Lucinda and I wait in her room, listening at the door, tense with concentration. When we don’t hear noises anymore, Lucinda turns the knob carefully, and we tiptoe out into the hall.
The SIM seem to have left. We spot Chucha crossing the patio toward the front of the house, a broom over her shoulder like a rifle. She looks like she’s going to shoot the SIM for tracking mud on her clean floors.
“Chucha!” We wave to her to come talk to us.
“Where’s Mami?” I ask, feeling the same mounting panic I felt earlier when Mami left with the SIM. “Is she okay?”
“She’s on the teléfono, calling Don Mundo,” Chucha explains.
“What about ...?” Lucinda wrinkles her nose instead of saying their names.
“Esos animales, ”Chucha says, shaking her head. Those animals, the SIM, searched every house in the compound, getting more and more destructive when they didn’t find what they were looking for, tromping through Chucha’s room, turning over her coffin and tearing off the velvet lining. They also stormed through Porfirio’s and Ursulina’s rooms. “Those two are so terrified,” Chucha concludes, “they are packing their things and leaving the house.”
But the SIM stay. They sit in their black Volkswagens at the top of our drive, blocking our way out.
At dinner, Papi says everything will be fine. We just have to act as if the SIM aren’t there and carry on with normal life. But I notice that, like the rest of us, he doesn’t eat a single bite. And is it really normal that Mami and Papi have us all sleep on mattresses on their bedroom floor with the door locked?
We lie in the dark, talking in whispers, Mundín on a mat by himself, Lucinda and I on a larger mattress, and Papi and Mami on theirs they placed right beside ours.
“How come you don’t just stay up on your bed?” I ask.
“Keep your voice down,” Mami reminds me.
“Okay, okay,” I whisper. But I still don’t get an answer. “And what about Chucha?” I ask. “She’s all by herself at the back of the house.”
“Don’t worry,” Mundín says, “I don’t think a bullet can get through that coffin!”
“Bullets!” I sit right up in bed.
“Shhhh!” my whole family reminds me.
Those black cars sit there for days and days— sometimes there’s only one, sometimes as many as three. Every morning, when Papi leaves for the office, one of the cars starts up its colicky motor and follows him down the hill. In the evening, when he comes home, it comes back with him. I don’t know when those SIM ever go to their own houses to eat their suppers and talk with their kids.
“Are they really policemen?” I keep asking Mami. It doesn’t make any sense. If the SIM are policemen, secret or not, shouldn’t we trust them instead of being afraid of them? But all Mami will say is “Shhh!” Meanwhile, we can’t go to school because something might happen to us. “Like what?” I ask. Like what Chucha said about people disappearing? Is that what Mami worries will happen to us? “Didn’t Papi say we should carry on with normal life?”
“Anita, por favor, ”Mami pleads, collapsing in a hall chair. She leans forward and whispers in my ear, “Please, please, you must stop asking questions.”
“But why?” I whisper back. I can smell her shampoo, which smells like coconuts in her hair.
“Because I don’t have any answers,” she replies.
Not that Mami is the only one I try talking to.
My brother, Mundín, who’s two years older, sometimes explains things to me. But this time when I ask him what’s going on, he looks worried and whispers, “Ask Papi.” He’s biting his nails again, something he stopped doing when he turned fourteen in August.
One evening when the phone rings, I follow him into our living room. I hear him say something about some butterflies in a car accident. “Butterflies in a car accident?”
He seems startled that I’m in the room. “What are you doing here?” he snaps. I put my hands on my hips. “Honestly, Papi! I live here!” I can’t believe he’s asking me what I’m doing in our own living room! Of course, he immediately apologizes. “Sorry, amorcito, you startled me.” His eyes are moist, as if he’s holding back tears.
“So what about those butterflies, Papi?”
“They’re not real butterflies,” he explains softly. “It’s just ...a nickname for some very special ladies who had an ...accident last night.”
“What kind of an accident? And why are they called butterflies anyhow? Don’t they have a real name?”
My last resort is asking Lucinda. My older sister has been in a vile mood since the SIM cornered us in our own house. Lucinda loves parties and talking on the phone, and she hates being cooped up. She spends most of the time in her room, trying out so many hairstyles that I’m sure that when we finally leave the compound and go to the United States of America, Lucinda will be bald.
“Lucinda, por favor, pretty please, tell me what is going on?” I promise her a back rub that she doesn’t have to pay me for.
Lucinda puts her hairbrush down on her vanity and makes a sign for me to follow her to the patio out back.
“We should be okay out here,” she whispers, looking over her shoulder.
“Why are you whispering?” In fact, everyone has been talking in whispers and low voices this last week, as if the house is full of fussy babies who’ve finally fallen asleep.
Lucinda explains. The SIM have probably hidden microphones in the house and are monitoring our conversations from their VWs.
“Why are they treating us like criminals? We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Shhh!” Lucinda hushes me. For a moment she looks doubtful about continuing to explain things to a little sister who can’t keep her voice down. “It’s all about T-O-N-I,” she says, spelling out our uncle’s name in English. “A few months ago, he and his friends were involved in a plot to get rid of our dictator.”
“You mean. ...” I don’t even have to say our leader’s name. Lucinda nods solemnly and puts a finger to her lips.
Now I’m really confused. I thought we liked El Jefe. His picture hangs in our front entryway with the saying below it: IN THIS HOUSE, TRUJILLO RULES. “But if he’s so bad, why does Mrs. Brown hang his picture in our classroom next to George Washington?”
“We have to do that. Everyone has to. He’s a dictator.”
I’m not really sure what a dictator does. But this is probably not a good time to ask.
It turns out that the SIM discovered the plot and most of our uncle’s friends were arrested. As for Tío Toni, nobody knows where he is. “He might be hiding out or they”— Lucinda looks over her shoulder. I know just who she means—“ they might have him in custody.”
“Will they disappear him?”
Lucinda seems surprised that I know about such matters. “Let’s hope not,” she sighs. Tío Toni is a special favorite of hers. At twenty-four, he’s not that much older than she, at fifteen, and he is very handsome. All her girlfriends have crushes on him. “Ever since the SIM uncovered that plot, they’ve been after the family. That’s why everyone’s left. Tío Carlos and Mamita and Papito —”
“Why don’t we leave, too, since we’re not going to school anyway?”
“And abandon Tío Toni?” Lucinda shakes her head vigorously. Her pretty auburn hair is up in this hairdo called a chignon, like Princess Grace wears in her magazine wedding pictures. It comes undone and cascades down her back. “What if he comes back? What if he needs our help?” Her voice has risen above her usual whispering.
For once in the last few weeks, it’s my turn to tell someone else in our house, “SHHHH!”
Excerpted from Before We Were Free by Julia Alvarez, published by Laurel-Leaf Books.