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With the words still forming hastily on his tongue, the man granted his parents a final few seconds of peace before speaking. “We can’t all go down,” he said. “Someone has to stay up top.”

“Our daughter’s going to stay,” the woman reminded him.

“We have a daughter?” was the question the man offered as a response.

The woman lowered her head.

Grandma rubbed her forehead against Grandpa’s wrinkled cheek. She wanted to cover his mouth to stop him from saying what she knew he was going to say.

“It has to be me,” said Grandpa. First he spoke to his daughter-in-law. “You have to look after your son.”

She confirmed she would by kissing the crown of the boy’s head. He was still listening to music in some corner of his mind.

“And you.” Grandpa now addressed his own son. “You have to look after her,” he said, indicating his daughter-in-law with his chin. She smiled back at him. Grandpa hugged his wife with such force that he felt the beads of her rosary dig into his chest. “And you have to look after all of them,” he said into her ear. “Please, don’t cry,” he added when she began to tremble.

He repeatedly kissed his wife’s white hair to give himself time to think. Concentrating, he pinched the right arm of his glasses.

“You need someone up here,” he went on. “I’ll go down to the jetty. I’ll get the boat started and let it go.”

He dried his lips with his fingers.

“When they arrive, I’ll tell them you’ve fled.” Grandpa delivered his speech with his eyes on his son and daughter-in-law, inviting them to get involved in the plan that he was improvising. “I’ll say that I didn’t know anything. That my granddaughter’s lying.”

“Will they believe you?” the woman asked.

“They’d better.”

“And if they don’t?”

“They’ll have to.” They all acquiesced in silence. Accepting the risk like they’d accepted others that they hadn’t even thought of. Taking on in their hurried decision all of the pitfalls, all of the failures, cracks, errors, mishaps, and unforeseeable events that might arise in their escape plan.

“I’ll tell them I feel hurt,” Grandpa continued. “Betrayed by all of you. And by my wife. I’ll say that was why I didn’t go with you.”

Again he observed his family’s faces. They nodded, seeing the logic of the plan.

“They’ll find the boat floating somewhere. Or dashed against some rocks. They’ll assume you’ve gone overboard. With a bit of luck this island will want to erase you from its memory after finding out what you did with the girl.”

“And you?” his daughter-in-law asked him. “If they believe you, if everything goes OK . . .”

“I can go back to the mainland,” he said. “To our house. We’ve got money, and it’ll be easier to go unnoticed there. To get ahold of everything you’re going to need.”

“You won’t be able to come much,” his son said. “The town mustn’t see you near the lighthouse. They’ll wonder what you’re doing here.”

“I worked in this lighthouse all my life,” he replied. “And now it’s yours. This lighthouse belongs to us. I have every right to come to remember my missing family.” He curved one side of his mouth in something like a smile.

“But for that we have to disappear.” Grandma sobbed.

“Come on,” Grandpa encouraged her, “we need to be quick. If they find us here it’ll be worse.”

“I don’t want to—” A crying spasm interrupted Grandma’s sentence.

Her husband looked at her with raised eyebrows, as if looking at a child exaggerating a tantrum more than was believable. “You just said you wanted to go down.”

“But with you,” she spluttered.

Grandpa spoke to his wife from very close to her face.

“We gave up everything to come back here, to help our grandson.” He swallowed. “We’ve done unforgivable things to protect him.” A slight tipping of the head was enough to relive the last two months. “Are you going to abandon him now, when he needs you most?”

He forced a smile to hide the trembling that surfaced on his chin. Then he inserted a hand between their bodies. He squeezed the fist in which his wife held the crucifix.

“Has He ever abandoned you?” An imminent sob was reduced to a change in intensity in the brightness of her eyes. “It’s what we have to do,” he whispered.

“It’s what we have to do,” she repeated.

And that was when the four adults synchronized a deep, spontaneous breath, as if an epiphany had been reached, as terrible as it may be. “We have to do it right now,” said the man. “You get to the jetty and let the boat go.”

