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That was when her hand came out of her pocket.

Straightaway I noticed the sky-blue crumbs between two of her knuckles. The same color as the cubes of rat poison. She stroked her bare nipple with her fingers. She circled it a few times with two fingertips.

She hummed as she did it.

The brown skin turned bluish.

Then she lowered her fingers. She rubbed them together over the pocket like when Mom added salt to a salad.

“Is everything all right?” Grandma asked.

My sister stopped humming to answer. “Everything’s fine,” she said.

I stared at her. At the blue powder that’d spread over her nipple.

“That’s it,” my sister whispered to the baby. “This one’s yours. You can eat now.”

She guided the little boy’s head to her bare nipple stained blue.

20

I hit my head against the boards that supported the mattress as I tried to come out. My chin hit the floor. The firefly jar rolled. I kicked as if swimming, trying to make as much noise as possible. I couldn’t find the strength to scream.

When I managed to get my head out, I steadied myself by anchoring my hands to the floor. I looked up toward my sister, not caring what face I’d find. Her hair flapped on her shoulders, free without the strap that always held it to her head.

“What’s going on?”

It was my grandmother who shouted that. She shot up and waved her arms in the air as if a swarm of wasps attacked her.

My sister ran off around one side of the crib, heading for a corner of the room. An escape very similar to the one made by the rat I’d found in that very crib. She crouched in the corner, nowhere else to go.

The little boy started crying again. It sounded muffled coming from the small space where my sister had confined him, between her breast and the wall. When I reached them, I tried to get my hands in around her hips, but she stopped me with her elbows. She was pumping her arms as if they were a praying mantis’s big legs.

“Let go of the baby!” I screamed.

A rough hand covered my mouth. I could taste the talcum powder. My grandma held me around the middle and pulled me. I stretched out my hands in an effort to grab hold of my sister. And my nephew. My fists closed on the air. Grandma turned me around and knelt in front of me. Locks of white hair were falling down her face, getting caught in the eyelids, in the scars on her skin, and in the corners of her mouth. I could see some bald patches. “What is it?” she shouted. She pressed my face between her hands. “You have to describe it to me.”

I breathed.

Behind me I heard my sister squirming in the corner.

Drops of sweat slid down my forehead.

I let out a wild moan. It was a while before I was able to say a sentence.

“She’s giving the baby rat poison,” I finally said.

My grandmother’s two eyebrows joined at the top of her nose to become one. She moved her lips but said nothing.

At that moment a tremor started in my bedroom. The earthquake advanced up the hall toward us. The door opened, the handle hit the wall, and my brother appeared in the room.

Grandma put him to use.

“Get the baby from her,” she ordered him. She pointed at the corner where my sister still crouched.

I took a step back to get out of my brother’s way. My sister’s elbowing was no bother for him. Neither was her kicking. He took a few blows before he was able to grab her by the arms. He pulled her shoulders back, making a bigger space between her body and the wall. My sister’s attempts to defend herself were reduced to spasms.

My brother yelled at us, “Take him!”

My grandmother stepped forward. She felt the contours of my siblings, searching for a gap between them where she could reach the baby, until she managed to get her arms over my brother’s shoulder.

“I’ve got the baby,” she said to my brother. Then, to my sister, she said, “Let him go.”

My sister thrashed about.

“Let him go,” my grandmother said again.

The thick veins on my sister’s ankles changed shape when she went up on tiptoes. The baby’s red face emerged from behind my sister’s back. My grandmother grabbed him under the arms, my nephew’s feet hanging in the air. She rocked and shushed him.

She sat on the bed.

My mother then came into the room.

“Leave her!” she shouted at my brother, who was still overpowering my sister in the corner. She leapt into the corner with her bent elbow pointing outward. She rammed it into the bottom of my brother’s back when she fell on him. “Leave her!”

His response was just a grunt.

“It’s not what you think. He hasn’t done anything this time,” Grandma said. “It was your daughter.”

Mom stopped her attack. The baggy T-shirt she slept in reached her knees and showed the cleft in her chest.

Dad appeared in the doorway.

His face wrinkled up when he saw my mother with her legs apart, shoulders slumped and hands hanging on each side of her body. And my brother pushing my sister to trap her against the wall.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Grandma held out her arms, offering the baby to anyone who could see him.

“Is his mouth blue?” she asked. “Is his little mouth blue?”

The baby kicked and cried.

“What do you mean?” My father looked at me, searching for an explanation. “What’s your grandmother saying?”

Instead of answering, I went up to Grandma. I touched her arms so she knew I was there. She lowered them to my height. I took the baby like Mom had taught me. Then I sat on the bed, beside my grandmother.

“What’s this about a blue mouth?” asked Dad.

I opened the baby’s mouth with two fingers. Bubbles of snot exploded on his nose and splashed my hand. I separated his lips and discovered the ridges of flesh that were his gums. I examined them, and the inside of his lips. Another loud scream allowed me to peer into his mouth.

Tears gave me away. I sniffed.

Grandma touched my eyelids before I could say anything.

“No . . .” It was Mom who said that. It must’ve been the moment she understood what was happening. Perhaps, like me, she remembered the cubes of poison that’d disappeared. And she grasped the meaning of my grandmother’s question. And the meaning of my tears. And why my brother was trapping my sister against the wall.

“What have you done to him?” she yelled at the corner. She knelt beside me to look at the baby and stroked his face with a finger. Then she pinched him hard. Twice. Three times. I wanted to get the baby away from her, but when he started crying again, I understood what Mom was trying to do. She kept his mouth open until she, too, could see the tip of his blue tongue. She snatched the baby from my arms and pinched it between two fingers.

