Beautiful Broken Girls Read online

  “Fine!” Ben yelled. “You man the counter, I’ll sit with him and wait. Stick up the cleaners’ sign.”

  Ben knew he was treading a fine line: nothing was off-limits for his manager. Just six years older than Ben, he was an immature toad, and the only person in town sadistic enough to use Ben’s status as “touched” to keep him in line. Taunts of “delicate sensibilities” and “having issues” were whispered for Eddie to miss, and thus not report to Ben’s ad hoc protector, Kyle Kulik, which would ensure a good tire slashing of the manager’s Corolla.

  The manager blinked. “What. Did you just say to me?”

  Something blazed inside Ben. He smiled ferociously, let his eyes loosen and jitter. The manager backed into the door. He tucked his chin into his chest, swearing he would never again hire a messed-up psycho, and left.

  Ben watched the door until he heard the scrape of the sign on its hook, then rose.

  “You’re gonna be all right, Eddie boy,” Ben said, flinging open lockers until he found a pile of thin white towels, which he tore into strips that shed dust. He wrapped them around Eddie’s wrist, then circled the palm where the knife had made a clean diagonal slice toward the pinkie. He counted Eddie’s fingers: 9.5, since the pinkie was severed near-through. He used the strips to tack the finger back together tight. When no blood showed through, he pushed Eddie’s head between his knees and rubbed his back, lowering his own head against a wave of nausea. Through the slats, Ben spotted a flash of white. Mira’s note had gotten knocked off the bench, and was right under Eddie’s nose, if he was looking.

  “Close your eyes, man,” Ben said.

  Eddie groaned.

  “The palm’s a bad place to get cut, that’s all,” Ben yammered, eyeing the note. “Like a nose or a lip, it goes and goes. Might not be using that hand in basketball for a while, but you’ll be fine. Maybe keep those eyes closed.”

  Ben studied the mummified hand to distract himself from the note. He was impressed by his own handiwork. It hadn’t been easy to cover the palm in a way that kept the slice closed. Or the finger on. He hoped it would stay on. Maybe he should call Kyle. Where was the stupid ambulance? Ben knew it could be tricky to get across Bismuth in the middle of the summer with the endless construction, and then the long ride out to Powder Neck meant they might be waiting a while. Ben placed his hand over Eddie’s and squeezed.

  Eddie moaned.

  “Gotta stem the bleeding,” Ben murmured.

  Eddie swooned forward. Ben caught the collar of his polo shirt and righted him, slapping his cheek lightly. “Eddie? Eddie, listen, stay with me!”

  “I’m coming, Concetta Marie. It’s your big brother, Eddie. I’m coming to take care of you…”

  “Jesus, Eddie! Listen: Do you remember how funny Connie was? How much she looked up to you, and the girls? Remember that time the three of them had a yard sale and Connie sold your special 1975 Carlton Fisk World Series card to the creepy dude with the handlebar mustache for twenty-five cents?”

  He shook his head and laughed anemically. “I wanted to kill her. She didn’t know.”

  “And the girls got mad at you, like you were the one who did something wrong? They were ready to lynch you for yelling at her! All for one, they said. You guys talk about blood. Those girls were Connie’s oxygen, man. She wouldn’t have wanted to be around if they were gone. It’s a terrible thing to say, but Connie loved her cousins so hard, I don’t think she could’ve handled it.” Ben could hardly believe what was coming out of his mouth, but it seemed to help, so he kept going.

  “Maybe not,” Eddie whispered, rocking over his thumb.

  “Sometimes stuff happens for a reason. Maybe they’re better off in heaven, together.”

  “Ouch,” Eddie whispered.

  “Ouch,” Ben said. “They’re angels looking down on you right now, and you’re gonna be fine.”

  “You hurt one, you hurt all of them. That’s what they said.” Eddie shifted uncomfortably. “Truth be told though? She could be kind of annoying sometimes.”

  “Nah. She was a cute kid.” Connie had been barely a year younger than either of them, but Ben went with it. “A real cutie.”

  “She wanted to please people. Delicate, too. Not just her condition. She was sensitive. Easily led and easily hurt, a bad combination, my mom always said.” Eddie coughed thickly into his swaddled hand, the signature hacky cough that always made Ben wonder. In basketball, he’d stop and hock a loogie, two or three times a game, into trash barrels in the gym or on the asphalt. He wasn’t nearly as bad as Connie, where any real exercise would send her into spasms, but Ben wondered if there was something rogue about the Villela genes, where doing ordinary things made them implode.

