The back of the Lisbon house was visible through clumped trees, but no lights showed, probably because the electricity had been turned off by then. We went back inside, where people were having a good time. The waiters were serving small silver bowls of green ice cream. A tear-gas canister was set off on the dance floor, propelling a harmless mist. Mr. O’Connor danced with Alice. Everyone toasted her future.

We stayed until daybreak. As we came out into the first alcoholic dawn of our lives (a bleachy fade-in, overused through the years now by the one-note director), our lips were swollen from kissing and our mouths throbbing with the taste of girls. Already we had been married and divorced, in a sense, and Tom Faheem found a love letter left in his pants pocket by the last person to rent the tux. The fish flies that had hatched during the night were still quivering on trees and streetlights, and made the sidewalk squishy under our feet, like walking through yams. The day threatened to be muggy. We took off our jackets and shuffled along, up the O’Connors’ street, around the corner, and down our own. In the distance, at the Lisbon house, the EMS truck sat, flashing its lights. They hadn’t bothered to use the siren.

That was the morning the paramedics appeared for the last time, moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one made the crack about its not being TV. By this time they’d been to the house so often they didn’t even knock, just walked right in, past the fence that was no longer there, into the kitchen to see if the gas oven was on, then down to the basement where they found the beam clean, and finally upstairs where the second bedroom they checked contained what they were looking for: the last Lisbon daughter, in a sleeping bag, and full of sleeping pills.

She had on so much makeup that the paramedics had the odd feeling she had already been prepared for viewing by an undertaker, and this impression lasted until they saw that her lipstick and eyeshadow were smudged. She had clawed herself a little, at the end. She was dressed in a black dress and veil, which reminded some people of Jackie Kennedy’s widow’s weeds, and it was true: the final procession out the front door, with the two paramedics like uniformed pallbearers, and the sound of post-holiday firecrackers going off on the next block over, did call to mind the solemnity of a national figure being laid to rest. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Lisbon appeared, so it was up to us to send her off, and, for the last time, we came and stood at attention. Vince Fusilli held up his lighter as though at a rock concert. It was the best we could do for an eternal flame.

•

For a while we tried to accept the general explanations, which qualified the Lisbon girls’ pain as merely historic, springing from the same source as other teenage suicides, every death part of a trend. We tried to go back to our old lives, to let the girls rest in peace, but a haunted quality persisted about the Lisbon house, making us see, whenever we looked, a flame shape arcing from the roof, or swinging in an upstairs window. Many of us continued to have dreams in which the Lisbon girls appeared to us more real than they had been in life, and we awoke certain that their scent of the next world remained on our pillows. Almost daily we met to go over the evidence once again, reciting portions of Cecilia’s journal (the description of Lux testing a chilly sea, one knee up, flamingo-like, was popular with us then). Nevertheless, we always ended these sessions with the feeling that we were retracing a path that led nowhere, and we grew more and more sullen and frustrated.

As luck would have it, on the day of Mary’s suicide, the cemetery workers’ strike was settled after 409 days of arbitration. The strike’s length had caused mortuaries to fill up months ago, and the many bodies awaiting burial now came back from out of state, in refrigerated trucks, or by airplane, depending on the wealth of the deceased. On the Chrysler Freeway one truck got into an accident, flipping over, and the front page of the newspaper ran a photo showing metal caskets spilling from the truck like ingots. No one attended the final mass burial of the Lisbon girls other than Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon; Mr. Calvin Honnicutt, a cemetery worker just back on the job; and Father Moody. Because of limited available space, the girls’ graves did not lie side by side but widely separated, so that the funeral party had to make the rounds, going from grave to grave at the excruciatingly slow speed of cemetery traffic. Father Moody claimed the constant getting into and out of the limousine made him lose track of which girl lay at which grave. “I had to keep the eulogies sort of general,” he said. “There was a lot of confusion at the cemetery that day. You’re talking a year’s worth of departed. The place was pretty well dug up.” As for Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, tragedy had beaten them into mindless submission. They followed the priest from graveside to graveside, saying little. Mrs. Lisbon, under sedation, kept looking up into the sky, as though at birds. Mr. Honnicutt told us, “I’d been working seventeen hours straight by that point, wired on No Doz. I’d buried over fifty people that shift alone. Still, when I saw that lady, it broke me up.”

We saw Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon when they returned from the cemetery. With dignity, they got out of the limousine and walked toward their house, each one parting the front shrubs to find access to the porch steps. They picked their way amid the broken pieces of slate. For the first time ever, we noticed a similarity between Mrs. Lisbon’s face and the faces of her daughters, but that may have been due to the black veil some people recall her as wearing. We ourselves don’t remember a veil and think that detail only an elaboration of romantic memory. Still, we do have the image of Mrs. Lisbon turning toward the street and showing her face as never before, to those of us kneeling at dining room windows or peering through gauzy curtains, those of us sweating in Pitzenberger’s attic, the rest of us looking over car hoods or from troughs serving as first, second, and third base, from behind barbecues or from the apex of a swing’s arc—she turned, she sent her blue gaze out in every direction, the same color gaze the girls had had, icy and spectral and unknowable, and then she turned back and followed her husband into the house.

