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The man didn’t wait for Grandpa to finish the sentence. He launched himself at the swinging door with his hand raised, ignoring the pain in his palm from the impact.

In the living room, he found what he’d feared.

The telephone’s curled wire vibrated in time with his daughter’s accelerated pulse. She trembled as she held the receiver. Her mouth opened when she knew she’d been caught. The string of drool that still hung from her chin broke. A drop of blood fell to the floor. She had already dialed the number, but nobody was answering the call. She knew straightaway that there wouldn’t be time to speak before her father crossed the living room and reached her. And she also knew that if she didn’t seize the moment, if she didn’t feed off the rage that the slap had provoked in her, she’d never muster the courage she needed to turn in her family. Alarm bells went off in various parts of her brain, trying to warn her about her own future. She didn’t listen to them. She acted without thinking. Driven by pure instinct. She hung up and held the telephone in one hand. Crouching down, she searched the bottom of the wall for the socket where the wire was connected. She found it right away. She pulled on the cable before her father had taken two strides. With the telephone unplugged, she made a run for the stairs, knocking over the two lamps that stood in her path. One of them fulfilled its purpose: to trip her father. She heard him fall with a deep groan, an animal snort. She set off up the stairs.

On the landing, she pulled at the gate that led to the lantern. She shook it in its frame. A metallic rattling accompanied the action. Locked. She could hear her father cursing downstairs. It seemed that neither his wife nor the grandparents were succeeding in giving him the help he’d asked for to get to his feet. Another thump on the floor confirmed the uselessness of their assistance. A crystalline detonation signaled a broken bulb. With a single leap she positioned herself in front of the painting of the naval battle on a stormy night. On tiptoes, she searched for the mermaid key ring that they kept out of the boy’s reach. She ran her fingers along the top of the picture frame, her hand’s frenetic shaking lifting clouds of dust. With one shake she hit the key ring. The mermaid fell to her feet.

The tip of the key clinked around the lock, her fingers’ trembling preventing her from inserting it. The telephone she held against her stomach was beginning to slip. She heard a footstep at the bottom of the stairs. And another on the next step. Her father was coming up. A grunt came from her throat, bringing her momentary relief from the tension and steadying her pulse for just an instant. Just enough time to insert the key. She turned it. She saw her father appear on the landing the moment she closed the gate from the other side. She screamed as she inserted the key again. The lock clicked into place with one turn. There was no time for anything else. Her father’s hand attacked through two of the bars, as aggressive as a piranha. He managed to catch her by the blouse, but she got loose with a tug that tore the seam of a sleeve.

She climbed the steep staircase in a spiral as twisted as the events that were ruining life in the lighthouse. The man watched his daughter’s shoes go up until they disappeared. He gave up trying to catch her. His tensed arms, stretched as far as the top of the gate allowed, fell like dead weight.

“Please,” he begged into the darkness of the tower, his face lodged between two bars. “We’re your family.”

There was no response. She didn’t want to hear anything that would make her change her mind. She rounded the lantern room. The chalky glow of a moon blurred by the mist flooded the space, giving it a dreamlike texture, full of shadows that might not have been shadows. She moved along the curved space between the lantern and the dome’s windows.

Down below, listening for his daughter’s footsteps, the man made a desperate attempt to prevent what seemed inevitable.

“If you’re planning to plug the telephone in up there, don’t bother. It’s never worked properly.”

But she knew that wasn’t true. And she also knew that her father had always made an effort to keep the lantern workable, because he still held out hope that the lighthouse would one day shine again. Like he hoped that her brother’s head would suddenly fix itself. On a desk, she felt along the spines of a row of books. The thick volumes on medicine, psychology, and psychiatry that her father labored to read without really understanding, hoping that on one of their pages he’d find the words that would allow him to work a miracle. She kicked a stool and crouched under the table, treading on her skirt. She searched on her knees for the telephone socket.