  Ben shook the image from his brain. “Led?”

  Eddie’s lips were turning blue, and he trembled. Ben snatched a dirty towel from the warped particleboard shelf and wrapped it around Eddie’s shoulders and gave him a loose, one-armed hug. Sirens wailed in the distance. Ben figured they had reached the breakaway stretch and would arrive in less than a minute.

  Eddie slumped into Ben. “Connie wouldn’t like me saying that.”

  “Nah, she knows you loved her.”

  “And she loved those girls. They were the sisters she never had. I shouldn’t have said that, about her being led. When she died up there on the hill, they were just having fun.”

  It seemed to Ben that Mira and Francesca were always leading Connie away from things that could hurt. Like stopping her from heading behind the boathouse with two dudes. Running interference between her and Piggy, both drunk. Just the way she died—running after the girls, forgetting her EpiPen—smacked of Connie’s refusal to be left behind, and her recklessness.

  Eddie slumped forward.

  “They’re coming. Hold on, buddy.”

  “It’s like I’m bein pun’shed. You eva feel that way? Like you’re bein pun’shed?”

  Ben didn’t like the way Eddie was slurring his words. “Punched? You’re talking gibberish. Try and relax. That siren’s for you.” Ben tapped his sneaker on the floor, eyes sweeping the locker room desperately. He was starting to think Eddie might be the next Bismuth teen casualty.

  “Not punched, knucklehead,” Eddie whispered. “Punished. For not having protected them good enough.”

  “Shh now.”

  “You. Them.” Eddie shook his head hard at the floor. “I could’ve protected you, too, but I didn’t. I didn’t tell when I knew.”

  “That was a million years ago.” Ben didn’t like where Eddie was heading. Coach Freck had been in jail for seven years. His list of baseball players he touched—and Ben’s place on it—was old news; Ben was better now, and Eddie would never have said anything if he wasn’t half out of his mind with blood loss.

  “You’re talking nonsense,” Ben said, a little roughly.

  Eddie’s head tipped up, and he held Ben’s eye. The door banged open and a girl and a guy, paramedics not much older than Ben and Eddie, charged in, the guy pushing a wheelchair. The girl was small and pretty and grim looking, with a hard fringe of honey-colored bangs and a turned-up nose. The girl felt Eddie’s pulse while her partner kicked out the feet of the wheelchair.

  Eddie raised his good hand weakly. “I ain’t walking out of here in that.”

  The guy shoved Ben out of the way and lifted Eddie underneath his shoulders. “You ain’t walkin’,” the girl said, wrapping a blood pressure cuff around his bicep. Eddie’s head lolled. Ben followed them out, suddenly conscious of his own shirtlessness, which seemed disturbing even though they were at a pool. He avoided the eyes of the mothers whispering “Villela” like an answer, or a curse. Little kids stared at Ben’s ribs. He looked down and saw blood smears across his torso like war paint. Walking behind the paramedics in their navy pants and white button-down shirts, Ben felt like a savage. He took mental inventory of the gawkers’ feet: tan toes, wrinkled toes, fat smooth kid toes. When the ambulance whined away, Ben wandered back into the locker room.
Under the bench, Mira’s tiny note was speckled with blood. He snatched his nylon bag out of the locker and tucked the note inside, his thoughts flashing to a story where a man sewed a leather bag for a woman who carried her heart outside her body. Ben had found it hard to read—the descriptions of the heart made him gag—but it was exactly the kind of bag in which he could keep Mira’s letter (and the notes he would find. Oh, the notes!) protected, near his heart.

  His cheeks grew hot at his own familiar dorkiness. Where the Cillo sisters made other guys behave worse than they actually were, Mira made Ben want to commit heroic acts.

  Ben slunk back to the snack bar. Because they had no more shirts, the manager ordered Ben home immediately, and he waited for his mother in the parking lot, leaning against the plaster pelican with the Bismuth Boat Club sign in its beak, hugging his elbows to hide the blood.

  SEPTEMBER 2015

  Mira rolled off the bed and into the bathroom, unwinding her arms, pajama pant cuffs swishing above her ankles. She shifted on her hip and sighed.

