Authors: Paul Pen
“You’ve seen that we don’t.”
I wanted to tell her everything I knew. That the baby was Dad’s son. That Dad didn’t treat my sister well. And that it was Dad’s fault that her nose bled.
“Mom . . .”
But I was left voiceless as I remembered the oath I’d made to the One Up There. The way in which Grandma’s rosary had strangled my finger. The feel of the figure molded in metal on my lips.
“Ye—es?”
The One Up There could stop sending us stuff. Might punish the whole family by making us go without food if I said something.
“Can a family of mammals have babies among themselves?”
Mom didn’t answer. “Why do you ask that?”
I shrugged.
“I read in an animal book that they can’t,” I made up.
“Well, no, they can’t.” She bent over to kiss me. And then corrected herself: “It’s not good if they do,” she whispered. “But sometimes it happens.”
Then I knew my sister was right. Mom knew about everything.
“I think someone hasn’t brushed his teeth,” Mom said. “I can smell mashed potato from here. Come on. Go. It’ll take you two minutes.”
“Do other mammals’ pups clean their teeth?” I improvised.
Mom smiled.
“You win,” she said. “But I’ll only let you off this once. I don’t know what’s with you today with all this talk of mammals. I thought it was those strange bugs that you liked.”
From the hall she asked me if I wanted her to leave the light on.
“Yeah, I’m going to read a bit more.”
I put down the book as soon as she closed the door. I got out of bed and put my pillow under the sheets, hitting it to mold a shape like my body. My brother wouldn’t notice my absence if my bed disappeared and his floated in the air on an invisible frame, but my parents might look in on me. I took the firefly jar from the drawer. They were glowing at different times in an irregular way. They were as nervous as me about the mission.
“Let’s go,” I said to them.
I turned off my bedroom light before opening the door. The water was running in the kitchen. There was still movement in the living room. My brother was talking loudly to my father about the movie they were going to put on. I crossed the hallway with a leap. There was total darkness in my sister’s bedroom, but the baby wasn’t crying. Mom was right: the best way to overcome a fear was to face up to it. I tapped the jar’s lid. The fireflies lit up part of the room. Copying one of the book’s basic movements I’d practiced in the day, I rolled along the floor. Before I reached my sister’s bed I rotated myself so that my feet went under the bedsprings first. Then my legs and torso. With the help of my free hand I got my head under, too.
I put the jar near my face, with my arms bent and my hands pressed against the floor. I rested my chin on them.
“Off,” I whispered to the fireflies. “We have to get used to the dark.”
For a few seconds the world turned black, but I soon began to make out some forms. I could see vertical lines in front of me, in the background. After appearing to float in the air, they finally took shape. They became the baby’s crib.
The baby himself was a dark blob behind them.
I also located the legs of Grandma’s bed and even some of the cracks that time had made in the bedroom floor. As if the floor was the basement’s skin and time was the fire that damaged it, just like my family’s faces. I felt it. Grit and dust.
I took a deep breath.
I waited.
Until the door opened.
19
I recognized the sound of Grandma’s slippers on the first footstep. And the smell of her talcum powder. I held my breath so she wouldn’t hear me. Her feet moved in front of me like two frightened rodents. They stopped by the crib before continuing their slow walk to the bed.
The springs squeaked when she sat down, and I took the chance to take in air.
I heard her opening the drawer in her bedside table, straightaway recognizing the rattle of the rosary beads between her fingers. She prayed with a constant murmur, like the wings of a hummingbird hawk moth. The noise allowed me to breathe easily.
Before finishing, Grandma said out loud, “Take from me the days you give to him.”
I identified the wet sound of a kiss and knew that Grandma was making her own oaths to the One Up There.
“You don’t need to ask that,” Mom’s voice said, surprising me. She’d appeared in the room during Grandma’s prayer. She turned on the light.
“I’m sure he has plenty of days left. You’ll see.” She sat on the bed beside my grandmother.
“I hope to God you’re right,” Grandma replied. “But he’s old now. We’re both old. The doctors have made it very clear to him what he’s facing. He’s been making all this effort for ten years and—”
I saw Mom hug Grandma when her voice failed.
