by Paul Pen
“I asked you if you wanted me to switch them—”
Elmer covered his wife’s mouth to stop her from starting another argument. Rose went down off the porch, hugged Melissa, brushed the hair from her face.
“Honey, why would you do something like that? Put your life in danger for some rocks?”
“I wasn’t in any danger.”
“Did you see anything?”
“I was in and out. It was dark.”
“Did he try to do anything to you?”
Melissa shook her head and pressed her chin against her chest. A tear fell onto the dirt. Elmer thought about approaching, consoling his daughter the way he had when she was younger, holding her face against his chest and stroking it, but he let Rose do it.
“Don’t cry, don’t be afraid.” She dried her daughter’s cheeks with her thumbs. “You can’t go in that bedroom, you hear me?” She turned her head to include all the sisters in her warning. “If I have to I’ll stand guard myself inside the room. You have to understand, that boy’s dangerous.”
Melissa’s crying intensified, her shoulders trembling.
“What is it, honey?” asked Rose. “What’ve I said?”
Melissa didn’t answer. Elmer caught Iris holding Rick’s T-shirt to her nose. She closed her eyes as she smelled it.
“What’re you doing?” He tore the garment from her hands with a tug. “What kind of a girl am I bringing up?”
The rage that had flushed Iris’s cheeks red during her clash with Rose now hardened the angles of her face.
“I’m no girl, Dad. I’m a woman. And I have every right to fall in love with a man.”
“Hang on, hang on.” He shook his head. “What?”
“Yes, fall in love with a boy.”
“This boy?” He held up the T-shirt as if it were roadkill.
“Iris, please, don’t be ridiculous,” Rose cut in. “You’ve known him for a day.”
Iris moved closer to the steps. “And how long did Marius need to know that he loved Cosette?”
Elmer didn’t understand the reference, but Rose was left openmouthed.
“Loved?”
“Yes, Mom. Love.”
Rose ignored Melissa’s crying. She went into the house and paced around the kitchen. She returned with something in her hand.
“Love a boy who fired a gun at your mother?”
Rose showed her the remains of a shotgun shell. She held it so close to Iris’s face that she had to turn away so it wouldn’t touch her nose.
Elmer snorted. “I think I’ve been buying you too many romantic novels . . .”
Iris fled into the house and scampered up the stairs. She slammed her bedroom door so hard that the porch shook. Elmer went after her, but only climbed the first step. Much the way he hadn’t known how to go to Melissa to console her, he had no idea what he could say to Iris to make her feel better.
The wind flapped Melissa’s nightgown as she stood at Edelweiss’s grave. A shiver ran through the skin on her arms. She looked at the cross, using a pinkie to remove the hair the current of air had thrown onto her face. The moon cast shadows in the grooves of each letter engraved in the wood, misshaping Dad’s writing. A gust of wind carried off the wilted flower arrangement before she could react, scattering lifeless flowers across the land. Some of them were caught between the rocks that marked out the grave, the ones the twins had decorated with colored beads. Most of them rolled off into the darkness. Melissa watched them fly toward the shadows.
“I don’t know whether I’m doing the right thing,” she whispered to her sister. “I just hope you understand.”
Although she could hear the voices of her cacti and stones with ease, Melissa had never heard her sister’s again except in her memories—words that she’d said when she was alive. Now she listened with her face tilted to one side, an ear aimed at the grave. In the distance, she heard the agitated murmurs of Needles, Pins, and Thorns, who must have been carrying on the heated debate from earlier in the day. Clark, whom she held in her hands, wanted to say something, too, but Melissa hushed him. The only person she wanted to hear was Edelweiss. She pleaded inwardly for her to respond, to please tell her what she thought about the decision Melissa had made. She closed her eyes and visualized her sister approaching with her everlasting smile, enveloped in the honey smell of her hair. Edelweiss took her by a shoulder, and she moved her lips, yet Melissa could hear nothing but the howl of the night wind. It roared in her ears, muting the world. When she opened her eyes again, her sister was just a wooden cross with a name written on it in shadows.
