by Paul Pen
Her sigh blew out the match, erasing everything around them. As if the basement really had ceased to exist. This time he didn’t bother to light another. He took his wife’s face in his hands and stroked her cheeks with his thumbs.
“We’ll be able to come in this way,” he whispered. “But if someone comes to search the house, if someone questions our story about our son’s disappearance, they’ll only find a brick wall in the first basement. There’ll be no way to get to this place.”
The woman nodded as if accepting what he said, but the man’s thumbs spread two tears around her face, two tears that gave away the truth.
“Don’t cry,” he said in her ear. “It’s the best thing we can do.”
When he held her, he felt her heart beating against his chest as if it were his own. She sniffed. Then something moved between their feet. A moist tickle nosed the woman’s bare ankles. Her every fiber wanted to escape that darkness.
“It’s a rat,” her husband whispered. “That’s something else I have to take care of. Now don’t move.”
She stood paralyzed. Barely moving her lips, she asked, “Will he be all right?”
“Huh?”
“Our son,” she clarified. “Will he be all right?”
In the total darkness of the basement that shouldn’t exist, they heard the rat run off in the direction of the wardrobe.
26
After returning from their first visit to the basement, the woman went to look for her son. She found her daughter on the stairway, still standing on the second-to-last step. Her mother tried to move her out of the way, but she wriggled from her grasp. Guessing she was intent on blocking her path, the woman dodged around her daughter as best she could. No words were exchanged.
In his bedroom, the boy spun around in the office chair he’d inherited from his sister’s room. He grabbed the desk to propel himself and squealed with excitement with each spin, his legs outstretched, his forehead pressed against the chair to combat the dizziness. The room smelled unpleasantly of feet and another smell, one similar to bleach. She approached the bed knowing what she’d find. She felt the sheets until she found the stains. She pulled them off the mattress, rolling them around her arm.
The boy carried on, floating around the room in circular motions. The genuine delight of his howling made his mother smile, watching him while he completed the space odyssey that must have been taking place in his head. The woman gave him a few minutes to enjoy the total freedom of his childhood, his imagination, and his complex innocence. She dodged his flying feet to open the window and air out the room.
The approaching nightfall’s breeze brought with it a cricket’s chirp. The boy threw a hand onto the table and stopped the journey through space. He rolled to the window in the chair. The dizziness made his eyes plot orbits like the ones he’d just traveled. Gripping the frame, he poked his face outside. He mimicked the cricket sound with his lips. The boy’s head still moved in circles.
“Son.” She held his shoulder. “Son, listen to me.”
The boy carried on his imitation. A third guest, hidden in the grass, or among the pine tree’s branches, joined the chirruping conversation.
“We have to talk,” his mother insisted. He remained oblivious, absorbed in his dialogue, still rocked by the dizzy hangover. And she felt an urge to grab her son’s head. Full of guilt, she thought about how she’d squeeze him in her hands and scream at him until she lost her voice to please stop being like he was. To be a normal boy. The boy he was before the fall.
He stopped his head’s swaying. Almost as if he’d heard his mother’s terrible thoughts, he looked at her with eyes that had regained their usual angle, equally as uncoordinated.
“I know what you’re going to say.”
The woman hugged the bundle of sheets. “What?”
“I know what you’re going to do with me.”
Not knowing how to respond, the woman simply knitted her brow.
“You’re going to hide me,” he added.
She wondered whether she had heard right.
“What did you say?”
“I’ve seen Dad and Grandpa. Th . . . they’re . . .” His tongue fought to separate from the roof of his mouth. “Working in the basement. They’re making a house. You’re going to hide me. Underground. Because of what happened with the girl.”
The boy looked at his mother, though his eyes seemed not to go much farther than the tip of his nose. She tried to dry her tears with the dirty sheets before her son realized she was crying. He got up from his chair and took the sheets from her. He hugged his mother and played with the knots of her braid while her shoulders shook. Her chest rose with little in-breaths. She sniffed. When his mother had stopped crying, the boy separated from her and dried her face with his hands. He kissed her left eye first and then the right.
“Don’t be sad,” he whispered. “Crickets live underground. I don’t mind living like them.”
She held him tight. Over his mother’s shoulder, the boy discovered his sister watching them from the door.
“Oh, how sweet. Moments like this make everything you’re doing worthwhile, don’t they?”
The woman turned around. Her daughter’s voice had cut the flow of emotions dead.
“Leave us in peace,” she replied.
Behind the girl, on the landing, she saw her husband appear, followed by Grandma and Grandpa. They were returning from saying sorry to each other for the argument in the kitchen. None of them wanted to stay angry on the night they were to take the boy down. It was important that everything was as good-natured as possible.
“Ooh, everyone’s together,” the daughter noted. “Pretending to be a normal family.”
The man pulled her away from the door.
“Come on,” he said to his wife. “Let’s go.”
The boy took the hand his father offered him. Mother and son walked over the creased sheets on their way to the landing.
“Do you know where they’re taking you, little brother?”
The woman covered the boy’s ears. “Of course he knows,” she answered her daughter. “Your brother’s much cleverer than you think.”
