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Lots of cold slime ran down my palm until the orange clot hit the floor. I stared at it blankly. Mom’s nose whistled. She knelt down. I felt the damp cloth on my hand before I saw it. My eyes were fixed on the puddle of shell and death at my feet. Mom wiped my hand, working each finger. The smell of ammonia made me cough.

Her eyes moistened.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s the ammonia,” she replied.

“
My
eyes aren’t crying.”

Mom’s shoulders slumped.

“I was remembering something,” she said.

“Something from outside?”

She nodded.

I kissed her rough cheek.

“Don’t be sad,” I said. “The basement’s much better than out there.”

Her nose whistled. Then she whispered in my ear: “Any place where you are is much better than anywhere else.”

My shoulder tickled and I wriggled away.

Mom let the cloth fall onto the floor, cleaned up the remains of the chick that never was, and went back to her work at the kitchen sink. I stood next to her, watching the damp patch that the cloth left behind shrink. Until it disappeared.

On the way to my bedroom, Mom called out my name. She asked me to come over to her. She crouched down in a very similar way to how Dad had done.

“Here.” She opened my hand. “Put it away and keep it warm. That’s what it needs to hatch.”

“And what Dad said?”

“You just keep it warm.”

I ran to my room holding the egg in both hands against my bare tummy.

My brother was sitting on his bunk, his feet hanging a yard and a half from the ground. He could spend hours there, his pajama bottoms tucked into his slippers, shaking his head and moving his feet and hands as if he was walking through a cornfield that didn’t exist. He would also whistle a tune, though the result wasn’t perfect since his bottom lip was split in half because of the fire. For a long time Mom and Dad didn’t understand what his trance meant. Then one afternoon, when we couldn’t get him to talk or stop smiling at nothing, my sister came into the room. She picked up a book from the shelf.
You read it to him when he was little,
she said, showing
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
to my parents.
It’s as though you’ve already forgotten we had a life outside,
she added. Since then, every time my brother traveled to that other world, there was only one way to communicate with him.

“Scarecrow, you haven’t seen anything,” I said. “And ask the Lion and the Tin Man to keep quiet, too.”

My brother saw the egg in my hands, but he soon resumed his imperfect whistling.

I picked up a dirty T-shirt from the floor and wrapped the egg in it, in the best imitation of a nest I was able to make. Afterward I put everything in the drawer of the one piece of furniture I didn’t share with my brother. The cabinet was at the foot of my bed. It had just two sections. Enough for my cactus, my crayons, and the insect and spy books that Dad gave me on cake days. I perfected the nest beside my jar of crayons.

I sat cross-legged in front of the cabinet and took out
How to Be a Spy Kid
. It was my grandmother and mother who’d taught me to read and write. There was plenty of time for it in the basement. The book contained tricks for children to learn. It taught me how to use lemon juice as invisible ink, writing secret messages that could then be read under a light. The first time I tried the trick I asked Mom to hold the piece of paper near one of the bulbs hanging from the ceiling in the living room. She had squeezed the lemon for me while I explained what I was going to do, following the instructions in the book. She doubted it was going to work, but she took the piece of paper anyway and held it near the glass bubble.

“There’s nothing on here,” she said, “and there won’t be anything however close I hold it to the light.”

Then, some brown lines began to appear on the sheet. Mom moved it around so the heat would spread evenly across its surface. New brown stains gradually emerged everywhere I’d applied the lemon juice. Finally, the secret message was visible: I TOLD YOU I WAS A SPY. Mom smiled as she read it. Her nose whistled.

“So you were right,” she said.

Sitting now in front of the cabinet with the book on my legs, I was looking for a particular page. I went over the sequences of dots and dashes. With the nail of my forefinger I tapped the shell four times in quick succession. Then twice more, as the book instructed.

I held my ear to the egg.

Not a sound.

“It’s Morse code,” I told the chick.

I tuned in again to see if there was any reply. There wasn’t, so I closed the drawer, leaving it open a slit so I could hear the chick tweeting if it decided to hatch overnight.

