by Paul Pen
Iris pulled Rick’s dirty T-shirt out from under the mattress. She breathed through it. Mom had just asked her to lock her door from the inside. She lay on the bed hugging the garment, which had dried completely but preserved his smell. She stroked the wall with the tips of her fingers, imagining herself closer to him. Between this room and Melissa’s was the twins’ bedroom, but she could ignore it in her mind and dream that she was touching a wall that Rick could touch on the other side. He would feel her energy through the partition, and it would ease his pain. She was certain that if they both placed their hands on the wall, without seeing each other they could superimpose their fingers precisely, guiding themselves only by the attraction of their skin.
The line of light under the bedroom door disappeared. Mom and Dad must’ve turned off the light in their bedroom. Iris waited. With her eyes closed, she enjoyed the feel of the wall, imagining it was Rick’s body. She prolonged the fantasy for fifteen minutes. Twenty. Then she got up and hid the T-shirt under the sheet. She pressed her ear against the door.
Silence.
She turned the lock, avoiding the slightest click. As she opened the door, every tiny squeak of the hinges seemed to her like a clangor that would wake the whole family, but her parents’ breathing remained constant. If she got a little closer to Melissa’s bedroom she would also hear Rick breathing, perhaps smell his aroma escaping through the cracks around the door. She opened the door just enough to squeeze out, pressing her breasts against the edge of the wood. She stood with just the tips of her toes on the floor, keeping contact to a minimum. The third floorboard she trod on creaked harshly.
“Iris?” Dad’s voice sounded as firm as it did at any other time of day. “Iris, is that you?”
She hunched her shoulders, motionless, not knowing what to do. She kept her balance on tiptoes, her toes tense against the floor.
“Iris,” Mom said.
Hearing her parents’ mattress springs, she reacted. “I was going to the bathroom.”
“Well go, then. And come right back.”
She dropped her heels and took firm steps, not caring now if the floor shook. She went into the bathroom but didn’t use it. She looked in the mirror, grimacing when she discovered a new pimple on her chin. She tried to improve her messy hair by combing it with four fingers. Then she smoothed down her eyebrows with a pinkie wet with saliva. After a while, she pulled the chain.
When she came out of the bathroom, Dad spoke from his bed. “Back to your room.”
She looked at Melissa’s door. She knew she couldn’t get in because her parents had locked it, but she’d make do with lying there, on the floor. Resting her cheek against the wood, listening to Rick sleep. Keeping him company like a domestic animal until they took him to the hospital tomorrow.
She took a step toward him.
“I said to your room.”
Iris let her shoulders drop. She returned to her bedroom with heavy footsteps, tears brimming over her lower eyelids. She’d wanted to slam the door but stopped herself so as not to wake Rick, if in fact he could sleep given the pain he was in. Retrieving his T-shirt from under the sheets, she wore it around her neck like a scarf. She paced around her room, trapped in her powerlessness. She toyed with the threads that hung from the torn stitching down the side of her nightgown.
She stopped at the window.
She peered outside. The three adjoining bedrooms looked out from the front of the house. Iris remembered Melissa scaling one of the posts the night before, walking across that same roof to her room. The window next to her own was the twins’ room, but through the one beyond that she would be able to see Rick. The sound of glass breaking repeated in her mind, the noise she’d heard after the gunshot. Not only would she be able to see in, but she could also enter through the broken window. A gecko appeared on the tiles, and Iris imagined herself doing the same, using the roof as a walkway to take her to Rick.
She held her hands to her heart. She crossed the room and listened through the door, but she couldn’t hear her parents’ heavy breathing. They hadn’t gone back to sleep yet. She sat at her dressing table, where she opened Pride and Prejudice to page 17. Resting it against a bottle of perfume and a powder compact, she read until she folded the corner of page 93.
She didn’t need to go to the door to hear her father’s snoring.
