.

Three (#u4efa0307-dc2b-51bd-a36b-192563e781a6)

Flower arrangements arrived at the Lisbon house later than was customary. Because of the nature of the death, most people decided not to send flowers to the Funeral Home, and in general everybody put off placing their orders, unsure whether to let the catastrophe pass in silence or to act as though the death were natural. In the end, however, everybody sent something, white roses in wreaths, clusters of orchids, weeping peonies. Peter Loomis, who delivered for FTD, said flowers crammed the Lisbons’ entire living room. Bouquets exploded from chairs and lay scattered across the floor. “They didn’t even put them in vases,” he said. Most people opted for generic cards that said “With Sympathy” or “Our Condolences,” but some of the Waspier types, accustomed to writing notes for all occasions, labored over personal responses. Mrs. Beards used a quote from Walt Whitman we took to murmuring to one another: “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / and to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” Chase Buell peeked at his own mother’s card as he slipped it under the Lisbons’ door. It read: “I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.”

A few people braved personal calls. Mr. Hutch and Mr. Peters walked over to the Lisbon house on separate occasions, but their reports differed little. Mr. Lisbon invited them in, but before they could broach the painful subject, he sat them down in front of the baseball game. “He kept talking about the bullpen,” Mr. Hutch said. “Hell, I pitched in college. I had to straighten him out on a few essentials. First of all, he wanted to trade Miller, though he was our only decent closer. I forgot what I’d gone over there to do.” Mr. Peters said, “The guy was only half there. He kept turning the tint control up, so that the infield was practically blue. Then he’d sit back down. Then he’d get up again. One of the girls came in—can you tell them apart?—and brought us a couple beers. Took a swig from his before handing it over.”

Neither of the men mentioned the suicide. “I wanted to, I really did,” said Mr. Hutch. “I just never got around to it.”

Father Moody showed more perseverance. Mr. Lisbon welcomed the cleric as he had the other men, ushering him to a seat before the baseball game. A few minutes later, as though on cue, Mary served beers. But Father Moody wasn’t deflected. During the second inning, he said, “How about we get the Mrs. down here? Have a little chat.”

Mr. Lisbon hunched toward the screen. “Afraid she’s not seeing anybody right now. Under the weather.”

“She’ll see her priest,” Father Moody said.

He stood up to go. Mr. Lisbon held up two fingers. His eyes were watering. “Father,” he said. “Double-play ball, Father.”

Paolo Conelli, an altar boy, overheard Father Moody tell Fred Simpson, the choirmaster, how he had left “that strange man, God forgive me for saying so, but He made him that way,” and climbed the front stairs. Already the house showed signs of uncleanliness, though they were nothing compared to what was to come later. Dust balls lined the steps. A half-eaten sandwich sat atop the landing where someone had felt too sad to finish it. Because Mrs. Lisbon had stopped doing laundry or even buying detergent, the girls had taken to washing clothes by hand in the bathtub, and when Father Moody passed their bathroom, he saw shirts and pants and underthings draped over the shower curtain. “It sounded quite pleasant, actually,” he said. “Like rain.” Steam rose from the floor, along with the smell of jasmine soap (weeks later, we asked the cosmetics lady at Jacobsen’s for some jasmine soap we could smell). Father Moody stood outside the bathroom, too bashful to enter that moist cave that existed as a common room between the girls’ two shared bedrooms. Inside, if he hadn’t been a priest and had looked, he would have seen the throne-like toilet where the Lisbon girls defecated publicly, the bathtub they used as a couch, filling it with pillows so that two sisters could luxuriate while another curled her hair. He would have seen the radiator stacked with glasses and Coke cans, the clamshell soap dish employed, in a pinch, as an ashtray. From the age of twelve Lux spent hours in the john smoking cigarettes, exhaling either out the window or into a wet towel she then hung outside. But Father Moody saw none of this. He only passed through the tropical air current and that was all. Behind him he felt the colder drafts of the house, circulating dust motes and that particular family smell every house had, you knew it when you came in—Chase Buell’s house smelled like skin, Joe Larson’s like mayonnaise, the Lisbons’ like stale popcorn, we thought, though Father Moody, going there after the deaths had begun, said, “It was a mix between a funeral parlor and broom closet. All those flowers. All that dust.” He wanted to step back into the current of jasmine, but as he stood, listening to rain beading bathroom tiles and washing away the girls’ footprints, he heard voices. He made a quick circuit of the hallway, calling out for Mrs. Lisbon, but she didn’t respond. Returning to the top of the stairs, he had started down when he saw the Lisbon girls through a partly open doorway.

