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Four
A few weeks after Mrs. Lisbon shut the house in maximum-security isolation, the sightings of Lux making love on the roof began.
Following the Homecoming dance, Mrs. Lisbon closed the downstairs shades. All we could see were the girls’ incarcerated shadows, which ran riot in our imaginations. Moreover, as fall turned to winter, the trees in the yard drooped and thickened, concealing the house, even though their leaflessness should have revealed it. A cloud always seemed to hover over the Lisbons’ roof. There was no explanation except the psychic one that the house became obscured because Mrs. Lisbon willed it to. The sky grew darker, and light abandoned the daytime, so that we found ourselves always moving in a timeless murk, the only way to discern the hour the taste of our burps, toothpasty in the morning, redolent in the afternoon of the jellied beef of school cafeteria meals.
Without explanation, the girls were taken out of school. They merely failed to show up one morning, and then again the next. When Mr. Woodhouse asked about the matter, Mr. Lisbon seemed to have no idea the girls were gone. “He kept saying, ‘Have you checked out back?’ “
Jerry Burden picked the combination on Mary’s locker to find most of her books left behind. “She had postcards taped up inside. Weird stuff. Couches and shit.” (Actually art museum postcards showing a Biedermeier chair and a pink chintz Chippendale sofa.) Her notebooks were piled on the top shelf, each one bearing the name of a bright new subject she never got to study. Inside American History, amid spasmodic notes, Jerry Burden found the following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.
Given Lux’s failure to make curfew, everyone expected a crackdown, but few anticipated it would be so drastic. When we spoke to her years later, however, Mrs. Lisbon maintained that her decision was never intended to be punitive. “At that point being in school was just making things worse,” she said. “None of the other children were speaking to the girls. Except boys, and you knew what they were after. The girls needed time to themselves. A mother knows. I thought if they stayed at home, they’d heal better.” Our interview with Mrs. Lisbon was brief. She met us at the bus station in the small town she now lives in, because the station was the only place that served coffee. Her hands were red-knuckled and her gums had receded. Her tragedy hadn’t made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed. Nevertheless, we wanted to talk to her most of all because we felt that she, being the girls’ mother, understood more than anyone why they had killed themselves. But she said, “That’s what’s so frightening. I don’t. Once they’re out of you, they’re different, kids are.” When we asked her why she had never pursued the psychological counseling Dr. Hornicker offered, Mrs. Lisbon became angry. “That doctor wanted to blame it on us. He thought Ronnie and I were to blame.” A bus came into the station then, and through the open doorway at Gate 2 a gust of carbon monoxide blew over the counter with its stacks of fried doughnuts. Mrs. Lisbon said she had to leave.
She had done more than take the girls out of school. The next Sunday, arriving home after a spirited church sermon, she had commanded Lux to destroy her rock records. Mrs. Pitzenberger (who happened to be redecorating a room next door) heard the fierce argument. “Now!” Mrs. Lisbon kept repeating, while Lux tried to reason, to negotiate, and finally burst into tears. Through the upstairs hall window, Mrs. Pitzenberger saw Lux stomp to her bedroom, returning with a collection of peach crates. The crates were heavy and Lux slid them down the stairs like sleds. “She acted like she was going to whiz them down. But she always grabbed them before they got out of control.” In the living room, Mrs. Lisbon had the fire going, and Lux, now crying without sound, began to consign her records one by one to the flames. We never learned which albums were condemned at that auto-da-fé, but apparently Lux held up album after album, appealing for Mrs. Lisbon’s mercy. The smell quickly grew overpowering, and the plastic melted over the andirons, so that Mrs. Lisbon told Lux to stop. (She threw out the rest of the albums with that week’s trash.) Still, Will Timber, who was getting a grape pop, said he could smell burning plastic all the way to Mr. Z’s, the party store on Kercheval.
For the next few weeks we hardly saw the girls at all. Lux never spoke to Trip Fontaine again, nor did Joe Hill Conley call Bonnie, as he had promised. Mrs. Lisbon took the girls to their grandmother’s house to get advice from an old woman who had lived through everything. When we called her in Roswell, New Mexico, where she had moved after living forty-three years in the same single-story house, the old lady (Mrs. Lema Crawford) did not respond to questions about her involvement in the punishment, either out of stubbornness or because of the feedback her hearing aid picked up over the phone. She did refer, however, to her own misfortune at the hands of love some sixty years earlier. “You never get over it,” she said. “But you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.” And then, before hanging up: “Lovely weather down here. Best thing I ever did was to throw down the old shovel and hoe and get out of that town.”
