by Paul Pen
The daughter threw the towel down from above. It hit the woman’s face.
“You don’t have to remind her of the accident every day,” Grandma broke in.
“You bet I don’t have to.” The woman handed the damp towel to her mother-in-law. “All she has to do is look at her brother’s face to remember it.” She zipped up the raincoat with an energetic tug.
“Let’s go,” her husband said, grabbing her by the wrist. “Before it gets dark.”
He pulled on her just as the doorbell rang.
“That’ll be the boy,” the daughter shouted from upstairs. “Go give your favorite child a hug.”
In a bathrobe, she fled to her bedroom and slammed shut the door.
The bell rang again.
“At least he came back on his own two feet today,” the woman said.
“What did I say? Our boy’s going to get better and better,” noted the man with optimism.
During the first year after the fall, the boy screamed whenever they tried to take him out of his room, but in recent weeks he’d made progress, to the point that he wanted to go out whenever possible. He’d already gotten lost twice. Both times, he was found on the road to town. To his mother’s despair he’d been soaked in seawater. She felt breathless every time she thought of her son near the rocks. When they told him off, the boy would run away to some corner of the plot, his hands twisting at chest height, crying with his mouth wide open and hitting his ears to block out his own tantrum. And in the guttural voice that resulted from the fall, he pleaded for someone to make the sea be quiet.
The doorbell rang again.
A shiver ran down the woman’s back when she heard the way the last of the three notes trilled. There was something wrong with that sound. An eerie quality that floated in the living room air until the note fell silent.
“I’ll go,” her husband said.
A plea came from the woman’s throat. “Don’t open it.” Flanked by her husband and by Grandma, she was almost as surprised as they were to hear her own request.
“What’re you talking about?” the man replied. “The kid must be soaked through by now.”
And when the man took his first step toward the entrance, the woman was certain that two policemen would appear behind the door, standing on the doormat. Lowering their heads in a gesture of respect before giving them the news that those damned cliffs seemed to make inevitable. The woman remembered how she’d murmured her fateful verdict to the television while she chopped carrots.
“My son!” she yelled.
She overtook her husband with a sudden dash across the living room. Without intending it, she kicked the posters of the girl. They rolled to the front door. The woman bent to pick them up. Tiny drops of rain had reached the glossy paper through the crack under the door.
A somber harmony tinged the notes of the doorbell when it rang for a fourth time.
“My son,” the woman murmured.
With a chill on the back of her neck, she turned the handle. The door opened in front of her, fanned by a current of air from outside. Before she could register what she was seeing, Grandma screamed behind her.
“What the—?” was all the man could vocalize.
The woman didn’t find enough air in her lungs to scream. She just stood there, feeling the raindrops on her contorted face. Hearing them hit the waterproof material of her raincoat. She felt a growing tingling in the hand that held the rolled-up posters. When her fingers were totally numb, the roll fell to the floor. The wind pushed them inside the house as if wanting to tear them away from the scene at the threshold. So that the eyes of the girl in the photograph wouldn’t have to see what had appeared in the door.
23
The woman didn’t resist when her son pushed her aside. She just closed her eyes. Something soft brushed past her ankles. The hiss from that contact turned her stomach. The boy went into the living room, taking with him the smell of damp earth with which the storm imbued the air.
Her eyes still shut, the woman felt for the edge of the door that the wind had torn from her hands. She closed it. A sudden hot flush made the moisture on her face evaporate. The raincoat’s neck choked her. She unzipped it with a trembling hand. She could smell salt residue and a child’s sweat.
“Help me,” the boy said. He drew out the vowels and got stuck on some consonants. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s stopped talking.”
The man kept his mouth clamped shut, his throat tight.
Grandma felt for the chain of her rosary before fleeing upstairs. She went to yell Grandpa’s name, but just babbled a few meaningless words. She tripped on the last step before crashing through her bedroom door. She let herself fall onto the bed. Her choking sobs and her body’s uncontrollable shaking woke Grandpa, whose afternoon nap had prevailed over the storm, the yelling, and the doorbell. Unable to decipher a coherent sentence among his wife’s stammering, Grandpa got up. He found his glasses on the bedside table and slotted the arms among the last two clumps of gray hair he still had, the ones that grew over his ears until they ended a little higher than the temples. A crease from his pillow was engraved on his face.
Holding each other, the grandparents went out onto the landing. The next door along opened as well.
“Has the kid shown up?” their granddaughter asked, still in her bathrobe.
Her father yelled from downstairs, “Stay in your room!”
The daughter closed her door with contempt. Her stomach burned with rage every time they spoke to her like that. She hoped her brother had gotten himself in serious trouble.
Grandpa looked at his wife in search of an explanation. She seemed to be staring into nothing. He pushed her so she’d let go of the doorframe. Then he guided her to the top of the stairs leading down to the living room. They heard their grandson speak.
“Mom, open your eyes,” he said in guttural gulps. “You have to help me, she’s stopped talking.”
The woman screamed in the living room.
The boy’s words made Grandma cry.
A sudden tension attacked Grandpa’s belly.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” he growled.
