by Paul Pen
“I . . . this . . . it was . . .”
She didn’t know what words to use to express herself. She kissed Rick’s lips once more.
“I love you.” The feeling was now a physical reality that had changed her body forever. “You’re going to be OK.”
She went back to her bedroom feeling so ethereal that her feet might not have touched the roof. She landed between her sheets as if returning from a magical nocturnal flight.
Melissa opened her eyes. She’d fallen asleep. She turned her face toward the window, her stomach tense. The darkness on the horizon was total—it was still the middle of the night. She sighed with relief and felt a tingling in her urethra.
“It worked,” she whispered to Marlon.
She walked with her legs together to the toilet, her thighs rubbing against each other. She peed out the three glasses of water she’d drunk as an alarm system. On her way back to the living room, she stopped at the foot of the stairs. She pricked her ears. The silence was the same as it always was in the early hours. Melissa retrieved Marlon and went outside, through the back door in the kitchen. She walked around the house to the porch. She climbed up the post with the dried-up paint, the one that scratched her hands but led straight to her window. She entered her bedroom through the broken pane.
The room still smelled like used Band-Aids. As it had the previous night, the sheet covered Rick to the chin. His position was almost identical.
“And to think how much I move around in that bed when I sleep . . .”
Melissa left Marlon on the shelf, where there was no longer a folder. On tiptoes, she felt around for Clark. She recognized him by the distinctive hole in one ear. Moving the stones around, the changes of weight on the shelving, made it creak. Melissa tightened the nut that always came loose.
“Till next time, Marlon,” she whispered. “Good evening, Clark.”
Then she turned to Rick.
“I need to speak to you. It’s important.”
She touched his shoulder, but he didn’t wake up. Melissa held her mouth near his ear. She raised the volume of her voice as far as she considered prudent.
“Wake up, I have to speak to you.”
She waited a few seconds. There was no response. She pinched his nose. She thought he’d wake, desperate for a breath of air, but his lips opened a crack and he breathed through his mouth. Melissa scanned her room, inspecting her belongings. In a drawer, she kept some paintbrushes, old jars of tempera, watercolor sets, and tubes of oil paint. She rummaged through the contents until she found a bottle of turpentine, a paint thinner she’d only used once, to erase the mouth from a rock that looked too sad. When she unscrewed the lid, she had to tilt her head to one side to escape the pungent smell. She held the opening to Rick’s nose, then waved the bottle in front of his face. She blew at the liquid to make it easier for him to inhale its fumes.
“Wake up.” She shook him by the shoulder again. “How can you sleep like this?”
The thinner had no effect. Melissa put it back. She found the lantern, lit the candle with a match. She investigated the medication on the bedside table. Salicex. Profineril. Dormepam. She knew Mom used those last ones when she was struggling. She said they helped her sleep. Melissa held the box to the lantern, illuminating the text on the back. Although it was in Spanish, she understood the meaning of 6 horas. She looked out at the dark sky speckled with stars. She tried to calculate how long ago Dad would’ve gone to bed.
“I’m going to wait,” she whispered to Rick. “Please wake up before dawn.”
From the same chest of drawers that contained the tempera, Melissa took a sketchbook. She flicked through the pages until she came to a blank one. From a can of pencils on her desk, she selected the sharpest. Then she moved the chair next to the bed. Sitting in front of Rick, in the orangey light of the lantern, she removed the hair from her face with her pinkies and began to draw him. The angle of his jaw was her first stroke. She kept true to the position he was in—lying flat, covered in the sheet up to the chin, his head resting on the pillow. But she ignored the wounds on his forehead, the cut on his nose, the bruises on his cheeks. In her drawing, Rick was a healthy guy sleeping peacefully on a bed that could’ve been his own.
The final detail she added to the portrait was his eyelashes.
The pencil’s tip was blunt from so many strokes.
Melissa turned her head.
A yellowish radiance told her that day was about to break, as if the horizon were a corner the sun was about to turn.
“Come on. Please.” She pinched Rick’s cheek. “I’m running out of time. We need to talk.”
Rick felt a tingling on his cheek—a sudden focus of sensation in a body that could have been made of stone. In his state of sedation, he imagined that he was a statue of white marble. And that a pink spot had appeared on his cheek. A scale of human skin. A cluster of living cells that began to infect the surrounding mineral material, spreading throughout the anatomy until it covered the statue in organic tissue.
And that statue coated in life was him.
He woke with a spasm.
When he opened his eyes, his optic nerve smarted all the way to the back of his neck. The pain in each joint made it clear he was no statue. Stone didn’t hurt like that. He recognized the room he was in. He remembered what had happened. He tried to move his wrists, but he was still tied up. Pinching fingers were causing the sensation that had brought him back to life.
“You’re awake.”
Alarmed, he turned his face toward the girl’s voice, feeling a stab of pain from his neck to the middle of his back. He saw a nightgown. A midlength head of hair. A stone with eyes.
“I need to speak to you.”
