Beautiful Broken Girls

On the same day Ben walked out of Piggy’s basement for the last time he ever would, he waited for his parents to fall asleep before slipping into his moonlit backyard clutching Mira’s notes against his chest.

Stealth was required. His parents had been watching him closely since the incident. His mother had collapsed at his feet; his father had wept. Drenched, cocooned in a Mylar emergency blanket, the cops pushed Ben over his own doorstep. Now, his father’s wing tip toe nudged the side of his sneaker under the kitchen table, his mother’s fingers brushed the tops of his shoulders. Constantly, they touched him. Ben couldn’t blame them, since it seemed like the teenagers of Bismuth were disappearing into the ether. Ben had even agreed to weekly dinners with Mr. Falso, which had to be easier than seeing a real therapist. Like his parents, Mr. Falso had accepted his excuse: that he’d gone to the ledge that night to get peace. His swim was deemed a sad reenactment of what his lost girlfriend had done months before, but resulting in hypothermia instead of rigor mortis. What they didn’t know was that he’d brought something back with him from that night. Something he couldn’t shake.

Softly, he placed the notes inside the patio chiminea and lit the match, each time snuffed by the wind, until the third time when it caught. The smoke blew away from his house, the smell of ink and char rising out of the neighborhood and over the Neck, out across the water and toward the city, where it would mingle with the smells of salt and city and new beginnings.

He no longer needed the notes. He could tell their story now using his own words. Mira’s and Francesca’s and Connie’s.

He stepped lightly across the frozen grass to his front yard, flush against the house so as not to set off the sensor lights his father had installed to discourage further escapes. From the bush in his front yard, Ben could see Mr. Cillo in his office, hunched over his desk, head resting on forearms. He had watched Mr. Cillo every night since he’d hidden in the man’s dead daughters’ closet. Graying gelled hair on a massive head. Meaty hands with scarred knuckles cupping elbows. Epaulettes of an ancient Members Only jacket worn indoors. Always the same.

Ben checked his watch: 11:19—arguably too late. But he was still a kid. Harmless if he showed up on a doorstep. He knew vaguely that the old Ben would have realized it was inappropriate to ring his neighbor’s doorbell after eleven o’clock at night. But somewhere on the altar ledge, the new Ben had lost the compass that told him what normal kids did not do. For sure, his new lack of a filter had contributed to his near-friendless state. Since that night, Ben had felt Francesca’s disapproving presence.

The sense of Francesca hit a crescendo in Piggy’s basement, when Piggy began comparing the Miller girls to the Cillo sisters and everyone started weighing in, sizing them up. Ben’s indignance had risen with every jaw-click in his ear. He’d yelled at Piggy, then each of them, and when they laughed at him, he threw his Xbox controller at Louis’s lap, nailing his balls and starting a fight. Kyle tried to call them off, even said it was Ben’s meds making him a nutbag, though to his knowledge, Ben was still faking his daily dose.

And then, without remembering he had walked across his own driveway and the small patch of lawn that separated them, he was ringing Mr. Cillo’s doorbell.

The door creaked open slowly. Framed by the indoor gloom, Mr. Cillo’s form was rumpled and aged. A belly had developed that winter. Streetlight glare caught in a pair of never-before-seen glasses. Behind Ben, the wind whipped up. Something about the house seemed cozy, and for the first time in ages, he wanted to be inside.

“I’d say it’s late, boy. It’s almost midnight. Do your parents know you’re out here?”

Ben looked down at the stoop, his cheeks hot. Mr. Cillo was referring to Ben’s runaway escapade, one that he had been drawn into, a favor that he knew was unwise, hadn’t wanted to give. The sureness of purpose Ben had had moments before evaporated.

“No, sir. But I couldn’t sleep. I know you can’t either. I see you awake every night.”

Mr. Cillo wrinkled his brow, and Ben noticed his eyebrow hairs were long and tangled. He crossed his arms over his gut. “You peeping in my windows, son?”

“I can’t help but see. We’re so close, our houses…” Ben was fumbling. In his ear, the impatient click click of bone in socket.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Ben blurted. A leak had given way, and something hot and heavy poured out of him.

“Yeah, well. We’ve had our differences, your dad and me. But you got a good family. Show me how sorry you are by sticking close to your mom and dad and not scaring them anymore.”

“Yes, sir.” Ben told himself that it didn’t matter what Mr. Cillo thought he meant, only that he said it. He had been mistaken in his belief about Mira’s father, and now he had atoned.

“And stay away from the quarry. Nothing good comes out of that place.” He raised his arm to close the door, ready to sulk back into the dim.

Ben wondered if he understood the irony of what he’d said—the quarry had given him a living, and it had taken away his daughters. The filter was gone. Before he could stop himself, he said, “It’s like the Bible says. First it gives, then it takes away.”

Mr. Cillo let his arm fall. He opened and closed his fists. Ben cringed, ready for him to come after him, deliver him a smack for his insolence. But the wrinkles around his eyes grew soft, and his fists loosened at his waist.

