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“Don’t come down if you’re barefoot,” he shouted to his daughter. “There’s glass everywhere down here.”

The wood of the staircase creaked under her weight. A foot stopped on the second step. She hadn’t put her shoes on after drying herself with the bathrobe. A cold breeze climbed her legs to her groin. The elastic on her pajama bottoms, the worn, gray ones that were so comfortable and warm, danced on her bare ankles.

“So the window
has
been smashed,” she assumed.

“I’ve already cut myself,” her father lied. He trod on the floor to make the glass crunch. “Don’t come down.”

“It’s dangerous,” added the woman.

There were a few seconds of silence. Looks were exchanged in the room. Then the boy yelled, “We’re going to have a baby!”

Grandma shushed him in his ear. The man grabbed the girl’s wet arms through the raincoat, ready to escape outside.

“What nonsense is he spouting now?”

“It’s nothing. Go back to your room.”

“You’re fine now that the boy’s home, huh? And you don’t want me around. Makes a change.”

“It’s because of the glass,” the woman said.

“It’s always because of something.”

She moved down to the third step. The wood creaked again. Grandma, who was rocking the boy in her arms, couldn’t keep the words in.

“Please, don’t come down.” She waited for her granddaughter’s reaction, allowing herself to be hypnotized by the curtain fluttering in the living room, lifted by the wind that came through the broken window. In the random curves in the fabric she saw the same randomness that the future of the boy in her arms depended on. A whole life staked on the effect those four words would have on her granddaughter. Please. Don’t. Come. Down. When the ceiling shook under her angry footsteps, returning to her room with energetic strides, Grandma sobbed with silent relief on the boy’s shoulder.

The whole house shook when the door slammed.

“Come on,” the man whispered. “We have to do it now.”

He lifted the girl by the torso. The raincoat slid down, revealing her bluish face. His wife put it back, tying the sleeves behind the broken neck. The man gestured to Grandpa to take her by the legs.

“Hurry up,” he insisted. “Before the tank gets flooded. If it fills up with rain we won’t be able to—”

“Shut up,” Grandpa cut him off. “Don’t say another word.” His knees clicked when he crouched down. His hands were trembling. “God forgive me,” he murmured.

As he wrapped his fingers around the girl’s ankles, so slender it seemed as if he would be able to close his fist entirely, he felt dizzy. And when he lifted the little body, as light as his granddaughter’s had been years ago when he’d held her up by the belly to make her fly like an airplane through the air of that very living room, the dizziness became a feeling of repulsion toward himself. He opened his hands. The heel of the one shoe the girl still wore hit the floor in a sad and incomplete tap-dancing step.

“I can’t,” he said, showing the palms of his hands as if those very words were written on them. “I can’t.”

The boy escaped his grandmother’s arms. He took Grandpa’s place. “Let’s go to the rocks, Dad,” he said. “She lives on the rocks.”

His father tried to speak, but the anguish swallowed his words. The woman approached the boy, and, one by one, she unpicked the fingers that squeezed the girl’s legs.

“Are you going to help him or not?” she asked her father-in-law.

Grandpa shook his head. He showed his palms again.

The man clenched his jaw, chewing on the cry he didn’t let out. “I’ll do it by myself if I have to,” he said. He picked up the girl in his arms to illustrate his words. He turned toward the door. The air that came in through the window dried the sweat from his forehead.

“I’ll help you,” the woman said. She signaled to Grandma to take care of the boy, pointing at the crown of his head. “You give him a bath. He can’t stay like that, he’ll get sick.”

The woman picked up the corrugated iron. She approached her husband and grabbed his tensed arm, the bicep swollen with the effort. She stood on tiptoes to speak into his ear.

“I won’t hand my son over,” she whispered. And it was her who took the first step toward the septic tank.

The boy spoke behind her. “Don’t take her. I want her.”

The woman turned around and noticed the same confused expression she’d seen the day the hamster had stopped moving between his twisted hands. The pet they’d given him after the accident, when the boy still screamed if he was left alone in his bedroom, was crushed to death between the fingers of its owner, who squeezed it until it died, showing it how much he loved it.

