He closed the booklet and dried his eyes with the bedsheet. From his hoodie pocket peeked one of the photocopies of Diana’s face. He’d left the others on the stove. It didn’t make sense to go out and put them up now, in the rain. He thought about the dog. She spent all her time lying around and gnawing on a tennis ball. She had a problem with her hip and that made it hard for her to get up: on walks she’d go slowly at first and then gather speed, as if her hip needed a little practice before it could work again. She was good and a little dumb, and that’s why it seemed so strange she would run away.
Gaspar had read somewhere—a magazine? a story? He didn’t remember—that if you wished for something hard, if you concentrated and shut your eyes and asked for what you wanted sincerely, it was possible to make it happen. He pictured Diana, her big head and slightly sloped back, the way she sometimes seemed to perk up, especially when Electra, Vicky’s younger dog, would pester her and they’d run together, with their tongues hanging out and that kind of smile dogs sometimes have, in the backyard of the house. It was a small backyard with flower beds all around, flower beds with flowers, hydrangeas and roses and azaleas, explosions of purple and red against the white-painted bricks. He fell asleep thinking about Diana eating the jasmine and Vicky’s grandmother yelling at her not to ruin the plants she worked so hard on.
First he woke up feeling cold and realized he’d kicked the blanket off in his sleep. He did that a lot. Vicky had told him, on their last vacation, that he moved a lot and talked in his sleep. What do I say? he had asked, and Vicky, looking very serious, told him she couldn’t understand anything. Gaspar didn’t believe her. One of these nights he’d have to set up a recorder so he could hear himself.
The second time he woke up he wasn’t sure where he was: he’d been dreaming about Diana. A strange dream: he found her floating in the fountain at the park, and he was sure she had drowned. But when he called to her, she lifted up her head and swam to him, panting and happy, struggling to paddle with her front paws. It wasn’t the dream that had woken him: it had been, precisely, paws. Dog paws scratching at the shutters and the whining of an animal that wanted to get in.
“Diana!” he said out loud, and he thought he would take her to Vicky right away, now, in the middle of the night. Gaspar got up quickly, opened the window and raised the shutter. There was nothing outside. Nothing but the bars over the window, the closed garden door, and the empty yard, the soft but continuous rain on the pavement that turned it slippery and silver under the streetlamps. The sky was cloudy and light: it was a damp and luminous night. He stuck his head out the window and said, “Diana!” softly, but then he felt a violent yank on his hair that pulled him back into the room and a shove that pushed him into the wall, though not hard. He saw his father, naked except for his black underwear, close the shutter and slam the window shut with a speed that seemed strange, overly urgent. Then his father looked at him. He wasn’t angry, not really, he wasn’t enraged. He was shocked.
“What are you doing?” Juan asked, though not in a very loud voice—he wasn’t shouting. Gaspar relaxed his shoulders, which he had braced reflexively. “Why were you summoning the dead?”
“It was Vicky’s dog.”
“What dog? What are you talking about?”
“Vicky lost her dog and I just heard her scratching at the window!”
Now his father softened, dropping his threatening pose and running a hand through his hair. His left eyebrow was arched, his habitual gesture of incredulity, sometimes showing contempt and other times—less often—that he found something funny. He sat on Gaspar’s bed and covered his shoulders with the blanket.
“Go and bring me what I was drinking, it’s on my night table. And my cigarettes.”
Gaspar didn’t like it when his father smoked in his room; it left a terrible smell. He didn’t like that he smoked at all, but he had already asked him to quit and there was no point in insisting. He brought the glass of whiskey and the cigarettes. His father lit one and then crushed it out right away on the floor.
“Come here.” And he made room beside him under the blanket for Gaspar.
After he took a sip of whiskey and slowly licked his lips, he said:
“The dog is dead. That wasn’t Vicky’s dog you heard. If it was even a dog at all.”
Gaspar felt his fear dry out his mouth. His father was staring at him. He had dark circles under his eyes and slightly purple lips, like a drowned man.
“Are you sure? She just ran away this morning . . .”
“I’m sure.”
His father smelled of alcohol. He was a little drunk, Gaspar thought, but you never really knew. He shifted to get more comfortable and accidentally touched the booklet, which was on the pillow. He moved it to the nightstand.
“Did you ever try with her, with your mother?”
“Try what?”
“What you did tonight when you called your friend’s dog.”
“I didn’t call her . . .”
“Gaspar, we both know perfectly well what we’re talking about.”
What should he say? He was afraid of his father sitting there under the blanket, and of the lamplight, of the rain suddenly coming down harder—with the wind blowing so hard, the drops pounded the shutter—and of the ghost dog’s paws scratching in his head.
I have to tell him the truth, he thought.
“Yes, I tried, but nothing ever happened.”
His father took a deep breath, and when he let out the air, it was slow and shaky.
“We must not keep what is dead alive,” he said. “Don’t ever do it again.”
“I didn’t know the dog was dead.”
“No, of course not. But don’t do it again. It’s very dangerous.”
“I never would have called her, why would I call her if she’s dead?”
“But you called your mother.”
Gaspar hesitated.
“I didn’t know that thinking about her and wanting her back was the same as calling her.”
His father downed his whiskey in one gulp.
“Usually it’s not. I don’t want you to do it again.”
“I’ve got it, Dad.”
“Ghosts are real. And the ones who come aren’t always the one you’ve called.”
His father lit another cigarette, and this time he did smoke it in the darkness. Sometimes, when he exhaled, he coughed. He had taken the blanket from his shoulders and now it was only draped over his long, thin legs that were covered in blond fuzz. The cigarette slowly went out in what remained of the whiskey in the glass. Gaspar expected his father to leave, but instead he stretched out in the bed. Beside him, Gaspar bent his knees against his chest.
“I can’t sleep,” his father said, by way of explanation.
They looked at each other in the half darkness. Outside, the rain lashed the trees and Gaspar thought he heard dog paws again, this time running over the pavement, but he tried to ignore them.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“You’re not tired either.”
“No, plus I already slept some. Yesterday I was talking to Adela and she told me that sometimes her missing arm itches. I called her a liar because it’s obvious she was lying, right? But she went away crying and, I don’t know, I know when she’s lying, she does it all the time, and I think maybe this time she was telling the truth.”