“I feel sorry for you, kid,” he said, shaking his head. “That coach really messed you up, didn’t he?”

Ben felt the emotion rising in his throat. There was a time when he would have done physical violence to Mr. Cillo for his words. But Ben was beginning to master his own white-hot rage. Turn it into something else.

He straightened his shoulders and turned away from the Cillos’ home. There was nothing here that he wanted.

Pale thimbles floated in a congealed Crock-Pot of pasta e fagioli. Spatulas under squares of lasagnas in colored Pyrex invited takers, but every slice remained. Children had filched all of the Jordan almonds from the pizzelle trays, and the cookies lay unadorned.

Everything had gone switchback, sideways, wrong. Francesca couldn’t take it any longer. Mr. Falso had spent the entire night counseling her aunt, though she was barely responsive from the Xanax, and could easily be attended to by any one of the priests who had come to the house directly from the cemetery. Even her father—no fan of Mr. Falso, not really—had squeezed his shoulder at one point and offered him a cigar and an escape, but Mr. Falso had refused. Francesca was beginning to see Mr. Falso’s behavior as one big attempt to avoid her, and she would not have that. Not now, when she needed him most, for comfort, of course—Connie had been her cousin, her blood—but her spiritual resolve was in jeopardy, never more so than now, since her dream had confirmed what she had begun to suspect.

Francesca broke away from Mira. It was stifling, anyway, the way she clung to her, gave her no room to breathe, depending on her to get through her own terrible guilt. How could Mira feel guilty when the guilt was Francesca’s to bear? It seemed almost selfish to Francesca, the way Mira sucked up responsibility for what had surely been Francesca’s fault. But that was their way: one body, shared blood. Mio sangue.

Francesca caught her reflection in a mirror. She was a ghost of herself, in her favorite black dress, the same one she’d worn to the wake, shapeless skin and bones under a cheap spandex blend, with hollows under her eyes. She looked like crap, really. But that was to be expected when your little cousin dies.

Somehow Mira looked okay, in her flowy dress, her eyes sad but beautiful. Surely she had been tortured as much as Francesca by what happened to Connie. It had been a dumb trick, a stunt too soon to try, since she’d had so little time to explore her latest power. Mr. Falso’s waning interest had set her on an accelerated time line. Francesca’s eyes narrowed on Mira. Her cheeks had color; Mira hadn’t lost weight like she had. Her small belly was soft and slightly rounded under her dress, her arms still full. Perhaps Mira felt less guilty, because she’d tried to use the pen to save Connie? What ever happened to that pen?

“It’s nothing.” Francesca smiled gently. “I’ll ask Daddy if we can go in a minute. I promise. Stay here and don’t talk to anyone.” She waited half-hidden behind the corner of the Villelas’ hutch until Mr. Falso broke away to get her aunt a paper cup of punch. The other women seemed relieved as they swarmed Mrs. Villela’s chair; they couldn’t leave without sharing regrets and a proper goodbye, and Mr. Falso’s monopolizing had stalled them for a good hour.

Francesca waited until he set the crystal ladle back in its bowl with a soft clink.

Mr. Falso spun and punch splashed onto his curled hand. With his eyebrows raised, the creases in his forehead and around his eyes and mouth seemed deeper than before, making him look old and clownish. Francesca set the thought aside.

“Of course!” Mr. Falso looked over Francesca’s head toward Mrs. Villela, surrounded by mavens, not in need of punch anytime soon. He set it down on the table and forced his expression into something more sober. “How are you doing, Francesca?”

“Yes, right.” They walked past clumps of neighbors and Connie’s classmates to the back of the house. Each time he turned for approval, Francesca shook her head. Finally, they came to the back stairs.

“I don’t care what anybody thinks is appropriate or inappropriate. Half the guests are only here to look good for my father and my uncle anyway. They don’t care about Connie. She’s my dead cousin. I’m the one in pain. You’re supposed to counsel me, do you understand?” She shook with the force of her words, angry at him, but more angry at the tears forming at the corners of her eyes that meant she was losing control. Silently, he passed her, and she followed him up the stairs. He paused in the hall until she grabbed his wrist and pulled him past Eddie’s closed bedroom door and into Connie’s bedroom.

Someone had drawn the nubby purple tab curtains that covered the room’s only window. Francesca dropped Mr. Falso’s wrist and strode to the window. She yanked the halves apart and light streamed in. He shaded his eyes. Flowers, brown and desiccated, hung from a noose of ribbon. The walls were covered with posters of pretty boys with puffy lips. In a corner, a rigged strip of lightbulbs above a sheet of mirror, under which a slab of plywood jutted from the wall, fashioning a makeshift vanity. The plywood was laden with small bottles of flesh-colored liquid, sticks, and tubes. Above, the mirror was coated with a film of hairspray from cans lined up on the floor below. A stool with a round seat topped by a frilly pink circular pillow came to half the height of the makeshift counter.

