Beautiful Broken Girls

by Kim Savage

He came closer, staring right into Mira’s face. She could feel his breath. “I never could have gotten over it.”

  Mira stepped backward. “You said you saw Ben. Where is he?”

  Louis laughed to the side, his hand on the back of his neck.

  “What are you laughing at?” Mira demanded.

  “Yeah, I saw Ben. I saw him leaving. With Gina Tramondozzi.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Louis shook his head. “It’s nothing new. He hooks up with Gina T. every time he gets lonely. They go way back. She’s, like, your body double or something. A bad one, but you take what you can get. Not me, of course. I’m discriminating in my tastes.”

  He said it so surely, so effortlessly. Mira’s eyes went dark.

  “See, you can’t tease a guy, hooking up every once in a while, when you feel like it. Growing guy like Ben Lattanzi’s got needs,” Louis said.

  Mira felt her sureness disassemble and fall away. “You don’t know Ben’s needs.” She faltered.

  “I know Ben’s human. And Gina’s a warm body. It’s hard to resist when it’s right there in front of you, just asking to be taken,” he said, the corner of his lip flicking up.

  “He would never,” she said, her voice tightening to a squeak.

  “The thing about urges is, eventually you gotta give in, or they’ll keep coming back.” Louis stood over her, lifting a hank of hair from her eyes. “And back. And back.”

  Mira spun away from Louis and staggered to the front of the house, filmy-eyed, her gaze gone dead, her mother’s voice in her head.

  It’s quiet here, Mira.

  * * *

  By mid-May, the cherry tree on the Cillos’ front lawn began to bud, then bloom. By the end of the same week, its petals blanketed the fallow lawn. Mira sat under the tree sometimes, cradling a new kitten gifted by one of Mr. Cillo’s associates, and initially, Louis used the cat as an occasion to stop and talk. Mira whispered one-word answers and refused to lift her eyes from her lap, where the kitten lay curled in a tight C. He brought the cat a toy purchased from Claws and Paws, a wand with blue and purple feathers on the end that looked like a ravaged feather duster, which Mira accepted without protest or thanks.

  When the grocery delivery van pulled up one day, Francesca poked her head inside the passenger side window, her foot kicking up playfully behind her. She laughed and dug cash out of her purse, which she shoved through the window, jamming it back into her bag when it was refused. Francesca moved to the back and slid boxes out through the doors, stacking them on the curb. Mira didn’t budge from her spot under the bare tree, as if watching her sister stockpiling for an apocalypse was unremarkable.

  Francesca moved the boxes into the house. Mira took mental inventory. Twelve canisters of Maxwell House instant coffee. Overgrown cylinders of sugar, salt, and pepper. Canned tuna, salmon, chicken, and turkey. Mega-packages of Charmin, Kleenex, Bounty, and napkins, in multiples. Barber pole–striped shaving cream cans in a beer box. A mountain of hamburger trapped under an arc of plastic wrap. Powdered milk. Black licorice nips in a plastic barrel. Racks of short ribs laminated in plastic. Envelopes of Red Cap pipe tobacco packed upright in a slant-cut box.

  Mira tickled the kitten with the feather duster. It batted the tuft. It was cute, not more than a gray ball of fluff, its bones loose and light, a barely there creature you could hardly feel in one hand. Mira cupped the kitten’s tail end with one hand and pinched its nose with her two forefingers with the other. The kitten became a writhing ball of fluff, then settled as Mira released her fingers. She repeated the squeeze again, each time tweaking a little longer. When the kitten stilled, she carried it into the house and left it in its box underneath a blanket, and went looking for something else pleasing to touch.

  Mira didn’t remember when the fishbowl had come into the Cillo house. They had never had a fish, nor any pets before Mira’s kitten. Francesca said it wasn’t a real fishbowl, but an enormous cocktail glass that their parents had won as a prize at some boozy Lions Club fund-raiser many years before. Mira loved touching the smooth glass, and the thick lip that folded over itself at the top. There was something perfectly round and lovely about it, and even though it left the tiny notes she had started writing Ben over the last few months exposed, Francesca didn’t seem to notice or care, which always made Mira wonder, since as sisters, and in particular sisters who lived on top of one another, anything seemingly private—diaries, magazines with cute boy bands, diet logs—was fair game. Why the notes were left alone mattered little now. Francesca was so caught up in their preparations, she wouldn’t notice that the notes were gone.

