by Paul Pen
“I can’t stand seeing her face,” the man said. He pressed his eyes with his wrists. The rough texture of his eyelids made him even angrier. “I can’t stand seeing her,” he spat through his teeth. Then he finished by yelling it so she could hear it, too. “I can’t stand seeing your face!”
The woman went up to him. She soothed him with a hand on his shoulder. The man sobbed.
“I need Grandpa to hurry up and bring it.” He swallowed. “I can’t stand seeing her face.” He pointed at his own burned features. She hushed him like a baby.
Grandma felt for him with her hands. She stroked her son’s head until he calmed down. Until he managed to contain his rage, turning it into one of the layers of sediment that had begun to build up on him in the basement, forming the base of future mountains. He stroked his wife’s stomach, still flat.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked.
She nodded. An eye closed involuntarily when she gave a thin smile, trying to emulate what would have been her reaction had she found out she was pregnant in other circumstances.
“Now we have to think about what we’re going to do,” she said.
The spiral of conflicting thoughts that plagued the minds of the three of them culminated in an initial response from Grandma.
“There’s one thing we’re definitely not going to do,” she said, handling her rosary. “No man has the right to take away a life the Lord has given.”
“Nobody’s suggested that,” her daughter-in-law replied.
The man kissed his wife’s belly to keep his lips busy, so he wouldn’t confess that that had been his first choice.
“Grandpa will have to look after it, then,” he offered as an alternative. He looked up to meet the woman’s gaze.
“And how would he explain the child’s existence?” she argued. “A baby appears exactly nine months after the tragic disappearance of his family?”
The man pressed one side of his face against his wife’s body. Another bed of contained desperation settled on top of the previous sediments. He received it, biting his bottom lip.
“So tell me what options we have left,” he whispered. “Because I can’t think anymore.” He rested his elbows on his knees. He shook his head, looking down at the floor. “I can’t take it anymore.”
“Give it away?” Grandma ventured, with the quiet voice of someone who doesn’t believe her own words.
The idea made her daughter-in-law shudder, and she paced around the room to ride out the anxiety it brought her.
“Give it away?” She repeated the words as if she’d just learned them from another language. “For adoption? My child?”
Her voice rose in pitch with each word. She stopped her frenetic pacing and turned around, waiting for an answer.
Grandma moved her lips without finding the right words.
The woman held her hands to her stomach. She massaged it as if she could make out the future baby’s anatomy inside.
“I imprisoned myself in this basement so I wouldn’t lose a son,” she spat out. When she took a step forward to give her words more presence, the beam of sunlight that came in through the basement ceiling was projected onto her body, navel-high, painting a golden circle on her stomach. “And I’m not prepared to lose this one, either.”
The man looked his wife in the eye.
“Even if it has to live here?” he asked.
Before she was able to respond, there were booming sounds overhead. A louder bang reverberated in the master bedroom, the one they’d planned to use as a storeroom when the basement was only going to have one occupant. Grandma adjusted her dressing. She also combed her uneven scalp with her fingers, trying to cover the bald patches that the fire had left. Without waiting for anyone to guide her, she made her way to the hall.
“Are you going by yourself?” asked the man.
“This is going to be my life,” she answered, her arms stretched out front. “I may as well start getting used to it.”
The man put his arm around his wife’s shoulder. Together they watched Grandma rush to the metal door, excited that she was about to be reunited with Grandpa. She barely strayed from her path.
“The key,” she said from there. “I need the key.”
Once in front of the door, the man bent down, holding the key that hung from his neck in the air.
“She’s in her bedroom, right?” he said, referring to his daughter.
The original purpose of that door had been to stop any attempts the boy might make to escape, but in the end it was his sister who it prevented from fleeing. If she managed it they would all be condemned. As the daughter herself often screamed at them, telling the world about the basement and its occupants was the first thing she intended to do when she set foot outside. She’d tried it tirelessly during the first weeks. The entrance in the kitchen was no longer a danger since Grandpa built the planned second wall, so all of her attempts to escape had to focus on the metal door without a handle. Listening in, the daughter discovered the existence of the wardrobe. She also learned of the passage that led to the surface. She was unaware, however, that any plan to get away would be cut short at the final trapdoor, the one that only Grandpa could open from the outside.
“Is she in her bedroom?” repeated the man.
“Open up,” the woman replied.
He unlocked the door without taking the key from his neck.
As soon as they went into the room, the daughter’s head poked out into the hall. She leapt to the door. She thrust her foot toward the threshold to stop it closing. She arrived late. Again.
“I swear to you I’m getting out of this basement,” she muttered to herself. “I’ll make all of you pay, for everything.”
On the way back to her bedroom, she found her brother standing in the middle of his own room. Motionless, with his arms outstretched on either side.
“Crows everywhere,” she told him. “You can’t even get that right.”
