by Paul Pen
At the top of the tower, squatting under the desk, with trembling fingers she turned the dial seven times. After the first ring, a man’s voice answered the call.
And she spoke.
She spoke in a voice as deep and as dark as the sea they had looked out on as a family from that tower on so many nights. She spoke without pause. Tears, blood, and saliva fell on the receiver. After identifying herself, she told the man how her brother had found the girl on the rocks. How he’d kept her existence secret in order to live for a few days in a crazed fairy tale in which the two of them made a family together. Until the girl’s body faded forever. She told him how her brother had then brought the corpse to the old lighthouse. The decision her family had made to hide the body. And she told him also that the girl lay in the septic tank. Under a pile of stones that they later sealed off with concrete.
“Hello?” She looked at the telephone with an anxious expression. She’d heard a bang. “Are you there? I have more to tell you. They’re going to hide my brother now . . .”
But nobody was listening at the other end of the line. Her last words were reduced to an electrostatic crackle emanating from the receiver of a telephone left lying on the floor. Because the man who’d answered, and who had dropped the receiver when the voice mentioned the concrete that they used to cover the body of his daughter—the girl he’d dressed in pink one spring morning to teach her to ride a bicycle—that man was now moving frenetically around his garage. Searching among empty cans. Praying to the God he no longer believed in that he wouldn’t find a full one. When he found one, he changed his plea. Now he prayed for the strength he would need to stop himself. To prevent himself from going through with the idea that had germinated in his mind.
“Have you done it?”
Her father’s voice, reverberating around the dome’s glass, startled her. She hit her head as she came out from her hiding place under the table. She brushed her damp hair away from her face and hooked it behind her ears. She wiped her mouth with the torn sleeve of her blouse, then dried her eyes with her fist. Until now she hadn’t noticed the intense throb in one of her back teeth caused by the slap. She returned the receiver to its base. She even went to untangle the curled wire, but her father shouted again, interrupting the task.
“Tell me whether you’ve done it!” The gate rattled, shaking in its frame.
“I did it.”
“The police?”
“Her father.”
The reply filled the man’s chest with air contaminated with guilt, with remorse. He let it out in an agonizing sigh, a wretched, high-pitched wail that rose up the staircase. His daughter heard him from upstairs. Never in her eighteen years of life had she heard her father cry.
And she smiled.
The blood that soured her tongue took on a sudden taste of victory.
27
“He’s going to come for us,” the man said in the living room. “Do something.”
Grandma, who was repositioning one of the fallen lamps beside the cuckoo clock, whimpered. The boy, by his mother’s legs, let out a misguided guffaw. The woman covered her mouth with the flaps of her cardigan, as if she felt cold. She wanted to cower behind them and disappear. She knew what her husband’s words meant.
“She’s told them,” she whispered. She said it for herself, bringing a deep trail of thought to its conclusion. Then her mouth appeared over the woolen neck.
“She’s told them.”
Her husband acknowledged it with a long blink. She cursed her daughter with murmured words that were unintelligible.
Grandma ran to the front door. She turned the keys that hung from the lock. Spinning around, she pressed her hands against the door, as if keeping at bay an onslaught from outside. “What do we do?” she asked.
Grandpa improvised. He drew the curtains in the adjacent windows, including the one that the corrugated iron from the septic tank had smashed two months earlier, and which he himself had mended. He crossed the living room and closed the curtains on the other side. Then he headed for the kitchen.
“I’ve drawn the curtains in the kitchen, too.” He took a deep breath. “Nobody can see us from outside.” He said it as if it were a solution to the problem. As if the sections of curtain that hid them could separate them from the outside world. Insulate them from the truth.
Grandma heard her husband’s labored breathing. She saw him bent over, his hands on his knees, his glasses out of place on his nose. She noticed how weary he looked, the result of an absurd idea that she herself had initiated when she blocked the door. As if two turns of the lock were enough to keep them captive in the alternate reality they’d invented. The one in which there was no girl who’d appeared dead in the living room. In her actions, and Grandpa’s, she recognized a final desperate attempt to prolong the lie they had kept up for two months. To keep the secret covered up any way possible. This time with curtains. Just looking at her husband made her feel exhausted. The two months of guilt, fear, and bad decisions fell on top of her like the pile of stones they’d used to cover the body. A sigh escaped from the depths of her chest.
And then, almost at the same time, the rest of them also realized the uselessness of their improvised solution. Several looks were exchanged in a silence broken only by a cricket’s chirp.
“Not now,” the woman whispered to her son to get him to stop his mimicking. But she discovered that the boy had his mouth shut. The cricket continued to chirp outside the house. A cyclic chirp that seemed to measure the time that was running out on them. Time spent among secrets and lies.
Grandma was the first to accept it. “We won’t be able to hide forever,” she said.
“We have the boat at the jetty,” the man suggested. “We can make a run for it.”
“And then what?” Grandma asked.
