The Virgin Suicides (21 page)

It9s bigger. Which one of you can drive?"

Chase Buell raised his hand. "Think you can drive a station wagon?"

"Sure." And then: "It's not a stick, is it?"

"No."

"Sure. No problem."

"Will you let me steer some?"

"Sure. But we should get out of here. I just heard something. Maybe it's your mom."

She came up to Chase Buell. She came so close her breath stirred his hair. And then, in front of us all, Lux unbuckled his belt. She didn't even need to look down. Her fingers saw their way, and only once did something snag, at which point she shook her head, like a musician missing an easy note. All the while she stared into his eyes, rising up on the balls of her feet, and in the quiet house we heard the pants unsnap. The zipper opened all the way down our spines. None of us moved.

Chase Buell didn't move. Lux's eyes, burning and velvet, glowed in the dim room. A vein on her neck was softly pulsing, the one you're supposed to put perfume on for that reason. Even though she was doing it to Chase Buell, we could all feel Lux undoing us, reaching out for us and taking us as she knew we could be taken. Just at the last second, another soft thud came from downstairs. Upstairs, Mr. Lisbon coughed in his sleep.

Lux stopped. She looked away, consulting with herself, and then she said, "We can't do this now."

She let go of Chase Buell's belt and crossed to the back door. "I've got to get some fresh air. You guys have got me all worked up." She smiled then, a loose, clumsy smile, genuine, unpretty. "I'll go wait in the car. You guys wait here for my sisters. We've got a lot of stuff." She fished in a bowl by the back door for the car keys. She made to leave, but stopped again. "Where will we go?"

"Florida," Chase Buell said. "Cool," said Lux. "Florida."

A minute later, we heard a car door slam shut in the garage. A few of us recall hearing the faint strains of a popular song drifting through the night, which told us she was playing the radio. We waited. We weren't sure where the other girls were. We could hear sounds of packing upstairs, a closet door opening, a suitcase jangling bedsprings. Feet moved above and below. Something was being dragged across the basement floor. Though the nature of the sounds eluded us, a precision surrounded them; every movement seemed exact, part of an elaborate escape plan. We understood that we were only pawns in this strategy, useful for a time, but this didn't lessen our exhilaration. The knowledge welled in us that we would soon be in the car with the girls, driving them out of our green neighborhood and into the pure, free desolation of back roads we didn't even know yet. We played paper, scissors, rock to see who would go along, who would stay behind. And all the while the sense that the girls would soon join us filled us with a quiet happiness. Who knew how accustomed we might get to those sounds? Of elastic satin suitcase pockets snapping closed? Of jewelry rattling? Of the hunchback foot-dragging sound of the girls carrying suitcases down an anonymous corridor? Unknown roads took shape in our minds. We saw ourselves cutting swaths through cattails, freshwater inlets, old boatyards. At some gas station we would ask for the ladies' room key because the girls would be too shy. We would play the radio with the windows open.

Sometime during this reverie, the house went silent. We assumed the girls had finished packing. Peter Sissen took out his penlight and made a shallow foray into the dining room, coming back to say, "One of them is still downstairs. There's a light on in the stairway." We stood, we waved the penlight, we waited for the girls, but no one came. Tom Faheem tried the first stair, but it creaked so loudly he came back down again.

The silence of the house rang in our ears. A car passed, sending a shadow sweeping across the dining room, momentarily lighting up the painting of the Pilgrims. The dining table was heaped with winter coats wrapped in plastic. Other hulking bundles loomed. The house had the feel of an attic where junk collects, establishing revolutionary relationships: the toaster in the birdcage; ballet slippers protruding from a wicker creel. We snaked our way amid the clutter, passing into spaces cleared for games-a backgammon board, Chinese checkers-then moving again into thickets of eggbeaters and rubber boots. We entered the kitchen. It was too dark to see, but we heard a small hiss, like someone sighing. A trapezoid of light projected up from the basement. We went to the stairs and listened. Then we started down to the rec room.

Chase Buell led the way, and as we descended, holding on to one another's belt loops, we traveled back to the day a year earlier when we had descended those same steps to attend the only party the Lisbon girls were ever allowed to throw. By the time we reached bottom, we felt we'd literally traveled back in time. For despite the inch of floodwater covering the floor, the room was just as we had left it: Cecilia's party had never been cleaned up. The paper tablecloth, spotted with mice droppings, still covered the card table. A brownish scum of punch lay caked in the cut-glass bowl, sprinkled with flies. The sherbet had melted long ago, but a ladle still protruded from the gummy silt, and cups, gray with dust and cobwebs, remained neatly stacked in front. A profusion of withered balloons hung from the ceiling on thin ribbons.

