by Paul Pen
“What’ve I done?” He raised his hands, protesting his innocence.
“You smell like smoke,” Melissa observed.
Rose held her hands to her chest. “Finally, she opens her mouth.”
Iris came out of the kitchen pouring milk into a bowl as if she couldn’t wait to serve it.
“When’re you leaving?” she asked her father. “You have to call the ambulance from the gas station. Are you going now?”
Rose got up.
“All right, leave your father in peace.” She stopped Iris from pouring the milk before the bowl overflowed. Iris seemed to have detached herself from her actions while she waited for Elmer to respond. “He’s going to take a shower”—she slapped her husband on the shoulder to let him know that he smelled like bonfire—“I’m going to fetch the twins, and you two are going to finish getting breakfast ready.”
She pulled Melissa up off the sofa and pushed her into the kitchen along with Iris, who turned her head back over her shoulder.
“Hurry, Dad, please.”
Rose and Elmer climbed the stairs. The smell of smoke on her husband’s T-shirt reassured her, because it meant all those documents no longer existed.
“He won’t wake up,” Elmer said about the boy. “I gave him three. He may well sleep till tomorrow.”
“And then what?” she asked. “What do we do then?”
Elmer went into the bathroom without speaking, the screech of the shower faucet as he turned it his only reply.
Rose held her ear to Melissa’s door. When she heard the boy breathing, she thought of Edelweiss.
In the twins’ room, she walked over the yellow carpet of sunlight that spread across the floor at that time of day and would disappear without a trace by midmorning. She sat on Daisy’s bed and shook the mattress with her backside, pushing herself with her feet on the floor. The little girl stirred between the sheets with a moan.
“The Breakfast Express is preparing to depart,” Rose announced, making the bedframe clatter. “All diners aboard the train!”
Dahlia, in the other bed, reacted first. She got down from her mattress and climbed onto Daisy’s to sit next to Rose. She hugged her with her eyes closed, her hair tangled.
“I’ll get on the train but I’ll sleep till we arrive.” She rested her head on Rose’s lap.
The chuckle Rose let out finally woke Daisy, who sat up with her head tilted, her eyelids still stuck together with sleepiness.
“What’s going on?”
“The breakfast train’s about to leave.” Rose intensified the clattering and Daisy changed her neck’s incline, searching for balance. “Up to you if you want to come.”
Daisy opened her left eye, squeezing the right one even more tightly shut. She smiled when she saw Rose driving a train her sister had already boarded. She took her seat on the other side, hanging on to Rose’s arm, ready to enjoy the scenery through the windows.
“But it has to be fast. I’m hungry,” Daisy said.
Rose laughed again. She pulled twice on an imaginary cord, imitating the sound of a whistle. She maintained the bed’s clattering and held her daughters. She wished they really could board a train and travel a thousand times around the world. So that the journey would never end.
Iris set a pile of silverware on the tablecloth. She sat opposite Melissa, who’d remained silent, with her hands on either side of her plate, while Iris finished making breakfast. She served herself a cup of coffee, added two spoonfuls of sugar, and stirred it as if ringing a handbell.
“Did you hear?” she asked. “He said my name. Rick, this morning. He wanted to talk to me.”
She took Melissa’s hand to share her excitement with her. A tear appeared over her sister’s lower eyelid. It fell onto the table, propelled by the pronounced ramp of her cheekbone, leaving a damp mark on the cloth that was soon lost among the traces of milk, water, and coffee.
“Is it classes again?” Iris asked. “I won’t lie, I struggle to comprehend why Socorro’s visits mean so much to you.”
Melissa caught her bottom lip between her teeth. She looked to one side. Then to the other.
“What? What is it?” Iris could see in her sister’s face when she was fighting with herself not to reveal a secret. “You can tell me, whatever it is. Have you found out something about Rick? Have you looked in his backpack? I don’t know where they’ve put it, but I’d love to take a peek inside.”
Melissa released her lip.
She breathed.
