Beautiful Broken Girls Read online

  “I mean, it has to suck losing half a finger.”

  Eddie laughed, first through his back teeth, then from his throat and belly, shaking his head at the floor, his one good hand on the counter to steady him. Ben thought he might be going nuts, in this house that would always be painted half-red and where Easter stayed. Finally, he held up his papered claw.

  “This?” He staggered as if drunk, and waved it in Ben’s face. “This is nothin’.”

  Mr. Villela shouted from the living room, and Eddie’s head snapped. He started toward the back of the house but Ben caught his good wrist.

  “You gotta give Mr. Falso time to do his thing,” Ben said.

  Eddie stared at Ben’s hand. “He’s wasting his time. The old man’s mad at God.”

  Ben let his hand fall. “He’s got a right. Let’s go outside.” Ben headed out the front door and to the driveway, betting that Eddie would follow. He felt underneath a bush and pulled out a basketball with his fingertips. When he rose, Eddie was standing in the driveway. He tossed it to Eddie, who caught it with his good hand.

  Ben grinned. “How you gonna do me now?”

  “Fool, I could beat you with no arms and one leg using my nose,” Eddie muttered, managing a perfect layup with his good hand. Eddie’s height belied the fact that he was springy and nimble, like his dad scrambling across rooftops in the summer. They were opposites on the court, Eddie’s scrappiness next to Ben’s elegance, his shooting arm resembling a swan’s neck arched elegantly toward the basket. When they played together, they burned through everybody. One on one, they were well matched, taking turns dunking on each other until sweat blinded them. It felt good to run and grunt and sweat and not have to talk. Eddie was explosive, coiling and then shooting up like a spring, and he had the advantage the entire game. They went at it for forty minutes before Ben collapsed on the front lawn near the ceramic Mary on the half shell. Mrs. Villela repainted her every year, and added extras, like red lips and cheeks. Ben knew it wouldn’t be long until Mary was abandoned, like the house and the roses.

  Eddie flopped beside Ben and lay in the clover that flourished across the overgrown lawn.

  “Nicely played. And yet—”

  “And yet?”

  “I’m thinking pick-up hoops isn’t part of the chopped-off-baby-finger protocol. How’s your hand?”

  “It itches.”

  “Sorry, man. Stitches are the worst.”

  “Not the stitches. My finger itches.”

  “Can you stick a chopstick down past the bandages, you know, to scratch it?”

  “No, knucklehead. It’s the missing half of my finger. It’s called phantom limb syndrome. You feel a part of your body that’s missing because the nerves are still firing. It’s your body fooling itself into thinking it’s still there, and you can fix it.”

  Ben blinked into the sun. “I dunno. Maybe if you scratch it, it’ll go away.”

  “That’d be a waste of time.” Eddie sat up on his elbow. He plucked a piece of clover and chewed on its stem, considering the darkening edges of his bandage. “Can’t fix something that isn’t there anymore. Besides, it bleeds whenever I try to do anything.”

  “I’m really sorry. About your finger. And Connie. Connie, too. I’m really sorry about all of it.”

  Eddie spit the clover to the side and gave Ben a shove. He had an endorphin flush to his face and verged on smiling. “I know you are, man. You’re one of the good ones.”

  Ben bit his lip. A sound came from inside the house, aluminum clanking, kitchen noises.

  “I wish things had been different between your uncle and my dad.”

  “Nah. What you don’t get is that my uncle didn’t want those girls getting any extra attention, for anything, period. Can’t say I blame him. You saw the way the guys in the hood treated them, slobbered over them. Uncle Frank couldn’t stand it. It was getting outta control.”

  “True that.”

  Eddie fell backward and rested his claw over his eyes. “I’m probably the only guy in Bismuth who didn’t wax the dolphin for the first time thinking about them.”

  “Ed…”

  “Louis acting like an after-hours door-to-door salesman? Piggy breaking his toes?”

  Ben laughed. “All right. You got me.”

  Eddie peered at Ben from underneath his hand. “So tell me something, Benny. If they were your girls, would you give people more reasons to be talking about them?”

  Ben felt the note in his pocket. He shimmied slightly on the grass. “I guess not.”

