by Paul Pen
“Wait for me in bed,” she whispered.
In my room, I said goodnight to the fireflies with a few taps on the glass of their jar. They answered by filling the drawer with their magical light. I also checked that the eggshell was still there. No sign of the chick. I got into bed with the green glow of the fireflies still alight. It went out before Mom came into the room. She sat on my bed and tucked the sheet in on each side of my shoulders, at chin height. Then she kissed my forehead, her skin rough as always.
“Is there somewhere to go?” I asked. The pressure from the material on my chest was a cozy feeling.
Mom blinked in her usual unsynchronized way. First the eye least affected by the burns, and then the other. There was very little difference between the movements of each eyelid, but it was a characteristic mannerism of my mother’s.
“What?” she asked.
“Is there somewhere outside I could go?”
“Do you want to go to the bathroom?” She looked at the hallway.
“No, Mom.” I knew she was playing dumb. “You asked me if I want to leave.”
“What does it matter if there’s somewhere to go?” she now said, answering my previous question. She smoothed one of my eyebrows with her thumb. Then she lowered her voice as quiet as it’d go, down to a whisper.
“Man took off to the moon without knowing exactly what he’d find. Would you do that, too? Would you leave the basement if you could?” Some of the consonants were no more than whistles.
“By myself?”
“Just you.”
Like it was a reflex action, I spoke in a low voice as well. “With the baby?”
Mom fell silent for a while.
“No,” she finally said.
“And how would I get out?” I asked. “There’re bars on both windows. And Dad lied to me about the door in the kitchen. It’s always been locked.”
“Son, that wasn’t my question,” she whispered. “Imagine you could get out. Imagine I have this magic chalk.” She held an imaginary object between two fingers. “And I can paint a door in the ceiling. Straight to the surface. Would you go?”
I could only see Mom’s face when the light reached her from the hall. “Could you come with me?”
“No.”
“What about Grandma?”
“No, not her, either.”
“Dad?”
“You’d have to go alone.”
I considered it with my eyes closed, feeling the material inside my pillow with my fingers. I could almost make out the smell of carrot soup that spread through the basement in the evenings. I could feel the softness of the towel that Mom hugged me with when I got out of the bath. I remembered how just now we’d all laughed together as a family in front of the television. I thought about Grandma. I breathed deep to smell her talcum powder by memory. I opened my eyes. It was one thing seeing my reflection in the window and imagining myself out there. It was quite another to leave for real.
“No,” I answered.
“You wouldn’t leave this basement if you could?” A flash lit up the room. Mom’s eyes observed me from two deep shadows.
I shook my head.
“Are you sure?” she persisted.
“I’m sure,” I replied. I fought against the sheets that pressed against me to sit up and hug my mother. “I want to live with you forever.”
Her chest rose under our hug. Her nose whistled with a bubbling sound and she sniffed up snot. I separated myself from her. It was dark again, and I could see only the silhouette of her head. I touched her eyes. They were wet.
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
“I’m not crying,” she answered. She waved a hand in front of her face to move my fingers away, like she was swatting a fly. “Come on, sleep,” she added, and she sniffed in snot again.
“You are crying,” I insisted.
Then she hugged me, and very close to my ear, she whispered, “I’m crying with happiness.”
I wanted to touch her eyes again, but misjudged it. I felt the folds of burned flesh on her cheek.
“Enough now,” she said. “Go to sleep.”
The pressure on my chest returned when Mom tucked me in. She left the room. I lay awake, repeating every line in the movie.
12
More fireflies appeared in the following days. Whenever I peered through the bars on the window at the end of the hallway, something I did more and more often, at least one would drop down. Others arrived by themselves at the jar where I kept the rest. I found two one afternoon near Dad’s toolbox. A few calendar boxes later, I ended up with nineteen specimens in the jar. I could turn off the light and illuminate the whole room with my firefly lamp. Sometimes, lying in bed at night, I’d peek out over the sheet. There was a green glow beyond my feet. It emanated from inside the drawer even when it was closed, through the crack. My brother snored, oblivious to the light dancing in our room, but I’d be hypnotized by it, imagining it was sunbeams that the fireflies brought from outside so I could see them. Though I knew that wasn’t true: fireflies make light using chemicals from their own body.
It was on one of those nights that the rat walked over me.
First I felt something strange on my chest. Then on my belly. Then the unexpected sensation reached my groin. I knew what it was before its feet found my bare foot. The rat walked over me, scratching me with its claws. It jumped off the bed and fell with a muffled thump, which was followed by the rattle of its feet on the floor. Its silhouette moved along the line of orange light that came under the door. Someone was awake.
When I went out to get help, I heard voices in the living room. It was just a murmur. I recognized my grandmother’s voice and my mother’s. I walked toward them and heard another, deeper murmur join the conversation. It was my father. I stood still, not knowing what to do.
Standing in the middle of the hall, among the indecipherable murmuring I heard a word that caught my attention. My father had said my name. Then my grandmother said something back, but I couldn’t make it out.
Involuntarily, I took a step forward.
And then another.
