Authors: Paul Pen
“Come on,” he said in the basement, “look at this.”
They reached an arch that opened into a hallway.
“What about that?” the woman asked. She was looking at a circle of light that was projected onto the floor from the ceiling. A beam of sparkling powder was flowing into the room. “Where’s it coming from?”
“There must be a crack up top,” he explained. “The sun comes in through that hole in the ceiling.” He stepped on the light spot as if he could kill it that way. “I’ll have to fill it in so that—”
“Don’t do that,” she broke in. “Don’t fill it. Let him see the sun.”
The man withdrew his foot. The sunlight slithered off his shoe and clung to the floor again. “Come on, I want you to see the bathroom.”
He pushed the door open.
She went inside. The skin on her arms tightened. When she opened the drawers that were behind the door, the movement knocked the tubes of toothpaste and bars of soap they contained out of place. Then she turned one of the faucets on the sink, expecting remnants of plaster to fall out of it, or the air in the empty pipes to whistle. But what came out was a firm stream of pressurized water. She turned it off and turned the left one on, holding two fingers under the jet.
“There’s no hot,” her husband explained. “I couldn’t get it to work.”
She looked at him in the mirror. He saw that her chin was trembling, that she was about to cry, as if the absence of hot water had reminded her that it wouldn’t be a normal life that the boy would lead in the basement. He went up to her and hugged her from behind.
“Don’t be upset,” he said. “I’ll keep trying. It’s got something to do with a pipe. I’m not sure where it goes.”
They looked at each other’s reflections in the glass. The woman squeezed her husband’s arms, which held her at waist height. “Are we doing the right thing?” she asked.
“He can’t stay up there. It’s dangerous for everyone.”
“What your mother said earlier . . . Do you think it’s a life, what we’re offering him?”
Her husband shook her gently to make her turn around.
“Right now it’s the best life we can give him.”
Her chest rose.
“Let’s go,” he said. “You haven’t seen the bedroom yet.”
The hinges creaked when they opened another door and walked into a room.
“The bunk bed?” said the woman.
“He loved sleeping up there.”
She remembered the afternoon in the mattress store. And how, after her husband had chosen a new bed for the boy who was too big for his crib, she’d approached the bunk bed that was at the back of the store. She pointed at it timidly with a smile. An invitation to have a third child that he accepted without a second thought. The boy celebrated the decision to buy the bed by clambering right then onto the top bunk, and to the salesclerk’s despair, messing up the display sheets. In the end, the bunk bed’s second occupant never arrived. And the bottom bunk was still empty when the accident on the stairs upset all of their plans for the future.
“Do you remember?” she asked, without needing a response. She approached the bed for two and gripped the red metal frame. She shook it. She examined every part of the structure, her eyes resting on each corner and joint.
“At the rate the boy’s growing, this bed’s going to collapse within a few months,” she noted.
“We’ll be upstairs,” he said. “If the bunk bed breaks or if he runs out of food . . .” He positioned himself beside his wife and laid a hand on the frame. “He’ll be hidden. But he won’t be alone.”
The woman recovered her braid. She twisted it in her fingers. She lifted a foot and swiveled on her heel to take in the rest of the room. Something caught her attention on the shelves that covered one of the walls. She hugged her cardigan around her, crossing her arms at belly height instead of buttoning it. She crouched down on her knees to take out one of the dozen books lined up in a row. She pulled on one of the cardigan’s sleeves and used the cuff as a handkerchief, wiping the book cover in circles.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
She remembered reading that book to the boy at night, when he was ready to sleep on the top bunk, and the laughter that had exploded in his mouth at the silly things the Scarecrow said.
When I grow up I want to be like him,
the boy had said one night. The woman felt like crying when she thought of that sentence, remembering what had happened to the boy and what the Scarecrow was seeking on his journey to Oz.
“We read such nice things to him . . .”
The man contemplated the book cover, peering over his wife’s shoulder.
“Our son’s still a lovely boy,” he whispered in her ear.