The smoky sound of her voice brought the scene to life for us: the old woman at the kitchen table, her skimpy hair up in an elasticized turban; Mrs. Lisbon tight-lipped and grim in a chair opposite; and the four penitents, heads lowered, fingering knickknacks and porcelain figurines. There is no discussion of how they feel or what they want out of life; there is only the descending order—grandmother, mother, daughters—with the back yard outside under rain, and the dead vegetable garden.
Mr. Lisbon continued to go to work in the mornings and the family continued to attend church on Sundays, but that was it. The house receded behind its mists of youth being choked off, and even our own parents began to mention how dim and unhealthy the place looked. Raccoons were attracted by its miasmic vapors at night, and it wasn’t unusual to find a dead one squashed by a car as it had tried to make its getaway from the Lisbons’ trash cans. One week, on the front porch, Mrs. Lisbon set off tiny smoke bombs that gave off a sulfurous stench. No one had ever seen the gadgets before, but it was rumored they were a defense against the raccoons. Then, about the time the first cold spell hit, people began to see Lux copulating on the roof with faceless boys and men.
At first it was impossible to tell what was happening. A cellophane body swept its arms back and forth against the slate tiles like a child drawing an angel in the snow. Then another darker body could be discerned, sometimes in a fast-food restaurant uniform, sometimes wearing an assortment of gold chains, once in the drab gray suit of an accountant. Through the bronchioles of leafless elm branches, from the Pitzenbergers’ attic, we finally made out Lux’s face as she sat wrapped in a Hudson’s Bay blanket, smoking a cigarette, impossibly close in the circle of our binoculars because she moved her lips only inches away but without sound.
We wondered how she could do such a thing on her own house, with her parents sleeping nearby. True, it was impossible for Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon to see their own roof, and, once installed, Lux and her partners enjoyed relative safety; but there was the unavoidable prior noise of sneaking down to let the boys and men in, of leading them up creaking stairs in a darkness charged with anxious vibrations, night noises humming in their ears, the men sweating, risking statutory rape charges, the loss of their careers, divorce, just to be led up the stairway, through a window, to the roof, where in the midst of their passion they chafed their knees and rolled in stagnant puddles. We never knew how Lux met them. From what we could tell, she didn’t leave the house. She didn’t even leave at night, sneaking out to do it in a vacant lot or down by the lake, but preferred to make love on the premises of her confinement. For our own part, we learned a great deal about the techniques of love, and because we didn’t know the words to denote what we saw, we had to make up our own. That was why we spoke of “yodeling in the canyon” and “tying the tube,” of “groaning in the pit,” “slipping the turtle’s head,” and “chewing the stinkweed.” Years later, when we lost our own virginities, we resorted in our panic to pantomiming Lux’s gyrations on the roof so long ago; and even now, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is always that pale wraith we make love to, always her feet snagged in the gutter, always her single blooming hand steadying itself against the chimney, no matter what our present lovers’ feet and hands are doing. And we’d have to admit, too, that in our most intimate moments, alone at night with our beating hearts, asking God to save us, what comes most often is Lux, succubus of those binocular nights.
We received reports of her erotic adventures from the most unlikely sources, kids from working-class neighborhoods with feathered haircuts who swore they’d gone to the roof themselves with Lux, and though we quizzed them, trying to find inconsistencies in their stories, we never succeeded. They said it was always too dark inside the house to see, the only thing alive Lux’s hand, urgent and bored at once, tugging them forward by their belt buckles. The floor was an obstacle course. Dan Tyco, with his tackle’s neck, stepped in something soft at the top of the landing and picked it up. Only after Lux led him out the window and up to the roof could he see by moonlight what he held: the half-eaten sandwich Father Moody had encountered five months earlier. Other kids found congealed bowls of spaghetti, empty tin cans, as though Mrs. Lisbon had stopped cooking for the girls and they lived by foraging.