And another.
I snuck forward, keeping balance with my arms, holding my breath. Three shadows were cast against a wall of the living room. Now the conversation reached me more or less clearly.
“. . . moon. But he doesn’t want to leave,” Mom was saying.
“What did I tell you?” Dad asked. “We knew this moment would come.”
“And we’ve dealt with it very well,” said Mom. “He’s happy here.”
“But now comes the difficult part,” Dad added.
“Has any of this been easy?” Grandma sobbed.
The rattle of the rat’s feet on the floor started up behind me, passed by me to one side, and went into the living room.
“The rat!” screamed my mother. A piece of furniture was dragged over the tiles in the living room. Grandma hiccupped. My father shushed everyone, as if that would keep the sudden commotion under control, but Mom was already running around the room following the noise the animal was making as it scuttled among the chairs. I saw her appear under the arch that led to the hall, whacking the floor with the broom. She was after the rat, but what she found was me, standing there in the hallway. She looked at the sofa, where their conversation had taken place and where my father would now be sitting. She came toward me, hitting out with the broom.
“Get out of here,” she said as if speaking to the rat. She kept hitting the floor with the broom until she reached me, and then she swept at my feet.
“Don’t let your father see you,” she whispered to one side of me.
I fled to my bedroom. As I went through the door, I ran into a hot, soft barrier that made me fall. I landed on my backside, softening the impact with both hands. I heard a heehaw. My brother turned on our bedroom light before going out.
“Why are you shouting?” he blurted out down the hall.
“Nothing. It’s nothing,” my mother said.
“Go back to your room, or you’ll wake your sister. And the baby.”
“I can hear it under the fridge!” my grandmother yelled.
Then I heard cupboards opening. And the bottles of ammonia rattling about.
“Another rat!” my brother then concluded. He said it as if it were news that should be celebrated.
I poked my head through the doorway.
The baby started crying.
“There you go, you’ve done it,” my father said.
The little boy’s screams got louder.
“Hey!” my father screamed from the living room. “I don’t think you’re sleeping with this racket! Tend to your son!”
The line of light that emerged under her bedroom door confirmed that my sister had woken up. But Dad, who couldn’t have seen this, continued to yell.
“Hey!” he shouted again, then waited a few seconds before adding, “Damn it!”
I heard his footsteps before he appeared in the hall. When he discovered me, there was surprise in his eyes, but he had more important things on his mind.
He opened the door to my sister’s room. The baby fell silent for a moment before taking up his screaming again at a higher volume than before.
“Make him be quiet,” Dad said.
“I’m going,” my sister mumbled from inside the room.
“And put your mask on,” he ordered. He looked at me to make sure I was still paying attention to him. Then he raised his top lip and stuck his tongue out. He bent forward contracting his stomach, pretending to retch, as if seeing my sister’s uncovered face had made him want to throw up. “The baby will never stop crying if he sees you like that.” He smiled at me, wanting to make me complicit in the joke. I remained serious, looking at the horrid grin spread across his disfigured face. As his smile faded, the hair scar on his cheek slowly regained its usual straightness. The wrinkles around his eyes, including the fold of sunken flesh that he had as a lower eyelid, also relaxed. Inside the bedroom, the baby’s crying eased up.
“The rat’s gone,” my mother said from the kitchen. Then she appeared in the hallway. She rested both hands on the end of the broom handle.
“What are you doing here?” she asked me.
“I just came out,” I answered.
She knew I was lying, which was why she quickly changed the subject.
“What happened with the poison?” she asked. “Didn’t we lay it all over the house? How can we be overrun with rats again?”
Dad dashed off into the living room. I heard him walking all around the main room. He moved some furniture. Then he reappeared in the hall and went into my sister’s room. “That’s what I like to see,” I heard him sneer. “Your little mask where it should be, covering that face.”
He moved around in that room, too, before crossing over to me and my brother’s bedroom. He pushed me by the head into the room to get past. He knelt by the bunk bed and looked under my bed. Then he searched in the three other corners of the room. My heart beat faster when he went near my drawer, near the firefly jar and the chick’s abandoned nest.
He came out of there, and then used the key hanging from his neck to open his own bedroom door. He emerged a few seconds later and moved on to the bathroom. I recognized the metallic rattle of the shower curtain as he drew it back. He also opened the cupboard under the sink, rummaging through the towels and first-aid kit. Then he returned to his position in my sister’s doorway and looked at me from there with a serious expression.
“Who was it?” he asked. He turned to my sister. The question was for her as well.
Neither of us answered.
“Who?” he pressed. My brother arrived from the living room and stood behind my mother.
“Leave them,” my grandmother shouted from the sofa.
Mom twisted the broomstick in her hands. “What do you want to know?” she asked my father.
Dad huffed. He looked at both of us. “Let him tell you what’s happened to the rat poison,” he said, pointing at me with his chin, before doing the same at my sister. “Or her. It’s everywhere in the house. Everywhere I laid it. Everywhere except the bathroom. There’s only one cube in the bathroom. Who did I tell to lay it in there?” he asked. “Who decided to go against the rules of this house?”
