by Paul Pen
I identified the wet sound of a kiss and knew that Grandma was making her own oaths to the One Up There.
“You don’t need to ask that,” Mom’s voice said, surprising me. She’d appeared in the room during Grandma’s prayer. She turned on the light.
“I’m sure he has plenty of days left. You’ll see.” She sat on the bed beside my grandmother.
“I hope to God you’re right,” Grandma replied. “But he’s old now. We’re both old. The doctors have made it very clear to him what he’s facing. He’s been making all this effort for ten years and—”
I saw Mom hug Grandma when her voice failed.
“—and I don’t want to be here when he’s gone,” she said between sobs.
I had no idea what they were talking about.
“Everything will be fine,” Mom said. “I’m sure he has years left in him. He’s strong.”
I heard a kiss.
“And your son’s certain of it, too. That’s why he wants to start organizing Grandpa’s replacement. So he can make the decision himself. None of us know what the best way will be, but—”
The baby started crying, interrupting the conversation. Mom got up to tend to him.
“What’s up with him?” asked Grandma.
Mom shushed the baby. The screaming fit subsided, reduced to an almost inaudible gurgle.
“Do you know what?” Mom said. “The boy asked me something very odd today.”
I pricked my ears even more when I heard myself mentioned.
“Odd?” Grandma asked, still sounding sad.
“About animals. Something about . . .” She paused as though trying to find the right words. “Something about whether a family of mammals can have babies among themselves.”
I heard the drawer in Grandma’s bedside table close. “Did he ask it because of the baby?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Mom answered.
When Grandma burst into tears again, Mom went back to the bed beside her. I saw that the crib was empty, so she must’ve had the baby in her arms.
“What’s wrong now?” she asked. “What did I say?”
Grandma sniffed.
“Nothing. It’s not you,” she said. “It’s this baby. I swear . . . I love him more than I love myself. I swear that’s the truth. But every time I hold him . . .” She took a deep breath. “Every time I hold him, I feel the weight of every bad decision we’ve made.”
She cried but kept speaking, letting her words out in a howl rising in pitch. “I see in him the worst of the sins committed in this basement. The worst of our sins.”
Under the mattress, I, too, let out silent tears. I again felt my sister’s scratches on my back imitating the ones I’d seen on Dad’s. I remembered the single tear that she’d shed when she told me the truth about the baby. The tear that’d fallen behind the mask.
“How could we have let it happen?” asked Grandma.
Mom took a while to respond.
“We could punish ourselves every day,” she said, “but there’s no point.”
Grandma blew her nose.
“And you know why?” continued Mom. “Because we have a healthy baby. And a baby as lovely as your grandchildren were. And we’re going to look after him like we do them. Because he has his whole life ahead of him. Plus,” Mom went on, “it’s us, me and you, who have to love this baby most.”
She lowered her voice. “This beautiful little thing that’s fallen asleep. Such a gorgeous little boy whose mother doesn’t want him.”
As Mom got up to put the baby back in the crib, Grandma added, “His father doesn’t want him, either.”
Mom took a deep breath. “But that’s not the same,” she replied from the door.
“Goodnight.” She turned off the light, barely making a noise with the switch. We were left in the dark again.
“Goodnight,” Grandma whispered.
In the total silence of the room, I slowed my breathing until Grandma’s slowed, too. I found a thousand meanings for the words I’d just heard from my hiding place.
When I knew Grandma was asleep, I took the chance to change the position of my arms.
My sister soon arrived.
The door opened, and the room was filled with flashes from the television in the living room, which disappeared as soon as she turned on the light. I put a hand over my eyes to give my pupils time to get used to the new reality. When I took it away, I saw her legs by the crib. I pressed my chin against the floor to expand my field of vision. My sister had a hand resting on the baby’s tummy. She rocked him. The little boy carried on sleeping.
The mask turned on my sister’s shoulders. I could see an eye hole, the curve of the nose, and a corner of her mouth. She was still. Perhaps listening to the rhythm of Grandma’s breathing like I had minutes before. By the way her chest rose and fell, I could tell her own breathing had quickened.
She rocked the baby again.
She waited.
Then the hand she’d rocked the baby with went to one of the pockets she had on each side of the five-buttoned blouse. She undid the toggles with her eyes fixed on the baby. The movement of her fingers inside the pocket made it look as if it was full of life, as if cockroaches were crawling around in there.
Wood creaked on Grandma’s bed. “It’s not time yet,” she said.
My sister’s fingers stopped. They shot out of the pocket with the speed of real cockroaches.
“Feeding him now won’t get you out of having to wake up later, you know,” Grandma added.
My sister’s white mask looked at her and at the baby. At the baby and at her.
“And switch the light off, will you? It’s been hard enough as it is trying to get him used to the dark. It’s taking him longer than it did your brother.”
I smiled under the bed when I heard that, as if I’d won some sort of prize.
“How do you know I turned on the light?” my sister asked.
“Do you think I don’t hear it when you flick the switch?”
With one step, my sister reached the door. She hit the switch hard, so it made a sound. “Did you hear that?”
