There, on that double mattress in the studio, the heater on and the window cracked, Vicky, Gaspar, and Pablo would gather whenever they could, and they often could. Marita was not invited to those meetings. They sat and remembered and talked about things that were still going on now. When they were together, it wasn’t bad for them to remember. Sometimes, when the memories got very intense, Gaspar had to take a deep breath and announce that he was stopping, because otherwise he would feel the horrible caress of a fear that paralyzed him, that drove him into bed, that even fixed his pupils. A neurologist had explained how some epilepsies had symptoms that were only mental, like the sensation of fear—sometimes of euphoria—and of déjà vu, and sometimes the fear was paralyzing. They had never found definitive signs of epilepsy or a brain injury in Gaspar. The tests were always questionable, indeterminate. He took medication erratically—mostly, he pretended to take it. Vicky got mad—Doctor Vicky, the rational one. For a long time migraines used to be diagnosed as epilepsy, she told him, and you have them really often, too often. True, but his father had suffered from migraines, his uncle did too, and neither of them was epileptic.

Still, they didn’t talk about that. They talked about Adela and about the house. It had recently been demolished with authorization from the owners, who had never managed to sell it and clearly never would. Vicky had gone to the site several times; her parents still lived a few blocks away. There was some graffiti on the only wall that was still standing, but not much. The place scared everyone. It had the look of a spot where something bad has happened: an expectant air. Evil places wait for evil things to reoccur, or else they seek it out.

“It’s like a magnet,” said Pablo, who had walked by it on a visit to Vicky’s parents. “It always was.”

And Gaspar said he would rather avoid visits to his old neighborhood. He felt bad about Hugo and Lidia Peirano, because he missed them. I don’t want them to think I’m ungrateful, he told Vicky, and she reassured him. Call them every once in a while. That’s enough for them. Gaspar sometimes felt about the Peiranos the same way he did about Esteban or Tali: he didn’t understand why they’d stopped seeing him. Or why they’d left, like Betty, Adela’s mother. As if his father had ordered everyone not to bother him.

Gaspar had taken a sheet of the very large sketch paper his uncle used for his designs. And there, little by little for the past year, they’d been reconstructing the house they had seen when Adela disappeared. Pablo sketched it out. It had taken them some time to remember where the shelves were. The doors. The piano. The old clothes. The medical books. What could those books be, and why were they there? One was green, said Vicky. Pablo remembered it as sky blue. In the drawing they didn’t color it. They wrote beside the sketch: “uncertain color.”