Under the Water

by Paul Pen

  “It’s not funny, Mom.” Audrey left the kitchen and opened the door to the garage stairs.

  When they resumed breakfast, Grace noticed Frank spreading butter on his bagel with an absent look, moving the knife but concentrating on something else.

  Audrey’s trembling voice came from below.

  “M . . . Mom?”

  Frank was first to react. He stood so quickly he knocked over his chair. When Simon and Grace reached them in the garage, Audrey was pointing at a broken square of glass in the side door’s frame. The glass fragments were scattered across the floor. The door keys were in the lock inside.

  “Oh God, Frank, my studio.”

  Grace ran up to the office where she recorded her videos. She found it intact. The new Canon, the old one, the iMac, the two laptops, the iPad—it was all there. In the kitchen, with Frank’s help, she moved the refrigerator. She removed the tile that concealed the space behind the wall where she kept her jewelry. That was also all there. Frank opened drawers in the living room, in the master bedroom. He returned saying their money, their cards, everything was still in its place.

  “What a fright.” Grace released her tension in a sigh so deep she had to sit down—her legs had gone weak. “It wasn’t a burglary.”

  “They stole my ferret, Mom,” said Audrey. “Don’t you care?”

  “Are we sure the glass wasn’t broken before? We never use that small door—we go in and out of the garage in the car,” Grace said. “Your ferrets love climbing, and Hope could easily have gotten out through that hole. No one steals a ferret and leaves a Canon 80D like I have upstairs. The camera’s worth much more.” She regretted her words as soon as she’d said them. “Sorry, honey, you know what I mean.”

  But Audrey didn’t know. Without saying another word, she left the kitchen and went up to her bedroom. Breakfast remained on her plate until lunchtime, and then lunch remained on the table until dinnertime. For two weeks, Audrey answered Grace’s questions with monosyllables, looking away from her when they crossed paths in the hall or when her mother asked her for the soy sauce at the table. Accepting that there’s a teenage logic there’s no point in trying to reason with, Grace apologized to her every day for leaving the back door open. One night, on the sofa, the girl burst out laughing at a scene in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and then got up to hug Grace, saying she was sorry for giving her such a hard time. They watched the rest of the episode holding hands, sharing the reclining armchair.

  When this difficult period was over and Audrey had accepted that her pets were lost forever, the plans to break in the motor home resumed—perhaps they could go during the spring break. But that was when the marks appeared on Grace’s scalp and she began to lose hair. The bad times were taking shape, and the trip was postponed again.

  The outbreak happened overnight, scabs and blemishes on the scalp that soon translated into hair loss. One morning, as she checked whether her skin had improved after she’d applied an overnight lotion, an entire lock of hair came off as if it were a strip of Velcro. She barely slept, gripped by a sense of foreboding and fixated with finding suspicious lumps on her body that would confirm the inevitable, until tests and a dermatologist’s diagnosis ruled out any serious conditions. At his clinic, the dermatologist confirmed that the attack on the scalp had come from external agents. “It’s as if you picked up the wrong bottle in the shower and used hair removal cream,” the specialist speculated, “or used the most aggressive solvent in your house as a conditioner. Just to be sure: You don’t keep household cleaning products in the bathroom, do you?”

  Grace shook her head, a little offended by the doctor’s ludicrous assumption. She kept the cleaning products under the kitchen sink like everyone else, and there wasn’t even any hair removal cream in the bathroom. In any case, her Victoria’s Secret shampoo, Pure Seduction, with its lovely red plum and freesia scent, came in such a distinctive container that it would be impossible to confuse it with a bottle of turpentine. That was when a terrible thought germinated in Grace’s mind. She took Frank’s hand. He was sitting next to her in the consulting room.

  “Could she be that angry with me?” she asked.

  Her husband’s face twisted out of shape. His gaze was lost somewhere outside the room. Seeing his disturbed expression, Grace felt like a horrible person. He couldn’t even entertain the awful thing she was implying.

  “Because of the ferrets,” she explained. “She didn’t speak to me for two weeks.”

