Desert Flowers

by Paul Pen

  The truck’s jolting as it went over some potholes lifted Iris from her seat. She hit the roof with her head without letting go of the steering wheel. Despite the blows, she stepped hard on the gas. On the passenger’s seat was the piece of paper with Socorro’s telephone number on it. Bouncing up and down beside that was the key to Dad’s pickup.

  Elmer folded down the sun visors. He lifted up the mats. He ran his hand along the space between the windshield and the dashboard. He heard Rose go around the outside of the Ford, kneeling in the dirt in case the key had fallen under the vehicle.

  “Nothing. It’s not here,” she said through the open window on the passenger’s side. “She’s taken it.”

  Elmer covered his face with his hands, his elbows resting on the steering wheel. He slapped himself. He hit himself on the head, forcing himself to think. He got out of the pickup and climbed into the cargo area. He rummaged through it until he found the large screwdriver. The hammer. Back in the cab, he used them to break open the steering column.

  He pulled two wires down.

  “Dad?”

  “Not now, Melissa.”

  He searched for a knife in the mess behind the seat.

  “What do you want, honey?” Rose asked. “What’re you doing here?”

  The girl said nothing.

  “Why’re you giving me this?”

  “It was Socorro’s telephone number.”

  Elmer couldn’t see what was happening outside the vehicle. His attention was on the wires.

  “What’s going to happen, Mom?” Melissa asked.

  “Nothing’s going to happen, everything’s fine,” Rose answered. “We’re just worried about her driving on her own. She hasn’t learned properly yet.”

  Elmer stripped the wires and twisted the bare copper threads together.

  “Go back to the living room,” Rose said. “I don’t like you coming out at night to talk to those cactuses.”

  Elmer heard Melissa go back to the house. He burned his fingers on the sparks that flew when he connected the wires. Through the open window, Rose showed him the first page of a textbook. She pointed at a torn corner.

  “She’s taken the teacher’s telephone number.”

  Elmer touched the wires together again, and more sparks flew. He kept trying even when the electric smell began to mix with the smell of burned flesh.

  The sketchbook remained on the sofa where Melissa had left it. It was open to the family portrait with Edelweiss. She felt a nostalgia for the past contained in those pages, but also fear in the face of a future holding no more family moments to depict in pencil. In the end, it would be Iris who changed everything, though it had been Iris who’d asked Melissa during the picnic to leave things as they were in the drawing. Melissa felt stupid for thinking the family’s future depended on her decision alone. Perhaps the truth always found a way.

  Her stone spoke from the table.

  “Clark, please, it’s not a good time.”

  The rock insisted.

  “I can’t take you now.” She pointed at her parents out on the land. Orange flashes illuminated the inside of the truck. “They’d see me climb onto the roof.”

  Clark said something.

  “Open?” Melissa blew out. “I don’t think they would’ve forgotten, no matter how quickly they came down.”

  But the stone persisted until he’d persuaded her.

  Halfway up the stairs, she could already hear groans from Rick. Closer to the door, Melissa discovered that they were in fact words. He was mumbling them, as if talking in his sleep.

  Melissa gripped the handle.

  “It won’t open,” she informed the stone.

  But the door swung open. She hugged Clark as she walked in, pressing his face against her belly so that he wouldn’t see the chaos in front of them, the fallen shelf. Melissa knelt in front of her rocks, stacked in a corner. She held her hands to her mouth when she discovered that Natalie and Marlon had lost their eyes. She searched for them on the desk. There were empty blister packs on top of the magazines, a whitish powder all over the sheets of paper. A wet pencil was moistening a sketch, blotting it.

  “What happened?”

  “Melissa . . .” Rick whispered, “it was me, the shelf, I did it . . . I’m sorry . . . your parents . . .”

  He was looking at her with eyes that were all pupil, as if black was their color. Melissa went to him. On the bedside table was a glass with the casing of a ballpoint pen in it. The end was resting on the remains of a substance similar to the one that was crusting around Rick’s nose.