“I hope you understand,” she said again. “Rick’s a good guy.”
The hinges on the back door squeaked. Mom poked her head out.
“You still there? It’s time to come in, there’s a lot of wind.”
Crouching, Melissa patted the earth, saying goodbye to Edelweiss.
In the kitchen, Mom was clearing away the final remains of dinner. She scraped a fork against a plate, throwing the food Iris hadn’t touched into the trash. She hadn’t come out of her room since the fight. Dad was going up to put the twins to bed.
Melissa left Clark on the living room table, on top of the science book that Iris had somehow stained with iodine. She heard Mom turn on the tap, squeeze the dish-soap bottle, scrub something with the scourer. She retrieved her sketchbook from its hiding place behind the sofa and opened it to the last page, where she was keeping Rick’s clippings. She’d studied them so many times that she had almost learned them by heart, though she tried hard to ignore the real names her sisters had possessed in their first months, or days, of life. It was also strange for her to read the names of the towns they’d come from, far-off places where they had never really set foot. Those names, those towns, seemed like strange words from a foreign vocabulary, a language invented to tell the gigantic lie that was the other reality the newspapers spoke of. Or maybe the lie was this reality, in which Mom had given flower names to five girls hidden away in a house among the cactuses. Much of Melissa’s discussion with Needles, Pins, and Thorns had revolved around figuring out what was more real: the families the sisters had never been a part of, or the one Mom and Dad had created for them.
Melissa turned a page in the sketchbook and fixed her eyes on the drawing she’d been looking at with Iris after lunch. A snapshot in which Edelweiss still appeared, and where Melissa herself could be seen—she seldom added herself to her drawings. It was an image from a family’s perfect past. Melissa repeated in a mumble the words Iris had said to her when she’d tried to change a detail in the portrait.
“Don’t change anything,” she murmured in the living room.
“What’s that?”
Mom’s voice made her jump. She was looking at her from the entrance to the living room, drying her hands on her clothes. Melissa closed the sketchbook.
“Were you talking to your rock?” Mom sat on the sofa next to her. “Do you want me to switch it for another one?”
Melissa moved the sketchbook over to the side away from Mom, between her body and the arm of the sofa.
“I promise I’m going to do my part to make sure we communicate better,” Mom said. “It’s pretty clear to me now how important it is for you to follow the order with your stones, and I’m going to try to attach the same importance to things as you do. If I’d listened to you when you told me the first time, you wouldn’t have done what you did.”
Melissa sighed. She preferred not to hear Mom talk about Rick.
“Are you all right, honey?”
She nodded, even though it wasn’t true.
“I want to start proving it to you, so I’m going to ask Dad to take you to the gas station so you can speak to your teacher, if that’s what you really want.” She pinched Melissa’s cheek. “Do you still want to talk to Socorro?”
Melissa hugged the sketchbook that contained news of destroyed families among the drawings of a happy family built on their suffering. They were two realities that could
not coexist, and it was up to Melissa to decide which one prevailed. She looked at the science book where Socorro had written her telephone number. Then she closed her eyes. Her mind rang with Needles, Pins, and Thorns’s arguments. She also visualized Edelweiss, floating in front of her as she’d just done at her grave. Melissa gave her one last chance to speak her mind, but on her translucent face all she could see was a smile.
“No, it’s all right, Mom.” Melissa opened her eyes. “I don’t have to speak to my teacher.”
“Good,” said Mom, unaware of the true implications of the decision her daughter had just made. “We’re going to have a great summer.”
Melissa squeezed the sketchbook hard, silencing the imaginary cries of the people in the articles’ photographs—people whose pain she couldn’t allow herself to hear, even if Rick was among them.
Mom brushed aside her bangs as if she were a little girl. “You’ll have your bed back soon.”
