1503933547 (31 page)

Then my sister’s foot stopped with a final click of the bone. The mask tilted up to look at me.

“We have to wait for the Cricket Man to come.”

I dropped the three potatoes onto the floor.

31

We moved from the bathroom to my bedroom before Dad came out of his room. Still in her bra, my sister walked around the bedroom with the potatoes in her hand, not finding anywhere to put them down. She went up to the drawers at the foot of my bed.

“Move that,” she said. She was referring to the cactus. I moved it out of the way. She left the three potatoes there.

“I don’t want to wait for the Cricket Man,” I said, unable to accept what my sister was proposing. “I don’t want him to take me away.”

“If you do what I say, he won’t take you away in his wheelbarrow.”

“Wheelbarrow?”

My sister looked at me in silence.

“Sack,” she then corrected herself. “In his sack. Come here.” She pulled my T-shirt to drag me to the bookshelf. A bump of material was left in the piece of clothing when she let it go.

“Take one,” she said. She chose one herself. She crossed her legs to sit down, the book open on her lap. “Go on, take any one.”

I ran my finger along the spines, reading the titles. Trying to decide which one I felt like reading most. My sister pulled on my T-shirt to make me sit opposite her.

“Take this one here,” she said. “Pretend you’re reading.”

She passed me
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
. The book opened by itself on a page that had its top corner folded over. It was number twenty-one.

“Did you see the Cricket Man?” my sister whispered near my face.

“Yes, I did. I saw him in the kitchen.” I pronounced the words with emphasis, tired of having to make myself believed. “The Cricket Man really exists.”

“Of course he exists,” she said. “
I
believe you.”

I was going to challenge what she said almost without hearing it.

“You believe me?” I asked when I’d processed her words.

“Sure I believe you.”

“Mom says he doesn’t exist.”

My sister gave a loud sigh. “What did I tell you about your mother?”

I didn’t want to answer that question. I looked away, but she straightened my face with a finger.

“What did I tell you about her?” she repeated.

“That she tells me a load of lies.”

“That’s right,” she said. Her lips stretched out behind the mask. “And if you saw the Cricket Man, it was because he came in the house, right?”

I nodded.

“And if he came in the house he must’ve come in through the only door there is.”

“The kitchen door’s locked, it won’t—”

“I mean the only real door,” she cut in. “Which is the only real door?”

I ignored the question again.

“Which is it?”

“The one in the wardrobe in Dad’s room,” I replied.

“So . . .”

She said the word in a high tone, inviting me to complete the sentence. Like she did when she read the factors of a multiplication and waited for me to calculate the product. I usually solved sums in no time. I didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“So that man came in through the wardrobe in your parents’ bedroom,” she said, completing the sentence herself after a silence.

I felt a sudden coldness when I imagined the Cricket Man walking around in my parents’ room. Scraping the ceiling with his antennae. Prowling around their bed, his legs bending backward on each step. I rubbed my thighs.

“I don’t want to wait for the Cricket Man,” I said. I raised my voice without realizing it. “He scares me.”

“Wait,” she said, hushing me, “I haven’t finished.” Her eyes moved behind the orthopedic material.

“Can you take the mask off?” I asked. “I don’t like seeing you in it anymore.”

My sister hesitated. Then she pushed it back, leaving it on her head, like a second face looking up at the One Up There. I was relieved to see the smooth skin of her features.

“But when we hear someone walking in the hall,” she whispered, “I’ll put it back on.”

“OK.”

She resumed the conversation.

“For the Cricket Man to reach your parents’ wardrobe he must’ve come through the tunnel that leads to the surface. Which means that—”

“No,” I interrupted, “that’s not right.”

“How come?”

“The Cricket Man lives underground,” I explained. “The Cricket Man never goes up to the surface.”

“What do you mean, he never goes up there? So what does he eat?”

“He eats children,” I replied.

“But he must have to breathe,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

I opened my mouth to say something. But I couldn’t remember what my insect book said about how crickets breathe. I knew that caterpillars breathe through holes in their skin, but I didn’t know how crickets did it.