Grandpa hugged his wife. He grasped the ultimate meaning of her words. And he seconded her decision. “You know how long we’d take to get to the mainland,” he said to dissuade his son. “They’ll be waiting for us there.”
“There are other islands,” the man insisted. “We can get away.”
The grandparents didn’t listen. They just looked each other in the eye and accepted the end of the time of secrets. The cricket outside gave a final chirp. It, too, confirming the end of an era.
Grandpa repeated his wife’s sentence. “We won’t be able to hide forever.”
“That’s what you were going to do with me!” yelled the boy, who began to laugh compulsively. “Hide me forever! There’s a house in the basement!”
“The basement,” said the woman.
“Could we go down?” Grandpa asked, wrapping his hand around the fist in which Grandma squeezed the rosary.
“It’s not designed for all of us,” said the man. “But we could.”
The woman swallowed a large quantity of saliva. “Forever?” she said in barely a whisper. “Would we be going down forever?”
“Of course not,” her husband answered without knowing whether he lied. “Just until we think of something else.”
“And what would that be?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I really don’t know. But what other options do we have? Are we going to wait for them to come for us? Give up like that? Now?”
Grandma burst into tears.
“What will they do if they find us?” the man went on. “What can they do to us?”
“Lock us up,” Grandpa replied.
“So either way we end up imprisoned,” his daughter-in-law concluded. “The outcome’s the same.”
“It’s not the same,” the man corrected her. He used a pause to reorganize his thoughts. “Out here they’d lock us up separately. Down there we’d be together.”
“You’re going to live with me!” cried the boy. His feet began an arrhythmic dance that he accompanied with spasmodic movements of his waist. He also waved his arms with pure joy, launching his elbows at the ceiling, until his mother halted him with an arm that w
as really a straitjacket.
“Stop. Please, don’t dance.” But the boy kept wiggling his body in her arms, humming a tuneless melody. The murmuring continued while his mother, father, and grandparents observed the unexpected outbreak of happiness and optimism with confusion. At the end of the song, the boy managed to free an arm from the straitjacket that had now loosened, and he stuck a finger in his mouth, his cheeks inflated. The slobbery plop that detonated on his lips when he took out his finger made his mother expel air through her nose in a timid chuckle. And when the grimace that the boy had for a smile lit up his face, the decision suddenly became simpler.
“I want to go down,” the woman said.
Grandma rested her forehead on Grandpa’s face. “So do we.”
Grandpa confirmed it with a nod. Then he moved his wife’s head so it rested on his chest. Almost identical smiles spread across their faces. The man then realized something. He looked at his parents, who were talking to each other without words, in a conversation of caresses. He observed the tender way they rubbed their heads together, a loving gesture achieved only after decades of coexistence.
With the words still forming hastily on his tongue, the man granted his parents a final few seconds of peace before speaking. “We can’t all go down,” he said. “Someone has to stay up top.”
“Our daughter’s going to stay,” the woman reminded him.
“We have a daughter?” was the question the man offered as a response.
The woman lowered her head.
Grandma rubbed her forehead against Grandpa’s wrinkled cheek. She wanted to cover his mouth to stop him from saying what she knew he was going to say.
“It has to be me,” said Grandpa. First he spoke to his daughter-in-law. “You have to look after your son.”
She confirmed she would by kissing the crown of the boy’s head. He was still listening to music in some corner of his mind.
“And you.” Grandpa now addressed his own son. “You have to look after her,” he said, indicating his daughter-in-law with his chin. She smiled back at him. Grandpa hugged his wife with such force that he felt the beads of her rosary dig into his chest. “And you have to look after all of them,” he said into her ear. “Please, don’t cry,” he added when she began to tremble.
He repeatedly kissed his wife’s white hair to give himself time to think. Concentrating, he pinched the right arm of his glasses.
“You need someone up here,” he went on. “I’ll go down to the jetty. I’ll get the boat started and let it go.”
He dried his lips with his fingers.
“When they arrive, I’ll tell them you’ve fled.” Grandpa delivered his speech with his eyes on his son and daughter-in-law, inviting them to get involved in the plan that he was improvising. “I’ll say that I didn’t know anything. That my granddaughter’s lying.”
“Will they believe you?” the woman asked.
“They’d better.”
“And if they don’t?”
“They’ll have to.” They all acquiesced in silence. Accepting the risk like they’d accepted others that they hadn’t even thought of. Taking on in their hurried decision all of the pitfalls, all of the failures, cracks, errors, mishaps, and unforeseeable events that might arise in their escape plan.
“I’ll tell them I feel hurt,” Grandpa continued. “Betrayed by all of you. And by my wife. I’ll say that was why I didn’t go with you.”
Again he observed his family’s faces. They nodded, seeing the logic of the plan.
“They’ll find the boat floating somewhere. Or dashed against some rocks. They’ll assume you’ve gone overboard. With a bit of luck this island will want to erase you from its memory after finding out what you did with the girl.”
