by Paul Pen
Elmer unscrewed the lid on the mescal bottle.
“Don’t do it . . .”
At first, Rose assumed she was hearing a thought. That her conscience had adopted the injured boy’s rasping voice to sound more convincing. But Elmer must have heard it, too, because he looked at her, holding his breath.
“Please, don’t do it . . .”
They both turned their heads toward the bed. Rick was observing them with eyes so wide that it seemed he had no eyelids. It was as if the effect of the sleeping pills had not just disappeared but reversed. He seemed focused, alert.
“Please.”
Rose lowered her head. She preferred not to see him, or hear him. Elmer squeezed her knee, kissed her on the forehead.
“You don’t have to do it,” Rick added. The dryness of his mouth was making him click his tongue in unexpected consonants. “I won’t say anything. I promise. I came here looking for my sister, and my sister’s gone. I don’t care about anything else. I’ll go away as if nothing happened. I swear. You can carry on living here with the rest of them as if they were your daughters.”
“They are our daughters.”
“Your daughters. You can carry on living here with them. But let me go. You don’t have to do that.” His body convulsed in a failed attempt to indicate the glass. “Please, don’t do it.”
Rick’s voice was improving as his throat regained elasticity. To Rose it seemed as if he spoke at a deafening volume. She looked at the glass in her hand, the crushed pills. She passed it to her husband before approaching the bed.
“I know you couldn’t do that,” she said to Rick. “You see your sister in all of my daughters. You think of yourself, of your mother. And you’d like to be able to help those other women.”
“Their mothers?”
“I am their mother.” Rose gestured at her own heart with such force that her fingers drummed on her sternum. “All those other ones have is blood.”
Rick’s lidless eyes grew in size, as if inflating.
“My mother was more a mother to Elizabeth than you will ever be.”
“You think so?” The remark didn’t even offend Rose. A lie couldn’t hurt her. “For starters, her name was Edelweiss. And your mother wasn’t holding her hand when she took her first steps, right there on the porch. Your mother doesn’t know how much she loved melon, or how scared she was of scorpions. She doesn’t know how her face wrinkled up when she cried, or how many teeth she showed when she smiled. It wasn’t your mother she stole sticks of cinnamon from when she was cooking, or gave a bunch of cactus flowers to as a gift. Your mother didn’t know that she turned into a mermaid in the bathtub. She didn’t put up with tuneless guitar chords for weeks until Edelweiss managed to put her fingers in the right place. Nor will she ever see the incredible color that her hair took on when the sun went down over this desert. Your mother never had to wash her nightgowns when they stank of sickness. Nor was she by her side, holding the same hand that she’d held that day when she’d taught her to walk, when she smiled for the last time at her bedroom ceiling.” Rose dried her tears before they’d even appeared. “It doesn’t matter what your mother feels, or if she believes flesh and blood means something. Edelweiss only had one mother. And that was me.”
Elmer put the bottle and glass down on the desk. He rubbed Rose’s shoulder with a warm hand and kissed her on the back of the neck.
“A real mother doesn’t need to hide her daughters,” Rick said. “She’s proud to show them to the world.”
“There’s no mother prouder of her girls than I am.”
“You even gave them flower names.”
“Sure I did.” Rose frowned, not understanding. “Because they’re beautiful.”
“Or because you collected them?”
Rose screwed up her face.
“That’s horrible.” His dirty interpretation of her daughters’ names disgusted her. “Take it back, it’s horrible.”
“Horrible is what the two of you have done.”
“Give our daughters great parents?” Rose looked at Elmer. “A good family? They’ve had everything they need, everything they—”
“Your daughter talks to stones,” Rick cut in.
“We’ve given them a good life.”
“A life that isn’t theirs.”
Rose shook her head. There was no point in explaining something to someone who refused to understand.
“You’re bad people.” Rick spoke through clenched teeth.
“And you’re so good,” she said. “That’s why you’d turn us in if we let you go. Or would you have me believe you won’t tell your mother? You’d tell her and the rest of them. You’d need to reunite all those other women with their girls, to imagine that it’s Edelweiss—”
“Elizabeth.”
“—being reunited with your mother. You wouldn’t care about destroying this family. Separating my daughters from their parents.”
“You’re the one who separated them from their real pare—”
Elmer covered his mouth. Rick jerked his body, making the mattress springs squeak. Then he twisted his neck, pressing his head against the pillow, and thrashed his whole body under the sheets, as if an intense pain ran through him.
“If only you hadn’t come.”
Rose took the bottle of mescal from the desk and filled the glass halfway. She stirred the contents with one of Melissa’s pencils. She had to add more liquor to get the powder to dissolve.
Iris had completed the hundred strokes an eternity ago. The light in Rick’s bedroom was still on. Her parents’ voices reached her from there now and again, syllables that occasionally stuck out in an unintelligible conversation.
“Come on,” she said into the air. “Go back to your room.”
She switched the cheek she was biting on—the inside of the other one had begun to taste of blood. She wandered her room, tracing one of the infinity symbols in which she’d tended to become trapped these last few days. In one hand she waggled the truck key, the key ring hooked onto her ring finger as if she’d already married Rick.
