Everyone dated the demise of our neighborhood from the suicides of the Lisbon girls.
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People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms and harsh sunlight.
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Some thought the torture tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them:
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So full of flaws.
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But the only thing we are certain of after all these years is the insufficiency of explenation.
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"Obviously doctor, you've never been a thirteen year-old girl."
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The Lisbon girls were 13, Cecillia, 14, Lux, 15, Bonnie, 16, Mary, and 17, Therese.
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No one could understand how Mrs. Lisbon and Mr. Lisbon, our math teacher, had produced such beautiful creatures.
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From that time on, the Lisbon house began to change.
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Almost every day, and even when she wasn't keeping an eye on Cecilia,
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Lux would suntan on her towel wearing a swimsuit that caused the knife-sharpener to give her a 15-minute demonstration for free.
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The only reliable boy who got to know Lux was Trip Fontaine
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For only 18 months before the suicides had emerged from baby fat
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To the delight of girls and mothers alike.
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But few anticipated it would be so drastic.
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The girls were pulled out of school, and Mrs. Lisbon shut the house for maximum security isolation.
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The girls' only contact with the outside world was through the catalogs
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They ordered that started to fill the Lisbon's mailbox with pictures of high-end fashions and brochures for exotic vacations.
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Unable to go anywhere, the girls traveled in their imaginations:
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To gold-tipped Siamese temples or past an old man, the leaf broom tidying the maw carpeted speck of Japan.
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And Cecelia hadn't died. She was a bride in Calcutta.
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Collecting everything we could of theirs, we couldn't get the Lisbon girls out of our minds, but they were slipping away.
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The colours of their eyes were fading, along with exact locations of moles and dimples.
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From five, they had become four, and they were all, the living and the dead, become shadows.
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We would have lost them completely if the girls hadn't contacted us.
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Lux was the last to go.
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Fleeing from the house, we forgot to stop at the garage.
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After the suicide free-for-all, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon gave up any attempt to lead a normal life.
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They had Mr. Hedly pack up the house, selling what furniture he could at a garage sale.
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Everyone went just to look.
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Our parents did not buy used furniture, and they certainly didn't buy furniture tainted by death.
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We of course took the family photos that were put out with the trash.
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Mr. Lisbon put the house on the market, and it was sold to a young couple from Boston.
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It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls.
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But only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling; still do not hear us.
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Calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time. alone in suicide,
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Which is deeper than death,
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And where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.
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Suicide Underground
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Air |