It was the middle sister. Marguerite. No, Melissa. Rick scanned the room. He was afraid he’d find Elmer at the foot of the bed, crouched in a corner, perching on a shelf, hanging from the ceiling. That man could come out from between the sheets at any moment and stick his gasoline-flavored fingers in Rick’s mouth. Fingers that dulled his senses. He writhed, trying to escape the threat that wasn’t there. He ignored the crunches within his flesh, the crackle in the tissues. His body’s twisting made cramps spread to his buttocks.
“Quit it, Dad will hear you.”
Rick stopped. “Are you alone?”
She nodded.
“Help me.” He spat the words out through his teeth, dizzy from the pain that the motion of his eyes had detonated in his head. “Melissa, please, help me.”
“Don’t worry, you’re OK.” She rested a hand on his chest. “My parents are taking care of you.”
“Melissa, your parents . . .” Rick looked at the face of the girl who spoke to him as if lulling a restless baby to sleep. As if instead of his having broken bones, lying on a rope that bound his hands together, and being riddled with cactus spines, his stomach had merely been upset by some bad food. Melissa’s face was a bubble of innocence, ignorant to the truth. Rick felt incapable of touching her with his dirty, reality-covered fingers, of destroying something so fragile with the information he possessed. “I need a hospital . . . Please, Melissa, tell someone I’m here.”
The morning light that began to illuminate the room helped Rick read the girl’s eyes for the first time. There was an incongruous maturity in her look.
Melissa removed her hand from his chest. She took a deep breath.
“Are you Edelweiss’s brother?”
The bubble exploded in front of Rick’s eyes without him touching it.
“You know?”
“I was here last night.” A film of tears clouded her eyes. “I saw your folder. My parents did all of that?”
If the rope that bound him had suddenly disappeared, Rick would have used his freedom not to tend his injuries but to hold Melissa. The sadness he saw in those eyes hurt him more than his two fractured knees. He squirmed, as if he could somehow halt the loss of innocence, plug the leak with his hands.
“I’m sorry,” Rick said, as if
it were his fault.
He had too often seen the void that hope leaves when it abandons someone. How dull the eyes become after losing the light of expectation. He’d seen it go out in his mother’s eyes. His father’s. Sometimes even in the ones he saw in the mirror. But seeing it happen in the eyes of a young girl was heartbreaking.
“I’m so sorry,” he repeated.
Melissa stroked her stone and pressed it against her belly.
“My parents did all of that?”
Her eyes traveled around the room, filling with tears as they paused on certain locations. Family memories that no longer had the same meaning, Rick guessed. Maybe she was looking at pen marks on the door frame that recorded her growth. Or some old toy that her parents had given her years ago.
“I’m the baby from the orphanage, right?” she blurted out. “In your articles. Those ones are the stories about me.”
Rick nodded.
The way she lowered her head and looked at her feet moved him.
“They didn’t steal me from a family,” she said to the floor.
“But they did your sisters. Like Edelweiss, my sister. Her name was Elizabeth.”
Melissa wiped her tears.
“I read about it. It’s a very pretty name.” She sniffed. “Though I like Edelweiss more.”
He conceded with a nod.
“She was a great sister,” she whispered. “The best.”
“She was?” The pain disappeared from his body, numbed by a warm feeling of happiness.
“It was her that gave me the idea to put eyes on my stones. And on the cactuses. She knew that I felt lonely here, so far away from everything, that I wanted to talk to other people. One day she showed up in my room, right here, with four rocks and an old movie magazine. Between the two of us we found the nicest eyes from all the pictures and brought the stones to life. We did the mouths with a paintbrush.” Melissa traced a smile on her own face. “Dad brought the magazines for her, and now he brings them for me. Edelweiss liked the photos of the actors. See that drawing of her with the guitar and a towel on her head?” She pointed at one of the portraits on the wall. “We were copying a photograph of an actress. She never saw the movie, or heard the song she played, but she loved the picture.”
Rick recognized a scene featuring Audrey Hepburn. He remembered how his mother had cried watching the movie at the theater, unaware there was a drawing of her missing daughter imitating that image. When the melody his mother had whistled for days, the tune the actress played on her guitar in the movie, played in his head, the anesthesia of happiness stopped working. The pain returned, to the joints and to the muscles, but it was a pain so deep he wasn’t sure it was just physical.
“You don’t know how much I’d have liked to have known her . . .”
As he had just done, Melissa said sorry, even if what had happened had nothing to do with her. From a chair beside the bed she retrieved a sketchbook. She left the pencil on the bedside table.
“I did this.”
She turned the book around. He saw himself reproduced on the paper, his face repeated on the page as if it were a mirror. Although he hadn’t seen himself since the truck hit him, he knew Melissa had left out his injuries. The burning sensation on his forehead and the palpitations in his right eyebrow couldn’t belong to that unscathed face drawn in pencil.
“Your eyes are like Edelweiss’s,” Melissa noted.
“They’re our mother’s eyes.” The whistled melody returned to his mind. “That’s how I recognized Elizabeth in the drawing you showed me in the living room.”
Melissa tried to take his hand, but trapped as it was under the sheet, she ended up resting hers on his chest.
“Why’ve you covered yourself up like this? Aren’t you hot?”