  “What’ve they done to you?”

  She knew when she saw the empty Dormepam boxes by the broken lamp. When she looked at the used blister packs on the desk. When she felt the powder that had stuck to her fingers after she moved the sheets of paper. She wiped them on her nightgown to remove any trace of her parents’ actions from her body.

  “Iris has gone for help,” she said to him. “She’s taken Mom’s truck.”

  A grimace screwed up Rick’s face.

  “And you? You didn’t say anything.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “You decided to keep your home.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Melissa lowered her head. She expected Rick to berate her. To yell all the awful things at her that she’d imagined the people in the newspaper photographs shouting at her.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I would’ve done the same . . . This is your home . . . your family . . .”

  Melissa wiped away the tears that slid down her cheeks. She sniffed.

  “It was Edelweiss’s home, too,” she said, looking up. And then she repeated the sentence in a different way, even though it was hard to say the other name. “It was Elizabeth’s home, too.”

  Rick’s distorted face regained its familiar shape when he smiled.

  “Elizabeth . . . Tell me about her . . . tell me about my sister . . . your sister.”

  His eyes quivered in quick, uncontrolled movements, as if he were sleeping with his eyelids open.

  “Hold on. Iris has gone for help.”

  But Melissa saw the glass on the table. She imagined how big the dose must have been to leave that much sediment. He didn’t have long. With her elbows sinking into the mattress, she took Rick’s hands.

  “Tell me about her . . .” he said.

  “Can you look at the wall with the drawings?”

  “I don’t think so . . . I can’t see . . .” he whispered. “Are my eyes open?”

  He asked the question with his eyes wide open, his giant pupils focused on the distance. Melissa didn’t answer. She’d wanted to show him the drawing at the bottom of the wall, the one of Edelweiss’s grave at the back of the house.

  “She’s here,” she said. “Elizabeth, she’s very close to you.”

  A broader smile than the previous one reset his features once more.

  “She’s here? In the room?” Rick moved his head from side to side on the pillow. He was reacting to stimuli that didn’t exist, seeing things that weren’t there. “Elizabeth?”

  Melissa pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, fighting tears that she shed nonetheless.

  “Yes, she’s here,” she said, “in the room.”

  Rick’s eyes stopped on an arbitrary point.

  “Right there, beside you,” Melissa said. “She’s wearing her hair the way she liked most, gathered over her shoulder. With a cactus flower over her ear. Can you smell the honey? It’s her shampoo. She used to make it herself. She knew how to do so many things . . .”

  Rick took a deep breath of air.

  “That dress she’s wearing was her favorite,” Melissa went on. “She said it came out of the washing machine so white because it was made of real edelweiss petals. And that the four flowers embroidered on the skirt reminded her of her sisters. She’s smiling, like she always did. Can you see her?”

  Rick nodded at nobody.

  “I see her . . .” he said, closing his
eyes. “At last . . . Elizabeth, it’s so good to meet you, at last.”

  “She’s holding your hand.”

  “I can feel it.” He squeezed Melissa’s. “I can feel your hand, Elizabeth. You’re just like Mom, you’re just like her when she was young.”

  “She says thank you for coming to find her.”

  “Of course I came. You’re my little sister . . .”

  Melissa let the tears flow, allowed them to soak her face as Rick’s soaked the pillow.

  “Elizabeth . . .”

  “Thank you for coming to find me,” Melissa said, standing in for Edelweiss, for Elizabeth. “I’m so glad you came.”

  He smiled as far as his lips would reach.

  “I’m glad I came, too,” he said. “It was worth it just to see you.”

  Rick’s fingers lost their strength.

  “Now we have to go to see Mom . . .”

  His hand went limp.

  His whole body relaxed.

  A sob washed over Melissa. She cried with her forehead resting on Rick’s chest. His breathing slowed until it stopped completely.

  Rose saw the blood on Elmer’s blackened fingers. Repeated rubbing against the copper wires had blistered his skin.