She hid the T-shirt under her sheet. Standing at the window, she took a breath so deep that it startled the gecko. The animal disappeared behind a ledge. Iris climbed out onto the roof with bare feet. The breeze that found its way under her nightgown dried the sweat her nerves had brought on. Among the cacti, or under the stones, some crickets chirped. The moon had painted the landscape gray. She stooped as she walked past the twins’ room, willing them not to wake up. Not just so they wouldn’t give her away, but also because of the fright it would give them to see a figure in floating cloth through the window.
Anticipation filled her chest before she reached the next bedroom. She was only a step away from seeing Rick again. She thought to herself that in this story it was Juliet who was going to find Romeo, not on a balcony but through a window. She fantasized about listening to him from her hiding place as he revealed his love for her in a soliloquy, but her Romeo was badly wounded and wouldn’t have the strength to speak.
She peered in, holding her breath.
The white sheet reflected the moonlight, illuminating the only clear form in a room immersed in shadows. A smile spread across Iris’s face as she began to make out the contours of his feet, his knees, his chest. Her heart beating in her ears drowned out the crickets. She ran a finger over the empty window frame until she pricked herself on a fang of glass. To avoid snagging her nightgown, she gathered it up to her belly, leaving her legs and underwear uncovered. She went through the nonexistent pane, stepping onto Melissa’s magazine-covered desk. Holding on to the toothed window frame, she reached the floor without difficulty. With her nightgown still above her waist, her stomach contracted when she found herself almost naked so close to Rick. She let the garment fall over her knees, enjoying the brush of the material against her skin.
Iris recognized the smell from Rick’s T-shirt. It reawakened in her the sensations of her nocturnal visit to the truck. His breathing was uniform. After each inhalation, there was silence for a few seconds before he exhaled. Iris imagined herself nestled up against him on the porch swing as they fell asleep together at sunset. In her fantasy, she also heard the chords of Edelweiss’s guitar. Somehow, her sister was still alive and sat on the porch steps and played for them. Iris approached the bed, straining her eyes in the dark to avoid the furniture, taking care not to knock anything over that would make a noise.
The sheet covered Rick to the neck, his body hidden under cotton. It dawned on Iris that he would be naked, and the muscles in her abdomen tensed, setting off a tingling in the lower part of her body. She had to open her mouth to breathe. She wet her lips. The same excitement that had made her want to touch James Dean’s pants in the photograph was now impelling her to pull back the sheet, fold the material from the chin to the chest, from the chest to the belly, from the belly to . . . the knees. Her thoughts embarrassed her. She covered her flushed face with her hair even though nobody could see her. That kind of behavior was not becoming of a lady. No love story worth its salt would begin with a woman taking advantage of a wounded man. Instead of uncovering him, and to prove to herself the purity of her intentions, she adjusted the sheet under Rick’s chin, pulling it up a little farther.
“The Fates have something much better in store for us.” Her words were little more than an outbreath, inaudible thoughts. “How are you?”
The faint light from outside allowed Iris to discern some of his features. He had a swollen eye, a split eyebrow. The dark patches on his face that weren’t shadows turned out to be bruises. A groan escaped from between his lips. A rattle. Iris held her ear to his mouth, from which warm breath emanated. There was no second groan, but she heard his tongu
e scrape against the dry skin of his lips, unable to moisten them.
“Wait,” she whispered.
A glint floated over the bedside table, a moonbeam’s reflection on the water in a pitcher. Iris felt around for a glass among the medication boxes, bottles, and leaflets. The rustle of the paper was deafening. She found nothing. She looked at the other bedside table, at the darkness that surrounded it. Another floating glint revealed the glass. It was farther up, on the shelving where Melissa kept her rocks. When she went to take it, Iris scratched her wrists on something that protruded from the shelf. A cardboard edge. She recognized the thick cardboard of a folder. She ran her finger over the stack of paper it contained, as if counting the pages of a book.
They must be drawings of Melissa’s.
Iris reached the glass. With her free hand, she lifted Rick’s head. He held out his tongue when he felt the edge of the glass between his lips, searching for the liquid. He moaned when he couldn’t locate it. Iris tilted the glass so that water went into his mouth. He received it with a gurgle. A slight upturn appeared at the corner of his lips, a trace of a smile that filled Iris with tenderness. She felt as if she were nursing him, giving him life with a liquid that sprang from her.