Mr. Falso sat on the edge of a padded chair and moved his folded hands in front of his groin, crossing his legs in a feminine pose, as if to hide all the parts of him that made him male. Francesca paced the pink braided rug, swearing every time the heel of her shoe got caught on the weave.

She stopped and stared at him. “That’s right, Nick. I actually say curse words. Just another reason for you to make the case that I am not, in fact, saint material.”

Hours before, Francesca had envisioned this very scenario, the two of them alone. Herself crying on Mr. Falso’s shoulder, and there’s where it would get difficult for them both, her frail loveliness pressing against him, tears smearing her mascara. He would allow her to soak the breast of his button-down shirt, wear it downstairs like a badge. Tip her jaw with thumb and forefinger and look deeply into her eyes, and say, “Your cousin is safe with God,” and then, “And you are safe with me.”

She hadn’t gone to her father for help when the rest of the town turned only to Frank Cillo to solve their problems. She hadn’t gone to a priest, or one of the myriad uncles, genetic and in name, that their father positioned around the town like grizzled watchdogs to monitor his daughters. She came to him, Nick Falso, Friend of Teens. She trusted him. He could be trusted.

“I’m not making a case one way or another. You’re in pain, Francesca. You’ve lost someone you loved deeply. This is a confusing time. Don’t begin to think that I don’t care.”

Francesca’s eyes jittered. She grabbed her elbows and rubbed them. “I haven’t been in this room since I was twelve. Connie practically lived at our house.” She stalked over to a knickknack shelf and raised a photograph in a cheap brass frame that said Sisters in curlicue letters: Connie, across the laps of the two Cillo girls, their feet stretched toward the camera, animal slipper heads cocked in different directions. They wore ponytails and pajamas, and their faces were coated with green pasty masks like Day-Glo mimes.

Francesca twisted the side of her mouth into a crooked smile. “I treated her like blood. You do anything for blood. Connie understood that.”

“Connie was an extraordinary girl. She never allowed her physical limitations to keep her from leading a good life, filled with love.”

Francesca laughed then, a gruff noise, and placed the frame back on the shelf. “Connie loved to be loved.”

Mr. Falso coughed. “We should be getting back downstairs. Your aunt will wonder where I am.”

“You need to hear me.” Francesca rushed to the chair and fell to her knees on the braided rug. Mr. Falso’s head snapped toward the door; there were only the same distant murmurings of middle-aged parents, tired and thick-waisted, searching for the space between mourning and sociability. His gaze fell to Francesca’s hollowed cheeks and perfectly carved jaw, and he seized Francesca’s hands and tried to raise her, but she pulled him down and he was drawn forward, closer to her face, on his knees.

“You don’t understand,” Francesca pleaded, her eyes bright and wet. “Satan came to me in my dreams. Last night, and the night before that! It was awful: he looked like he does in pictures, only he was little, a little demon, with an awful mouth and sharp teeth, and his mouth was filled with light, but not good light, a hot, rank light, like fire, a fire caused by something awful burning, like … skin. He speaks, and his voice is terrible; I’m saying ‘he’ but the voice could have been a man or a woman. He taunts me, tells me I should give up wanting to be a saint, because I’m not good enough!”

“But here’s the thing: I was protected. There was a light around me, a different sort of light than the one coming from his mouth. And I had the sense”—Francesca’s eyes ran over Mr. Falso’s face—“I had the sense the light was protecting me from him.”

“That’s good. That’s very, very good, Francesca. That’s your faith protecting you.” Mr. Falso shifted, his wrists still caught by her slender, strong hands. “Protecting you from a bad dream.”

Mr. Falso rubbed his wrists, settling back in the chair. “Yes. And if I were going to interpret it, I would say that Connie’s death tested your faith. This is common: when bad things happen to good people, we ask, Why, God, why her? Why me? That’s what the whole book of Job is about: God testing people with terrible trials. You’re like Job, Francesca. You won’t stop believing in God because your beautiful, vibrant young cousin died! Your faith will win out.”

Mr. Falso sat back in his chair, satisfied. As if he could have had a cigarette.

“If you know so much about Job, how about Saint Teresa of Avila? She had visions of the devil—visions, not dreams—on a regular basis. On a regular basis, Satan taunted and tempted her, tried to get her to give up being a saint. She describes them exactly as what I saw!” Francesca stabbed the rug with her finger. “Exactly! The light pouring out of his mouth, the light around her! It’s exactly the same, you can google it…”

“Well, yeah! But that was after I had the first dream! What are you saying?”

“Francesca.” Mr. Falso reached out and stroked her hair with the back of his hand. “I’m saying nothing, except that you are exhausted. You’ve experienced things that are confusing to you, and then had a terrible tragedy. You’re looking for answers.”

“I’m looking for someone who believes me.” Francesca grabbed his hand in midstroke and pressed it to her cheek. “You have to believe me, Nick.”

His name hung there in the room as the sun dropped behind a cloud, or below the horizon. Francesca had lost track of time. In her mind’s eye, she knew she had made herself ugly to him, her cheeks like onionskin, thin, with veins showing underneath, her dark eyebrows drawn in crayon strokes.

