Beautiful Broken Girls

by Kim Savage

  “Of course!” Mr. Falso looked over Francesca’s head toward Mrs. Villela, surrounded by mavens, not in need of punch anytime soon. He set it down on the table and forced his expression into something more sober. “How are you doing, Francesca?”

  “Privately.”

  “Yes, right.” They walked past clumps of neighbors and Connie’s classmates to the back of the house. Each time he turned for approval, Francesca shook her head. Finally, they came to the back stairs.

  “Up here,” Francesca said, mounting the stairs.

  “Francesca, I don’t think—”

  “I don’t care what anybody thinks is appropriate or inappropriate. Half the guests are only here to look good for my father and my uncle anyway. They don’t care about Connie. She’s my dead cousin. I’m the one in pain. You’re supposed to counsel me, do you understand?” She shook with the force of her words, angry at him, but more angry at the tears forming at the corners of her eyes that meant she was losing control. Silently, he passed her, and she followed him up the stairs. He paused in the hall until she grabbed his wrist and pulled him past Eddie’s closed bedroom door and into Connie’s bedroom.

  Someone had drawn the nubby purple tab curtains that covered the room’s only window. Francesca dropped Mr. Falso’s wrist and strode to the window. She yanked the halves apart and light streamed in. He shaded his eyes. Flowers, brown and desiccated, hung from a noose of ribbon. The walls were covered with posters of pretty boys with puffy lips. In a corner, a rigged strip of lightbulbs above a sheet of mirror, under which a slab of plywood jutted from the wall, fashioning a makeshift vanity. The plywood was laden with small bottles of flesh-colored liquid, sticks, and tubes. Above, the mirror was coated with a film of hairspray from cans lined up on the floor below. A stool with a round seat topped by a frilly pink circular pillow came to half the height of the makeshift counter.

  Mr. Falso sat on the edge of a padded chair and moved his folded hands in front of his groin, crossing his legs in a feminine pose, as if to hide all the parts of him that made him male. Francesca paced the pink braided rug, swearing every time the heel of her shoe got caught on the weave.

  She stopped and stared at him. “That’s right, Nick. I actually say curse words. Just another reason for you to make the case that I am not, in fact, saint material.”

  Hours before, Francesca had envisioned this very scenario, the two of them alone. Herself crying on Mr. Falso’s shoulder, and there’s where it would get difficult for them both, her frail loveliness pressing against him, tears smearing her mascara. He would allow her to soak the breast of his button-down shirt, wear it downstairs like a badge. Tip her jaw with thumb and forefinger and look deeply into her eyes, and say, “Your cousin is safe with God,” and then, “And you are safe with me.”

  She hadn’t gone to her father for help when the rest of the town turned only to Frank Cillo to solve their problems. She hadn’t gone to a priest, or one of the myriad uncles, genetic and in name, that their father positioned around the town like grizzled watchdogs to monitor his daughters. She came to him, Nick Falso, Friend of Teens. She trusted him. He could be trusted.

  “I’m not making a case one way or another. You’re in pain, Francesca. You’ve lost someone you loved deeply. This is a confusing time. Don’t begin to think that I don’t care.”

  Francesca’s eyes jittered. She grabbed her elbows and rubbed them. “I haven’t been in this room since I was twelve. Connie practically lived at our house.” She stalked over to a knickknack shelf and raised a photograph in a cheap brass frame that said Sisters in curlicue letters: Connie, across the laps of the two Cillo girls, their feet stretched toward the camera, animal slipper heads cocked in different directions. They wore ponytails and pajamas, and their faces were coated with green pasty masks like Day-Glo mimes.

  Mr. Falso smiled. “She was like a sister to you, wasn’t she?”

  “But she wasn’t our sister. She wasn’t actually our sister.”

  “I’m sure you treated her like a sister.”

  Francesca twisted the side of her mouth into a crooked smile. “I treated her like blood. You do anything for blood. Connie understood that.”

  “Connie was an extraordinary girl. She never allowed her physical limitations to keep her from leading a good life, filled with love.”

  Francesca laughed then, a gruff noise, and placed the frame back on the shelf. “Connie loved to be loved.”