He choked on the final drops. The coughing joined the noise of the shaking mattress and the creaks of the bedframe. Iris returned his head to the pillow. She made a shushing sound near his face until he was calm. The house remained silent—the coughing fit hadn’t alarmed her parents. Rick’s lips were shiny after regaining their moisture.
Iris wondered what they tasted like.
Her breathing grew labored.
With her lips apart, she covered Rick’s. She caressed them with the tip of her tongue. The contact set off an explosion of pleasure that made her head spin. She gripped the headboard.
“Last night when I kissed you in the truck I wasn’t brave enough to open my mouth,” she whispered onto his lips. “What a fool I was.”
Without realizing it she’d rested a hand on his chest. She felt his muscles through the material, the grooves of his abdomen. The heat that his body gave off set her on fire inside. She wanted to keep touching, to feel all of his body, to taste his flavors.
Another coughing fit shook Rick, interrupting her fantasy. Iris hushed him again, but this time it didn’t have the same calming effect. His coughing spattered her face with saliva. He ended each cough with a groan, as if the convulsions hurt him inside. The headboard hit the wall as the intensity of the spasms grew.
She heard the floor in her parents’ room creak under Dad’s weight.
A light shone into the room from under the door.
Iris ran to the window. She climbed out onto the roof without lifting her nightgown, which got caught on the glass fang in the frame. She gathered it with a tug and sat down on the tiles, her back against the wall. Despite the danger to her, she wanted Dad to come in as soon as possible to tend to Rick’s coughing, to relieve the suffering that the convulsions caused and that also hurt her.
She heard Dad open the door. She stopped breathing. The coughing fit ended at that very moment, before Dad could even turn on the bedroom light. Rick’s breathing regained its normal rhythm as if the coughing had never happened. Dad waited a few seconds before leaving.
Iris let out a sigh.
A voice made her jump.
“. . . if it’s Marlon’s turn to sleep in the bed with me, then I’ll have to make sure he does, whatever that guy’s . . .”
It was Melissa, down on the ground.
She was speaking to her stone, walking away from the house. She walked among the cacti, following a memorized route in the darkness. Iris saw her stop in front of a row of bluish sparkles, the moon reflecting on one of the clothed cardones’ shirt buttons.
“I’d better get back,” Iris whispered to Rick through the window. “We’ll see each other again tomorrow, before they come for you.”
Back in her bedroom, Iris slumped onto the bed on her back, her arms outstretched, and gave a deep sigh. She spread Rick’s T-shirt over her face.
The wind blew Melissa’s hair over her face. The gusts began to arrive just as she sat down in front of Needles, Pins, and Thorns, and they continued throughout the conversation. At first she’d been annoyed that she couldn’t fetch the lantern and candle from her room, but it would have gone out anyway.
“So, from what I can see, we all feel the same.” She removed the hair from her face with her little fingers. “Nobody’s going to know, and I’m not scared of the man. I can do it.”
The three cacti and Gregory agreed.
“Then let’s go.” She got up with the stone. “Thanks, guys. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”
The wind had brought with it narrow clouds that striped the moon. Melissa pointed Gregory’s eyes at the sky so he could see it. The effect was also reflected on her bedroom window, at least on the pane that remained intact. The broken side was a black square of total darkness.
She aimed the stone’s face at the front of the house. “Look, you can see it there, too.”
Melissa climbed the porch post without letting go of Gregory, even when a gecko forced her to change her handhold. She reached the roof and walked along it as she had on so many nights, taking care not to make the tiles crunch outside her sisters’ windows. She kept hold of the stone when she climbed into the room as well. She knew what to grip on to, where to support herself, when to jump.
The smell in the room reminded her of the Band-Aid she’d removed from her finger a few days after she’d cut it dressing Needles.
Melissa went up to the young man in her bed. She touched his shoulder with a finger.