At the wardrobe doors, the man told his mother to wait. He went into the passage alone, and set off up the tunnel bored through the earth. He turned right. Then left. Then right again. At the end of that section he found a giant sack.
“Dad?” he asked into the darkness. His voice traveled up through the passage, muted, chewed up by the earth. There was no response. This time Grandpa hadn’t come down. Sometimes it was better not to take the risk. Better to just drop the package and get away from the lighthouse before anyone could see him. The man grabbed the sack’s knotted drawstring. He dragged it. After he turned the second corner, the glow from the bedroom was visible at the end of the passage, filtering through the wardrobe.
“Is he with you?” asked Grandma when she heard her son return.
“No.”
Grandma’s face darkened even more than it had when they’d taken off her bandage. As if coping with Grandpa’s absence saddened her more than a future of darkness. In reality, the two things were the same to her.
“Sit down,” her daughter-in-law said to her. She wanted to take her arm to guide her to the foot of the bed, but Grandma evaded her. She found the mattress by herself. And by herself she unknotted the bandage that covered her eyes. She made a ball with it, which she deposited on the bed. Then she gathered her hands between her legs. She rubbed her fingers. A continuous but almost inaudible groan vibrated on the roof of her mouth. The woman sat beside her to accompany her in her sorrow.
The man undid the knot on the sack. Although they urgently needed toothpaste, painkillers, rice, vitamin D, and Grandma’s medication, he was only worried about finding one thing. The cord untwined into threads with his frenzied attempt to untie it. When he’d achieved a large-enough hole, he inserted a finger. Then three fingers, and then both hands. He opened the bag, holding his breath.
He peered into the sack.
His burned lips spread into a broad smile across his face.
“What’s in there?” his wife asked.
The man took out what he’d hoped to find.
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“We won’t have to look at her anymore,” he said.
He showed the woman a white mask.
THE PRESENT
29
In one step I positioned myself in front of my sister.
I kicked the mask that she’d just thrown on my bedroom floor out of the way.
I stroked her face, lingering on each curve. Feeling skin so similar to mine. It was the first time I’d touched an adult face that wasn’t burned. She just let me do it, holding her breath. Experiencing something that was new to both of us with the same intensity as me.
“Your face,” I whispered. “Your face is OK.”
She nodded.
“Why aren’t you burned?” I asked.
She swallowed, containing her emotion.
“You were all together when the fire happened,” I went on. At least, that was what Mom and Dad had always told me. They never said much more about it. And they’d never answered any of the questions I’d asked them.
“Why aren’t you burned?” I said again.
My sister stopped my hand. She separated it from her face. She closed her eyes. I observed her heartbeat in her eyelids, such soft eyelids, with fascination. I discovered the even coloring of her healthy skin. Amazed, I witnessed a faint flush light up her cheeks.
“Because I wasn’t with them,” she answered. The eyelids opened. She fixed her eyes on me.
“You weren’t in the basement?”
“No.” Her eyes wandered for a fraction of a second. She gripped my wrist harder than she had before, but she didn’t seem to know she was doing it.
“Where were you?”
“I shouldn’t be here” was the response she offered. “And you don’t have to be here, either. We can get you out. Because you want to go. You just said so.”
“There’s no way out,” I replied. “The kitchen door’s locked. There’re bars on the windows. And Mom says we can’t be anywhere else.”
“But, do you want to go?”
Mom had asked me the same question a few nights before, when we talked about the big pale-green moths. Then, the memory of my nephew’s hand gripping my finger and the smell of carrot soup had been reason enough to not want to leave the basement. But now all I could think of was what my sister had confessed to me about the baby’s real father. And the fact that she’d tried to poison the little boy. And that Mom and Grandma had referred to him as the worst of their sins. And that they’d forced my sister to wear a mask when her face wasn’t really burned.
“I want to get out,” I said.
My heart sped up. I felt it beating in my neck. I relived the dream in which the kitchen door shrank until it disappeared and a beam of light illuminated my face as if I were a cactus. I felt the dream’s heat on my cheeks.
“I know how to get out,” said my sister. She wetted her lips while, hypnotized, I watched her unscarred features functioning. “With my help, you can get out.”
The beating in my neck stopped. The heat suddenly vanished. The imaginary door closed to become the same door it’d always been. The locked door in the kitchen. Because I remembered how my sister’s fingers had moved like cockroaches in her blouse pocket, just a few hours earlier. And how she’d painted her breast with the pale blue of the poison cubes and offered it to the baby to stop him living with me in the basement.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “As if I can trust you.”
I grabbed the sides of the metal ladder. My sister had fought against Dad so she didn’t have to sleep in my brother’s bed, so I’d given her mine. On the third rung, a hand grabbed me by the underpants.
“I’m not listening to you,” I said. “I don’t like what you did to the baby.”
I managed to tug myself loose and I climbed onto my brother’s mattress. The springs, softer than mine, gave way to my weight without much resistance. The pillow also felt weird. Too thin.
