The Gonzalo House

CW: Murder, substance abuse, child abuse, domestic violence

I will never forget the night of the fire.

I sat in the gutter, watching rabid flames consume Gonzalo House. Beside me, the maids huddled in prayer. Around us, the town had leapt into action.

A man with a shirt tied tightly around his nose and mouth stumbled out the front door just as the lintel collapsed. Soot covered him, streaks of skin visible only where sweat glistened. On his back, he carried Julio. Unconscious, unmoving. Other men moved quickly to relieve him of the weight. They started chest compressions. 

The world stopped. All I could hear was a loud, strong voice counting each push. One, two… thirty. Two breaths. On and on, until there came a chorus of praises to God. 

My brother was alive. 

I forced myself to find composure. It was too soon for emotion. There was still Lucas. There was still our father.

The Gonzalos were a family of four: me, my brothers, and our father Julian. Once, we also had a mother, but she was long gone. Our father claimed she had run away with another man. 

He spoke of it no more than that, but the town gossiped enough to paint a full picture. I grew up with the constant noise of her affair, her disappearance, and most of all, how her abandonment has ruined Lucas.

Lucas, our prodigal youngest. When he was thirteen, one of the maids found cigarettes in the pocket of his school uniform. Because Helen was a compassionate woman, she came to me first. I took the pack from her and promised that I would speak with my brother. 

“I’ll take care of it,” I promised. She sighed wearily. 

“Oh, Ariana, you shouldn’t have to do this. And that poor boy shouldn’t have turned out this way. What could have possessed your mother to abandon you?”

Helen was not long with us after that. 

Julio soon came across a cigarette butt in the veranda and promptly told our father. Our rooms were stripped. My closet turned up the pack that Helen had given me.

I shrank. Our father would lash me with the belt if I said nothing. He would use the buckled end. It scared me down to the bone. Even so, I kept my silence.

Helen came to my rescue. She came clean to our father about what she had found and what she had asked me to do. He sent her packing that very day.

Then he summoned Lucas to his study. For the next hour, everyone pretended not to hear the thud of metal on wood each time the buckle missed flesh, or the howls of pain that erupted each time it did not.

On the night of the fire, our father left Gonzalo House under a sheet. 

Everything faded into a blur. The gasps, the hushed prayers, the shouting of men still stamping out flames in the peripheries. I was underwater, inching slowly up toward the light.

The covered lump on the stretcher looked much too tiny. Had our father always been that small? Was that really him underneath?

I reached for the sheet. But one of the firemen shook his head. “Best not to,” he said gently. “Best to remember him as he had been.”

I slowly let my hand fall to my side. 

“We’ll keep searching for your other brother,” he promised.

But in the end, it was the police who found Lucas, concussed but alive. He had crashed his car. They found alcohol in his breath, worse substances in his blood. He smelled of smoke. His clothes were covered in soot.

I made my way to the municipal precinct as soon as the hospital would let me.

“I didn’t do it, Yana!”

It was out of Lucas’s mouth as soon as he saw me. His wrists tugged at the cuffs that bound them.

“I hated that house but I wouldn’t burn it down. I swear!” 

“I know,” I tried to soothe him. “I know. Do you remember what happened?”

Shame clouded his face. His eyes left mine. “No. I… I had a lot to drink… and I hit my head.” 

He mentioned nothing of his drug use, but we both knew. Everyone knew. 

“I swear to God I didn’t do it,” Lucas pleaded. “You believe me, right? You’ll get me out of here?”

“I will do everything I can.”

“You won’t abandon me like our mother did?”

Lucas had been a baby when our mother disappeared. Everyone, himself included, blames her for how he has turned out, but I often wonder how that could be.

How could her absence possibly have a profound impact on his life when he had never known her? He had no real memories of her. Not in the way I did.

When I was very young, I went missing for almost a whole day. The maids combed every room in Gonzalo House, but it was my mother who found me.

I had broken a window while playing. Fearing punishment, I ran to the back of the house and crawled into the giant rain barrel that we kept by the shed. I closed the lid loosely over my head and stayed hidden for hours until my mother came.

When I was presented to my father, he looked me over without speaking. Then he turned to my mother and backhanded her across the face. 

My mother never let me out of her sight after that. 

She took me wandering almost daily. We played hopscotch on quiet sidewalks. We sat outside corner stores and shared snacks. But most often, she took me to the market.

I remember a young man who worked at the butcher’s stall. He always stank of blood, but he only laughed when I crinkled my nose at him. He always gave me chocolates. 