She imagined the Dodge’s headlights looking at her from the ground.
Waiting for her.
“I’m coming . . .”
The winding course of the loop her feet traced reminded her of a skein of wool. She thought of rope. And remembered the way Rick’s wrists had been tied.
Iris stopped.
She couldn’t wait any longer.
She’d have to change her escape plan.
She looked at the window.
As she’d done the two previous nights, she climbed out onto the roof. In her hand she carried a pair of slippers. She had an urge to peek into Rick’s room and resume the nocturnal liaison with her lover, but in there with him were the archenemies of their romance.
The wind whistling among the cactus spines and the rustling bushes disguised the crackle of the tiles under Iris’s bare feet. She held her breath until she reached the edge of the roof. First she let her slippers drop, so light that the wind blew them against the front wall of the house. Then she waited for another gust to climb down the post. The creaks of the porch could have been caused by the wind.
Grit dug into the sole of her foot before she’d recovered her footwear. The whirl of air that breached her nightgown cooled the nervous sweat that covered her body. The living room was dark—Melissa must be asleep. Rather than head straight to the truck, crossing the land in view of her parents, Iris skirted around the yard. She disappeared among the night shadows.
Melissa reached the barbecue.
She set the box of matches and the science book on the grill.
From among the book’s pages she took out the documents that, in the end, were going to be burned like the rest. Melissa was going to finish the job that Dad had begun, reducing to ashes the unreal names of her sisters, their far-off places of origin, the photographs of the people who belonged to other families.
The first match went right out.
> The second didn’t even light. It just fizzled, consuming the match head.
Nor could she light the third, the fourth, or the fifth.
The wind seemed to blow harder each time she tried, as if a presence near her wanted to put them out.
Rose made her eyes go out of focus so she wouldn’t see her husband hold the glass to Rick’s lips. It reduced what was happening in front of her to blurry smudges, like the vague images of a nightmare.
“You’re doing this to my mother for the second time,” Rick said.
Sitting on the bed, Rose tried to take his hand, an offer of affection that he rejected. He twisted his bound wrist to hide his fingers under his leg.
“Don’t touch me.”
The blurry smudge that was Rick turned its face away on the pillow, escaping the glass. From Melissa’s pencil can, Rose took a ballpoint pen. Using her teeth, she pulled out the tube of ink from inside. She passed the empty outer cylinder to Elmer to use as a straw.
“I’m going to need you to help me,” he said.
Rose took a deep breath, and brought reality into focus.
“Hold his head,” Elmer instructed.
She went to the other side of the bed, to where Rick was facing. With a hand, she straightened his jaw, the one that had rekindled in her the desire to have a son. With the other, she lifted his head the way she would have with that boy to treat a sore throat with some syrup. Rose wanted to hide her tears, but one rolled down her cheek. It fell onto Rick’s face.
“You don’t want to do this,” he whispered. “Please, don’t do it.”
Rose looked at the wall of drawings.
“You’re doing this to my mother for the second time.” Rick spoke quickly now, firing off words as if he knew his time was running out. “She was just starting to get over what happened with Elizabeth. Please, think of my mother.”
“I’m a mother, too.”
“Don’t do it. It’s not fair, this happening to her.”
Rose felt her brow tighten over her eyes, and her lips went tense. She fixed her gaze on Rick.
“Fairness doesn’t exist. Things just happen to people.” She let go of Rick’s head, discarding it on the pillow. “Every day, all over the place, terrible things happen to people. People kill one another in their cars. Others fall down the stairs in their own homes. Can you imagine?” Rose closed her eyes as she recalled it. “Something bad happened to those women, to your mother, too, like it does to so many people. What happened to them was that they lost a baby.”
“You took the babies from them.”
“Those women lost their babies.” She stopped after each word, as if teaching him a lesson. “Because they’re things that happen. There’re mothers who give birth to babies that don’t live two days. Others, their children are killed in war. There are also mothers who kill their children themselves or abandon them on the sidewalk. Some, their babies go missing. Whether we did it or not, it would still happen. Or am I to blame for everything bad in the world?” She paused, even if she didn’t expect a response. “Some terrible things have happened to us, too, believe me. Receiving the news that you can’t have children, when being a mother was your life’s dream . . . trust me, it’s not easy. But did I let it destroy me? No. Did I complain, did I cry about it? No. Alongside the most wonderful man in the world”—she took Elmer’s hand, stroked it with her thumb—“I found a solution to my problem. We found a way to move forward. And those women . . . those women have to find a solution to their problems, too. To what’s happened to them in their lives.”
Rick looked from her to Elmer, from Elmer to her. He was frowning with such force that the scab over a wound on his eyebrow cracked. Strings of white, sticky saliva sewed together his dehydrated lips.
The stitching of sputum broke open when he spoke. “You are what happened to those women . . .”
Rick pushed his head against the pillow, as if trying to get away from them. Rose gripped his jaw again. She lifted his head.
“If only you hadn’t come,” Rose said. “This wouldn’t have to be happening.”