The man set off downstairs. He ran to the side table and batted it out of the way while his family members gave each other puzzled looks. He tried to rip out the telephone jack with his fingers, looking for some internal connection that he could interrupt. A fingernail broke in the attempt. “Christ!” he yelled. “We have to rip this thing out!” Grandpa shot off to the kitchen. He returned with a screwdriver. The man snatched it from his hands. He hit the socket with the tip, and chips of plastic flew from it. It was all for nothing. Because of the time it took to break the plastic and because there was nothing there anyway behind that cream-colored square that could cut off the call his daughter made.

At the top of the tower, squatting under the desk, with trembling fingers she turned the dial seven times. After the first ring, a man’s voice answered the call.

And she spoke.

She spoke in a voice as deep and as dark as the sea they had looked out on as a family from that tower on so many nights. She spoke without pause. Tears, blood, and saliva fell on the receiver. After identifying herself, she told the man how her brother had found the girl on the rocks. How he’d kept her existence secret in order to live for a few days in a crazed fairy tale in which the two of them made a family together. Until the girl’s body faded forever. She told him how her brother had then brought the corpse to the old lighthouse. The decision her family had made to hide the body. And she told him also that the girl lay in the septic tank. Under a pile of stones that they later sealed off with concrete.

“Hello?” She looked at the telephone with an anxious expression. She’d heard a bang. “Are you there? I have more to tell you. They’re going to hide my brother now . . .”

But nobody was listening at the other end of the line. Her last words were reduced to an electrostatic crackle emanating from the receiver of a telephone left lying on the floor. Because the man who’d answered, and who had dropped the receiver when the voice mentioned the concrete that they used to cover the body of his daughter—the girl he’d dressed in pink one spring morning to teach her to ride a bicycle—that man was now moving frenetically around his garage. Searching among empty cans. Praying to the God he no longer believed in that he wouldn’t find a full one. When he found one, he changed his plea. Now he prayed for the strength he would need to stop himself. To prevent himself from going through with the idea that had germinated in his mind.

“Have you done it?”

Her father’s voice, reverberating around the dome’s glass, startled her. She hit her head as she came out from her hiding place under the table. She brushed her damp hair away from her face and hooked it behind her ears. She wiped her mouth with the torn sleeve of her blouse, then dried her eyes with her fist. Until now she hadn’t noticed the intense throb in one of her back teeth caused by the slap. She returned the receiver to its base. She even went to untangle the curled wire, but her father shouted again, interrupting the task.

“Tell me whether you’ve done it!” The gate rattled, shaking in its frame.

“I did it.”

“The police?”

“Her father.”

The reply filled the man’s chest with air contaminated with guilt, with remorse. He let it out in an agonizing sigh, a wretched, high-pitched wail that rose up the staircase. His daughter heard him from upstairs. Never in her eighteen years of life had she heard her father cry.

And she smiled.

The blood that soured her tongue took on a sudden taste of victory.

27

“He’s going to come for us,” the man said in the living room. “Do something.”

Grandma, who was repositioning one of the fallen lamps beside the cuckoo clock, whimpered. The boy, by his mother’s legs, let out a misguided guffaw. The woman covered her mouth with the flaps of her cardigan, as if she felt cold. She wanted to cower behind them and disappear. She knew what her husband’s words meant.

“She’s told them,” she whispered. She said it for herself, bringing a deep trail of thought to its conclusion. Then her mouth appeared over the woolen neck.

“She’s told them.”

Her husband acknowledged it with a long blink. She cursed her daughter with murmured words that were unintelligible.

Grandma ran to the front door. She turned the keys that hung from the lock. Spinning around, she pressed her hands against the door, as if keeping at bay an onslaught from outside. “What do we do?” she asked.

Grandpa improvised. He drew the curtains in the adjacent windows, including the one that the corrugated iron from the septic tank had smashed two months earlier, and which he himself had mended. He crossed the living room and closed the curtains on the other side. Then he headed for the kitchen.

“I’ve drawn the curtains in the kitchen, too.” He took a deep breath. “Nobody can see us from outside.” He said it as if it were a solution to the problem. As if the sections of curtain that hid them could separate them from the outside world. Insulate them from the truth.