Gently, he slipped his hand from underneath hers and rested it in his lap. “You are not a saint.”

Francesca blinked heavily, then gazed down sharply to her right as though struck.

“I have to go downstairs. Why don’t you take a few minutes here alone? I’ll let your family know you’re lying down. Your sister will bring you a glass of punch, okay?”

“Okaaay, maybe not.” Mr. Falso edged from the room, looking around as though the objects might save him, something interesting and upbeat to note, some capper that might make light of their circumstances. At the window, a dried bud fell to the floor.

Kneeling, head torqued as though she’d been slapped, Francesca remained still.

Minutes passed, then an hour. The room ebbed from blue to purple to black. Francesca’s legs went dead, and her neck ached. Still, she did not move. She had slipped into a sweet numbness. She wondered if this was where Connie had existed before she died, when her body was overtaken by histamines and her mind stopped flashing, in this pale, cottony place of no feeling. It wasn’t so bad, she thought. She was resting.

Mira crept into the dark room. She felt for the lacquered dresser and placed a cup of punch on it, and fumbled with a lamp topped with a ceramic canary finial. The canary fell to the floor and splintered. When the light switched on, she saw it was split in two.

Francesca fell onto one hip, legs useless, propped on one arm like a tent pole. Mira snatched the paper cup from the dresser top and handed it to her. Francesca took a sip.

Francesca laughed huskily, bright red punch dribbling down her chin. The depth of her voice was at odds with how weak and dejected she looked, on the floor. It frightened Mira.

“No, of course he didn’t,” Mira said quickly. “Mr. Falso would never do anything to you. I thought, since you were on the floor … never mind.” She scrambled up and pulled a dusty tissue from a box on the dresser. Kneeling beside Francesca, she dabbed at her sister’s chin tentatively, the way one approached a wounded animal.

Behind the tissue, Francesca smiled bitterly. “You’re right. He would never do anything to me.”

Mira crumpled the tissue and made a big deal out of tucking it into her little bag, giving herself time to consider how to yank Francesca back from her dark place. “It’s probably wrong to say, but he looks handsome tonight.”

Francesca laughed again, her pitch ticking up. Mira knew it was not right. Her laugh sounded sharp and rangy, like it was looking for something to puncture. Mira tucked her lip to keep herself from speaking any more. Minutes passed, and the silence between them thickened. Through Connie’s window, Mira saw the outline of a tree against the grape-colored night sky. The leaves trembled, and she buried her chin. The tree alarmed Mira, like a lot of things (the ropy underside of a dog’s neck, a dead mosquito fat with blood). Inexplicable threats that made her press the insides of her elbows into her forehead until her thoughts stopped racing. It was those times when Mira would remind herself that Ben Lattanzi was right next door, and she could go to him, and his presence would force her into normalcy. Connie could have used a Ben. She’d never had a real boyfriend, or real friendships, really, beyond her cousins. Everywhere hung reminders of the smallness of Connie’s world, flimsy, curly-edged things made of paper: ribbons, movie posters, photos with cheeks pressed together.

“Visions. Not dreams. Of course,” Mira corrected herself. “What was his face like when you told him?”

“I imagine he wanted to comfort you.” Mira lifted her slowly by the arm. “Protect you, I imagine.”

Francesca shuffled toward the door. “The word he used was ‘exhausted.’ But the word he meant was ‘delusional.’”

Mira fixed on the point at Francesca’s waist where her leotard bagged, where a man might lift her, were she a real ballerina. She envisioned a man’s hands around Francesca’s waist, fingers overlapping. Why couldn’t this man, this “spiritual director,” lift her?

“He thinks I googled Saint Teresa of Avila, and that I’m acting out the things she wrote.”

Mira knew Francesca’s confessions to Mr. Falso were dangerous. He didn’t know how close to the edge Francesca’s mind twirled, that disappointment could cause her to spiral. Or maybe he did know. In that moment, she hated him, and the hate felt like something Francesca could see. She crossed back to the window to hide her face, tugging the curtains together against voices drifting up from the yard below.

Francesca sagged against the doorframe. “After what happened to Connie? You want to try again?”

“Girls! Time to go!” Their father’s voice boomed from downstairs, a yell meant to smoke them out without having to stumble across something private and embarrassing.

Mira spun and stepped lightly across the room toward Francesca and closed the door softly behind them. “Truth be told, it was probably going to happen sooner or later. Connie wasn’t going to live like a teacup for the rest of her life. Eventually, she was going to test her limits. In some ways, it was a beautiful thing, that we were there as witnesses.”

From the bottom of the stairs rose the clucks of women rushing to aid Frank Cillo.

“You can’t discount Donata’s hands. Did you tell Mr. Falso about Donata’s hands?”

Francesca gazed at her sister, smiling, her eyes lit softly, like the faint glow from a long-dead star only now reaching Earth.

Mira’s protests faltered as Francesca took her hands in her own, scars grazing their tops. She drew Mira’s hands to her mouth and kissed them.

