by Paul Pen
Until she flicked to the next page.
It was a Nevada newspaper, from six years before. The headline announced the recent disappearance of two girls. The text of the article explained how the mother had left them in the car as she returned a cart to the supermarket where she’d just done her shopping. The woman heard the screech of brakes in the parking lot, followed by the roar of powerful acceleration, but she didn’t connect it to her little girls. She even stopped at a flower stand at the supermarket entrance and chatted for a few minutes with the salesperson, trying to choose the right bunch for a family dinner she was hosting that evening. When she got back to her vehicle, her twins were no longer in the rear seat.
Melissa’s eyes stopped blinking. The writing in front of her disappeared, turning the cutting into a gray piece of paper with just one word printed on it. Twins. It was repeated several times in the article, forming a horrifying constellation amid the invisible text. Her eyes moved to one corner of the clipping, where someone had traced an x in red pen. The mark was repeated on subsequent documents.
Seeing the black-and-white image, Melissa screamed.
She covered her mouth with both hands.
The sheet of paper fell to the floor, sliding over the wood to the feet of the bedside table.
Her eyes burned. Marlon’s weight on her lap was suddenly suffocating. It stopped her from taking in the air she needed. She pushed the stone. It fell with a heavy thump.
Rick moaned.
Melissa froze.
The house was silent.
Little by little, she regained control of her breathing. She left the folder on the floor and dragged herself along on her backside, around the lantern, until she reached the photocopy.
The date on the article was the most recent. From seven months ago. BROTHER FIGHTS ON TO KEEP MISSING-BABY CASE OPEN AFTER 18 YEARS. Melissa struggled to read the headline despite the capitals. The tears in her eyes blurred the letters. Though the photograph was also out of focus, she knew the young man in it was Rick. She had only met him yesterday, but not even the most intense desire to disbelieve her own eyes could refute the evidence.
It was him.
The image revealed something that horrified Melissa even more. She recognized his eyes, the bone structure that surrounded them. His brow. She stood with the lantern and held the page near the face on the pillow. Then she went to the wall covered in her best drawings. She found a portrait in which Edelweiss wore Mom’s straw hat, her smile as delicious as the vegetables she held to her chest. Melissa had sketched it one spring in the garden.
She held the newspaper article next to it.
The candle’s warm glow illuminated both faces.
At once the flame went out, unable to survive the shaking of Melissa’s trembling hand.
Rick began coughing.
She didn’t react. She couldn’t even think. She knew she was standing somewhere. That she’d discovered something terrible. That a light had gone out. She experienced that knowledge as a collection of abstract feelings she was unable to process.
She heard a hammering.
It was her bed’s headboard banging against the wall. She had the absurd idea that Edelweiss’s brother was coughing between the sheets, but that wasn’t possible. Edelweiss didn’t have any brothers, just four younger sisters who missed being in her arms as much as the guitar hanging in the living room did. This man was choking behind her. An arc of light entered through the crack under the door. She heard footsteps in her parents’ room and Iris coming out of her bedroom.
“Stay inside.” It was Dad, speaking to Iris.
The severity in his voice tore Melissa from her trance.
She returned the lantern to its place, blowing to dissipate the smoke that still floated from the wick. She picked up the folder from the floor. When she was about to put it up on the shelf, she stopped. She took out several of the documents marked with red pen and put them under her arm. She pushed the folder under the stones, as she’d found it.
Outside the room, Iris spoke. “He’s suffocating.”
“I’ll take care of it.” Dad’s shadow crossed the arc of light on the floor.
Melissa climbed onto the desk and mounted the window frame. Out on the roof, she realized she’d left Marlon on the floor, near the bed.
The key entered the lock.
There was no time to think. She leapt back over the desk into the room, treading only on the points of the floor that didn’t creak. She recovered her stone, returned to the window, and bounded through it.
The bedroom door opened just as she managed to hide to one side of the frame, her back against the wall. A square of light was projected onto the porch roof, brushing against the tip of one of her slippers. Melissa jerked her foot back as if it had been burned. She heard Iris begging Dad to let her in. She also heard the commotion when Mom came out to deal with her sister, telling her that she was going to wake the twins, that Melissa was sleeping on the sofa. Mom made Iris go back to her bedroom. That room projected another searchlight onto the porch roof. Melissa held her breath, hugging Marlon. Feeling threatened by the two windows, she closed her eyes, as if not seeing would make her invisible. She heard Dad approaching the bed, where Rick was fighting against his constricted throat. She heard the bubble of water as he filled the glass, the rustle of medicine leaflets, the plastic crackle of a blister pack as he extracted a pill. Dad tended to Rick until the coughing stopped. Melissa’s pulse accelerated when she heard him nosing around the shelf where the rocks were, where she’d left the folder. Perhaps she’d put it back the other way around, or with the sheets of paper uneven. Dad might look through the documents and discover that the ones marked with red pen were missing.
“The easiest thing would be to let you die,” he whispered there inside.
Thick saliva blocked Melissa’s throat.
She struggled to swallow.
