Each night we tried to break the code. Tim Winer began recording the girls’ flashes with his mechanical pencil, but somehow we knew they wouldn’t correspond to any established mode of communication. Some nights, the lights hypnotized us so that we came back to consciousness having forgotten where we were or what we were doing, only the bordello glow of Lux’s Chinese lantern lighting the back room of our brains.
It took us a while to notice the lights in Cecilia’s old room. Distracted by flashes at either end of the house, we failed to see the red and white pinpricks glowing at the window from which she’d jumped ten months before. Once we did, we couldn’t agree what they were. Some believed they were incense sticks glowing in a secret ceremony, while others claimed they were only cigarettes. The cigarette theory caved in as soon as we detected more red lights than possible smokers, and by the time we counted sixteen, we understood at least a portion of the mystery: the girls had created a shrine to their dead sister. Those who attended church said the window resembled the Grotto at St. Paul’s Catholic Church on the Lake, but instead of neat ascending rows of votive candles, each alike in size and importance like the souls they pilot-lighted, the girls had engineered a phantasmagoria of beacons. They had fused drippings from dinner candles into a single paraffin bundle wrapped with its own wick. They had fashioned ten torches from a psychedelic “craft candle” Cecilia had bought at a street art fair. They had lit the box of six squat emergency candles Mr. Lisbon kept in the upstairs closet in case of power failures. They had ignited three tubes of Mary’s lipstick, which burned surprisingly well. From the windowsill, from cups suspended on clothes hangers, from old flowerpots, from cut-out milk cartons, the candles burned. At night we saw Bonnie tending the flames. Occasionally, finding candles drowning in their own wax, she dug runoff trenches with a pair of scissors; but most often she watched the candles as if their outcome held her own, the flames almost extinguishing themselves, but, by some greed of oxygen, persisting.
In addition to God, the candles beseeched us. The Chinese lantern sent out its untranslatable S.O.S. The overhead light showed us the shabby state of the Lisbon house, and showed us Billy Jack, who had avenged his girlfriend’s rape using forsworn karate. The girls’ signals reached us and no one else, like a radio station picked up by our braces. At night, afterimages flashed on our inner eyelids, or hovered over our beds like a swarm of fireflies. Our inability to respond only made the signals more important. We watched the show nightly, always on the verge of discovering the key, and Joe Larson even tried flashing his own bedroom light in answer, but this made the Lisbon house go dark, and we felt reprimanded.
The first letter arrived on May 7. Slipped into Chase Buell’s mailbox with the rest of the day’s mail, the letter bore no stamp or return address, but when we opened it, we recognized at once the purple Flair Lux liked to write with.
Dear whoever,
Tell Trip I’m over him.
He’s a creep.
Guess Who
That was all it said. In the next few weeks, other letters arrived, expressing various moods, each envelope delivered to our houses by the girls themselves in the dead of night. The idea of their sneaking out and moving about our street excited us, and a few nights we tried to stay up long enough to see them. We always awoke in the morning realizing that we’d fallen asleep at our posts. In the mailbox, like a quarter deposited under our pillows by the Tooth Fairy, a letter would be waiting. There were eight letters in all. Not all of them were written by Lux. All were unsigned. All were brief. One letter said: “Remember us?” Another said: “Down with unsavory boys.” Another: “Watch for our lights.” The longest said: “In this dark, there will be light. Will you help us?”
In the daytime, the Lisbon house looked vacant. The trash the family put out once a week (also in the middle of the night because no one saw them, not even Uncle Tucker) looked more and more like the refuse of people resigned to a long siege. They were eating canned lima beans. They were flavoring rice with sloppy-joe mix. At night, when the lights signaled, we racked our brains for a way of contacting the girls. Tom Faheem suggested flying a kite with a message alongside the house, but this was voted down on logistical grounds. Little Johnny Buell offered the recourse of tossing the same message on a rock through the girls’ windows, but we were afraid the breaking glass would alert Mrs. Lisbon. In the end, the answer was so simple it took a week to come up with.
We called them on the telephone.
In the Larsons’ sun-faded phone book, right between Licker and Little, we found the intact listing for Lisbon, Ronald A. It sat halfway down the right-hand page, unmarked by any code or symbol, not even an asterisk referring to an appendix of pain. We stared at it for some time. Then, three index fingers at once, we dialed.
The telephone tolled eleven times before Mr. Lisbon answered. “What’s it going to be today?” he said right away in a tired voice. His speech was slurred. We covered the phone and said nothing.
“I’m waiting. Today I’ll listen to all your crap.”
Another click sounded on the line, like a door opening onto a hollow corridor.
“Look, give us a break, will you?” Mr. Lisbon muttered.
There was a pause. Assorted breathing, mechanically reformulated, met in electronic space. Then Mr. Lisbon spoke in a voice unlike his own, a high screech … Mrs. Lisbon had grabbed the receiver.
“Why won’t you leave us alone!” she shouted, and slammed down the phone.
