Beautiful Broken Girls

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  For Charlie, my beautiful dreamer,

  whose gifts touch my heart every day

  For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

  For the hearing of my heart____

  It really goes.

  And there is a charge, a very large charge

  For a word or a touch

  Or a bit of blood

  —Sylvia Plath,

  from “Lady Lazarus”

  PROLOGUE

  AUGUST 2016

  When they found Mira Cillo at the bottom of the quarry lake, her fingers were shot through the loose weave of her sister Francesca’s sweater, at the neck. They were so tangled, jammed through past the knuckles, the coroner had to cut away the yarn to separate them.

  Ben kept thinking about that.

  Ben heard this from Kyle Kulik, who had graduated that summer from Bismuth High and was training to become an EMT. Kyle’s voice shook as he told Ben it was the sight of the Cillo girls as they were lifted from the water, blue and wilted, with hollows around their eyes and, later, froth cones around their lips, that made Kyle realize being an emergency medical technician wasn’t for him if it meant plucking hot dead girls out of the quarry.

  Ben knew in a hazy way that he was focusing on the wrong thing. It didn’t matter that the girls were wearing sweaters in August. Or that pink-tinged foam could appear from dead lips even after it was wiped away. It must be shock that was causing Ben to focus on the little things instead of the big horrible thing right in front of him: that the girls next door dumped their bikes the night before behind Johnny’s Foodmaster and hiked three-quarters of a mile through the dark to the highest ledge. And fell.

  Frank Cillo noticed his daughters were gone at eleven o’clock bed check. He called the police immediately. At 11:29 p.m., cell phones across the Northeast jumped with a shocking mechanical buzz and read, “AMBER Alert now. Bismuth, MA: Missing,” with the girls’ names and ages. To get an AMBER Alert that fast meant Frank Cillo knew Someone at the Department of Justice. He also knew Someone at Bismuth High School, Saint Theresa’s Church, the Parks Department, and the Bismuth Boat Club. Friends he’d gone to school with, played football with, served in the army with. Fellow football boosters, Lions, and Rotarians; members of the Massachusetts Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, the Workers Injury Law & Advocacy Group, and the Brotherhood of Malpractice Attorneys. Friends who brought macaroni and cases of Budweiser when Francesca and then Mira were born after his wife’s miscarriages, and later, after she passed at forty-three. Networks of prematurely grizzled men with yellowing shirts and eyes who owed Frank Cillo, directly and otherwise.

  Between 11:29 and 11:36, lights flicked on in bedrooms throughout Ben’s neighborhood of compact brick colonials clustered in the throat of Powder Neck. Calls were made among the houses. Mothers panicked and checked their children. Fathers shrugged fleece jackets over undershirts and staggered toward the Cillos’ house, the glare of flashing police lights filling their glasses.

  The only ones who wouldn’t have seen the AMBER Alert would have been the girls themselves, since their shared and heavily monitored cell phone rarely moved from the top of the refrigerator. That technology was barely present in the Cillo household only reinforced for the Bismuth mothers how healthy the Cillo girls were, what firm limits Frank Cillo set.

  It was around January that the girls started acting weird. By early summer, their weirdness had become a topic among the neighborhood boys. Some argued it made sense, with Connie’s accident only a few weeks before. Connie with her helium laugh and her dumb nicknames—Sistah, Sangue, Cuz—the slangy, silly words Mira and Francesca used for Connie, the ones that thrilled Connie as much as they annoyed Ben, bounced around his head.

  Ben touched the picture on his phone with his fingertip. The divers had left the sisters attached, removed their pants but left on their panties. The photo was a pocket shot, a quick yank of the camera out of Kyle’s pants, a snap-and-stuff. The image ended above the ribs, leaving waists and legs turned inward toward each other, as though they were curled in bed whispering to each other. At that angle, Ben couldn’t tell if it was Mira; the oval coffee-colored stain on the back of her right thigh, above where her knee folded, was hidden. Still, he knew them by the lengths of their legs. In the foreground, the shorter set was shadowed, and covered by what Ben thought might be downy fuzz. In the background was a longer set, with the familiar rise of the thigh even at its most lax. The lovely swell.

  He told himself that it was another girl. Not Mira.

  Ben blinked hard, focusing on their bare feet, small and wrinkled. According to Kyle, the sisters had lined their sneakers side by side on the flat rock, the one the boys called the altar. Ben thought the rock looked more like an old man’s throat, its skin loose over tendons, with the tip as its chin. The summer before last, Ben had stood on the chin, showing off for a sunbathing Mira. He pointed at her, turned, and made a clean dive. Seconds before breaking water, he saw the viscous stuff that floated on its surface, iridescent swirls of silver, blue, and purple, and it alarmed him. He’d struggled to surface quickly and didn’t bother waiting for the reward of Mira’s reaction. Instead, he powered to the wall, scaled it quick, and toweled off hard.

