“Careful, it’s slippery.”
Vicky and Pablo didn’t ask why; maybe they imagined something horrible, but Gaspar couldn’t reassure them that it was only wax because just then the flashlight revealed a window, and what he saw through it was impossible. Gaspar didn’t want to stop and look, but he did: on the other side of the dirty glass he saw the moon above trees, many trees, a still forest, as if the house were high atop a hill that allowed for a panoramic view. It wasn’t a pretty forest. It could also be a very detailed painting, he thought. A painting of a window that looked out on a forest. That’s what it was. Still, there was something off about the painting; it looked like a trap. The whole house was a trap.
He didn’t shine the light on the walls anymore. Or on the floor. He kept it pointed straight ahead, painfully aware that if someone really was in the house, they could snatch the flashlight from his hand at any moment, hit him （hit all of them）， and drag them into one of those dark rooms, like the one Adela had chosen. Why had she waved to them like that? It had been such a small gesture, a goodbye.
What if the person who’d slammed a door somewhere in the house was Adela’s father? What if he was still alive? Not disappeared, but a serial killer? Pablo gave a feeble scream in the darkness, and Gaspar asked what’s wrong, what’s wrong?
“Something touched me. On my back,” said Pablo.
“Enough,” said Gaspar. “We’re getting out of here. Don’t turn around.”
Vicky said nothing. Had she heard Pablo? She must have.
The flashlight illuminated a wooden staircase with a beautiful handrail: it led to another floor upstairs. The problem, of course, was that the house on Villarreal didn’t have a first floor.
“Do you see the door?” Vicky asked. Her breath was very hot and smelled of pennies. But now she sounded less scared. Her hands squeezed Gaspar so tight that it hurt a little.
“We’re almost there,” he said, and he thought: Adela is locked in this house, Pablo is about to have a little brother, and Vicky is loved. Enough, he thought. Dad, show me the door. We have to get out.
“Vicky, do you hear anything?”
“The buzzing, but less.”
Gaspar repeated without moving his lips: Dad, show me the door, and he felt the sweat drenching the back of his neck, his back, and he kept walking.
The flashlight beam fell upon the door, which was wide open. Had they left it like that? It didn’t matter. He sped up without a word, just in case, and he felt Vicky’s relief when she, too, saw the streetlights, the night outside, and let go of his waist and went running out to the sidewalk, safe. Pablo did the same, instinctively. Gaspar turned off the flashlight and looked at the house. From outside, it looked the same as always. Small, ugly, gray, its windows bricked up. Dark. He handed the flashlight to Pablo. He couldn’t speak. Vicky was different now: her long, tousled hair gave her an adult air. She hugged him fast but tight, and said, you’re soaked in sweat, and then, thank you, thank you. Outside, she was back to being decisive.
“Let’s go to my house. My parents can call the police, we have to get Adela out of there.”
And with that Vicky took off running straight to her house; Pablo and Gaspar followed her. Are you sure someone touched you? Gaspar wanted to know, and Pablo, running but looking him in the eye, said yes and no. He could have imagined it. Are you going to tell the truth? Pablo asked, and Gaspar said yes. And he was going to tell the truth about what he’d seen, but only up until Adela went into the room. He wasn’t going to talk about the flashlight beam the others couldn’t see, or the magnificent staircase, or the piano, or say that he had opened the door himself without any effort, as if the door had obeyed him. As if it had been waiting for him.
He had brought Adela there. He was sure of it. He had delivered her to the house. He hadn’t been able to stop her when she ran—a girl as light as a toy, a girl who was missing an arm! And he, big as he was, hadn’t been able to stop her because she’d stuck her fingers in his eyes! Now the guilt twisted his chest from inside, now he knew the only person who could tell him where Adela was and who had taken her was his father, and his father wasn’t going to talk to him ever again.
Everything that happened after that happened for Gaspar through a kind of fog. As if he had rubbed his eyes until he was half-blind. And as if that partial blindness, that gray mist, had spread throughout his whole body. A distance between him and everyone else, between him and what others said and did, as if he were watching a movie on mute through smoke.
His uncle, angry because they’d gone into the house. And because he had to go with him to talk to the police, to the juvenile court judge, to other people Gaspar could no longer distinguish. Betty had fainted at the news of Adela’s disappearance: she’d wanted to go into the house, she’d pounded against the walls and the door, she’d clawed at the bricks in the windows. Someone told Gaspar that the door was locked again. Also that Betty had blamed him, that she’d shouted, it’s Juan’s son’s fault, he brought her, he handed her over. Gaspar wasn’t surprised: Betty was right. But he could no longer respond. He did talk, just a little, to the police and the people in court, which came much later.
He went to visit his father between one thing and another. Juan was still motionless. How many days had passed? Dr. Biedma said he was in a coma, that it was definitive, that he wasn’t going to wake up. Gaspar didn’t know how to reply. He had to talk to his father. They let him in to see him. He was utterly inert except for his breathing, which was still strange, very intermittent. Gaspar whispered into his ear: If you can hear me, tell me where she is. Why couldn’t I open that door when I can open others? Who took her? How do we get her out? Why did I take her there? And he sincerely expected those words to wake his father, but he waited in vain. Juan’s lips were cracked and bloody and nearly purple. His fingers, too, were bluish. His arms were covered in bruises and so was his chest, big bruises, and patches of his skin were burned. They had tried to resuscitate him.
I don’t want to go to school, Gaspar told his uncle, who told him that was fine. He could still feel Adela’s body beneath him, the way she had struggled, like she was made of rubber, and then her fingers in his eyes, but he knew, he knew, that if he’d made a little more effort she wouldn’t have gotten away. She had gotten away from him. When he wasn’t being called in to talk to some detective or yet another woman in an office （the judge? A psychologist?）， Gaspar was in a bed beside his father’s. They let him stay. The sound of the cardiac monitor kept him from sleeping, but he didn’t want to budge. His uncle had to press him to bathe and eat. On one of those breaks from the clinic he found out that Betty was gone, no one knew where she was, and how was it possible that she left right when her daughter had disappeared?, and Gaspar closed his eyes. Maybe Betty had gone looking for Adela. He had to return to his father’s side because, if he woke up even for a second, two seconds, he would tell Gaspar where Adela was or how he could find her. He had looked at his father’s eyes again. Now they were both completely black, as if they reflected the night sky. Like Omaira’s, the girl Vicky still saw in dreams.