“Listen to me,” my sister said. “The Cricket Man comes down through the tunnel from the surface. Which means that he has to open the other door. The outer one. The one we can’t open. That door’s only open while the Cricket Man’s inside.”

I hunched over even more. I lowered my voice.

“Another door?” I asked.

She smiled. “I told you there’re a lot of things you don’t know,” she said. “It’s the trickiest door. That’s why we need the Cricket Man. He’s the only one who can open it.”

I shifted on my backside to move closer to her.

“And if he doesn’t come back?” I asked. “If I’m good, he won’t have to come back. He eats bad boys.”

My sister straightened her back. She held a finger to her mouth, thinking. After a silence, she relaxed her spine again.

“But he will come,” she sighed.

“How do you know?”

“Because you still have that jar in your drawer.”

I lowered my head, knowing that she was right, that I hadn’t been good, that the Cricket Man would keep looking for me until he found me. A shiver ran through my body. My sister must’ve realized because she swooped on me. The books hit each other between our legs like the tectonic plates that Mom had told me about. She put her arms around me, her breasts squashed against my body.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said in my ear. “We’ll be ready when he comes. We’ll make sure the Cricket Man doesn’t catch you with his legs.”

Then I told her a secret.

“I peed myself in the living room,” I said. “Last time he came. He almost got me in the living room. And I peed myself.”

My sister squeezed harder with her arms. Her body shook in spasms.

“What is it?” I asked.

She couldn’t contain her laughing fit and let out a cackle.

“You peed yourself!”

She separated from me, pointing a finger at me while she laughed. At first it made me angry. Then her noisy laughter became contagious. She hit my shoulder to coax me to laugh with her. And there was something comforting in her reaction to my secret. She managed to make me feel like it wasn’t a secret to be ashamed of. I let out a first solitary giggle. She was holding her hands to her belly.

“Peed your pants!” she yelled. The last sound stretched out until it became another fit of laughter. She also tried to imitate the sound of a stream of pee, letting out air through her teeth. That really was funny. I laughed again. This time I couldn’t stop. I surrendered completely to it.

We laughed together until we ran out of air, while she gestured with her hands for us to control the volume of our laughter.

After a few deep breaths we calmed ourselves down. My sister picked up the books that’d fallen on the floor, and opened them on our legs. She combed her hair with her fingers. She glanced at the bedroom door to make sure our laughing hadn’t attracted anyone’s attention.

“There’s nothing to be frightened of,” she said. “The Cricket Man won’t find you.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because you’ll be hidden in Dad’s wardrobe.”

The heat from the laughter vanished in an instant. The momentary chrysalis of tranquility split open to let out a black moth of absolute terror. A death’s-head hawk moth, the lepidopteran that has a skull tattooed on its thorax.

I shook my head.

I tried to get up. I didn’t even want to listen to any explanation my sister might have for those words. She grabbed me by the T-shirt, using the bump of material that she herself had marked in the fabric before.

“You’ll hide in the wardrobe before the Cricket Man arrives,” she said. I opened my mouth, but she whispered more loudly to assert herself. “And when he comes down to find you, you’ll leave through the tunnel. There’s a passage and a ladder on the wall. All going up. When you get out, you’ll head toward the lights. You’ll look for some people. Look for the houses. You’ll tell them that you want to save your little nephew. And you’ll bring them here.” The last word stumbled in her throat. Her eyes went shiny.

“You’re going to bring people to this basement.” One end of her mouth lifted as if she was going to smile, but for some reason she made an effort to remain serious.

“What’s outside?” I asked.

She pressed her lips together. She blinked faster than usual.

“You’ll see,” she said.

I imagined myself poking my head out to see what was above the basement, making myself visible to the rest of the world. Emerging from the depths with my firefly lamp held high. Tapping the jar’s lid to tell them to use their flashing light to make the SOS signal I’d been teaching them. Three short, three long, then three more short flashes. They almost had it. The thought of going outside made me remember something. Or someone. An uncontrollable feeling started in my stomach. It pushed the thought to my mouth. The words escaped before I could contain them.