“Excellent,” Grandma replied, ignoring my sister’s provocation. “Lights off.”
The floor, crib, and bed legs gradually materialized in front of me in the darkness. Two moving blots, my sister’s feet, approached the bed. Something touched my back. It was the mattress I was hiding under, dipping now under her weight as she sat. I laid the jar on its side and pressed a cheek against the floor. I remembered how Mom had explained to me what noodles were by squashing spaghetti on the table.
The blouse fell to the floor. It made another irregularly shaped patch in front of me. The bulge on my back changed shape and position, dividing itself bit by bit until it became a slight contour stretched along the mattress. I heard the mask strap stretch, and the elastic click as it was released. Then a hollow sound that told me she’d put the thing down on the bedside table.
My sister’s breathing gradually fell in time with my grandmother’s.
I listened to them for a long time, until my own breathing imitated their rhythm. I blinked a few times to stop myself from falling asleep. The dust gave the floor a rough texture, like the hair scar on Dad’s face. I closed my eyes just for a second.
But it wasn’t a second.
And what woke me was the sound of footsteps.
Someone was walking around the room.
When I opened my eyes I thought the Cricket Man must’ve come back to the basement to take away the baby he’d been unable to snatch on his first visit. Or to put me in his sack for spying from my hiding place under the bed. After blinking a few times I remembered the mission. It must be Dad walking around the room. He wanted to make my sister bleed, or put another baby in her belly.
The mattress lifted above me in one corner.
I was about to ask the fireflies for light.
Then the footsteps dragged along the floor near the crib. I heard my sister humming a tun
e, the music becoming a string of mmm’s that came from some place between the roof of her mouth and her nose.
It was the music from Dad’s favorite movie. The saddest melody I’d ever heard. The orchestra’s swell was now reduced to my sister’s almost inaudible murmur. I recognized the silhouette of her feet by the crib.
The melody broke up in her throat when she arrived at the highest note.
The baby began to cry.
“I told you,” I heard Grandma say. Her voice sounded deep, as if it’d traveled light-years to reach the room from the planet of dreams where she’d been. “Turn on the light.”
My sister didn’t reply, but she took Grandma’s advice. I pressed my eyelids together when she flicked the switch. Then gradually relaxed them while she hummed the sad tune and the baby’s crying rose and fell.
I was about to peer out, but then I remembered that my sister left her mask on the bedside table when she went to sleep. So I fixed my eyes on her feet. I climbed her legs with my gaze, stopping at her hip, her blouse pocket, her chest. The baby’s legs hung at belly height. She held him with her left arm, the fingers lost in the folds of the diaper.
Still humming the song, she undid the top two buttons of her blouse. Her breast popped out from the material. I saw a purple circle around her nipple.
I pushed myself forward to expand my field of vision. I did it carefully: I stopped when the bed frame above me still blocked the view of my sister’s face.
The humming broke off. I thought she’d heard the dust crunch under my hands. But then she continued with the melody, unaware of my presence.
Now I could see her bare breast and all of the baby’s body. His little face was wrinkled up and his eyes were closed. His mouth wide open as if he was crying, but he wasn’t. He bit my sister’s left breast through the blouse.
“Not that one,” she said. With a movement of her shoulder she pushed the little boy’s mouth away, and that was when I noticed another movement lower down. In the blouse pocket. The imaginary cockroaches had returned. My sister’s hand was moving around in there. Her wrist emerging and hiding behind the folds of fabric.
My heartbeat boomed in my ears. It seemed as if the whole house would hear it.
The hummed melody reached its highest point again. Once more my sister’s throat gave way. She took up the song again from the beginning.
That was when her hand came out of her pocket.
Straightaway I noticed the sky-blue crumbs between two of her knuckles. The same color as the cubes of rat poison. She stroked her bare nipple with her fingers. She circled it a few times with two fingertips.
She hummed as she did it.
The brown skin turned bluish.
Then she lowered her fingers. She rubbed them together over the pocket like when Mom added salt to a salad.
“Is everything all right?” Grandma asked.
My sister stopped humming to answer. “Everything’s fine,” she said.
I stared at her. At the blue powder that’d spread over her nipple.
“That’s it,” my sister whispered to the baby. “This one’s yours. You can eat now.”
She guided the little boy’s head to her bare nipple stained blue.
20
I hit my head against the boards that supported the mattress as I tried to come out. My chin hit the floor. The firefly jar rolled. I kicked as if swimming, trying to make as much noise as possible. I couldn’t find the strength to scream.
When I managed to get my head out, I steadied myself by anchoring my hands to the floor. I looked up toward my sister, not caring what face I’d find. Her hair flapped on her shoulders, free without the strap that always held it to her head.
“What’s going on?”
It was my grandmother who shouted that. She shot up and waved her arms in the air as if a swarm of wasps attacked her.
My sister ran off around one side of the crib, heading for a corner of the room. An escape very similar to the one made by the rat I’d found in that very crib. She crouched in the corner, nowhere else to go.