  Daddy would be left with everything he needed. Stocking so the supplies wouldn’t be found was another matter, and it meant hiding things in the basement. Mira was supposed to be inputting Daddy’s profile into online dating sites, because it wouldn’t be long before the supplies ran out—six months for perishables, eight months for paper goods, twelve months for canned goods. After trying and failing to interest him in Louis Gentry’s mother, who had been single since Louis’s dad died in the Iraq War, the girls knew they needed to get a wife for their father some other way, and if they hit enough sites, the law of averages said they’d make a connection. Francesca ran the outside errands, the ones that required begging for rides and interactions with the outside world. She convinced Kyle’s delinquent older brother Kamil to bring his bus by on a Wednesday afternoon before Mr. Cillo got home from work and load the bikes up so Francesca could take them to the bike shop for a tune-up. Mira suspected Francesca’s outside errands included visits to the parish center, where she no longer worked. Her services were not needed, would be too much strain after Connie died, was Mr. Falso’s strong feeling.

  Mira did not like looking too closely at Francesca. She was no longer sleeping, afraid of the nightly dreams where the devil tempted her into abandoning her “path.” Dusky circles under her sister’s eyes extended along the line of her thin nose, and she squinted. The corners of her mouth drooped, and she seemed to have trouble finding words for things.

  “Stack the—cans, cans of, fish, whatever—away from the hot water heater. They might spoil; we don’t know!” she’d shout.

  “The tuna or the salmon?” Mira would ask.

  “The salmon. Tuna! Oh whatever, the cans!” she’d stumble to say.

  The fishbowl contained exactly five notes. Mira scooped out the notes one by one. Francesca would be home soon from her visit with Kamil, trying to get cyclobenzaprine, which was supposed to make you fall asleep. Francesca had hoped that Kamil did what she asked and got it beforehand, and would not make her sit in his car waiting to meet his “associate.” But since they’d been gone three hours now, Mira assumed things had not gone as planned.

  Mira folded the notes she planned to leave for Ben to find, and placed them on top of one another until they made a precarious tower. In a way, she hated the notes. Most of them were cryptic and stupid. They contained an accounting of ugly things. Each one had been shed, a flake sloughed from her heel as she ran. It was tempting to edit them, clean them up. But she knew that was dangerous. Her intention, for Ben to tell their story, was vulnerable. So simple to touch their father’s lighter to the top note and make a pile of ash. No. She would give Ben the notes, and then he would see her. All her parts. For a time, that was what he had wanted the most.

  What was missing were instructions.

  By the time you get this, I’ll be gone, she wrote, recounting what she knew people would call them, and how some of it was true. Her eyes filled with tears, and the paper went blurry. It felt impossible to keep going.

  In her mind’s ear, she heard her mother, gentler than she’d ever been in life. Tell him to tell your story, Mira.

  She could do that. So she did.

  Six notes. They had been together a total of seven times in seven places. A seventh note ought to be a kind of summary, she thought. A guarantee Ben would get the story right. She slipped her hand into the desk drawer
and felt for the EpiPen she’d hidden there last March. On a new sheet of paper, she wrote:

  Francesca tried to raise Connie from the dead

  to win Mr. Falso’s love. And because of that,

  Connie died.

  She wrapped the note around the pen and tied it with a purple ribbon from her wrist. She tried to stack the rest of the notes into a neat pile, then gave up and settled for a messy polyhedron. She set one note, the sixth, aside and stuffed the rest of the wad into a manila envelope. It would take a few days for her to get around town and hide most of the notes where they needed to be. They’d been planning for this moment for two months. Now, she had only a few days.

  A few days was good. Merciful. If she waited any longer, she might change her mind.

  Mira slipped the instructions into an envelope and addressed it, wondering how long a slightly misaddressed letter would take to find its way. She knew from her aunt’s long career at the post office that a misaddressed letter without a return address ran the risk of ending up in the dead letter office, which was somewhere in Boston. It could be opened, even. But one with a nonexistent street name that sounded a lot like an existing street name would end up with the “lost ladies,” a cadre of blue-haired postal employees whose only job was to decipher cryptic addresses, trace mangled mail, and return stolen wallets dropped in mailboxes to their rightful owners. Her letter would be in good hands; it would just take awhile for it to get there. Mira counted on this.