“My chick!” I cried. I covered my mouth with my hands. I’d let out the secret in front of my sister. With my eyes wide open, I watched her reaction.

“Your chick?” she asked.

I remained silent. My eyes began to dry out from keeping them open so wide.

“Poor thing,” she said. “You don’t understand a thing.” She looked at me in silence for a few seconds. Then she took my hands from my mouth. She wrapped them in hers. “That chick—” she began.

“I didn’t mean chick,” I interrupted in a late attempt to deny its existence.

“I know what chick you’re talking about.”

My neck went soft. My head fell forward.

“I was in the bedroom that night, too, remember?”

I recalled how one of my sister’s arms had emerged from under her sheets to grab the mask and put it on when Dad came in to tell me off for sneaking into his bedroom. I nodded.

“I heard what Grandma had you believe,” she said. Her words left me confused. “Poor boy, look at your little face.” My sister rested a hand against my cheek. “It must be tough finding out about so many lies at once.”

The corners of my lips pulled downward. I felt pressure on top of my eyes. And an itch in my throat. My chin began to tremble when I thought that my chick could be another invention.

“My chick . . .” I didn’t know what else to say.

“Another lie,” confirmed my sister. “I told you that Grandma appears better. But she isn’t.”

“But I saw it,” I managed to say. “It was yellow. With feathers. And it tweeted.” I relived the excitement of the birth of the little bird in my grandmother’s bedroom.

“Grandma put it here,” I said, pointing at my shoulder, “and the chick ate from her hair. And then she passed it to me.”

“And then what happened?”

“Dad came. Angry because I’d gone in his room,” I remembered without difficulty. “I hid the chick behind my back. I had it in my hands. Dad made me show them. And the chick . . . the chick . . .” I had to breathe through my mouth to stop myself from crying. I looked at my sister, struggling to understand.

“The chick wasn’t there,” she said, finishing my sentence. “Because there is no chick. It never existed. Grandma lied to you. Chicks can’t hatch from an unfertilized egg.”

“But I saw it . . .”

“Covered in yellow feathers as soon as it hatched? Climbing onto Grandma’s shoulder? Eating from her hair?” She raised the pitch of her voice with each new question. “You don’t know how a bird’s really born.”

I’d never seen it. Not even in a photo in the many books we had in the basement. So I shook my head.

“They come out wet,” she went on. “And clumsy. With their feathers stuck to their body. Like your nephew when he was born, but in bird form,” she added. “Grandma hid the egg under her pillow. And I bet she crushed it with her head.”

I remembered how Grandma had asked me to close my eyes just before it hatched.
They don’t hatch if they know someone’s looking,
she’d said. Then I’d discovered a wet patch on Grandma’s pillow, similar to the one left by the clot of liquid that fell onto the floor when Dad squashed my other egg.

I thought about the piece of shell I’d kept in my drawer since that night, protected in its T-shirt nest. A string of dribble overflowed one side of my mouth.

“No, please,” I said to my sister. “No . . .”

She hugged me. She stroked my head, hushing me, repositioning herself so that she was sitting beside me. I lay down over her lap. “Don’t worry,” she said to me. “Things will be different very soon.”

That night, I waited for Grandma in her room after dinner. I stood peering into the baby’s crib, my chin resting on the edge of his little shelter. Listening to him breathe. The bedroom door opened. Grandma headed to her bed without noticing my presence.

“I’m here,” I told her. She turned toward my voice, holding a hand to her chest.

“Don’t give me frights like that,” she said. “I’ll start thinking your father was right about you being like a ghost.”

“Don’t say that,” I whispered.

“Do you want to talk about what happened last night?”

I shook my head.

“Do you want to?”

“No.”

Grandma sat on the side of her bed. She took off her rosary and began to flick through the beads with both hands resting on her knees. I went and stood in front of her. I smelled the talcum powder. I bent, intending to give her a kiss, but I changed my mind and straightened my body again.

“Is my chick still alive out there?” I asked.

She said a few more words of her prayer before breaking off. She pinched one of the beads to remember where she’d stopped.