“You asleep?” She prodded him twice more. “Are you sleeping?”
There was no change to his breathing, and his eyelids were motionless. He was covered up to the chin with the sheet, as if he was cold despite the heat.
“The one time I have someone to talk to . . .”
She wanted to put Gregory on the bedside table, where she also thought she’d left Marlon, but she found it covered with things for the injured man. Medicine, a glass. In the dark she counted the shapes on the shelf. All the rocks were there. She would have to find Marlon by touch. She ran her hand along the shelf. She recognized James, the newcomer, by his pronounced nose and masculine forehead. She also felt Clark and Cary.
Her arm encountered an obstacle.
A folder that wasn’t hers.
On top of it, like a paperweight that kept it closed, was Marlon. She identified him from the rough texture, especially on his cheeks, though she could barely touch them with the tips of her fingers. The papers were in the way, preventing her from picking up Marlon even on tiptoes. She decided to lift down the entire folder, with the stone on top. The thick stack of paper held the rock’s weight. She put the whole thing down on the floor and said hello to Marlon in a low voice. She said good night to Gregory as she returned him to the shelf.
“What a day for it to be your turn to come down from there, huh?” she whispered.
She tried to wake Rick again.
Nothing.
She shrugged.
Gathering up Marlon, she went to put the folder back where she’d found it. She didn’t want Dad to discover that someone had been in the room. But the stone asked her a question.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “It’s not mine.”
She listened to Marlon.
“But we can barely see.” She gestured at the darkness that surrounded them.
Marlon said something else.
“Oh, of course it’s here.”
She found the lantern in the room and lit the candle with a match. The light was weak, so it didn’t reach the bedroom door. Only someone out on the land would have been able to see it, and the whole family was asleep. She sat on the floor with the folder on her knees, Marlon on her lap, and the lantern to one side.
“Let’s see,” she said to the stone.
She opened the
cover without moving the elastic band, which was broken. A newspaper clipping slid between her crossed legs. The masthead of the paper it was taken from was stapled to it: the Rocky Mountain News. The date, in September 1952, sounded very remote to Melissa, since it was a few years before she was born. The article was about a missing baby, a little girl someone had snatched from her crib in the night while her parents slept in the adjoining room. Then Melissa took out a full page from another newspaper, this time from Arizona and dated 1963. It was folded in such a way that it showed only the report on some parents accusing a hospital of losing their newborn. Behind it she found a cutting from a newspaper called the Deseret News: a piece from 1964 on another missing baby in Murray, Utah.
“What is all of this?” Melissa asked Marlon.
She went through more clippings, more documents, more newspaper pages. She leafed through dozens of cases, perhaps almost a hundred. There were cuttings from 1949, 1959, 1951, 1967, 1962. They were from the Santa Fe New Mexican, the Tucson Citizen, the El Paso Times, the Denver Post. Masses of mastheads with the names of cities. They all told stories of lost babies, missing girls, abducted girls. Others announced the discovery of a body in a river, remains of clothing found in a forest, and even the confessions of mothers who had admitted to murdering their children. A shiver washed over Melissa’s shoulders. The candle flickered beside her, illuminating the horror and suffering contained in those reports with its quivering orange light.
Melissa slowly leafed through them, wanting to stop but unable to do so, trying to fathom the unfathomable. A deep sadness gradually took hold of her with each new clipping. The trick that Socorro had taught her, the one where she focused on the good things she had in her life, now made complete sense. She wanted to wake her parents, her whole family, to thank them for being who they were, for loving her, for taking care of her so well, and for giving her a home to be happy in, even if there were little things she didn’t like and despite sometimes feeling like a stranger in her own home. She wanted to thank them for protecting her from strangers like Rick, who abused the kindness of others and might harbor intentions as terrible as whoever was responsible for the acts described in the documents. Melissa felt lucky. The folder on her legs contained a horrifying world of which she, to her good fortune, was not part. For the first time, she felt truly happy that they lived in such an isolated place, far from all that horror.