by Paul Pen
A cold blade tore at my stomach when I realized my mistake.
It had all been a trick of the Cricket Man’s. He’d come in the house attracted by the smell of my sister’s blood. He’d hidden somewhere in the living room without any of us noticing. Disappearing into the shadows of a corner. Watching us with his giant black eyes. His long antennae vibrating and brushing against the ceiling. He’d trapped my sister in the living room and was using her as bait to lure me there.
And it’d worked. There he had me, defenseless in the middle of the room, my eyes closed. I hunched my shoulders waiting to hear his back-to-front knees as they bent. Waiting for his legs to touch my face.
But nothing happened.
The sweat on my back evaporated, leaving me with an icy sensation.
I half opened my eyelids. I could make out the usual contours of the living room: the sofa, Dad’s armchair, the shelves for the books and tapes. The television’s red pilot light made a silhouette.
Lots of hair.
I closed my eyes so tight my top lip was pulled in.
“What on earth are you doing?” whispered my sister.
“The Cricket Man,” I answered.
She rasped the roof of her mouth. “Going chirp-chirp?”
I heard the strap tighten against her head. I opened my eyes. The red light from the television outlined my sister’s artificial features. She was sitting on the floor with her legs crossed and her back resting on the sofa legs. Inside the holes in her mask her eyes seemed as black as I’d imagined the Cricket Man’s to be.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked.
She just let her head fall. I noticed some remains of blood that my mother must’ve missed or which perhaps she’d been unable to clean off. I sat on the floor next to my sister, brushing against her with the left side of my body. I could feel her breathing. I wondered whether I should ask her anything, or just let things happen around me like I always did. Just observing, and accepting Mom’s and Dad’s explanations. And Grandma’s.
“Was it Dad?” I asked then.
My voice was no more than an out-breath, just air that my lips molded in letter form, like the smoking caterpillar in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I read that book and watched the movie in the basement. It was one of the tapes that Dad kept on the lower shelves.
“Da . . . d?” In a single syllable my sister managed to change her voice from a whisper to normal volume. “What about Dad?”
“The nosebleed,” I said.
My sister swallowed. I went to stroke her face, but stopped my hand in midair. She noticed. Her eyes moved behind her mask like bee larvae inside a honeycomb’s cells. She grabbed my wrist to pull my hand to her face.
“You can touch me,” she whispered. “If you want, you can touch me.”
“I don’t want—”
But my sister squeezed my wrist harder. The first thing I touched, just with the tips of my fingers, was the curve of her false cheekbone. I kept my hand cupped so it wouldn’t span more surface. She rested her left hand on mine while keeping hold of my wrist with her right. The gentle gesture made me stop resisting. I laid my now-relaxed hand on the right side of her mask.
The white wall that hid my sister.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“I can feel your warmth,” she said.
And although what I was touching was a cold, rigid surface, I could feel the throb of something living underneath, like an eggshell with the chick still inside.
“Was it him?” I persisted.
The bee larvae squirmed. She examined my face, our intertwined hands resting on her cheek. She swallowed.
“Yes,” she answered, “everything’s his fault.” She squeezed my fingers and separated them from the orthopedic material. Pain burned in my thumb. “But you can’t tell anybody,” she said. “On the One Up There.”
I remembered the oath we’d made with Grandma’s rosary. She made me renew it. The red light from the television gave the mask a different glaze. New, darker circles appeared under her eyes.
“Nobody,” she said again.
The shadows changed inside the hole she had for a mouth. My sister pushed my hand away and got up without giving me a chance to reply. Her socks crept off down the hallway while I sat still rubbing my thumb. Her bedroom door closed before I had time to get to my feet. She’d suddenly gone, like the spot of sunlight between my fingers at the end of each day.
I tiptoed back to my room.
I got into bed under the thunderstorm of my brother’s snores. I reached up and felt the curved contour of his bunk. Then I ran two fingers over the palm of the hand that’d stroked my sister’s face. A face that could’ve been sculpted from the bone of her own skull.
An inside-out face.
With the sheet up to my chin, I asked the One Up There not to be hard on me if I decided to break the oath and tell my mother everything I knew. I also asked him not to let my father do anything bad to my sister.
“You don’t have to bring me any more potatoes,” I murmured as an offering.
Then I remembered the wood from which Dad had built the crib. It had appeared in the basement just a few days before my sister gave birth on the kitchen table. Grandma had been saying how urgently we needed the crib, including it in her prayers, I bet, since my sister had started to sit with her hands resting on the bulge on her tummy. But even so, that wood hadn’t appeared until my sister was complaining of pains down there.
The One Up There had to be asked for things ahead of time. Being nailed on Grandma’s cross meant he couldn’t do everything right away.
So for the time being, it fell on me to protect my sister.
18
The next morning, while Mom explained to me with a textbook that Earth had lots of tectonic plates that moved and smashed against each other to form mountains, I was thinking about another book. How to Be a Spy Kid. It would give me all the tricks I needed to protect my sister.
Mom told me about the liquid core, the strata, the crust, and the atmosphere. “Have you understood everything?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Let’s see whether you have.” She pushed the book toward me on the page where there was a picture of Earth, with a corner cut into it like an orange.
“A practical example: Where do we live?” She handed me the pencil she’d been using to underline part of the text.
Kneeling on the chair, I drew a rectangle, the place where we lived. The basement.
Mom’s nose whistled when I showed her the drawing. “Son, that’s the center of the Earth. You’ve put us next to the core.”
I looked at her without understanding where I’d gone wrong. She snatched the pencil from me.
“We live here.” She drew an arrow pointing at the blue-and-white part of the ball.
