The Virgin Suicides

The paramedics arrived again, and they were all recognizable by then. The deaths by suicide weren’t a surprise to anyone in the neighborhood, seemingly not even the Lisbon parents. Mary survived her attempted death by suicide but lived only another month. The girls’ bodies were examined via autopsy, and the coroner wrote of the heartbreak of the examinations and how pristine the girls’ bodies were. The “final suicides” happened on the anniversary of Cecilia’s first attempt, and conspiracies of ritual sacrifice and astrological connections ensued. News reporters came and went through the girls’ rooms, reaching conclusions that the boys found shallow and irrelevant.

Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon stopped pretending to be functional, and Mr. Lisbon put the house up for sale and hired a man to throw away everything inside. He wore a mask to protect his face from the dust and the leftover particles of lives no longer there. After he set the trash out each day, the boys went through it, often finding treasures such as a collection of old family photos. The furniture was put up for sale, the inside of the house was cleaned, and the entire neighborhood came to see it. Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon lived in the empty house until it sold, and when Mary came back from the hospital, she was given a sleeping bag. When she was found dead from an overdose a few days later, no one was the least surprised, and Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon were nowhere to be found.

Only Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon attended Mary’s funeral, and when they returned home that day, Mrs. Lisbon looked out onto the street, showing that she was as much like her daughters as anyone had ever seen her. A new couple moved into the house, and the remaining elm trees (including the Lisbons’) were cut down, leaving a blank street behind. Over time, the girls’ deaths by suicide came to be viewed as something that hinted at their foresight about the decline of nature and societal decadence in the US. The boys felt unsatisfied with every explanation and thought that even if these reasons, along with others (like Cecilia, the confinement, and a possible genetic predisposition) were true, some piece of the mystery was still missing and would never be solved. They sit in their treehouse now, in middle age, still calling out to the girls, still in love, and knowing that they’ll never have the answers they seek.