She sat there, clenching her teeth, until Dad left the room. When she opened her eyes, the two squares of light on the roof had disappeared. To avoid passing Iris’s window, she went down the post on the other side, the one with the parched paint, the one she never used because it was more splintered and scratched her hands. She let Marlon drop as though he were just a stone.
Melissa went in through the back door. She completed her journey to the sofa with a blank stare, prohibiting her eyes from falling on any of the details that defined the family life of this home. She didn’t want to see the identical yellow bowls from which the twins ate their breakfast cereals in the morning. Or any of the jars of beads they used to color in her drawings. Nor did she want to see Iris’s books. Or the apron that Mom left folded beside the stove each night after washing the dishes from dinner.
All of a sudden, the true meaning of those objects was unknown to her.
She sat on the sofa and covered herself with the sheet, brushing the hair from her face with her pinkies. She unfolded the papers on her knees. Melissa spent the night reading about the four cases recounted in the documents marked with an x in red pen. She had to stop several times to dry her tears.
Elmer did not sleep again after tending to the kid. Lying face up, he watched the room grow brighter as the sun rose. With his hands on his stomach, he waited until it was time to get up. Lying beside him, Rose was silent, but Elmer knew she was awake, too. She barely made a sound as she breathed, and her arm wasn’t stretched out under the pillow.
A raspy voice broke the silence of the house.
“Water . . .”
Elmer leapt out of bed. Rose sat up, alert. Iris came out of her bedroom.
“Does nobody sleep around here?” he asked.
He crossed the hallway in the direction of the voice.
“Water . . .”
“He needs water, Dad,” said Iris.
“I can hear him.”
He unlocked the door and went in. Rick tried to yell, taking advantage of the open door, but what came out of his throat was an off-key croak. Elmer relocked the
door.
“Don’t start.”
“Give me water . . .”
“I gave you some last night, don’t you remember?”
“Water . . .” Rick flailed about under the sheets.
“Don’t make so much noise, please. My daughters are waking up.”
The springs squeaked as Rick thrashed again. Elmer placed a hand on the kid’s chest.
“Please.”
He searched for the glass on the shelf with the rocks on it. He thought he’d left it half full on top of the folder, but he found it empty on the bedside table. He shrugged. His memory was becoming less reliable with age. So that he wouldn’t forget to take the folder away, he left it at the foot of the bed. He offered the glass to Rick, who sipped the water.
“Am I going to die in this bed?” A drip slid down from the corner of his mouth until it was channeled through a cut on his jaw.
Elmer didn’t respond to the question. He tipped the glass so that Rick would drink faster and evaded his glazed eyes by turning his head toward the wall of portraits. When the kid had finished, he returned the glass to the bedside table without looking him in the face.
Rick kicked his legs. He groaned with pain. He continued to thrash about. Elmer frowned.
“What’re you doing?”
The folder at the foot of the bed fell onto the floor. The documents flew out, spreading across the wood. One slid to the door, the corner of the page slipping under it. A film of dust that covered the boards was shining in the morning sun.
“What’re you playing at?” Elmer asked.
Rick breathed in, filling his lungs. His nostrils bubbled.
“Iris!” he screamed. “Iris!”
Elmer covered the kid’s mouth with his hands. He kept them there even when Rick stuck out his tongue. To keep him from biting, he squeezed Rick’s jaw with his fingers. Iris’s footsteps running toward the room shook the cans of pencils.
Rose joined her daughter on the other side of the door. “You can’t go in there,” she said. On the floor, very near their feet, lay news of a girl who had disappeared in California. The corner of the paper was poking under the door. Rick’s eyes moved from side to side, above Elmer’s hand.
Elmer spoke close to the kid’s ear. “Don’t try anything.”
The door handle shook.
“Don’t even think about opening that door,” said Rose.
Rick writhed on the bed, making the frame and springs creak.
“He wants to see me!” cried Iris.
The handle rattled, but the lock held fast. Rick’s chest deflated under Elmer’s weight, and he felt the kid’s tensed muscles relax.
“That’s enough now, honey,” Rose said.
“But he called my name. He wants to speak to me.”
“Who knows what he really wants? He also said he wanted somewhere to sleep and ended up shooting at me.”
Iris sighed.
“Help me get breakfast ready. Before the twins wake up.”
Rick groaned, but neither Iris nor Rose seemed to hear him. They were already on their way down the stairs. Elmer waited for them to reach the kitchen.
“Don’t try anything like that with my daughters again,” he said. “Don’t even try it.”
“Anything like what? Letting them know the truth?”
A plastic cracking sound detonated between Elmer’s fingers as he took out a pill.
“The only truth is that we’re their parents.”
“Those papers on the floor prove otherwise.”
“Those papers might have some value to you. To me, the pieces of paper on the wall mean much more.” He lifted Rick’s head to make him look at Melissa’s drawings. “What you see there is a family. A thousand newspaper articles like yours couldn’t change what my wife and I have built. Where were you during Edelweiss’s happiest times?”
“Searching for her.”
“You weren’t there. Her sisters were. Her parents were.”
