by Paul Pen
“I still can’t hear him crying,” my grandmother said. “Something’s wrong with the boy.”
We sat in silence. All that could be heard was Mom’s slipper hitting the floor, and the constant sizzle of the eggs burning in the frying pan.
From the entrance to the living room, my sister said, “Is something wrong with him?”
She came over to us and picked up her son, then rocked him in her arms. There was no response. She pointed at the kitchen with her chin. A column of smoke was coming from the pan, where the eggs were now totally burnt.
“We’re going to set ourselves on fire,” she said. “Again.”
Dad shot to his feet and stood there for a few seconds, before clicking his tongue and leaving the room. My sister watched his movements. Something happened behind the hole in her mask. A smile.
I had an idea. With the baby still in his mother’s arms, I took hold of him.
“Can I?” I asked. I waited for her to let go. When she did, I took the baby like Mom had shown me, his head near my elbow, and I went to the spot of light in the living room.
“Be careful,” Mom said. “What’re you doing?”
“What is he doing?” Grandma also wanted to know.
I sat in the spot of light as I had done the day the little boy was born. I positioned myself so that my back faced the others, hiding the baby.
“What are you doing?” my mother repeated with curiosity.
I moved the baby on my lap until the beam of light fell on his face.
“You don’t know about locked doors yet,” I whispered. “Feel the sun.”
The baby opened his eyes and started crying.
“See?” I heard my sister say. “There was nothing wrong with him.”
15
That night, while I was cleaning my teeth, my sister’s mask appeared reflected in the mirror.
“Were you in the bathtub?” she asked me.
She gripped my free hand, then picked up her toothbrush and dipped it in the froth I’d spat out. There were some days we had to share the foam, use baking soda, or even brush our teeth with just water, but in the end we always had toothpaste again. Among all the pills that Mom made us take there was one, a white one, called calcium. It was good for our teeth.
My sister began moving the brush inside her mouth. She had to manage with just her left hand. During the process, we looked at each other in the mirror, without saying a word. I spat. Then she did. A string of red saliva hung from her mouth, joining her bottom lip to the small puddle of blood and drool she’d spat out. When she lifted her head, the thread broke and stuck to her mask. “Is that normal?” I asked when I saw the blood.
“Living like we live, yeah.”
She quickly washed the froth and blood away, before drying the saliva on her chin with the five-buttoned blouse. Then she let me rinse my mouth out, before rinsing her own and turning off the water. She pulled on my wrist to lead me out of the bathroom, much like Mom had done that very morning. I resisted until I managed to put my toothbrush back in its place. I hadn’t used it, but I also made sure the soap was firmly in the blue fish.
We went into my sister’s room. She sat me at the bottom of her bed and went to the baby’s crib. The rest of my family was still in the living room after dinner. She turned around, resting her backside on the edge of the crib.
“Tell me, were you in the bathtub?”
I nodded. I squeezed my hands between my bare knees. I was wearing a pair of my white underpants.
“And?” she said. She noticed she’d left her bedroom door open. She closed it without making a sound. Her mask turned on her shoulders to look at me. “What did you see?”
“I didn’t see anything.” It was true.
“Did you wake up when I came in?”
I took a bit longer to answer that question. My sister had time to come sit beside me. I felt her breath on my neck, the mask almost touching my face. I nodded.
“What did you hear?”
I shrugged.
“Tell me what you heard.”
The mask moved even closer.
“You threw up,” I said.
“Don’t lie,” she replied. “I didn’t throw up.”
“I heard you . . .” Instead of saying it with words, I imitated the retching.
“But I didn’t throw up.”
“And you washed.”
“I was washing my hands,” she explained, “and what else?”
“You ran out when there was a noise in the hall.”
“It was Dad, wasn’t it?” My sister’s mask came away from my face. “What did Dad go into the bathroom for?”
“You left the soap in the sink,” I complained.
“That’s not what I asked. Why did Dad go to the bathroom?”
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Did he go to see what I’d been doing?”
“He told me off,” I reminded her. “He didn’t even know you’d been in there.”
“Why was he there, then?”
“He had scratches on his back,” I said. “But he didn’t put anything on them.”
“Scratches,” my sister repeated. She ran her left thumb over the curve of the fingernails on her right hand.
“I also saw him wash himself.” I wasn’t sure how to say it. “You know . . .” I pointed at my underpants. “Then he pulled the chain. And he told me off for the soap.”
My sister continued to run her thumb over the edges of her nails.
She sat in silence.
For a long time.
So long, it was me who carried on the conversation.
“What?” I asked.
The baby moved in the crib. He made the special cooing sound he made when he got himself comfortable.
“What is it?” I said again.
It was another few seconds before she began to speak. She lowered her face until her plastic chin almost touched her chest. She checked the door was still shut.
“Do you know what Dad was washing?”
I shook my head.
