The Blinking Eye

The sound tore through the penthouse again at half past two in the morning, and Solange heard it before she was fully awake. She had been sleeping in her uniform, which was something she had started doing without deciding to, somewhere around the sixth week. It was simply easier. The screaming never gave much notice.

She sat up on the edge of her narrow bed in the housekeeper’s room at the far end of the service hall and pressed her palms flat against her thighs. The cry came again, higher this time, with a desperate, spiking quality that lifted the fine hairs on her arms. In the four months she had worked for the Almeida Prado family she had catalogued every version of that baby’s voice the way a nurse catalogues symptoms. The whimper that meant hunger. The rolling complaint that meant a wet diaper. The drowsy, irritable fussing that meant he had been overstimulated by the parade of visitors his father liked to bring through on weekends. She knew all of those sounds the way she had once known the sounds of the Atlantic through the walls of her grandmother’s house in Bahia, known them so well they had stopped waking her.

This one always woke her.

This one was different. It had been different since the beginning, since the very first night she had worked late enough to hear it, and she had spent four months trying to find the right word for it. Not pain. Not hunger. Not loneliness. The word she kept landing on, the one that embarrassed her a little when she turned it over in her mind, was terror. The baby sounded afraid. He sounded the way her little brother had sounded during the great storm of her childhood, when the tin roof had lifted off the back of their house and the rain had come through vertical and the lightning had stayed so long it was almost like daylight, blue and merciless. Her brother had been two years old. He had not had words for what frightened him. But his body had known, the way bodies always know before the mind catches up, and it had screamed with everything it had.

Solange pulled on her shoes and walked down the service hall toward the nursery.

The penthouse was the top two floors of a building in Leblon that had been photographed for architecture magazines and listed in real estate publications with language like unprecedented and singular and once in a generation. Gold leaf on the nursery walls. Velvet drapes that pooled on the marble floor. A chandelier above the crib that had been imported from a workshop in Murano and cost more than Solange’s mother had earned in fifteen years of cleaning other people’s houses. The Almeida Prados had spared nothing. They had bought the best mattress, the best organic cotton, the best German baby monitor with its screen the size of a paperback novel. They had hired three different nannies in eight months and paid each of them generously. They had brought in three separate pediatricians who had each confirmed that the baby was healthy, that his lungs were strong and his reflexes excellent and his neurological development was right on track.

None of them had been here at half past two in the morning. None of them had heard what Solange heard every time she stood outside that door.

She stopped in the hallway and pressed the back of her hand against the oak. The crying came through it clearly. She could hear Lilian Almeida Prado moving somewhere behind her, the soft slap of silk against marble, the sound of a woman who had been awake for too long trying to hold herself together. Then Lilian was beside her, very close, close enough that Solange could smell the traces of the perfume she wore to bed out of some habit that had perhaps survived from before the baby, from the life she and Heitor had lived when sleep was something they chose.

Please do something, Lilian said. Her voice was barely above a whisper and it shook at the edges.

Solange pushed the door open.

The nursery glowed the way only rooms assembled entirely by money tend to glow, with a completeness that had something vaguely unsettling about it, as though a decorator had been given a photograph of a nursery and asked to reproduce it from scratch without having ever seen an actual child sleep. Everything was immaculate. The gold on the walls caught the light from the chandelier and threw it back in warm coins across the ceiling. The velvet drapes were a deep emerald that looked nearly black at this hour. The mobile above the crib turned slowly in the air-conditioned draft, its little wooden animals circling without urgency, as though the noise below them had nothing to do with them at all.

The baby was in the center of the crib. He was eight months old and his name was Tomás, and in the daylight hours he was the kind of child that made strangers stop on the street, with his dark curls and the wide, curious seriousness of his eyes. Right now his face was flushed a deep and frightening red. His fists jerked against the satin blanket in small, frantic movements. His mouth was open so wide that Solange could see the pink roof of it. He was not looking at anything. He was simply screaming, completely and fully, without pause or variation, with the total commitment of an animal that has decided the only remaining option is noise.

Solange stepped forward and began her check without speaking. She had learned in her first weeks here that the household staff were expected to perform their work as though they were not quite present, as though the tasks accomplished themselves, and she had absorbed this expectation without complaint even as it had occasionally made her want to say something sharp. She checked the blanket for anything caught or bunching. She felt the air near the crib for drafts. She looked at the mobile, at the monitor, at the water she had left on the shelf two nights ago in case the pediatrician’s suggestion of added humidity turned out to be correct. Everything was where it should be.