“It’s always been that way for saints, since the beginning of time.” She dropped Mira’s hands and turned the doorknob. “He doesn’t want me while I’m living. But he’ll have me when I’m dead.”

Mira hung ten paces behind Francesca, watching as her sister’s shadow lengthened between them. At the bottom of the stairs, Francesca turned right toward their father’s voice in the parlor. Mira needed a moment; she needed to find Ben, to whisper directions to meet her somewhere. It wouldn’t be easy: they’d have visitors coming and going at their own house now, at all hours and for days, dropping by to touch their shoulders. She and Francesca would be expected to greet them and accept their Saran-wrapped packages of concern. Mira would have to nod at the injustice of Connie’s leave-taking, as though she had boarded a flight for spring break, and as though Mira herself had no relation to the event.

Mira searched the dining room, still stuffed with bodies. No Ben. She looked for him among the parlor bustle, and was relieved to see her father and Francesca waylaid by a circle of biddies from St. Theresa’s. She ducked out fast before they could spot her, cutting through the den and onto the back porch, past her father’s Rotary Club pals smoking cigars and watching the Red Sox on TV. She leaned over each of the grizzled men, accepting cheek kisses while shoving each one off a little. When she finally stepped down the porch into the yard, she exhaled and looked up at the sky. On the other side of the fence, the old rottweiler, Lupo, panted hard, his wet teeth visible through the slats. Lupo was bad to the core; Mira’s uncle blamed Lupo for the cat’s bad eye, had sworn many times to take a shotgun to the beast himself.

Mira whirled around, dress floating around her legs, Lupo howling. Louis Gentry was perched on the highest rung of staging set up in the Villelas’ backyard. Her uncle had planned to paint his house that coming summer; Ben was going to help. More money for something special he was saving up for, he’d told Mira.

“Sure looked like it. And I’m not sure this family could handle another freak accident.” Louis cocked his head toward the house. “Looking to get air?”

“I hate them when they’re waking my flesh and blood, if that’s what you mean,” Mira said sharply, rubbing her arms. She smelled the ocean and a worse smell, dog mess from next door, probably.

“Um, none of you guys cared about Connie. You cared about what you got off Connie—that would be more accurate.”

Louis gave her a look of hard disappointment. “Now that isn’t fair. You know, this whole thing gets me thinking about how fragile life is.” Louis leaped off the staging like a cat and walked toward her. “Say it was you instead of Connie who got hurt up there.”

Mira had known Louis nearly half her life, but something in his eyes now looked manic and empty at once. “It wasn’t.”

He came closer, staring right into Mira’s face. She could feel his breath. “I never could have gotten over it.”

Louis shook his head. “It’s nothing new. He hooks up with Gina T. every time he gets lonely. They go way back. She’s, like, your body double or something. A bad one, but you take what you can get. Not me, of course. I’m discriminating in my tastes.”

“See, you can’t tease a guy, hooking up every once in a while, when you feel like it. Growing guy like Ben Lattanzi’s got needs,” Louis said.

Mira felt her sureness disassemble and fall away. “You don’t know Ben’s needs.” She faltered.

“I know Ben’s human. And Gina’s a warm body. It’s hard to resist when it’s right there in front of you, just asking to be taken,” he said, the corner of his lip flicking up.

“The thing about urges is, eventually you gotta give in, or they’ll keep coming back.” Louis stood over her, lifting a hank of hair from her eyes. “And back. And back.”

Mira spun away from Louis and staggered to the front of the house, filmy-eyed, her gaze gone dead, her mother’s voice in her head.

By mid-May, the cherry tree on the Cillos’ front lawn began to bud, then bloom. By the end of the same week, its petals blanketed the fallow lawn. Mira sat under the tree sometimes, cradling a new kitten gifted by one of Mr. Cillo’s associates, and initially, Louis used the cat as an occasion to stop and talk. Mira whispered one-word answers and refused to lift her eyes from her lap, where the kitten lay curled in a tight C. He brought the cat a toy purchased from Claws and Paws, a wand with blue and purple feathers on the end that looked like a ravaged feather duster, which Mira accepted without protest or thanks.

When the grocery delivery van pulled up one day, Francesca poked her head inside the passenger side window, her foot kicking up playfully behind her. She laughed and dug cash out of her purse, which she shoved through the window, jamming it back into her bag when it was refused. Francesca moved to the back and slid boxes out through the doors, stacking them on the curb. Mira didn’t budge from her spot under the bare tree, as if watching her sister stockpiling for an apocalypse was unremarkable.

Francesca moved the boxes into the house. Mira took mental inventory. Twelve canisters of Maxwell House instant coffee. Overgrown cylinders of sugar, salt, and pepper. Canned tuna, salmon, chicken, and turkey. Mega-packages of Charmin, Kleenex, Bounty, and napkins, in multiples. Barber pole–striped shaving cream cans in a beer box. A mountain of hamburger trapped under an arc of plastic wrap. Powdered milk. Black licorice nips in a plastic barrel. Racks of short ribs laminated in plastic. Envelopes of Red Cap pipe tobacco packed upright in a slant-cut box.