I put the book back in the cabinet and picked up the cactus. Two green balls covered in prickles surviving in a little pot. It appeared one day among the pile of things the One Up There sent us. Like the wood that Dad built the baby’s crib with. Or the carrots that Mom used to make her soup for dinner.
While this cactus is OK, we’ll be OK.
We must be strong like a cactus,
my grandmother said when she gave it to me.

I left the bedroom. My brother was still whistling.

I lay facedown in the living room, my chin resting on my hands, one above the other. I positioned the cactus in the patch of light. A little cloud of dust danced among its prickles. As the light traveled along the floor, I pushed the pot with my finger to follow its course and keep the sunbeams on the cactus. If my brother could travel to Oz on a path as mysterious as the depths of his own unfocused gaze, I could imagine I was one of the cowboys from the Westerns that Dad watched.

I spent the whole day on the floor, walking through the desert among cactuses.

4

It was some time before the egg moved. “Keep it warm,” Mom had said. And I had kept it warm. Now the creature was ready to be born. What Dad had said about unfertilized eggs must’ve been a lie.

That evening when I saw the egg in a different position from where I’d left it in the morning, I had to gulp back my urge to scream with excitement, because only Mom and I knew it was there. The fact that my brother had seen me put it in the drawer didn’t mean he’d remember it five minutes later. I put my hands to my mouth and looked around, not knowing what to do.

A feeling of paternal responsibility made me act quickly. I carefully picked up the egg and held it to my belly button. The shell was warmer than usual. I felt the chick’s heart beating through it. I ran to find Mom to get her to help with the hatching.

There was nobody in the living room. I swiveled around to scan the whole room. There was no one in the bathroom, either, so I went to my parents’ room. Their door was metal and it didn’t have a handle like the rest of the doors. From outside it could only be opened with a key that Mom and Dad hung from their necks. My father didn’t want us to go near his room, but I was so excited by the egg and the chick inside that I banged on the door several times with my forehead to get Mom’s attention.

“Go to your room,” she shouted from inside.

“Mom, it’s important,” I said to the crack in the locked door. “It’s going to—” Before I finished the sentence I realized Dad would be in there, too, so I swallowed my words. “I need you to come out.”

“Not now,” she said. “I can’t right now.”

“Please,” I insisted.

I pictured the helpless chick hatching in front of me, and me not knowing what to do. Mom had dealt with my sister giving birth, an emergency, and this was an emergency, too. I pleaded with her with my whole face jammed into the corner of the doorframe. Slobbering on the metal. Dad didn’t like it when I cried. And I knew he was about to start shouting at me from in there at any moment.

There was a short silence, then I heard my mother’s steps as she came to the door. I suppose she wanted to open it a crack to see what the matter was, not knowing I was pushing against it. As soon as she turned the key, the door gave way under my weight. Mom couldn’t hold it. I rolled forward, unable to hold out my arms to stop my fall as I attempted to shield the egg from harm. In a rapid succession of images I saw the ceiling of the room, the washing machine in one corner, the floor, my mother’s face, my mother’s feet, and a door closing. I ended up lying on my back at the foot of my parents’ bed, my hands still held against my belly.

Mom looked me in the face. Then she noticed my hands. The eye that she still controlled opened in an expression of understanding. The folds of burned flesh that surrounded the other one barely moved. Just then she glanced somewhere to the right of the bed.

At Dad. Who would now ask me what I was hiding. And he’d see the egg. And he’d put it in my hand. Wrap it in his. And squeeze. Until the shell broke and a load of slime poured through my fingers. Only now it wouldn’t be slime that came from the egg, but a body, with bones and feathers. It wouldn’t leave a puddle on the floor that Mom could clean up with ammonia, but would hit the ground with a hollow sound. Because it would be the dead body of the chick I was waiting for, which I still had in my hands, all warm. I closed my eyes waiting to hear Dad’s voice.

But it was Mom who spoke.

“Goodness, son, what’s the matter? Are you sick?”

I opened my eyes as my mother bent over to take hold of my wrist. When I was up, I turned my head toward the bed.

Dad wasn’t there.