“—and I don’t want to be here when he’s gone,” she said between sobs.
I had no idea what they were talking about.
“Everything will be fine,” Mom said. “I’m sure he has years left in him. He’s strong.”
I heard a kiss.
“And your son’s certain of it, too. That’s why he wants to start organizing Grandpa’s replacement. So he can make the decision himself. None of us know what the best way will be, but—”
The baby started crying, interrupting the conversation. Mom got up to tend to him.
“What’s up with him?” asked Grandma.
Mom shushed the baby. The screaming fit subsided, reduced to an almost inaudible gurgle.
“Do you know what?” Mom said. “The boy asked me something very odd today.”
I pricked my ears even more when I heard myself mentioned.
“Odd?” Grandma asked, still sounding sad.
“About animals. Something about . . .” She paused as though trying to find the right words. “Something about whether a family of mammals can have babies among themselves.”
I heard the drawer in Grandma’s bedside table close. “Did he ask it because of the baby?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Mom answered.
When Grandma burst into tears again, Mom went back to the bed beside her. I saw that the crib was empty, so she must’ve had the baby in her arms.
“What’s wrong now?” she asked. “What did I say?”
Grandma sniffed.
“Nothing. It’s not you,” she said. “It’s this baby. I swear . . . I love him more than I love myself. I swear that’s the truth. But every time I hold him . . .” She took a deep breath. “Every time I hold him, I feel the weight of every bad decision we’ve made.”
She cried but kept speaking, letting her words out in a howl rising in pitch. “I see in him the worst of the sins committed in this basement. The worst of our sins.”
Under the mattress, I, too, let out silent tears. I again felt my sister’s scratches on my back imitating the ones I’d seen on Dad’s. I remembered the single tear that she’d shed when she told me the truth about the baby. The tear that’d fallen behind the mask.
“How could we have let it happen?” asked Grandma.
Mom took a while to respond.
“We could punish ourselves every day,” she said, “but there’s no point.”
Grandma blew her nose.
“And you know why?” continued Mom. “Because we have a healthy baby. And a baby as lovely as your grandchildren were. And we’re going to look after him like we do them. Because he has his whole life ahead of him. Plus,” Mom went on, “it’s us, me and you, who have to love this baby most.”
She lowered her voice. “This beautiful little thing that’s fallen asleep. Such a gorgeous little boy whose mother doesn’t want him.”
As Mom got up to put the baby back in the crib, Grandma added, “His father doesn’t want him, either.”
Mom took a deep breath. “But that’s not the same,” she replied from the door.
“Goodnight.” She turned off the light, barely making a noise with the switch. We were left in the dark again.
“Goodnight,” Grandma whispered.
In the total silence of the room, I slowed my breathing until Grandma’s slowed, too. I found a thousand meanings for the words I’d just heard from my hiding place.
When I knew Grandma was asleep, I took the chance to change the position of my arms.
My sister soon arrived.
The door opened, and the room was filled with flashes from the television in the living room, which disappeared as soon as she turned on the light. I put a hand over my eyes to give my pupils time to get used to the new reality. When I took it away, I saw her legs by the crib. I pressed my chin against the floor to expand my field of vision. My sister had a hand resting on the baby’s tummy. She rocked him. The little boy carried on sleeping.
The mask turned on my sister’s shoulders. I could see an eye hole, the curve of the nose, and a corner of her mouth. She was still. Perhaps listening to the rhythm of Grandma’s breathing like I had minutes before. By the way her chest rose and fell, I could tell her own breathing had quickened.
She rocked the baby again.
She waited.
Then the hand she’d rocked the baby with went to one of the pockets she had on each side of the five-buttoned blouse. She undid the toggles with her eyes fixed on the baby. The movement of her fingers inside the pocket made it look as if it was full of life, as if cockroaches were crawling around in there.
Wood creaked on Grandma’s bed. “It’s not time yet,” she said.
My sister’s fingers stopped. They shot out of the pocket with the speed of real cockroaches.
“Feeding him now won’t get you out of having to wake up later, you know,” Grandma added.
