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The boy started crying.

“Christ!” his father repeated.

“You’re going to have to calm down,” Grandpa said. “Look at the state of us all.”

The man let out a final cry. He released some of the tension that numbed his muscles. Then he was able to look more calmly at the rest of the family. His wife had sat the boy on the floor, hugging him as if nursing a giant baby. Grandma, shrunk back in fear, looked at them while clutching Grandpa, who was fighting to keep his composure. The missing girl lay on the floor where she’d been left. Judging by her appearance, the boy had told the truth: the girl had not been dead long. Certainly not the six days that had gone by since her disappearance. The skin was bruised and had a viscous texture, but did not smell decomposed, and there weren’t any obvious signs of putrefaction. The man guessed that she had been exposed to the seawater for a long time, to the crashing of the waves and to . . . When he thought about the other blows, the ones he imagined his son might have dealt her, he felt an urge to throw another chair against the wall.

“What have you done to her?!” he screamed at the boy. He swooped on him, unable to contain his rage.

The woman blocked her husband’s path with her back. Grandpa freed himself from Grandma, who was left standing with her arms hanging. He grabbed the man by the neck, pulling him away from the boy, who trembled in his mother’s arms.

When the man saw his son’s frightened face, the fit of rage vanished. He managed to get away from Grandpa. He hugged his wife through the raincoat. The boy was encased between them. The man said sorry several times.

“What have you done to her?” he whispered. His breath warmed the damp space the three of them faced, the parents’ heads brow-to-brow.

“I looked after her,” said the boy. “She was on the rocks.” The last consonant whistled between his teeth. “She wasn’t moving. But she spoke. To the rocks. To me.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

The boy blinked in silence. As if waiting for a question that was worth answering. A bitter smell filled the inside of that embrace when the boy breathed out.

“We’re going to have a baby,” he said.

“A baby?” asked the woman.

“A baby,” he said again.

“Why?”

“Because I did this to her. Like this . . .” The boy moved his body in thrusts to explain himself. He moved his pelvis back and forward, back and forward, back and forward.

“I put a baby in her tummy,” he whispered.

The woman grabbed the boy’s neck. She squeezed it to stop that repugnant display. He shrank back, twisting his body and making a mewing sound, as his mother remembered what some medical prognoses had predicted.

The boy’s mewing stopped.

The parental hug dissolved.

Standing, the four adults exchanged profound looks as impenetrable as the mysteries of the boy’s brain. A deathlike silence overcame the room, broken only by the sound of the rain beating against the roof. Drops of fresh- and saltwater slid down the girl’s face before falling into the puddle that framed her body on the floor.

The woman finished unzipping her raincoat. She took it off and shook it, splashing her son.

“Get off,” she said when he tried to hug her legs.

Watched closely by the rest of the family, the woman approached the dead body. She dropped the coat onto the corpse, covering it from forehead to waist. The hands poked out from each side of the improvised shroud. She pushed them under the raincoat with her feet.

“What are we going to do?”

“What’re our options?” her husband asked.

Grandpa cut in. “We have options?”

After thinking about it for a few seconds, the man persisted, “Well, what can we do?”

Total silence was the only response.

“How’re we going to explain this?” The woman pointed at the shape on the floor.

Grandma had to grip the banister to stay on her feet. “My grandson’s killed her,” she said, and immediately went on. “My grandson’s killed that girl.”

“We don’t know he killed her,” the man said.

“He didn’t do anything to save her,” his wife argued, and she pressed the boy again. “How many days ago did you find her?”

He counted with his hand, twisted at chest height. “Five.”

His mother used the answer as proof.

“And he says she was talking,” she went on. “In other words, she was alive. The girl must’ve fallen on the rocks when she went missing. Onto one of those ledges. And our son found her . . .” Her voice failed when she remembered the two times the boy had run off in the last few days. And how he’d shown up soaked on the road to town. The woman closed her eyes. The darkness showed her an image of her son thrusting his pelvis over the girl’s battered body.

