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Mary's one when Bonnie is born; two when Lux is born; three when Cecilia is born. She doesn't know what it's like to not be a sister; to not have sisters. They do everything together, under the ever-watchful eyes of their parents.
She’s the second to go off to school and she and Therese sit in the back of the station wagon driven by their father, in their monotone uniforms with their books and brown bag lunches on their laps. She doesn’t make any friends; doesn’t need any because she has lunch with Therese out on the grass under the trees if the weather’s nice.
By the time she’s 9, between the five Lisbon girls, they form a full on clique. They’re rarely approached and later, when she’s older, she’ll realize that the girls kept their distance out of jealousy; the boys out of insecurity.
She spends her pre-teen years struggling to find herself. They all look the same on the outside – blonde hair, blue eyes, strained smiles – but they have distinct personalities: Therese, brave and mature; Bonnie, the peacekeeper; Lux, outgoing and adventurous; Cecilia, quiet and artistic.
Mary doesn’t know what hers is. She's not the oldest, not the youngest, not the middle child, not the wild child. Sometimes she thinks she might just fade away and nobody would even notice.
She’s 14 and monkeying around on the jungle gym, when she falls face-first and chips a tooth on one of the bars. It’s the single most traumatizing event of her life so far. The tooth gets capped and she can’t stop touching it with her tongue. It makes her increasingly self-conscious, even though everyone swears it looks natural. Everyone except her mother, who tells her it’s a sin to be so vain.
She's 16 when Cecilia tries to kill herself for the first time. She never really understood Cecilia, who wrote in her journal constantly and loved nature, but it’s not unexpected and she doesn’t cry. More than anything, it’s an annoyance because now her mother’s irrational fear of letting the girls into the world on their own, of letting them have any sort of freedom, is justified.
Part of Cecilia's recovery plan is socializing outside of school and the newness of it, of inviting near strangers into their home, is exciting. At their first and only party, Mary sits on the sofa, cradling a cup of punch in her hands, and she can feel the cushions shift as Tim awkwardly sits down next to her. He grins nervously at her, stumbling over a hello, and she smiles back weakly.
It’s the closest she’s ever been to a boy.
That same night, Cecilia succeeds, impaling herself on the wrought iron fence in front of their house. Her mother is distraught, choking on her sobs as she makes sure none of the girls are looking.
She’s 16 and a few months when she knows loneliness – sheer and hopeless loneliness – for the first time. Her parents lock them in the house for a full six months following Cecilia’s suicide. It’s supposed to be a safety measure, an act of love and concern; it feels more like a cruel punishment. They’ve always been strict, but now they have the girls on lockdown.
They’re not allowed to go anywhere; do anything; talk to anyone. They listen to music – whatever records are left after their mother went on a rampage and made Lux burn most of them – and flip through travel brochures, imagining they’re anywhere but where they actually are.
Mary’s favorites are the hikes through Egypt with the sun beating down around her.
They defy their parents once, rushing outside in their long, flowy nightgowns; squinting against the sunlight they haven’t seen in nearly a month. They circle the tree, arms linked, refusing to let it be cut down. It seems like the right thing to do at the time – Cecilia loved that tree – but eventually it ends up poisoning the others around it; ends up poisoning the air; poisoning them.
She's almost 17 when she tries to kill herself. Head in the oven, like Sylvia Plath. They all made a suicide pact, all four sisters; a promise to follow after Cecilia – only it doesn't work and she wakes up in the hospital two days later, alone.
She’s never been alone before.
Her mother visits once, on the third day. She doesn’t say anything; can barely even look at her. She spends the entire time with her hands folded in her lap and her head bowed like she’s praying but Mary knows she isn’t. She hasn’t prayed since Cecilia died.
Mary ends up spending two weeks in the hospital. Half of that is spent in the Psych ward with restraints on her arms and legs because she’s a suicide risk. She doesn’t fight it; doesn’t fight the various tests they put her through, double and triple checking her serotonin levels. She meets with Dr. Horniker three times a week and he shows her various inkblots and makes her do word association exercises. No matter what her response is, he lets out a soft, mildly perplexed hmm and jots something down on her chart.