My sister poked her head over the side of the bed.
“Listen to me,” she said.
Her breath felt like a crane fly’s legs on my face. I turned away from her.
“Switch off the light,” I said, looking at the wall.
“You don’t have to be shut away down here,” she whispered.
Her words fanned the flame that had been lit inside me that night. The desire to see the place the fireflies came from.
“We’re here because we want to be,” I said.
“I heard you crying. You just said you don’t want to be here.”
I considered her words.
“You told me off for leaving the firefly jar in the bed,” I reminded her. “You said it was dangerous for the baby. But you don’t care about the baby. You’re not going to trick me again.”
My sister’s hand climbed up my back. It stopped on the shoulder that wasn’t resting on the mattress.
“It’s them who’re tricking you,” she whispered. “Your parents. And Grandma. Why do they make me wear a mask? Why do they tell you I’m burned?”
“Leave me alone,” I answered.
“Why did they tell you the kitchen door was unlocked?”
I lay in silence. Reliving the night so many calendars ago when I went up to that door for the first time. When I didn’t even try to open it because I was happy in the basement. With my family. Where a little boy should be.
“Poor boy, you don’t even know why you’re here,” she went on. “Do you know why we’re here?”
“Because we can’t be anywhere else.” I reeled off the words that Mom had taught me. “It’s the same for everyone.”
“That’s not what I asked,” she said, squeezing my shoulder. “I asked whether you know why we’re here.”
I opened my mouth to answer but couldn’t find the words. I really didn’t know.
“Do you know?”
It was a while before she answered.
“No,” she finally whispered. “I don’t know, either. They have me tricked just like you.” She moved her hand to the back of my neck and stroked it. She played with the uneven little hairs that Mom never managed to cut. The skin on my back reacted with a pleasant shiver.
“They have us both tricked,” she continued. “Held prisoners. But you don’t want to be here anymore. They like this place. Living underground. With no sunlight.” Her fingers now sailed along the imaginary canals in my hair.
“Your brother even acts like a cricket when he makes that noise with his mouth,” she whispered.
I froze.
“When he makes what noise?”
“You know,” she replied, “that noise he makes with his mouth.” My sister made her lips vibrate while whistling. I didn’t understand why she was spitting on me. Then, for a second, she got the sound she was trying to mimic just right.
“The Cricket Man?” I had to swallow before I could go on. “My brother’s the Cricket Man?”
“You didn’t know that, either?” she asked. “Wow, they have you even more tricked than I thought.”
I covered myself in the sheet. I trembled under the material until I realized that something didn’t fit.
“It can’t be him,” I said. “I’ve heard the Cricket Man on top of the ceiling while my brother was sleeping here.”
My sister tutted. She was silent for a few seconds.
“I didn’t say it was him,” she corrected me. “But it’s him who summons the Cricket Man. He makes that noise with his mouth to call him.”
She repeated her slobbery imitation.
“He does it better,” she said, “even with his split lip.” My sister grabbed my wrist through the sheet.
“But don’t be afraid,” she said. “From now on I’m going to sleep here with you. You’re safe from that Cricket Man now, whoever he is.” She pulled back the sheet.
I turned on the mattress until I was lying face up. I said out loud something that wasn’t more than a thought. “They’re all tricking me.”
My sister breathed right near my ear.
“We don’t even know if thi
s is really a basement,” she whispered.
The heat in my chest rose when I heard her words. The firefly jar glowed at the foot of the bunk bed. Its light radiated from there like a green sun rising. My sister stroked my neck. It was a nice feeling.
“And the poor baby,” she went on. “Do you want them to trick him as well? Make him grow up in this basement full of lies?”
I shook my head.
For the first time I saw my sister’s eyebrows move. “Of course you don’t. And that’s why you have to listen to me. Nobody can know you’ve seen me without the mask on. Swear you won’t say anything.”
“How shall I swear it?”
“Like you swore not to tell what Dad did to me. They’re both very important secrets.”
I remembered the words from the other night.
“I swear on the One Up There,” I repeated.
“Good boy,” she said. “Between us, we can get out of here.”
“But Mom says we can’t be anywhere else. And that no one can know we’re here.”
“Another one of their lies. What you have to do is get out of here. Tell someone that the baby’s here. They’ll come get him. And you and I can go.”
“But I want to keep seeing the others . . .”
“They’ll still live here in the basement. Where they like being.”
“Will they be able to stay here when the people know where we live?”
“Of course they will.” My sister’s lips made a smile that didn’t seem happy. “Do you want me to tell you how to get out or not?”
“You can’t get out. The kitchen door’s locked. There’re bars on the windows.”
“But there’re a lot of things you don’t know,” she said. She paused on purpose to make me impatient.
“What things?”
“That there’s another door in this basement.” My hair brushing against the pillow was all we could hear in the deep silence that followed her words.