Neither of us answered.
“Come with me,” he said then. He went into my sister’s bedroom. “Leave the baby.”
My mother passed the broom handle to my brother and quickly went in to take the little boy. Dad came out seconds later dragging my sister by the arm. Before I knew it, he’d grabbed me, too. He took us to the bathroom. “I remember giving you the box right here, and I asked you to put cubes there, there, and there.” He pointed to three places. “Why’s there only one behind this door?”
“The rats eat it,” Mom intervened. “Perhaps—”
Dad silenced her with a stare.
“It was him,” said my sister. Her lips smiled through the hole in the mask. “You gave the box to him in the end.”
I remembered the box on the cistern while I peed. And I remembered my sister standing in front of the mirror. Splashing her reflection with water so she couldn’t see it anymore.
“Was it your job?” Dad asked.
My sister wasn’t lying. So I nodded. I did it in the manner of someone admitting guilt: looking down at the floor. But then I lifted my head again and looked my father in the eyes.
“And I did it,” I said, “everywhere you told me to. I put a cube in each place. Dad, I swear, I did what you told me to do.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying.”
One of my sister’s contained laughs bubbled in her throat.
“He must be lying,” she said. Then she imitated a pair of legs with two fingers, making them walk. “Those cubes can’t grow feet and walk off on their own, you know.”
“You be quiet,” Dad cut in.
From the hallway, my brother started to sing to himself. “He’s lyyyyyyying! He’s lyyyyyyying! He’s lyyyyyyying!”
“I swear I laid them, Dad—”
“He’s lyyyyyyying!”
“—I remember it perfectly.”
This time my sister couldn’t contain her laughter. She laughed until my father grabbed her by the neck and squeezed, forcing her to be quiet. Then he dragged her down the hall by her head. “You’re hurting me,” I think she said. It was hard to understand her. Dad shoved her into her bedroom. Mom came out after Dad beckoned her with his head. He slammed the door closed. The baby started crying again.
“And shut that child up,” he yelled at the closed door. “This door won’t open until—”
“May I?” Grandma had appeared at some point. She wrapped one of her hands, wrinkled by time and the fire, around the same door handle that Dad was gripping. “May I?” she repeated.
She was speaking in a calm way, gently defying my father’s authority. “I need to get in. I sleep here, too.”
Dad hesitated for a few seconds. Then he came away from the door to let her past.
Grandma turned the handle. The baby’s crying emerged from inside the room. “Thank you very much,” she said. “And goodnight.”
She closed the door with great care.
Dad glared at me. “I can’t ask you to do anything.” He reached me with one stride and knelt in front of me. With a finger outstretched, he turned my face until we were both looking into the bathroom.
“How do you think you’ll sleep in that bathtub?” he asked.
“Please,” Mom said, “there’s no need for any of this.”
He pushed me inside the bathroom. The floor was cold. “Tell me, how do you think you’ll sleep in that tub?” he said again.
I shrugged.
“Well, you can tell me tomorrow,” he announced. And he closed the door.
13
The banging woke me up. With my eyes open in the dark, my legs pressed against the cold ceramic of the bathtub, I attuned my ears. I expected to hear th
e Cricket Man’s sack, too, dragging along the ground up above.
More bangs. One after the other, but soft. On the door. Someone was knocking. I waited for a few seconds before poking my head out. I lifted a corner of the shower curtain, carefully, so the metal hoops it hung from wouldn’t make any noise. The door opened then without the hinges making a sound, as if whoever had opened it only wanted to leave it ajar. My eyes, accustomed to the dark, made out a new shape beside the door. Whoever it was moved, and I heard the familiar sound of fabric rustling. I smiled.
I got out of the bathtub in the direction of the door, the shower curtain rattling when I went through it. With my arms held out in front of me feeling the air, I reached the place where the shape was.
I touched it.
It was what I’d imagined.
My pillow.
I felt the material, searching for whatever was holding it up. I found a hand. I stroked it with my fingers, recognizing its bumps. The wrinkly fold between two of her knuckles, the circle of burned skin at the base of the thumb, the wide, smooth scar near the wrist. It was my mother’s hand.
I squeezed it gently to tell her she could let go. Her nose whistled from the other side of the wood. The door closed.
I went back to the bathtub.
I closed the curtain again and lay back.
I hugged the pillow inside that cold white ceramic bed.
I slept.
The pipes whistling woke me up again. The water was running in the sink. On the other side of the curtain, someone had turned it on, but the light in the bathroom was still off. Only Grandma would use the bathroom without switching on the light. I breathed, trying to smell her talcum powder.
Then I heard a cough that I recognized. It wasn’t my grandmother’s, but my sister’s. She hadn’t seen Dad punish me by making me spend the night in the bathtub. Maybe she didn’t know I was there. Which was why she hadn’t knocked on the door. But why hadn’t she turned on the light?
There was another cough. It was actually a wetter sound than a cough. A retch. I waited to hear the vomit hitting the sink, but it didn’t. She just hawked the spit and snot from her throat.