  “And now she lives with God.”

  “It must be nice to know where you stand with Him.”

  Mr. Falso coughed. “We should be getting back downstairs. Your aunt will wonder where I am.”

  “You need to hear me.” Francesca rushed to the chair and fell to her knees on the braided rug. Mr. Falso’s head snapped toward the door; there were only the same distant murmurings of middle-aged parents, tired and thick-waisted, searching for the space between mourning and sociability. His gaze fell to Francesca’s hollowed cheeks and perfectly carved jaw, and he seized Francesca’s hands and tried to raise her, but she pulled him down and he was drawn forward, closer to her face, on his knees.

  “You don’t understand,” Francesca pleaded, her eyes bright and wet. “Satan came to me in my dreams. Last night, and the night before that! It was awful: he looked like he does in pictures, only he was little, a little demon, with an awful mouth and sharp teeth, and his mouth was filled with light, but not good light, a hot, rank light, like fire, a fire caused by something awful burning, like … skin. He speaks, and his voice is terrible; I’m saying ‘he’ but the voice could have been a man or a woman. He taunts me, tells me I should give up wanting to be a saint, because I’m not good enough!”

  “Francesca…”

  “But here’s the thing: I was protected. There was a light around me, a different sort of light than the one coming from his mouth. And I had the sense”—Francesca’s eyes ran over Mr. Falso’s face—“I had the sense the light was protecting me from him.”

  “That’s good. That’s very, very good, Francesca. That’s your faith protecting you.” Mr. Falso shifted, his wrists still caught by her slender, strong hands. “Protecting you from a bad dream.”

  Francesca’s mouth fell open as she dropped his wrists. “A bad dream?”

  Mr. Falso rubbed his wrists, settling back in the chair. “Yes. And if I were going to interpret it, I would say that Connie’s death tested your faith. This is common: when bad things happen to good people, we ask, Why, God, why her? Why me? That’s what the whole book of Job is about: God testing people with terrible trials. You’re like Job, Francesca. You won’t stop believing in God because your beautiful, vibrant young cousin died! Your faith will win out.”

  Mr. Falso sat back in his chair, satisfied. As if he could have had a cigarette.

  Francesca set her jaw hard.

  “If you know so much about Job, how about Saint Teresa of Avila? She had visions of the devil—visions, not dreams—on a regular basis. On a regular basis, Satan taunted and tempted her, tried to get her to give up being a saint. She describes them exactly as what I saw!” Francesca stabbed the rug with her finger. “Exactly! The light pouring out of his mouth, the light around her! It’s exactly the same, you can google it…”

  Mr. Falso leaned forward, his voice soft. “And did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Google it?”

  “Well, yeah! But that was after I had the first dream! What are you saying?”

  “Francesca.” Mr. Falso reached out and stroked her hair with the back of his hand. “I’m saying nothing, except that you are exhausted. You’ve experienced things that are confusing to you, and then had a terrible tragedy. You’re looking for answers.”

  “I’m looking for someone who believes me.” Francesca grabbed his hand in midstroke and pressed it to her cheek. “You have to believe me, Nick.”

  His name hung there in the room as the sun dropped behind a cloud, or below the horizon. Francesca had lost track of tim
e. In her mind’s eye, she knew she had made herself ugly to him, her cheeks like onionskin, thin, with veins showing underneath, her dark eyebrows drawn in crayon strokes.

  Gently, he slipped his hand from underneath hers and rested it in his lap. “You are not a saint.”

  Francesca blinked heavily, then gazed down sharply to her right as though struck.

  “I have to go downstairs. Why don’t you take a few minutes here alone? I’ll let your family know you’re lying down. Your sister will bring you a glass of punch, okay?”

  Francesca was silent.

  “Okaaay, maybe not.” Mr. Falso edged from the room, looking around as though the objects might save him, something interesting and upbeat to note, some capper that might make light of their circumstances. At the window, a dried bud fell to the floor.

  Kneeling, head torqued as though she’d been slapped, Francesca remained still.

  “You rest, then.” He slid from the room, leaving the door open a crack.

