by Paul Pen
“It hurts,” she said.
“What did Dad do to you?”
“It really hurts. I have to loosen it.”
She swayed under the lightbulb. She pulled at the mask’s strap, and then laid a hand on her artificial face, inserting three fingers in the three holes. I heard an elastic slap when the strap was freed behind her head.
“You can’t do that,” I said.
My sister pulled the mask forward. “Didn’t you see what your father did to me? I just want to stop this plastic pressing against the cuts. You don’t have to shut your eyes. I just need to loosen the strap.”
She groaned when the orthopedic material came away from her face. From where I was, it looked like the mask was still in the same place. She was holding its chin with one hand, and with the other she was playing with the elastic strap to loosen it.
She let her shoulders drop, breathing all the way out.
“Do you really want to get out of the basement?” she said. “At last?”
I looked at the unlit firefly jar.
“Yeah,” I answered. “Do you know how?”
“Course I know. But first you have to make me a promise.”
“What?”
“That you’ll only listen to me. And you’ll open your eyes from now on.” She made the vowels long when she spoke. Her waist made a circle, as if dancing with an imaginary hoop. “Do you promise me?”
I said yes with a sound in my throat.
“If you don’t open them, you’ll never find out what really happens in this basement,” she added. “You don’t know anything yet, and—”
She let the mask fall before she finished the sentence.
I saw her face for an instant before I could react.
And after that instant, my eyes refused to close.
Because the face that appeared behind the mask changed everything.
My sister blinked. She was as overwhelmed as I was that we could look at each other without the barrier of white plastic that’d always been there. On her face there was no disgusting hole instead of a nose. There wasn’t a single burn. Apart from the marks from Dad’s recent slaps, my sister’s face was as smooth and pink as mine. Under one of her eyes I could even make out two moles identical to the ones I had.
“See?” she said.
At that moment, the fireflies in the jar came back to life to glow brighter than ever.
ELEVEN YEARS EARLIER
22
A gust of wind banged the window against the frame. It interrupted the woman’s concentration. She had been staring at the television. The town was on the news. Until now it had never taken up so much as a minute’s airtime, but for the last ten days every channel’s news program had been linking up with its correspondent on the island. Sitting at the kitchen table, the woman resisted the urge to look away from the screen. The spokesperson for the missing girl’s family was about to make another statement.
“Oh, she must’ve fallen on the rocks,” the woman murmured to the screen. The window banged against the frame again.
The woman continued to chop carrots with her eyes still glued to the television. On the third bang, she wiped her fingers on the dishtowel that lay on her lap and went over to the sink. She closed the window. Through the glass she discovered the dark clouds of an inevitable storm on the horizon. The approach of nightfall and the threat of bad weather had made the landscape so dark that the gravel path crossing the plot had turned the same gray as the surface of the road that went down to the town. On one of the bends in the path, near the old septic tank, the laundry flapped at the mercy of the wind. A peg came loose with a gust, and the white shirt it held in place flew off. It rolled along the ground in a curl of fabric. The sheet of corrugated iron that covered the septic tank took flight as well.
The woman pushed open the kitchen’s swinging door, crossed the living room in the direction of the front door, and ran out in search of the shirt. She couldn’t find it on the dirt track or the ground that stretched out on either side. Nor had it rolled to the front of the house. She turned toward the cliff and there she saw it. The shirt was fluttering like a flag at half-mast, caught in some weeds. The woman crossed the plot. Her vertigo wasn’t so bad if she kept four limbs on the ground. Rather than look down, she fixed her eyes on the heavy gray horizon where the sea ended. She snatched the shirt by the neck. As she pulled on it, the thistle it was caught on tore one side of the pocket.
Wind filled the woman’s skirt. The braid of her dark hair, which she had knotted that morning, just like every morning before that, traveled up her back. It fell in front of her face like a rope. Still on her knees, she crawled backward to move away from the cliff’s edge. She didn’t get up until the rocks were more than five handbreadths away. She brushed the dust and earth from her clothes with an open hand. On the clothesline, the rest of the laundry was threatening to take flight. The woman ran back to the house.
On the TV in the kitchen they’d stopped talking about the town and the missing girl. The news program was covering another story. The woman left the shirt she’d rescued on the table, picked up a Danish cookie tin she used as a sewing box, and placed it on the material so she wouldn’t forget she had to mend the pocket. She looked around for the big maroon-colored washbowl. The one she’d bathed her eldest daughter in those first summers when she was a baby. She found it under the sink. The windowpane shook with the wind outside. The laundry flapped, about to come loose.
She reached it with the washbowl resting on her hip. Some pegs leapt off when she pulled at the clothes hanging on the line. Another white shirt of her husband’s. Grandma’s petticoat. Grandpa’s corduroy pants. Her daughter’s bras. The dozen pairs of underpants that her youngest son dirtied every week. And his sheets, which had to be changed every day. A single odd sock was left pegged at one end. The woman’s eyes ran the length of the clothesline. She checked the ground. She turned on the spot searching for the missing sock in the vicinity of the house. Then her gaze fell on a human figure that was observing her from the gravel path. A faceless silhouette. It took her a few seconds to recover from the fright. Then she shouted to her daughter, “You scared me with your hair like that.”
