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 nonunion 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 co
ntracted. 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.
Then, abruptly, less than six weeks after the girls left school, Mr. Lisbon resigned. From Dini Fleisher, the headmaster’s secretary, we learned that Mr. Woodhouse had called Mr. Lisbon in for a meeting over Christmas vacation. Dick Jensen, chairman of the Board of Trustees, also attended. Mr. Woodhouse asked Dini to serve eggnog from the carton in the small office refrigerator. Before accepting, Mr. Lisbon asked, “This isn’t spiked, is it?”
“It’s Christmas,” Mr. Woodhouse said.
Mr. Jensen spoke about the Rose Bowl. He said to Mr. Lisbon, “You’re a U. of M. man yourself, right?”
At this point Mr. Woodhouse indicated that Dini should leave, but before she was out the door, she heard Mr. Lisbon say, “I am. But I don’t think I’ve ever told you that, Dick. Sounds like you’ve been looking into my file.”
The men laughed, without mirth. Dini shut the door.
On January 7, when school resumed, Mr. Lisbon was no longer on staff. Technically, he had taken a leave of absence, but the new math teacher, Miss Kolinski, evidently felt secure enough about her position to remove the planets from their ceiling orbit. The fallen globes sat in the corner like the final trash heap of the universe, Mars embedded in Earth, Jupiter cracked in half, Saturn’s rings slicing poor Neptune. We never learned exactly what was said in the meeting, but the gist was clear: Dini Fleisher told us that parents had begun making complaints shortly after Cecilia killed herself. They maintained that a person who couldn’t run his own family had no business teaching their children, and the chorus of disapproval had grown steadily louder as the Lisbon house deteriorated. Mr. Lisbon’s behavior hadn’t helped, his eternal green suit, his avoidance of the faculty lunch room, his piercing tenor cutting through the male singing group like the keening of a bereaved old woman. He was dismissed. And returned to a house where, some nights, lights never went on, not even in the evening, nor did the front door open.
Now the house truly died. For as long as Mr. Lisbon had gone back and forth to school, he circulated a thin current of life through the house, bringing the girls treats—Mounds bars, orange push-ups, rainbow-colored Kool-Pops. We could imagine what the girls felt inside because we knew what they were eating. We could share their headaches from wolfing ice cream. We could make ourselves sick on chocolate. When Mr. Lisbon stopped going out, however, he stopped bringing home sweets. We couldn’t be sure the girls were eating at all. Offended by Mrs. Lisbon’s note, the milkman had stopped delivering milk, good or bad. Kroger’s stopped bringing groceries. Mrs. Lisbon’s mother, Lema Crawford, mentioned during that same crackling phone call to New Mexico that she had given Mrs. Lisbon most of her summer pickles and preserves (she had hesitated saying “summer” because that had been the summer Cecilia had died, and all the while the cucumbers, strawberries, and even she herself, seventy-one years old, had gone on growing and living). She also told us that Mrs. Lisbon kept an abund
ant supply of canned goods downstairs, as well as fresh water and other preparations against nuclear attack. They had a kind of bomb shelter downstairs, apparently, just off the rec room from which we had watched Cecilia climb to her death. Mr. Lisbon had even installed a propane camping toilet. But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.
Our concern increased when we saw Bonnie visibly wasting away. Just after dawn, as Uncle Tucker was going to bed, he used to see her come onto the front porch, under the mistaken notion that everyone on the street was asleep. She always wore the feathered smock and sometimes carried the pillow Uncle Tucker referred to as a “Dutch wife” because of the way she hugged it. One ripped corner spewed feathers, fleecing the air around her head. She sneezed. Her long neck was thin and white and she had the rickety painful walk of a Biafran, as though her hip joints lacked lubrication. Because he was so skinny himself from his liquid beer diet, we believed Uncle Tucker’s statements about Bonnie’s weight. It wasn’t as if Mrs. Amberson had said Bonnie was wasting away. Compared to her, everyone was. But Uncle Tucker’s turquoise-and-silver belt buckle looked as big on him as the jeweled belt of a heavyweight champ. He knew what he was talking about. And, peering from his garage, one hand on the refrigerator, he watched as with uncoordinated movements Bonnie Lisbon came down the two front steps, proceeded across the lawn to the small dirt mound left from the digging months ago, and, at the site of her sister’s death, began to say the rosary. Holding the pillow in one hand, she told her beads with the other, making sure to finish before the first house light came on down the block and the neighborhood awoke.