Grandma heard her husband’s labored breathing. She saw him bent over, his hands on his knees, his glasses out of place on his nose. She noticed how weary he looked, the result of an absurd idea that she herself had initiated when she blocked the door. As if two turns of the lock were enough to keep them captive in the alternate reality they’d invented. The one in which there was no girl who’d appeared dead in the living room. In her actions, and Grandpa’s, she recognized a final desperate attempt to prolong the lie they had kept up for two months. To keep the secret covered up any way possible. This time with curtains. Just looking at her husband made her feel exhausted. The two months of guilt, fear, and bad decisions fell on top of her like the pile of stones they’d used to cover the body. A sigh escaped from the depths of her chest.

And then, almost at the same time, the rest of them also realized the uselessness of their improvised solution. Several looks were exchanged in a silence broken only by a cricket’s chirp.

“Not now,” the woman whispered to her son to get him to stop his mimicking. But she discovered that the boy had his mouth shut. The cricket continued to chirp outside the house. A cyclic chirp that seemed to measure the time that was running out on them. Time spent among secrets and lies.

Grandma was the first to accept it. “We won’t be able to hide forever,” she said.

“We have the boat at the jetty,” the man suggested. “We can make a run for it.”

“And then what?” Grandma asked.

Grandpa hugged his wife. He grasped the ultimate meaning of her words. And he seconded her decision. “You know how long we’d take to get to the mainland,” he said to dissuade his son. “They’ll be waiting for us there.”

“There are other islands,” the man insisted. “We can get away.”

The grandparents didn’t listen. They just looked each other in the eye and accepted the end of the time of secrets. The cricket outside gave a final chirp. It, too, confirming the end of an era.

Grandpa repeated his wife’s sentence. “We won’t be able to hide forever.”

“That’s what you were going to do with me!” yelled the boy, who began to laugh compulsively. “Hide me forever! There’s a house in the basement!”

“The basement,” said the woman.

“Could we go down?” Grandpa asked, wrapping his hand around the fist in which Grandma squeezed the rosary.

“It’s not designed for all of us,” said the man. “But we could.”

The woman swallowed a large quantity of saliva. “Forever?” she said in barely a whisper. “Would we be going down forever?”

“Of course not,” her husband answered without knowing whether he lied. “Just until we think of something else.”

“And what would that be?”

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I really don’t know. But what other options do we have? Are we going to wait for them to come for us? Give up like that? Now?”

Grandma burst into tears.

“What will they do if they find us?” the man went on. “What can they do to us?”

“Lock us up,” Grandpa replied.

“So either way we end up imprisoned,” his daughter-in-law concluded. “The outcome’s the same.”

“It’s not the same,” the man corrected her. He used a pause to reorganize his thoughts. “Out here they’d lock us up separately. Down there we’d be together.”

“You’re going to live with me!” cried the boy. His feet began an arrhythmic dance that he accompanied with spasmodic movements of his waist. He also waved his arms with pure joy, launching his elbows at the ceiling, until his mother halted him with an arm that was really a straitjacket.

“Stop. Please, don’t dance.” But the boy kept wiggling his body in her arms, humming a tuneless melody. The murmuring continued while his mother, father, and grandparents observed the unexpected outbreak of happiness and optimism with confusion. At the end of the song, the boy managed to free an arm from the straitjacket that had now loosened, and he stuck a finger in his mouth, his cheeks inflated. The slobbery plop that detonated on his lips when he took out his finger made his mother expel air through her nose in a timid chuckle. And when the grimace that the boy had for a smile lit up his face, the decision suddenly became simpler.

“I want to go down,” the woman said.

Grandma rested her forehead on Grandpa’s face. “So do we.”

Grandpa confirmed it with a nod. Then he moved his wife’s head so it rested on his chest. Almost identical smiles spread across their faces. The man then realized something. He looked at his parents, who were talking to each other without words, in a conversation of caresses. He observed the tender way they rubbed their heads together, a loving gesture achieved only after decades of coexistence.