We stayed on. For five more seconds her furious breath blew through the receiver, but just as we expected, the line didn’t go dead. On the other end, an obscure presence waited.
We called out a tentative hello. After a moment, a faint, crippled voice returned, “Hi.”
We hadn’t heard the Lisbon girls speak in a long time, but the voice didn’t jog our memories. It sounded—perhaps because the speaker was whispering—irreparably altered, diminished, the voice of a child fallen down a well. We didn’t know which girl it was, and didn’t know what to say. Still, we hung on together—her, them, us—and at some adjacent recess in the Bell telephone system another line connected. A man began talking underwater to a woman. We could half hear their conversation (“I thought maybe a salad” … “A salad? You’re killing me with these salads”), but then another circuit must have freed, because the couple were shunted off suddenly, leaving us in buzzing silence, and the voice, raw but stronger now, said, “Shit. See you later,” and the phone was hung up.
We called again next day, at the same time, and were answered on the first ring. We waited a moment for safety’s sake, then proceeded with the plan we’d devised the night before. Holding the phone to one of Mr. Larson’s speakers, we played the song which most thoroughly communicated our feelings to the Lisbon girls. We can’t remember the song’s title now, and an extensive search through records of the period has proved unsuccessful. We do, however, recall the essential sentiments, which spoke of hard days, long nights, a man waiting outside a broken telephone booth hoping it would somehow ring, and rain, and rainbows. It was mostly guitars, except for one interlude where a mellow cello hummed. We played it into the phone, and then Chase Buell gave our number and we hung up.
Next day, same time, our phone rang. We answered it immediately, and after some confusion (the phone was dropped), heard a needle bump down on a record, and the voice of Gilbert O’Sullivan singing through scratches. You may recall the song, a ballad which charts the misfortunes of a young man’s life (his parents die, his fiancée stands him up at the altar), each verse leaving him more and more alone. It was Mrs. Eugene’s favorite, and we knew it well from hearing her singing along over her simmering pots. The song never meant much to us, speaking as it did of an age we hadn’t reached, but once we heard it playing tinily through the receiver, coming from the Lisbon girls, the song made an impact. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s elfin voice sounded high enough to be a girl’s. The lyrics might have been diary entries the girls whispered into our ears. Tho
ugh it wasn’t their voices we heard, the song conjured their images more vividly than ever. We could feel them, on the other end, blowing dust off the needle, holding the telephone over the spinning black disk, playing the volume low so as not to be overheard. When the song stopped, the needle skated through the inner ring, sending out a repeating click (like the same time lived over and over again). Already Joe Larson had our response ready, and after we played it, the Lisbon girls played theirs, and the evening went on like that. Most of the songs we’ve forgotten, but a portion of that contrapuntal exchange survives, in pencil, on the back of Demo Karafilis’s Tea for the Tillerman, where he jotted it. We provide it here:
the Lisbon girls “Alone Again, Naturally,”
Gilbert O’Sullivan
us “You’ve Got a Friend,”
James Taylor
the Lisbon girls “Where Do the Children
Play?” Cat Stevens
us “Dear Prudence,”
The Beatles
the Lisbon girls “Candle in the Wind,”
Elton John
us “Wild Horses,”
The Rolling Stones
the Lisbon girls “At Seventeen,” Janice Ian
us “Time in a Bottle,”
Jim Croce
the Lisbon girls “So Far Away,”
Carole King
Actually, we’re not sure about the order. Demo Karafilis scribbled the titles haphazardly. The above order, however, does chart the basic progression of our musical conversation. Because Lux had burned her hard rock, the girls’ songs were mostly folk music. Stark plaintive voices sought justice and equality. An occasional fiddle evoked the country the country had once been. The singers had bad skin or wore boots. Song after song throbbed with secret pain. We passed the sticky receiver from ear to ear, the drumbeats so regular we might have been pressing our ears to the girls’ chests. Occasionally, we thought we heard them singing along, and it was almost like being at a concert with them. Our songs, for the most part, were love songs. Each selection tried to turn the conversation in a more intimate direction. But the Lisbon girls kept to impersonal topics. (We leaned in and commented on their perfume. They said it was probably the magnolias.) After a while, our songs turned sadder and sappier. That was when the girls played “So Far Away.” We noted the shift at once (they had let their hand linger on our wrist) and followed with “Bridge over Troubled Water,” turning up the volume because the song expressed more than any other how we felt about the girls, how we wanted to help them. When it finished, we waited for their response. After a long pause, their turntable began grinding again, and we heard the song which even now, in the Muzak of malls, makes us stop and stare back into a lost time:
Hey, have you ever tried
Really reaching out for the other side
I may be climbing on rainbows,
But, baby, here goes:
Dreams, they’re for those who sleep
Life, it’s for us to keep
And if you’re wondering what this song is leading to
I want to make it with you.
The line went dead. (Without warning, the girls had thrown their arms around us, confessed hotly into our ears, and fled the room.) For some minutes, we stood motionless, listening to the buzz of the telephone line. Then it began to beep angrily, and a recording told us to hang up our phone and hang it up now.