He can’t find anything wrong with her. She stuck her head in an oven, yes, but she’s not psychotic; not manic-depressive, not schizophrenic. She’s not even sad, not really – not the way you’re supposed to be after your four sisters have killed themselves. But she’s also not suicidal, and that’s really all anybody’s interested in, so he signs off on her release and suggests she continues therapy once a week.
When she goes home – though it isn’t really home anymore, just a quiet, empty house with a for sale sign on the lawn – it’s worse than being in the hospital. She’s still alone. Her parents are hanging on by a thread.
The house, like their marriage, is empty. What wasn’t packed up was put out in a garage sale while Mary was recovering; what wasn’t sold was left on the curb with the trash. It sits piled there, full of records and trinkets and pictures that no longer hold any meaning.
Even through the overpowering scent of potpourri and dust, Mary can still smell the gas.
Her bed is just a sleeping bag on the floor of her old room. There’s still remnants of tape on the wall, small holes from pushpins that used to hold up posters and photographs. There’s still a faint stain on the carpet where Lux spilled a mug of cocoa.
When she can’t sleep, which is almost always, she likes to run her finger along the indentation from where the table that held the record player used to sit and hum something by Gilbert O’Sullivan or Todd Rundgren.
A reporter comes to the door – Lydia Perl, who barely recognizes Mary even though they met before when she was doing a story on Cecilia. She looks nothing like the girl she questioned all those moths ago.
“Mary?” she tries kindly. “Can I ask you a few questions?”
Mary doesn’t say anything for a long moment and Lydia can’t tell if she’s considering how to answer or if she hasn’t heard her at all.
“No,” she eventually says, and it comes out as a weak sigh. Then she shrugs and closes the door in Lydia’s face.
She tries pills next – leftover from Therese’s successful attempt and hidden in a pencil case; fished out of the trashcan in the middle of the night – but there’s only enough to make her violently ill and she vomits everything into the toilet. She stays there, on the floor with her cheek against the lid, and stares at the tub where Cecilia slit her wrists; where she and Therese took baths together until they were old enough for their mother’s deep Catholic shame to filter through and drive them to take showers separately.
Hours later, her father finds her. He scoops up the empty bottle, squeezing it in his hand before tossing it in the trash. He doesn’t say anything to her and she doesn’t say anything to him and neither one says anything to her mother.
They eventually sell the house to a young couple that’s just moved there from Boston. They don’t know the tragic story of the Lisbon sisters; don’t see the dark cloud of death looming overhead. They give the house a fresh coat of paint and have the dead tree torn out and Lakeland Avenue is returned to its former luster. The suicides are a fading memory; the Lisbon sisters are memorialized on a bench at school.
She’s 17, trying to live a normal life, but she doesn’t even know what that means. Her sisters are dead, her parents are on the brink; she thinks she might be on the brink, too. Her grades aren’t that good, but mass suicide makes for a hell of a college essay, and she manages to get accepted to the University of Michigan.
She leaves for Ann Arbor the summer she’s 18. She doesn’t take much with her; doesn’t have much to take in the first place. Just some clothes that were mostly Therese’s first and a picture, creased down the middle and worn at the edges, taken the night of their first and only dance.
Her roommate’s name is Summer. She has long strawberry blonde hair and thick bangs that fall into her hazel eyes and an outgoing smile. She’s nothing like anyone Mary’s ever met before, though Mary doesn’t have much to compare her to.
Summer likes to sit cross-legged on her bed and pluck at her worn guitar and talk to Mary. She doesn’t know anything about Mary’s past; doesn’t look at Mary with the thinly veiled pity she’s used to. She tries to get Mary to open up; to laugh – smile, even – and, it takes a while, but Mary finds herself letting Summer in.
She’s never had a friend before. It seems only fitting that she has one now that her sisters are gone.