“I really want her,” the boy added, pointing at the body his father carried.

The woman contained a sob as she remembered the lethal consequences of her son’s love, which turned the rodent into a purée of hair and blood that she cleaned from his fingers with an ammonia-soaked rag. And it occurred to her that it was the same thing they were doing now: cleaning away the girl’s remains by hiding her in a septic tank.

“Get the door for me,” the man said.

The woman peeled her eyes away from her son, who was folding his bottom lip into an endearing pout. She opened the door. Lightning flashed in the sky. It allowed them to make out the silhouette of the septic tank. A gust of wind from the night’s storm unsteadied them both. The woman swallowed as if she could ingest her guilt, and said again, “I’m not going to hand my son over.”

Grandma pushed the boy toward the stairs. “Let’s go get you showered and dried,” she said as they went up. Before reaching the bathroom, they heard the front door slam shut.

“So we really are going to do it,” Grandpa said from somewhere.

Grandma closed another door behind her and sat her grandson on the bath’s edge. “Arms up.”

The boy obeyed. He laughed when the T-shirt tickled his armpits as it rose up his body. She used the damp piece of clothing to wipe her grandson’s face, then put him in the bathtub and stripped him naked. It still surprised her to find hair in some places.

“Why am I so dirty?”

Grandma heard the question, but preferred to ignore it. She unhooked the showerhead before turning on the hot water. She untangled the hose and directed the jet onto her wrinkled hand to check the temperature. The boy extracted remains of sand from under his fingernails.

“I’m really dirty,” he whined. “Why am I so dirty?”

Grandma watched the swirl of water, which was beginning to steam. She turned down the temperature.

“You’re dirty because you’ve come from the rocks.”

The boy frowned so much his eyes closed. As if straining to remember something that eluded him.

“Why didn’t you tell us you’d found the girl?” Grandma asked.

The boy twisted his fingers. Ashamed, he lowered his head and covered his face to hide it. Accepting his guilt.

She grabbed him by the shoulders. “Do you realize what has happened to that girl?”

The boy mewed.

“Tell me, do you realize?”

After a silence, the boy broke into laughter hidden behind his hands, which shot open, revealing his grubby face.

“She’s going to have a baby!” he yelled. The boy began thrusting his pelvis arrhythmically.

“Stop,” said Grandma. She looked at the shower, which was flowing directly to the plughole. “Stop!”

The boy stopped. He opened his mouth in an exaggerated way as he did when he was about to cry. Or to pretend to cry.

“Don’t cry,” Grandma said. “I’m sorry. Don’t cry.”

The enormous mouth closed.

“You’re going to have to promise me something,” she added. The boy opened his eyes with the same curiosity he’d shown when she gave him the toy scarecrow.

“That you won’t tell anyone about this,” Grandma went on. “You must do as I say.”

Her grandson covered his mouth with both hands.

“Not anyone,” she repeated. “Do you swear?”

The boy pinched an imaginary zipper that hung from a corner of his mouth. He ran it from one side of his lips to the other. He rotated his wrist to padlock it shut. Then, despite having sealed his mouth, he opened it to swallow the invisible key that he threw down his throat.

“There’s a good boy,” said Grandma. “Lips locked and the key in your tummy. You can’t tell anyone. Not even your sister. Especially not your sister.”

Earnest gravity darkened the boy’s face. “She doesn’t love me,” he said. Then he repeated something he’d heard many times in that house. “It was her fault I fell down the stairs.”

Moved, Grandma hugged her grandson, naked in the bathtub.

“My sister doesn’t love me. But I love her very much.”

If his mother had heard that sentence, she would have remembered the remains, the blood and hair that came from the boy’s love for the hamster. But Grandma just kissed her grandson’s head. She smelled the salt in the child’s hair.

“Shower time now, you stink,” she said. “And afterward we’ll put some talc on you, so you smell as nice as I do.”

When he’d finished his shower, the boy laughed when he saw his face covered in white powder. Grandma kissed the cowlick of dry hair that formed in the middle of his head. An image of his fractured skull flashed somewhere in her mind.

“And now to bed,” she said.