Because no furniture remained, we didn’t think the Lisbons would be long. Nevertheless, three hours went by and they did not reappear. With a fungo bat, Chase Buell hit a Wiffle ball into their yard, but came back saying he didn’t see a single living soul inside. Later he tried to hit another Wiffle ball, but it got stuck in the trees. We didn’t see Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon come out the rest of that day, or evening. It was in the middle of the night that they finally left. Nobody saw them go except Uncle Tucker. Years later, when we interviewed him, he was completely sober and recovered from his decades of abuse, and in contrast to everyone else, including ourselves, who looked much the worse for wear, Uncle Tucker looked much better. We asked him if he remembered seeing the Lisbons leave and he said he did. “I was outside, having a smoke. It was about two in the morning. I heard the door open across the street and then they came out. The mother looked bombed. The husband sort of helped her in. And then they drove away. Fast. Got the hell out.”

When we awoke the next morning, the Lisbon house was empty. It looked even more run-down than ever and seemed to have collapsed from the inside, like a lung. Once the new young couple took possession of the house, we had time, amid the scraping, painting, and roofing, the uprooting of bushes and planting of Asiatic ground cover, to coalesce our intuitions and theories into a story we could live with. The new young couple knocked out the front windows (still bearing our finger- and noseprints) and installed sliding plate-glass windows with airtight seals. A team of men in white overalls and caps sandblasted the house, then over the next two weeks sprayed it with a thick white paste. The foreman, whose tag said “Mike,” told us that “the new Kenitex method” would eliminate the need to repaint once and for all. “Pretty soon everybody’s going to be Kenitexing,” he said as the men moved about with spray guns, coating the house. When they finished, the Lisbon house was transformed into a giant wedding cake dripping frosting, but it took less than a year for chunks of Kenitex to begin falling off like gobs of bird shit. We thought it just revenge on the new young couple who had set themselves so purposefully to removing signs of the Lisbon girls we still held dear: the slate roof, where Lux had made love, covered with sandpapery shingles; the back flower bed, whose soil Therese had analyzed for lead content, laid with red bricks so that the young wife could pick flowers without getting her feet wet; the girls’ rooms themselves made into private spaces for the new young couple to pursue their individual interests—a desk and computer in Lux and Therese’s old room, a loom in Mary and Bonnie’s. The bathtub where our naiads once floated, Lux poking cigarettes above the water like reeds to breathe through, was ripped out to make room for a fiberglass Jacuzzi. At curbside, we examined the tub, fighting the urge to lie down in it. The little kids who did jump in couldn’t appreciate the significance. The new young couple turned the house into a sleek empty space for meditation and serenity, covering with Japanese screens the shaggy memories of the Lisbon girls.

It wasn’t only the Lisbon house that changed but the street itself. The Parks Department continued to cut down trees, removing a sick elm to save the remaining twenty, then removing another to save the remaining nineteen, and so on and so on until only the half-tree remained in front of the Lisbons’ old house. Nobody could bear to watch when they came for it (Tim Winer compared the tree to the last speaker of Manx), but they buzz-sawed it down like the rest, saving trees farther away, on other streets. Everyone stayed inside during the execution of the Lisbons’ tree, but even in our dens we could feel how blinding the outside was becoming, our entire neighborhood like an overexposed photograph. We got to see how truly unimaginative our suburb was, everything laid out on a grid whose bland uniformity the trees had hidden, and the old ruses of differentiated architectural styles lost their power to make us feel unique. The Kriegers’ Tudor, the Buells’ French colonial, the Bucks’ imitation Frank Lloyd Wright—all just baking roofs.

Not long after, the FBI arrested Sammy the Shark Baldino, who never made it to his escape tunnel, and after a long trial, he went to prison. He reportedly continued to run his crime operation from behind bars, and the Baldino family remained in the house, though the men in bulletproof limousines ceased to pay their respects on Sunday afternoons. The laurel trees, untrimmed, burst into odd inharmonious shapes, and the terror the family inspired decreased day by day until someone had the courage to deface the stone lions beside their front steps. Paul Baldino began to look like any other fat boy with rings around his eyes, and one day he slipped, or was pushed, in the showers at school, and we saw him lying on the tiles, nursing his foot. The convictions of other family members followed, and finally the Baldinos moved, too, carting their Renaissance art and three pool tables away in three trucks. An obscure millionaire bought the house. He made the fence a foot higher.