The domino game still called for a three or a seven.

We didn't know where the girls had gone. Ripples spread across the water's surface as though something had just swum by or dived down. The gurgling drain sucked intermittently. The water lapped the walls, reflecting our pink faces, and the red and blue streamers overhead. The room's changes-water bugs adhering to walls, one bobbing dead mouse-only heightened what hadn't changed. If we half closed our eyes and held our noses, we could trick ourselves into thinking the party was still going on. Buzz Romano waded out to the card table, and as we all watched, began to dance, to box-step, as his mother had taught him in the papal splendor of their living room. He held only air, but we could see herthem-all five, clasped in his arms. "These girls make me crazy. If I could just feel one of them up just once," he said, as his shoes filled and emptied with silt. His dancing kicked up the sewage smell, and after that, stronger than ever, the smell we could never forget. Because it was then we saw, over Buzz Romano's head, the only thing that had changed in the room since we left it a year before. Hanging down amid the half-deflated balloons were the two brownand-white husks of Bonnie's saddle shoes. She had tied the rope to the same beam as the decorations.

None of us moved. Buzz Romano, oblivious, kept dancing. Above him, in a pink dress, Bonnie looked clean and festive, like a pifiata. It took a minute to sink in. We gazed up at Bonnie, at her spindly legs in their white confirmation stockings, and the shame that has never gone away took over. The doctors we later consulted attributed our response to shock. But the mood felt more like guilt, like coming to attention at the last moment and too late, as though Bonnie were murmuring the secret not only of her death but of her life itself, of all the girls' lives.

She was so still. She had such enormous weight. The soles of her wet shoes were embedded with bits of mica, shining and dripping.

We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out.

How long we stayed like that, communing with her departed spirit, we can't remember. Long enough for our collective breath to start a breeze through the room that made Bonnie twist on her rope. She spun slowly, and at one point her face broke out of the seaweed of balloons, showing us the reality of the death she'd chosen. It was a world of blackening eye sockets, blood pooling in lower extremities, stiffening joints.

Already we knew the rest-though we would never be sure about the sequence of events. We argue about it still. Most likely, Bonnie died while we sat in the living room, dreaming of highways. Mary put her head in the oven shortly thereafter, on hearing Bonnie kick the trunk out from under herself. They were ready to assist one another, if need be.

Mary might have still been breathing when we passed by on our way downstairs, missing her by less than two feet in the dark, as we later measured. Therese, stuffed with sleeping pills washed down with gin, was as good as dead by the time we entered the house. Lux was the last to go, twenty or thirty minutes after we left. Fleeing, screaming without sound, we forgot to stop at the garage, from which music was still playing. They found her in the front seat, gray-faced and serene, holding a cigarette lighter that had burned its coils into her palm. She had escaped in the car just as we expected. But she had unbuckled us, it turned out, only to stall us, so that she and her sisters could die in peace.

We knew them now. Knew the way the skinny one drove, with his bursts of acceleration mid-block, his cautious turning, his habit of misjudging the Lisbons' driveway so that he ran over the lawn. We knew the bending sound a siren made as it passed, a phenomenon Therese identified correctly as the Doppler effect the third time the EMS truck came, but not the fourth because she was bent herself by then, winding down and away in slow spirals, a feeling akin to being sucked through your own intestines. We knew that the fat one had sensitive skin and was plagued with razor bumps, that.he wore a metal wedge on the heel of his shoe because his left leg was shorter than his right, and that he made an uneven clicking sound as he hitched across the macadam driveway. We knew that the skinny one's hair tended to get oily, because when they came to get Cecilia his long hair had looked like Bob Seger's, but now, a year later, the fluff was gone and he looked like a drowned rat. We still didn't know their real names, but we were beginning to intuit the condition of their paramedic lives, the smell of bandages and oxygen masks, the taste of pre-calamity dinners on resuscitated mouths, the flavor of life ebbing away on the other side of their own puffing faces, the blood, brain spatter, blue cheeks, bulging eyes, and-on our own block-the succession of limp bodies wearing charm bracelets and gold lockets in the shape of a heart.

