by Paul Pen
“Oh God, what’re we going to do?” She sucked in saliva loudly and massaged the back of her neck with both hands. She groaned a mixture of pain, despair, and disgust. When she felt her husband grasp her by the waist, she opened her eyes. “What’re we going to do?” she said again.
As if they didn’t know, she explained to the others that the girl was all over the news. That she’d seen her on the television that very afternoon, while she chopped carrots, before it started raining. That the police, the fire department, everyone was searching for her. That the town had organized teams of volunteers to comb the island.
“Even our daughter has just been putting up posters with a photo of her,” she said, pointing at the roll that the wind had blown to the other end of the living room.
The man held a finger to his mouth to stop her from raising her voice. “The last thing we need is for his sister to find out as well.”
“We have to decide,” the woman blurted out.
“Our son’s a minor,” the man suggested. “And he’s not well. What can they do to him?”
“That girl has everyone moved to tears. Imagine what’ll happen when they discover what our son did to her.” She shook her head to free her mind of the image it insisted on projecting. “His life will be over. For the second time.”
Her eyes welled up, full of sadness and guilt, as she remembered with nostalgia the boy who had said good-bye to her the afternoon of the accident.
“And this time it will be forever. He’ll never be forgiven for this.” The woman bit the inside of her lips to stop herself from crying. “It’s not fair . . . Not again.”
The man hardly thought of the legal process. It was enough for him to imagine what the boy’s future would be like, forever rejected by society. A future that had been uncertain since the fall and that would be marred for the rest of his life. He looked at his son, who was stroking the dead body’s hair, and remembered the little boy full of imagination, who played with the toy scarecrow that Grandma had made from two handfuls of straw and tiny hand-sewn clothes, making it walk over his cereal bowl at breakfast. A perverse twist of fate had turned him into his favorite character from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The memory of the boy’s childhood moved the man. His son didn’t deserve the dark future that destiny was intent on offering him.
“It’s not fair,” the woman repeated.
“And what happened to that girl’s not fair, either,” Grandpa said then. “She had a family, too.”
He took a step forward. Some of the sand the woman had brushed from the boy’s hair crunched under his shoes. He walked around the living room, over the muddied rugs, until he reached the telephone that was lying on the floor. Grandpa crouched down, his knees clicking as they bent. He pushed up the glasses that had slid down his nose. First he took the base of the telephone, and then he pulled the wire until he could reach the receiver and hold it to his ear. There was a tone. His knees clicked again as he stood up.
“What’re you going to do?” the boy’s mother asked.
Grandpa put the telephone down on the side table. He picked up the receiver and held it between his cheek and shoulder.
“The only thing we can do,” he answered. “The right thing.” He inserted his finger in one of the holes in the telephone’s rotary dial. He turned it.
“Don’t call,” she pleaded. “Think of your grandson.” The dial returned to its initial position with a crackle.
“What will happen to your grandson?” she persisted. Without answering, Grandpa began to turn it again. “He’s not even responsible for his actions.”
The disk repeated its return journey. Grandpa felt for the hole to dial the third digit before his daughter-in-law could say anything else. He moved his face closer to the telephone, pushing up his glasses to restore his vision.
“This girl’s dead already,” she continued. Grandpa found the hole he was looking for. He inserted his finger. “But your grandson has his whole life ahead of him.”
The finger trembled. The fingernail scratched against the telephone’s plastic cover. When he’d regained his composure, he turned the dial. Then Grandma spoke.
“He’s our grandchild,” she said. She swallowed when she finished the sentence. “We came back to live in the lighthouse for him. We came to look after him.”
With his finger still in the dial, the receiver pressed against his face, Grandpa looked at his wife. He questioned her without the need for words. With just a crease in his forehead, he asked whether she was sure of what she was saying. Sure she knew what it meant. Grandma squeezed the banister’s ball top as if wanting to strangle it.
“I’m sure,” she answered.
His eyes then traveled to the crucifix that hung from her neck. Grandma squeezed it in her fist. She moved her other hand to the back of her neck. The chain came undone, the two ends hanging on each side of her closed hand. She kissed her tensed fingers before hiding the jumble of beads in the pocket of the cardigan that she had knitted herself.
“He’s my grandson,” she whispered as an apology to the ceiling, her sky.
Grandpa understood what his wife’s gesture meant. He accepted her decision. He took his finger from the dial, but didn’t notice it returning to its position and completing the call to emergency services. The woman jumped over the girl’s body in the direction of the side table. She pushed down the tabs to cut off the line just as a female voice took the call. She took the receiver from Grandpa’s shoulder and deposited it on the telephone. Then she turned to address the family.
“I’m not going to hand my son over,” she said in a deep voice. The boy applauded when he heard himself mentioned. On the third clap, with nobody joining in, he gave up the celebration.
“So, what are we going to do with the girl?” Ashamed by his question, the man looked away. He scratched his forehead despite it not itching.
“They still haven’t come to search the north of the island,” explained the woman. “They started from her house, but headed south. They didn’t come up this way.”