He set off down the stairs, pulling his wife. When he reached the last step, he stopped there and stood, trying to understand the scene he found in front of him. He pressed Grandma’s face against his chest to shield her from the image.
The first thing he saw was the lock of blond hair emerging from inside the boy’s fist. The son was trying to get his mother’s attention by waving the clump of hair. A moist, fleshy sound accompanied each movement. The sound that the girl’s neck made when it twisted freely, dislocated from the rest of the body to which it remained connected by a viscous, yellowy-purple skin.
“She’s stopped talking,” the boy said again. He pulled on the false blond ponytail to show Mom the face of the toy that had stopped working. Two blue eyes looked up at the woman. As they’d looked at her that very afternoon from the edge of some rolled-up posters. The girl’s mouth was twisted into a silent scream. Her son carried the body by the armpits, the back resting on his chest.
“Tell her to talk!” he yelled. He shook the body. The girl’s head danced on the broken neck until it fell backward with a crunch. It was left resting on the boy’s shoulder.
Reality clouded over when the woman’s eyes filled with tears. Her son was reduced to a foggy blob pulsating in front of her. The guttural voice of that out-of-focus creature continued to ask for help. He tugged on the waist of his mother’s raincoat.
“We’re going to have a baby,” he explained.
From his position beside the grandparents, the man saw his wife cover her face. He also saw a drop of water run down the girl’s hand, which hung from the end of a pink sleeve. And he remembered: that was the color of the cardigan worn by the girl sitting on a bike and looking out at the people of the town from her photograph on every street corner. When the drop hit the floor the man reacted.
The mud on his shoes left wet prints on the living room’s timber floor. His paternal instinct manifested itself in an unexpected way when, ignoring his son’s ravings, he decided to tear the swollen girl from his arms. He laid her face-up, and without stopping to consider what he was doing, how useful it would be, he covered her mouth with his lips. A salty, sludgy, vegetal flavor raked his throat. He blew hard. He pressed the cold flesh of her cheeks so the lips would give way, then blew again into the opening. He could feel the girl’s chest inflating, but the air escaped from her soft anatomy as soon as he separated himself to look for a response in her face. The smell that came from that mouth made him nauseous. It penetrated his body like a toxic gas poisoning his blood.
“She’s dead,” said the woman, her voice trembling.
But still he tried to revive her. This time he breathed into the girl’s mouth while pressing her chest. The taste of sea made his stomach turn, but it was the feel of her tongue, slimy like the soft part of a bivalve, that was too much to bear. The man moved his face away with a convulsion. He pressed his belly as if he could control it. Covered his mouth with both hands.
“She’s dead,” the woman repeated. The air had dried her eyes. She turned to the boy, who was looking at his parents without fully understanding their reaction. The man, kneeling, was fighting his nausea with deep breaths. He swallowed thick, sour saliva.
“It’s the girl,” his wife added. She rubbed her eyes with the back of a hand. “It’s the missing girl.”
Grandma kissed the crucifix on her rosary.
The boy crouched down by the girl and shook the blond ponytail.
“Don’t tell me she’s dead,” he sobbed. “She can’t be d—dead. We’re going to have a baby!”
The boy’s face lit up in an expression of euphoria. It gradually twisted out of shape when he grasped that his family was looking at him with horror. When he let go of the ponytail, the girl’s head dropped to the floor like an old gourd. The boy’s confused face moved his mother despite the bloodstains she saw on his clothes. Despite the mud that was all over his face. Despite the solitary blond hair that shined like a golden filament tangled between his fingers.
The woman hugged her son. Seaweed hung from the shoulder where she rested her chin. The boy cried loudly. She held him to stop him from hitting himself, soothing him with words in his ear. She stroked the back of his head, squeezing seawater from his hair. Sand from the beach came away as well. When the boy was calmer, she positioned her face in front of her son’s.
“What have you done, sweetheart?” She brushed aside the boy’s wet bangs with her fingers.
“I’ve looked after her.”
“Who have you looked after?”
“The girl I found on the rocks,” he said, pointing at the body lying on the floor.
“You found a girl on the rocks?”
The boy nodded.
“When?”
“A—ages ago.”
“How long? A few hours?” she asked hopefully.
The boy held up a hand, the wrist folded inward. He moved his fingers, counting in his strange way. “Five,” he concluded. “Five days.”
“Was she—?” A faltering sigh made her lose her voice. “When you found her. Was she—?” The pressure on her chest stopped her speaking.
Her husband skirted the girl’s body. When he stepped on a clump of hair stuck to the timber, the girl’s bluish face shuddered in a spasm of artificial life. The man looked away. He knelt beside the boy.
“Listen to me.” He gripped him by the chin. “The girl, was she alive?”
The boy frowned, concentrating. His parents studied the wrinkles on his forehead, trying to guess their son’s thought process. Grandpa held his breath. Grandma looked at her grandson.
The boy’s forehead unwrinkled. He smiled.
“She was alive,” he said, as if it were good news. “She’s stopped talking . . .” His tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth a moment too long. “She stopped talking today.”
After a few seconds of horrified disbelief, the man exploded.