When they came the fourth time they were losing faith. The truck made the same jolting stop, tires skidded, doors flew open, but as they jumped out the paramedics had lost their valiant appearance and were clearly two men afraid of being humiliated. "It's those two guys again,"

said Zachary Larson, five. The fat one gave the skinny one a look and they started for the house, this time taking no equipment. Mrs. Lisbon, face white, answered the door. She pointed inside, saying nothing. When the paramedics entered, she remained in the doorway, tightening the belt of her robe. She straightened the welcome mat with her toe, twice. Soon the paramedics ran out again, changed and electrified, and got the stretcher. A minute later they were carrying Therese out, facedown. Her dress, hiked up around her waist, revealed her unbecoming underwear, the color of an athletic bandage. The buttons in back had popped open to reveal a slice of mushroom-colored back. Her hand kept falling off the stretcher, though each time Mrs. Lisbon replaced it. "Stay," she commanded, to the hand apparently. But the hand flopped out again. Mrs.

Lisbon stopped, her shoulders sagged, she seemed to give up. In the next second she was running, holding on to Therese's arm and murmuring what some people heard as, "Not you, too," and Mrs. O'Connor, who had acted in college, as, "But too cruel."

By this time we were back in our beds, shamming sleep. Outside, Sheriff wore an oxygen mask to enter the garage and raise the automatic door.

When it opened (so people told us) nothing came out, no smoke as everyone expected, not even a trace of gas that made things shimmer like a mirage-the station wagon sat vibrating, and because Sheriff had brushed another switch accidentally, the windshield wipers were going like mad. The fat one went inside to get Bonnie down from the rafters, balancing one chair on another like a circus performer. They found Mary in the kitchen, not dead but nearly so, her head and torso thrust into the oven as though she were scrubbing it. A second EMS truck came (the only time this happened) bringing two paramedics more efficient than Sheriff and the fat one. They rushed inside and saved Mary's life. For a while. For what it was worth.

Technically, Mary survived for more than a month, though everyone felt otherwise. After that night, people spoke of the Lisbon girls in the past tense, and if they mentioned Mary at all it was with the veiled wish that she would hurry up and get it over with. In fact, the final suicides surprised few people. Even we who had tried to save the girls came to consider ourselves temporarily insane. In hindsight, Bonnie's battered trunk lost its associations with travel and flight and became only what it was: a drop weight for a hanging, like sandbags in old Westerns. Still, while everyone agreed the suicides came as predictably as seasons or old age, we could never agree on an explanation for them.

The final suicides seemed to confirm Dr. Hornicker's theory that the girls had been suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but Dr.

Hornicker later distanced himself from that conclusion. Even if Cecilia's suicide led to copycatting, that still didn't explain why Cecilia had killed herself in the first place. At a hastily called Lions Club meeting, Dr. Hornicker, the guest speaker, brought up the possibility of a chemical link, citing a new study of "platelet serotonin receptor indices in suicidal children." Dr. Kotbaum of the Western Psychiatric Institute had found that many suicidal persons possessed deficient amounts of serotonin, a neurotransmitter essential for the regulation of mood. Since the serotonin study had been published after Cecilia's suicide, Dr. Hornicker had never measured her serotonin level. He did, however, examine a blood sample taken from Mary, which showed a slight deficiency of serotonin. She was put on medication, and after two weeks of psychological tests and intensive therapy, her blood was tested again. At that time her serotonin level appeared normal.

As for the other girls, autopsies were performed on each of them, in accordance with a state law requiring investigation in all deaths by suicide. As written, the law gave the police leeway in such cases, and their prior failure to order an autopsy on Cecilia led many to believe they now suspected Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon of foul play, or wished to put pressure on them to move. A single coroner, brought in from the city with two fatigued assistants, opened up the girls' brains and body cavities, peering inside at the mystery of their despair. They used an assembly-line approach, the assistants rolling each girl past the doctor as he used his table saw, his hose, his vacuum. Photographs were taken, but never released, though we wouldn't have had the stomach to look at them. We did, however, read the coroner's report, written in a colorful style that made the girls' deaths as unreal as the news. He spoke of the incredible cleanliness of the girls' bodies, the youngest he had ever worked on, showing no signs of wastage or alcoholism. Their smooth blue hearts looked like water balloons, and the rest of their organs possessed a similar textbook clarity. In older people, or the chronically ill, the organs tend to lose their shape, to distend, change color, grow connections with organs they have nothing to do with, so that most entrails look, as the coroner put it, "like a rubbish dump."