  Headlights illuminated the living room window. She snapped her head, then dropped it as the dark crowded back in. Not Francesca, not yet. She was probably fending off Kamil, who always expected something in return for a favor. It was hardly fair that Mira sat at their father’s desk while Francesca was out doing the dirty work, but Francesca had wanted it that way. Mira pinned note six to the torn liner underneath the couch, steeling herself against memories of the last time she was with Ben. She tried to complete her father’s profile, which she thought with some pride reflected the right mix of rugged manliness and lovability. But her eyes kept wandering to the window. The street was dark. Her stomach gripped; a thought niggled at the edge of her brain. It was a good plan, it was fair and just. And yet. In confessing, she condemned Francesca. Even if Ben never told anyone, he would always know that Francesca had killed Connie. He would judge her.

  And Francesca’s wasn’t the only heart broken.

  She grabbed a lighter from the desk drawer, removed the note attached to the EpiPen, and set it on fire. As she watched the paper flicker, slowly, it seemed, she remembered the time she, Francesca, and Connie had smoked for the first time on the back deck of Connie’s house, in the middle of January, Connie freaking out that the wind would blow the smoke back in through the screen into her kitchen. She thought of how easily Francesca had convinced Connie to steal her mother’s Parliaments. How Connie had exhaled a thin strip of smoke with her eyes closed, and how silly she had looked. Francesca told Connie she looked older smoking, and that was what it took for Connie to get hooked. When Mira and Francesca got in trouble after their father smelled smoke in their hair, Connie took the blame, earning herself a full week without her phone. She’d been happy to take the punishment, Mira thought, because it made her more like them, her cousins, the Cillo sisters she worshipped and emulated. Only Connie could romanticize their electronic-less existence, their strict rules. Only Connie could view it as exotic and enviable. Only Connie would give her life in an effed-up experiment to prove one of them was a saint.

  Mira ran her finger through the flame a few times before she doused the flame. She collected the half-burned note and its ashes onto a sheet of legal paper and dumped it into the trash can underneath the desk. On a new piece of paper, she wrote:

  Francesca thought she was touched by God.

  But we couldn’t prove it. And because of that, Connie died.

  We didn’t plan for Connie’s heart to stop forever. We didn’t plan for our hearts to be broken.

  Here’s what we learned: when you touch things, they can break.

  She attached the new note to the EpiPen with the ribbon and stashed it in her bag on the floor.

  Mira lifted her chair so it did not scrape as she rose, flicked off the overhead lights, and sat on the couch enveloped in darkness. She crossed her arms over the back of the sofa and rested her cheek on the fold of her elbow. The phone rang. I’m asleep, she told her father, without moving. Francesca’s asleep too. He would realize quickly and hang up. Three rings, half a fourth, then … silence. She smiled. With the lights off, Mira could see straight through the Lattanzis’ living room window, past where Mrs. Lattanzi sat at her own small desk, pooled in a computer screen’s blue light, into their kitchen, where Mr. Lattanzi passed by the doorframe with a dish of something in stunted hands, which she realized were encased in oven mitts. She knew by the smile on Mr. Lattanzi’s face that Ben was seated at the dining room table out of Mira’s sightline, waiting for his dinner. Mira knew Mrs. Lattanzi loved her work, and there she was, working on her computer. She knew Mr. Lattanzi had helped coach Ben’s lacrosse team that night, and that they were having a late dinner after practice, and that his ears were still red because it had been cold on the field. Mira marveled at the clarity with which she could see straight into the heart of Ben’s house, where everything was as it should be, where everything was what it seemed. Where no one had been touched by gifts that became curses, and fathers knew what was going on in lives they allowed their children to live, and mothers didn’t beg daughters to join them in the ether.

  Mrs. Lattanzi yelled something over her shoulder and Ben loped into sight. Mira lifted her face from her arm and sat up on the couch cushions. Ben stood behind his mother as she showed him something on the screen, and he laughed. As he laughed, he turned to look out the window, and Mira froze. She wondered if the light from the basement was filtering in somehow, and he could see her, it had caught her hair, made her visible. Mira wanted to yell, to wave her arms. She knew at that moment that she wanted to be seen by Ben. He may have failed her, screwed her, and run from her crazy, but she still loved him, for his beauty, and his wounds.