The woman ran her forefinger along the book’s edges. When she reached the top-right corner, she opened it on a random page. She heard the moist sound of her husband’s lips as they stretched into a smile near her ear.
“See?” he said into her ear. He ran a finger along the sentence printed on the page, the one that said there’s no place better than home. “And a home is what he’ll have here.”
“A home,” she repeated. She folded the top corner of page twenty-one to mark it.
The man grabbed the book by the spine, making his wife close it. He put it back on the shelf.
“And look who’s going to sleep with him every night.” He reached for a photograph frame that stood on the next shelf along.
She smiled when she saw the image. The one her husband had taken of her on the rocks. “What a soaking I got from that wave,” she said. “You took too long taking the picture.”
“I wanted you to get wet so you’d have to come up with me,” he joked.
The woman took the photograph from him. She stroked it through the glass. Remembering better times.
“You’ll be here with him every night.”
She sighed.
“We still have the other side to see,” he said. The woman put the frame back. Before leaving the room, she cast a last glance over the bunk bed. And the shelves. The walls, the corners, and the ceiling. The space that would be her son’s bedroom for a long time, perhaps the rest of his life. When her stomach contracted until it hurt, she turned away to stop looking, and went out into the hall behind her husband. His hand was already resting on the handle of the door opposite.
“And this is the guest room.” They went into a room slightly smaller than the one they’d just visited. There was another bed. “In case one of us wants to stay and sleep with him,” the man explained.
The woman walked around the empty space.
“What if we take turns staying the night here?” She imagined herself sleeping in that room, spending the night there as if visiting a grown-up son who’d moved out. The idea gave her a sudden feeling of peace. Without realizing it she turned to smile at her husband. It was a sincere, proud smile, the smile of a mother who knows for certain that her son is the best son in the world.
“That’s what I like to see,” he said. But now she had to force her cheeks to maintain the smile, because she knew that in reality her son wasn’t moving out. Instead he was being locked in the basement of his own home to become a secret hidden under their feet. One they’d walk over every day. Like a mother walking over the grave of a son dead before his time. She pretended to look at something on the bed frame to give her eyes time to dry, the smile remaining like a cut on her face.
“There’s still the storeroom,” her husband added from the door.
She blinked several times before turning around, and then rubbed her lips together, tasting the bitterness of her fleeting smile.
“This way,” he indicated. At the end of the hallway, a final door appeared on the left, opposite the bathroom. This door was different from the rest, gray in color. The man tapped it with his knuckles as if knocking.
“It’s metal,” he said. “And it can’t be opened from the outside. It doesn’t even have a handle.” He waved his hand in the air in the place where it should have been.
“Here, it can only be opened with this key,” he said, showing it to her between two fingers before inserting it in the lock. “He can’t have access to this part, you’ll see why in a second.”
He pushed the door with his shoulder. The dust crackled under the metal’s weight as a room larger than the others appeared in front of them. Once inside, the woman noticed the large wardrobe against one of the walls.
Then there was a bang that made her shoulders flinch. She thought that the renovations that her husband had carried out in the basement over the last two months had undermined the structure of the house.
“It closes on its own,” her husband said, indicating the metal door. “And it’s heavy.”
She opened her eyes, her shoulders still tense. “I thought the lighthouse was coming down on top of us.”
“The people in the town won’t be so lucky,” he answered.
His wife tutted her disapproval. “Nobody wants that.”
“They would if they knew the truth.”
She pulled her cardigan around her.
“It’s colder here,” she observed. She attributed it to the room being empty.
“All the better, don’t you think?” He opened his palms toward the ceiling to feel the temperature with more accuracy. “The basement keeps the temperature constant. It never gets too hot or too cold,” he explained.
“That’s good?”
“No need for heating. Or ventilation. The earth regulates the temperature. It’s one less thing to worry about. He’ll be as comfortable in summer as in winter.”
