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why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.”
We would have lost them completely if the girls hadn’t contacted us.
He was right, though not in the way he intended.
Just at the last second, another soft thud came from downstairs.
Cecilia’s party had never been cleaned up.
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.
We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out.
Lux was the last to go, twenty or thirty minutes after we left.
What she could never explain, however, was why the girls chose the date of Cecilia’s suicide attempt rather than her actual death some three weeks later on July 9.
Herb Pitzenberger saw her come out onto the back porch with a stack of manuscript pages. Putting them into a pile, she lit them. We never learned what they were.
It was in the middle of the night that they finally left. Nobody saw them go except Uncle Tucker.
“With most people,” he said, “suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn’t mean the chambers were empty.”
Then the rope thrown over the beam, the sleeping pill dropped in the palm with the long, lying lifeline, the window thrown open, the oven turned on, whatever.
We couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins,
It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