They went out onto the first-floor landing. Grandma pricked her ears. The silence told her that neither her son nor her daughter-in-law had yet returned from the septic tank. Seeing the gate at the bottom of the spiral staircase open, she clicked her tongue, incredulous that her son still sometimes forgot to lock it. She went across to the painting of a naval battle on a stormy night. On tiptoes, she ran her fingers along the top of the golden picture frame, making channels in the accumulated dust. She found the mermaid figure that acted as a key ring and locked the gate they’d fitted after the accident to stop the boy going back up to the top of the lighthouse. Lamenting as she always did that they hadn’t installed it before, even if just a day earlier. She returned the keys to their hiding place.

They went past the daughter’s bedroom without stopping. Without suspecting what was happening inside. When Grandma went to close the shutter and leaned out of the boy’s window, which was just along the wall from his sister’s, she stopped breathing.

“What’s wrong?” the boy asked. Grandma didn’t respond. Her hands went white squeezing the shutter’s cord. Outside, in the rain, two silhouettes lingered around the septic tank. And she sensed what was happening in the bedroom next door.

Sure enough, her granddaughter had watched the man and woman’s every movement through the glass. A circle of condensation grew with each breath from her mouth, her nose pressed against the window, unable to believe what was happening in front of her house. The daughter had seen her father carrying something. A bolt of lightning showed her the blond hair that hung from his arm. She held her hand to her heart. A second bolt allowed her to make out a fleeting, pinkish flash over the septic tank as her father let the bundle drop. It was enough for her to recognize the piece of clothing. An unusual movement of muscles contorted her features. She covered her face, but kept watching through the cracks between her fingers. Her father and mother made a dozen or so trips to the path that crossed the plot. They picked up the rocks that marked it out and threw them to the bottom of the tank. Until they’d filled it. They kept the biggest one to weigh down the sheet of metal that had come through the window.

Then she saw them go back to the house, which was when she sprinted down to the living room.

From the boy’s room, Grandma glimpsed her granddaughter crossing the landing. She let the shutter fall like a guillotine of gray plastic that blocked out the window. She rescued the rosary she’d earlier forsworn from her pocket and hung it on her neck, welcoming the weight of the crucifix.

“By the sign of the holy cross,” she recited, plotting three crosses, on her forehead, mouth, and chest. “Amen.”

“What is it?” asked the boy from under the sheets.

Grandma went to the door. She softly closed it to protect her grandson from what he might hear.

“It’s nothing,” she answered.

She sat on the bed’s edge, adjusting the bedspread. Thinking it could be the last time she’d do so, a tear appeared in each eye. She dried them before the boy could see.

“Show me that thing you can do with your mouth,” she said to distract his attention. “The cricket thing.”

The grimace he had for a smile lit up the boy’s face. Then he positioned his lips in a certain way, whistling through them while the air that he pushed out made them vibrate. A perfect imitation of the chirping sound made by the crickets on the plot. Grandma listened to her grandson, trying to detach herself from what was happening in the living room.

Outside, the daughter found her parents soaked through in the middle of the room. She held the banister to stop the trembling in her hands. She spoke from the second-to-last step on the stairway.

“What have you done?” she asked.

“What is it you’ve seen?” her father asked back.

“I saw everything.”

“Then you know,” said the man.

Their words were serious. Heavy. Thrown between them like the rocks had been thrown onto the girl’s body.

“Was it her?” She gestured with her chin at the roll of posters in the middle of the living room. Her parents exchanged a look, not knowing how to respond.

“Was it my brother?”

The air that came in through the window made the gray pajamas hug her body.

“Kind of,” answered the woman. “He’s not responsible for his actions.”

“What did he do to her?”

“You don’t want to know,” the father said.

“And you haven’t called anyone?” she asked.

“What do you think?” The woman wrung out her braid as if it were a dishcloth. “You know why we’re so wet.”

“Dad?”

“The girl was already dead,” he explained. “We’re protecting the life that’s still alive. Your brother’s life.”

“That girl has a family, too. If my brother has done something to her, I don’t care what happens to him.”

“We’ve known for a long time how much you care about your brother,” her mother cut in.