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 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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

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.”

“We’ll be long gone by the time it blows up, anyway.” Kyle rolled off the cot and shoved his pillow into his trunk suitcase, bouncing on it until it clicked shut. “Your bags in the truck?”

“On top of the tools.” Ben sealed the last envelope and tugged at the front of his shirt. It was a dry, cool summer night, the kind that didn’t happen much near the ocean, but Ben was sweating buckets. “Help me lift?” Ben grabbed the handle on one end of the trunk and Kyle grabbed the other, and Kyle whistled as they hoisted his worldly possessions into the flatbed of his truck. Ben slid in on the passenger side.

The truck rumbled to a start. No one in the house came out; no one asked where they were going, and Kyle didn’t bother to look back.

“Post office?” Kyle said.

“Yep,” Ben replied.

They cruised by the darkened Powder Neck branch of the post office and dropped the three envelopes in the nighttime slot. With the wheeze and slam of the handle, Mira’s words were out there. No turning back.

Ben didn’t anticipate how dark the cemetery would be, but Kyle’s vision was freakishly sharp, a cosmic balancing for years of near-deafness. They came to the Cillo plot and decamped, carrying the shovels and file from the back of the truck swiftly, like men for whom grave digging was an everyday thing. Ben rubbed his hands together to dry the sweat (so much sweat) and they set to work, each to his own task.

Bats pinwheeled low above their heads. After a while, the mosquitos found them, and Ben’s bites had bites. The moon was a lucky break: it shone with a clear ferocity so that when the shovel slipped from Ben’s raw and clumsy hands, he spotted the long white outline of its handle and lost no time. Three hours later, sweat soaked their shirts, and every part of their bodies burned, including, inexplicably, Ben’s crotch. But there was no stopping until they hit bottom, because once the letters telling Mira and Francesca’s story had been dropped, everything else had to follow.

“I hit something!” yelled Ben. He went into overdrive, dropping to his knees and digging around the small box with a hand spade. Kyle dropped his file and kneeled beside Ben, using his hands to dig. When they cleared enough dirt to lift it out of the ground, they stood, swaying like drunks, taking in the unearthed treasure. Ben would have liked to stand like that for a while, honoring whichever sister it was. But Kyle brought him back.

“Time, dude,” Kyle said softly.

Ben rubbed his chin, squinting at the urn.

“Dude?” Kyle said, louder. “They deserve to rest in peace. This is not peace.”

Ben held his mouth, unsure.

“Ben: it’s time.”

Ben kicked the ground like a horse. “Yeah. I know. They deserve to rest in peace,” Ben relented, repeating the words he and Kyle had told each other over and over that summer.

They worked together, digging up the second plot, and soon the box revealed itself. When they set them both in the flatbed and slipped into the safe carriage of the truck, reality set in, and Ben was relieved to get away from the girls. Kyle seemed spooked, too, gunning it so fast out of the long cemetery road that Ben was mashed up against the door. Ben tried not to think about the urns knocking around inside the boxes: it was unconscionable for the urns to be left loose inside these things not unlike plaster beer coolers, with nothing to protect them.

The boys fell quiet. Ben’s wet shirt stiffened, and the dirt on his arms and legs dried to a floury paste. They hadn’t made a plan for getting clean, but Ben couldn’t think that far ahead when they still had so far to go. He blinked and rubbed grit from his eyes until the headlights of oncoming cars bled together. Cars roared past and the truck rattled, but the noise did nothing to mask the klunk! in the flatbed.

Ben shivered uncontrollably.

Kyle looked over at him. “You all right?”

A sedan with pink LED lighting on its undercarriage cut Kyle off. He slammed the brakes.

Klunk! and a rattle.

“I’ve got a confession to make,” Ben yelled. “I used to hate driving with you.”

Kyle grinned, teeth gleaming in his grimy face. “Oh really?”

“You were the worst driver. I deliberately wouldn’t talk the whole time so you wouldn’t take your eyes off the road to watch my lips, or give me your good ear, or whatever it was you used to do. But somehow, I think you’ve actually gotten worse.”

Kyle laughed. “And here I thought you were always quiet because my driving made you carsick.”

“Still does.”

Ben noticed Kyle’s right hand resting on the seat next to him. The hand looked wrong, bent at a strange angle and twitching, like its nerves were frayed and accepting the wrong signals.

“Your hand any better?”

For three hours, while Ben had dug, Kyle had worked the file like a demon, sparking as he grated the rough edge against the granite. By the time they’d finished, they had both used up every part of their bodies, and they were starting to become unglued. Ben’s shoulders screamed, lactic acid already seeping inside the tears in his muscles. But Kyle had it worse, performing the same motion on the bench for hours, filing the girls into anonymity.

Kyle regarded his hand and whistled through his teeth. “When am I ever whole?”

Ben laughed. “You’re right about that.” Maybe she can fix it, Ben wanted to say.

