1503933547 (4 page)

I examined her hands with surprise. They appeared empty.

“Can’t you see it?” she insisted.

At first I didn’t see anything.

“Look,” she added, “it’s here.”

Then I saw it. A bright yellow chick. Feathers like cotton. And chirping so loudly I thought it would wake up the baby.

My grandmother smiled at me as she cradled the chick. Then she put it on her shoulder. The chick perched there, picking at locks of white hair, as if its first meal was in among them. My grandmother laughed and shrugged her shoulders. It was tickling her.

“See it?” she asked.

I nodded, speechless with excitement.

“See it?” she repeated, unable to see my head move.

“Of course,” I now said, so she could hear me. “It’s just as I imagined it would be. All yellow.”

My grandmother took the chick from her shoulder in one hand. The bird’s head poked out between her fingers, looking all around. It wouldn’t stop tweeting.

“Hold out your hands properly,” she said.

I did, and moved them toward hers until I brushed against them. The chick leapt. I felt its claws dig into my palms and its down brush my fingers. I held it to my face.

“I’ve been waiting for you for two rows,” I told it. In the basement there was a calendar stuck to a wall in the main room, near the bike. The boxes were the days, the rows were weeks. When all the boxes had crosses in them, Dad tore off the sheet. And that was a month. The whole calendar wasn’t changed very often, but when it was, a year had gone by. Years also went by when we made a cake for one of us. My family looked at the calendar often. To me all that mattered was whether it was day or night, and for that I had the patch of sun. “I saved you from being fried in the pan,” I added.

My grandmother laughed.

That was when my father shouted.

He shouted my name.

My grandma’s bedroom door burst open. So hard the handle hit the wall and dented it.

I stood up with my hands behind my back, hiding the chick.

I saw one of my sister’s arms come out from under the sheets. She grabbed hold of the mask and put it on with barely a movement.

The baby began to cry.

“Did you go into my room when the door was locked?” Dad asked.

“It was an accident.”

I looked at Grandma as if she could back up my story, but she said nothing.

“Come here,” my father said.

I hesitated.

“Now!”

I walked forward until I stood in front of him.

“What have you got behind you?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

I could still feel the chick’s claws and feathers between my fingers.

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?” said Dad.

Before I could react, he grabbed me by a shoulder. His hand went down my arm like an aphid toward the elbow. And then to my wrist, behind my back. When he got hold of my hand, he forced me to show it to him.

I closed my eyes, as though it would make the chick disappear.

But the hand was empty.

“Show me the other one,” he ordered. “Come on.”

Slowly I held out my other hand. There was nothing there, either.

Not a trace of the chick.

I was as surprised as my father.

“Explain to me why you went into my room,” he said. He put his open hand on my forehead. “Your mother says you’re sick.”

I didn’t know what to say.

I observed Dad’s hair scar. His nostrils opened and closed in time with his noisy breathing.

“Are you?” he asked. “Are you sick?”

I remained silent. All I could think about was where the chick had gone.

“It’s nothing,” my grandmother cut in. “He’s got a bit of fever, but not much. We won’t need anything.”

My father touched my forehead again.

“I’m going to explain to you now what a lock is,” he said.

He grabbed my neck, his hand like pincers. If he had wanted, he could have closed them completely.

“Hey,” said my grandmother.

My father looked at her, and I was able to do the same when he released his grip on my neck a little.

“There’s not long left on that lightbulb,” she said. “A few days ago I heard an electrical buzzing sound.”

When Dad looked up at the ceiling where the glass body hung, my grandmother stroked her pillow so I could see it. Just where she had put the egg earlier. I understood right away.

“Thanks, Grandma,” I said.

She smiled and stopped stroking the material.

“I don’t know when we’ll be able to change it,” my father said.

“Maybe it will last a bit longer,” she replied.

The pincers closed around my neck again, but I didn’t care. The chick was OK and it was going to sleep with my grandmother. Smelling her talcum powder.

5

That night I was woken by a scream.

“He’s choking!”

