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 beneath 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.”