Or by the wardrobe on the right-hand wall. Or near the washing machine. He was nowhere in the room. I held out the egg to show my mother.

“No, Mom, it’s not me, it’s—”

She put a hand over my mouth, and with the other she covered the egg. I tried to speak but instead I just sucked on the skin of her hand. Rough and irregular. It tasted like my cactus pot. Of earth.

She pushed my hands farther down to hide the egg.

“If you’re sick, go and tell Grandma. She’ll know what to give you. Dad’s going to be really angry when he finds out you came in here when the door was locked.” She led me back into the hall, keeping her hand on my mouth at all times. “And you know I’m going to have to tell him.”

Unable to speak, I motioned with my hands to get my mother’s attention. She turned her uneven eyes to the egg for just a second.

“Your grandmother will know what to give you,” she repeated.

She pushed me out of the room.

In the hall, she took her hand off my mouth.

“It’s the chi—” I started to say, but Mom shut me up again.

“Your grandmother,” she said. She tilted her head to signal her room. “Don’t go to the living room, your father will be there.”

I wrinkled my nose. I’d just been in the living room.

My mother closed the door in my face.

She turned the key.

I opened Grandma’s bedroom door by turning the handle with my chin. The egg was throbbing in my hands like a warm heart. Or like a giant saturniid chrysalis, the one where you can see the insect’s blood pumping inside.

The light was on in the room. My grandmother was sitting on her bed with her back against the wall, her lifeless eyes on the child, who slept locked in the prison of shadows cast on him by the bars of the crib. In another bed, my sister slept with her sheet up to her forehead. On the bedside table lay the white form of the mask.

“The light’s on,” I told my grandmother.

She turned her head to me as if she hadn’t heard me come in.

“I know. Leave it,” she said. “It’s for him. And keep your voice down.”

She gestured in the direction of the baby’s crib.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered. “I could hear you running all over the house. Did you go into your father’s room?”

“The door opened accidentally,” I explained. “But Dad wasn’t in there.”

I went over to Grandma’s bed. She always smelled of talcum powder. Sometimes when she put it on she left white patches on her face or clothes.

“It’s going to hatch,” I told her.

I took one of her wrinkly hands and made her touch the egg. Since the fire, my grandmother could only see with her fingers.

“It’s your egg,” she said when she stroked the shell. She lowered her voice even more to add, “Your mother told me about it.”

“It’s going to hatch,” I repeated.

My grandmother frowned. One of her eyebrows had less hair than the other. There were parts of the scar where the hair hadn’t grown back again. It had disappeared forever with the fire, like her vision had.

“Hatch? An unfertilized egg?” She lifted her upper lip. “What exactly has your mom said to you?”

“She said to keep it warm. That’s how they hatch. Dad killed one and Mom gave me this one. And just now it moved. Look, touch it. The chick’s going to come out.”

Her face smoothed out as much as the furrows that had been sculpted by the flames and by time allowed.

“Oh, of course, that’s right,” she said. “Come on, give it here.”

She pulled her bed covers down to her knees. I sat in front of her, crossed my legs, gave her the egg, and rested my chin on my interlocked hands. Grandma held the egg against her ear. She put a finger to her lips to signal that I should be quiet.

“I hear it,” she said a few seconds later.

She held the egg near my face. I guided her movement to position it against my ear.

“Can you hear it?”

I couldn’t hear anything.

“Can you hear it chirping?” she insisted.

Then I heard it. Chirping. A very faint tweeting, through the shell.

“Yes, yes, I can hear it!” I cried.

My grandmother shushed me.

“It’s about to hatch,” I added under my breath.

My grandmother nodded. She put the egg under her pillow.

“Now you have to close your eyes,” she said.

“Close my eyes?”

“They don’t hatch if they know someone’s looking.”

She put the palms of her hands on my eyelids. For a moment we sat in complete silence.

“It’s here,” she said.

She removed her hands but turned to the pillow in such a way that, for a few seconds, I couldn’t see what she was doing anymore. When she turned back she had her hands cupped.

“See it?” she asked.