According to the boys’ descriptions, Lux had lost weight, though we couldn’t tell through the binoculars. All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water. A few boys mentioned the acidic taste of her saliva—the taste of digestive fluids with nothing to do—but none of these signs of malnourishment or illness or grief (the small cold sores at the corners of her mouth, the patch of hair missing above her left ear) detracted from Lux’s overwhelming impression of being a carnal angel. They spoke of being pinned to the chimney as if by two great beating wings, and of the slight blond fuzz above her upper lip that felt like plumage. Her eyes shone, burned, intent on her mission as only a creature with no doubts as to either Creation’s glory or its meaninglessness could be. The words the boys used, their shifty eyebrows, fright, bafflement, made it clear they had served as only the most insignificant footholds in Lux’s ascent, and, in the end, even though they had been carried to the peak, they couldn’t tell us what lay beyond. A few of them remarked on the overriding sense of Lux’s measureless charity.
Though she carried on few extended conversations, we got an idea of her state of mind from the little that got back to us of the little she said. She told Bob McBrearley that she couldn’t live without “getting it regular,” though she delivered the phrase with a Brooklyn accent, as though imitating a movie. A sense of playacting permeated much of her behavior. Willie Tate admitted that, despite her eagerness, “she didn’t seem to like it much,” and many boys described similar inattention. Lifting their heads from the soft shelf of Lux’s neck, they found her eyes open, her brow knitted in thought; or at the height of passion they felt her pick a pimple on their backs. Nevertheless, on the roof, Lux reportedly said pleading things like, “Put it in. Just for a minute. It’ll make us feel close.” Other times she treated the act like some small chore, positioning the boys, undoing zippers and buckles with the weariness of a checkout girl. She oscillated wildly in her contraceptive vigilance. Some reported her administering complex procedures, inserting three or four jellies or creams at once, topping them off with a white spermicide she referred to as “the cream cheese.” Occasionally she sufficed with her “Australian method,” which involved shaking up a Coke bottle and hosing down her insides. In stricter moods she laid down her catch-phrase ultimatum: “No erection without protection.” Often she used sanitized pharmaceutical products; other times, presumably cut off by Mrs. Lisbon’s blockade, she fell back on the ingenious methods devised by midwives in centuries past. Vinegar proved useful, as did tomato juice. Love’s tiny seacraft foundered in acidic seas. Lux kept an assortment of bottles, as well as one foul rag, behind the chimney. Nine months later, when the roofers hired by the new young couple found the bottles, they called down to the young wife, “Looks like somebody was having salad up here.”
It was crazy to make love on the roof at any time, but to make love on the roof in winter suggested derangement, desperation, self-destructiveness far in excess of any pleasure snatched beneath the dripping trees. Though some of us saw Lux as a force of nature, impervious to chill, an ice goddess generated by the season itself, the majority knew she was only a girl in danger, or in pursuit, of catching her death of cold. Therefore we were not surprised when, three weeks into Lux’s airborne displays, the EMS truck appeared yet again. By this, its third rescue, the truck had become as familiar as Mrs. Buell’s hysterical voice calling Chase home. When it rocketed up the drive, familiarity blinded us to its new snow tires, the rings of salt encrusting each fender. We saw Sheriff—the skinny one with the mustache—leaping from the driver’s seat even before he did so, and after that every sight had déjà vu written all over it. We were prepared for the nightgowned girls to streak past the windows, for lights to chart the paramedics’ progress toward the victim, first the foyer light going on, then the hall light, the upstairs hall, the bedroom on the right, until the pinball-machine house was lit up in sectors. It was after 9 p.m. and no moon showed. Birds had built nests in the old streetlamps, so that light filtered down through straw and moulted feathers. The birds had flown south long ago, but in dappled beams Sheriff and the fat one appeared once again in the doorway of the Lisbon house. They were carrying the stretcher, just as we expected, but when the porch light came on we were not prepared for what we saw: Lux Lisbon, sitting up, very much alive.
She appeared to be in pain, but as they carried her out of the house she had the presence of mind to snatch up a Reader’s Digest, which she later read cover to cover in the hospital. In fact, despite her convulsions (she was clutching her stomach), Lux had dared to put on a coat of the forbidden pink lipstick that tasted—so the boys on the roof told us—like strawberries. Woody Clabault’s sister had the same brand, and once, after we got into his parents’ liquor cabinet, we made him put on the lipstick and kiss each one of us so that we, too, would know what it tasted like. Beyond the flavor of the drinks we improvised that night—part ginger ale, part bourbon, part lime juice, part scotch—we could taste the strawberry wax on Woody Clabault’s lips, transforming them, before the artificial fireplace, into Lux’s own. Rock music blared from the tape player; we threw ourselves about in chairs, bodilessly floating to the couch from time to time to dip our heads into the strawberry vat, but the next day we refused to remember that any of this had happened, and even now it’s the first time we’ve spoken of it. At any rate, the memory of that night was superseded by that of Lux’s being hoisted into the EMS truck, because, despite discrepancies of time and space, it was Lux’s lips we tasted, not Clabault’s.
