The bag holding the box was in a corner beside the table. Gaspar picked it up and brought it to Adela, but told her: “I have to show it to you alone, I can’t give it to you in front of anyone.”
“Why not?” she asked, and she wiped her mouth and fixed her dark, short-lashed eyes on him.
“Because I don’t know if it works.”
“Such secrecy,” Betty said with a smile, but her eyes were serious. Adela moved fast, grabbing Gaspar’s hand and half-dragging him to her room. Once they were inside, she shut the door.
“So? Show me.”
Gaspar went to Adela’s bed and set the box on the turquoise bedspread.
“Come here,” he said.
Wary, she went closer.
“What is this?”
Gaspar scratched his nose; he was a little nervous.
“It’s called a mirror box.”
“Is it magic?”
“No. More or less. It sounds like it, right? Let’s hope it is, I guess. Stick your arm in here,” he said, pointing to one of the holes. Adela bent down obediently. “Now stick your other arm in the other hole.”
Adela looked at him with annoyance, with incipient anger.
“You know what I mean. You told me you can feel your arm, right? So put it in.”
Now she was looking at him with eyes full of tears. Gaspar felt sorry for Adela as he looked at her there, kneeling on her bedroom floor in a pink dress, her hair in two braids, a girl who never wanted to be different. He felt older than her.
“Ade, I don’t know if it’s going to work,” he said, and he had to clear his throat. “I got it from a book. But I swear it’s not a joke. I would never pull a prank on you like that. Never. Let’s try.”
She hesitated a moment, then said okay, and with her eyes closed, she made a small movement with her stump.
“Done,” she said.
“Great.” Gaspar knelt down beside her. “Now look at the mirror. See? It’s like you had two arms. Tell me where it hurts.”
“It doesn’t hurt. It itches.”
“Okay. Where? But don’t look at me, don’t look at your real arm, just look at the reflection. Tell me.”
The box was open on top, with no lid, so Gaspar was able to put his own hand in and follow Adela’s instructions: the side of the elbow. No, down a little. No, up a little.
“Sometimes it takes a while,” said Gaspar, and instead of continuing to look for the place that itched, he caressed Adela’s hand, her fingers, her arm, and moved her bracelets, for a long time, in silence, until she said, I can feel my arm! And Gaspar then followed her instructions again and found the place that itched, the phantom itch that had been impossible to forget until that moment, until that twelfth birthday on a turquoise bed.
“There!” Adela said in a low voice, and Gaspar scratched softly with his short nails while she stared disconcertedly at the reflected arm. He kept going until Adela said that’s it and took her arm out of the box. Sitting on the floor, she covered her face with her hand. She wasn’t crying. Gaspar didn’t know what was going on. He wanted to ask her if she wasn’t happy, and why wasn’t she happy, and had it had worked or not, but he knew he had to keep his mouth shut for a while. They could hear Vicky and Pablo’s conversation coming from the kitchen, and also the noise of dishes: Betty was cleaning up from the party. Adela broke the silence.
“Why?” Adela asked, and Gaspar realized she was angry. Then he tried to explain that he’d had the idea after a conversation about phantom limbs with his father, who had told him there was a diagram in a book in their library, but she interrupted him.
“No, stop, I’m not asking you. What I mean is: why did the doctor never do this? Or my mom? Why didn’t they ever tell me there’s a cure for when my arm hurts or itches?”
Gaspar opened his mouth, but he didn’t say anything, only shrugged.
“Didn’t they know? Are they that dumb? I’m gonna kill them.”
Now she was crying, from pure rage, her lower lip trembling. Gaspar knelt down in front of her.
“They might not have known.”
She was still mad, and Gaspar let her be. He let her stand up, didn’t insist on asking if she’d liked his gift, let her yank open the door and run to the kitchen, and when he heard the noise of dishes crashing to the floor, Gaspar told his surprised friends we’d better leave, and he pushed Vicky and Pablo through the open door and into the passageway. They heard shouting from Adela and from her mother, but it was impossible to make out what they were saying because one shouted over the other and they were both crying.
“What the hell did you do?” Vicky asked, half running down the hall, while Pablo sighed in relief on finding the gate to the street unlocked. Gaspar didn’t know how to answer. He needed to talk to them to figure out what he’d done wrong.
“Let’s go to the kiosk,” he said, and he checked his back pocket to be sure he had enough money for a Coke.
Gaspar didn’t want to go back to Adela’s house, as Vicky and Pablo suggested, and after finishing his soda he put on his jacket and said goodbye. She’ll get over it, Vicky told him, and Gaspar didn’t answer. He went home. When he closed the door, before he could take a step toward his room, he heard his father’s voice calling him from upstairs.
His tone held no threat and Gaspar wanted to ignore him, to keep walking and pretend he hadn’t heard, but instead he answered. What do you want? he yelled. For you to come upstairs a while, his father said, his voice loud but not a shout, free of any violence or mockery. Gaspar obeyed. The wooden steps creaked a lot; there used to be a rug to muffle footsteps, he remembered, but it was gone now. Maybe his dad had pulled it up—it could have been fuel for one of his periodic bonfires. He didn’t know, and in fact only remembered the existence of that rug now, as he hurried up the stairs.
The door to his father’s library-study was open, and once Gaspar saw him lying on the sofa with a book beside him, he entered without fear. He didn’t sit down, but leaned against the desk, surveying the messy books, an unfinished drawing, the closed notebook with its dark covers.
“How are you?”
Gaspar shrugged and heard his father stand up; he didn’t look at him until he sensed him very close.
“You can stay mad at me forever, but I don’t know if it makes much sense.”
Juan’s eyes shone in the room that was lit only by the small lamp he used for reading. He was wearing a gray long-sleeved shirt that was too small for him and showed how thin he was. Gaspar took a deep breath before speaking.
“Why did you make me touch what was in that box?”
The library was hot and smelled of dust; his father, freshly bathed and with still-wet hair, smelled of soap.
“Sometimes I’m not myself. I apologize.”
Gaspar shivered.
“What does that mean, you’re not you?”
“It means exactly what I said: sometimes I’m not me.”
Gaspar rested his elbows on the desk and idly picked up the drawing his father hadn’t finished. It looked like a small city, a few houses on a plain and in the sky a black sun or maybe a scribble, but very big and centered.
“Why do you never tell me what it is you do, what all of this is?” Gaspar indicated the books, the closed doors, the dark corners.