by Paul Pen
For a moment my mother stopped. Hesitated. Then she carried on. My brother grunted. The dishes stacked in the kitchen shook every time he took a step. He positioned himself behind me. I felt the heat given off by his body on my back. He pushed the baby back toward my mother.
To stop me from taking him.
The dishes vibrated again as he stomped back to the table, picked up the pile of towels, and disappeared down the hall. Mom’s nose whistled.
The morning after the birth, I opened my eyes earlier than usual. I knew because all I could hear was my brother snoring in the top bunk, when normally I’d be woken up by the sound of my mother making breakfast in the kitchen. I lay awake in the dark. Something scratched the walls, on the other side. There were rats in the basement.
Between two of my brother’s snores, I heard the baby whimper in the distance.
Silently I opened our bedroom door. Dad didn’t like us to go around the basement as we pleased. I stuck my head out into the hall and looked toward the living room. The patch of light was there, shining on the floor, much farther to the right than I normally saw it. It must’ve been really early.
The baby whimpered at the other end of the hall.
Dad had put the crib in the room shared by my grandmother and sister. I waited for one of them to wake up and help the baby with whatever was upsetting him, but nothing happened. The child whimpered again.
I went into the room and approached the crib. I remembered the stack of wood that’d appeared in the basement one day and how Dad, with his box of tools, had turned it into the structure that the little boy now lay in. His eyes were open. He whimpered again. My grandmother let out a single snore. I looked over to the other bed, and in the darkness I could make out the white contour of my sister’s mask, which could’ve been on her face or lost among the sheets. My grandmother soon recovered the normal rhythm of her breathing. I bent over the baby and rocked him with a hand on his little tummy, and he closed his eyes.
I thought about it for a few seconds and then picked him up. I held him against my chest, his head resting near my elbow, like Mom had shown me. I walked out and took him to the dining room. I sat on the floor, near the patch of light, crossing my legs and feeling the baby breathe in my arms. I moved him into the pale yellow beam of light. It made his face glow.
“This is the sun,” I told him.
We stayed there for a few minutes.
Until my sister woke up and began to scream.
3
“No one’s stolen the child from you,” my father said when we all sat down to eat breakfast.
My sister sniffed under the mask, which was fixed in a diagonal, indifferent stare at the ground. The eggs my mother was making for breakfast frizzled as she cracked them into the hot oil. At the time I thought they suffered when they were burned, like we do. And they screamed.
“I took the baby this morning,” I said. “I woke up early and wanted to show him—” I found the circle of light on the table, but didn’t finish the sentence.
“Since when are you allowed to come out of your room so early?” my father cut in. “Do you know what a scare you gave your mother and grandmother with your sister screaming?” Dad was pointing a finger at me. “She thought someone had stolen the child.”
I kept quiet, ashamed. My brother tried to hold in his laughter, but it heehawed out through his nose.
The frying pan banged against the kitchen sink. My mother appeared with a plate full of fried eggs. She always said they had to stay in the pan until a black line surrounded the white. That was why there was a burning smell. With her free hand she straightened the tablecloth. As she maneuvered, some hot oil dripped from the plate and fell on her fingers, beside old scars. I peered at the seven bright orange yolks.
“I wasn’t screaming because of that,” said my sister. “Who would steal him from me?”
“The Cricket Man!” I replied.
“Be quiet,” my father said.
“Who would steal him from me?” she repeated. Then she took a deep breath, and her nose made a bubbling sound. “The One Up There?”
My sister looked at Dad.
“I screamed because I can’t wake up,” she added.
The baby cried in the bedroom.
“You see?” she continued, keeping her plastic mask pointing down to the floor. “He’s still here. I can’t wake up.”
My brother’s chair shot out from under him when, without warning, he stood up and began to make his way around the table toward my sister. His stomps made little concentric waves in my cup of milk. My father held out an arm to block his path, a waist-high barrier.
“Leave it,” he said. My brother grunted. “What did you mean by that?” he asked my sister.
She didn’t respond, just sniffed. My father’s hand shot from the table to her artificial face. He forced her to look up, grabbing her by the chin. My sister looked at me first. I could see her eyes behind the orthopedic material.
“This is a nightmare,” she said.
My grandmother bowed her head. She slid her hand along the table until it rested on my mother’s. She squeezed.
“You should have thought it through better,” my father said. With a jerk he made my sister look toward the hall. “Whether you like it or not, that thing that’s crying is your son.”
My sister swallowed. The swollen veins on each side of her neck made it seem thicker. She stayed in that position until my father loosened his grip, and she let her head fall. I didn’t think she would say anything else, but then she replied: “Only mine?”
“That’s enough,” Grandma interrupted.
The hand that Dad had sent flying toward my sister again stopped in midair.
“Join hands.”
My grandmother held hers out, one on each side. Mom took her right hand, my sister her left. The rest of us did the same. When we’d formed the circle, Grandma, as she always did, gave thanks.
“We thank the One Up There for allowing us to eat each day.”
She kissed the crucifix on the rosary she wore round her neck.