  “So I think we put talk of them to rest. Starting now.” He sat up and stood slowly, suddenly aged, and wandered, slope-shouldered, back into the house.

  “You all right?” Ben called.

  “Hand hurts,” Eddie said, barely audible over the wheeze and slam of the screen door.

  Ben sat, frozen. He could tell Eddie didn’t want him to follow, but Mr. Falso could be in there for hours. There was only one thing he wanted to do, was dying to do, but he couldn’t. He busied himself by checking his armpit stink. He grabbed a bit of clover and stuck it in his mouth as Eddie had, then spit it out. He looked over his shoulder at the house. Finally he grew sure Eddie wasn’t looking out the window. He knew that he’d been swallowed by the bowels of the house, the forever-Easter house, and wouldn’t emerge again anytime soon.

  Ben hunched his shoulders and slipped the new note from his frontmost pocket. He unfolded it on the grass between his legs in the shadow made by his growing body. But before he read it, he made himself remember. Because if the note was going to be about Francesca, he wanted first to think about Mira.

  “Let me feel it,” Mira had whispered, insistent.

  Ben’s febrile brain had flashed on the guys’ catcalls, had they heard. But that wasn’t what was going on. This wasn’t some backseat, copping-a-feel scenario. It happened on an Indian summer day the October before, tearing out shingles and shooting in nails. Eighty degrees in Powder Neck, but closer to a hundred on the roof that Villela and Son had been working on that week, twelve of them up there. By one p.m., Ben couldn’t say his own name. Mr. Villela was worried enough that he took Ben home early himself, to sit in his cool linoleum kitchen with a jelly glass of Eddie’s mom’s lemonade. When Ben excused himself to use the toilet, it wasn’t because he needed to pee, but because he thought he might puke, and he didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of his friend’s father. He’d heard the music of the girls’ voices in the living room as soon as he left the kitchen: Connie’s hyena laugh, Francesca’s pious insistence of something. Mira quizzical, excited. Ben slipped in the bathroom, pale and miserable, and stood over the sink for a time. When he came out, Mira was there, standing under the spoon rack. She pushed him against the wall and dragged up his sweaty shirt.

  “Mira!” Ben gasped.

  Mira pressed her finger to his lip. Then she pressed her ear over his heart. Hard.

  Ben forgot to breathe. When he remembered, he choked.

  “Shh!” Mira whispered. He gazed down into coarse, dark gold waves of hair, at the pink shell of her hand resting against the inside of his shoulder. The press of the fine bones of her ear into his bare chest was delicious and disturbing, and he needed to move, but moving might have ended it, so he stood, tense, immobile, arms by his sides. He emptied his brain, should his thoughts distract her.

  It was the first time Ben felt his own blazing fear that Mira would leave him.

  “Mira,” he started.

  “Francesca has the gift of reading hearts.” She pressed her ear against him harder, hot and sharp. “She says it won’t work for me. But I still want to try.”

  “I can tell you how I feel about you right now,” he gasped.

  He felt her cheek rise against his chest in a smile. “Shh.” Her breath blew against his skin. “Not from your mouth. I want to hear it from your soul.”

  For a moment, she stayed against him. Ben was so turned on he thought he might die. He shut his eyes and pressed the
back of his head against rows of dusty trinket spoons. When she finally drew away, the space between her eyes crinkled in a deep frown. Ben’s soul had answered her with silence. Her chest heaved and her eyes grew wide; she looked close to crying. Her vulnerability made her even more beautiful. Ben reached down with a tinkle of the spoons and cupped her breast. It was ballsy of him, but she looked so good in that tank top, and for Christ’s sake, she’d had her whole head up his shirt. He didn’t care. He wanted her. And now that he knew, clear and hot, the terror of her leaving, he wasn’t wasting any more time.

  Mira moved closer. Ben bent his neck to kiss her as the call came.

  “Mira!”

  It wasn’t Eddie’s dad, but Francesca calling her back to the living room. Mira’s eyes bored into his: she didn’t want to leave. Ben had pushed her away gently; in an instant, he regretted it. Mira looked at him ruefully and started for the living room.