  Francesca had been scraping for close to an hour. She tore the brush through her hair, ripping from the roots, creating tangles. Mira thought of other times she’d seen her sister in the same trance. Like when their father found the tablet Francesca had borrowed from school, and she’d gone glassy-eyed under his hollering, tearing sheets of skin from the sides of her fingernails. And when he blocked her from getting her driver’s permit, biting the insides of both cheeks so hard they swelled, which made her look pouty. Even further back, after their mother died, and Bambi Maggiore appeared in the doorway with a pan of lasagna. They’d sat on the couch watching their father’s ears turn red, Bambi’s drugstore Vanilla Musk invading the room. Mira had watched Francesca file her fingernails into points and make fists, leaving four purple marks on the heel of each hand.

  And though she knew the answer, Mira asked, “What’s wrong?”

  The black nest of hair in the bristles grew.

  “You’re going to be bald,” Mira warned.

  The brush caught a snag. Francesca’s mouth twisted as she yanked. Mira eased Francesca’s hand from the handle. “Let me,” she said, tugging the clump. She cupped her sister’s shoulder and skimmed the brush lightly over the tangle.

  Francesca stiffened.

  “I’m trying to be gentle.” Mira set the brush on the slim edge of the pedestal sink. “Here, I’ll use my fingers.”

  Mira weaved her fingers into her sister’s hair. Francesca relaxed slightly, her arms falling to her sides, eyes half closed, exhausted. Mira caught a bright red flash, a trick of light in the mirror, she thought, until she saw the tendrils of blood trailing down Francesca’s lax fingers.

  Mira sucked in her breath. “You cut yourself!” she gasped, pointing into the mirror.

  Francesca raised her hands, fingers curled into claws, twisting at the wrists. The blood reversed direction and curled back on itself, past the palm and the wrists and down the blue insides of her arms.

  “What did you touch?”

  “Nothing! I didn’t touch anything!” Francesca bent her elbows and gazed about her waist, as though admiring a pretty dress. “Am I bleeding from anywhere else?”

  Mira shook her head. “Just your hands. Let me look at them.”

  Francesca offered her palms to Mira, who lowered her head over the dark puddles. A thin stream bled from identical holes in her palms and crested the creases of her cocked wrists.

  Francesca started to shake. “It keeps coming.”

  Mira grasped her hands and squinted. She could not place where the bleeding started, or how such a thing could happen without cause, and she blinked to clear her vision, but nothing changed.

  “Make it stop!” Francesca cried, her voice warbling.

  Mira dropped her hands and shook a towel from its metal hoop with a hollow clang. She pressed it between Francesca’s fists, squeezing the tops between hers. As the towel grew bright with blood, a sticky warmth inside Mira’s own palms made her pull away.

  “What?” Francesca squeaked.

  “The blood is coming from both sides,” Mira sputtered.

  Francesca swayed, her face draining of color.

  “I’m getting Daddy!” Mira said.

  “He’ll think I did it,” Francesca said.

  Mira’s forehead shot up. She hadn’t considered what Daddy might think: that Francesca had tried to do what their mother had done, but a nonnarcotic version, messy and overblown. All that was missing were razor blades in the sink.

  “Then stick your fingers in the holes,” Mira cried. “In the palms. Do it.”

  Francesca nodded mutely and let the towel fall, dropping her middle fingers delicately to the centers of her palms.

  “Press harder,” Mira breathed. “It’s not going to stop unless you press harder.”

  Francesca bit on her lip and balled her fists. “There’s so much blood. It’s not going to stop. You need to plug both sides.”

  Mira dug her fingers into the pulsing stars on the backs of her sister’s hands, taking jackhammer breaths to stem the shock that was catching up with her. “Oh, Francesca.” She leaned in until their foreheads touched. “What now?”

  Their heads snapped at footbeats on the stairs, slow and reluctant. Their father usually receded from his daughters’ before-school manipulations, which were fraught with higher emotions than other times of day. But this morning, there had been no drawers slamming, no rumble of hair dryers, only whispers: Francesca’s, harsh; Mira’s, pleading. He cleared his throat. More whispers, rushed. He pushed open the door, eyes still cast down.

  “Time for school!” he called.

  “Daddy!” Mira cried.