“Have you got to the book in Mom’s lessons about how children are made?” she continued.
“I know how children are made.”
My sister breathed out. She took ages to finish taking a deep breath. “Dad’s not as good as you think,” she said.
“I know. He made me sleep in the bathtub.”
She smiled and took my hand.
“That’s nothing,” she said. “He can do worse things.” She pulled my hand to position it on her stomach. Then she looked at the crib. She waited for me to do so, too, before continuing. “That baby there came from my tummy.”
As if he’d heard us talking about him, the little boy kicked the air with both legs.
“I know he did,” I said, “I saw him come out.” I remembered how I’d gripped my sister’s leg while she struggled, naked on the dining table. How she’d fought to free herself. And to get the mask off her face. I heard in my mind the sound made by her wrist bone when Dad let her hand drop.
“And who put it there?” she asked me. At the same time she pressed my hand against her belly. A bone in her neck clicked. A tear appeared on her lower eyelid and got trapped on the edge of the mask’s hole. For an instant it sparkled when it reflected the light from the bulb hanging from the ceiling. In the end it fell inside, behind the orthopedic material.
I thought about the answer to the question she’d asked. All I could do was reply with another question. “Was it the Cricket Man?”
She shook her head with a click of her tongue. She rested the hand that was still free on mine.
“No,” she whispered. Another long out-breath prepared her for what she was about to say. She moistened her lips before speaking. “It was Dad.”
She blurted it out. The baby kicked behind the bars of his crib. Bars like the ones on the basement’s windows. My sister looked at me. She held my gaze for just a few seconds. Twice her eyes glanced toward the door.
“Dad
?” I asked. The skin on my arms and thighs tightened and was suddenly covered in dozens of dots, as if a creature inside me wanted to get out.
“Yesterday wasn’t the first time,” she continued.
“Yesterday?”
My sister let go of my hand. She rested one of hers on my back. She ran it up and down, digging her nails into my flesh. Tracing scratches much like the ones I’d seen the night before on Dad’s back.
“Was it you?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What did he do to you?”
“He hurt me.”
“And, a baby?” I asked.
Her eyes went out of focus. “No, not that,” she answered. “I hope not.” Her chest rose as she breathed in. Then she shook her head as if waking herself up. She repositioned herself on the bed, tucking a leg in and sitting on it. The mattress springs squeaked with the movement.
“Promise me you won’t say anything,” she said. Her voice took on a sudden hardness. “You must promise. Not to Dad, not Mom, not Grandma. Not even your brother.”
“Does he do it to you a lot?”
“What?”
“Dad. Does he do that to you a lot?”
My sister showed me a fist. She unfolded her fingers one after the other. After opening a full hand, she closed it again and continued to count. She stopped when she closed her fist for the second time.
“Does Mom know Dad hurts you?”
“If you know how children are made,” replied my sister, “then that baby makes it pretty obvious, doesn’t it?”
A shiver ran through my whole body.
“But you have to promise you won’t say anything. You have to swear it on the baby’s life. And on . . .” My sister looked around her. The orthopedic nose pointed to various parts of the room as the mask scanned the space. Then she got up, took something from Grandma’s bedside table, and returned to her position on the bed. She took both my hands in hers and then untangled what she’d taken from Grandma’s bedside table. It was a rosary. She wrapped our fingers in the maroon-colored beads.
“Swear on the One Up There,” she said. She squeezed the rosary until my hands hurt. “Say after me: I won’t say anything about this to anyone.” My sister was breathing in a strange way, her eyes fixed on the door. “I won’t say anything about this to anyone. I swear on the One Up There,” she reeled off. “Repeat it.” She spat out the last words, spraying me with saliva. “Repeat it!”
She squeezed the rosary even tighter, twisting it to strangle one of my fingers, which turned bright red.
“I won’t,” I started to say. A white band appeared on my skin around the beads. “I won’t say anything about this to anyone. I swear . . .” I tried to remember the words. “On the One Up There.”
“Not anyone,” she repeated. “You’ve sworn on it.”
I nodded.
“And not just because of that.” A different light appeared in her eyes. “But also because otherwise I could tell all your secrets.” She was referring to the firefly jar with which I could’ve suffocated the baby. “Not anyone,” she said one last time.
“Not anyone,” I repeated.
Then she untangled the rosary. She got up to put it back in its place, but stopped. All of a sudden I felt the crucifix against my lips. “Kiss the One Up There,” she ordered me. “You have to, to make your oath real. If you break it after you kiss the One Up There, the punishment will be a thousand times worse.”
She pressed the cross against my mouth with such force that I could barely move my lips. Even so I managed to give it something resembling a kiss.
“Good,” she said.
The bedroom door opened just as my sister put the rosary back. With a leap, she let herself fall onto my grandmother’s bed. She pretended to laugh.
“What’s going on in here?” my grandmother asked.