“Hoped I might,” she replied. With a head movement she’d repeated for years, the daughter flicked the hair away from her face. She caught it behind her neck with both hands, revealing her face.
“We had to stop,” she explained. She raised her arm to show her mother the rolled-up stack of posters. “We couldn’t put them up anymore,” the daughter continued. “It’s going to rain.”
“You don’t say.” The woman pulled on the solitary sock that hung in front of her nose. The peg twisted rather than come away. The spring bent out of shape, pinching the material with more force. She heard her daughter laughing behind her as she ran toward the house.
“Don’t shut the door on me,” she yelled to her daughter.
The door slammed. The woman pulled at the sock with such anger that it tore. Part of the material stayed caught in the peg. The woman examined the frayed remains she held in her hand. She threw them into the air. The sock flew, lifted by the wind, in the direction of the rocks. It continued its upward trajectory, passing in front of the lighthouse tower, before disappearing into the void over the cliff.
A current of air soaked the woman with a sudden spray of water. Bent over, she fled the rain, carrying the washbowl full of clothes. Unable to ring the bell, she turned her back to the door and knocked with her heel. She could forget about her daughter paying her any attention. Her husband, at the top of the tower, no doubt reading another of those medical books he didn’t understand, wouldn’t hear the banging, either. And since the incident on the stairs, she couldn’t count on her son for much. She felt a pang of guilt in her stomach when she thought about that.
She heeled the door again. The gusts of wind spat the water under the porch roof. The sky lit up with a flash of lighting. Thunder rumbled above her and under her feet at almost the
same time. She could hear the raging waves crash against the rocks. The sheet metal that had been ripped from the septic tank resisted the onslaught, trapped against the trunk of a tree. The woman leaned back against the door to rest her shoulders, the washbowl supported on her thighs. She was about to lose balance when the door opened.
“Was no one going to open up for me, or what?”
“I’m here,” Grandma answered.
“That granddaughter of yours is insufferable. She closed the door on me on purpose.”
“Your daughter, you mean.”
“You wouldn’t believe she was eighteen years old,” the woman went on. “She still behaves like a little girl.”
Grandma snatched the washbowl from her daughter-in-law, who made no complaint. The woman shook off some drops of rainwater that had pearled on her fleece jacket. She also dried her forehead and her smooth cheeks, before going over the knots of her braid.
Grandma rammed the kitchen door with her side.
“Everything’s wet again,” the woman announced. “Where’re you going to hang it?”
“In the basement,” Grandma answered. “All that space may as well be some use.” She passed through the swinging door.
The woman took off her jacket. She hung it on the banister of the stairs that led to the first floor. Her daughter had also left a black raincoat there. And on the floor, resting against the wall, the roll of posters held together with an elastic band, the corners curling from the moisture. A partial image inside that cylinder showed the blue eyes of the girl who was missing on the island. Like almost the entire town, the daughter had been helping the family for days. Forming search teams to scour the craggy coast. Rallying in front of the town hall to call the authorities to account. Helping to monitor the boats coming and going at the main port. Or putting up posters on the streets showing a photograph of the girl. The one that showed her on a bicycle, wearing a pink cardigan, smiling at the camera that captured that image without ever suspecting what it would finally be used for.
The woman looked away from the posters. Gripping the banister, she yelled at her daughter for closing the door on her. Her daughter replied with another slammed door, this time taking refuge in the bathroom. In addition to that bathroom, there were four bedrooms on the first floor of the house. A gate prevented access to another staircase: the spiral one that rose to the top of the lighthouse. The stairway she hadn’t climbed since what happened to the boy. That was the stairway her husband went up every afternoon to hide away in the lantern. He’d lived in the lighthouse in the days when the light was still in service. And although they’d managed to maintain the building as a family home when the lighthouse keeper’s trade became unnecessary, he’d never been able to devote himself to making the light turn like his father.
The woman climbed two steps to project her voice more loudly up toward the stairwell. “The wind’s blown the cover off the tank,” she shouted to her husband. “It needs to be covered, it’s raining already.”
The metal stairs squeaked as her husband came down.
“Check on the boy, while you’re there,” she added.
“Shall I fix the septic tank or watch over the boy?” he complained. “I can’t do everything.”
A draft penetrated the house through the gap under the front door. And through the poorly insulated window frames. The building’s timber creaked. The wind howled outside.
“Fix the tank,” the woman decided. “Before the cover ends up in the sea. I’ll go up and see the boy.”
The man studied the weather from the window beside the front door. The height of the lighthouse had distanced him from the effects of the rainstorm. Little puddles were beginning to form in the dips in the ground. On the clothesline, the remains of a frayed sock hung from a twisted peg. He saw that the septic tank was uncovered. He pressed his face to the glass, blocking out the reflections with a hand around his eyes. He searched the plot of land for the metal cover, finding it anchored to the pine tree’s trunk. The wind was shaking it without managing to tear it from the obstacle that blocked its path. A flash of lightning illuminated the landscape like an overexposed photograph.