  Ben let the sisters’ deaths as they had been told to him play once more through his brain: misguided adventure, impulsive spree, deadly escapade. The local bum who stole recyclables after dark told the police he saw them riding their bikes toward the quarry on August 8th at 10:30 p.m. By 5:44 a.m., when the first streaks of purple streamed across the Boston skyline, the entire recovery team had descended, red-and-white trucks screaming, tearing into the quarry, where the first responders in scuba suits had already pulled the girls out, entangled.

  It was the parts in between that gave Ben trouble.

  Like, why would the girls ever come to the quarry at night?

  “It seemed fun,” Ben said, his voice hollow.

  Why would they fall off a ledge they knew as well as they knew the bedroom they’d shared since birth?

  “It was dark.”

  Ben closed his eyes and tried to imagine the girls who bathed in the sun bathing in moonlight. Catching sight, maybe, of something in the water. Something worth leaning too far over to see. That got Ben to wondering in what order they fell. It made sense to Ben, now that he thought about it, that Francesca and Mira would have reached for each other. According to Kyle, the girls had been in the water for at least six hours, because the blotches on their skin had joined up. Ben opened his eyes and counted on his fingers, from 11:00 p.m. to 5:44 a.m.

  The girls must have been quick. Quick to get there, quick to line up, quick to place the rocks that were found in their sweater pockets. Quick to fall off the high ledge into the black water, one after the other.

  Not one after the other exactly. If it had been an accident, they would have tried to save each other. They would have done t
hat.

  Fingers snarled in wool.

  Francesca first, then Mira.

  Mira first, then Francesca.

  Ben shuddered. Though he knew it was wrong, he preferred to think of them falling at the same time, holding hands. Because, by the start of the summer, they had sealed themselves together and off from the rest of the world.

  Ben used two fingers to enlarge the image on his phone, but it blurred into meaningless pixels.

  PART 1

  Palm

  AUGUST 2016

  Mira’s letter arrived seven days after she died.

  Mira. Was. Alive.

  The idea hit Ben like a punch to the throat. It grew into a vibrating, ludicrous shiver of hope that he’d seen another girl’s body in Kyle’s photo. A different beauty with long arms and gold-flecked eyes and a perfectly straight back, another girl had fallen alongside Francesca. Not Mira.

  But: the swell of a thigh. He knew that swell tanned in white shorts. He knew it peeking from under the hem of a skirt, sitting at her desk in English, toes curled under, leaning forward. He knew it taut, lying on her back on a towel at the club and the quarry, one knee up.

  Of course Mira was dead.

  Ben studied the envelope, wondering if it was a sick joke. But there was the handwriting. Benvenuto Lattanzi, 20 Springvale Street, spelled out in purple ink on a long white generic business envelope, stained where it had passed through hands. Mira had put the letter through a convoluted dance to be delivered next door, a dance that made little sense until you realized that arriving too late was the whole idea. A deliberate misspelling of Springdale Street that kept the envelope circulating around the city. That was like Mira: resourceful. Good at sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet Ben.

  Good at sneaking out in the middle of the night to die.

  Ben moaned. He pressed the curve of his fist into his mouth.

  “Ben?” his mother called from her bedroom, her voice threaded with worry.

  Overhead, his mother’s footsteps quickened. Ben’s head snapped. He pulled himself together fast and tore open the envelope, extracting the letter. It fluttered as his hand shook. More of Mira’s handwriting, but the words wouldn’t come together, and Ben felt like he was reading Spanish, which he sucked at, as if Mira’s sentence was a string of cognates at which to guess. Sweat prickled under his arms. He rubbed his forehead with his wrist and held the letter close, his eyes skittering over the words. Finally, the words decoded themselves.

  Everyone wanted to touch us. Including you.

  So remember the seven places you touched me.

  That’s where you’ll find the truth. In my words.

  Start at the beginning.

  Ben wiped sweat from his eyes. Mira had left him something. Mira had left him her words. Letters, notes. Something. Where?

  Remember the places you touched me.

  A whole summer had passed since Mira broke contact with him, after Connie’s wake, days after Easter. But Ben remembered those places. Places where Mira had let him stroke, brush, caress, graze, kiss, nuzzle.

  Stay.

  He couldn’t go there, not now.

  She had done things with him in those places, innocent things, then more. The parts of Mira that Ben had touched were etched on his soul.

  Palm. Hair. Chest. Cheek. Lips. Throat.

  Then—

  Not now.

  Ben shook it off. Mira had given him a puzzle, one that Ben could solve, that would give him answers for the holes that haunted him, the parts of Mira’s life between what he saw from his bedroom window and the diluted version he got when they were among friends. For Ben had spent endless hours wondering about the pretty mysteries of Mira’s life that seemed far away, but were playing out right next door. Ben drifted again to a place he knew he shouldn’t go, and the shame and pleasure was awful.

  A creak above. He stuffed Mira’s letter in the back waistband of his shorts and looked up as his mother flew down the stairs, slowing at the bottom, attempting to model normalcy. She’d had practice at remaining calm when evil intruded into their lives. Specifically, when it targeted her son. Ben imagined her pacing upstairs moments before, whispering “You’ve got this” to herself, over and over.

  “I heard a strange noise,” she said, her hand reaching toward his face, then pulling back. “Are you all right?”