  “Come on!” he yelled.

  Sparks flew from under the steering wheel, and the engine reacted with a slight murmur that promptly died out. Rose was outside the truck, standing next to him, the door open. The smell of electricity, of hot flesh, was making her sick.

  “Leave it.”

  But Elmer connected the two wires again.

  “We wouldn’t catch her now, anyway.” Rose rested a hand on her husband’s. “It’s been too long since she left.”

  Elmer let go of the wires. He collapsed against the back of the seat.

  “It’s over.” He raised his arms, accepting defeat.

  “No. We’re not going to give up now.”

  “We have a kid tied up in a bed.” Elmer gestured at Melissa’s window, then at the road. “And our daughter’s gone to tell the world.”

  Rose paced up and down the land, her eyes on the ground. She walked from one end of a straight line to the other, in both directions. She rubbed out some of the footsteps Iris had left on the day she waited for the ambulance to come. On her fifth lap, Rose lifted her head to suggest an idea, but she remained silent. It was unfeasible. On the ninth loop, she caught a glimpse of the empty sofa in the living room out of the corner of her eye.

  “Melissa?”

  “What about Melissa?” Elmer asked from the truck.

  Rose went up to the porch to peer in through that window. On the sofa, there was only a sketchbook.

  “She’s not there.”

  Elmer got out of the pickup. He looked up at Melissa’s illuminated bedroom.

  “Did you lock the door when you came out?”

  Rose felt her face lose its color. She held her hands to her cheeks. Elmer opened his mouth. They both yelled at the same time.

  “Melissa!”

  They ran inside. From the foot of the stairs they could already see the glow emanating from Rick’s room.

  “It’s open . . .”

  Rose was left paralyzed, unable to let go of the newel post she gripped. She didn’t want to go up and find Melissa in the middle of her ruined bedroom. Demanding to know why the shelf of stones had collapsed. Why they’d tied up the young man they were supposed to be taking care of in her bed. Why there was a glass on her bedside table containing the remains of sleeping pills dissolved in alcohol.

  “Melissa!” Elmer reached the top of the stairs in three strides.

  Rose squeezed her eyes shut. She hunched her shoulders as if preparing to hear an explosion.

  “Mom?”

  She thought the voice had come from upstairs. She pictured Melissa waving the glass at her from there. She even thought she could hear the jingle of the pen against the glass.

  “What is it?”

  The second question enabled her to determine that the voice came from one side. Rose opened her eyes. Her daughter was coming out of the bathroom with a rock in her hand.

  “Nothing, we thought that . . . we thought . . . Elmer!” she yelled up the stairs. “She’s here!”

  A door banging shut on the second floor extinguished the light that had alarmed them.

  “Where else was I going to be?”

  Rose shook her head while her daughter went around her and into the living room.

  “Have you been crying?” Rose asked. “Your eyes are red.”

  “I was washing my face.”

  She heard Melissa slump onto the sofa.

  A cloud of mosquitoes flitted around the truck’s headlights. The hot air coming in through the window had dried Iris’s skin, her tears. The illuminated area in front of the vehicle revealed the dirt track, the cacti that flanked it on either side, the mice crossing in front. Insects exploded against the windshield, detonating with more or less force depending on the thickness of their bodies. The biggest one left a brownish mark in a corner of the glass.

  Iris began to think she’d taken a wrong turn, or gone in the wrong direction. She’d been driving for too long. Her foot gradually eased off the accelerator as her uncertainty grew. She pressed hard on the pedal again when, on the right-hand side of the road, a wooden sign appeared. It was nailed to the trunk of a cardón, handwritten in black paint. It informed her that the gas station was nine miles away.

  Rose went into the room. She found Elmer by the bed, pressing his fingers against Rick’s neck. Though her husband’s face made it obvious what had happened, she questioned him with her eyes.

  He nodded.