“Christ!”
Upstairs, the scream made his daughter’s shoulders flinch. She was lying in bed reading. A corner of her mouth turned upward. Her brother had gotten himself into trouble. Big trouble. Big enough, perhaps, to get him down from the hero’s pedestal on which they’d put him since the accident. The smile finished forming on her face, narrowing her eyes. She turned a page.
Downstairs, her father yelled with enraged burbles of saliva.
“Christ! Christ! Christ!”
He pressed against his temples with his fists, unable to bear the pressure he felt in his head. He stood up, shaken by a jolt of panic. He paced around the living room, digging his heels into the flooring and rugs. Bits of mud stuck to the material. He dodged the sofa, where the family gathered in the evenings to watch movies, and avoided the trunk, the cuckoo clock, and two standing lamps that lit the living room. When a chair got in the way of his erratic route, he grabbed its back and threw it against the wall. The windowpanes shook with the impact more than they’d vibrated with the last clap of thunder. The cream-colored telephone fell to the floor from the little table. The receiver stayed on its base thanks to the curly cable that the women of the house twisted between their fingers as they chatted.
The boy started crying.
“Christ!” his father repeated.
“You’re going to have to calm down,” Grandpa said. “Look at the state of us all.”
The man let out a final cry. He released some of the tension that numbed his muscles. Then he was able to look more calmly at the rest of the family. His wife had sat the boy on the floor, hugging him as if nursing a giant baby. Grandma, shrunk back in fear, looked at them while clutching Grandpa, who was fighting to keep his composure. The missing girl lay on the floor where she’d been left. Judging by her appearance, the boy had told the truth: the girl had not been dead long. Certainly not the six days that had gone by since her disappearance. The skin was bruised and had a viscous texture, but did not smell decomposed, and there weren’t any obvious signs of putrefaction. The man guessed that she had been exposed to the seawater for a long time, to the crashing of the waves and to . . . When he thought about the other blows, the ones he imagined his son might have dealt her, he felt an urge to throw another chair against the wall.
“What have you done to her?!” he screamed at the boy. He swooped on him, unable to contain his rage.
The woman blocked her husband’s path with her back. Grandpa freed himself from Grandma, who was left standing with her arms hanging. He grabbed the man by the neck, pulling him away from the boy, who trembled in his mother’s arms.
When the man saw his son’s frightened face, the fit of rage vanished. He managed to get away from Grandpa. He hugged his wife through the raincoat. The boy was encased between them. The man said sorry several times.
“What have you done to her?” he whispered. His breath warmed the damp space the three of them faced, the parents’ heads brow-to-brow.
“I looked after her,” said the boy. “She was on the rocks.” The last consonant whistled between his teeth. “She wasn’t moving. But she spoke. To the rocks. To me.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
The boy blinked in silence. As if waiting for a question that was worth answering. A bitter smell filled the inside of that embrace when the boy breathed out.
“We’re going to have a baby,” he said.
“A baby?” asked the woman.
“A baby,” he said again.
“Why?”
“Because I did this to her. Like this . . .” The boy moved his body in thrusts to explain himself. He moved his pelvis back and forward, back and forward, back and forward.
“I put a baby in her tummy,” he whispered.
The woman grabbed the boy’s neck. She squeezed it to stop that repugnant display. He shrank back, twisting his body and making a mewing sound, as his mo
ther remembered what some medical prognoses had predicted.
The boy’s mewing stopped.
The parental hug dissolved.
Standing, the four adults exchanged profound looks as impenetrable as the mysteries of the boy’s brain. A deathlike silence overcame the room, broken only by the sound of the rain beating against the roof. Drops of fresh- and saltwater slid down the girl’s face before falling into the puddle that framed her body on the floor.
The woman finished unzipping her raincoat. She took it off and shook it, splashing her son.
“Get off,” she said when he tried to hug her legs.
Watched closely by the rest of the family, the woman approached the dead body. She dropped the coat onto the corpse, covering it from forehead to waist. The hands poked out from each side of the improvised shroud. She pushed them under the raincoat with her feet.
“What are we going to do?”
“What’re our options?” her husband asked.
Grandpa cut in. “We have options?”
After thinking about it for a few seconds, the man persisted, “Well, what can we do?”
Total silence was the only response.
“How’re we going to explain this?” The woman pointed at the shape on the floor.
Grandma had to grip the banister to stay on her feet. “My grandson’s killed her,” she said, and immediately went on. “My grandson’s killed that girl.”
“We don’t know he killed her,” the man said.
“He didn’t do anything to save her,” his wife argued, and she pressed the boy again. “How many days ago did you find her?”
He counted with his hand, twisted at chest height. “Five.”
His mother used the answer as proof.
“And he says she was talking,” she went on. “In other words, she was alive. The girl must’ve fallen on the rocks when she went missing. Onto one of those ledges. And our son found her . . .” Her voice failed when she remembered the two times the boy had run off in the last few days. And how he’d shown up soaked on the road to town. The woman closed her eyes. The darkness showed her an image of her son thrusting his pelvis over the girl’s battered body.