Melissa preferred not to ascribe a specific meaning to those words. She pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth to hold back her tears.
Rose said good night to Melissa with a kiss on the cheek. She went to the window to say good night to Edelweiss. Upstairs she found Elmer, who was coming out of the twins’ room, taking care not to make any noise as he closed the door.
“Can you explain to me now why you’re covered in bruises?” he whispered when he saw her.
They hadn’t had a moment alone since he’d returned. Rose gestured with her head that they should go into Rick’s room. She opened it with the key she’d taken from her apron. When she turned on the light, Elmer’s eyes doubled in size as he saw the fallen shelf, the rocks stacked in the corner.
“Was it him?” His initial anger turned to disbelief. “Was it?”
Rose nodded. She told him about the pills that Rick had spat out, the loose bolt, and the rocks raining down on her back. The muscles in her husband’s jaw grew tenser as she told him how the struggle had unfolded.
“But you’re all right?”
“It hurts, a bit”—Rose massaged her shoulder, making light of it—“but we can’t keep him here. Not after what he did to me. I swear, just thinking that Melissa’s been here, that he could’ve . . .” Her voice failed her.
She let her husband comfort her, rub her back.
“And what Iris said . . . In love?” Rose uttered the word as if it tasted bad in her mouth. She shook her head, biting her bottom lip, remembering Socorro’s warnings about the needs of a young woman her daughter’s age. “We can’t keep this boy here. Not anymore. How long do you think it’ll be before Iris tries to sneak in through the window now that I’ve told her how to do it?”
In the bed, Rick went into spasm. He groaned, shaking his head as if about to wake, but his body relaxed again. His breathing steadied its rhythm.
“We have to do something,” said Rose.
Elmer understood. He paced around the room, from one wall to another, with his hands on his hips. His fingers went white from the pressure they exerted. Then he grabbed his chin and squeezed it hard.
“I was about to let him go,” he said. “When I stopped in front of him with the truck, there was a moment when I thought about letting him get away, letting him run off through the cactuses. I didn’t think I was capable of running him down. I never thought I could do something like that. I didn’t want us to be that kind of people. I squeezed the steering wheel”—now he clenched his fists in the air—“accepting that the time had come to face up to the consequences of what we’ve done.”
“What we’ve done is bring up a beautiful family.” Rose stroked his face. “Love our daughters more than anything in the world.”
“That’s why I hit the gas.” Elmer guided her hand to his heart. “And I think I’ll hit it again if I have to. Maybe we are that kind of people.”
“We wouldn’t be if he hadn’t come,” Rose whispered. “If only he hadn’t come . . .”
She rested her cheek against her husband’s chest. When she noticed his efforts to hide that he was crying, she hugged him around the waist. She didn’t ask him why he sniffed, or why he dried his eyes with his wrists. She didn’t look him in the face until she knew he’d recomposed himself.
“How do we do it?” he asked.
Rose broke away and went to the bedside table. She spread all the blister packs of Dormepam over the bed and looked at her husband.
Elmer lowered his head, accepting the suggestion. He pushed aside the movie magazines and cans of pencils on Melissa’s desk, placing the glass in the space he’d made. He tilted the pitcher in front of his eyes and found it empty.
“I’ll go.” Rose took it from his hands.
Elmer transferred the blister packs to the desk. He sat on the chair with a sigh with which part of his soul seemed to escape. He began popping out the pills. Rose was hypnotized, watching them fall onto the table with each plastic crackle her husband’s thumbs produced.
She didn’t even realize that Iris had come to the door.
“I don’t care that you’re there,” she said through the crack. “Rick, hold on, you’re going to be OK. My heart is and will always be yours.”
The handle shook. Elmer covered the pile of tablets as if Iris had come into the room, though they both knew the door was locked. Rose showed him the pitcher, indicating that she was going to fetch water. She told Iris to take a step back before opening the door. As soon as she went out, her daughter leapt into the doorway, trying to see something. Rose closed the door in her face.
