The Virgin Suicides (20 page)

We knew better. Three nights after the record playing, we saw Bonnie bring a black trunk into her bedroom. She put it on her bed and began filling it with clothes and books. Mary appeared and threw in her climate mirror. They argued about the trunk's contents and, in a huff, Bonnie took out some of the clothes she'd put in, giving Mary more room for her things: a cassette player, a hair dryer, and the object we didn't understand until later, a cast-iron doorstop. We had no idea what the girls were doing, but we noticed the change in their demeanor at once. They moved with a new purpose. Their aimlessness was gone. It was Paul Baldino who interpreted their actions: "Looks like they're going to make a break for it," he said, putting down the binoculars. He made this conclusion with the confident air of someone who had seen relatives disappear to Sicily or South America, and we believed him at once. "Five dollars gets you ten those girls are out of here by the end of the week."

He was right, though not in the way he intended. The last note, written on the back of a laminated picture of the Virgin, arrived in Chase Buell's mailbox on June 14. It said simply: "Tomorrow.

Midnight. Wait for our signal."

By this time of year, fish flies coated our windows, making it difficult to see out. The next night, we gathered in the vacant lot beside Joe Larson's house. The sun had fallen below the horizon, but still lit the sky in an orange chemical streak more beautiful than nature. Across the street the Lisbon house was dark except for the red haze of Cecilia's shrine, nearly hidden. From the ground we couldn't see the upper story well, and tried to go up to the Larsons' roof. Mr. Larson stopped us. "I just got finished retarring it," he said. We wandered back to the lot, then walked down to the street, putting our palms against the asphalt still warm from the day's sun. The sodden smell of the Lisbon house reached us, then faded, so that we thought we'd imagined it. Joe Hill Conley began climbing trees, as usual, though the rest of us had outgrown it. We watched him shinny up a young maple. He couldn't climb far because the thin limbs wouldn't support his weight. Still, Chase Buell called up to him, "See anything?" and Joe Hill Conley squinted, then pulled the skin at the corners of his eyes taut, which he thought worked better than squinting, but finally shook his head. It gave us an idea, however, and we moved to the old tree house. Gazing up through foliage, we determined its condition. Part of the roof had been blown off in a storm years ago, and our crowning touch, the doorknob, was missing, but the structure still looked habitable.

We climbed up to the tree house the way we always had, stepping in the knothole, then on the nailed board, then on two bent nails, before grasping the frayed rope and pulling ourselves through the trapdoor. We were so much bigger now we could barely squeeze through, and once we were inside, the plywood floor sagged under our weight. The oblong window we'd cut with a handsaw years ago still looked onto the front of the Lisbon house. Next to it were five spotted photographs of the Lisbon girls, pinned with rusty tacks. We didn't remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were the phosphorescent outlines of the girls' bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet. Outside and below, a few people had come out to water lawns or flower beds, tossing silver lassos. The cracker voice of our local baseball announcer rose from a score of radios, describing a slow drama we couldn't see, and homerun cheers rose, too, converging above the trees and then dispersing. It grew still darker. People went inside. We tried the wick of the ancient kerosene lamp, which lit, burning on invisible residue, but within a minute, fish flies began streaming through the window, and we put the lamp out. We could hear their bodies battering streetlamps, a hail of hair balls, and popping under the tires of passing cars. A few bugs exploded as we leaned back against the tree-house walls. Inert unless detached, they flapped furiously between our fingers, then flew away to cling again, on anything, inert. The scum of their dead or dying bodies darkened street-and headlights, turned house windows into theater scrims poking out light. We settled back, pulling up a warm six-pack on a rope, and drank, and waited.

Each of us had said he was sleeping over at a friend's house, so we had all night to sit and drink, unmolested by adults. But neither at twilight nor thereafter did we see any lights in the Lisbon house other than the candles. They seemed to bum more dimly, and we suspected that despite their ministrations, the girls were running out of wax.

Cecilia's window had the dank glow of an unclean fish tank. Angling Carl Tagel's telescope out the tree-house window, we managed to see the pockmarked moon steaming silently across space, then blue Venus, but when we turned the telescope on Lux's window it brought us so close we couldn't see a thing. What at first appeared the xylophone of her spine, curled in bed, turned out to be a decorative molding. A stringy peach pit, left on her bedside table from a time of fresh food, gave rise to a number of lurid conjectures. Any time we caught sight of her, or of something moving, the piece was too small to put the puzzle together, and in the end we gave up, retracting the telescope and relying on our eyes.