  He had called to her back, “You know, Mira Cillo!”

  She stopped without turning. Ben’s heart skipped. She had looked back at him then, over her shoulder with a half smile that told Ben she knew, and that she was not done with him yet.

  Ben pursed his lips and blew hard. He opened the note. Her handwriting was precise and tense.

  I see bones through Francesca’s chest. She’s stopped eating.

  Of course. Francesca.

  The grass swayed in a sudden, hot wind.

  One more year and he’d have had his full license, and there would have been no stopping them. They’d start over, in New York, he figured, where she wasn’t the sheltered daughter of an overprotective father and he wasn’t the son of the man the jerk hated. Where he wasn’t known as a boy who’d been touched. Why couldn’t Mira have waited? What could have been so bad that she had to leave this earth before they had a chance to leave together?

  Ben mashed the note with his hand and crumpled it into a tiny ball.

  “Ready for a ride home?” Mr. Falso called over the wheeze of the screen door. A foam egg bounced off the front step and into a bush. Ben jammed the note in his pocket and rose, walked over to the bush and snatched up the egg, setting it down on the front step. Mr. Falso kept walking to his car, talking as if Ben followed close behind.

  “What’ve you got, a few more months before you’re behind the wheel? That’ll open up a whole new world for you, Ben. You wait and see!”

  “I’m already six … Never mind,” Ben muttered, rising slowly under the weight of the realization that he and Mr. Falso would be spending a lot of time together. Because the next place he’d touched Mira was in Mr. Falso’s bedroom.

  JANUARY 2016

  Francesca adjusted her shirt for the third time waiting for Mr. Falso to come downstairs. He’d been on his cell phone, and raised his hand when he saw her at his door. He ushered her in soundlessly, and she was careful not to speak, lest the person on the other line hear her. As he wandered to another part of the house, she decided to sit on the chair she knew was his, in his living room. It was a bold move: for months now, during their wound checks, they’d sat in the same kitchen chairs as the first time she had revealed her true, changed self to him. He had snapped pictures and taken notes on a legal pad, and then they talked of lighter things, him always trying to steer the conversation to this boy or that crush, as if reminding them both that she was still a teenage girl. At the end, he cupped her hands gently from underneath and they closed their eyes and prayed for this inconceivable, unknowable miracle to explain itself to them. The week before, she’d forced his promise not to tell Father Anthony or Father Ernesto, or anyone else. She wasn’t ready, she said. She would tell him when she was.

  The recliner was the sole chair in a living room with one flat-screen television, a bicycle, a workout bench, a set of dumbbells, and a retro Pac-Man pinball machine in the corner. She knew there was nowhere for him to sit, but throwing him off-kilter seemed right somehow. This was to be a special day.

  As his murmurs grew louder, she slipped one hand under her shirt, pressing the skin over her left breast. A month ago, muscle would have pressed back. Now, the skin was thinner. She closed her eyes and envisioned his face, the curve of his brow over his dark eyes. Her chest was still. She breathed deeply and imagined him holding the back of her hand, marveling over her wounds, calling her special and gifted and touched. Her heart beat harder. She felt the pump and the rush, felt the papery skin moving under its pulse. Her stomach growled at the exertion. It had been twenty-eight hours since she’d allowed herself a cup of broth. Saints starved themselves so that the flesh would melt away and their hearts would be left beating behind racks of ribs for God to see. Her father had barely noticed at first; when he had, she’d argued back, expounding long and hard on how fat Americans understand self-indulgence, but are disturbed by self-denial. It was an argument worthy of a seasoned trial lawyer. Eventually he gave up, waved her away, swearing, and stormed off to the club.

  Francesca arranged her shirt again so that Mr. Falso could see her heart beating for him. She lowered her eyes to a focal point to keep from blacking out, set a weak smile on her lips, and waited.

  Mr. Falso bounded down the stairs apologizing and stopped short at the sight of Francesca. In her mind, he was startled by the vision of her, made purer by her fasting. She was certain he could see her heart as it rose and fell, glowing beneath her paper-white skin.

  “Are you sick?” he asked, drawing closer in the dim light. He reached underneath the shade of a floor lamp and flicked it on.