  He gaped at the sight of his girls attached at the hands, blood between them. Mira was never to see their father in his bathrobe. It was an unwritten rule of their house, one of many bodily-related vagaries, like when he showered, or what he slept in. Mira was surprised by her overwhelming wish that he cover himself, put on his uniform—suit, shiny wingtips, black socks—so that she didn’t have to see him in this state. She tried to look away from his body, barrel-chested in his robe, thin legs below. He was her beloved dad, but somehow she was disturbed by his swollen parts. What was it about Mira that gave her weird, out-of-place thoughts? A normal girl didn’t hear the T coming and back away from the urge to leap onto the rails. She didn’t cradle a baby and consider how easy it would be to hold its nose for a minute, maybe two. Didn’t know the smell of gypsy moth caterpillars when they burned in an aluminum watering can filled with lighter fluid. Sometimes the only thing that stopped Mira was her mother’s voice in her head, reminding her that where she was, it was quiet.

  He pushed past Mira and scooped the towel off the floor, blotting Francesca’s hands clumsily. Mira thought it was not like their father, to seem clumsy, but Francesca wasn’t making it easy for him, twisting and drawing away.

  “Should I call an ambulance?” Mira said, her voice small.

  His cheeks flapped as he shook his head. “Why, baby? Why would you do this to yourself? Why?”

  “I didn’t slit my wrists!” Francesca said. She flipped her hands to expose the backs and threw them under his nose. “I have holes, Daddy! I have holes in my hands!”

  He held her hands, turning them over and over, examining them for what seemed like an eternity to Mira.

  “I didn’t make them,” Francesca whimpered. “They were there when I looked down.”

  He raised his eyes. “Do they hurt?”

  Francesca nodded, wincing. As their stare deepened, her wince dissolved until her face was neutral.

  “I’m going to ask you again. Do they hurt?” he said.

  She shook her head no.

  “Good. That’s good. Mira: get the long ACE bandages from my bathroom, under the sink,” he said, never dropping contact with Francesca’s eyes.

  Mira ran into her parents’ bathroom and dug around the tiny vanity, knocking over old bottles of her mother’s hairspra
y, nozzles encased in amber globules. It was touching that Daddy kept these relics, but it also seemed sort of lazy to Mira. She found the bandages and ran back to find Francesca with her face buried inside their father’s shoulder, his big hand cradling the back of her head. Mira felt the familiar sting of envy, and then shame. Francesca was her blood.

  “Daddy,” Mira whispered.

  He released Francesca and unfurled the bandages, wrapping them swiftly around her hands. Francesca cried softly.

  “I’m sorry, baby, but we have to stop the flow,” he said.

  “I can’t go to school like this,” Francesca cried.

  “You’re not going anywhere until we sort this out,” he replied.

  Mira crept closer, breathing in her father’s smell of coffee and eggs, aftershave and sleep.

  “Are we going to the hospital?” Francesca sniffled.

  “No!” he said, catching himself and saying more softly, “No.”

  “Dr. Amendola, then?” Mira said.

  He drew Francesca close to him, shooting Mira a pointed look past her sister’s head that meant yes and stop talking now. Mira frowned. He pushed Francesca away and held her chin.

  “You’re going to be okay, do you understand? You’re going to go downstairs and Mira is going to make you a nice breakfast. Orange juice, too. I’m going into my office to make some phone calls,” he said.

  Francesca broke into sobs. “But what if it starts up again?”

  “We’ve got it under control. Don’t use your hands for anything for a while.” He steered her into the hall and down the stairs. Mira followed. When they got to the bottom landing, he turned before his office door. “It’s nowhere else, right?”

  Francesca looked back at him, her face blanched. “The blood? No!”

  “Good.” He shut the door.

  Francesca slipped into the red leather banquette. Mira opened the refrigerator and spoke quietly into the sterile space. She needed to prepare her sister, who hated doctors keenly. “I think he’s calling Dr. Amendola.”

  “Daddy wouldn’t,” Francesca said sharply.

  Mira flinched, tossing her father’s cold eggs and toast from his plate into the trash. She dropped fresh slices into the toaster and topped his mug with sludge from the pot, staring at the ombré coffee as it swished inside, catching the light, gradations of black and brown. As she swept away the crumbs from around the toaster, she felt the grainy sharpness of each tiny morsel under the soft side of her pinkie. The toast popped exuberantly, it seemed, and she placed it on a plate, dragging the knife across the rough surface, the butter melting fast into sharply defined crevices. She looked over her shoulder at Francesca, her head bowed above her bandaged hands crossed in front, prayerful. Mira had noticed that in times of shock, life’s details became overly distinct, scoring themselves into her memory. She first noticed it the morning after her mother didn’t wake up. Her ordinary world took on a surreal quality, with higher colors, textures, and distinctions. It was a cruel trick her mind played, because those moments were the ones she wished to rush past, yet somehow they were made more vivid.