“At that point, those girls had no intention of repeating Cecilia’s mistake. I know everyone thinks it was a plan, or that we handled it poorly, but they were just as shocked as I was.” Father Moody rapped softly on the door and asked for permission to enter. “They were sitting on the floor together, and I could tell they’d been crying. I think they were having some kind of slumber party. They had pillows all over. I hate to mention it, and I remember scolding myself for even thinking it at the time, but it was unmistakable: they hadn’t bathed.”

We asked Father Moody whether he had discussed Cecilia’s death or the girls’ grief, but he said he hadn’t. “I brought it up a few times, but they didn’t take up the subject. I’ve learned you can’t force it. The time has to be right and the heart willing.” When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls’ emotional state at that point, he said, “Buffeted but not broken.”

•

In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased. Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life. Grief made them wander. We heard reports of the girls walking aimlessly through Eastland, down the lighted mall with its timid fountains and hot dogs impaled beneath heat lamps. Now and then they fingered a blouse, or dress, but bought nothing. Woody Clabault saw Lux Lisbon talking to a motorcycle gang outside Hudson’s. One biker asked her to go for a ride, and after looking in the direction of her house more than ten miles away, she accepted. She hugged his waist. He kicked the machine into life. Later, Lux was seen walking home alone, carrying her shoes.

In the Kriegers’ basement, we lay on a strip of leftover carpeting and dreamed of all the ways we could soothe the Lisbon girls. Some of us wanted to lie down in the grass with them, or play the guitar and sing them songs. Paul Baldino wanted to take them to Metro Beach so they could all get a tan. Chase Buell, more and more under the sway of his father the Christian Scientist, said only that the girls needed “help not of this world.” But when we asked him what he meant, he shrugged and said, “Nothing.” Nevertheless, when the girls walked by, we often found him crouching by a tree, moving his lips with his eyes closed.

Not everyone thought about the girls, however. Even before Cecilia’s funeral, some people could talk of nothing but the dangerousness of the fence she’d jumped on. “It was an accident waiting to happen,” said Mr. Frank, who worked in insurance. “You couldn’t get a policy to cover it.”

“Our kids could jump on it, too,” Mrs. Zaretti insisted during coffee hour following Sunday Mass. Not long after, a group of fathers began digging the fence out free of charge. It turned out the fence stood on the Bateses’ property. Mr. Buck, a lawyer, negotiated with Mr.. Bates about the fence’s removal and didn’t speak to Mr. Lisbon at all. Everyone assumed, of course, that the Lisbons would be grateful.

We had rarely seen our fathers in work boots before, toiling in the earth and wielding brand-new root clippers. They struggled with the fence, bent over like Marines hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima. It was the greatest show of common effort we could remember in our neighborhood, all those lawyers, doctors, and mortgage bankers locked arm in arm in the trench, with our mothers bringing out orange Kool-Aid, and for a moment our century was noble again. Even the sparrows on the telephone lines seemed to be watching. No cars passed. The industrial fog of our city made the men resemble figures hammered into pewter, but by late afternoon they still couldn’t uproot the fence. Mr. Hutch got the idea of hacksawing the bars as the paramedics had, and for a while the men took turns sawing, but their paper-pushing arms gave out quickly. Finally they tied the fence to the back of Uncle Tucker’s four-wheel-drive Bronco. Nobody cared that Uncle Tucker didn’t have a license (driving examiners always smelled booze on him, even if he quit drinking three days before the test they still smelled it evaporating from his pores). Our fathers just cried, “Hit it!” and Uncle Tucker floored his accelerator, but the fence didn’t budge. By midafternoon they abandoned the effort and took up a collection to hire a professional hauling service. An hour later, a lone man showed up in a tow truck, attached a hook to the fence, pressed a button to make his giant winch revolve, and with a deep earth sound, the murdering fence came loose. “You can see blood,” Anthony Turkis said, and we looked to see if the blood that hadn’t been there at the time of the suicide had arrived after the fact. Some said it was on the third spike, some said the fourth, but it was as impossible as finding the bloody shovel on the back of AbbeyRoad where all the clues proclaimed that Paul was dead.

None of the Lisbons helped with the fence removal. From time to time, however, we saw their faces blinking at the windows. Just after the truck pulled the fence free, Mr. Lisbon himself came out the side door and coiled up a garden hose. He didn’t move to the trench. He raised one hand in a neighborly salute and returned inside. The man lashed the fence, in sections, to his truck and—getting paid for it—gave Mr. Bates the worst lawn job we’d ever seen. We were amazed our parents permitted this, when lawn jobs usually justified calling the cops. But now Mr. Bates didn’t scream or try to get the truck’s license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips—they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.