“And you’re taking him down in his pajamas so he feels at home, huh?”
Nobody replied. She was left at the end of the line that went down in the direction of the kitchen, led by the boy and his father. Her mother followed them, and her grandparents advanced a few steps behind. Grandma sobbed, her head resting on her husband’s shoulder.
“You look like a funeral march!” the daughter yelled from behind. “Well, you are going to bury a son, so it makes sense.”
It satisfied her to see Grandma hunch even more under the effect of her words.
The man held open the kitchen door to let his son through. He also waited for his wife to go in. She held it until the grandparents arrived. Once they were through, she let go of it. Still in the living room, the daughter watched the door close.
Then she noticed the cream-colored telephone. The one she’d wanted to use the night she discovered what her parents had done with the girl. She cursed the moment she’d allowed herself to be blackmailed. If only she’d called the police then. Or the girl’s family, who she’d met one day when they were putting up posters. She still knew she could do it. She’d wanted to. She’d wanted to every day. And each day that passed, it became harder and harder to justify her silence. At the beginning two days seemed a long time: they would consider her an accomplice to her family for not turning them in as soon as she discovered them. Then five days went by. I can’t do it now. Eight days. Now I really can’t. Two weeks. I have to call. Three weeks. Nobody will believe me. Until two months had gone by, in which time her parents had carried through the plan to hide the boy. To bury him like a criminal buries the evidence of a crime. Like they’d buried the girl’s body. Except that her brother was still alive.
While she remembered the two months of inner conflict, her feet had acted by themselves and taken her near the
side table. She was surprised to find herself beside the telephone. She heard the murmur of the conversation in the kitchen. She felt repulsion toward that group of people who had turned her into a ghost since the incident on the stairs. Always looking through her as if she were no longer a part of the family. She could make them pay for all of that. She lifted the receiver.
She listened to the tone that invited her to dial.
It remained off the hook until the line went dead with a series of beeps.
She hung up.
Energetically massaging her face, she breathed through her fingers. Wavering. She walked in short steps over the rug, traveling back and forth, again and again, along an imaginary line. The brown skirt moved to the rhythm of her restless legs.
As she completed a lap, she lengthened her next step. Three more took her to the swinging door. With a push she entered the kitchen.
The boy was already going down the stairs to the basement, his mother beside him.
“Would you do something like this for me?” she asked. The five members of her family looked at her.
“What did you say?” asked her father.
“Would you do something like this for me?” she said again. “If I did something as terrible as he’s done. Would you protect me like this?”
There was silence. When the man went to speak, his wife raised her voice to talk over his reply.
“You already did something just as terrible,” she answered, observing her daughter’s questioning expression. “You put your brother in his bed with his head cracked open. And we protected you. We protected you in the hospital by hiding the truth about what happened.”
The daughter blinked twice in quick succession. She hadn’t known that piece of information.
“This isn’t the same,” she said back to show she wouldn’t budge. “He killed a girl.”
“And your brother could’ve died in that bed.”
The daughter examined the faces in front of her. Her eyes came to rest on her brother’s.
“Seeing how he’s going to end up”—she gestured at him with her chin—“maybe he would’ve been better off dead.”
Grandma held her breath. The woman held a hand to her mouth. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t recognize you.”
The man positioned himself in front of his daughter with his hand held high.
She shielded her face with her arms. She closed her eyes and waited for the slap.
But it never came.
When she reopened them, she discovered her father looking at her, his hand still raised, struggling to control his rage. He breathed with difficulty, overcome with fury. Or sadness. Or disappointment. The man studied his daughter’s half-closed eyes. Those eyes that her pale cheeks squeezed almost totally shut when she smiled. And he remembered how she had smiled, years ago, on the night when they looked up at the sky from the cliffs, by the lighthouse, when he had made her believe that the freckles that dotted her nose were fallen stars. She’d celebrated by lifting her arms in victory, and he’d picked her up to hug her while they spun around on the rock, the girl kicking the air with pure joy. Now the freckles had disappeared, leaving just two moles. The man knew the girl had gone, too.
“I’m not surprised the stars wanted to leave your face,” he said.
She feigned a smile. “Is that supposed to hurt me?” she asked. “First you threaten to hit me and then you come out with some stupid crap like that?”
The way his daughter spurned one of the memories he treasured rekindled the rage that had gripped his stomach. It spread to his chest, to his shoulder, to his arm, to his hand. He slapped his daughter.
She held her hands to the side of her face. She looked at each member of her family through incipient tears. Grandpa exhaled two breaths onto the lenses of his glasses and wiped them with his shirt. Grandma crossed herself. Her mother shook her head as she stroked the boy’s hair, while he deciphered some kind of code in the lines of her hands. In front of her, her father examined his warm, palpitating palm.
“You’re going to regret this.” She spat the words through her teeth, trying with her numb lips to contain the saliva that overflowed from her mouth. A string of red drool, tinted with blood, was left hanging from her chin. It swung as she uttered each of the words that she repeated. “You’re going to regret it.”
She left the kitchen.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” the man yelled at the door, which closed with its usual to and fro.