  A pain that wasn’t physical gripped Rose’s chest, or her stomach. She didn’t want to connect Rick’s death to Edelweiss’s, but she couldn’t help thinking of her daughter, of how, after a final exhalation, the smile she’d been giving the ceiling had faded away.

  Elmer withdrew his hand from Rick’s neck. He lifted his arms as he had after he failed to hotwire the truck, accepting defeat.

  “And now what?”

  “Now we still don’t give up,” said Rose. “Help me with the shelf.”

  They pulled on it until they managed to tear it from the wall. The bolts came straight out without the nuts loosening. Rose left it to one side as if they were making some everyday alterations.

  “We have to straighten this up as much as possible.” She gestured all around the room. “You tidy the desk.”

  Elmer shook the magazines, dried the splashes. Rose took the glass to the bathroom. Under the faucet, she washed it with hand soap. Remnants of medicine and mescal disappeared down the drain. She returned it, filled with clean water, to the bedside table, placing it next to the pitcher. She made the lamp stand up by resting it against the wall, turning the shade to hide the torn part. She left the boxes of medication in view, except for the Dormepam. She threw those in the trash, along with the blister packs Elmer had removed from the desk and the empty pen they’d used as a straw. Crouching, she tied up the trash bag, then pulled it out of the can. A piece of glass was poking out of the bottom, tearing the plastic. She thought it was a fragment of lightbulb, but it was thicker.

  It was a shard from the window the gunshot had shattered.

  Rose stared at it.

  She was resting an elbow on her bent leg, her forefinger on her lips.

  A grunt of realization escaped her throat.

  “What’re you thinking?” asked Elmer.

  She leapt up.

  “Help me untie him.”

  Elmer frowned.

  “Help me,” she said again.

  She removed the sheet covering Rick without allowing herself to be affected by the sight of his injuries. Elmer flinched just looking at them. She began to untie the knots on Rick’s left hand, and her husband did the same with the right.

  “If your idea is to hide him,” Elmer said while he fought with the rope, “it’ll be easier to carry him, wherever it is, if he�
�s tied up.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “What, then?”

  Rose stopped working on the knots.

  “Finish up,” she instructed Elmer.

  She left the room, taking the trash bag with her. When she passed the door to the twins’ room, the handle shook.

  “Mommy? What’s all the noise?” Daisy asked from inside.

  “Are you all awake?” Dahlia asked.

  “Let us out,” they both said.

  Rose swallowed.

  “Go back to bed, it’s nothing. The stranger had a turn.”

  “Is he going to steal our pictures?”

  “Is he going to steal our pictures?”

  “Not if you keep your door closed, no.”

  Rose continued to her bedroom, carrying the bag full of bloody bandages, remnants of medication, and broken glass. She hid the bag in the wardrobe. From one side, from behind the one long overcoat she owned, she took something out. She returned to Melissa’s room, where Elmer was finishing the task of untying the hand she’d left half-done.

  “So?” he asked.

  Rose showed him the shotgun.

  She loaded it with two shells.

  The telephone booth at the gas station projected a diagonal shadow onto the ground. Its angle had changed as the moon moved along its trajectory. Iris was waiting with her hands in the pockets of her nightgown. Her right hand toyed with the coin she had left over after making the call. The wind messed up her hair. It also shook the door on the Dodge that she’d left open when she got out.

  She could hear the sound of an engine in the distance. A vehicle’s headlights pierced the darkness. Iris went out onto the road and waved her arms until the truck stopped in front of her. She climbed, panting, into the passenger’s side.

  “I don’t like being scared like this at all, Iris.” Socorro spoke with one hand on her chest, the other on the steering wheel. “Who is this boy? Are you all OK?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Did you drive here on your own?”

  “Come on, go.” Iris banged on the dashboard.

  Elmer looked out through the broken window. The wind was blowing so hard that the crickets had stopped chirping. A black moth, big as a bat, perched with its wings spread on the roof tiles. Elmer didn’t bother frightening it away.