Her hair clearly needed washing. George Pappas, who reached the truck before Sheriff closed the door, described how blood had pooled in Lux’s cheeks. “You could see veins,” he said. Holding the magazine in one hand, clutching her midsection with the other, she rode the stretcher as though it were a bobbing lifeboat. Her thrashing, cries, scowls of agony only emphasized the inertness of Cecilia, whom we now saw in memory as even deader than she had actually been. Mrs. Lisbon didn’t jump into the truck as she had previously but remained on the lawn, waving as though Lux had boarded a bus to summer camp. Neither Mary, Bonnie, nor Therese came outside. Discussing it later, many of us felt we suffered a mental dislocation at that moment, which only grew worse through the course of the remaining deaths. The prevailing symptom of this state was an inability to recall any sound. Truck doors slammed silently; Lux’s mouth (eleven fillings, according to Dr. Roth’s records) screamed silently; and the street, the creaking tree limbs, the streetlight clicking different colors, the electric buzz of the pedestrian crossing box—all these usually clamorous voices hushed, or had begun shrieking at a pitch too high for us to hear, though they sent chills up our spines. Sound returned only once Lux had gone. Televisions erupted with canned laughter. Fathers splashed, soaking aching backs.
It was half an hour before Mrs. Patz’s sister called from Bon Secours with the preliminary report that Lux had suffered a burst appendix. We were surprised to hear the damage was not self-inflicted, though Mrs. Patz said, “It’s the stress. That poor girl’s under so much stress, her appendix just blew up. Same thing happened to my sister.” Brent Christopher, who had nearly cut off his right hand with a power saw that night (he was installing a new kitchen), saw Lux being wheeled into the emergency room. Though his arm was bandaged and his brain stupefied with painkiller, he remembers the interns lifting Lux onto the cot next to his. “She was breathing out of her mouth, hyperventilating, and holding her stomach. She kept saying, ‘Ouch,’ exactly the way you’d spell it.” Apparently, after the interns hurried off to get the doctor, there came a moment when Brent Christopher and Lux were left alone. She stopped crying and looked his way. He held up his gauze-wrapped hand. She looked at it without interest. Then she reached up and closed the curtain separating the beds.
A Dr. Finch (or French—the records are illegible) examined Lux. He asked her where it hurt, took blood, thumped her, gagged her with a tongue depressor, and peered in her eyes, ears, and nose. He checked her side and found no swelling. She no longer showed signs of pain, in fact, and after the first few minutes, the doctor stopped asking questions relating to her appendix. Some people said that to an experienced medical eye the signs were obvious: a look of anxiety, a frequent touching of the belly. Whatever it was, the doctor knew right away. “How long since your last period?” he asked.
“A while.”
“A month?”
“Forty-two days.”
“Don’t want your parents to know?”
“No, thank you.”
“Why all the commotion? Why the ambulance?”
“Only way I could get out of the house.”
They were whispering, the doctor leaning over the bed, Lux sitting up. Brent Christopher heard a sound he identified as teeth chattering. Then Lux said, “I just want a test. Can you give me one?”
The doctor didn’t verbally agree to the test, but for some reason, when he stepped into the hall, he told Mrs. Lisbon, who had just arrived, leaving her husband home with the girls, “Your daughter’s going to be fine.” He then went into his office, where a nurse later found him chain-smoking his pipe. We’ve imagined various possibilities of what went through Dr. Finch’s mind that day: that he had fallen in love with a fourteen-year-old with a late period, that he was estimating in his head how much money he had in the bank, how much gas in the car, how far they could get before his wife and kids found out. We never understood why Lux went to the hospital instead of to Planned Parenthood, but most people agreed she was telling the truth and that, in the end, she could devise no other way to see a doctor. When Dr. Finch came back, he said, “I’m going to tell your mother we’re running gastrointestinal tests.” Brent Christopher stood up then, silently vowing to help Lux escape himself. He heard her say, “How long will it take to find out?”
“About half an hour.”
“Do you really use a rabbit?”
The doctor laughed.