Sometimes he went around town in an old van. When he passed my mother and me on the road, he would honk and offer us a ride. It smelled rancid inside his van, but the rocky drive always lulled me to sleep. My mother would wake me much later to take the last few blocks back home on foot. 

I remember complaining that he never drove us all the way to our gate. The young man ruffled my hair and said, “I don’t think Mr. Gonzalo will like me very much.”

Our trips to town stopped when my mother became pregnant with Lucas. I never saw the young man again. Shortly after, my mother disappeared as well. In time, rumors that she and the butcher’s boy had run away together made their way to me.

Julio echoed them. He told me our mother was a whore. Had he known what that meant when he was only a child barely older than me? He said it anyway. He said it loudly and often. He took after our father so much it was no wonder he was favored. 

After our father’s death, Julio inherited his estate. But with the fire having left him severely impaired, control of affairs went to me. He resented me for it. He resented most of all that I would help Lucas, that I would have him live with us.

“How dare you…” Julio croaked through his damaged throat. “How dare you use our father’s money to free his murderer!”

“You don’t know that he did it,” I reproached. 

“If you don’t know, you are a fool,” he spat.

I bailed Lucas out of police custody while the investigation continued. Eyes followed us as we walked out of the precinct. No one spoke a word, but it was not difficult to imagine what everyone must have been thinking.

“Poor Ariana, forced to care for her brothers… one an invalid, the other a murderer. She will never be free.”

But our new living arrangements barely lasted. One evening, I found Lucas standing dazed in the hallway of our small rental. He trembled violently. His fists were bloody. Beneath him lay Julio. Battered, lifeless.

Lucas’s eyes struggled to focus on mine as he whispered, “He wouldn’t leave me alone. Why couldn’t he just leave me alone?”

Then he sobbed and begged for me to call the police. I respected his wishes.

“Everyone thinks I’m a monster,” Lucas later shared. “Julio made sure to remind me every chance he got. I only hit him to shut him up. I didn’t mean to kill him... but I couldn’t stop.” 

His official statement also contained a confession to the arson of Gonzalo House. The memories that had eluded him returned in pieces.

He recalled being in our father’s study. He recalled an empty bottle of whiskey, a sopping mess of papers on the desk. He recalled the menthol taste of a cigarette, the soft sizzle as a spark caught, the sudden heat of flames. 

“I recall the devil’s voice in my head,” he said.

It was ruled a psychotic episode caused by his years of substance abuse. Lucas would be spending the rest of his life behind bars. When I saw him last, the fight had gone from him. He had accepted his sentence, even welcomed it.

“It scares me what I’m capable of,” he told me. “I can’t risk you falling victim too.”

I put on a small, sad smile. 

“That night,” I shared gently. “I was only able to escape because someone made sure I had a way out. The veranda door nearest my bedroom was open.” 

Tears welled up in Lucas’s eyes as the implication of my words sank in. He grasped my hands tightly from across the table and thanked God that in his worst moment, he had been left enough humanity to think of his beloved sister.

Tomorrow, Lucas will be moved to a high-security facility a few hours away. I will not be able to see him for a while. I will not have the time. 

There is much for me to do at Gonzalo House now that rebuilding is in progress.

Everyone is baffled by my decision to stay. “You are young,” they tell me. “Your inheritance will be more than enough to allow you a new start. You can be free.”

They do not understand. Here is where I will find my freedom.

To rebuild Gonzalo House, the workers will lay new foundations. When they do, they will discover two sets of human remains, long decayed. I will finally be free of the secret that I have kept so closely for so long.

My mother never ran away. 

She and the butcher’s boy never drove into the night in his rancid van. They never got the chance. 

On the night she disappeared, Julio and I had been squabbling. Whatever it might have been about, he threatened to get our father involved. I ran to my hiding spot. I crawled into the rain barrel at the back of the house. Just as I secured the lid above my head, the shed door creaked open.

Several people walked past dragging something heavy between them. A smell I knew well from trips to the market wafted into the small gap I had left for air.

My mother’s voice broke with sobs. “How could you do this, Julian? You’ve killed him!”

“He’s not dead yet,” my father replied. 

His words were followed by the sound of a hard, blunt object hitting what could be a bag of meat. There was a wet cough. My mother cried louder.

“Julio saw you with this boy, you whore,” spat my father. “You have no shame, using your own daughter to disguise your affair.”

There was a metallic click. My mother’s sobbing devolved into desperate whimpers. 

“Is Lucas mine?” My father demanded.

“Please, Julian—” 

“I asked you a question.”

My mother took a big, shuddering breath. 