Midnight passed in silence. The moon set. A bottle of Boone's Farm strawberry wine materialized, was passed around, and set on a tree limb.

Tom Bogus rolled to the tree-house door and dropped from sight. A minute later, we heard him retching in the bushes of the vacant lot. We stayed up late enough to see Uncle Tucker emerge, holding a piece of linoleum from the thirteenth layer he was installing to fill up the hours of his life. After getting a beer from the garage refrigerator, he walked to the front yard and surveyed his nighttime territory. Moving behind a tree, he waited for Bonnie to appear, rosary in hand. From his vantage point he couldn't see the flashlight come on in the bedroom window, and he had gone back inside before we heard the window open. By that time we were fixed on it. The flashlight waved through the darkness. Then the light went on and off three times in succession.

A breeze arose. In the blackness, the leaves of our tree began to flutter, and the air filled with the crepuscular scent of the Lisbon house. None of us remembers thinking anything, or deciding anything, because at that moment our minds had ceased to work, filling us with the only peace we've ever known. We were above the street, aloft, at the same height as the Lisbon girls in their crumbling bedrooms, and they were calling to us. We heard wood scrape. Then, for an instant, we saw them-Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese-framed in a single window. They looked our way, looked across the void at us. Mary blew us a kiss, or wiped her mouth. The flashlight went off. The window closed. And they were gone.

We didn't even stop to discuss it. In single file, like paratroopers, we dropped from the tree. It was an easy jump, and only on impact did we realize how close the ground was: no more than ten feet down. Jumping from the grass, we could nearly touch the tree-house floor. Our new height astounded us, and later many said this contributed to our resolve, because for the first time ever we felt like men.

We advanced on the house from different directions, hiding in shadows of surviving trees. As we approached, some of us crawling army-style, others still on two feet, the smell grew stronger. The air thickened.

Soon we reached an invisible barrier: no one had gotten this close to the Lisbon house in months. We hesitated, and then Paul Baldino held his hand in the air, giving the signal, and we went in closer. We grazed the brick walls, crouching under windows and getting spider-web in our hair.

We came into the damp mess of the back yard. Kevin Head tripped on the bird feeder, which was still lying there. It cracked in half, the remaining seed spilling out onto the ground. We froze, but no lights came on.

After a minute, we inched in closer. Mosquitoes divebombed past our ears, but we paid no attention. We were too busy gazing up into the darkness for a ladder of knotted bed sheets and a descending nightgown.

We saw nothing. The house rose above us, its windows reflecting dark masses of leaves. In a whisper, Chase Buell reminded us that he had just gotten his driver's license, and held up the keys to his mother's Cougar. "We can use my car," he said. Tom Faheem searched the overgrown flower beds for pebbles to ping against the girls' windows. Any second an upstairs window might open, breaking its seal of fish flies, and a face would look down at us for the rest of our lives.

At the back window, we grew brave enough to look in. Through a scrub of dead windowsill plants, we made out the interior of the house: a seascape of confused objects, advancing and retreating as our eyes adjusted to the light. Mr. Lisbon's La-Z-Boy rolled forward, its footrest raised like a snow shovel. The brown vinyl sofa slunk back against the wall. As they moved apart, the floor seemed to rise like a hydraulic stage, and in the room's only light, coming from a small shaded lamp, we saw Lux. She was lying back in a beanbag chair, her knees lifted and spread apart, her upper half sunk into the bag, which closed over her like a straitjacket. She was wearing blue jeans and suede clogs. Her long hair fell over her shoulders. She had a cigarette in her mouth, the long ash about to fall.

We didn't know what to do next. We had no instructions. We pressed our faces against the windows, using our hands as goggles. The glass panes conducted sound vibrations, and as we leaned forward, we could feel the other girls moving about above us. Something slid, stopped, slid again.

Something bumped. We drew our faces away and everything went still. Then we returned to the buzzing glass.