Grandpa broke away from the embrace with his wife. She didn’t fight against it. She stood there with her arms hanging, her eyes moving from point to point on the floor without coming to rest on any of them. As if her gaze were nothing more than a ball of fluff. Grandpa ran to the kitchen. Before reaching the door, he went back to his daughter-in-law.

“Give me your jacket,” he said.

“What for?”

“Come on, give it to me,” he insisted.

She took off the jacket. Grandpa snatched it from her hands. His joints clicked when he knelt beside the boy. He pulled down his pajama bottoms, guiding the boy’s feet to take them off him.

“Good idea,” said the man. “Here, my watch.” He undid it in a second. Grandpa added it to the collection.

“What do I have to do?” Grandma asked.

“Give me something of yours. Anything. I’ll put it all in the boat. In case they find it.” Before she could decide, Grandpa tore a brooch from her blouse.

“Not that. That’s from when—”

He silenced her with a kiss. “Nothing matters anymore,” he whispered. “Nothing’s worth more than your family.” Without giving her a chance to respond, Grandpa escaped to the kitchen.

“So we’re really going to do it?” Grandma said.

“We’re going to do it,” replied the man.

Grandma consulted her daughter-in-law.

“We’re going to do it,” she confirmed. Beside her, in his underpants, the boy shivered. His mother hugged him. Grandma joined them. She pressed her cheek against her daughter-in-law’s. They were both enveloped in a new warmth when the father joined the hug.

“We’re going to stay together,” he said.

And they stayed like that for over a minute.

Enjoying a final moment of total calm.

Until the window, the one that had been smashed two months ago, shattered again.

A shower of glass rained on them. They separated from each other, confused. One shard found its way down the neck of the man’s shirt. Grandma looked down at her feet to discover what it was that crunched under every step she took. She saw glass lodged in the cracks in the timber floor. Some pieces still rolled along under the momentum of their fall. The man felt for the shard that danced around inside his shirt. He shook the garment until the fragment fell out. The woman covered her son’s ears.

At the top of the tower, the daughter heard the racket. She walked uneasily down the stairs, peering through two of the gate’s bars without opening it. She pricked her ears to listen to what was happening on the ground floor.

A sudden draft penetrated the living room through the new opening. Its occupants felt it on their skin like the caress of a ghost from the past, the one that had visited them in the same way one stormy night two months ago.

“What’s going on?” Grandma asked.

The man shushed her. He tapped his lips with a finger. Then he leapt to the front door. Glass crunched when he landed. He flicked the switches that were beside the doorframe.

“Turn off that lamp!” he yelled in a whisper.

The woman ran to the sideboard in the middle of the living room wall. The switch, a protrusion halfway down the wire, danced between her fingers until she was able to get her nerves under control. She slid the notch along in its groove with her fingernail. When the light went off, an unidentified orange glow came from behind the armchair near the cuckoo clock, at the bottom of the stairs. Projected against the wall, the ring of light expanded and contracted, as if its source palpitated. The man thought of fire, of the matches he’d lit to illuminate the secret passage in the basement that very afternoon.

That was when another man’s voice came in through the open hole where the window had been.

“She was my daughter!” the voice screamed. “I know you’re in there!”

The yelling reached the living room with another current of air. The man scanned the darkness of the room, guided by the flashes of silvery light that seeped in with every movement of the curtain. When he arrived at the armchair, he found what he expected. The orange glow came from a piece of material that burned on the floor. Near it, a green glass bottle dripped gasoline.

“It’s a Molotov cocktail,” the man explained in a low voice. “But it didn’t smash when it dropped. And the cloth’s come away.”

Before Grandma could react, a second window shattered. Another volley of glass surprised them as a second firebomb fell into the room. It was thrown in too much haste. The flame on the fabric had almost gone out before it fell to the floor, and it burned down even more with every turn of the bottle, which, like the other, remained intact. It was reduced to a band of incandescent pores on the edge of the material.