Then calmly, as though she had not just been in hysterics, she said, “No, and I’m glad for it, you evil—” 

She was interrupted by dull, flat coughs of metal, two in quick succession. There was a thud, then a momentary silence, then my father’s voice rang cold again.

“Bury the bodies under the house. I want no sign of them by morning.”

I stayed in that barrel for hours, keeping as still and quiet as I could manage. I was only a child, but I understood enough of what had happened to be afraid. When the night was silent around me again, I crept back into my bedroom and pretended I knew nothing. 

I have been pretending ever since, biding my time until I could exact revenge for my mother’s murder. Revenge on my father, her executioner. Revenge on Julio, the rat that had allowed it to happen. 

I might have spared Lucas, but he chose to smear her memory with his filth. I would not stand for it.

When Helen blamed my mother for Lucas smoking at thirteen, I decided to punish them both. 

I planted a cigarette where I knew Julio would see. That snitch would delight in telling our father. Helen would be forced to reveal the truth to spare me a beating. I would get what I wanted, free from blame.

My father’s fury terrified me, but I forced myself to trust that things would unfold as I had imagined.

That was when the seed of a bolder plan took root in me. In the years that followed, I nursed it. I kept my head down.

I was only waiting for an opportunity.

I will never forget the night of the fire.

Lucas’s drug abuse was no secret, but only I paid attention. I knew how much he used. I knew when he teetered on the edge. That night, I tipped him over.

I guided Lucas to our father’s study. I sat him behind the heavy wooden desk and handed him a glass of whiskey. He gulped it down like water. I placed a lit cigarette in his fingers. He raised it to his lips like clockwork. 

In the dark, his glassy eyes tried to fix on me. I gently wiped a hand over his lids to close them. 

“No one’s here but you,” I crooned. 

His eyes stayed shut. He took another sip from the glass in his hand. The cigarette dangled in the other, the burning end crumbling slowly into ash.

I poured out more whiskey, the undulating motion of the amber liquid hypnotic, almost sensual. A tremor of his arm jolted the glass out of position. I kept pouring. His hand drooped. Whiskey ran down the sides of the glass onto the desk. I did not stop.

The ash that fell from his cigarette still glowed. 

“Be careful with that now,” I murmured. “You could start a fire.” 

There was a breathiness in my voice that I could not control. 

I let him take another drag from the cigarette. Then, entwining my fingers in his, I eased it gently from his grip onto the desk.

I watched the spark catch. My breath came out in a shudder. The fire spread rapidly across the wood.

I pulled Lucas up sharply. Pressing his car key into his hand, I pushed him stumbling out the door. The stage was set regardless of what he did next.

I retreated into my bedroom. Drawing my window curtains open, I wrapped both hands around the wrought iron grilles that stood between me and outdoors. They would grow far too hot before they even gave an inch. 

Good. If I could not escape through my bedroom window, then neither could Julio through his. Neither could our father.

The smoke had become so thick that every inhale coated my throat with tar. I could hear the wood of Gonzalo House splintering all around me. It was time to go.

I dropped to my knees and inched my way blindly to the veranda, to the only door that I knew would be waiting unlocked and open. I stumbled through, heaving and coughing. I gulped in the night air. Over the railing, the ground looked farther away than I remembered. But behind me was an inferno. I jumped.

For the rest of the night, I sat with the maids in the gutter, my insides swirling in a mix of anxiety and silent excitement. The flames entranced me with their promise of freedom. 

I went cold when Julio was pulled out of the house. I prayed for the compressions to fail, but God was not on my side. Still, I kept my emotions in check. There was still Lucas. There was still our father.

When firemen brought his corpse out, everything faded away. I was in a dream, one that had haunted me for years. Was that really him under there? The sheet was a tease. I wanted to strip it off and see. I wanted to see his charred, devastated remains with my own eyes. 

“Best to remember him as he had been,” the fireman had told me. I wish I could have laughed in his face.

More good news came. Lucas had gotten into a crash. He had hit his head. He never would have been credible, but now, he likely would never even remember.

If only Julio had died as he was supposed to, everything would have been perfect.

But really, I only had to take Lucas in. Julio had the rest of it coming. He should have known better than to provoke an addict. All it took was one struck nerve too many, and my problem fixed itself.

I could not have asked for a more poetic outcome.

My father and Julio are dead, in return for my mother’s life. Lucas is taking the fall for my crime, in return for all that he has blamed on my mother's memory.

And soon, when the slander on her name comes to an end with the discovery of what my father had done, my revenge will be complete. 

I will finally, truly be free.