  She remained still.

  Ben squinted, his eyes searching in the dark, until he looked away, collapsing on the couch and chatting with his mother, reassured that he had seen nothing.

  JULY 2017

  Ben gazed out the Kuliks’ screened porch. His vision was loopy, caught on the tiny wire squares, and he squinted to see beyond them to the abandoned ball field where kids had stuffed red Solo cups to spell out the class year. Beyond the field, he saw the redeveloped Superfund park, with joggers and middle-aged walkers and baby strollers bouncing above loamed and seeded poison. Beyond the park, he saw the red blear of headlights on Route 3, and the perfectly gray Atlantic behind.

  Now everything was crystal clear. His letter would tell the truth about what happened to Connie: a big fat mistake that would drive anyone with a conscience to a desperate act. It was all anyone needed to know, that the girls weren’t crazy, just good. Too good for this world. How good would be Ben and Kyle’s secret, because after the shameless parade of graveside selfies, the webcam someone installed claiming to see the girls’ ghosts, and the endless articles and littered beer cans and the rumored TV movie chronicling the sisters’ last days, Ben and Kyle both knew that calling out Francesca’s specialness would only make the lurid interest in the girls worse.

  The light was falling fast.

  “You almost done, Tolstoy?” Kyle stretched his legs on the cot he slept on in his sunporch and mined his teeth with a safety pin. That summer, Ben had noticed it looked a lot like Kyle was living out here, having moved in a cube fridge, printer, TV, and a laundry basket full of clothes. The Kuliks might not have such a hard time of it when Kyle left.

  Ben wiggled his cramped fingers over the keyboard. Waves of pain shot through his butt. The wrought-iron filigreed chair and matching table Kyle had brought in for the task were perilously dainty b
eneath him. The story that had taken him five months to start, and another six months to rewrite, was finished. Tonight, as he came to the last page, his hands were connected in a direct line to his brain, his typing feverish, and the only sound he heard was his own breathing. Now it was go time. He unfolded his long body and hit Print, shoving the hot documents into three envelopes addressed to the Cillos; the Villelas; and the Bismuth Evening Gazette.

  Kyle arched an eyebrow. “You sure about that last one?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “We’ll be long gone by the time it blows up, anyway.” Kyle rolled off the cot and shoved his pillow into his trunk suitcase, bouncing on it until it clicked shut. “Your bags in the truck?”

  “On top of the tools.” Ben sealed the last envelope and tugged at the front of his shirt. It was a dry, cool summer night, the kind that didn’t happen much near the ocean, but Ben was sweating buckets. “Help me lift?” Ben grabbed the handle on one end of the trunk and Kyle grabbed the other, and Kyle whistled as they hoisted his worldly possessions into the flatbed of his truck. Ben slid in on the passenger side.

  The truck rumbled to a start. No one in the house came out; no one asked where they were going, and Kyle didn’t bother to look back.

  “Post office?” Kyle said.

  “Yep,” Ben replied.

  They cruised by the darkened Powder Neck branch of the post office and dropped the three envelopes in the nighttime slot. With the wheeze and slam of the handle, Mira’s words were out there. No turning back.

  Ben didn’t anticipate how dark the cemetery would be, but Kyle’s vision was freakishly sharp, a cosmic balancing for years of near-deafness. They came to the Cillo plot and decamped, carrying the shovels and file from the back of the truck swiftly, like men for whom grave digging was an everyday thing. Ben rubbed his hands together to dry the sweat (so much sweat) and they set to work, each to his own task.

  Bats pinwheeled low above their heads. After a while, the mosquitos found them, and Ben’s bites had bites. The moon was a lucky break: it shone with a clear ferocity so that when the shovel slipped from Ben’s raw and clumsy hands, he spotted the long white outline of its handle and lost no time. Three hours later, sweat soaked their shirts, and every part of their bodies burned, including, inexplicably, Ben’s crotch. But there was no stopping until they hit bottom, because once the letters telling Mira and Francesca’s story had been dropped, everything else had to follow.