porch step. When we lit bonfires that night, every house leaped forward, blazing orange. Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames. As weeks passed, their leaves remained. When they blew onto other people's lawns there was grumbling. "These aren't my leaves," Mr. Anderson said, stuffing them into a can. It rained twice and the leaves grew soggy and brown, making the Lisbon lawn look like a field of mud.
It was the growing shabbiness of the house that attracted the first reporters. Mr. Baubee, editor of the local paper, continued to defend his decision against reporting on a personal tragedy such as suicide.
Instead, he chose to investigate the controversy over the new guardrails obscuring our lakefront, or the deadlock in negotiations over the cemetery workers' strike, now in its fifth month (bodies were being shipped out of state in refrigerated trailers). The "Welcome, Neighbor"
section continued to feature newcomers attracted by our town's greenness and quiet, its breathtaking verandas-a cousin of Winston Churchill at his home on Windmill Pointe Boulevard, looking too thin to be related to the Prime Minister; Mrs. Shed Turner, the first white woman ever to penetrate the jungles of Papua New Guinea, holding in her lap what appeared to be a shrunken head, though the caption identified the blur as "her Yorkie, William the Conqueror."
Back in summer, the city newspapers had neglected to report on Cecilia's suicide because of its sheer prosaicness. Owing to extensive layoffs at the automotive plants, hardly a day passed without some despairing soul sinking beneath the tide of the recession, men found in garages with cars running, or twisted in the shower, still wearing work clothes. Only murder-suicides made the papers, and then only on page 3 or 4, stories of fathers shotgunning families before turning the guns on themselves, descriptions of men setting fire to their own houses after securing the doors. Mr. Larkin, publisher of the city's largest newspaper, lived only a half mile from the Lisbons, and there was no doubt he knew what had transpired. Joe Hill Conley, who fooled around with Missy Larkin every so often (she'd had a yearlong crush on him despite his frequent shaving cuts), testified to us that Missy and her mother had discussed the suicide within Mr. Larkins hearing, but that he showed no interest as he lay on his chaise in the sun with a wet cloth over his eyes.
Nevertheless, on October 15, over three months later, a letter to the editor was published describing in the sketchiest manner possible the particulars of Cecilia's suicide, and calling on the schools to address
"today's teenagers' overwhelming anxiety." The letter was signed "Mrs.
1. Dew Hopewell," an obvious pseudonym, but certain details pointed to someone on our street. First of all, the rest of the town had forgotten about Cecilia's suicide by that point, whereas the growing disrepair of the Lisbon house constantly reminded us of the trouble within. Years later, after there were no more daughters to save, Mrs. Denton confessed that she had written the letter, in a fit of righteous indignation under the hair dryer. She did not regret it. "You can't just stand by and let your neighborhood go down the toilet," she said. "We're good people around here."
The day after her letter appeared, a blue Pontiac drove up to the Lisbon house and an unfamiliar woman got out. After checking the address against a piece of paper, she walked up to the front porch nobody had climbed in weeks. Shaft Tiggs, the paper boy, now lobbed papers against the door from ten feet away. He'd even stopped collecting on Thursdays (his mother made up the difference from her pocketbook, cautioning him not to tell his father). The Lisbon porch, where we'd first stood to see Cecilia on the fence, had become like a sidewalk crack: stepping on it was bad luck. The Astroturf welcome mat curled at the edges. Unread papers lay in a waterlogged
Marie Sexton
Belinda Rapley
Melanie Harlow
Tigertalez
Maria Monroe
Kate Kelly, Peggy Ramundo
Camilla Grebe, Åsa Träff
Madeleine L'Engle
Nicole Hart
Crissy Smith