  Frank’s shoulders relaxed.

  “Oh. Audrey,” he said, as his face smoothed out. “Of course, of course.”

  “Do you think she’d be capable? She’s convinced it was my fault the ferrets escaped. She might’ve wanted to play a joke on me or, I don’t know . . . take revenge by putting something in my shampoo.”

  She asked the doctor if that would explain what had happened with her hair, and he confirmed that it would make sense. Grace looked her husband in the eye, searching for the sensitivity she needed at times like this.

  “Frank, do you think Audrey would be capable of putting something bad in my shampoo?”

  Her husband’s blinking stopped in an unnatural way. Grace could sense the effort he was making not to divert his gaze. His silence felt eternal—long enough for her to accept that if he got up from his chair right now and left her forever, she would deserve it. The suspicion she’d just raised about her own daughter made her the worst mother in the world, a woman who didn’t deserve such good children and such a good husband. Any other mother would blame herself and admit that, without realizing it, perhaps, she’d gone to the kitchen sink and washed her hair in bleach.

  “Au . . . Audrey?” Frank swallowed. He fell silent again for a few seconds. He looked down at the floor, at his hands, at Grace. His jaw muscles pulsated with the accelerated rhythm of his thoughts. “Maybe.”

  “She saw me scratching and crying all this time and said nothing?”

  Saying nothing, Frank nodded.

  The doctor intervened, judging that the girl wouldn’t have gauged the effect of the toxic substance she’d used. That she might just have wanted to punish her mother with an itchy head and that, now that the matter had gotten out of hand, she was afraid and didn’t know how to admit what she’d done.

  But Audrey didn’t admit anything when they told her that afternoon what the dermatologist had suggested. Bigger tears than the ones she’d shed for the ferrets appeared on her lower eyelids.

  “That hurts, Mom.” She dried her eyes with her pajama sleeve, sitting on the sofa with her laptop on her crossed legs. “Even more than what happened with Hope and Joy. Do you really think I’d do that to you? And that I’d sit here acting dumb while you turned into Eleven? Dad, how could you both think that? What kind of person watches someone suffering, knowing the cause, and says nothing?”

  Frank looked down to avoid eye contact, and Grace felt guilty for making him feel such shame.

  “I’m not even angry with you, Mom,” Audrey went on. “It wasn’t your fault the ferrets got out, all right? I get it. I’m not a child anymore, I’m a young adult, and adults accept things and move on. We don’t go around taking revenge or lying.”

  Frank left the living room.

  “So?” asked Grace. “Why am I like this?”

  She gestured at the bald patches on her head, the marks that made her look like a mangy cat.

  “Some makeup turned Emma in my biology class red for a month. When you stop using cosmetics tested on animals, you won’t have these problems anymore,” said Audrey, taking up another cause. “Or, I don’t know . . . maybe the ferret thief put something in your shampoo.”

  Grace snorted. “That makes no sense, honey.”

  “It makes more sense than accusing me of putting stuff in there.”

  Without closing the computer, Audrey uncrossed her legs and left, leaving the blanket, which had gotten caught on her ankles, lying in the middle of the room. Grace followed her daughter to the stairs without
knowing what to say. She found Frank there, and he shrugged when Audrey slammed her bedroom door shut. He was on his way down with an armful of bathroom products. In the kitchen, he emptied their contents into the sink.

  “You just threw hundreds of dollars down the drain.”

  “Your skin’s worth a lot more than that.”

  “We could’ve complained to one of the brands for selling a defective product,” Grace said, half joking. “Now we have no proof.”

  “I don’t want lawsuits, or money, or free shampoo for a year.” Frank finished squeezing out a green bottle. “I want your hair to be OK.”

  It was a while before her hair was OK, but as soon as the scabs disappeared and she was able to cover up the bald patches by styling it in a certain way, she began recording videos again. And as soon as she saw hair growing in the most affected areas, she knew it would all go down as a passing complaint.