“Oh God, what’re we going to do?” She sucked in saliva loudly and massaged the back of her neck with both hands. She groaned a mixture of pain, despair, and disgust. When she felt her husband grasp her by the waist, she opened her eyes. “What’re we going to do?” she said again.

As if they didn’t know, she explained to the others that the girl was all over the news. That she’d seen her on the television that very afternoon, while she chopped carrots, before it started raining. That the police, the fire department, everyone was searching for her. That the town had organized teams of volunteers to comb the island.

“Even our daughter has just been putting up posters with a photo of her,” she said, pointing at the roll that the wind had blown to the other end of the living room.

The man held a finger to his mouth to stop her from raising her voice. “The last thing we need is for his sister to find out as well.”

“We have to decide,” the woman blurted out.

“Our son’s a minor,” the man suggested. “And he’s not well. What can they do to him?”

“That girl has everyone moved to tears. Imagine what’ll happen when they discover what our son did to her.” She shook her head to free her mind of the image it insisted on projecting. “His life will be over. For the second time.”

Her eyes welled up, full of sadness and guilt, as she remembered with nostalgia the boy who had said good-bye to her the afternoon of the accident.

“And this time it will be forever. He’ll never be forgiven for this.” The woman bit the inside of her lips to stop herself from crying. “It’s not fair . . . Not again.”

The man hardly thought of the legal process. It was enough for him to imagine what the boy’s future would be like, forever rejected by society. A future that had been uncertain since the fall and that would be marred for the rest of his life. He looked at his son, who was stroking the dead body’s hair, and remembered the little boy full of imagination, who played with the toy scarecrow that Grandma had made from two handfuls of straw and tiny hand-sewn clothes, making it walk over his cereal bowl at breakfast. A perverse twist of fate had turned him into his favorite character from
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
. The memory of the boy’s childhood moved the man. His son didn’t deserve the dark future that destiny was intent on offering him.

“It’s not fair,” the woman repeated.

“And what happened to that girl’s not fair, either,” Grandpa said then. “She had a family, too.”

He took a step forward. Some of the sand the woman had brushed from the boy’s hair crunched under his shoes. He walked around the living room, over the muddied rugs, until he reached the telephone that was lying on the floor. Grandpa crouched down, his knees clicking as they bent. He pushed up the glasses that had slid down his nose. First he took the base of the telephone, and then he pulled the wire until he could reach the receiver and hold it to his ear. There was a tone. His knees clicked again as he stood up.

“What’re you going to do?” the boy’s mother asked.

Grandpa put the telephone down on the side table. He picked up the receiver and held it between his cheek and shoulder.

“The only thing we can do,” he answered. “The right thing.” He inserted his finger in one of the holes in the telephone’s rotary dial. He turned it.

“Don’t call,” she pleaded. “Think of your grandson.” The dial returned to its initial position with a crackle.

“What will happen to your grandson?” she persisted. Without answering, Grandpa began to turn it again. “He’s not even responsible for his actions.”

The disk repeated its return journey. Grandpa felt for the hole to dial the third digit before his daughter-in-law could say anything else. He moved his face closer to the telephone, pushing up his glasses to restore his vision.

“This girl’s dead already,” she continued. Grandpa found the hole he was looking for. He inserted his finger. “But your grandson has his whole life ahead of him.”

The finger trembled. The fingernail scratched against the telephone’s plastic cover. When he’d regained his composure, he turned the dial. Then Grandma spoke.

“He’s our grandchild,” she said. She swallowed when she finished the sentence. “We came back to live in the lighthouse for him. We came to look after him.”

With his finger still in the dial, the receiver pressed against his face, Grandpa looked at his wife. He questioned her without the need for words. With just a crease in his forehead, he asked whether she was sure of what she was saying. Sure she knew what it meant. Grandma squeezed the banister’s ball top as if wanting to strangle it.

“I’m sure,” she answered.