“And what’re we supposed to do?” The man fell silent to give someone else the opportunity to voice the idea. He didn’t want to be the one to spell out what they were all thinking.
“Hide her?” he finally said.
A high-pitched whimper escaped from Grandma’s throat. She approached her grandson with a hand over her eyes, so she wouldn’t see the body. The boy’s drool wet her blouse when she hugged him.
“Bury her?” the man asked, pronouncing the words as if they were foreign to his language. The taste of the salty lips returned to his palate. Along with the stench exhaled by the swollen body. And the slimy feel of her shellfish tongue. “Are we really going to bury this girl?”
Nobody answered the question.
Lightning flashed in the sky. For an instant it accentuated the shadows on the faces in the living room. The clap of thunder that followed rumbled under their feet. The windowpanes reproduced the vibration.
The cuckoo popped out of the clock.
It cuckooed once. Twice. Three times.
Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
Nine times.
“Tell me if that’s what we’re going to do!” the man yelled.
Upstairs, his daughter, alarmed by the intensity of the lightning and her father’s voice, jumped out of bed. Her book fell to the floor on the way to the window, which looked out of the front of the house, illuminated by the porch light. A violent gust of wind picked up just then. The metal fence that demarcated the plot shook wildly from post to post. Invisible hands pulled on the tree branches as if wanting to uproot them. The air whistled through their leaves. The corrugated iron that covered the septic tank fought against the weight of the stone the man had used to pin it down. A corner lifted up. The rock rolled off onto the ground. The metal cover flew into the air like a kite with nobody holding its string. It floated for a few seconds, before a second rush of wind propelled it against the house like a projectile. The daugh
ter’s hands went to her face.
The living room window smashed into a shower of glass when a corner of the metal sheet went through it. Grandma hugged her grandson more tightly. The man had just asked what the hell they were going to do with the girl. The corrugated iron fell inside the living room. It slid along the timber floor until the corpse itself stopped it in its tracks.
It took the man a while to identify the object. Discovering what it was, he looked at his wife, his eyes wide open. His heartbeat quickened. She nodded in response to the arrival of a solution.
“The septic tank,” the man whispered.
Grandpa read the words on his son’s lips. He, too, glimpsed the idea that had formed in his mind. He pushed the bridge of his glasses up his nose and adjusted the arms. Then he began to roll the cuffs of his sweater up his arms, to the elbow.
A door opened upstairs.
“Has the window smashed?” the daughter asked from there.
And she started coming down the stairs.
24
The sudden intrusion of his granddaughter’s voice made Grandpa initiate a series of movements that he did not complete, unable to decide what the best reaction would be. Grandma closed her eyes, hugging the boy, preparing for the worst. The woman looked at the roll of posters that her daughter had been putting up that afternoon. She sighed, accepting what would happen if she discovered what her brother had done.
The man rushed to the girl’s body.
“Don’t come down if you’re barefoot,” he shouted to his daughter. “There’s glass everywhere down here.”
The wood of the staircase creaked under her weight. A foot stopped on the second step. She hadn’t put her shoes on after drying herself with the bathrobe. A cold breeze climbed her legs to her groin. The elastic on her pajama bottoms, the worn, gray ones that were so comfortable and warm, danced on her bare ankles.
“So the window has been smashed,” she assumed.
“I’ve already cut myself,” her father lied. He trod on the floor to make the glass crunch. “Don’t come down.”
“It’s dangerous,” added the woman.
There were a few seconds of silence. Looks were exchanged in the room. Then the boy yelled, “We’re going to have a baby!”
Grandma shushed him in his ear. The man grabbed the girl’s wet arms through the raincoat, ready to escape outside.
“What nonsense is he spouting now?”
“It’s nothing. Go back to your room.”
“You’re fine now that the boy’s home, huh? And you don’t want me around. Makes a change.”
“It’s because of the glass,” the woman said.
“It’s always because of something.”
She moved down to the third step. The wood creaked again. Grandma, who was rocking the boy in her arms, couldn’t keep the words in.
“Please, don’t come down.” She waited for her granddaughter’s reaction, allowing herself to be hypnotized by the curtain fluttering in the living room, lifted by the wind that came through the broken window. In the random curves in the fabric she saw the same randomness that the future of the boy in her arms depended on. A whole life staked on the effect those four words would have on her granddaughter. Please. Don’t. Come. Down. When the ceiling shook under her angry footsteps, returning to her room with energetic strides, Grandma sobbed with silent relief on the boy’s shoulder.
The whole house shook when the door slammed.
“Come on,” the man whispered. “We have to do it now.”
He lifted the girl by the torso. The raincoat slid down, revealing her bluish face. His wife put it back, tying the sleeves behind the broken neck. The man gestured to Grandpa to take her by the legs.
“Hurry up,” he insisted. “Before the tank gets flooded. If it fills up with rain we won’t be able to—”
“Shut up,” Grandpa cut him off. “Don’t say another word.” His knees clicked when he crouched down. His hands were trembling. “God forgive me,” he murmured.