Upright, Brent Christopher felt his hand throb, his eyes blurred, he became dizzy; but before he fell back into unconsciousness, he saw Dr. Finch pass by, heading toward Mrs. Lisbon. She heard about it first, and then the nurses heard about it, and then we did. Joe Larson ran across the street to hide in the Lisbons’ bushes, and it was then he heard Mr. Lisbon’s girlish weeping, a sound quite musical, he said. Mr. Lisbon was sitting in his La-Z-Boy, his feet up on the footrest, his hands over his face. The phone rang. He looked at it. He picked it up. “Thank God,” he said, “thank God.” Lux, it turned out, had only a bad case of indigestion.
In addition to a pregnancy test, Dr. Finch gave Lux a complete gynecological exam. It was from Ms. Angelica Turnette, a hospital clerical worker, that we later received the documents that we hold among our most prized possessions (her non-union pay hardly made ends meet). The doctor’s report, in a series of titillating numbers, presents Lux in a stiff paper gown stepping onto the scale (99), opening her mouth for the thermometer (98.7), and urinating into a plastic cup (WBC 6–8 occ. clump; mucus heavy; leukocytes 2 +). The simple appraisal “mild abrasions” reports the condition of her uterine walls, and in an advancement that has since been discontinued, a photograph was taken of her rosy cervix, which looks like a camera shutter set on an extremely low exposure. (It stares at us now like an inflamed eye, fixing us with its silent accusation.)
“The pregnancy test was negative, but it was clear she was sexually active,” Ms. Turnette told us. “She had HPV [human papilloma virus, a precursor to genital warts]. The more partners you have, the more HPV. It’s that simple.”
Dr. Hornicker happened to be on call that night and managed to see Lux for a few minutes without Mrs. Lisbon’s knowledge. “The girl was still waiting for the test results, so she was understandably tense,” he said. “Still, though, there was something else about her, an additional unease.” Lux had gotten dressed and was sitting on the edge of the emergency room cot. When Dr. Hornicker introduced himself, she said, “You’re the doctor who talked to my sister.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you going to ask me questions?”
“Only if you want me to.”
“I’m just here”—she lowered her voice—“to see the gyno.”
“So you don’t want me to ask you questions?”
“Ceel told us all about your tests. I’m just not in the mood right now.”
“What kind of mood are you in?”
“No mood. I’m just kind of tired is all.”
“Not getting enough sleep?”
“I sleep all the time.”
“And yet you’re still tired?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you think that is?”
Up to this point, Lux had answered briskly, swinging her feet, which didn’t reach the floor. Now she paused and regarded Dr. Hornicker. She settled back, retracting her head so that the slight chubbiness swelled beneath her chin.
“Iron-poor blood,” she said. “Runs in the family. I’m going to ask the doctor for some vitamins.”
“She was in deep denial,” Dr. Hornicker told us later. “She was obviously not sleeping—a textbook symptom of depression—and was pretending that her problem, and by association her sister Cecilia’s problem, was of no real consequence.” Dr. Finch came in with the test results soon after that, and Lux jumped happily off the cot. “But even her delight had a manic quality to it. She bounced off the walls.”
Shortly after that meeting, in the second of his many reports, Dr. Hornicker began to revise his view of the Lisbon girls. Citing a recent study by Dr. Judith Weisberg that examined “the bereavement process of adolescents who have lost a sibling by suicide” (see List of Funded Studies), Dr. Hornicker gave an explanation for the Lisbon girls’ erratic behavior—their withdrawal, their sudden fits of emotion or catatonia. The report maintained that as a result of Cecilia’s suicide the surviving Lisbon girls suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “It’s not unusual,” Dr. Hornicker wrote, “for the sibling of an A.L.S. [adolescent lost to suicide] to act out suicidal behavior in an attempt to come to grips with their grief. There is a high incidence of repetitive suicide in single families.” Then, in a marginal aside, he dropped his medical manner and jotted: “Lemmings.”
