A few days later Micaela, the nanny, snuck her over to visit the gardener’s house. Elena tried to re-create her unhappiest expression, but she was too nervous to feel sadness as she tried in vain to reach her previous state of suffering. When they arrived, the family’s conversation, punctuated by laughter, was all about embroidered tablecloths, knit scarves, weddings, and the best way to earn a living. It was as if nothing had happened in that house. Micaela listened sternly, as if someone were playing a trick on her. The visit could not end like this: she had come to take pity on the family. She tried to slip in a sad word like a child slips into a game of jump rope, and at last she did. She asked if they had saved any portraits of the deceased. Until then the entire family had been acting as if Cecilia would walk through the door at any moment, coming home from the market, the river, or one of the neighboring estates. Now there was pandemonium in the rooms as they searched all the wardrobes and drawers for photographs as if they were looking for vital medications. During a stretch of silence Elena heard footsteps—Cecilia’s bare feet. No, there was no portrait except the photograph on the girl’s identification card. A dark cloud hovered over the house. Her mother brought out the photograph, already fading: only the outline of her mouth was clear. Ester was all that remained of her. They had been born together but looked nothing alike. Ester laughed in her chair. “Go on, wash your face,” her mother yelled, before returning urgently to the matter of the tablecloths. . . . When they said goodbye, her mother wiped Elena’s eyes. Micaela inspected her face for tears, then opened the small door and stood motionless on the porch, her hands crossed over her gray apron, smiling.

Witch hazel, 86% distilled water, and the crazed woman running on the cardboard box. Elena stood up and peered through the shutters. The gardener dressed in black was laughing. No one knew that Cecilia had died. And who was to say, if she waited at the window long enough, that one day she wouldn’t reappear, gathering acorns. Elena would run down with a spoon and a bottle of cough syrup, and they would keep running until they reached the cedar tree, where they would live from then on, among the branches, in a cave of their own making, at siesta time.

The Head Pressed Against the Window

For fifteen years Mademoiselle Dargère had presided over a colony of sickly children that had been founded by one of her great grandmothers. The asylum was located along the coast, and since her youth she had lived in a side room on the top floor of the tower.

In the beginning she lived on the first floor, but at night the head of a man would appear to her in the window, in flames. A horrifyingly red head, pressed against the window like the stained glass paintings in Chartres Cathedral. She moved to the second floor: the same head followed her. She moved to the third floor: the same head followed her. She moved to every room in the house with the same result.