Mr. Hessen’s with a tiny green feather, while their schnauzer sniffed at the end of his leash. Grapes burst above their heads. Mrs. Hessen’s humped back dove and surfaced amid her swelling rosebushes as she sprayed.
At some point, we looked up into the sky to see that all the fish flies had died. The air was no longer brown but blue. Using kitchen brooms, we swept bugs from poles and windows and electrical lines. We stuffed them into bags, thousands upon thousands of insect bodies with wings of raw silk, and Tim Winer, the brain, pointed out how the fish flies’ tails resembled those of lobsters. “They’re smaller,” he said, “but possess the same basic design. Lobsters are classified in the phylum Arthropoda, same as insects. They’re bugs. And bugs are only lobsters that have learned to fly.”
No one ever understood what got into us that year, or why we hated so intensely the crust of dead bugs over our lives. Suddenly, however, we couldn’t bear the fish flies carpeting our swimming pools, filling our mailboxes, blotting out stars on our flags. The collective action of digging the trench led to cooperative sweeping, bag-carting, patio-hosing. A score of brooms kept time in all directions as the pale ghosts of fish flies dropped from walls like ash. We examined their tiny wizards’ faces, rubbing them between our fingers until they gave off the scent of carp. We tried to light them but they wouldn’t burn (which made the fish flies seem deader than anything). We hit bushes, beat rugs, turned on windshield wipers full blast. Fish flies clogged sewer grates so that we had to stuff them down with sticks. Crouching over sewers, we could hear the river under the city flowing away. We dropped rocks and listened for the splash.
We didn’t stop with our own houses. Once our walls were clean, Mr. Buell told Chase to start cleaning bugs off the Lisbon house. Because of his religious beliefs, Mr. Buell often went the extra mile, raking ten feet into the Hessens’ yard, or shoveling their walk and even throwing down rock salt. It wasn’t odd for him to tell Chase to start sweeping the Lisbons’ house, even though they lived across the street and not next door. Because Mr. Lisbon only had daughters, boys and men had gone over in the past to help him drag away lightning-struck limbs, and as Chase approached, holding his broom over his head like a regimental banner, nobody said a word. Then, however, Mr. Krieger told Kyle to go over and sweep some, and Mr. Hutch sent Ralph, and soon we were all over at the Lisbon house, brushing walls and scraping away bug husks. They had even more than we did, the walls an inch thick, and Paul Baldino asked us the riddle, “What smells like fish, is fun to eat, but isn’t fish?”
Once we got to the Lisbons’ windows, our new inexplicable feelings for the girls came to the fore. As we slapped off bugs, we saw Mary Lisbon in the kitchen, holding a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. She appeared to be contemplating whether or not to open it. She read the directions, turned the box over to look at the vivid picture of the noodles, and then put the box back on the counter. Anthony Turkis, pressing his face to the window, said, “She should eat something.” She picked up the box again. Hopefully, we watched. But then she turned and disappeared.
Outside it grew dark. Lights came on down the block, but not in the Lisbon house. We couldn’t see in any better, and in fact the glass panes began to reflect our own gaping faces. It was only nine o’clock, but everything confirmed what people had been saying: that since Cecilia’s suicide the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep. Up in a bedroom window, Bonnie’s three votive candles glimmered in a reddish haze, but otherwise the house absorbed the shadows of night. Insects started up in their hiding places all around, vibrating the minute we turned our backs. Everyone called them crickets, but we never found any in the sprayed bushes or aerated lawns, and had no idea what they looked like. They were merely sound. Our parents had been more intimate with crickets. For them the buzzing apparently didn’t sound mechanical. It came from every direction, always from a height just above our heads, or just below, and always with the suggestion that the insect world felt more than we did. As we stood charmed into stillness, listening to the crickets, Mr. Lisbon came out the side door and thanked us. His hair looked even grayer than usual, but grief hadn’t altered the highness of his voice. He had on overalls, one knee covered by sawdust. “Feel free to use the hose,” he said, and then he looked at the Good Humor truck passing by, the jingle of the bell seemed to trigger a memory, he smiled, or winced—we couldn’t tell which—and returned inside.
We went with him only later, invisibly, with the ghosts of our questions. Apparently, as he stepped back inside, he saw Therese come out of the dining room. She was stuffing her mouth with candy—M&M’s, by the colors—but stopped immediately on seeing him. She swallowed an unchewed chunk. Her high forehead glowed in the light from the street and her cupid’s lips were redder, smaller, and more shapely than he remembered, especially in contrast to her cheeks and chin, which had gained weight. Her eyelashes were crusted, as though recently glued shut. At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time. He rested his hands on her shoulders, then dropped them to his sides. Therese brushed the hair out of her face, smiled, and began walking slowly up the stairs.
Mr. Lisbon went on his usual nighttime rounds, checking to see that the front door was locked (it wasn’t), that the garage light was off (it was), and that none of the burners on the stove had been left on (none had). He turned off the light in the first-floor bathroom, where he found Kyle Krieger’s retainer in the sink, left from when he’d taken it out during the party to eat cake. Mr. Lisbon ran the retainer under water, examining the pink shell form-fitted to the roof of Kyle’s mouth, the crenellations in the plastic that encircled the turret of his teeth, the looping front wire bent at key spots (you could see plier marks) to provide modulated pressure. Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like these—simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving—held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toilet. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled in the surge, disappeared down the porcelain throat, and, when waters abated, floated triumphantly, mockingly, out. Mr. Lisbon waited for the tank to refill and flushed again, but the same thing happened. The replica of the boy’s mouth clung to the white slope.
At that point something flashed in the corner of his eye. “I thought I saw somebody, but when I looked, there was nothing there.” Nor did he see anything as he came around the back hall into the foyer and up the front stairs. On the second floor he listened at the girls’ doors, but heard only Mary coughing in her sleep, Lux playing a radio softly, singing along. He stepped into the girls’ bathroom. A beam of light from the risen moon penetrated the window, lighting up a portion of mirror. Amid smudged fingerprints, a small circle had been wiped clean where his daughters contemplated their images, and above the mirror itself Bonnie had taped a white construction-paper dove. Mr. Lisbon parted his lips in a grimace and saw in the clean circle the one dead canine tooth beginning to turn green on the left side of his mouth. The doors to the girls’ shared bedrooms were not completely closed. Breathings and murmurings issued from them. He listened to the sounds as though they could tell him what the girls were feeling and how to comfort them. Lux switched her radio off, and everything was silent. “I couldn’t go in,” Mr. Lisbon confessed to us years later. “I didn’t know what to say.” Only as he left the bathroom, heading for the oblivion of sleep himself, did Mr. Lisbon see Cecilia’s ghost. She was standing in her old bedroom, dressed in the wedding dress again, having somehow shed the beige dress with the lace collar she’d worn in her coffin. “The window was still open,” Mr. Lisbon said. “I don’t think we’d ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close that window or else she’d go on jumping out of it forever.”
According to his story, he didn’t cry out. He didn’t want to make contact with the shade of his daughter, to learn why she had done herself in, to ask forgiveness, or to rebuke her. He merely rushed forward, brushing past, to close the window. As he did, however, the ghost turned, and he saw that it was only Bonnie, wrapped in a bedsheet. “Don’t worry,” she said, quietly. “They took the fence out.”
•
In a handwritten note displaying the penmanship perfected