Mom cleared the dishes after breakfast. She tipped one of them into the trash so that a whole egg slid off it. When she took up position by the kitchen sink, I went over to her.
“If you didn’t break them”—I pointed at the box of eggs that was still open on the countertop—“could a chick hatch from one of them?”
Mom lowered her gaze, looking for mine.
“A chick?”
She smiled from above, her left eye closing against her will. I hugged her waist, resting my cheek on her belly.
Dad laughed when he heard my question. He was the only one left sitting at the table. He was reading and passing the key that hung from his neck between his fingers. He put down his book, stood up, took an egg from the carton, and went down on one knee. He held the egg between his face and mine with three fingers.
“Let go of your mother.” He pulled me away. Then he lifted one of my hands and made me reach out. “Let’s see what’s inside.”
Dad laid the egg in my palm and closed my fingers around it. I was certain I was going to feel the chick’s heart beating through the shell. That a crack would open and lots of yellow feathers would appear between my fingers. My father closed his hand around mine. He began to apply pressure. I tried to pull away, but he kept squeezing. I couldn’t stop it. The pressure was too much, and the egg cracked open. The sticky liquid seeped out between my fingers and Dad’s. He shook it off his hand, splashing me in the face.
“You don’t want to bring anyone else into this house,” he said. “And anyway, nothing can hatch from the eggs we eat. They’re not fertilized.”
He disappeared down the hall, dragging his brown slippers along the floor.
Lots of cold slime ran down my palm until the orange clot hit the floor. I stared at it blankly. Mom’s nose whistled. She knelt down. I felt the damp cloth on my hand before I saw it. My eyes were fixed on the puddle of shell and death at my feet. M
om wiped my hand, working each finger. The smell of ammonia made me cough.
Her eyes moistened.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It’s the ammonia,” she replied.
“My eyes aren’t crying.”
Mom’s shoulders slumped.
“I was remembering something,” she said.
“Something from outside?”
She nodded.
I kissed her rough cheek.
“Don’t be sad,” I said. “The basement’s much better than out there.”
Her nose whistled. Then she whispered in my ear: “Any place where you are is much better than anywhere else.”
My shoulder tickled and I wriggled away.
Mom let the cloth fall onto the floor, cleaned up the remains of the chick that never was, and went back to her work at the kitchen sink. I stood next to her, watching the damp patch that the cloth left behind shrink. Until it disappeared.
On the way to my bedroom, Mom called out my name. She asked me to come over to her. She crouched down in a very similar way to how Dad had done.
“Here.” She opened my hand. “Put it away and keep it warm. That’s what it needs to hatch.”
“And what Dad said?”
“You just keep it warm.”
I ran to my room holding the egg in both hands against my bare tummy.
My brother was sitting on his bunk, his feet hanging a yard and a half from the ground. He could spend hours there, his pajama bottoms tucked into his slippers, shaking his head and moving his feet and hands as if he was walking through a cornfield that didn’t exist. He would also whistle a tune, though the result wasn’t perfect since his bottom lip was split in half because of the fire. For a long time Mom and Dad didn’t understand what his trance meant. Then one afternoon, when we couldn’t get him to talk or stop smiling at nothing, my sister came into the room. She picked up a book from the shelf. You read it to him when he was little, she said, showing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to my parents. It’s as though you’ve already forgotten we had a life outside, she added. Since then, every time my brother traveled to that other world, there was only one way to communicate with him.
“Scarecrow, you haven’t seen anything,” I said. “And ask the Lion and the Tin Man to keep quiet, too.”
My brother saw the egg in my hands, but he soon resumed his imperfect whistling.
I picked up a dirty T-shirt from the floor and wrapped the egg in it, in the best imitation of a nest I was able to make. Afterward I put everything in the drawer of the one piece of furniture I didn’t share with my brother. The cabinet was at the foot of my bed. It had just two sections. Enough for my cactus, my crayons, and the insect and spy books that Dad gave me on cake days. I perfected the nest beside my jar of crayons.
I sat cross-legged in front of the cabinet and took out How to Be a Spy Kid. It was my grandmother and mother who’d taught me to read and write. There was plenty of time for it in the basement. The book contained tricks for children to learn. It taught me how to use lemon juice as invisible ink, writing secret messages that could then be read under a light. The first time I tried the trick I asked Mom to hold the piece of paper near one of the bulbs hanging from the ceiling in the living room. She had squeezed the lemon for me while I explained what I was going to do, following the instructions in the book. She doubted it was going to work, but she took the piece of paper anyway and held it near the glass bubble.
“There’s nothing on here,” she said, “and there won’t be anything however close I hold it to the light.”
Then, some brown lines began to appear on the sheet. Mom moved it around so the heat would spread evenly across its surface. New brown stains gradually emerged everywhere I’d applied the lemon juice. Finally, the secret message was visible: I TOLD YOU I WAS A SPY. Mom smiled as she read it. Her nose whistled.
“So you were right,” she said.
Sitting now in front of the cabinet with the book on my legs, I was looking for a particular page. I went over the sequences of dots and dashes. With the nail of my forefinger I tapped the shell four times in quick succession. Then twice more, as the book instructed.
I held my ear to the egg.