  Both she and Audrey soon found themselves eager to start organizing the trip again, but the plan was cut short once more when, one night, Grace woke up in the early hours with her stomach tight, alerted by a bang. She wondered whether she’d heard it in a dream, but another thud, like something falling onto the floor, confirmed that both sounds were real. When she whispered Frank’s name, he was already going out through the bedroom door.

  “You stay here,” he said before leaving.

  Grace covered herself in the sheet up to her eyes, too frightened to disobey the order. She tried to follow her husband’s movements by listening to the floor creaks, to his slippers brushing against the steps. His hand squeaking on the banister was the last sound she identified. Then, complete silence. She stopped breathing. A nocturnal breeze ruffled the leaves on the trees in the yard—perhaps the fugitives Hope and Joy were now living in a burrow among the roots of one of them. She was sure Frank would return saying it was nothing. It was what always happened when there were bumps in the night. But he didn’t return, nor did a new sound reveal his whereabouts. When her concern eclipsed her fear, Grace poked her head out the bedroom door. The children’s doors were closed, and everything was calm. Simon was snoring, as he’d started doing a few months ago—little by little her boy was becoming a young man. Containing the urge to call out to her husband, Grace advanced to the stairs. And there, she heard—or believed she heard—Frank whispering.

  Crouching on the top step, she hooked her hair behind her ears to improve her hearing. Was Frank talking? Who could Frank be talking to? The supposed conversation was little more than a rustle, so weak that Grace could have been fabricating it from the murmur of the leaves blowing in the breeze. She couldn’t be sure what she was hearing. A possibility made her skin prickle: that her husband was calling for help, unable to yell because it would alert the burglar who had broken into their house.

  Grace’s feet moved by themselves, deaf to any sense of caution if Frank was in danger. She slowly descended the stairs, straining to decipher the whisper that might not be a whisper. When she reached the second-to-last step, a wooden creak resounded in the silence with the intensity of a thunderbolt in summer. Revealing her presence triggered more sounds. Agitation in the kitchen. The thief must have realized the game was up and wanted to escape through the side door. Grace ran into the kitchen, driven by unexpected courage. She found Frank there, standing in front of the open door, peering out at the porch.

  “What is it?” All of Grace’s contained shock burst out in a cry: “What is it!?”

  He opened his eyes wide.

  “It’s nothing, honey.” He brushed her depleted hair with his fingers. “Why are you here?”

  “What was the noise? We heard a noise. That’s why you came down here.”

  “Sure, there was a noise. We both heard it. I told you not to come down. But it was nothing, there’s no one here. It’s always nothing.”

  “And the open door?” she indicated the one leading to the side porch.

  “I just opened it to check. You must’ve heard some other sounds—I’ve been opening all the cupboards. But everything’s fine. There’s no one here, and nobody’s tried to get in or anything.”

  “So who were you talking to?”

  Frank raised his eyebrows.

  “Talking? Me?”

  “I thought I heard you talking, sort of whispering.”

  “Oh, to the ferrets? I was talking to the ferrets, honey. I’m starting to think they haven’t gone far and they’re living in the walls. It must’ve been them making the noises. Just now, I was telling them to come out and give Audrey a nice surprise, but they don’t seem to pay any attention.”

  Grace nestled into Frank’s chest.

  “How scary! I thought you might be trying to call for help or something.”

  “You’ve been watching too many movies.”

  Her husband comforted her with a hug that extinguished all her fear. Nothing truly bad could happen with him by her side.

  “Best not tell your daughter about the ferrets in the walls,” Grace said. “It could give her false hope.”

  Audrey appeared in the kitchen, yawning. “What’re you doing making so much noise at this time of night?”

  “We were . . . ,” Grace stuttered. “We were keeping guard in case the Ferret Thief returned.”

  She made the joke without thinking, intoning the criminal’s name as if it were a cartoon villain. For an instant, she thought she’d screwed up. She could almost hear her daughter slamming her door behind her after going back to her room in a temper. But Audrey opened her mouth in surprise at her mother’s nerve, then burst out laughing as if she also wanted to make light of her pets’ disappearance. She hugged Grace in what was the final act of forgiveness between them, if such a thing ever exists in a mother-daughter relationship.