“You—”
“You’re going to sleep till I get back.” He let the kid’s head fall onto the pillow, interrupting his words. “I’d rather you weren’t awake near my daughters.”
He put the pill in Rick’s mouth. Rick spat it out, and it rolled along the floor. Elmer took out two more. He pushed them to the back of the kid’s throat, fighting against Rick’s attempts to bite his fingers. He smothered the kid’s nose and mouth.
“Don’t make this difficult.”
Rick held on until his face turned red. When his Adam’s apple moved up, then down, Elmer released the gag. He filled the glass and held it to Rick’s lips. The kid drank, looking him in the eyes. Elmer picked up the pill he’d spat out.
“You have to sleep till I get back.”
He inserted the third pill between Rick’s lips. The kid swallowed without resistance. Elmer returned the glass to the bedside table. Squatting, he picked the papers up from the floor, starting with the one under the door. The kid’s breathing began to steady as Elmer stacked the crumpled documents in a pile that turned out thicker than before. He put them back in the folder.
“Eliza . . . beth . . .” Rick whispered.
Elmer slammed the folder shut.
He went back to his bedroom. From under the bed, he took out the notebook that Rose had found in the truck. Securing both under the elastic of his underpants, he covered them with his T-shirt. He went downstairs. The refrigerator door opened. A frying pan was on the stove. Rose and Iris were making breakfast in the kitchen. Water was running in the bathroom by the front door. Melissa had already gotten up.
He went out onto the porch without being seen and walked barefoot to the barbecue beside the hose. He placed the folder containing all of the documents on the grill. From a bucket he took a metal bottle and a matchbox. Dousing the papers in flammable liquid, he dropped a match on top of them. The edges of the folder curled up, and the brown cardboard soon caught fire. The notebook’s cover, reinforced with some kind of varnish, took a little longer. The flames devoured faces, words, lies. Elmer poked the fire, reducing the past to ashes.
Rose flinched when the kitchen ceiling vibrated. Rick must have made the bed shake again.
“See?” She opened the box of cereal she’d just gotten down from the cupboard. “He’s aggressive and dangerous.”
“Will he be OK?” Iris asked from the refrigerator. “Will the ambulance come in time? When’s Dad leaving?”
Rose heard the toilet tank emptying. She saw Melissa come out of the bathroom and head to the living room. She went after her.
“Serve up the cereal,” she said to Iris from the doorway. “And stop worrying so much about a stranger.”
The force with which Iris slammed the refrigerator door made the bottles of beer inside jingle. Rose found Melissa unmaking her bed on the sofa.
“Morning.”
Her daughter shook the sheet, folded it, and piled up the cushions.
“Was it so bad sleeping down here?”
Melissa plumped up the backrest, the cushions. She plucked fluff from the upholstery.
“What’s the matter?” Rose snatched away the pillowcase Melissa had just taken off a pillow and invited her to sit down on the sofa with her.
“Melissa, please, look at me.” She tried to lift Melissa’s chin with a finger, but her daughter resisted. “We needed a bed for the boy. And this sofa isn’t so bad.” She bounced on the seat to prove it. “Don’t be like this. You’ll be back in your room in no time.”
Melissa looked at her.
“That’s better.”
But there was a tension in her daughter’s brow that hardened her gaze, making it darker, as if the color of her eyes had dropped a shade overnight.
“What?” Rose traced a line on her own cheek with her finger. “Do I have a sheet mark on my face?”
Melissa shook her head.
“Why’re you looking at me like that, then?”
Her daughter’s hair fell over her face when she looked down at t
he floor again.
“Talk to me, sweetheart.” Rose squeezed her hand. “Are you worried about having a dangerous man in the house?”
Rose noticed Melissa’s slippers to one side of the sofa. The toes were covered in a reddish dust, and spiny seeds were stuck to the rubber soles.
“You won’t say anything to me, but I see you went out last night to talk to someone.”
Melissa lifted her head all of a sudden, her eyes wide open. Rose pointed at the evidence.
“I got you!”
Her daughter’s hand tensed under hers.
“But don’t worry, we won’t tell your father. If it was hard to sleep in here, I can see why you wanted to go out and speak to your cactuses. Did they tell you anything interesting?”
The girl let her head fall again. She shrugged.
“Sorry. The cactuses are your thing, and I don’t have to play along. In that case, I won’t ask your rock if it was so bad sleeping down here when it was his turn to sleep on the shelf.” She lay a hand on the stone. “I’m sure . . . Gregory? . . . was glad he got to spend the night with you.”
Rose waited for an answer.
“Really, you scare me with your adolescence.” She repeated a phrase she used with increasing frequency. “But just one thing, honey. Put some proper shoes on if you’re going to go walking at night, don’t go out in those terry cloth slippers. Out there everything stings, everything burns, everything attacks. Well, like life itself.”
The front door opened. Elmer was coming in from outside. Rose realized he was barefoot, contradicting the advice she’d just given Melissa.
“Thanks for ruining what would’ve been a great maternal lesson,” she said to her husband.