After the truck drove away, our fathers gathered around the hole once more, staring down at wriggling earthworms, kitchen spoons, the one rock Paul Little swore was an Indian arrowhead. They leaned on shovels, mopping brows, even though they hadn’t done anything. Everyone felt a lot better, as though the lake had been cleaned up, or the air, or the other side’s bombs destroyed. There wasn’t much you could do to save us, but at least the fence was gone. Despite the devastation of his lawn, Mr. Bates did some edging, and the old German couple appeared in their grape arbor to drink dessert wine. As usual they wore their Alpine hats, Mr. Hessen’s with a tiny green feather, while their schnauzer sniffed at the end of his leash. Grapes burst above their heads. Mrs. Hessen’s humped back dove and surfaced amid her swelling rosebushes as she sprayed.

At some point, we looked up into the sky to see that all the fish flies had died. The air was no longer brown but blue. Using kitchen brooms, we swept bugs from poles and windows and electrical lines. We stuffed them into bags, thousands upon thousands of insect bodies with wings of raw silk, and Tim Winer, the brain, pointed out how the fish flies’ tails resembled those of lobsters. “They’re smaller,” he said, “but possess the same basic design. Lobsters are classified in the phylum Arthropoda, same as insects. They’re bugs. And bugs are only lobsters that have learned to fly.”

No one ever understood what got into us that year, or why we hated so intensely the crust of dead bugs over our lives. Suddenly, however, we couldn’t bear the fish flies carpeting our swimming pools, filling our mailboxes, blotting out stars on our flags. The collective action of digging the trench led to cooperative sweeping, bag-carting, patio-hosing. A score of brooms kept time in all directions as the pale ghosts of fish flies dropped from walls like ash. We examined their tiny wizards’ faces, rubbing them between our fingers until they gave off the scent of carp. We tried to light them but they wouldn’t burn (which made the fish flies seem deader than anything). We hit bushes, beat rugs, turned on windshield wipers full blast. Fish flies clogged sewer grates so that we had to stuff them down with sticks. Crouching over sewers, we could hear the river under the city flowing away. We dropped rocks and listened for the splash.

We didn’t stop with our own houses. Once our walls were clean, Mr. Buell told Chase to start cleaning bugs off the Lisbon house. Because of his religious beliefs, Mr. Buell often went the extra mile, raking ten feet into the Hessens’ yard, or shoveling their walk and even throwing down rock salt. It wasn’t odd for him to tell Chase to start sweeping the Lisbons’ house, even though they lived across the street and not next door. Because Mr. Lisbon only had daughters, boys and men had gone over in the past to help him drag away lightning-struck limbs, and as Chase approached, holding his broom over his head like a regimental banner, nobody said a word. Then, however, Mr. Krieger told Kyle to go over and sweep some, and Mr. Hutch sent Ralph, and soon we were all over at the Lisbon house, brushing walls and scraping away bug husks. They had even more than we did, the walls an inch thick, and Paul Baldino asked us the riddle, “What smells like fish, is fun to eat, but isn’t fish?”

Once we got to the Lisbons’ windows, our new inexplicable feelings for the girls came to the fore. As we slapped off bugs, we saw Mary Lisbon in the kitchen, holding a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. She appeared to be contemplating whether or not to open it. She read the directions, turned the box over to look at the vivid picture of the noodles, and then put the box back on the counter. Anthony Turkis, pressing his face to the window, said, “She should eat something.” She picked up the box again. Hopefully, we watched. But then she turned and disappeared.

Outside it grew dark. Lights came on down the block, but not in the Lisbon house. We couldn’t see in any better, and in fact the glass panes began to reflect our own gaping faces. It was only nine o’clock, but everything confirmed what people had been saying: that since Cecilia’s suicide the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep. Up in a bedroom window, Bonnie’s three votive candles glimmered in a reddish haze, but otherwise the house absorbed the shadows of night. Insects started up in their hiding places all around, vibrating the minute we turned our backs. Everyone called them crickets, but we never found any in the sprayed bushes or aerated lawns, and had no idea what they looked like. They were merely sound. Our parents had been more intimate with crickets. For them the buzzing apparently didn’t sound mechanical. It came from every direction, always from a height just above our heads, or just below, and always with the suggestion that the insect world felt more than we did. As we stood charmed into stillness, listening to the crickets, Mr. Lisbon came out the side door and thanked us. His hair looked even grayer than usual, but grief hadn’t altered the highness of his voice. He had on overalls, one knee covered by sawdust. “Feel free to use the hose,” he said, and then he looked at the Good Humor truck passing by, the jingle of the bell seemed to trigger a memory, he smiled, or winced—we couldn’t tell which—and returned inside.

