Ben waited until after six thirty on Thursday night. He was sure his parents would never leave for their respective meetings, first his father, running out the door gripping a chicken sausage wrapped in oily paper towels in his hand, then his mother, forgetting her coat, then keys. He even let her drop him off at the indoor turf field, making excuses about feeling sick before Coach Taylor could stop him, and jogged home. As he rounded the bend, he saw his dark house, then the Cillos’, lit from the inside like a pumpkin, with the old white Chevy Lumina parked in the driveway. He yanked the prepacked backpack from its hiding place in the rhododendron bush at the front of his own house. Dumped his lax stick, gloves, and helmet inside the front door but kept his chest pads and shirt on, figuring it gave him cred with a guy like Mr. Cillo. Lacrosse in November? Why, yes, Mr. Cillo, the best players play year-round! What, they didn’t have lacrosse when you were a boy? Not my dad either, not that he’s that much younger than you, ’course he wasn’t the high school athlete that you were, Mr. Cillo. I’ve heard the stories …
Ben stopped the chattering in his brain. He cleared his throat and rang the doorbell with a jab, checking his shadowy reflection in the glass. It was a good call to wear his uniform. It made him seem more innocent, a reminder that he was still a boy, no matter what foul accusations came from his lips. Besides, his chest pads might serve as some kind of protection, if things got rough. But really, Ben knew that his uniform bulked him up, and he wanted that bulk when he faced his enemy. He studied the Lumina, as though it had been an earlier trick of light. He pressed the doorbell, longer this time, and shifted from foot to foot. It got dark early now, and he was cold in shorts. He tried to remember how long his parents’ meetings were. Was it his father who’d be home by nine, or his mother? He had no time for things to go wrong.
Ben glanced over his shoulder at Piggy’s house. The Winnebago sat in the driveway like an aluminum-sided whale. Piggy would still be at lacrosse for another forty-five minutes, and his mother would be sacked out with the rest of his overweight family in front of the TV, except Mr. Pignataro, who rarely left his Gentlemen’s Club, not even to sleep sometimes, according to his son.
Ben noted how easily thoughts of others crowded his head when the one person he should be focused on was Mira. He bit his lip and knocked on the door, a fast rap that meant business. The door gave a little. Ben spread his hand flat against it and pushed. It creaked open.
“Hello?” Ben called into the same living room his own front door opened into. Every light was on: the flush overhead oval, the lamp above the Barcalounger, the matching table lamps bookending the couch and trimmed in velvet brocade. Even the tiny stained-glass lights behind the windows painted on the velvet picture on the wall. Mr. Cillo had been taking his meals on a chair in front of the flat-screen TV, given the crumpled napkins, empty glasses, and crumbs on the table beside.
Ben fingered the straps of his backpack as he took careful footsteps around the living room. “Mr. Cillo? It’s Ben Lattanzi, next door! The door was open! Anybody home?” He cringed at anybody since nobody besides Mr. Cillo lived there anymore. Then he checked himself, remembering this was no time to get soft. His eyes caught a set of two brass frames on the mantel, eight-by-ten school photos taken the year before. Francesca had tipped her chin down—had probably been told to by the photographer, Ben thought—and the result was pure mockery. Her eyes nearly twinkled, a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me stare down her nose that made Ben’s belly twist. He blinked hard and looked to Mira next. The photographer had done that thing only school photographers and morgue beauticians were capable of: he’d made her look like someone else entirely. Her face was frozen in a fake smile, her eyes fixed on some unseen object. These were not the hot Cillo sisters anyone thought of, and he was struck by the fact that they seemed to have ruined their pictures deliberately.
Ben stepped backward and landed on a rubber cat toy. It squeaked, and he jumped, stumbling over a pair of worn wing tips, the source of a tangy funk that repelled Ben in its intimacy.
Ben shoved a bent finger under his nose. “Mr. Cillo?!” His voice reverberated through the house. He waited, still and listening, for a bathroom flush, a footfall, a snore. The silence was heavy and complete. Ben relaxed his shoulders. Mr. Cillo was somewhere without his car—with a drinking buddy, probably.
The longing came on hard, to see and touch everything from the girls’ final days. The weird stuff they wore during the last days anyone saw them: Francesca’s shapeless hand-me-down dresses, Mira’s ratty knit hat. He could walk right up into their bedrooms and look in their drawers. Mira had brought him here sure as if she had dragged him through the front door by his wrist. The notes had done that; Ben had the proof right in his backpack, should he get caught. Ben gazed out the window. With every light on, Piggy didn’t need his Winnebago perch to see Ben. Anyone driving down the street, walking a dog, even a teenage boy looking out his bedroom window could see him standing in the middle of the Cillos’ living room. Ben moved away from the window to the edge of the couch he knew well. A thrill ran through him in a detached way, like a history buff seeing the blood-stained pillow from Abraham Lincoln’s death bed for the first time. Ben ran his hand over the back of the couch, imagining he might find a strand of blond hair. He looked through the window again, up to his own bedroom, dark but for the faint blue glow of his computer.
Ben shivered. Living in this house was like living in a fishbowl. He and Mira could have gotten caught so easily.
It’d been December, and they’d planned it for weeks, when Francesca would be working late at the rectory on an Advent food drive, and Mr. Cillo would be at his club. Ben had lied to his parents about hanging at Eddie’s (a walkable distance being critical) then ducked into the Cillos’ backyard, where Mira had let him in the back door. They’d kept the lights off, in case Ben’s parents looked out their side living room window. Ben, in a low voice pretending to be his father: “Carla, tell Benvenuto to get off Mira Cillo!” which Mira met with silence. Her single-minded seriousness that night only drove Ben more mad. They’d dropped to their knees on the floor, right where he stood, in front of the couch. Mira undid Ben’s fly with surprising deftness and pushed him backward. Mira’s sharp knee on Ben’s thigh, holding him down. In the half-dark, her eyes carried depths that Ben had never seen, and he wanted to touch every part of her at once. Mira’s mouth slammed his, her muscled tongue pressing hard, stealing his breath, then breathing her own life force down his throat and into his lungs. Ben’s lips bruised, and she moved lower, biting his throat. Her eyes met his, and she rose above him again, shapeshifting into something urgent and furious. Ben’s blood swelled to meet hers, but he was aware that it was deficient. She had been cooking in her own want for so long, a want that Ben understood, but could never match.
Tonight there would be no fade to black. Here again, in front of that same couch, Ben would remember every part—mouth neck arms stomach waist back hips thighs inside—every part remembered.
After, they lay stuck together, their parts fitted perfectly, Mira gazing up, making sure Ben was real. Once, she made a small, upset noise, raising on an elbow and blowing softly on his throat where she’d left a mark.