Before We Were Free Read Free Page B

scared I am.
    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.
    I try asking Papi.
    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?” I ask, puzzled.
    He seems startled that I’m in the room. “What