“We’re here for Inga,” Pedro tells her. “She called and said she was here.”
“Inga?” the woman asks quietly.
“The Swedish chick,” Pedro says.
“Oh, right,” she says. “She’s around.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere. Come have a seat till she shows up.”
“Can we take a look for her around the house?” Pedro asks. “We’re in a hurry.”
“And your house, your streeeeeet, and your gaaaaarden,” the woman intones, and goes back to the group.
Pedro suggests we split up and check the bedrooms and bathrooms.
“Or wherever you guys think they might have her,” he says.
“I don’t know her,” I say again.
“How are you not going to spot a Swedish chick among all these natives?” says Pedro, irritated.
“Did you see the fireplace?” I ask. “They’re roasting something wrapped in rags.”
“What was Inga doing with these weirdos?” La Murciélaga asks.
Julieth tugs my hand and says, “You come with me.”
Something about all this reminds me of Libardo right after he’d disappeared. Back then, too, somebody suggested splitting up to look for him, and I went up to his room, where I already knew he wasn’t, but it was the only place in the world I thought he might be. Should be. I found him in the photos Fernanda had hung on the wall, and I reviewed his history with us in each one. Happy fragments of his crazy life, some of them now faded with the passage of time, others in black and white like old movies or like they say dreams are. Those walls held only smiles and hugs, the things people like to immortalize in photos. The perfect life of an imperfect family. The handsome, ambitious man with his beauty queen and one son who looks like him and another who looks like her. At any rate, that man wasn’t the Libardo I’d gone looking for in his room, the one others were combing the hospitals and morgue for, searching high and low, scouring heaven and earth.
“Murci told me that Swedish chick’s a huge slut,” Julieth says in my ear.
Or that’s what I hear as I let her lead me to the second floor. Pedro and La Murciélaga stay downstairs.
“But don’t tell her I said that,” Julieth says.
“Let’s go to the kitchen—I’m dying of thirst,” I say.
“In a minute,” she says, and casually opens the door to a bedroom as if it were her own. There’s an unmade bed, soda bottles on the floor, but nobody’s there. “Inga?” Julieth asks, but Inga doesn’t answer.
We go into a hall bathroom, two more bedrooms, and the master, where there’s a naked couple screwing.
“Sorry,” Julieth says, closes the door, and cracks up, leaning against the wall.
The people downstairs are still doing their thing: thank you to life, which has given me so much, it’s given me sound and the alphabet.
I don’t know why, but right from the start I knew Libardo wasn’t coming back. Or, rather, when nobody could think of anywhere else to look for him, I said to myself, Dad’s not coming back. I said it to Julio, and he freaked out, knocked me on the floor with a blow to the chest, and told me, don’t you ever say that again. The people close to Libardo tried to give us hope—we were the littlest mourners, we were the sons. But I think we all knew he wasn’t coming back. We wanted him to come back, but every one of us, deep down—my grandmother, Fernanda—we all knew why he’d been taken.
After that, Julio, Fernanda, and I would sleep together at night, all three of us in her and Libardo’s bed. We slept in our regular clothes so if anybody called with news in the middle of the night, we’d be ready, just in case. Of course, it isn’t really accurate to say we slept. We’d get only an hour or two of shuteye. By four in the morning, we’d be in the kitchen drinking hot chocolate, not talking, afraid to look at one another and discover the truth in one another’s eyes.
“Do you have a girlfriend, Larry?” Julieth asks, heading up to an attic.
“I don’t know,” I say. She stops and looks at me, puzzled.
“I don’t think so,” I add, in an attempt to be clearer.
Julieth scolds me. “I’m being serious, Larry.”
“I really don’t know,” I tell her. “I met someone on the plane, but . . .”
“What?” She breaks in, surprised, almost worried. “Are you being serious? You’re still hung up on her?”
Could be. I regret having told Julieth, especially given our history.
“Go on, keep going.” I shoo her along so she’ll stop quizzing me.
She turns around and climbs up a steep staircase. Her round butt is right at my eye level. Immediately, I recall that butt without clothes.
“Inga, Inga!” Julieth yells into the dark maw of the attic. She climbs up a little higher and stops.
“What’s up?”
“Where’s the light switch?” she says.
“Let me get by.”
I scooch to one side, but we end up jammed in the narrow stairwell. She grabs my face and plants a wet kiss on my mouth. Our tongues intertwine, we swap spit. I slide my hand to touch her.
“You should turn on the light,” she says.
I tread gingerly, groping the walls—there’s got to be a switch somewhere. Julieth sits down on the landing, staring into the darkness, and calls again, “Inga!”
All we hear is the muffled singing of the group downstairs.
“She isn’t here either,” says Julieth. “Let’s go.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if those guys killed her,” I say.
“Grow up, Larry,” she says, and moves past me, without giving me another kiss.
Actually, I don’t want any more kissing, just a glass of water and to get out of here, go home, talk to Fernanda, and sleep for two days straight. This house is bringing back bad memories—it looks like the one we used to have, my friends’ houses, my girlfriends’ houses, places where I wasn’t given a warm welcome. What’s Libardo’s kid doing here? Sometimes I didn’t get past the gates, other times I’d manage to reach the front door, and only rarely was I allowed in. I never complained about it. I told Fernanda on the condition that she didn’t say anything to Libardo, but she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. And then he’d say something like this: when you go to Gabriel’s place, tell his dad I said hi—the two of us set up a car dealership in Panama last year. Or, tell Valentina’s dad we’ve got to get together again, we haven’t seen each other since last January. Like that, pretty smooth but with the information necessary to bust down the doors that were shutting in my face.