We went with him only later, invisibly, with the ghosts of our questions. Apparently, as he stepped back inside, he saw Therese come out of the dining room. She was stuffing her mouth with candy—M&M’s, by the colors—but stopped immediately on seeing him. She swallowed an unchewed chunk. Her high forehead glowed in the light from the street and her cupid’s lips were redder, smaller, and more shapely than he remembered, especially in contrast to her cheeks and chin, which had gained weight. Her eyelashes were crusted, as though recently glued shut. At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time. He rested his hands on her shoulders, then dropped them to his sides. Therese brushed the hair out of her face, smiled, and began walking slowly up the stairs.

Mr. Lisbon went on his usual nighttime rounds, checking to see that the front door was locked (it wasn’t), that the garage light was off (it was), and that none of the burners on the stove had been left on (none had). He turned off the light in the first-floor bathroom, where he found Kyle Krieger’s retainer in the sink, left from when he’d taken it out during the party to eat cake. Mr. Lisbon ran the retainer under water, examining the pink shell form-fitted to the roof of Kyle’s mouth, the crenellations in the plastic that encircled the turret of his teeth, the looping front wire bent at key spots (you could see plier marks) to provide modulated pressure. Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like these—simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving—held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toilet. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled in the surge, disappeared down the porcelain throat, and, when waters abated, floated triumphantly, mockingly, out. Mr. Lisbon waited for the tank to refill and flushed again, but the same thing happened. The replica of the boy’s mouth clung to the white slope.

At that point something flashed in the corner of his eye. “I thought I saw somebody, but when I looked, there was nothing there.” Nor did he see anything as he came around the back hall into the foyer and up the front stairs. On the second floor he listened at the girls’ doors, but heard only Mary coughing in her sleep, Lux playing a radio softly, singing along. He stepped into the girls’ bathroom. A beam of light from the risen moon penetrated the window, lighting up a portion of mirror. Amid smudged fingerprints, a small circle had been wiped clean where his daughters contemplated their images, and above the mirror itself Bonnie had taped a white construction-paper dove. Mr. Lisbon parted his lips in a grimace and saw in the clean circle the one dead canine tooth beginning to turn green on the left side of his mouth. The doors to the girls’ shared bedrooms were not completely closed. Breathings and murmurings issued from them. He listened to the sounds as though they could tell him what the girls were feeling and how to comfort them. Lux switched her radio off, and everything was silent. “I couldn’t go in,” Mr. Lisbon confessed to us years later. “I didn’t know what to say.” Only as he left the bathroom, heading for the oblivion of sleep himself, did Mr. Lisbon see Cecilia’s ghost. She was standing in her old bedroom, dressed in the wedding dress again, having somehow shed the beige dress with the lace collar she’d worn in her coffin. “The window was still open,” Mr. Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever.”

According to his story, he didn’t cry out. He didn’t want to make contact with the shade of his daughter, to learn why she had done herself in, to ask forgiveness, or to rebuke her. He merely rushed forward, brushing past, to close the window. As he did, however, the ghost turned, and he saw that it was only Bonnie, wrapped in a bedsheet. “Don’t worry,” she said, quietly. “They took the fence out.”

•

In a handwritten note displaying the penmanship perfected during his graduate school days in Zurich, Dr. Hornicker called Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon in for a second consultation, but they didn’t go. Instead, from what we observed during the remainder of the summer, Mrs. Lisbon once more took charge of the house while Mr. Lisbon receded into a mist. When we saw him after that, he had the sheepish look of a poor relation. By late August, in the weeks of preparation before school, he began leaving by the back door as though sneaking out. His car would whine inside the garage and, when the automatic door rose, would emerge tentatively, lopsided like an animal missing a leg. Through the windshield we could see Mr. Lisbon at the wheel, his hair still wet and his face sometimes dabbed with shaving cream, but he made no expression when the tail pipe hit the end of the driveway, sending up sparks, as it did every time. At six o’clock he returned home. As he came up the drive, the garage door shuddered to engulf him, and then we wouldn’t see him until the next morning, when the clanging tail pipe announced his departure.