  Minutes passed, then an hour. The room ebbed from blue to purple to black. Francesca’s legs went dead, and her neck ached. Still, she did not move. She had slipped into a sweet numbness. She wondered if this was where Connie had existed before she died, when her body was overtaken by histamines and her mind stopped flashing, in this pale, cottony place of no feeling. It wasn’t so bad, she thought. She was resting.

  * * *

  Mira crept into the dark room. She felt for the lacquered dresser and placed a cup of punch on it, and fumbled with a lamp topped with a ceramic canary finial. The canary fell to the floor and splintered. When the light switched on, she saw it was split in two.

  “Oh!” Mira said.

  Francesca fell onto one hip, legs useless, propped on one arm like a tent pole. Mira snatched the paper cup from the dresser top and handed it to her. Francesca took a sip.

  Mira thrust her neck forward. “Did Mr. Falso do something to you?”

  Francesca laughed huskily, bright red punch dribbling down her chin. The depth of her voice was at odds with how weak and dejected she looked, on the floor. It frightened Mira.

  “No, of course he didn’t,” Mira said quickly. “Mr. Falso would never do anything to you. I thought, since you were on the floor … never mind.” She scrambled up and pulled a dusty tissue from a box on the dresser. Kneeling beside Francesca, she dabbed at her sister’s chin tentatively, the way one approached a wounded animal.

  Behind the tissue, Francesca smiled bitterly. “You’re right. He would never do anything to me.”

  Mira crumpled the tissue and made a big deal out of tucking it into her little bag, giving herself time to consider how to yank Francesca back from her dark place. “It’s probably wrong to say, but he looks handsome tonight.”

  Francesca laughed again, her pitch ticking up. Mira knew it was not right. Her laugh sounded sharp and rangy, like it was looking for something to puncture. Mira tucked her lip to keep herself from speaking any more. Minutes passed, and the silence between them thickened. Through Connie’s window, Mira saw the outline of a tree against the grape-colored night sky. The leaves trembled, and she buried her chin. The tree alarmed Mira, like a lot of things (the ropy underside of a dog’s neck, a dead mosquito fat with blood). Inexplicable threats that made her press the insides of her elbows into her forehead until her thoughts stopped racing. It was those times when Mira would remind herself that Ben Lattanzi was right next door, and she could go to him, and his presence would force her into normalcy. Connie could have used a Ben. She’d never had a real boyfriend, or real friendships, really, beyond her cousins. Everywhere hung reminders of the smallness of Connie’s world, flimsy, curly-edged things made of paper: ribbons, movie posters, photos with cheeks pressed together.

  “I told him about my visions.”

  Mira startled. “About the devil from your dreams? What did he say?”

  The sockets in Francesca’s cheeks hardened.

  “Visions. Not dreams. Of course,” Mira corrected herself. “What was his face like when you told him?”

  Francesca struggled to raise herself on bloodless legs.

  “I imagine he wanted to comfort you.” Mira lifted her slowly by the arm. “Protect you, I imagine.”

  Francesca pulled away and steadied herself. “You can imagine.”

  “He must have known you were terrified.”

  Francesca shuffled toward the door. “The word he used was ‘exhausted.’ But the word he meant was ‘delusional.’”

  Mira fixed on the point at Francesca’s waist where her leotard bagged, where a man might lift her, were she a real ballerina. She envisioned a man’s hands around Francesca’s waist, fingers overlapping. Why couldn’t this man, this “spiritual director,” lift her?

  “He needs time.”

  “He thinks I googled Saint Teresa of Avila, and that I’m acting out the things she wrote.”

  Mira knew Francesca’s confessions to Mr. Falso were dangerous. He didn’t know how close to the edge Francesca’s mind twirled, that disappointment could cause her to spiral. Or maybe he did know. In that moment, she hated him, and the hate felt like something Francesca could see. She crossed back to the window to hide her face, tugging the curtains together against voices drifting up from the yard below.

  Mira threw back her shoulders. “We’ll just have to try something new.”

  Francesca sagged against the doorframe. “After what happened to Connie? You want to try again?”

  “Not in the same way. Not with someone we know.”

  “We murdered her.”