She has her very first drink on her 18th birthday, only because Summer is so persuasive. She gives Mary a cheap bottle of tequila with a red ribbon tied around the neck and shows her how to do shots.
They don’t get drunk, just a little tipsy, and they end up lying side by side on one of the small twin beds, shoulders touching, staring up at the ceiling. It reminds Mary of growing up with three younger sisters in an area prone to thunderstorms. All the physical contact she knows has come from them; come from waking up with Bonnie draped over her, from cradling Lux’s head in her lap as she cried.
The backs of their hands touch lightly and Mary lifts hers, covering Summer’s and giving her fingers a squeeze. Summer doesn’t say anything, but she squeezes back.
A week later, Summer’s sitting on the corner of the bed when Mary walks up to her. She rocks forward on the balls of her feet and doesn’t think about how it sounds when she says:
“Will you kiss me?”
Summer looks up from her book and furrows her brows at Mary.
“Right now?” Summer asks and when Mary nods, she reaches up and threads her fingers through Mary’s hair; pulls her down until their lips meet in a chaste kiss. “There,” she says when she pulls back, smiling slightly.
“No,” Mary shakes her head. “Like I’ve seen you kiss Adam and Daisy.”
“Oh. Okay,” Summer says easily and pulls her back in. She catches Mary’s bottom lip between hers; coaxes Mary’s mouth open with her tongue. Mary’s response is slow and tentative, but willing as she leans forward and braces herself against the edge of the bed.
Summer leans back and watches, amused and satisfied, as Mary lets out a shaky sigh, eyes still closed.
“Like that?” Summer asks tartly. Mary’s eyes flutter open and slowly refocus.
“Can we do that again?” she asks and Summer just laughs and pulls Mary down on top of her.
Mary’s 18 and six weeks when she has sex for the first time. She had a sex ed class in sixth grade and knows about the mechanics of it all, but lying in bed in the dark with her hand creeping down her shorts and her nervous fingers probing experimentally feels nothing – nothing – like the way Summer’s touching her.
Mary pulls her bottom lip between her teeth and bites back a moan; suppresses the urge to buck her hips up off the bed.
“It’s okay to move,” Summer breathes against her ear. “You can fuck me back.” Mary inhales sharply, flushing with embarrassment, but she can’t stop her hips from jerking into Summer’s hand.
She’s 19 when she hacks off her hair in front of the bathroom mirror. She’s tired of seeing Therese in the reflection; tired of seeing Lux, Bonnie, Cecilia – everyone but herself. Long chunks of blonde hair drop into the sink; hit the edge and fall to the floor around her feet.
“God.” There’s a harsh sigh from the doorway. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Mary says flatly. “I just got tired of it being long.”
“Well,” Summer starts, hand closing around the ends of the scissors so Mary can’t do any more damage, “they have these places called salons. You know?” Her lips curl up a little at the corners and she meets Mary’s eyes in the mirror. “Full of people who are trained to do this sort of thing for you.”
Mary doesn’t respond; doesn’t give any indication that she’s even heard a word Summer’s said until she lets go of the scissors.
“I can – “ Summer says, free hand gathering Mary’s hair and smoothing it. “Let me get the back for you.” Mary holds her gaze in the mirror and says softly:
“Thanks.”
Mary doesn’t make it to 20.
There’s a tattered card taped to their dorm room door when Summer gets back from class, emblazoned with a picture of the Virgin Mary on one side and a prayer on the back. Summer’s seen it on Mary’s desk once before – Mary ran her thumb over the dented edge and idly told Summer it was an omen, before tucking it away in her history book. She knows it’s more than that; knows it’s a memento of the past Mary refuses to talk about.
She runs down the hall; dials 911 from the payphone and sits on the floor until the paramedics come rushing in. The first thing she spots when they open the door is a pair of white Chucks swinging just above eye level. She only sees Mary’s body for a brief second when they cut her down as the door’s swinging closed but she swears Mary’s smiling.