On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide-it was
Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese, the two paramedics
arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the
gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie
a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly
in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, "This ain't TV,
folks, this is how fast we go." He was carrying the heavy respirator and
cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the
erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the
trouble began.
Cecilia, the youngest, only thirteen, had gone first, slitting her
wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath, and when they found her, afloat
in her pink pool, with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her
small body giving off the odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had
been so frightened by her tranquillity that they had stood mesmerized.
But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in, screaming, and the reality of the room
reasserted itself: blood on the bath mat; Mr. Lisbon's razor sunk in the
toilet bowl, marbling the water. The paramedics fetched Cecilia out of
the warm water because it quickened the bleeding, and put a tourniquet
on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back and already her extremities
were blue. She didn't say a word, but when they parted her hands they
found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held against her
budding chest.
That was in June, fish-fly season, when each year our town is covered by
the flotsam of those ephemeral insects. Rising in clouds from the algae
in the polluted lake, they blacken windows, coat cars and streetlamps,
plaster the municipal docks and festoon the rigging of sailboats, always
in the same brown ubiquity of flying scum. Mrs. Scheer, who lives down
the street, told us she saw Cecilia the day before she attempted
suicide. She was standing by the curb, in the antique wedding dress with
the shorn hem she always wore, looking at a Thunderbird encased in fish
flies. "You better get a broom, honey," Mrs. Scheer advised. But Cecilia
fixed her with her spiritualist's gaze. "They're dead," she said. "They
only live twenty-four hours. They hatch, they reproduce, and then they
croak. They don't even get to eat." And with that she stuck her hand
into the foamy layer of bugs and cleared her initials: C. L. We've tried
to arrange the photographs chronologically, though the passage of so
many years has made it difficult. A few are fuzzy but revealing
nonetheless. Exhibit #1 shows the Lisbon house shortly before Cecilia's
suicide attempt. It was taken by a real estate agent, Ms. Carmina
D'Angelo, whom Mr. Lisbon had hired to sell the house his large family
had long outgrown. As the snapshot shows, the slate roof had not yet
begun to shed its shingles, the porch was still visible above the
bushes, and the windows were not yet held together with strips of
masking tape. A comfortable suburban home. The upper-right second-story
window contains a blur that Mrs. Lisbon identified as Mary Lisbon. "She
used to tease her hair because she thought it was limp," she said years
later, recalling how her daughter had looked for her brief time on
earth. In the photograph Mary is caught in the act of blow-drying her
hair. Her head appears to be on fire but that is only a trick of the
light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.
When the paramedics were satisfied they had reduced the bleeding to a
trickle, they put Cecilia on a stretcher and carried her out of the
house to the truck in the driveway. She looked like a tiny Cleopatra on
an imperial litter. We saw the gangly paramedic with the Wyatt Earp
mustache come out first-the one we'd call "Sheriff " when we got to know
him better through these domestic tragedies-and then the fat one
appeared, carrying the back end of the stretcher and stepping daintily
across the lawn, peering at his police-issue shoes as though looking out
for dog shit, though later, when we were better acquainted with the
machinery, we knew he was checking the blood pressure gauge. Sweating
and fumbling, they moved toward the shuddering, blinking truck. The fat
one tripped on a lone croquet wicket. In revenge he kicked it; the
wicket sprang loose, plucking up a spray of dirt, and fell with a ping
on the driveway. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lisbon burst onto the porch, trailing