Now Lux was groping for an ashtray. Finding none within reach, she flicked her ash onto her blue jeans, rubbing it in with her hand. As she moved, she rose out of the beanbag, and we saw that she was wearing a halter top. Tied behind her neck in a bow, the halter descended on two thin straps over her pale shoulders and sculpted collarbones, swelling finally into two yellow slings. The halter was slightly askew on the right side, revealing a soft white plumpness as she stretched. "July, two years ago," said Joe Hill Conley, identifying the last time we'd seen the halter. On a very hot day, Lux had worn it outside for five minutes before her mother had called her back in to change. Now the halter spoke of all the time in between, of everything that had happened. Most of all, it said that the girls were leaving, that from now on they'd wear whatever they liked. "Maybe we should knock," Kevin Head whispered, but none of us did. Lux settled back in the beanbag chair. She ground out her cigarette on the floor. Behind her, on the wall, a shadow swelled. She turned abruptly, then smiled as a stray cat we'd never seen before climbed into her lap. She hugged its unresponsive body until the animal struggled free (that's one more thing we have to include: right up to the end, Lux loved the stray cat. It ran off then, out of this report). Lux lit another cigarette. In the match's flare, she looked up at the window. She lifted her chin so that we thought she'd seen us, but then she ran her hand through her hair. She was only examining her reflection. The light inside the house made us invisible outside, and we stood inches from the window but unseen, as though looking in at Lux from another plane of existence. The faint glow of the window flickered against our faces. Our trunks and legs descended into darkness. On the lake a freighter sounded its horn, on a fogless night.

Another freighter responded at a deeper pitch. That halter could have come undone with one quick yank.

Tom Faheem went first, disproving his shy reputation. He climbed onto the back porch, quietly opened the door, and let us, at last, back into the Lisbon house. "We're here" was all he said.

Lux looked up, but didn't rise from the chair. Her sleepy eyes showed no surprise that we were there, but at the base of her white neck a lobstery blush spread. "About time," she said. "We've been waiting for you guys." She took another drag. "We've got a car," Tom Faheem continued. "Full tank. We'll take you wherever you want to go."

"It's just a Cougar," said Chase Buell, "but it's got a pretty big trunk."

"Can I sit in front?" Lux asked, screwing her mouth up to exhale to one side, politely away from us.

"Sure can."

"Which one of you studs is going to sit up front next to me?"

She tilted her head toward the ceiling and blew a series of smoke rings.

We watched them rise, and this time Joe Hill Conley didn't run forward to stick his finger in them. For the first time, we looked around the house. The smell, now that we were inside, was stronger than ever. It was the smell of wet plaster, drains clogged with the endless tangle of the girls' hair, mildewed cabinets, leaking pipes. Paint cans were still stationed under leaks, each full of a weak solution of other times. The living room had a plundered look. The television sat at an angle, its screen removed, Mr. Lisbon's toolbox open in front of it. Chairs were missing arms or legs, as though the Lisbons had been using them for firewood.

Where are your parents?" Asleep. ,:What about your sisters?"

They're coming." Something thudded downstairs. We retreated to the back door. "Come on," Chase Buell said. "We better get out of here. It's getting late." But Lux only exhaled again, shaking her head. She pulled a halter strap away from her skin, where it left a red mark. Everything was quiet again. "Wait," she said. "Five more minutes. We're not finished packing. We had to wait until my parents were asleep. They take forever. Especially my mom. She's an insomniac. She's probably awake right now."

She got up then. We saw her rise from the beanbag chair, leaning forward to get enough momentum. The halter, on its flimsy strings, hung completely away from her body so that we saw dark air between material and skin, and then the soft flash of her flour-dusted breasts. "My feet are all swollen," she said. "Weirdest thing. That's why I'm wearing clogs. Do you like them9" She dangled one on the end of her toes.

"Yeah." Now she stood at full height, which wasn't tall. We had to keep telling ourselves that this was happening, that this was really Lux Lisbon, that we were in the same room with her. She looked down at herself, adjusted the halter, tucked with one thumb the exposed plumpness on her right side. Then she looked up again as though into each of our eyes at once, and began walking forward. She shuffled in the clogs, moving into the shadows, and as she approached we could hear her printing the dusty floor. From the darkness she said, "We won't all fit in a Cougar." She took one more step and her face reappeared. For a second it didn't seem alive: it was too white, the cheeks too perfectly carved, the arched eyebrows painted on, the full lips made of wax. But then she came closer and we saw the light in her eyes we have been looking for ever since." We better take my mom's car, don't you think?