My sister’s white mask looked at her and at the baby. At the baby and at her.
“And switch the light off, will you? It’s been hard enough as it is trying to get him used to the dark. It’s taking him longer than it did your brother.”
I smiled under the bed when I heard that, as if I’d won some sort of prize.
“How do you know I turned on the light?” my sister asked.
“Do you think I don’t hear it when you flick the switch?”
With one step, my sister reached the door. She hit the switch hard, so it made a sound. “Did you hear that?”
“Excellent,” Grandma replied, ignoring my sister’s provocation. “Lights off.”
The floor, crib, and bed legs gradually materialized in front of me in the darkness. Two moving blots, my sister’s feet, approached the bed. Something touched my back. It was the mattress I was hiding under, dipping now under her weight as she sat. I laid the jar on its side and pressed a cheek against the floor. I remembered how Mom had explained to me what noodles were by squashing spaghetti on the table.
The blouse fell to the floor. It made another irregularly shaped patch in front of me. The bulge on my back changed shape and position, dividing itself bit by bit until it became a slight contour stretched along the mattress. I heard the mask strap stretch, and the elastic click as it was released. Then a hollow sound that told me she’d put the thing down on the bedside table.
My sister’s breathing gradually fell in time with my grandmother’s.
I listened to them for a long time, until my own breathing imitated their rhythm. I blinked a few times to stop myself from falling asleep. The dust gave the floor a rough texture, like the hair scar on Dad’s face. I closed my eyes just for a second.
But it wasn’t a second.
And what woke me was the sound of footsteps.
Someone was walking around the room.
When I opened my eyes I thought the Cricket Man must’ve come back to the basement to take away the baby he’d been unable to snatch on his first visit. Or to put me in his sack for spying from my hiding place under the bed. After blinking a few times I remembered the mission. It must be Dad walking around the room. He wanted to make my sister bleed, or put another baby in her belly.
The mattress lifted above me in one corner.
I was about to ask the fireflies for light.
Then the footsteps dragged along the floor near the crib. I heard my sister humming a tune, the music becoming a string of
mmm
’s that came from some place between the roof of her mouth and her nose.
It was the music from Dad’s favorite movie. The saddest melody I’d ever heard. The orchestra’s swell was now reduced to my sister’s almost inaudible murmur. I recognized the silhouette of her feet by the crib.
The melody broke up in her throat when she arrived at the highest note.
The baby began to cry.
“I told you,” I heard Grandma say. Her voice sounded deep, as if it’d traveled light-years to reach the room from the planet of dreams where she’d been. “Turn on the light.”
My sister didn’t reply, but she took Grandma’s advice. I pressed my eyelids together when she flicked the switch. Then gradually relaxed them while she hummed the sad tune and the baby’s crying rose and fell.
I was about to peer out, but then I remembered that my sister left her mask on the bedside table when she went to sleep. So I fixed my eyes on her feet. I climbed her legs with my gaze, stopping at her hip, her blouse pocket, her chest. The baby’s legs hung at belly height. She held him with her left arm, the fingers lost in the folds of the diaper.
Still humming the song, she undid the top two buttons of her blouse. Her breast popped out from the material. I saw a purple circle around her nipple.
I pushed myself forward to expand my field of vision. I did it carefully: I stopped when the bed frame above me still blocked the view of my sister’s face.
The humming broke off. I thought she’d heard the dust crunch under my hands. But then she continued with the melody, unaware of my presence.
Now I could see her bare breast and all of the baby’s body. His little face was wrinkled up and his eyes were closed. His mouth wide open as if he was crying, but he wasn’t. He bit my sister’s left breast through the blouse.
“Not that one,” she said. With a movement of her shoulder she pushed the little boy’s mouth away, and that was when I noticed another movement lower down. In the blouse pocket. The imaginary cockroaches had returned. My sister’s hand was moving around in there. Her wrist emerging and hiding behind the folds of fabric.
My heartbeat boomed in my ears. It seemed as if the whole house would hear it.
The hummed melody reached its highest point again. Once more my sister’s throat gave way. She took up the song again from the beginning.