My sister was still laughing.
“Nothing,” she answered. She moved on the bed so that it made a sound. “I’m playing with my brother.”
My grandmother’s sparse eyebrow moved up her forehead.
“Where are you?” she asked into the air.
“Here,” I answered.
My voice served as a guide so she could face me.
“What’s going on?” she persisted.
I looked at my sister, at her eyes behind the mask. The same eyes that had just cried, even if the tear had fallen inside. She forced another chuckle out and bounced on the bed again in an improvised imaginary game. I looked at the baby. The sound of the springs was making him stir. He began to cry. The scratches my sister had just made on my back were burning. Scratches like the ones that would already be healing on Dad’s back.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
And not even my grandmother, who usually heard much more than just the words, realized that I’d said that from the bottom of my soul.
The first tear fell on my bare leg.
Then I cried like the little boy I was.
I cried like I was beside my nephew, in his crib.
16
After that, Mom came to see me in bed.
Sitting with my back against the wall, the sheet up to my waist, I was flicking through my insect book looking at the photographs. Thanks to that book I knew what a dragonfly was before I ever saw one. And a cricket. And a saturniid. I learned the names of almost all the species that appeared in those pages. Once I tried to make Grandma believe I’d learned Latin by reciting to her a long stream of scientific names of bugs. Actias selene, Inachis io, Colias crocea. I said them to her one after the other, but voiced them as if I was speaking normally. I even asked a question with the name of one species and then answered it with another. Saturnia pyri? Acherontia atropos.
You won’t fool me, Grandma replied after hearing the list of names. I bet you got all those from that book of yours on bugs.
When Mom opened the door, I had the book open on the page that showed a photo of a firefly. In the picture it clung onto a blade of grass growing beside a lake. Its light was reflected, more weakly, on the water’s surface. It became my favorite insect from the first time Dad let me see the book. There’s no creature more amazing than one that can make its own light.
“Grandma tells me you cried,” Mom said from the door. She was poking her head through the narrow crack she’d opened. From the living room the irregular flashing from the television now reached my room like lightning bolts on the floor.
I didn’t answer. I was absorbed in the photograph of the firefly, in the magical green glow emitted from the bottom of its abdomen. Do these bugs really make light? I asked Dad the day he got the book down from the top shelf for me. It was when he still let me ride on his legs. When he didn’t punish me by making me sleep in the bathtub.
Well, he explained, I think they actually steal it from the sun. In the day they absorb its energy and then at night they let it out.
Then I’d asked if the sun was that light that came in through the ceiling in the living room. He got up and left me alone in the room. That afternoon I discovered that Dad was wrong, that fireflies make their own light with chemicals in their body. Not everything my father said was true.
“I want to know if you’ve been crying,” Mom said.
I shook my head.
“Grandma found you crying in her bedroom,” she went on.
I touched the green glow in the book. It was no more than a bit of ink printed on a piece of glossy paper. Another artificial light.
Mom came over to my bed. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”
My finger touching the picture of the firefly was the same one my sister had strangled with the rosary to make me swear I wouldn’t repeat anything she’d just told me.
“Nothing,” I replied.
I thought of the baby. Of the day my sister gave birth on the kitchen table. Of how much the little boy’s crying annoyed Dad. How he had never held the little boy in his arms. My throat tightened.
I shook my head.
“This is my house,” I replied. “I want to live with you all.”
Her nose whistled. “So what is it, then?”
I thought about it for a few seconds, before answering, “You’re tricking me.”
“Why do you say that?”
No one had explained to me who the baby’s father was.
“You all know whether or not the Cricket Man exists. You all knew that the kitchen door has always been locked. You all know much more than you tell me.”
“Well, that’s what parents do. It’s our job,” she responded. “Parents always know a lot more than their children.”
“Well, I want to know everything.”
“Believe me, there are things you don’t want to know yet.”
“Like what?”
Mom sighed. “All in good time.”
“See? You only tell me what you want to tell me. You’re tricking me all the time.” I laid the open book on my chest, crossed my arms, and looked away, at the wall.
“All right,” my mother then said, clapping her hands together. “Ask me whatever you want. Anything you can think of. And I promise I’ll answer only with the truth.” She gripped my chin to turn my face to her, her smile making the usual eye close. The light from the ceiling cast shadows under the irregular folds of her skin. “But just one question,” she added.
I lifted the book from my chest and turned a few pages. “Do all these insects live outside?”
She nodded.
“All of them?”
She nodded again.
“Will I be able to see them one day?”
Mom stretched out a finger. “You were only meant to ask one question,” she sang.
“Will I be able to see them one day?” I insisted.
She swallowed, then combed my hair with her hand.
“You’re already seeing them,” she answered. She touched the firefly picture in front of me.
“I mean really see them.” I put the stress on the second-to-last word so she’d understand what I meant. But she already knew.