She fixed her eyes on Iris’s.
“What?” Iris pressed her, dragging her chair nearer the table with her feet.
Melissa let her shoulders drop.
“It’s Socorro,” she sighed.
Iris pushed her sister’s hand away as if discarding a book that no longer interested her.
“I thought it was something important.” She sipped her coffee, trapping the teaspoon with her finger. “Why’s Dad taking so long?”
The ceiling shook. The twins were running up there. Their screams reached the kitchen, mimicking a train’s whistle as they came down the stairs.
“No more peace and quiet,” said Iris. “The Breakfast Express has arrived.”
Melissa sniffed and dried her eyes.
Mom walked in just in time to see the gesture.
“Honey, you can’t spend the whole summer like this.” She inspected the table and nodded at Iris to give her approval. “It’s the only summer of your life when you’ll be thirteen years old. Don’t waste it.”
Melissa held her head with her knuckles at her temples, her elbows on the table, and cried over her plate. Mom shrugged, appealing to Iris for help, but Iris ignored her. Mom knelt down to greet the twins.
“End of the line.” She showed a palm as if it were a railway signal. “Please alight from the train and enter the restaurant.”
The little girls went to sit down, but when they discovered that Melissa was crying, they positioned themselves on either side of her chair.
“She’s still sad about the classes,” Iris explained. “She misses Socorro.”
Daisy separated Melissa’s hair from her face, hooking it behind her ears. Dahlia stroked her arm, walking her fingertips from Melissa’s wrist to her shoulder.
“They’re little ants,” Daisy said into her ear.
Melissa wiped her nose.
“How can you be sad when the cactuses are covered in flowers?” Daisy let her elder sister’s hair fall over her back and smoothed it down. “Just think how nice they’re going to smell tonight.”
Melissa leaned back in her chair and stretched out her arms with a smile. The twins accepted her invitation for a hug. They kissed their sister on each cheek, drying her eyes.
“You can’t complain about your sisters, that’s for sure,” Mom said. “They’re the sweetest little girls in all the state.”
“The only little girls!” they said at the same time.
Iris looked at the kitchen clock.
“Is Dad leaving or not?” she asked, arms crossed.
Elmer zipped up his coveralls. From his chin he plucked a square of toilet paper that was stuck to the skin with dried blood. He never cut himself shaving, but today the razor had nicked him five times. Now he was by Rick’s bed, assessing his condition. The sedatives had slowed the rhythm of his breathing so much that the pause between each breath was worrying. Rick’s lips were so dry that they’d lost their color and were barely distinguishable from the rest of his skin. His black eye looked worse than yesterday, it could continue to swell.
Elmer was glad he didn’t have to see anything from the chin down. The sheet covered the bruises, the protruding bones, the rope with which he himself had bound the kid’s wrists. He felt the urge to vomit. Not because of the wounded flesh in front of him, but because of his actions. He overcame the wave of nausea by imagining Rick’s body uninjured under the sheet. The white material covered his entire anatomy, and Elmer could persuade himself that it hid smooth, healthy skin. Defined, intact mu
scles. The need to throw up began to subside. Elmer was an expert at spreading white sheets over reality.
“You’re going to stay like this till I get back.” He inhaled deeply to rid himself of the last remnants of nausea.
On the reassuring clean white of the material appeared a stain—a yellowish wet patch that expanded its circumference over Rick’s pelvis. A chemical smell filled the room.
“Oh no.” Elmer held his hands out toward the stain as if he could stop its progress, but he didn’t even touch the sheet. “No, no, no.”
He left the room.
He went downstairs, hearing the twins whistle like trains in the kitchen. Cutlery scraped against a plate.
Seeing him come down, his wife walked up to him. “You’re not having breakfast?” She dried her hands on her apron.
“You think I’m hungry?”
“I can see the state you’re in.” She peeled the toilet paper from the cuts on his face. “I can’t eat, either. And Melissa hasn’t touched her food. I wish I understood that girl, there’s no getting through to her.”