“And you?” his daughter-in-law asked him. “If they believe you, if everything goes OK . . .”
“I can go back to the mainland,” he said. “To our house. We’ve got money, and it’ll be easier to go unnoticed there. To get ahold of everything you’re going to need.”
“You won’t be able to come much,” his son said. “The town mustn’t see you near the lighthouse. They’ll wonder what you’re doing here.”
“I worked in this lighthouse all my life,” he replied. “And now it’s yours. This lighthouse belongs to us. I have every right to come to remember my missing family.” He curved one side of his mouth in something like a smile.
“But for that we have to disappear.” Grandma sobbed.
“Come on,” Grandpa encouraged her, “we need to be quick. If they find us here it’ll be worse.”
“I don’t want to—” A crying spasm interrupted Grandma’s sentence.
Her husband looked at her with raised eyebrows, as if looking at a child exaggerating a tantrum more than was believable. “You just said you wanted to go down.”
“But with you,” she spluttered.
Grandpa spoke to his wife from very close to her face.
“We gave up everything to come back here, to help our grandson.” He swallowed. “We’ve done unforgivable things to protect him.” A slight tipping of the head was enough to relive the last two months. “Are you going to abandon him now, when he needs you most?”
He forced a smile to hide the trembling that surfaced on his chin. Then he inserted a hand between their bodies. He squeezed the fist in which his wife held the crucifix.
“Has He ever abandoned you?” An imminent sob was reduced to a change in intensity in the brightness of her eyes. “It’s what we have to do,” he whispered.
“It’s what we have to do,” she repeated.
And that was when the four adults synchronized a deep, spontaneous breath, as if an epiphany had been reached, as terrible as it may be. “We have to do it right now,” said the man. “You get to the jetty and let the boat go.”
Grandpa broke away from the embrace with his wife. She didn’t fight against it. She stood there with her arms hanging, her eyes moving from point to point on the floor without coming to rest on any of them. As if her gaze were nothing more than a ball of fluff. Grandpa ran to the kitchen. Before reaching the door, he went back to his daughter-in-law.
“Give me your jacket,” he said.
“What for?”
“Come on, give it to me,” he insisted.
She took off the jacket. Grandpa snatched it from her hands. His joints clicked when he knelt beside the boy. He pulled down his pajama bottoms, guiding the boy’s feet to take them off him.
“Good idea,” said the man. “Here, my watch.” He undid it in a second. Grandpa added it to the collection.
“What do I have to do?” Grandma asked.
“Give me something of yours. Anything. I’ll put it all in the boat. In case they find it.” Before she could decide, Grandpa tore a brooch from her blouse.
“Not that. That’s from when—”
He silenced her with a kiss. “Nothing matters anymore,” he whispered. “Nothing’s worth more than your family.” Without giving her a chance to respond, Grandpa escaped to the kitchen.
“So we’re really going to do it?” Grandma said.
“We’re going to do it,” replied the man.
Grandma consulted her daughter-in-law.
“We’re going to do it,” she confirmed. Beside her, in his underpants, the boy shivered. His mother hugged him. Grandma joined them. She pressed her cheek against her daughter-in-law’s. They were both enveloped in a new warmth when the father joined the hug.
“We’re going to stay together,” he said.
And they stayed like that for over a minute.
Enjoying a final moment of total calm.
Until the window, the one that had been smashed two months ago, shattered again.
A shower of glass rained on them. They separated from each other, confused. One shard found its way down the neck of the man’s shirt. Grandma looked down at her feet to discover what it was that crunched under every step she took. She saw glass lodged in the cracks in the timber f
loor. Some pieces still rolled along under the momentum of their fall. The man felt for the shard that danced around inside his shirt. He shook the garment until the fragment fell out. The woman covered her son’s ears.
At the top of the tower, the daughter heard the racket. She walked uneasily down the stairs, peering through two of the gate’s bars without opening it. She pricked her ears to listen to what was happening on the ground floor.
A sudden draft penetrated the living room through the new opening. Its occupants felt it on their skin like the caress of a ghost from the past, the one that had visited them in the same way one stormy night two months ago.
“What’s going on?” Grandma asked.
The man shushed her. He tapped his lips with a finger. Then he leapt to the front door. Glass crunched when he landed. He flicked the switches that were beside the doorframe.
“Turn off that lamp!” he yelled in a whisper.
The woman ran to the sideboard in the middle of the living room wall. The switch, a protrusion halfway down the wire, danced between her fingers until she was able to get her nerves under control. She slid the notch along in its groove with her fingernail. When the light went off, an unidentified orange glow came from behind the armchair near the cuckoo clock, at the bottom of the stairs. Projected against the wall, the ring of light expanded and contracted, as if its source palpitated. The man thought of fire, of the matches he’d lit to illuminate the secret passage in the basement that very afternoon.
That was when another man’s voice came in through the open hole where the window had been.
“She was my daughter!” the voice screamed. “I know you’re in there!”