“Melissa . . .” He hesitated, reluctant to pop the bubble with his fingers. “Your parents have me tied up.”
“Tied up?”
She took a step back.
“I need your help, Melissa. Can you make a call?”
“We don’t have a phone.”
“Walk to another house, the nearest one.”
“There aren’t any near here.”
“Drive? Do you know how to drive?”
“I’m thirteen.”
“Then tell someone, your sister. Tell Iris. Have you told her . . . ?”
She shook her head.
“Tell her I’m tied up. That your parents aren’t making me better. That I need help.”
Melissa held her hands to her face. She moved them to her ears as though toying with the possibility of covering them so she couldn’t hear. As if she wanted to stop hearing.
“What will happen to my parents? And to us?”
Rick opened his mouth to say something, but closed it without uttering a word. He didn’t want to lie, nor was it wise for him to tell the truth. He fell silent while the furrows on her forehead changed shape and anguished whimpers emerged from her throat. She scraped the palms of her hands against her stone. The girl in front of him had to decide whether to help a stranger—and in doing so, destroy her parents, break up her family, and end the life she knew—or do nothing so that everything would stay the same.
Rick was gripped by the certainty that he would die in that bed.
“I’ve often felt I don’t belong in this place.” Melissa looked up at the ceiling. “Sometimes my family don’t understand me. I can’t talk about my stuff with Mom. I’ve wished I could live somewhere else. With more people. In a city. To have friends other than my sisters, some rocks, and a few cactuses.”
“You can have all of that,” Rick whispered.
“I could?” A flicker of a smile lit up her face for an instant.
“You could. A new life. Somewhere else.”
The first rays of sun poured in through the window and lit up the wall of portraits. The appearance of the band of light caught Melissa’s attention, as it did Rick’s. The flecks of dust shining in the amber glow of dawn created a veil of sparkles that gave the portraits a magical quality. Like memories floating in a golden consciousness, in a perfect past.
“They’re my parents,” Melissa said.
The affection with which she looked at the pictures tightened the grip of terror on Rick.
“You have to help me.” His voice took on a pitiful tone. “Please, Melissa, you have to do something.”
A floorboard creaked outside the room.
Melissa looked at the door.
“It’s Dad.”
“Untie me,” Rick pleaded. “At least untie me.”
Melissa searched for the edge of the sheet at the side of the mattress.
“It’s tucked under.”
She tugged on it, making the bed shake with each attempt. Rick clenched his teeth, confronting the pain that each jolt caused. The headboard banged against the wall.
“He’s going to come in,” Melissa whispered. “I have to go.”
“Please, do something. You have to help me.”
“He’s going to see me . . .”
Melissa moved away with an arm stretched out toward him, as if struggling to separate herself from the bed, to leave him there. She closed the sketchbook and returned it to the shelf. She put the lantern back and moved the chair.
Through the crack under the door, she could make out Dad’s feet.
The key entered the lock.
Melissa climbed onto the desk.
The handle turned.
From the other side of the window, standing on the porch roof, Melissa gave Rick a look in which it was impossible to read whether fear, sadness, guilt, or affection carried the most weight.
Elmer walked into the room.
The desk was still rocking.
The gasoline smell that accompanied him was weaker than at other times, but Rick could still taste it on his palate. He began coughing to distract Elmer from the empty frame through which Melissa had just disappeared.
Elmer didn’t bother tending to him. He went straight to t
he window.
He leaned out and grunted in suspicion.
Rick closed his eyes, held his breath.
He feared the worst.
“Hi, Dad,” he heard Melissa yell.
Her voice sounded far away, as if she was wandering the land.
“Up already?”
“I couldn’t sleep. It’s so hot in the living room as soon as the sun hits it.” Her casual tone was believable. “I’m going to speak to my cactuses.”
Rick breathed out. He opened his eyes a crack.
“The dawn’s so beautiful from your bedrooms,” Elmer yelled. “The whole desert, just for you girls.”
“The best thing is that the first place the sun shines is on the portraits.”
He turned toward the wall. Then he gave his daughter a thumbs-up, sticking his arm out through the broken pane.
That was when Rick saw Melissa’s pencil on the bedside table.
She’d left it among the medicine boxes.
His body made an instinctive attempt to grab it, but his wrists were still tied, however much his nervous system refused to accept it. He considered blowing at the pencil but gave up on the idea when he imagined it rolling along the floor to Elmer’s feet.
Elmer turned around.
Rick closed his eyes. He slowed his breathing to pretend to be sleeping, though his heart rate demanded otherwise. In the darkness of his mind, a single thought twinkled.
That Elmer must not see the pencil.
The bedframe moved slightly to the left when Elmer leaned against the other side. Perhaps he was observing Rick, deciding what to do with him. Or with his corpse.
“What’re we going to do with you?”
Rick slowed his breathing. He could hear the floorboards dip under Elmer’s weight. He was at the bedside table. Moving medicine boxes around. Paper rustled. The water bubbled in the glass as it filled. Elmer folded some cardboard. There was a metallic tear, a plastic cracking sound. The sequence was repeated twice more. He was taking out the pills.