As he wrapped his fingers around the girl’s ankles, so slender it seemed as if he would be able to close his fist entirely, he felt dizzy. And when he lifted the little body, as light as his granddaughter’s had been years ago when he’d held her up by the belly to make her fly like an airplane through the air of that very living room, the dizziness became a feeling of repulsion toward himself. He opened his hands. The heel of the one shoe the girl still wore hit the floor in a sad and incomplete tap-dancing step.
“I can’t,” he said, showing the palms of his hands as if those very words were written on them. “I can’t.”
The boy escaped his grandmother’s arms. He took Grandpa’s place. “Let’s go to the rocks, Dad,” he said. “She lives on the rocks.”
His father tried to speak, but the anguish swallowed his words. The woman approached the boy, and, one by one, she unpicked the fingers that squeezed the girl’s legs.
“Are you going to help him or not?” she asked her father-in-law.
Grandpa shook his head. He showed his palms again.
The man clenched his jaw, chewing on the cry he didn’t let out. “I’ll do it by myself if I have to,” he said. He picked up the girl in his arms to illustrate his words. He turned toward the door. The air that came in through the window dried the sweat from his forehead.
“I’ll help you,” the woman said. She signaled to Grandma to take care of the boy, pointing at the crown of his head. “You give him a bath. He can’t stay like that, he’ll get sick.”
The woman picked up the corrugated iron. She approached her husband and grabbed his tensed arm, the bicep swollen with the effort. She stood on tiptoes to speak into his ear.
“I won’t hand my son over,” she whispered. And it was her who took the first step toward the septic tank.
The boy spoke behind her. “Don’t take her. I want her.”
The woman turned around and noticed the same confused expression she’d seen the day the hamster had stopped moving between his twisted hands. The pet they’d given him after the accident, when the boy still screamed if he was left alone in his bedroom, was crushed to death between the fingers of its owner, who squeezed it until it died, showing it how much he loved it.
“I really want her,” the boy added, pointing at the body his father carried.
The woman contained a sob as she remembered the lethal consequences of her son’s love, which turned the rodent into a purée of hair and blood that she cleaned from his fingers with an ammonia-soaked rag. And it occurred to her that it was the same thing they were doing now: cleaning away the girl’s remains by hiding her in a septic tank.
“Get the door for me,” the man said.
The woman peeled her eyes away from her son, who was folding his bottom lip into an endearing pout. She opened the door. Lightning flashed in the sky. It allowed them to make out the silhouette of the septic tank. A gust of wind from the night’s storm unsteadied them both. The woman swallowed as if she could ingest her guilt, and said again, “I’m not going to hand my son over.”
Grandma pushed the boy toward the stairs. “Let’s go get you showered and dried,” she said as they went up. Before reaching the bathroom, they heard the front door slam shut.
“So we really are going to do it,” Grandpa said from somewhere.
Grandma closed another door behind her and sat her grandson on the bath’s edge. “Arms up.”
The boy obeyed. He laughed when the T-shirt tickled his armpits as it rose up his body. She used the damp piece of clothing to wipe her grandson’s face, then put him in the bathtub and stripped him naked. It still surprised her to find hair in some places.
“Why am I so dirty?”
Grandma heard the question, but preferred to ignore it. She unhooked the showerhead before turning on the hot water. She untangled the hose and directed the jet onto her wrinkled hand to check the temperature. The boy extracted remains of sand from under his fingernails.
“I’m really dirty,” he whined.
“Why am I so dirty?”
Grandma watched the swirl of water, which was beginning to steam. She turned down the temperature.
“You’re dirty because you’ve come from the rocks.”
The boy frowned so much his eyes closed. As if straining to remember something that eluded him.
“Why didn’t you tell us you’d found the girl?” Grandma asked.
The boy twisted his fingers. Ashamed, he lowered his head and covered his face to hide it. Accepting his guilt.
She grabbed him by the shoulders. “Do you realize what has happened to that girl?”
The boy mewed.
“Tell me, do you realize?”
After a silence, the boy broke into laughter hidden behind his hands, which shot open, revealing his grubby face.
“She’s going to have a baby!” he yelled. The boy began thrusting his pelvis arrhythmically.
“Stop,” said Grandma. She looked at the shower, which was flowing directly to the plughole. “Stop!”
The boy stopped. He opened his mouth in an exaggerated way as he did when he was about to cry. Or to pretend to cry.
“Don’t cry,” Grandma said. “I’m sorry. Don’t cry.”
The enormous mouth closed.
“You’re going to have to promise me something,” she added. The boy opened his eyes with the same curiosity he’d shown when she gave him the toy scarecrow.
“That you won’t tell anyone about this,” Grandma went on. “You must do as I say.”
Her grandson covered his mouth with both hands.
“Not anyone,” she repeated. “Do you swear?”
The boy pinched an imaginary zipper that hung from a corner of his mouth. He ran it from one side of his lips to the other. He rotated his wrist to padlock it shut. Then, despite having sealed his mouth, he opened it to swallow the invisible key that he threw down his throat.