“We don’t want this, either,” Elmer added.
He held the glass near Rick’s mouth, aiming the makeshift straw at his lips. Rose could smell the mescal. She also recognized the Dormepam, that sticky taste that clung to the roof of the mouth even hours after taking it. The mixture was so concentrated that a whitish sediment swirled at the bottom of the liquor.
Rick pressed his lips together until they whitened.
Elmer tried to push his way in with his fingers. He attempted to lever the kid’s mouth open by wedging the pen between Rick’s teeth.
“I can’t do it,” he said.
Rose pulled Rick’s chin to open his jaw, but Rick’s bite was so strong that his molars ground together. So she pushed his chin in the opposite direction, closing his mouth. She covered his lips with a hand. Her husband gave her a confused look.
“Up his nose,” she said.
Rick whined like a crying dog.
With a movement of her head, Rose urged Elmer to proceed. He held one end of the pen between his thumb and forefinger and guided it to Rick’s nose, looking away, his face turned toward the window. He was inhaling through his teeth, repulsed by the idea.
“You hold him,” said Rose.
Elmer handed her the glass and immobilized Rick in the same way that she had, trapping his jaw. Rose inserted the end of the tube in Rick’s right nostril. Rick opened his eyes wide, his breathing accelerating.
Rose sealed off his nose.
She could feel the pen through the cartilage.
Rick stopped breathing. He held on until his face turned purple, but then he breathed in. The liquid climbed up the tube.
It entered Rick’s body.
Some of the mescal returned to the glass, but then it climbed up the tube again as if in a closed circuit of tubes with no escape valve.
Rick choked with his mouth closed.
Retches and spasms broke out inside his chest.
When the convulsions stopped, Rose freed his nose. Substances of various densities and temperatures spattered her, expelled at high pressure from Rick’s nostrils. Rick’s horrified eyes were flooded with something that didn’t look like tears. The glass was empty except for some sediment from the pills. Rose took Rick’s hand out from under his leg, where he’d trapped it so that she wouldn’t touch him. She stroked it until his fingers went floppy.
His whole body relaxed.
“Have we . . . have we . . . ?” Elmer asked the question without letting go of Rick’s jaw, his forehead resting on the chest that had just deflated.
Rose searched for a pulse on Rick’s neck.
She felt a gentle throb under the tips of her fingers.
“Not yet,” she informed her husband. “But you can let go of him. It won’t be long.”
Elmer released the muzzle.
A barely audible rattle came from between Rick’s lips.
“I just want to tell my mother . . .” He moved his head to one side. “I found her . . . Mom . . .”
Rose dried her eyes with the back of her hand. She sought refuge on her husband’s chest, letting herself be held.
She needed to hear his firm heartbeat.
But what she heard was an engine starting.
Two spots of light were projected onto the bedroom ceiling. A truck’s headlights.
Elmer leapt to the window, throwing Rose against the bed. Leaning out, he held a hand in front of his face to shield himself from the blinding beams. His body was a dark silhouette against the light.
“It’s Iris,” he said.
“Iris?” Rose’s hand flew to her heart.
“She’s goi—”
Elmer ran downstairs with half the word still in his mouth.
Rose went after him.
She slammed the door behind her, without stopping.
Melissa was watching the front of an orphanage disappear among the flames when she heard an engin
e start behind her. She shook the grill to get the fire going, so that the final scraps of paper would burn away before Dad found out what she was doing. Rick’s face was the last thing to blacken—it floated up toward the sky as a flake of burning soot that she put out with a swipe of her hand.
The truck maneuvered erratically on the land, the engine’s mechanical noises like broken cogs. Melissa identified it as the Dodge.
“Mom?” she wondered out loud.
But Mom didn’t drive this badly. The vehicle suddenly accelerated toward the house. It braked when the headlights were almost touching the porch, forming well-defined circles of light on the timber. A frightened shriek came from the cab.
“Iris?”
Melissa recognized her sister at the wheel, fighting with it and with the gearshift. Her hair flapped with every turn of her head.
Dad appeared on the porch.
“Iris! No!”
A metallic screech came from under the hood. He leapt down the steps and grabbed ahold of the mirror on Iris’s side.
“Stop!”
“He needs help!” Iris screamed. “I love him!”
A loud roar from the engine propelled the truck backward, dragging Dad with it. His feet lifted up clouds of dust.
“Iris!” yelled Mom, climbing the porch handrail. “You don’t understand! Don’t do anything!”
The truck spun, threatening to throw Dad off.
“Brake!”
The centrifugal force of the circular skid finally launched Dad onto the ground, where he rolled, bellowing with pain. Mom ran to his aid. The Dodge moved away from the house, forming a swirl of dust among the cacti on the dirt road.
Melissa whispered a question into the air. “Where’re you going?”
Then she remembered the iodine marks on the book. She opened it to the first page, knowing what she was going to find. She ran her finger along the torn edge where a piece of the page was missing.
She looked up at the plume of dust that clouded the moon.
She visualized her home burning in the rearview mirror of that truck. When Iris was far enough away, the house would finally disappear.