I sat up in bed. For a few seconds, I wondered whether I’d really heard something or I was having a nightmare.

“He’s choking!”

The cry reached me again from the other side of the hall. The springs on my brother’s bed squeaked above my head. His weight fell to the floor. The bunk frame shook. When my brother opened the door, the light from outside painted a yellow trapezoid on the floor, the longest side of the shape lighting up the exact width of my bed.

I could barely see and my eyes were sore, but two silhouettes, of my father and of my mother, joined my brother’s in an improvised procession that traveled left, to where my grandmother’s screaming came from.

“He’s choking,” the voice repeated.

It was my chick that was choking. Grandma had hidden it under her pillow and must’ve fallen asleep on it, squashing the newly born bird, which now couldn’t breathe.

I ran over the trapezoid of light toward the door. It didn’t matter if my father knew my little secret anymore. I met him in the hall, shepherding my grandmother with his hands on his hips.

“Get out of the way,” he said to me.

She was carrying my nephew in her arms. But not like she normally did. She had him lying on her left arm, his head in her hand and his feet at her elbow, facing downward. With her right hand, she was slapping him on the back. It was him who was choking.

“Is he breathing?” my mother asked. She and my brother were behind Dad. They disappeared into the living room. I took the chance to search my grandmother’s bed. I wanted to get the chick. Take it to its drawer. Let it grow in peace in its T-shirt nest, beside the cactus. But when I lifted the pillow I saw the eggshell. Broken. Beside it, a yellowish mark. I touched it. It was moist.

“What’s that smell?” my sister asked.

She was sitting on her bed, staring at the wall. Her voice came from behind the mask, toneless. “I don’t know,” I replied. I felt the sticky moisture, took one of the shell pieces and dropped the pillow.

“Is the baby all right?” asked my sister, reeling off the question as if it were a single word.

“I’ll go see.” Before leaving the room, I stopped under the doorframe. I asked if she was coming.

“Not right now,” she answered.

I went into the living room and perched on the brown sofa. Grandma was on a chair by the second window, the one at the top of one of the walls. She had the baby in the same position as before. He was making little gurgling sounds that became less and less frequent. At first they were constant, almost at normal breathing speed, but the intervals got longer and longer as my mother’s erratic pacing around the chair accelerated. She was biting her thumbnail.

My brother covered his mouth to hide his laughter.

Dad approached the baby while fiddling nervously with the key hung from his neck. He let go and smacked the little boy so hard that Grandma had to raise her arm to keep him from falling off. “Not like that,” she protested.

Still, after the heavy blow the gurgling ended. The baby’s nose bubbled when air entered his body again. My mother interrupted her frantic pacing. My brother began to march up and down the room, lifting his knees with each step, swinging his arms. He whistled his song all the way to the table.

“Not now!” Mom shouted at him. The melody broke off. The ground stopped trembling. My brother made a scraping sound in his throat like he always did before one of his crying fits.

“Cry all you like,” she said.

My brother ran out into the hall. When he slammed the door the living room lightbulb swung. The shadow from my head stretched until it melded with the chair’s. There, my grandmother turned the baby around. His face was dark red now. She hunched her back to listen more closely.

The muffled gurgling continued.

“He’s not breathing,” said my grandmother. She shot to her feet. The chair balanced on two legs, the back resting on the wall. Grandma bit her lips, her lopsided eyebrows creased above eyes that struggled not to cry. She paced through the room’s half-light, rocking the little boy, and sang to him like she did on any other day when it was time for his nap. Then Grandma forced open the baby’s mouth and stuck two fingers inside. They disappeared up to the knuckles. When she took them out they shone with dribble.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she whispered. Then she shouted it. “I don’t know what else to do!”

She turned the little boy around. Then tipped him over. She slapped his back again and again. She shook him.

The baby was almost blue.

“I don’t know what else to do!” The light from the bulb reflected in the moisture around her eyes.

“We have to get him out of here,” my mother said. “He’s going to—”

“We won’t get there in time,” Dad cut in.