They walked to the front door together.
“He’s wet the bed,” Elmer whispered into Rose’s ear.
“Just wet it?” She wrinkled her nose.
“I think so.”
“I’ll go up in a second, when the girls have finished. And you.” She rested a hand on his face. “Come back soon.”
“I don’t know what they’re going to think of me after I didn’t show up yesterday.”
“Make something up, anything. I don’t want us to be alone with him.”
“You’re five against one,” he said, repeating the argument she had used the morning before.
“That’s what I said before I knew who he was.”
“He won’t wake up. He’s barely breathing.”
He opened the front door. When he went to open the screen door, his hand was left in the air. The confusion lasted a few seconds, until he remembered that the kid had ruined it. Chairs in the kitchen scraped against the floor. The twins ran after him.
“You’re going already?”
“You’re going already?”
Iris appeared behind them. “Call the ambulance first.” She grabbed the sleeve of his coveralls and shook it. “As soon as you arrive.”
“I will.” Elmer tried to hold her gaze but looked away, at Rose.
His wife pulled Iris’s hand away, smoothing down the creases she’d left on the fabric.
“Melissa!” Rose yelled. “Melissa, aren’t you going to say goodbye to your father?”
There was silence.
“Goodbye, Dad,” she said from the kitchen, a halfhearted murmur.
“Goodbye, honey,” he called.
On the porch, Rose kissed him on one corner of his mouth. “Come back soon,” she whispered.
“Come back soon!” cried the twins.
They wanted to follow him out, but Rose held them by their shoulders. “You can’t keep him today.”
Elmer walked down the three steps while the girls kicked against the floor, trying to free themselves from the trap. Before reaching the pickup, he turned and waved.
“Please, Dad!” Iris yelled, perching on the handrail. “Call right away.”
He turned without responding so he wouldn’t have to lie. Before climbing into the truck, he extracted pieces of glass from a headlight. From the grille he removed a lump of cactus that had survived his cleaning of the truck. Other signs of the collision, like the bent side mirror, were camouflaged by the general disrepair of a truck beaten up by weather and time. With his hands on the steering wheel, he discovered Melissa observing him from the kitchen window. She was moving her lips, speaking to one of her rocks. Elmer put the truck into reverse, turned the wheel, and set off up the road. He stepped on the gas. In the rearview mirror, Rose and the little girls were still waving goodbye from the porch.
Elmer drove with his eyes fixed on one side of the road until he found the mound of stones that marked the position of Rick’s car. He got out of the pickup. Among the cactuses he saw the same glint he’d seen yesterday: the sun reflecting off the Lincoln’s bodywork. From behind his seat, Elmer pulled out the kid’s backpack. The boots, with a ball of socks inside, hung from the straps. He picked up a can of gasoline from behind the seat, one of the ones he filled without permission at the end of his shift at the gas station to reduce the cost of running the generator at home. He selected a screwdriver from among the tools scattered around the truck’s cargo area. The matches he carried in the pocket of his coveralls shook in their box with each step he took toward the car. First he unscrewed the license plates. Then he let the air out of the tires. He splashed the upholstery with gasoline and started the fire on the driver’s seat. He waited for the flames to spread. Returning to the pickup, he felt the heat on the back of his neck, across his back.
Rose took a key out from her apron and opened the bedroom door. She was carrying a stack of clean sheets, holding them against her hip. When she put them down on Melissa’s desk, magazine cuttings fell to the floor. It was a few minutes before she was able to lay her eyes on Rick. She held her hand to her mouth when she saw the bruises on his face, the damp circle on the sheet. When she freed the edges from under the mattress, she was surprised at how tight she had made the sheet, at the pressure it exerted on the boy’s body. She rested a hand on his chest by way of an apology. She removed the dirty sheet by rolling it down from his chin to his feet, sucking in air through her teeth several times as she uncovered the injured body. She left the roll of wet material on the floor and slid the bottom sheet from under Rick. He groaned when her actions moved his limbs.