We had never dreamed the girls might love us back. The notion made us dizzy, and we lay down on the Larsons’ carpet, which smelled of pet deodorizer and, deeper down, of pet. For a long time no one spoke. But little by little, as we shifted bits of information in our heads, we saw things in a new light. Hadn’t the girls invited us to their party last year? Hadn’t they known our names and addresses? Rubbing spy holes in grimy windows, hadn’t they been looking out to see us? We forgot ourselves and held hands, smiling with closed eyes. On the stereo Garfunkel began hitting his high notes, and we didn’t think of Cecilia. We thought only of Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Therese, stranded in life, unable to speak to us until now, in this inexact, shy fashion. We went over their last months in school, coming up with new recollections. Lux had forgotten her math book one day and had to share with Tom Faheem. In the margin, she had written, “I want to get out of here.” How far did that wish extend? Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen. Our surveillance had been so focused we missed nothing but a simple returned gaze. Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone—for us—to save them.
But in the following days we tried to call the girls back without success. The phone rang on hopelessly, forlornly. We pictured the device howling under pillows while the girls reached for it in vain. Unable to get through, we bought The Best of Bread, playing “Make It with You” over and over. There was grand talk of tunnels, of starting from the Larsons’ basement and going beneath the street. The dirt could be carried out in our pant legs and emptied during strolls like in The Great Escape. The drama of this pleased us so much we momentarily forgot that our tunnel had already been built: the storm sewers. We checked the sewers, however, and found them full of water: the lake had risen again this year. It didn’t matter. Mr. Buell had an extension ladder we could easily prop against the girls’ windows. “Just like eloping,” Eugie Kent said, and the words made our minds drift, to a red-faced, small-town justice of the peace, and a sleeper compartment in a train passing through blue wheat fields at night. We imagined all sorts of things, waiting for the girls to signal for us.
None of this—the record-playing, the flashing lights, the Virgin cards—ever got into the papers, of course. We thought of our communication with the Lisbon girls as a sacred confidence, even after such fidelity ceased to make sense. Ms. Perl (who later published a book with a chapter dedicated to the Lisbon girls) described their spirits sinking further and further in an inevitable progression. She shows their pathetic last attempts to make a life—Bonnie’s tending the shrine, Mary’s wearing bright sweaters—but every stone the girls built shelter with has, for Ms. Perl, an underside of mud and worms. The candles were a two-way mirror between worlds: they called Cecilia back, but also called her sisters to join her. Mary’s pretty sweaters only showed a desperate adolescent urge to be beautiful, while Therese’s baggy sweatshirts revealed a “lack of self-esteem.”
We knew better. Three nights after the record playing, we saw Bonnie bring a black trunk into her bedroom. She put it on her bed and began filling it with clothes and books. Mary appeared and threw in her climate mirror. They argued about the trunk’s contents and, in a huff, Bonnie took out some of the clothes she’d put in, giving Mary more room for her things: a cassette player, a hair dryer, and the object we didn’t understand until later, a cast-iron doorstop. We had no idea what the girls were doing, but we noticed the change in their demeanor at once. They moved with a new purpose. Their aimlessness was gone. It was Paul Baldino who interpreted their actions:
“Looks like they’re going to make a break for it,” he said, putting down the binoculars. He made this conclusion with the confident air of someone who had seen relatives disappear to Sicily or South America, and we believed him at once. “Five dollars gets you ten those girls are out of here by the end of the week.”
He was right, though not in the way he intended. The last note, written on the back of a laminated picture of the Virgin, arrived in Chase Buell’s mailbox on June 14. It said simply: “Tomorrow. Midnight. Wait for our signal.”
By this time of year, fish flies coated our windows, making it difficult to see out. The next night, we gathered in the vacant lot beside Joe Larson’s house. The sun had fallen below the horizon, but still lit the sky in an orange chemical streak more beautiful than nature. Across the street the Lisbon house was dark except for the red haze of Cecilia’s shrine, nearly hidden. From
the ground we couldn’t see the upper story well, and tried to go up to the Larsons’ roof. Mr. Larson stopped us. “I just got finished retarring it,” he said. We wandered back to the lot, then walked down to the street, putting our palms against the asphalt still warm from the day’s sun. The sodden smell of the Lisbon house reached us, then faded, so that we thought we’d imagined it. Joe Hill Conley began climbing trees, as usual, though the rest of us had outgrown it. We watched him shinny up a young maple. He couldn’t climb far because the thin limbs wouldn’t support his weight. Still, Chase Buell called up to him, “See anything?” and Joe Hill Conley squinted, then pulled the skin at the corners of his eyes taut, which he thought worked better than squinting, but finally shook his head. It gave us an idea, however, and we moved to the old tree house. Gazing up through foliage, we determined its condition. Part of the roof had been blown off in a storm years ago, and our crowning touch, the doorknob, was missing, but the structure still looked habitable.