You’re crazy, Marita sobbed, we have to call your shrink, and while she cried, Gaspar started to empty out her drawers and pull her clothes from the closet, and to fill the suitcases they had so recently unpacked when they’d moved into that apartment that still smelled of paint. At the back of the closet, once it was empty, he saw a head. Or rather, the back of a neck. Someone had chewed it, there were teeth marks. He slammed the doors shut before the head turned around and showed him its face. He was afraid he would recognize it.
He had to give Marita credit—she’d brought the article to him immediately and told him everything. Not like his uncle. She didn’t hide things from him. She was brave. She was scared and crying, and although she had howled when he put her clothes into the suitcase, in a way it was what she’d expected. There could be no other outcome. Gaspar could understand fear and rage, but not secrecy. The price of revealing that secret, of course, was this. When Marita left, Adela stopped dancing: she was dressed now, wearing the old pink sweatsuit she used to wear when she was still his friend and not this ghost dancer. Gaspar could feel only relief when Marita left, saying she was never coming back. That was exactly what he wanted.
The phone rang again. Maybe it was his uncle. It could be Vicky, or Pablo. Had Luis met Betty out at Puerto Reyes? If he’d met his mother—no, worse, if his mother had taken him over the border and out of the country—anything was possible. It didn’t matter. The article mentioned his grandparents’ house. They were getting too close. They’re surrounding me. He read the article until he knew it by heart. He had to be practical. He had to realize that in all the years since Adela disappeared, this was the moment he was closest to finding his way to her and understanding what had happened, what his story was, and his parents,” his family’s. Adela, according to Gallardo, was his cousin. Betty had never told him, never even hinted. How cruel. He expected that cruelty from his father, but Betty? They were hiding something monstrous. He pictured Betty at that provincial hotel, drunk and raving about a monster that lived in the jungle.
She was telling the truth. That house, Puerto Reyes. He had to go. The Devil’s Throat, he thought. He had asked his father if he was going to throw him in and his father had sworn he wasn’t. Maybe he had lied.
During the next two days, Gaspar didn’t leave the apartment much: just to buy food and cigarettes, and a map of Misiones from the Auto Club. The one he found wasn’t very big, but it was good enough. Za?artú was marked on it. So were San Cosme and Puerto Libertad. It was easy to get to Puerto Reyes from Libertad, Andrés Sigal had told him. Puerto Reyes, the Moby Dick of the aristocracy’s mansions. His grandmother had a limp, he had a faint memory of it now. She climbed the stairs with a cane. Grandma Ahab. He had to plan out the trip’s itinerary. Betty could still be in Cosme. The excavations at the pit had ended. He remembered how they’d talked about that at one of his uncle’s cookouts. He had to find the list of identified bodies. Had they found Adela’s father? What had Betty done with him? The Corrientes morgue. He’d have to go there, too. It was a lot. Was Betty at Puerto Reyes? If anyone else was at the house, they would open the door to him. Olga Gallardo wasn’t the only one after him. And they weren’t looking for him so they could welcome him lovingly as the prodigal son. He knew that much, if nothing else. He had to go there, or else the circle closing in on him was going to start to squeeze. If they couldn’t reach him, they’d get to someone else. If they got to Marita, he couldn’t imagine how he would go on with his life, with life.
He unplugged the phone.
The ER had been unbearable from the start. She’d hardly clocked in and she got the worst kind of case: a pregnancy with complications. Vicky detested complicated births because the families never understood. They got angry, they blamed the doctors for the woman bleeding out, for the breached baby, or, in the best cases, for the emergency C-section. They didn’t understand the simple explanation that these things happened, that it was nature, that women had died in childbirth for centuries. They couldn’t understand that a birth was not some kind of sacred thing and all that nonsense. These doctors ruining their stupid joy. She detested the relatives.
And, after the pregnant woman, a boy convulsing from fever who had that kind of hysterical mother who won’t let you work and thinks she knows more than the doctors. It was pretty true what her own mother always told her: she had no empathy. All she wanted was for them to let her fix things. Why did she have to be nice on top of it?
Now a patient was arriving by ambulance, and the report said it was an accident. They were never told clearly what was coming into the ER. Communication between the hospital, the ambulances, and the police was a disaster. So it could be anything, a contusion, a hit-and-run, a massacre.
Vicky waited with her co-workers on the driveway, smoking the requisite cigarette before going back in for another fifteen minutes of stress. The ambulance workers lifted the victim down on a stretcher, and when asked, they said the same as always, we don’t know what happened; he turned up like this on Rambla 32. Vicky went closer. Rambla 32 was near the projects, where there were often fights over drugs, stabbings, and shootouts. The sight of the man on the stretcher left her open-mouthed. It was so unthinkable that on first glance she thought she was seeing the impossible: Juan, Gaspar’s father, with his surgery scar on his chest, his pale skin, his sunken eyes. She blinked, stepped back, and realized the truth with a lurch of her own body: the man on the stretcher was Luis Peterson. He was naked and had a wound on his chest, right above the sternum, a vertical wound brutally sewn up. She couldn’t tell in the driveway’s light if it was superficial or not. Temperature 39.5, pressure nine six, reported the ambulance doctor, and Vicky gave herself a mental slap. She touched the wound. It didn’t seem superficial. At first glance, it looked like his sternum had been broken, like in a thoracic surgery. Luis was unconscious. He had tiny cuts all over his body, now somewhat scabbed over. Fine but continuous cuts. Except for his face, his entire body had been delicately lacerated.
She tried to kick-start her ability to diagnose, made an effort to intuit as fast as possible, and her instinct told her the most urgent thing was an X-ray. To find out, right away, what that wound was. Blood analysis, oxygen, IV, check vital signs. The tachycardia was obvious and was another bad sign, as was the unconsciousness. He was in shock. And the wound wasn’t recent: it had the sickly red of infection.
The X-ray left everyone open-mouthed. One of the students had to leave the imaging room and Vicky heard the sound of him vomiting from far away, like in a dream. She and the head doctor looked at the films and looked at each other and turned back to the X-rays. The sternum was split, and not by a surgeon’s saw. The cuts, splintered and irregular, looked like they were from a giant pair of scissors. They could have been made with something similar. Hedge clippers, for example. And the bone was open, no one had made any attempt to close it: only the skin was sewn up. In the space between the bones of the split sternum, pressuring the lungs, there was an arm. A very small arm, not an adult’s. A child’s arm. Don’t let it be one of the twins’ arms, thought Vicky, please, please. The arm could be clearly seen. It had been cut off under the elbow. It had all five fingers and their bones.