  “I’m fine,” she said, suddenly conscious of her chapped lips. “I thought we might talk in here for a change.”

  Mr. Falso searched for a place to sit. Francesca closed her eyes and placed her palms on her knees, facing upward. Mr. Falso froze, then realized what she expected. He kneeled on the floor in front of her and took her hands in his. Francesca took a deep breath, her chest rising, inside, her heart like a bird banging against a cage. She could hardly contain her joy, that he had so willingly assumed his position—a supplicant in front of the divine. For the first time, she sensed she was capable of making him do what she wanted.

  He peeled away the right bandage.

  “You’re certain it doesn’t hurt?” he said quietly.

  Francesca smiled serenely. “You ask me every time. And every time, I say no.”

  Mr. Falso repeated his examination on the other side. He took pictures with his phone, then scribbled notes. Francesca relaxed into the calm space hunger made for her once she had passed the point of anxiousness. Finally he sat back on the rug. He seemed pensive. Francesca crawled off the chair and sat next to him, smiling benignly, something she had perfected and taken to applying when she sensed Mr. Falso moving away.

  She adjusted her shirt. “What are you thinking about?”

  “I wonder. Do you have any other signs like these, or is this the only one?”

  Francesca felt as though someone had hit a Pause button. “What do you mean?”

  “I wondered if anything else unusual was happening in your life, that’s all. I’m trying to put it into context. For my research.”

  Francesca licked her lips. The birds proved nothing. Her ability to speak in tongues was the equivalent of a party trick. And reading someone’s heart? Girly-sounding drivel that she wasn’t willing to risk.

  “Unusual like what?” she asked.

  “You know, things you can’t help. Have you seen anything unusual, for example?”

  Francesca scuttled back an inch. “You mean, have I had visions? No. Not yet. I mean, I don’t think I have. Why?”

  “No reason. I wanted to know if this is happening in isolation from other miraculous events. That’s all.”

  “What is it that you want me to do?” She flipped through her mental Rolodex of research she’d done on saints, looking for guidance. The lives of the Italian saints were particularly unhelpful, if not downright revolting. Saint Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi lay naked on thorns. Saint Catherine of Siena drank pus from
a cancerous sore. Veronica Giuliani cleaned the walls and floor of her cell with her tongue, swallowing spiders and their webs. Francesca pressed her palms into the floor to remain steady.

  “There’s nothing I want you to do.” He reached out to touch her face, caught himself, and pulled back. “I wondered if anything else had happened to you, that’s all. Historically speaking, certain things have happened to individuals like you, things common to their stories.”

  “You mean to saints. Things that have happened to saints.”

  “Now, no one said saints. I don’t think it’s helpful to label what’s happening to you. Our job is to gather information and let the Church make sense of it. If and when you decide you’re ready, that is.”

  Francesca gathered her skirt around her knees and stood too quickly. The room went white and a tinny buzz filled her ears. She felt around, stumbling, and there were Mr. Falso’s arms, steadying her.

  “You’re faint!” he exclaimed.

  She was about to wave him off, uncomplaining, like she always did. Like she imagined the saints did. Yet something stopped her. As her eyes filled in, sparkles reformed into shapes, and she leaned her head against his chest. She was shocked at the way it felt under her cheek, firm and soft, and warm through his T-shirt. She closed her eyes and whispered against his chest.

  “I’m not ready.”

  Mr. Falso drove Francesca home that afternoon. He wouldn’t allow her to ride her bike: it was absurd, the sidewalks were slush, and she seemed to be coming down with something. His car smelled manly, and he seemed happy to have her there with him. She imagined he was getting used to the idea of her by his side. Yet every time she allowed herself to relax and enjoy his presence, she felt an overwhelming sense that something was ending. He commented on which Christmas lights he liked best

  (The old fashioned ones, big like eggs.)

  and the packed parking lot at Johnny’s Foodmaster

  (Never sets foot in a supermarket himself. Gets it delivered.)

  and the traffic visible on the Southeast expressway

  (Rush hour already? Who knew? Lucky man he was, getting to work in his own neighborhood!).