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.