His eyes then traveled to the crucifix that hung from her neck. Grandma squeezed it in her fist. She moved her other hand to the back of her neck. The chain came undone, the two ends hanging on each side of her closed hand. She kissed her tensed fingers before hiding the jumble of beads in the pocket of the cardigan that she had knitted herself.

“He’s my grandson,” she whispered as an apology to the ceiling, her sky.

Grandpa understood what his wife’s gesture meant. He accepted her decision. He took his finger from the dial, but didn’t notice it returning to its position and completing the call to emergency services. The woman jumped over the girl’s body in the direction of the side table. She pushed down the tabs to cut off the line just as a female voice took the call. She took the receiver from Grandpa’s shoulder and deposited it on the telephone. Then she turned to address the family.

“I’m not going to hand my son over,” she said in a deep voice. The boy applauded when he heard himself mentioned. On the third clap, with nobody joining in, he gave up the celebration.

“So, what are we going to do with the girl?” Ashamed by his question, the man looked away. He scratched his forehead despite it not itching.

“They still haven’t come to search the north of the island,” explained the woman. “They started from her house, but headed south. They didn’t come up this way.”

“And what’re we supposed to do?” The man fell silent to give someone else the opportunity to voice the idea. He didn’t want to be the one to spell out what they were all thinking.

“Hide her?” he finally said.

A high-pitched whimper escaped from Grandma’s throat. She approached her grandson with a hand over her eyes, so she wouldn’t see the body. The boy’s drool wet her blouse when she hugged him.

“Bury her?” the man asked, pronouncing the words as if they were foreign to his language. The taste of the salty lips returned to his palate. Along with the stench exhaled by the swollen body. And the slimy feel of her shellfish tongue. “Are we really going to bury this girl?”

Nobody answered the question.

Lightning flashed in the sky. For an instant it accentuated the shadows on the faces in the living room. The clap of thunder that followed rumbled under their feet. The windowpanes reproduced the vibration.

The cuckoo popped out of the clock.

It cuckooed once. Twice. Three times.

Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.

Nine times.

“Tell me if that’s what we’re going to do!” the man yelled.

Upstairs, his daughter, alarmed by the intensity of the lightning and her father’s voice, jumped out of bed. Her book fell to the floor on the way to the window, which looked out of the front of the house, illuminated by the porch light. A violent gust of wind picked up just then. The metal fence that demarcated the plot shook wildly from post to post. Invisible hands pulled on the tree branches as if wanting to uproot them. The air whistled through their leaves. The corrugated iron that covered the septic tank fought against the weight of the stone the man had used to pin it down. A corner lifted up. The rock rolled off onto the ground. The metal cover flew into the air like a kite with nobody holding its string. It floated for a few seconds, before a second rush of wind propelled it against the house like a projectile. The daughter’s hands went to her face.

The living room window smashed into a shower of glass when a corner of the metal sheet went through it. Grandma hugged her grandson more tightly. The man had just asked what the hell they were going to do with the girl. The corrugated iron fell inside the living room. It slid along the timber floor until the corpse itself stopped it in its tracks.

It took the man a while to identify the object. Discovering what it was, he looked at his wife, his eyes wide open. His heartbeat quickened. She nodded in response to the arrival of a solution.

“The septic tank,” the man whispered.

Grandpa read the words on his son’s lips. He, too, glimpsed the idea that had formed in his mind. He pushed the bridge of his glasses up his nose and adjusted the arms. Then he began to roll the cuffs of his sweater up his arms, to the elbow.

A door opened upstairs.

“Has the window smashed?” the daughter asked from there.

And she started coming down the stairs.

24

The sudden intrusion of his granddaughter’s voice made Grandpa initiate a series of movements that he did not complete, unable to decide what the best reaction would be. Grandma closed her eyes, hugging the boy, preparing for the worst. The woman looked at the roll of posters that her daughter had been putting up that afternoon. She sighed, accepting what would happen if she discovered what her brother had done.

The man rushed to the girl’s body.