  “Get back to your room, go on,” Grace said when they’d stopped laughing. As soon as Audrey had gone up to her bedroom, Grace announced that she was going to call the neighborhood watch coordinator anyway. “If it turns out it wasn’t the ferrets and there really was someone prowling around here, it’s best if we’re all on the alert.”

  She had the phone at her ear when Frank took it from her.

  “Leave it, honey. I’ll speak to Bob tomorrow, face to face.” He pressed the red button on the screen. “It’s really late now and you’re going to alarm people more than necessary. What’re you going to say? That everyone should get out on the street because you heard some noises that in all likelihood were ferrets?” He put the telephone in her pajama pocket. “No one came in, I’m certain.”

  Frank confirmed the next day that Bob had promised that the neighbors would keep a closer eye on the area around their house for the next few nights. But on the next few nights, nothing happened—there were no more noises. And when the deafening noise came, when the real tragedy happened, not even a hundred police cars surrounding the house could have prevented it.

  Because the danger was inside.

  On the night of the gunshot, she and Frank were sitting on the living room sofa watching an episode from one of the HBO series they reserved for when the children were in bed. It may have been the show’s sexual content, or because her hair had finally regained a good volume, which had made her reevaluate the importance of feeling beautiful and healthy . . . or even because it had been more than eight months since she and Frank had made love, and that’s a long time even for a woman who lacks appetite and has been sleeping with the same husband for eighteen years. Whatever the reason, Grace suddenly felt more aroused than she had in a long time. Her pulse accelerated, the temperature in the living room went up, and Frank, at the other end of the sofa, seemed irresistible all of a sudden. Unshowered, unshaven since Friday, his hand resting on his abdomen in a pose as carefree as it was manly. Grace thought about stretching out her leg, trying to excite him with her bare foot—ankles were one of the body parts that most turned him on—but the idea suddenly made her feel embarrassed. It had been so long since they’d sought each other out that she didn’t know how he w
ould react. It saddened her that the idea of seducing her husband made her feel shy, as if they were strangers.

  It was what happened when sex had become an exception, when for so many months she had preferred to give herself relief in the shower when Frank was at work rather than sleep with him. For a long time, solitary sex had seemed more appealing than any other option, and she guessed he felt the same. She imagined him masturbating in the shower they shared—both of them pleasuring themselves separately, in the same house. And again, she felt sad. She envied the two people they had been, the couple that made love under that shower until their ears were filled with water and their skin wrinkled. A couple they no longer were because they each pleasured themselves so they wouldn’t have to suffer the awkwardness of pressing their bodies together, bodies they’d grown bored of, they’d had their fill of. Determined to rediscover her husband’s body—the only body she’d promised to devote herself to until death parted them—Grace stretched out her leg. She rested the ankle on Frank’s thigh, not in the tender way she did it to prompt him to stroke it while they watched a TV show, but in the provocative way, closer to the groin than the knee, which she hoped would excite him. She saw surprise in Frank’s eyes, delight as he understood what she was hoping for—right before the explosion upstairs.

  The glasses in the cocktail cabinet clinked together with the detonation.

  Several dogs barked down the street, but not much more than when someone let off a firecracker or a garbage can fell over.

  Grace landed face-first on the carpet when she tried to get up, her foot caught between Frank’s legs.

  “There’s someone in the house,” she said.

  The expression on his face was of pure terror. They both ran. They blocked the living room door when they tried to go through it at the same time, and Grace pushed Frank through with trembling hands. They climbed the stairs, stumbling over each other, crawling up the steps. There was a moment when she just sat, looking down, without moving. Listening only to the whistle in her ears. Wondering why there was a smell of gunpowder. After that, she must have gripped the railing and gotten up, because she somehow reached their bedroom. And then she lost her voice, almost lost consciousness. She’d heard on many occasions that a mother could lift up a truck that had run over her child with her bare hands, but she was paralyzed. Frozen to the spot.