Ben knew their plan involved an element of hypocrisy. Using Francesca’s gift could be considered an exploitation along the same lines as that of the freak-seekers who made pilgrimages to the Cillo gravesite. The activity had gotten heavier in the last few months, and Ben had started to think of their plan less as righting a wrong and more like a rescue mission. Vandals were getting braver, most recently spray-painting other graves with arrows pointing to the Cillos’ bench, which Ben and Kyle realized early on was too heavy to move.

Off the exit, Kyle took the corner around Johnny’s Foodmaster too fast, and the truck lifted on two wheels. Ben leaned toward Kyle, sure they would tip. The truck righted with a bounce—Klunk!—and flew past the rusted rack where the kids left their bikes before they entered the quarry. Ben hadn’t considered that his and Kyle’s escape out of Bismuth might be accelerated by dying. Though that would be right in line with Bismuth’s new rap. Consider People’s article on what was being called the “Deadly Quarry Mystery.” The article was less about the girls and more about Bismuth as a place where young people disappear (“Famed ‘Town of No Old Men’ Now Losing Its Youth,” December 2016). Ben had memorized the first line: Some call it a karmic correction, others see it as the inevitable result of the town’s youth’s unrestricted access to the dangerous Bismuth quarry. Regardless, a spike in suicides and accidental deaths among the town’s young people is a reversal for this rough “town of no old men” nine miles outside of Boston, where for decades, silicosis meant death for many by middle age. A trio of reporters had done some creative demographic addition that showed the number of deaths of citizens ages eighteen to thirty was triple the number of most towns in the Commonwealth. Ben noted that eighteen to thirty didn’t include the ages of the Cillo girls, or Connie, for that matter. A special insert box explained the nature of the poisonous quarry, that had “given so much and taken so much away.” Ben, who had taken to collecting clippings about the Deadly Quarry Mystery, would have known about the story anyway, since “local epidemiologist” Carla Lattanzi was a primary source.

Kyle looked over at Ben.

“You ready?” he asked.

Ben locked his fingers underneath his seat. “Now or never.”

Kyle jammed the accelerator, and the truck’s wheels spun dirt as they climbed the steep incline. He weaved in and out of saplings and drove right over the smallest ones. Ben could barely see ahead of them, and he bounced on the seat next to Kyle, who screamed and hollered, “Yee-haw!” Ben answered with a lame whoop. Ben checked over his shoulder for their precious cargo, strapped tight but probably bouncing around inside, though Kyle would remind him that human ash is indestructible and he needed to chill. Besides, it was too late to tell Kyle to stop. If he did stop, they could tip or get stuck in the mud. A couple of times he was sure they would die. The hill to the quarry seemed much steeper than it did when he hiked it, and he came to thinking about Mira, and Francesca and Connie, and the day they took Connie’s last hike. It wasn’t hard for Ben to understand how Connie had overexerted herself; perhaps she’d even run. He knew no one ran without being chased, or without a goal to reach at the top, and he wondered which of these it had been. Or did they have to convince her? He saw Connie that day on the ledge, looking like a rejected puppy, gazing at Ben with those wide-spaced eyes—“I thought, I mean, if you did like me, too, we might…”—so unconvincing on her own.

Who had held the EpiPen while she struggled to breathe?

Kyle hit a rock and Ben slammed his head against the roof. For a second, he saw black, and an electronic hum dulled the crashing noises of the truck tearing up the hill.

Teenagewasteland blogger Grim Reaper, a.k.a. thirteen-year-old Tyler Peavey of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, blogging from his parents’ house to more than one million subscribers, had instituted a Countdown Clock on his home page wherein he ticked off the deaths of teenagers and children in Bismuth, Massachusetts. Ben wondered if he would be another statistic to the Grim Reaper, or if he’d make his connection to the sisters at all. It would depend, he imagined, on whether or not Kyle got out alive and completed their mission. Surely it would be a big story if they were discovered here, splayed on the ground next to the toppled truck, with their stolen goods locked in the stowaway trunk. They’d say he and Kyle were fetishists, necrophiliacs, whacked on drugs. Who would tell their story?

Kyle shook Ben’s sore shoulder.

“Ouch,” Ben murmured, pulling his arm away.

“You smacked your head again. You gonna make it?”

Ben blinked and rubbed the top of his skull. “Yeah, I’m good.”

“Then get out of the truck. We’re here.”

Ben had slunk far down in the seat, and he shimmied upward, dazed, until he could see over the windshield hinge. Kyle had parked in the tiny clearing before the ledge. Ben knew if he looked backward, he might crap his pants, because going down meant jamming it into reverse, at least until they had enough room to clear a three-point turn. Kyle jumped down and strode to the back, shaking out his dead hand. Ben’s legs felt heavy, like the magnitude of the act had lodged in them.

He wasn’t ready to say goodbye. He began looking for excuses. “They said last night on the news they might drain it.”

Kyle came back around to the front of the truck. “Your mother said it’s too expensive and it’ll never happen.”

“What if they find out what we did, and then this place becomes a theme park, the way the cemetery is now?” Ben asked.

