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.