Title - The Broken Binding

Rating - PG13 for language and reality

Genre - Angst/Romance

Summary - The sixth Lisbon girl was never claimed by the world of newspapers and magazine articles. Being just a baby born three years after the youngest and careless child, Cecilia, she grew up thinking she was an only child. Living now in Southern Massachusetts, meet Lesley Cecilia Lisbon: dreamer, soul giver, and one of the most curious and determined young woman of all the Lisbon sister's combined.

Disclaimer - I do not own any of the Lisbon girls (Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, Theresa) or Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon, but I do own Lesley Cecilia Lisbon and Eddie Marks (The boy next door).

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The Broken Binding

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- p r o l o g u e -

"Mother?" A young girl with ashen brown hair falling down her back looked up from her bowl of cereal.

An older woman, hair gray at the temples and tired from years of bleaches and dyes, turned from her busy work scrubbing at china plates. She was annoyed with this daughter. Her constant questions and wonderment about the world. Mrs. Lisbon couldn't remember the last time she had looked at her with love in her eyes. Lesley Cecilia Lisbon was just a replacement. And a weak one at that considering the fact she held not one trace of a reminder towards her other sisters. It had been sixteen years since the "accidental death" of her children. Seventeen since the death of Cecilia. And now Lesley was thirteen. The same age as Cecilia was then. The same age she had made her first attempt. And Mrs. Lisbon couldn't help but cancel her birthday party and pretend like she had never aged. She would keep Lesley locked in her twelve year old body forever. And God forbid she ever tell anyone it was her fourteenth. For that she would be sentenced to her room forever and ever. And she knew better than that.

"What now, Lesley? Can't you see I'm busy doing dishes?"

But Lesley just sighed inside, her heart collapsing against her chest and waiting to rise again with hope. But nothing cynical reminded her of happiness. Why couldn't her mother just have a baby? Someone Lesley could play with besides her ratty dolls? True her mother was very old and the kids at school always wondered why she never attended PTA meetings. Lesley just told them she was always working and folded the papers and flyers she got from teachers about open-houses and parent-teacher conferences, pushing them between the seat cushions on the bus.

The weirdest thing her mother did though was continuously wash the same dishes that she kept in the china cabinet and never took out. It was like she was a compulsive cleaner. One time Lesley had even caught her cleaning sets of dresses that she knew weren't hers. Not only because they were of awkward colors and patterns, but because she couldn't remember her mother ever making her a dress, let alone buying her one. They were all small and smelt of mothballs, and every time her mother finished cleaning them she brought them up into that spare room she kept locked with a skeleton key. All folded neatly. All freshly cleaned.

When Lesley had asked her father one night about her mother's strange doings, he just looked at her with a teary gaze and put the paper he was reading back in front of his face. Her father didn't speak much and usually kept to himself in the living room most of the time drinking ale and reading whatever there was to read. Mostly the Bible. He was a retired science professor and usually helped Lesley with her homework, but that was the extent of their odd father daughter relationship.

But all this oddness was a relief for Lesley. Because within this house of plagued weird happenings there was her own little world. A place she confined to called The Closet. Lesley was never a child born to disobey, so when her mother told her she didn't want her going outside, that meant she wasn't going to go outside. But that was just out of protection she thought.

The Closet was her special place where nobody could bother her. Not even the drone from the television or the clanging of the dryer and her mother's busywork. Instead she went to another place, dreaming of one day growing up and getting married and having children. Lesley wanted to be a writer. To put all her dreams and memories on paper, and to explain, to the unknown world out there, that there was still someone who hadn't discovered everything and had never actually tasted a burger with fries. Ice cream was an unbelievable dare to her stomach, but she could do without all of that as long as she had her book.

This one book meant more to her than anything in the world. She had found it up in the attic where there were piles and piles of boxes all taped saying Do Not Touch in bold red print. Of course, her being only eight years old at the time and only slightly mischievous, she didn't scope around too much. Only long enough to find a Virgin Mary statue with a blank black sketchbook and charcoals scattered next to it. After grabbing it she had reached to touch the ivory white statue but was startled when the naked bulb hanging by a weak chain snapped on. There it swayed in the middle of the dark attic, lighting up everything in it's vicinity. The piles of boxes, china plates, hanging vintage dresses, and some other things she couldn't quite see.

Lesley had burst into tears, practically breaking her neck as she climbed down the ladder to her safe space. The closet right beneath the stairs. Her mother and father hung their coats and dress jackets in there, but nothing more. She had discovered the secret door inside the closet that led to the attic while playing hide and seek with her dolls one day. Since then she hadn't dared to peek, only once to see if her shoe had mistakenly fallen at the bottom. But it was no use. The black shoe was definitely in the attic somewhere, probably lying next to that statue where she had stolen that book. When she was little she believed it was a sin that she had grabbed the book under Mary's watchful stone eye. But she had grown out of that, and after many days of searching for her shoe with no luck, her mother switched her and sent her to her room. Ever since, The Closet had been her domain, and the black book her Savior.