As night fell he would smoke in silence, and he’d often watch the fireflies as they blinked among the eucalyptus trees and above the dirt path that led to the pools and the tennis courts and rugby fields. They were especially pretty when there was still a little light: at sunset they seemed like sparks given off by the sun. But after it was fully night, Gaspar wasn’t sure if he liked them or not: they reminded him of eyes that blinked and were suddenly gone, or else were too close to see. And yet they were beautiful, flickering like that among the tall grass and tree trunks.

The house in Villa Elisa was so different from the house Gaspar had shared with his father that it felt deeply foreign to him, even while he enjoyed it and loved it as if its walls were a careful person who always thought before speaking. And it was never silent: his uncle tended to keep the radio on, and other times, when Julieta would stay over for several days—she was ever closer to moving in—she listened to music on a boombox she’d brought over or turned up the volume on the TV, saying it kept her company. They both got up early, even when they stayed up late—and they often stayed up late, the empty wine bottles like green glass decorations on the patio and kitchen tables—and opened the blinds to let the sun in. At first the light bothered Gaspar, but once he got used to it, he ate breakfast outside at the patio table unless it was very cold.

Plus, there was nothing in the house. Nothing dangerous, nothing evil. The house was clean. The things he saw, the apparitions of his father or Adela, belonged to him, not the house. He would bring them wherever he went. Ever since his father had hurt him, the scar on his arm acted as a kind of alarm: it throbbed and burned when he went near certain houses, some that seemed threatening, others that looked perfectly innocent. Gaspar understood that it was indicating places he shouldn’t go into, other houses like the one that had swallowed Adela. He couldn’t share that with anyone, either. Vicky and Pablo were the only ones he could tell, but he still couldn’t bring himself to see them.

That feeling and the inexplicable horror certain places provoked in him could have been caused by whatever it was the doctors and psychiatrists were struggling to name: the aftermath of trauma, epilepsy derived from the accident, some kind of mental illness. Gaspar played dumb, but he heard them talking. And he thought maybe one of them was right. Adela was nearly gone, but she still appeared in the corner of his room and stared at him in accusation. I loved you, she told him, her lips not moving, and you betrayed me. Still, he could live with those feelings, and the guilt. As long as the house in Villa Elisa existed, his uncle arguing with the radio in the morning, Negro Sánchez trying out different pizza toppings, and Julieta bringing him poetry books, he could trust that someday he would see his friends again. And if some impossible memory left him mute and paralyzed, he now knew it was also possible to reemerge from that immobility and sit in the sun with the chocolate his uncle always kept for him in the refrigerator.