“Nearly done, nearly done.”
She gave a final tug to pull out a corner of fabric trapped under the heel of his twisted foot. She piled that sheet on top of the other one. From the top of the stack on the desk she took a towel she’d moistened in the bathroom. She cleaned Rick’s skin, avoiding the most damaged areas. The rope had made new wounds. She tended to Rick’s genital area unabashedly, as a mother would. When she covered the mattress with the clean bottom sheet, she knew she was hurting him again, but it was impossible not to move him. Then she let the second sheet fall onto his body. She thought about making it less tight than before, but remembering the accusations Rick had leveled at her, she tucked it under the mattress as far as her hand would reach.
She sat on the bed. She stroked the contours of his eyes, that part of him that reminded her so much of Edelweiss.
“What’re we going to do with you, huh?” she whispered. “If only you’d never come.”
She chose three locks of hair on his forehead and shaped them before brushing them to one side, then ran a fingertip over his eyebrows.
“I’d have liked to have had a son.” She felt the angle of his jaw as she wished that she could have witnessed a boy grow up. Seen a face widen, heard the voice of a child transform into a man’s. Elmer would’ve taught him to shave, would have played basketball with him with the hoop and the backboard that they ended up using one summer to light the barbecue. “Shall I tell you something? My husband thought the twins were boys. We only realized when he got home.”
She smiled to herself, moving her finger down to Rick’s Adam’s apple, then up along his hairline, stopping at the corners where his hair receded, corners none of her daughters would have.
“It would have been nice to have had a boy.”
The sound of the twins’ laughter came in through the window, as if they’d wanted to distracted her from her thoughts. She saw Daisy and Dahlia running around outside, chasing each other in turns that seemed random. Farther away, almost on the horizon, a plume of black smoke rose up from among the cacti.
“I’m sorry.” Rose stroked Rick’s face. “I’m so sorry. If only you’d never come.”
Melissa poked at the remnants of ash on top of the still-warm metal of the barbecue. They consisted of a pile of black sheets that broke up when touched, turning into a
black powder that fell through the cracks in the grill. She pulled out the tray. The rusty screech of the rails set her teeth on edge. With a finger, she bored through the mountain of ash until she hit the edge of a page. She dragged it to one side of the tray. It was a little triangle. She picked it up between two fingers and blew hard to remove the soot, revealing a piece of brown card. The corner of the folder that had contained the documents.
“What’s that fire?” Iris asked from the porch.
Melissa pushed the tray back under the grill, biting her tongue to fend off the shivers. She expected to find Iris leaning on the handrail, right above the barbecue, asking about the pile of ash to which her father had reduced the suffering of so many families. But Iris was standing on the porch steps. With her hand at her forehead, she was looking at something in the distance.
“What could that fire be?” she said again. “Turn around. See?”
She indicated to Melissa the direction in which she should look. As soon as she turned, Melissa saw a plume of smoke originating somewhere in the desert. It climbed into the sky, forming a black cloud. Melissa moved the triangle of card between her fingers, pricking herself with the sharpest point. She wondered what her father was burning now.
“What’re you looking at?”
“What’re you looking at?”
The twins ran up to them. They climbed onto the porch and let out a sigh of wonder when they discovered the black cloud. Mom came out of the house, carrying a ball of sheets.
“What’s that smoke, Mommy?”
“What’s that smoke, Mommy?”
“It’s nothing, girls, the sun must’ve set fire to a dead cactus.”
Melissa didn’t like the ease with which her mother lied to the twins. She took a few steps to distance herself from the barbecue.
“Is our house going to burn down?” the twins asked.
“Of course not.” Their mother came down the stairs, going around Iris. “The fire will consume the cactus, and then it’ll have nowhere to go with all this sand and rock.”
Mom looked at Melissa. “Feeling better?”
Melissa clenched her fist, driving the corner of the card into her palm. She nodded, though it was a lie.