As soon as he went out, the man slipped on the clayey surface. The rain attacked his eyes. He reached the cover just as an invisible whirlwind managed to snatch it from the tree. He clutched it under one arm. A gust of air pushed at the false wing, unbalancing the man as he stepped forward. He stopped himself from falling with a swivel that would have been comical in a silent movie. On the way to the septic tank, he searched among the white stones that marked the gravel path that led to the road. Lifting up one of the heaviest, he used it to weigh the square piece of corrugated roofing down over the septic tank, positioning it by eye in the common center of the hole and the cover. He checked it would withstand the onslaught of the wind by pulling up one corner.
Someone screamed inside the house.
The edge of the metal opened a cut on his thumb.
A second howl allowed him to recognize his name and the alarmed tone of his wife’s voice. The speed with which he set off back to the house made him slip again. He found the front door closed. He rang the bell relentlessly, turning the usual three-note melody into a continuous tremolo.
It was Grandma who opened.
“What’s going on?” the man asked.
“I don’t know, I just heard the screaming myself. I was in the basement.”
A current of air blew the door shut. The woman came down the stairs two at a time.
“The boy’s not there,” she said. “He’s not in his bed.”
“So where is he?” asked her husband.
“Do you think I’d be screaming if I knew?” As she reached the bottom of the staircase, her foot hit the roll of posters of the missing girl. The blue eyes rolled along the floor. “Let’s get out and look for him.”
“How can he be outside in that monsoon?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” the woman replied, “but he’s not in the house. And I don’t want him to end up on the rocks like that girl,” she added, now regretting what she’d said to the television.
“Don’t say that,” her daughter cut in. She was speaking from the floor above, her hands clutching the towel she’d used to dry her hair that was hanging around her neck. “Half the town is still hoping to find her alive.”
“Right now it’s your brother I want to find.” The woman slung her braid over the neck of her raincoat. “Because if something has happened to him—I won’t say it. But if something’s happened to him, it’ll be your fault, too.”
“Mine? This? How can this be my fault?”
“We shouldn’t have to watch a thirteen-year-old boy like he’s six. And we all know whose fault it is he’s like that.”
Grandma kneaded her rosary when she heard the attack. Another reprimand in the endless string of them that had been flung at the girl since the incident on the stairs. Since an afternoon four years ago when the daughter was left to look after her younger brother. To make sure, most of all, that he didn’t try to climb to the top of the lighthouse, because as their mother always said, every step that led up to the lantern was a death trap, especially for a boy not yet ten years old.
As soon as her parents had gone, their daughter did the exact opposite, and coaxed her brother to climb to the top of the tower alone. To the place full of the mysteries and family myths of which Grandpa always spoke, a place where the boy had seldom been allowed to go, and then only when supervised. Up there his mouth fell open when he discovered a sun that, at that time of day, bled red over a dark sea. In awe he ran his hand over the glass screens that covered the giant spotlight. He imagined himself sailing on one of the ships that the light once guided. Slowly, so he’d remember it forever, he breathed in the magical air that seemed to float about in that enchanted place. But when his sister shouted at him to come down to celebrate the adrenaline rush they’d received from rebelling against their parents, the boy slipped and plunged into the stairwe
ll, his fingers searching for something to grip onto on the tower’s brick walls.
They didn’t find anything. He landed at his sister’s feet, and still she kicked him gently in the side, telling him to stop playacting. She knelt to check that he was breathing, holding a hand to his chest and feeling his heart beating. She could’ve asked for help then. Could’ve picked up the cream-colored telephone on the side table in the living room to call an ambulance. But that would’ve forced her to accept her guilt, to admit her disobedience. And she didn’t want to imagine Dad’s face if he returned home to find the flashing sirens of an ambulance howling at the front door. And anyway, the boy was breathing normally. His heart was beating at the right speed. The fall couldn’t have been all that serious. That was why she decided to move her brother’s injured body, persuading herself that the boy’s silence, the absence of groans, must be a good sign. It couldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t even complaining.
When he started trembling, she wrapped him in his sheets, blaming the cold for spasms that really required much more attention. She even spoke into her brother’s ear, begging him not to tell on her. She’d think of some excuse she could tell their parents, and their prank that afternoon would be their secret. She left the boy in the bedroom, blocking out the voices that screamed in her head. When their parents returned home, she just told them that the boy had felt unwell and she’d put him to bed. But her mother’s scream when she went up to see him made the reality clear. The ambulances, and their flashing sirens, finally arrived at the house. Much later than would’ve been advisable. The child they stretchered away was no longer the boy who a few hours earlier had enjoyed, openmouthed, a sunset that would mark the end both of that day and of his life as it had been. Nor was he the same boy who, to remember it forever, had breathed in the magical air of that enchanted place at the top of the lighthouse. A feeling he never remembered because it disappeared into the tangle of brain connections that were knocked loose by the impact against the edge of the step that cracked open his head. The skull was left as fractured as the daughter’s relationship with her parents and grandparents, who from then on made her the gangrenous limb of the body formed by the six members of the family.