She examined her husband’s face, his features rugged now from the weeks of work in the basement. He hadn’t shaved.
“The wardrobe’s enormous,” said the woman.
He smiled, his eyes shining like they always did before he revealed a secret. He approached the four doors that ran along the wall perpendicular to the one they’d come in through. He gripped one of the knobs and looked at his wife. He stayed like that for a few seconds, unmoving.
“What?” she asked.
He remained on pause.
“What is it?” she insisted.
Her husband didn’t answer.
“Please . . .”
The man pulled the door open when he guessed his wife was about to leave the room. “Because it’s not just a wardrobe,” he said.
The latch was released with a metallic sound. The handle hit the wood of the next door along. In front of them a rectangle of total darkness appeared. “It’s much more,” added the man.
A current of air rushed out of the wardrobe. It made the bottom of the woman’s skirt flutter. She rubbed her ankles to fight off that subterranean draft.
“Are you going to explain what it is?”
Her husband positioned himself in the center of the black rectangle, his silhouette blending into the dark background. “It’s the other entrance.”
“Another entrance?”
“Come here and I’ll explain.” A curved line of light reflected on her husband’s chin betrayed his presence. “Coming?”
The line of light went out as she approached the rectangle of darkness. The current of air began to blow up her body, making the skirt hug her thighs like a second skin.
“What do I do? Go in?”
“Come here.”
The hand emerged from the darkness. The woman screamed. Because that was how it came out in her nightmares, from among the rocks, the blue hand at the bottom of the septic tank. She could see it now in front of her. A child’s hand made into a claw, sprouting from the ground like a carnivorous plant. When she managed to shake off the image and she recognized her husband’s hand inviting her into the wardrobe, the woman gave him a cuff.
“You frightened me,” she protested. Then she took the hand and let herself be led.
In one step, she was in the darkness.
The storeroom was left empty.
The inside of the wardrobe smelled of damp earth.
“It’s this way.” The man’s voice resounded in the small space. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” she asked. “We can barely fit in here.”
They began to walk to the left, into a space much bigger than there should have been behind the wardrobe doors. She felt along the wood until her fingers reached an edge. A change in texture as the wood transformed into soil. She took her hand away. They continued through the new corridor that came from nowhere. Behind them, the light from the storeroom was reduced to a distant radiance. They turned right, then left, and then right again, the moisture becoming an invisible shroud. When the man stopped, the woman’s momentum carried her into his back. She took the opportunity to hug him from behind.
“What is this place?” she asked into his ear.
“Why are you whispering?”
“Tell me where we are,” she whispered again, her chin resting on his shoulder.
“Look,” he replied. A circle of orange light was projected against the wall located in front of them. Its contour gently vibrated because of the trembling hand that held the match. The woman felt the wall of dark earth, lingering on the grayish roots that sprouted from it. She wrinkled her nose when she discovered an orange slug slithering along the wall. The man turned to look at his wife. The flame went out with the movement, and the space was flooded with the smell of phosphorous and burned wood. Straightaway a spark spawned another cloud of light between them. It lit up two faces that found themselves looking at each other. Orange-colored faces with deep, dark furrows.
“This is how we’ll bring him the supplies he needs.” The air he breathed out made the flame dance, distorting their faces’ shadows.
“You look scary,” she said. “Like you’re deformed.”
“So do you,” he replied. He held the flame nearer his wife’s face. The patches of shadow blurred her features until her orangey eyes floated in midair. Hypnotized by the effect, the man miscalculated, and the match touched the woman’s cheek. She batted his hand away.
The darkness returned when the flame went out. “You moron!” she yelled. “You burned me.”
He lit another match. “You’re fine,” he concluded after examining his wife’s face. He blew gently on the left cheek like he’d blown so many times on his children’s grazed knees.
“Well, it hurts.” The woman exaggerated her anger until he kissed the place where the burn wasn’t. “OK, it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
They both smiled. There was a surge of attraction between them. A desire that they thought had died in their marriage until a few days ago.