“Really?” I asked.
Mom nodded.
“That’s good. I thought we were deeper down.”
Her bumpy hand rested on mine. She sat looking at me.
“What?” I eventually asked. “Why are you looking at me?”
She smiled, making one eye close.
“Come on,” she said, “lesson’s over.”
I ran to my bedroom.
I threw myself onto my bed to reread the chapters of the book that would help me that night. Heading one of them was the motto that should guide any good spy.
“No one must know you are there,” I read out loud. “No one will know,” I whispered to the pages.
The book said I should familiarize myself with the terrain. That wasn’t a problem. I knew every last detail of my sister’s room. An illustration of a spy kid in uniform showed him dressed in black. The closest thing I found in the wardrobe was a black T-shirt and gray pajama bottoms. I hid them under the sheet. The young spy also had his face covered in a piece of clothing that only showed his eyes. I searched my bedroom, knowing I wouldn’t find anything like that in the basement. He also had a thing called a walkie-talki
e in his hand, which he’d use to alert headquarters if he was in danger. I shook my head because I didn’t have any gadgets like that, or a headquarters to contact. In the other hand, the boy held a flashlight. I only knew of a couple of candles and a box of matches. Mom kept them in one of the highest cupboards in the kitchen.
When I was little, Dad showed me a trick that always made me laugh: he built a structure with five matches, lit one of them, and when it’d burned away, the rest went flying into the air in an explosion of little sticks. He stopped doing it as I grew older. I touched the book, my finger falling on a circle of light with which the young spy illuminated a footprint on a muddy track.
“I need a flashlight,” I murmured.
I heard one of the colored pencils move inside the jar. The fireflies must have shifted it as they climbed up. I smiled. I might not have a walkie-talkie. I might not have a balaclava. But I did have my own flashlight. When I opened the drawer, the firefly jar glowed bright, lighting up the inside of the cabinet and the chick’s shell that lay empty beside it.
“But you’ll have to stay off until I say. We don’t want my sister to see us. Or Dad, especially not Dad.” The fireflies went out. I watched them walk around the jar’s transparent walls. Then, out loud, I reread the motto of a good spy, printed in orange capital letters: “No one must know you are there.”
I spent the day trying out movements on my bedroom floor. Rolling from one side of the room to the other. By dinnertime I was so nervous about the mission I was about to embark on that I could barely eat. My mother hit her head on the bulb when she stood to clear up the plates. The shadows stretched and shrunk, distorting the shapes on the table. Dad grabbed the lamp socket to stop it swinging.
“Not hungry?” he asked me. “You’ve left half your food.”
With my fork I tore the peak from a mountain of mashed potato and put it in my mouth. I chewed without enthusiasm.
“Come on, hurry up. Your mother shouldn’t have to make three trips.”
I swallowed.
“That’s what I like to see,” Dad said.
“I don’t want any more.” I pushed the plate into the middle of the table, dragging the tablecloth with it.
“Do you know that there’re children dying of hunger in other parts of the world?” said Dad.
“I don’t know any other parts of the world.”
“Oh yes, you do,” my mother cut in. “Today we found out about the strata, the core . . . Did you know he drew the basement as if we were in the center of the Earth?”
Grandma’s eyes lit up.
My sister laughed. “Wait, let me show you something,” she said before getting up.
“Are you going to eat some more or not?” asked Mom.
I shook my head. She picked up my plate and put it on top of the tower she’d built as she spoke, squashing the food left on the seventh plate that nobody had touched.
“I’m going to bed,” I said.
Dad gave an exaggerated gesture of surprise. “You don’t even want to know what movie we’re watching tonight?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I answered. “It’s bound to be one I can’t watch.”
“Because you’re younger than me,” my brother said beside me. Two drops of spit fell onto the creased tablecloth.
“Why don’t we watch a cartoon one tonight?” Grandma asked.
My brother groaned a complaint.
“Don’t worry, Grandma,” I said. “I’m tired.”
“Your voice doesn’t sound very tired.”
The mashed potato was stuck in my throat. Grandma had uncovered my lie. The mission was in jeopardy before it’d even begun. I’d never be as professional as the spy kid in my book with his uniform, flashlight, and gadgets. I would have to stick to writing secret messages in lemon juice and communicating in Morse code with chicks and fireflies.
I felt my family’s eyes on me as if they were giving off heat. Or maybe it was the heat from the blood rising to my face. I looked away as if I could escape it and saw my sister by the living room bookcase. Crouching, she was searching for a book, running her finger over the spines of the ones on the bottom shelf.
“Here it is!” she blurted out, attracting everyone’s attention, except my grandmother, who still faced me, with new wrinkles of curiosity.
Something hit me on the shoulder.
“Look,” my sister said, holding a book in front of my eyes. “This is the center of the Earth. Where we are is just a basement.”
Dad clicked his tongue. “Leave him alone.”
I read the title of the book out loud. “A Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
“There’s something to read in bed until you really are tired,” said my grandmother. When she winked an eye the suspicion disappeared from her face.
I left the book on the floor, by my bed, open on the first pages. Like a tent for the basement rats. I pulled back the sheet and got dressed in the uniform I had to wear to copy the spy kid in the book.
I heard footsteps in the hall.
I threw myself on the bed and covered myself up to my chest. Just before Mom appeared through the door, I grabbed the book from the floor and pretended to read.
“Since when do you go to sleep without giving me a kiss?” Mom sat on the bed, wagged a finger feigning anger, and with the same finger pushed my book downward. “And since when do you sleep with a T-shirt on?”
Unable to think of a reply, I distracted her attention with another question. “We don’t live at the center of the Earth?”
“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 j
ar’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.”