“I’ll fill it.” Iris took hold of the pitcher’s base. “Please, Mom, I’ll fill it. I’ll bring it up to him.”
Rose moved her aside with an arm. “I don’t know what else has to happen before you all understand that this boy’s dangerous. We’re taking care of him. There’s nothing you girls can do.”
A sudden calm relaxed Iris’s face.
“Good night, Rick.” She spoke straight to the door, as if Rose no longer existed. “Hold on.”
“That’s enough. Get back to your room.” Rose gestured at it with her chin. “Your sisters are sleeping.”
Iris turned away and returned to her bedroom. Rose expected her to slam the door shut, but she closed it gently. She locked it from the inside, as they’d insisted she do these last few days.
“Sleep well, honey,” Rose whispered.
She went down to the kitchen without making much noise in case Melissa was already asleep. She left the empty pitcher on the counter. She took the water from the refrigerator, but stopped before filling it. She’d seen something next to the blender.
She went back to the bedroom without the pitcher.
Elmer was crushing the heap of tablets with the glass. After that he rolled its thick base over the pieces, reducing them to powder. He ended up with a pile large enough to fill a salt shaker.
“The water?” he asked when he saw her.
Rose showed him the bottle of mescal she’d brought. The one Rick had drunk from on the first night. With his fingernail, Elmer tapped the glass to dislodge the powdered pills stuck to it.
Iris sat at her dressing table.
From the powder compact, she dug out the hidden truck key. She shook it, blew on it. She fanned the air to disperse the cloud of makeup.
She looked out the window without leaning through it, her back pressed against the wall beside the frame.
Mom had gone back to Rick’s bedroom after filling the water pitcher in the kitchen. The light from the room projected a luminous square on the porch roof. Vague shadows betrayed her parents’ movements inside.
“Come on, come on.”
She was going to set off when they were asleep. She’d tested where to tread so that the boards didn’t creak. Made sure the back door in the kitchen was open.
“Go back to your room.”
She opened her book on the dressing table. She was unable to concentrate on what she was reading. The letters on the page seemed to rearrange themselves to
spell out her thoughts.
She brushed her hair, counting the strokes back from one hundred. She did so with such force that the brushing hurt her scalp. The teeth of the brush caught dozens of hairs like the one Mom had discovered on Rick’s face.
“Hold on,” she whispered at her reflection. “Just a little longer.”
Melissa was looking up at the ceiling. Though she’d been lying on the sofa for a while, she still hadn’t closed her eyes. Above her head, hanging from the wall, she could see Edelweiss’s guitar, her name engraved on one side of the sound box. She thought of her sister’s other name. Elizabeth. She thought of Rick.
She tried to change position, moving onto her side to face the backrest. On the other side of it, between the sofa and the wall, was the sketchbook containing the articles. The people in the photographs, Rick among them, whispered things in her ear. She turned her back on them. In front of her she saw the science textbook on the table. The ink with which Socorro had written her telephone number seemed to be glowing through the pages, making itself visible in the darkness.
Melissa turned back again.
The people in the news stories began to scream at her.
She changed sides.
The luminous number pulsed.
She lay face up.
She read the grooves in the wood that spelled Edelweiss.
There was no way to escape her thoughts.
Melissa sat up.
She separated the sofa from the wall. She took the documents from among the drawings and inserted them in the science book. The sketchbook she left on the table, open to the portrait of the perfect past. Her rock asked her if she was going to take him back to the bedroom, because it was his turn to sleep on the shelf tonight.
“Not right now, Clark. Wait for me here.”
Melissa went to the kitchen. From the second drawer, she took out a box of matches.
She went out through the back door.
Elmer handed her the glass. Rose’s hand trembled as she took it. She positioned it under the edge of the desk. With her pinkie extended, she swept the pile of whitish powder into it. She could feel her heart beating in her temples.