  “Girls! Time to go!” Their father’s voice boomed from downstairs, a yell meant to smoke them out without having to stumble across something private and embarrassing.

  Mira spun and stepped lightly across the room toward Francesca and closed the door softly behind them. “Truth be told, it was probably going to happen sooner or later. Connie wasn’t going to live like a teacup for the rest of her life. Eventually, she was going to test her limits. In some ways, it was a beautiful thing, that we were there as witnesses.”

  “I should have been able to save her.”

  “You’re not saying that you don’t believe in your own gifts anymore?”

  “Girls!” their father called again.

  From the bottom of the stairs rose the clucks of women rushing to aid Frank Cillo.

  “You can’t discount Donata’s hands. Did you tell Mr. Falso about Donata’s hands?”

  Francesca gazed at her sister, smiling, her eyes lit softly, like the faint glow from a long-dead star only now reaching Earth.

  Mira swallowed hard. “Did you tell him?”

  “It wouldn’t have done any good. He wouldn’t have believed me.”

  Mira’s protests faltered as Francesca took her hands in her own, scars grazing their tops. She drew Mira’s hands to her mouth and kissed them.

  “It’s always been that way for saints, since the beginning of time.” She dropped Mira’s hands and turned the doorknob. “He doesn’t want me while I’m living. But he’ll have me when I’m dead.”

  Mira hung ten paces behind Francesca, watching as her sister’s shadow lengthened between them. At the bottom of the stairs, Francesca turned right toward their father’s voice in the parlor. Mira needed a moment; she needed to find Ben, to whisper directions to meet her somewhere. It wouldn’t be easy: they’d have visitors coming and going at their own house now, at all hours and for days, dropping by to touch their shoulders. She and Francesca would be expected to greet them and accept their Saran-wrapped packages of concern. Mira would have to nod at the injustice of Connie’s leave-taking, as though she had boarded a flight for spring break, and as though Mira herself had no relation to the event.

  Mira searched the dining room, still stuffed with bodies. No Ben. She looked for him among the parlor bustle, and was relieved to see her father and Francesca waylaid by a circle of biddies from St. Theresa’s. She ducked out fast before they could spot her, cutting through the den and on
to the back porch, past her father’s Rotary Club pals smoking cigars and watching the Red Sox on TV. She leaned over each of the grizzled men, accepting cheek kisses while shoving each one off a little. When she finally stepped down the porch into the yard, she exhaled and looked up at the sky. On the other side of the fence, the old rottweiler, Lupo, panted hard, his wet teeth visible through the slats. Lupo was bad to the core; Mira’s uncle blamed Lupo for the cat’s bad eye, had sworn many times to take a shotgun to the beast himself.

  Mira heard her mother’s voice in her head.

  Touch it, Mira.

  Mira stepped toward the fence and stretched her finger through the slat.

  “I wouldn’t pat that thing.”

  Mira whirled around, dress floating around her legs, Lupo howling. Louis Gentry was perched on the highest rung of staging set up in the Villelas’ backyard. Her uncle had planned to paint his house that coming summer; Ben was going to help. More money for something special he was saving up for, he’d told Mira.

  Mira set her chin low. “I wasn’t going to pet it.”

  “Sure looked like it. And I’m not sure this family could handle another freak accident.” Louis cocked his head toward the house. “Looking to get air?”

  “I was leaving. Have you seen Ben?”

  “I did. Hey, do you hate these things as much as I do?”

  “I hate them when they’re waking my flesh and blood, if that’s what you mean,” Mira said sharply, rubbing her arms. She smelled the ocean and a worse smell, dog mess from next door, probably.

  “I didn’t mean to be crude. You know I cared about Connie.”

  “Um, none of you guys cared about Connie. You cared about what you got off Connie—that would be more accurate.”

  Louis gave her a look of hard disappointment. “Now that isn’t fair. You know, this whole thing gets me thinking about how fragile life is.” Louis leaped off the staging like a cat and walked toward her. “Say it was you instead of Connie who got hurt up there.”

  Mira had known Louis nearly half her life, but something in his eyes now looked manic and empty at once. “It wasn’t.”