“We have to make him sick,” she said.

My sister spoke from her prison in the corner, her voice choked. “Don’t worry—he—he won’t die.” Her breathing rasped in her chest. “Never—he never dies.”

The hair scar on Dad’s face moved to a straight angle I’d never seen before.

“You can’t make me—” She choked on her own words. “You can’t make me love that child. That baby’s an abomination.”

“Shut up!” Dad screamed. “The boy’s here.”

My parents looked at each other. Then their eyes rested on me just for an instant. Grandma straightened her back so suddenly I heard the muscles in her neck tense. Mom left the bedroom with the baby in her arms, heading toward the bathroom.

Dad approached the corner, pushing my brother aside.

“What’ve you done to the baby?” he asked my sister.

She covered her ears, her hands over her hair, and shook her head, pressing it against the wall. Dad forced her to turn around.

I closed my eyes and covered them with my hands before she faced me.

“And the mask?” Dad asked. “Can’t you see the boy’s here?”

“I wouldn’t worry,” she replied. “You have your son perfectly trained. There’s no way to make him look at my face.”

“Good. He shouldn’t have to see it.”

My sister moaned with pain.

“Tell me what you’ve done to the baby.” Dad spat the words out.

“I gave him a little bit of this,” she replied. I heard a sound I couldn’t identify.

“Put that tongue away,” said Dad. “And tell me why it’s blue.”

“And why do you care so much—
Dad
?”

She said the last word in an exaggerated way. I understood the meaning behind it. I heard the first slap. Then there was another.

My brother’s guttural laugh exploded somewhere near them.

Grandma took me by the wrist. “Let’s go,” she whispered.

There was another slap.

This time my sister groaned.

“Are you trying to disfigure me?” she said. “Even more?”

My grandmother guided me across the bedroom. When I remembered the firefly jar under the bed I wanted to stop, but Grandma yanked me out of the room. The door closed behind me. On the other side, my sister screamed.

In the bathroom, my mother was holding the baby to her chest. A wet mark covered a bit of her T-shirt.

“I did it,” she said. “He’s been sick.” She ran a finger over the wet material, picking up some white and blue residue. She shook her finger over the washbasin. “See?”

“What is it?” asked Grandma.

I described it to her.

Mom held the baby out in front of her to inspect his face.

“Will he be OK?” my grandmother asked.

She examined him, looking for any unusual symptoms. “He looks all right. I think he got everything up.”

“Have you washed his tongue?”

“I had to pull on it. That’s how I made him be sick.”

“He couldn’t have had much,” I said. “I came out from the bed before he started sucking.”

“Why were you hiding there?” Grandma asked.

Mom rocked the baby. “Hidden?” she asked. “And why are you dressed like that?”

I thought about my secret mission. The idea to protect my sister from Dad. When really it was the baby who needed protecting from my sister.

I left the bathroom without answering Mom.

“Hidden where?” she asked again, but I was already setting off down the hall toward the kitchen. I heard my grandmother explain what’d happened in the bedroom. I hit the switch, and a cone of orangey light illuminated the main room. It still must’ve been several hours before the spot of light would appear. I pressed the back of a chair against the oven in the kitchen and climbed onto it to reach one of the highest cupboards. I opened it. It smelled of dry rags. There were bottles of bleach and ammonia, two half-used candles, matches, scourers with the green side worn away, and, at the back, the box I was looking for. The box of rat poison. I jumped off without bothering to put the chair back. I observed the picture of the rat in a yellow circle.

In the sink, I pulled back the flaps on the top of the box, shaking it so the cubes that were left would fall out. I turned on the water. I crushed the poison with a big wooden spoon, pushing the pieces down the plughole so they’d dissolve and wash away.

I cried thinking what could have happened. Imagining how I would never have been able to hold the baby in my arms again or enjoy the spot of sunlight together in the living room. Or stand by the window in the hall, breathing in the air from outside. Or how we would never have grown up together so that I could tell him about the night I left the firefly lamp in his crib so he wouldn’t be scared of the dark.

My sister was wrong when she said that what the baby and I had in the basement wasn’t a life.

Of course it was.

It was our life.

The only one we had.

The poison finished dissolving in the sink.

A door opened in the hall.

I heard my sister crying. There were thumps against the walls.

“Make her throw up as well,” my father said. “She’s swallowed the lot.”

The water started running in the washbasin.

While the whole family was seeing to my sister, I took the chance to go back to the baby’s room. I searched my hiding place under the bed. I found what I was looking for. The firefly jar had been hidden when it rolled away before the incident. This time I concealed it under the black T-shirt. It was obvious it was under the material, but I knew no one would pay any attention to me right then. In the hall, my brother was craning his neck to watch what was happening inside the bathroom from the door.

Before closing my bedroom door, between my sister’s groans, my brother’s donkey noises, and my grandmother’s instructions on how to make my sister sick, I heard Dad say: “I’m not dealing with another dead body.”

21

I quickly put the firefly jar in the drawer and undressed. I moved the pillow I’d hidden under the sheets to simulate my body, and took shelter in my bed, covering up to my chin.

I heard my sister throwing up in the bathroom.

She let out a cry of pain.

Similar to the one I’d heard once, when I discovered how my sister’s belly button had popped out when she was still pregnant. It happened one night as we got ready to take a bath, waiting naked for the tub to fill. “Is the baby going to come out?” I’d asked when I saw the belly button sticking out.

“I hope not,” she answered, looking at herself in the mirror while massaging her breasts.