I looked toward the door that was on the other side of the room, near the table. The one that had always been unlocked. The one I’d approached for the first time many calendars ago, on the night when my family had been five years in the basement. When my hand slipped on the knob because of my own saliva, I’d grasped it again. But I hadn’t found a reason to turn it. I didn’t even try. In the basement there was my mother. And my grandmother, sister, and brother. And Dad. That night I went back to his lap, and we ate carrot soup as I swung my legs in those pajamas, the ones that have feet.

“We won’t get there in time?” Grandma’s sobbing became anger. And all of a sudden her eyes seemed dry. “Let’s find out.”

She rested the little boy against her chest, still slapping his back. She rounded the sofa, but instead of heading toward the door that was always unlocked, she walked out into the hall.

I leapt off the sofa, my feet sinking into the cushion as I propelled myself forward, excited it was me who’d come up with the final solution to the problem. I grabbed my grandmother by the elbow to stop her.

“Grandma, the door’s there,” I said as I ran across the room. “Come on, we can get out through here.”

She raised her eyebrows halfway up her forehead when she understood. My father took a step forward with an arm outstretched as if he could pick me up just by thinking about it.

I clasped the doorknob.

And I turned it.

Or I tried.

Three times.

Dad lowered his arm. He stared at me for a few seconds. Then he spoke to Grandma. “And you’re not going anywhere, either.”

“I’m not going to let this child suffocate,” she replied. Ignoring Dad’s orders, she began walking toward the bedrooms again. He followed her, driving his heels into the floor.

“You don’t even have a key to that door,” he shouted at her. “Or the one up top.”

At that moment the baby produced a long gurgle that ended in a cough.

He started to cry.

And to breathe.

My father stopped dead. From the constant volume of the baby’s crying, I figured Grandma had stopped, too.

Mom ran into the hall.

I was still gripping the doorknob. Dad had lied to me. That door had never been unlocked.

It was just another wall.

The last wall.

There was a lot of movement in the hall and bedrooms. And in the bathroom. When Dad got back to the living room he found me still holding the doorknob. I noticed a blink of surprise. “Go to your room,” he said. “Go on.”

He switched off the light, leaving me in total darkness.

I heard the door to his bedroom close.

I let go of the knob, now warm, while the shapes in the room formed around me. I made for the hall, successfully negotiating all the obstacles. Before going to my room, I paid Grandma a visit.

First I went up to the crib to check the baby’s breathing. It sounded so easy, so healthy, it was as if the choking had never happened. Then I went up to my grandmother. I shook her by what I thought was her shoulder under the blanket. She groaned. I jiggled her again. An almost undetectable trembling told me she had woken up.

But she didn’t speak.

I shook her again.

My grandmother touched me at chest height. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, recognizing me by my feel. “What is it?” she asked. She moved under the covers and spoke louder. “Is it the baby again?”

“No,” I said. “The baby’s fine.”

She breathed out. A bitter smell reached me along with the talcum powder. “Where’s the chick?” I whispered.

I waited for her answer.

“The chick. Where is it?”

“So it was you who moved my pillow?” she asked.

“Yeah. Earlier. When the baby—”

“And what did you see?”

“I didn’t see the chick.”

“But, what did you see?”

“I saw the shell. And a yellow mark. Like the egg that Dad broke. Where’s the chick?”

“It escaped,” she quickly answered. “When your father came I took it from your hand. I hid it under the pillow.”

“That’s what you told me.”

“But when Dad took you to your room, it escaped. It ran across the bed.” She gestured with her hand. “And it went to the kitchen. It must have flown out of the window there.”

“There’s nothing on the other side of the windows. Just more concrete.”

“There is for a bird,” she said. “The chick was very small, it could fit through any crack. I bet you it managed to get out somehow.”

I considered it.

“Is the chick OK?” I asked. I imagined it alone in that world made of blisters.

“Oh, yes.” She rested a hand on my face, warming my cheek. “I’m sure it’s fine. It’ll be better off out there than in your—” She didn’t finish the sentence.