  It was like she thought death was contagious. Ben had considered the possibility. First Mrs. Cillo died (ten years back, and Ben barely remembered her); then the Cillos’ cousin, Connie Villela, in March; and now the Cillo girls. Was death a germ you could catch, like Mrs. Cillo’s depression, and Connie’s deadly allergy, and the girls with their … what?

  Nothing.

  Maybe he should call in sick. This would be the fourth day he hadn’t gone in to work, and the clubhouse manager had sent word that he was considering replacing him. Ben had been saving his paychecks to get Mira out of Bismuth. The timing worked. If he showed up five days a week for the rest of the summer, the $232.80 in his bank account would grow to $500.00. It was the half grand he needed to buy his father’s failing BMW. His father had been on his side since he’d turned sixteen—he was eyeing a new convertible—but that could change with weak grades or another roach and a vial of Visine found in a dirty pants pocket. Mira hadn’t known the plan, but she had only needed to say the word, and they would have left Bismuth for foreign highways. Getting out of Bismuth had become an obsession nearly as great as Mira herself.

  Ben rammed his nose with the heel of his hand. He hadn’t realized he was crying.

  “Oh, Ben,” his mother said softly, producing a tissue. “Maybe it’s too soon to go back to work.” She had been “giving space” and “being available”—the things suggested by her friends, who no doubt wished more than anything that this awful story would go away and they could get on with their tennis and low-glycemic diets.

  Start at the beginning.

  “Can you take me to the boat club right now?” Ben begged.

  His mother searched his face while Ben took in the sight of her. Her unwashed hair fell in finger-combed rows. One freckled breastbone pointed out of a graying tank. The ends of her eyes drew downward into the soft wince that accompanied the subject of the Cillos. Another person might translate the wince into empathy for the Cillos, but Ben knew better. His father’s historic falling-out with Mr. Cillo had been brutal. The intervening years with a scant eight feet between their houses had been strained. Mr. Cillo’s daughters dying? That was plain awkward.

  “I’m glad you want to go back to work already,” she said. “But I want you to be prepared. Have you spoken with Eddie since the incident?”

  Connie’s brother Eddie, the Cillos’ cousin Eddie, his oldest friend Eddie, now steeped in death’s perfume. Ben forgot he was going to have to face Eddie, never mind work around him to find more of Mira’s “words.” Not that he didn’t have experience. The Lattanzi-Cillo bad blood had kept his relationship with Mira secret from Eddie, who valued family loyalty and would’ve seen it as a betrayal from both sides. Though Eddie loved Ben and Mira both, he could not love them together.

  Sangue. Cuz.

  It was all so stupid.

  “Because I imagine you’ll see Eddie today,” his mother nattered, oblivious to Ben’s darkening expression. “Give him our love and support, and let him know we’re here to help. You might even tell him about the scholarship Daddy set up in the girls’ names.”

  Eddie had little to fear. After Connie’s wake, Mira had dumped Ben cold. Mira’s sudden silence was the first thing Ben thought of when he woke, and the last thing he thought of as he drifted off to sleep. In the mornings, he rose and stood at his window, staring at her house. Constantly, he checked his phone, though a text was as unlikely as the idea Mira might one day disappear from the earth. Later, he rationalized that girls were a headache, especially girls you had to see in secret, most especially girls who were complicated puzzles that often left him feeling dumb. He’d conv
inced himself that no longer having to hide their relationship from Mr. Cillo (and, truth be told, Eddie) was a relief. That the last time he and Mira had been together was sublime, and now it could never be corrupted by lesser, fumbling attempts.

  Lie after lie after lie.

  “Oh, bud.” His mother’s hand fluttered, producing another tissue.

  Ben kneaded his fist against the spot between his eyes. “I want it on the record that I will not serve as the goodwill ambassador for the Lattanzi household.”

  “I’m sorry. It was inappropriate. Give me five minutes and we can go,” she said. She knew Mira had been something more to Ben, though she was careful to talk about the “loss of his friend” and the “four stages of grief when losing a friend,” imagining she was minimizing Ben’s devastation by defining their relationship. Though it was only day seven, his mother had suggested there might be value in Ben speaking with someone—Saint Theresa’s Spiritual Director Nick Falso, for example—if only because she was running out of things to say.

  Ben waited in front of a calendar encased in lucite on the wall. Someone had interpreted August to mean fireflies caught in a mason jar, with moody, Monet swirls, the flies whirring in useless motion. Ben had looked forward to this summer, because it had meant more time around Mira without the distraction of school and sports and activities (his; the girls had none). Days swimming at the club and the quarry had their allure, especially for guys who had no real interactions with the girls otherwise, and who planned their days around seeing them in their bathing suits. Ben preferred the early evenings, when the windows were open and the sounds from next door drifted in: upstairs, a shower running overlong, one of the girls washing the metallic funk of quarry water from her hair and skin. Outside, the thrilling vacuum rush of the gas grill, which meant they’d assemble at the picnic table soon, Francesca fussing over her father’s plate, Mira indolent from the day’s sun.