Grandma approached him to examine his hand. She felt the reddened areas while he waited for an answer from his daughter.
“What else can you do to us?” he shouted. Then he lowered the volume to speak to Grandma. “Mom, get off, it’s nothing.” He snatched his hand free like he had as a child. “I’m asking you, what else can you do to us?” He raised his voice even more than before, assuming his daughter had reached the first floor by now.
But then a thought knotted his throat. Another cry died in his mouth before it existed. Almost at the same time, his wife voiced his thoughts.
“There is something she can do,” she said.
The grandparents understood what she meant right away. “Not now. I don’t think she’d be capable of—”
The man didn’t wait for Grandpa to finish the sentence. He launched himself at the swinging door with his hand raised, ignoring the pain in his palm from the impact.
In the living room, he found what he’d feared.
The telephone’s curled wire vibrated in time with his daughter’s accelerated pulse. She trembled as she held the receiver. Her mouth opened when she knew she’d been caught. The string of drool that still hung from her chin broke. A drop of blood fell to the floor. She had already dialed the number, but nobody was answering the call. She knew straightaway that there wouldn’t be time to speak before her father crossed the living room and reached her. And she also knew that if she didn’t seize the moment, if she didn’t feed off the rage that the slap had provoked in her, she’d never muster the courage she needed to turn in her family. Alarm bells went off in various parts of her brain, trying to warn her about her own future. She didn’t listen to them. She acted without thinking. Driven by pure instinct. She hung up and held the telephone in one hand. Crouching down, she searched the bottom of the wall for the socket where the wire was connected. She found it right away. She pulled on the cable before her father had taken two strides. With the telephone unplugged, she made a run for the stairs, knocking over the two lamps that stood in her path. One of them fulfilled its purpose: to trip her father. She heard him fall with a deep groan, an animal snort. She set off up the stairs.
On the landing, she pulled at the gate that led to the lantern. She shook it in its frame. A metallic rattling accompanied the action. Locked. She could hear her father cursing downstairs. It seemed that neither his wife nor the grandparents were succeeding in giving him the help he’d asked for to get to his feet. Another thump on the floor confirmed the uselessness of their assistance. A crystalline detonation signaled a broken bulb. With a single leap she positioned herself in front of the painting of the naval battle on a stormy night. On tiptoes, she searched for the mermaid key ring that they kept out of the boy’s reach. She ran her fingers along the top of the picture frame, her hand’s frenetic shaking lifting clouds of dust. With one shake she hit the key ring. The mermaid fell to her feet.
The tip of the key clinked around the lock, her fingers’ trembling preventing her from inserting it. The telephone she held against her stomach was beginning to slip. She heard a footstep at the bottom of the stairs. And another on the next step. Her father was coming up. A grunt came from her throat, bringing her momentary relief from the tension and steadying her pulse for just an instant. Just enough time to insert the key. She turned it. She saw her father appear on the landing the moment she closed the gate from the other side. She screamed as she inserted the key again. The lock clicked into place with one turn. There was no time for anything else. Her fathe
r’s hand attacked through two of the bars, as aggressive as a piranha. He managed to catch her by the blouse, but she got loose with a tug that tore the seam of a sleeve.
She climbed the steep staircase in a spiral as twisted as the events that were ruining life in the lighthouse. The man watched his daughter’s shoes go up until they disappeared. He gave up trying to catch her. His tensed arms, stretched as far as the top of the gate allowed, fell like dead weight.
“Please,” he begged into the darkness of the tower, his face lodged between two bars. “We’re your family.”
There was no response. She didn’t want to hear anything that would make her change her mind. She rounded the lantern room. The chalky glow of a moon blurred by the mist flooded the space, giving it a dreamlike texture, full of shadows that might not have been shadows. She moved along the curved space between the lantern and the dome’s windows.
Down below, listening for his daughter’s footsteps, the man made a desperate attempt to prevent what seemed inevitable.
“If you’re planning to plug the telephone in up there, don’t bother. It’s never worked properly.”
But she knew that wasn’t true. And she also knew that her father had always made an effort to keep the lantern workable, because he still held out hope that the lighthouse would one day shine again. Like he hoped that her brother’s head would suddenly fix itself. On a desk, she felt along the spines of a row of books. The thick volumes on medicine, psychology, and psychiatry that her father labored to read without really understanding, hoping that on one of their pages he’d find the words that would allow him to work a miracle. She kicked a stool and crouched under the table, treading on her skirt. She searched on her knees for the telephone socket.
The man set off downstairs. He ran to the side table and batted it out of the way while his family members gave each other puzzled looks. He tried to rip out the telephone jack with his fingers, looking for some internal connection that he could interrupt. A fingernail broke in the attempt. “Christ!” he yelled. “We have to rip this thing out!” Grandpa shot off to the kitchen. He returned with a screwdriver. The man snatched it from his hands. He hit the socket with the tip, and chips of plastic flew from it. It was all for nothing. Because of the time it took to break the plastic and because there was nothing there anyway behind that cream-colored square that could cut off the call his daughter made.