“We’ll cover our tracks by hand,” Kyle replied.

“What if it backfires on us? What if, since there’s nothing for them to look at in the cemetery, they start coming here because it’s the scene of the crime?”

“The papers said the electrical fence project starts next week.”

“Fine. But that’s three days from now.”

“Dude…”

“The gawkers might still come to the cemetery to see Connie.”

“It’s different for Connie. She wanted the attention. You know that. In a way—”

“Don’t even go there.”

“Right. I won’t. Because we don’t have time.” Kyle checked the skyline. A squiggly red line glowed at the horizon. “It’s almost daylight. We do it or we don’t do it. Unless you want to take these babies home and hide them in your bedroom closet, we need to execute.”

Ben looked over the swirling quarry water to the Boston skyline. Black night brightened into gunmetal as the sun stirred somewhere below. He slid over the seat and circled the truck on spent legs, back to the flatbed. Kyle followed and stood on the opposite side.

Kyle smiled. “How do you want to do this?”

“You take one, I take one,” Ben replied.

The urns were pearlized white and identical, except for names and dates, and pristine, having been inside their individual protective vaults. The boys stood, paralyzed and awkward, as though they were at a school dance and faced with deciding which of the girls to dance with. Kyle cleared his throat and took charge, like he would at a school dance, being oldest and knowing both probably wanted to dance with him. He lifted the first urn and squinted. Earlier, they’d weighed a ton, but now they seemed lighter. Ben was unfazed by the discrepancy. He’d expected the quarry’s sense-warping magic to be at work on this night. The screw top was silver, with imprinted flowerwork and the words Loving Daughter, Mira M. Cillo.

Kyle looked to Ben, who nodded and accepted the urn in his arms, then rested it at his feet. The second one Kyle pulled up read: Loving Daughter, Francesca M. Cillo.

“You ready?” Ben murmured. He had been thinking about blond waves and thighs, bone shards and dust. His eyes stayed dry, but he could feel the familiar sag that had come to his face this last year, a frown weighting his cheeks.

Kyle set Francesca’s urn aside and took a deep breath. He looked into Ben’s eyes, unflinching, the way no one had in a long time. “We’re doing the right thing, Ben.”

“What if we’re not?”

Kyle hefted Francesca’s urn to his chest, his arms wrapped around it. “She wanted someone to believe in her gift. We’re those people.” He turned the urn over and shined his flashlight on the bottom and a round, threaded plug. “And there she is.”

Ben handed him the screwdriver and looked away. “I’m not sure I can watch. What if it breaks?”

“It’s not”—Kyle grunted—“gonna”—he grunted again—“break.” The seal popped off with a suction noise.

Ben reached around his neck and pulled from his shirt a small leather bag on a cord. At the same time, Kyle stuck his hand inside the urn and lifted out a plastic bag of ash. Ben held the leather pouch away from his chest and Kyle poured some of Francesca’s ashes inside. Ben closed it quickly and tucked the bag into his shirt. The pouch hung next to his heart. Ben supposed he had imagined it, but he felt the bag pulse.

“What about you?” Ben asked, looking down, chin to chest.

“I’m not greedy. She helped me already: I can’t ask for more,” Kyle said. “I hope she helps you get over what that bastard did. You deserve it, man.” Kyle replaced the bag and fitted the plug into the urn. “The sun’s coming up, and we gotta hit the road. We wanna be on the highway by five thirty if we’re gonna get to New York by noon. It’s time to say goodbye.”

“They deserve to rest in peace,” Ben said stiffly, fighting tears.

Kyle sniffed hard. “It’s what they would have wanted.” He carried Francesca to the fingertip of the ledge. When Ben didn’t move, Kyle lifted Mira. When Ben finally raised his eyes, he saw the urns standing side by side on the edge, glowing amphorae from another age.

“Are you ready?” Kyle said.

Ben looked at Kyle’s hand, dangling at his side. “This might be your last chance at fixing your hand.”

Kyle considered his crooked hand in the moonlight. “Nah. I told you, dude. This isn’t about me.”

Ben nodded. In that moment, he knew that even if he was like the others, Kyle was not.

Kyle moved forward and lifted Francesca’s urn. He crouched, brushing his lips lightly over the silver tracings, and murmured thanks. He stood and held her aloft for a moment before letting go.

Ben waited for the splash. He lifted Mira’s urn and held it high, and did not trace the words with his fingertips, or press it to his cheek, or kiss its smooth face. He did none of these things: he only let it go. A whoosh of air, and the urn became small until it was enveloped by the platinum mist that hung above the water, then a fast, neat plop.

Kyle stepped back and rested his hands on his hips. “Now there’s nothing to look at.”

The sun broke over the horizon. Kyle gazed toward the city, and farther, then up at the sky, his throat bare to the heavens, where two glittering emerald birds circled, one following the other, swirling up and out of the quarry.

Ben checked the still water below. Not a ripple, no evidence of a break. The quarry had absorbed the girls, delivering them to a place where they would remain untouched by hands, and unbroken by hearts.