The little boy started crying again. It sounded muffled coming from the small space where my sister had confined him, between her breast and the wall. When I reached them, I tried to get my hands in around her hips, but she stopped me with her elbows. She was pumping her arms as if they were a praying mantis’s big legs.
“Let go of the baby!” I screamed.
A rough hand covered my mouth. I could taste the talcum powder. My grandma held me around the middle and pulled me. I stretched out my hands in an effort to grab hold of my sister. And my nephew. My fists closed on the air. Grandma turned me around and knelt in front of me. Locks of white hair were falling down her face, getting caught in the eyelids, in the scars on her skin, and in the corners of her mouth. I could see some bald patches. “What is it?” she shouted. She pressed my face between her hands. “You have to describe it to me.”
I breathed.
Behind me I heard my sister squirming in the corner.
Drops of sweat slid down my forehead.
I let out a wild moan. It was a while before I was able to say a sentence.
“She’s giving the baby rat poison,” I finally said.
My grandmother’s two eyebrows joined at the top of her nose to become one. She moved her lips but said nothing.
At that moment a tremor started in my bedroom. The earthquake advanced up the hall toward us. The door opened, the handle hit the wall, and my brother appeared in the room.
Grandma put him to use.
“Get the baby from her,” she ordered him. She pointed at the corner where my sister still crouched.
I took a step back to get out of my brother’s way. My sister’s elbowing was no bother for him. Neither was her kicking. He took a few blows before he was able to grab her by the arms. He pulled her shoulders back, making a bigger space between her body and the wall. My sister’s attempts to defend herself were reduced to spasms.
My brother yelled at us, “Take him!”
My grandmother stepped forward. She felt the contours of my siblings, searching for a gap between them where she could reach the baby, until she managed to get her arms over my brother’s shoulder.
“I’ve got the baby,” she said to my brother. Then, to my sister, she said, “Let him go.”
My sister thrashed about.
“Let him go,” my grandmother said again.
The thick veins on my sister’s ankles changed shape when she went up on tiptoes. The baby’s red face emerged from behind my sister’s back. My grandmother grabbed him under the arms, my nephew’s feet hanging in the air. She rocked and shushed him.
She sat on the bed.
My mother then came into the room.
“Leave her!” she shouted at my brother, who was still overpowering my sister in the corner. She leapt into the corner with her bent elbow pointing outward. She rammed it into the bottom of my brother’s back when she fell on him. “Leave her!”
His response was just a grunt.
“It’s not what you think. He hasn’t done anything this time,” Grandma said. “It was your daughter.”
Mom stopped her attack. The baggy T-shirt she slept in reached her knees and showed the cleft in her chest.
Dad appeared in the doorway.
His face wrinkled up when he saw my mother with her legs apart, shoulders slumped and hands hanging on each side of her body. And my brother pushing my sister to trap her against the wall.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Grandma held out her arms, offering the baby to anyone who could see him.
“Is his mouth blue?” she asked. “Is his little mouth blue?”
The baby kicked and cried.
“What do you mean?” My father looked at me, searching for an explanation. “What’s your grandmother saying?”
Instead of answering, I went up to Grandma. I touched her arms so she knew I was there. She lowered them to my height. I took the baby like Mom had taught me.
Then I sat on the bed, beside my grandmother.
“What’s this about a blue mouth?” asked Dad.
I opened the baby’s mouth with two fingers. Bubbles of snot exploded on his nose and splashed my hand. I separated his lips and discovered the ridges of flesh that were his gums. I examined them, and the inside of his lips. Another loud scream allowed me to peer into his mouth.
Tears gave me away. I sniffed.
Grandma touched my eyelids before I could say anything.
“No . . .” It was Mom who said that. It must’ve been the moment she understood what was happening. Perhaps, like me, she remembered the cubes of poison that’d disappeared. And she grasped the meaning of my grandmother’s question. And the meaning of my tears. And why my brother was trapping my sister against the wall.
“What have you done to him?” she yelled at the corner. She knelt beside me to look at the baby and stroked his face with a finger. Then she pinched him hard. Twice. Three times. I wanted to get the baby away from her, but when he started crying again, I understood what Mom was trying to do. She kept his mouth open until she, too, could see the tip of his blue tongue. She snatched the baby from my arms and pinched it between two fingers.
“We have to make him sick,” she said.
My sister spoke from her prison in the corner, her voice choked. “Don’t worry—he—he won’t die.” Her breathing rasped in her chest. “Never—he never dies.”
The hair scar on Dad’s face moved to a straight angle I’d never seen before.
“You can’t make me—” She choked on her own words. “You can’t make me love that child. That baby’s an abomination.”
“Shut up!” Dad screamed. “The boy’s here.”
My parents looked at each other. Then their eyes rested on me just for an instant. Grandma straightened her back so suddenly I heard the muscles in her neck tense. Mom left the bedroom with the baby in her arms, heading toward the bathroom.
Dad approached the corner, pushing my brother aside.
“What’ve you done to the baby?” he asked my sister.
She covered her ears, her hands over her hair, and shook her head, pressing it against the wall. Dad forced her to turn around.