AUGUST 2016
When they found Mira Cillo at the bottom of the quarry lake, her fingers were shot through the loose weave of her sister Francesca’s sweater, at the neck. They were so tangled, jammed through past the knuckles, the coroner had to cut away the yarn to separate them.
Ben kept thinking about that.
Ben heard this from Kyle Kulik, who had graduated that summer from Bismuth High and was training to become an EMT. Kyle’s voice shook as he told Ben it was the sight of the Cillo girls as they were lifted from the water, blue and wilted, with hollows around their eyes and, later, froth cones around their lips, that made Kyle realize being an emergency medical technician wasn’t for him if it meant plucking hot dead girls out of the quarry.
Ben knew in a hazy way that he was focusing on the wrong thing. It didn’t matter that the girls were wearing sweaters in August. Or that pink-tinged foam could appear from dead lips even after it was wiped away. It must be shock that was causing Ben to focus on the little things instead of the big horrible thing right in front of him: that the girls next door dumped their bikes the night before behind Johnny’s Foodmaster and hiked three-quarters of a mile through the dark to the highest ledge. And fell.
Frank Cillo noticed his daughters were gone at eleven o’clock bed check. He called the police immediately. At 11:29 p.m., cell phones across the Northeast jumped with a shocking mechanical buzz and read, “AMBER Alert now. Bismuth, MA: Missing,” with the girls’ names and ages. To get an AMBER Alert that fast meant Frank Cillo knew Someone at the Department of Justice. He also knew Someone at Bismuth High School, Saint Theresa’s Church, the Parks Department, and the Bismuth Boat Club. Friends he’d gone to school with, played football with, served in the army with. Fellow football boosters, Lions, and Rotarians; members of the Massachusetts Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, the Workers Injury Law & Advocacy Group, and the Brotherhood of Malpractice Attorneys. Friends who brought macaroni and cases of Budweiser when Francesca and then Mira were born after his wife’s miscarriages, and later, after she passed at forty-three. Networks of prematurely grizzled men with yellowing shirts and eyes who owed Frank Cillo, directly and otherwise.
Between 11:29 and 11:36, lights flicked on in bedrooms throughout Ben’s neighborhood of compact brick colonials clustered in the throat of Powder Neck. Calls were made among the houses. Mothers panicked and checked their children. Fathers shrugged fleece jackets over undershirts and staggered toward the Cillos’ house, the glare of flashing police lights filling their glasses.
The only ones who wouldn’t have seen the AMBER Alert would have been the girls themselves, since their shared and heavily monitored cell phone rarely moved from the top of the refrigerator. That technology was barely present in the Cillo household only reinforced for the Bismuth mothers how healthy the Cillo girls were, what firm limits Frank Cillo set.
It was around January that the girls started acting weird. By early summer, their weirdness had become a topic among the neighborhood boys. Some argued it made sense, with Connie’s accident only a few weeks before. Connie with her helium laugh and her dumb nicknames—Sistah, Sangue, Cuz—the slangy, silly words Mira and Francesca used for Connie, the ones that thrilled Connie as much as they annoyed Ben, bounced around his head.
Ben touched the picture on his phone with his fingertip. The divers had left the sisters attached, removed their pants but left on their panties. The photo was a pocket shot, a quick yank of the camera out of Kyle’s pants, a snap-and-stuff. The image ended above the ribs, leaving waists and legs turned inward toward each other, as though they were curled in bed whispering to each other. At that angle, Ben couldn’t tell if it was Mira; the oval coffee-colored stain on the back of her right thigh, above where her knee folded, was hidden. Still, he knew them by the lengths of their legs. In the foreground, the shorter set was shadowed, and covered by what Ben thought might be downy fuzz. In the background was a longer set, with the familiar rise of the thigh even at its most lax. The lovely swell.
He told himself that it was another girl. Not Mira.
Ben blinked hard, focusing on their bare feet, small and wrinkled. According to Kyle, the sisters had lined their sneakers side by side on the flat rock, the one the boys called the altar. Ben thought the rock looked more like an old man’s throat, its skin loose over tendons, with the tip as its chin. The summer before last, Ben had stood on the chin, showing off for a sunbathing Mira. He pointed at her, turned, and made a clean dive. Seconds before breaking water, he saw the viscous stuff that floated on its surface, iridescent swirls of silver, blue, and purple, and it alarmed him. He’d struggled to surface quickly and didn’t bother waiting for the reward of Mira’s reaction. Instead, he powered to the wall, scaled it quick, and toweled off hard.
Ben let the sisters’ deaths as they had been told to him play once more through his brain: misguided adventure, impulsive spree, deadly escapade. The local bum who stole recyclables after dark told the police he saw them riding their bikes toward the quarry on August 8th at 10:30 p.m. By 5:44 a.m., when the first streaks of purple streamed across the Boston skyline, the entire recovery team had descended, red-and-white trucks screaming, tearing into the quarry, where the first responders in scuba suits had already pulled the girls out, entangled.
It was the parts in between that gave Ben trouble.
Like, why would the girls ever come to the quarry at night?
“It seemed fun,” Ben said, his voice hollow.
Why would they fall off a ledge they knew as well as they knew the bedroom they’d shared since birth?
“It was dark.”
Ben closed his eyes and tried to imagine the girls who bathed in the sun bathing in moonlight. Catching sight, maybe, of something in the water. Something worth leaning too far over to see. That got Ben to wondering in what order they fell. It made sense to Ben, now that he thought about it, that Francesca and Mira would have reached for each other. According to Kyle, the girls had been in the water for at least six hours, because the blotches on their skin had joined up. Ben opened his eyes and counted on his fingers, from 11:00 p.m. to 5:44 a.m.
The girls must have been quick. Quick to get there, quick to line up, quick to place the rocks that were found in their sweater pockets. Quick to fall off the high ledge into the black water, one after the other.
Not one after the other exactly. If it had been an accident, they would have tried to save each other. They would have done that.
Fingers snarled in wool.
Francesca first, then Mira.
Mira first, then Francesca.
Ben shuddered. Though he knew it was wrong, he preferred to think of them falling at the same time, holding hands. Because, by the start of the summer, they had sealed themselves together and off from the rest of the world.
Ben used two fingers to enlarge the image on his phone, but it blurred into meaningless pixels.