As it circulated in the next few months, this theory convinced many people because it simplified things. Already Cecilia’s suicide had assumed in retrospect the stature of a long-prophesied event. Nobody thought it shocking anymore, and accepting it as First Cause removed any need for further explanation. As Mr. Hutch put it, “They made Cecilia out to be the bad guy.” Her suicide, from this perspective, was seen as a kind of disease infecting those close at hand. In the bathtub, cooking in the broth of her own blood, Cecilia had released an airborne virus which the other girls, even in coming to save her, had contracted. No one cared how Cecilia had caught the virus in the first place. Transmission became explanation. The other girls, safe in their own rooms, had smelled something strange, sniffed the air, but ignored it. Black tendrils of smoke had crept under their doors, rising up behind their studious backs to form the evil shapes smoke or shadow take on in cartoons: a black-hatted assassin brandishing a dagger; an anvil about to drop. Contagious suicide made it palpable. Spiky bacteria lodged in the agar of the girls’ throats. In the morning, a soft oral thrush had sprouted over their tonsils. The girls felt sluggish. At the window the world’s light seemed dimmed. They rubbed their eyes to no avail. They felt heavy, slow-witted. Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason. When we thought of the girls along these lines, it was as feverish creatures, exhaling soupy breath, succumbing day by day in their isolated ward. We went outside with our hair wet in the hopes of catching flu ourselves so that we might share their delirium.
•
At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling. The first slate tile slid off their roof, missing the porch by an inch and embedding itself in the soft turf, and from a distance we could see the tar underneath, letting in water. In the living room, Mr. Lisbon positioned an old paint can underneath a leak, then watched as it filled with the midnight-blue shade of Cecilia’s bedroom ceiling (she’d chosen the shade to look like the night sky; the can had been in the closet for years). In the days following, other cans caught streams, on top of the radiator, the mantel, the dining room table, but no roofer showed up, most likely, people believed, because the Lisbons could no longer bear anyone intruding into their house. They endured their leaks on their own, staying in the rain forest of their living room. Mary kept up appearances by getting the mail (heating bills, advertisements, never anything personal anymore), coming out in bright green or pink sweaters emblazoned with red hearts. Bonnie wore a kind of smock we took to calling her hair shirt, largely because of the spiky feathers that covered it. “Her pillow must leak,” said Vince Fusilli. The plumage, not white, as one would expect, but dun-colored, came from low-grade ducks, farmed creatures whose cooped-up smell drifted downwind whenever Bonnie appeared stuck all over with quills. But no one got very near. No one ventured to the house anymore, not any of our mothers or fathers, not the priest; and even the mailman, rather than touching the mailbox, lifted the lid with the spine of Mrs. Eugene’s Family Circle. Now the soft decay of the house began to show up more clearly. We noticed how tattered the curtains had become, then realized we weren’t looking at curtains at all but at a film of dirt, with spy holes wiped clean. The best thing was to see them make one: the pink heel of a hand flattening against the glass, then rubbing back and forth to uncover the bright mosaic of an eye, looking out at us. Also, the gutters sagged.
Mr. Lisbon alone left the house, and our only contact with the girls was through the signs they left on him. His hair looked excessively combed, as though the girls, unable to preen for anybody else, preened him. His cheeks no longer sported banners of tissue paper, blood-spotted like tiny Japanese flags, suggesting to many people that his daughters had begun to shave him with considerably more care than Joe the Retard’s brothers lavished on him. (Mrs. Loomis, however, maintained he’d gotten an electric razor after what had happened with Cecilia.) Whatever the details, Mr. Lisbon became the medium through which we glimpsed the girls’ spirits. We saw them through the toll they exacted on him: his puffy red eyes that hardly opened anymore to see his daughters wasting away; his shoes scuffed from climbing stairs forever threatening to lead to another inert body; his sallow complexion dying in sympathy with them; and his lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be the only life he ever had. As he set off for work, Mrs. Lisbon no longer fortified him with a mug of coffee. Nevertheless, at the wheel, he automatically reached for the mug in its dashboard holder … and brought last week’s cold coffee to his lips. At school, he walked the halls with a fake smile and welling eyes, or in shows of boyish spirits shouted, “Hip check!” and pinned students against the wall. He held on too long, though, freezing until the kids said, “Face-off,” or, “You’re in the penalty box now, Mr. Lisbon,” anything to snap him out of it. Kenny Jenkins got in a headlock with Mr. Lisbon and spoke only of the serenity that came over the two of them. “It was weird. I could smell his breath and everything, but I didn’t try to get away. It was like being on the bottom of a nigger pile, when you’re getting squashed but it’s all peaceful and everything.” Some people admired his continuing to work; others condemned it as hardness of heart. He began to look skeletal beneath his green suit, as though Cecilia, in dying, had tugged him briefly to the other side. He reminded us of Abraham Lincoln, loose-limbed, silent, carrying around the world’s pain. He never passed a drinking fountain without sampling its small relief.