Everyone we spoke to dated the demise of our neighborhood from the suicides of the Lisbon girls. Though at first people blamed them, gradually a sea change took place, so that the girls were seen not as scapegoats but as seers. More and more, people forgot about the individual reasons why the girls may have killed themselves, the stress disorders and insufficient neurotransmitters, and instead put the deaths down to the girls’ foresight in predicting decadence. People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms, the harsh sunlight, the continuing decline of our auto industry. This transformation in thinking went largely unnoticed, however, because we rarely ran into one another anymore. Without trees, there were no leaves to rake, no piles of leaves to burn. Winter snows continued to disappoint. We had no Lisbon girls to spy on. Now and then, of course, as we were slowly carted into the melancholic remainder of our lives (a place the Lisbon girls, wisely, it began to seem, never cared to see), we would stop, mostly alone, to gaze up at the whited sepulchre of the former Lisbon house.

The Lisbon girls made suicide familiar. Later, when other acquaintances chose to end their lives—sometimes even borrowing a book the day before—we always pictured them as taking off cumbersome boots to enter the highly associative mustiness of a family cottage on a dune overlooking the sea. Every one of them had read the signs of misery Old Mrs. Karafilis had written, in Greek, in the clouds. On different paths, with different-colored eyes or jerkings of the head, they had deciphered the secret to cowardice or bravery, whichever it was. And the Lisbon girls were always there before them. They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

But this came later. Immediately following the suicides, when our suburb enjoyed its fleeting infamy, the subject of the Lisbon girls became almost taboo. “It was like picking over a corpse after a while,” Mr. Eugene said. “And the liberal media distortion didn’t help either. Save the Lisbon girls. Save the snail darter. Bullshit!” Families moved away, or splintered, everybody trying out a different spot in the Sun Belt, and for a while it appeared that our only legacy would be desertion. After deserting the city to escape its rot, we now deserted the green banks of our waterlocked spit of land French explorers had named the “Fat Tip” in a three-hundred-year-old dirty joke no one ever got. The exodus was short-lived, however. One by one, people returned from their sojourns in other communities, reestablishing the faulty memory bank from which we have drawn for this investigation. Two years ago our last great automotive mansion was razed to put up a subdivision. The Italian marble lining the entrance hall—a rare rose shade found only in one quarry in the world—was cut into blocks and sold piecemeal, as were the gold-plated plumbing fixtures and ceiling frescoes. With the elms gone, too, only the runt replacements remain. And us. We aren’t even allowed to barbecue any longer (city air-pollution ordinance), but if we were allowed, we might still gather, who knows, a few of us at least, to reminisce about the Lisbon house and the girls whose hair, clotted on brushes we still faithfully keep, has begun to look more and more like artificial animal fur in a natural museum exhibit. All of it is going—Exhibits #1 through #97, arranged in five separate suitcases, each bearing a photograph of the deceased like a Coptic headstone, and kept in our refurbished tree house in one of our last trees: (#1) Ms. D’Angelo’s Polaroid of the house, scummed by a greenish patina that looks like moss; (#18) Mary’s old cosmetics drying out and turning to beige dust; (#32) Cecilia’s canvas high-tops yellowing beyond remedy of toothbrush and dish soap; (#57) Bonnie’s votive candles nibbled nightly by mice; (#62) Therese’s specimen slides showing new invading bacteria; (#81) Lux’s brassiere (Peter Sissen stole it from the crucifix, we might as well admit it now) becoming as stiff and prosthetic as something a grandmother might wear. We haven’t kept our tomb sufficiently airtight, and our sacred objects are perishing.

In the end we had pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name. “All wisdom ends in paradox,” said Mr. Buell, just before we left him on our last interview, and we felt he was telling us to forget about the girls, to leave them in the hands of God. We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too. But even as we make these conclusions we feel our throats plugging up, because they are both true and untrue. So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over back-yard fences, or related over the years in psychiatrists’ offices, that we are certain only of the insufficiency of explanations. Mr. Eugene, who told us that scientists were on the verge of finding the “bad genes” that caused cancer, depression, and other diseases, offered his hope that they would soon “be able to find a gene for suicide, too.” Unlike Mr. Hedlie, he didn’t see the suicides as a response to our historical moment. “Shit,” he said, “what have kids got to be worried about now? If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh.”

“It was the combination of many factors,” Dr. Hornicker said in his last report, written for no medical reason but just because he couldn’t get the girls out of his head. “With most people,” he said, “suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn’t mean the chambers were empty.”

But this is all a chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up in precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams. Every other loved one receding as though across a vast ice floe, shrinking to black dots waving tiny arms, out of hearing. Then the rope thrown over the beam, the sleeping pill dropped in the palm with the long, lying lifeline, the window thrown open, the oven turned on, whatever. They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn’t help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves. It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

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