The second smash made the daughter of the family even more anxious, and she used the key on the mermaid ring to open the gate. Squatting at the top of the stairs that led to the living room, she listened in on what was happening down below. Suddenly the windows on the second floor shattered. In her bedroom and in her brother’s. Both bottles smashed when they hit the floor. The daughter felt heat on the back of her neck. Turning around, she saw a tongue of fire lick from inside her bedroom to the middle of the landing. The fright made her stagger backward to halfway down the stairs.

“Look where she was,” her father said, seeing her appear. “A front-row seat to watch the result of her handiwork.”

His daughter turned around.

“I didn’t want this to happen,” she stammered. “They’re burning the house down!”

“And it’s all your fault,” said the mother.

At that moment Grandpa returned. “I’ve turned the motor on and let the boat go on a course for the mainland.” The darkness, the burning smell, and the cold in the living room made him break off. “What’s happening?”

“They’re trying to set the house on fire,” replied the man.

“Come on,” Grandpa reacted. “Quick.”

“What’re you going to do?” asked the daughter.

Grandpa saw his granddaughter on the stairs, but paid no attention to her. “Come on,” he whispered to the others from the kitchen door. “Come with me.”

“What’re you going to do?”

Nobody answered her question.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Grandpa insisted.

A constant crunch of glass accompanied the family’s movement as they used the glow from the fire to guide them. First Grandpa took his wife’s hand. The man, woman, and boy then reached them. They went into the kitchen.

The daughter remained in the living room, still halfway up the stairs, silhouetted against an increasingly orange background.
All your fault.
Those were the last words that her mother had said to her. She hoped they would really become her last words. As far as she was concerned, they could all burn to death in there. The lighthouse could fall on top of them.

In the kitchen, Grandma hugged her husband. “I’ll serve you a plate at every meal, every day,” she whispered into his ear. “To imagine you’re with me.”

“You won’t have to imagine,” he said. “Just promise me you’ll be strong. Strong as a—”

“Cactus,” she said, completing the sentence they’d repeated so many times during the toughest periods of their marriage. “Strong as a cactus.”

“Let’s go,” said the man. “We have to do it now.”

The woman positioned herself in front of the boy. Holding hands, they were the first to go down the stairs that led to the basement. The man went up to his parents. He stroked his mother’s lower back.

“Mom,” he whispered.

She nodded. She kissed Grandpa’s cheek, then walked toward the staircase still holding his hand.

“Mom,” her son insisted. His parents’ fingers came apart. The man spoke to his father, barely a shadow in front of him.

“Delay going out as long as possible,” he said to him. “Then tell them what we discussed, and . . .”

A sudden realization took his breath away.

“Dad, what if they come down to the basement? We have to build the false wall, the door’s still visible, they’re going to—”

“Son,” he cut in. “We’ve both seen the fire upstairs. This lighthouse is coming down. They’ll find nothing but rubble. From now on all you have to worry about is what happens in the basement. I’ll take care of everything up here. It will all be fine.”

The two men pressed their foreheads together, Grandpa with his hand on the back of his son’s neck. They breathed in synchrony.

Then the kitchen door opened.

“You say that all this is my fault,” the daughter called out, “but it wasn’t me who hid an innocent girl’s body.”

Her mother heard her from the basement. She handed the boy to Grandma and pointed at the door that led to the main room of their new home. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

She went back up to the kitchen, the timber stairs shaking under her feet.

“But it was you that ended the life of another innocent child,” she screamed at her daughter. “Your own brother!” The stairway creaked again on her way back down to the basement.

A final bottle crashed against the kitchen window. It hit the wall like a missile, then dropped down the stairs, the whole family holding its breath each time it hit a wooden step. Each time the glass clinked on the concrete floor. The bottle withstood the pounding. It remained in one piece when it landed at the bottom of the staircase.

“You’re going to pay for what you’ve done!” the voice yelled outside. It wanted to say more, but a police siren interrupted it from a distance. The missing girl’s father fled from the lighthouse, down the gravel path that crossed the plot.

The man kissed his father’s cheek. Pieces of glass that had rained on them dropped off them onto the floor with the movement. He didn’t look at his daughter before going down.