Not a sound.
“It’s Morse code,” I told the chick.
I tuned in again to see if there was any reply. There wasn’t, so I closed the drawer, leaving it open a slit so I could hear the chick tweeting if it decided to hatch overnight.
I put the book back in the cabinet and picked up the cactus. Two green balls covered in prickles surviving in a little pot. It appeared one day among the pile of things the One Up There sent us. Like the wood that Dad built the baby’s crib with. Or the carrots that Mom used to make her soup for dinner. While this cactus is OK, we’ll be OK. We must be strong like a cactus, my grandmother said when she gave it to me.
I left the bedroom. My brother was still whistling.
I lay facedown in the living room, my chin resting on my hands, one above the other. I positioned the cactus in the patch of light. A little cloud of dust danced among its prickles. As the light traveled along the floor, I pushed the pot with my finger to follow its course and keep the sunbeams on the cactus. If my brother could travel to Oz on a path as mysterious as the depths of his own unfocused gaze, I could imagine I was one of the cowboys from the Westerns that Dad watched.
I spent the whole day on the floor, walking through the desert among cactuses.
4
It was some time before the egg moved. “Keep it warm,” Mom had said. And I had kept it warm. Now the creature was ready to be born. What Dad had said about unfertilized eggs must’ve been a lie.
That evening when I saw the egg in a different position from where I’d left it in the morning, I had to gulp back my urge to scream with excitement, because only Mom and I knew it was there. The fact that my brother had seen me put it in the drawer didn’t mean he’d remember it five minutes later. I put my hands to my mouth and looked around, not knowing what to do.
A feeling of paternal responsibility made me act quickly. I carefully picked up the egg and held it to my belly button. The shell was warmer than usual. I felt the chick’s heart beating through it. I ran to find Mom to get her to help with the hatching.
There was nobody in the living room. I swiveled around to scan the whole room. There was no one in the bathroom, either, so I went to my parents’ room. Their door was metal and it didn’t have a handle like the rest of the doors. From outside it could only be opened with a key that Mom and Dad hung from their necks. My father didn’t want us to go near his room, but I was so excited by the egg and the chick inside that I banged on the door several times with my forehead to get Mom’s attention.
“Go to your room,” she shouted from inside.
“Mom, it’s important,” I said to the crack in the locked door. “It’s going to—” Before I finished the sentence I realized Dad would be in there, too, so I swallowed my words. “I need you to come out.”
“Not now,” she said. “I can’t right now.”
“Please,” I insisted.
I pictured the helpless chick hatching in front of me, and me not knowing what to do. Mom had dealt with my sister giving birth, an emergency, and this was an emergency, too. I pleaded with her with my whole face jammed into the corner of the doorframe. Slobbering on the metal. Dad didn’t like it when I cried. And I knew he was about to start shouting at me from in there at any moment.
There was a short silence, then I heard my mother’s steps as she came to the door. I suppose she wanted to open it a crack to see what the matter was, not knowing I was pushing against it. As soon as she turned the key, the door gave way under my weight. Mom couldn’t hold it. I rolled forward, unable to hold out my arms to stop my fall as I attempted to shield the egg from harm. In a rapid succession of images I saw the ceiling of the room, the washing machine in one corner, the floor, my mother’s face, my mother’s feet, and a door closing. I ended up lying on my b
ack at the foot of my parents’ bed, my hands still held against my belly.
Mom looked me in the face. Then she noticed my hands. The eye that she still controlled opened in an expression of understanding. The folds of burned flesh that surrounded the other one barely moved. Just then she glanced somewhere to the right of the bed.
At Dad. Who would now ask me what I was hiding. And he’d see the egg. And he’d put it in my hand. Wrap it in his. And squeeze. Until the shell broke and a load of slime poured through my fingers. Only now it wouldn’t be slime that came from the egg, but a body, with bones and feathers. It wouldn’t leave a puddle on the floor that Mom could clean up with ammonia, but would hit the ground with a hollow sound. Because it would be the dead body of the chick I was waiting for, which I still had in my hands, all warm. I closed my eyes waiting to hear Dad’s voice.
But it was Mom who spoke.
“Goodness, son, what’s the matter? Are you sick?”
I opened my eyes as my mother bent over to take hold of my wrist. When I was up, I turned my head toward the bed.
Dad wasn’t there.
Or by the wardrobe on the right-hand wall. Or near the washing machine. He was nowhere in the room. I held out the egg to show my mother.
“No, Mom, it’s not me, it’s—”
She put a hand over my mouth, and with the other she covered the egg. I tried to speak but instead I just sucked on the skin of her hand. Rough and irregular. It tasted like my cactus pot. Of earth.
She pushed my hands farther down to hide the egg.
“If you’re sick, go and tell Grandma. She’ll know what to give you. Dad’s going to be really angry when he finds out you came in here when the door was locked.” She led me back into the hall, keeping her hand on my mouth at all times. “And you know I’m going to have to tell him.”
Unable to speak, I motioned with my hands to get my mother’s attention. She turned her uneven eyes to the egg for just a second.
“Your grandmother will know what to give you,” she repeated.