Things We Lost in the Fire

by Mariana Enriquez

The pounding that woke her up was so loud she doubted it was real; it had to be a nightmare. It was making the house shake. The banging on the front door sounded like punches thrown by enormous hands, the hands of a beast, a giant’s fists. Paula sat up in bed and felt her face burning and the sweat soaking the back of her neck. In the darkness the pounding sounded like something was about to get in, about to break down the door. She turned on the light. Miguel was sleeping! It was incredible; maybe he was sick, or he’d fainted. She shook him brutally awake, but by then the pounding had stopped.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You didn’t hear it?”

  “What’s wrong, Pau? Why are you crying, what’s going on?”

  “I can’t believe it didn’t wake you up. Didn’t you hear the pounding on the door? They almost kicked it in!”

  “The front door? I’ll go check.”

  “No!”

  Paula had shouted. A snarling shout, animal in its terror. Miguel turned around while he was pulling on his pants and told her:

  “Let’s not start.”

  Then Paula clenched her teeth so hard she bit her tongue and started to cry harder. He was giving her that look again, and she knew how this was going to go. First he’d get impatient and then overly understanding, soothing; then, in a little while, Miguel would do what she hated most: he would treat her like she was crazy. Let him die, then, she thought. If there’s an armed gang trying to get in, if he’s such a dumbass he’s going to open the door because he doesn’t believe me, let him die. I’ll enjoy the house on my own, I’m sick of him. But Paula got up, ran behind Miguel, and asked him to please not open the door. He saw something in her eyes; he believed her.

  “Let’s take a look from the terrace. You have to be able to see the street from there.”

  “The terrace has wire mesh around it.”

  “I saw, but it’s loose, it’ll come off easy.”

  Miguel effortlessly pulled off the wire, which was practically unattached. He leaned boldly out over the roof’s edge. There was no one on the sidewalk. The light from the street illuminated the front door of the house and there was no room for doubt. The whole block was well lit. Across the street were two parked cars, but through the windows you could see they were empty. Unless someone was lying down in the backseat to hide, but…who would want to stalk them like that?

  “Let’s go to bed,” said Miguel.

  Paula followed him, still crying, still furious, but also relieved. She was even happy at having had a too-vivid dream, if that was what it had been. Miguel went back to bed without saying a word. He didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to argue, and she was grateful.

  In the morning the pounding seemed very distant, and Paula resigned herself and accepted that it must have happened in a nightmare. It helped that Miguel had already left for work by the time she got up, so she didn’t have to face him or talk about what she had heard. She didn’t have to endure his sad expression. It was so unfair. Just because she’d been depressed, like so many people were, and because she took medication—in very low doses—Miguel thought she was sick. She’d been surprised to find out that her husband was so prejudiced, but over the past year it had become clear. At the start of her depression, he’d insisted on getting her out of bed; he told her to go running, or to the gym, or to open the windows, visit her girlfriends. When Paula decided to consult a psychiatrist, Miguel flew into a rage and told her not to even think of going to one of those charlatans. Why did she have to talk to someone else, he asked. Didn’t she trust him? He’d even said they probably needed to have a baby. He started talking about her biological clock and a bunch of other weird ideas that at the time hadn’t mattered to her, but that when she started to recover had bothered her to the point where she started wondering if she even wanted to stay with Miguel. He had never shown any other kind of prejudice; it was directed exclusively toward psychiatrists, mental problems, madness. They’d talked about it not long ago: Miguel had admitted to her that in his opinion, except for serious illnesses, all emotional problems could be solved by force of will.

  “That’s some real bullshit,” she’d told him. “You really think an obsessive-compulsive person can just stop, I don’t know, washing his hands over and over?”

  It turned out that Miguel did think so. That an alcoholic could just stop drinking and an anorexic could start eating again if they really wanted to. He was making a huge effort—and he told her so while staring at the floor—to accept her going to a psychiatrist and taking pills, because he thought it was useless and the problem would pass on its own, that it was normal to be sad after the problems she’d had at work.

  “But I’m not just sad, Miguel,” she’d answered, cold and ashamed. Ashamed of his ignorance, and little disposed to tolerate it.

  “I know, I know,” he said.

  Paula knew that her mother-in-law, who was wonderful and who loved her, had talked to Miguel. More accurately, she’d given him a piece of her mind.

  “I don’t know, Paula dear, how my son turned out to be such an idiot,” she’d said over coffee. “In my house no one thinks like that. If none of us goes to therapy, it’s only because, thank God, we don’t need it. Although maybe that numbskull son of mine does. I’m truly sorry, dear.”

  Now she was waiting for her mother-in-law, Monica, who was supposed to come over and drop off Elly, the cat. They’d decided to bring her the day after the move so she wouldn’t bother them or get too nervous. Cat and mother-in-law arrived as Paula was finishing arranging pots, plates, and pans in the kitchen. She made coffee for Monica while the cat inspected the new house, sniffing everything, frightened, her tail between her legs.

  “It’s a beautiful house,” said Monica. “So big! And there’s so much light, you two really got lucky! It’s impossible to rent in Buenos Aires.”

  She wanted to see the courtyard. She said she’d bring some plants over next time, and she just loved the terrace; she promised meat for a barbecue as soon as they were settled. She left after kissing Paula and the cat, and she left a small bouquet of freesia as a gift. Paula loved her mother-in-law for things like that: for how she didn’t stay too long when she visited, how she never criticized except when asked for her opinion, how she knew how to help without overacting.

  Since she had first seen the terrace she’d been worried about Elly, because even though the cat was fixed and surely wouldn’t wander far, she would probably decide to investigate the rooftops for the first time in her life—she had only ever lived in apartments before. There was nothing Paula could do; it was an unsolvable problem. Not even the mesh would stop a cat—it would only help her climb. It was hot, and Paula went up to the terrace. She didn’t feel like studying. Sitting on the wall, she saw an enormous cat, gray with short hair, walk across the neighbor’s courtyard. Elly’s boyfriend, she thought, and she was happy to have a neighbor with a cat. He could recommend the best veterinarian in the neighborhood and help her look for Elly if she ran away.

  That night Miguel still didn’t mention the pounding, and she was grateful. They ate a delicious lentil stew from the delicatessen and went to bed early. Miguel was tired and he went right to sleep. Paula had more trouble. She listened to Elly, who still hadn’t calmed down and was roaming around the house, attacking boxes with her claws, climbing up crates or onto the stove. And she was waiting for the pounding on the door. She’d left the courtyard light on to shine into the bedroom, so they wouldn’t have to sleep in total darkness. The pounding didn’t come back.

  At some point near dawn, however, she saw that someone very small was sitting at the foot of the bed. At first she thought it must be Elly, but it was too big to be a cat. She couldn’t see more than a shadow. It looked like a child, but there was no hair on top of his head; you could clearly see the line where he was balding, and he was very small, thin. More curious than frightened, Paula sat up in bed, and when she did, the supposed child went running out. But he ran too fast to be human. Paula didn’t want to thi
nk. Surely it had been Elly because it had run like a cat. It was Elly and I’m half asleep and I don’t realize I’m half asleep and I think I’m seeing dwarf-elves, what a moron. She knew she was going to have trouble going back to sleep, so she took a pill and saw nothing more until she woke up very late the next morning.

  —

  The days passed, and Paula and Miguel gradually dealt with the boxes and crates, and neither the pounding nor the dwarf-cat came back. Paula convinced herself that it had been the stress from the move; she’d read once that moving was the third most stressful life event, after the death of a loved one and being fired. In the past two years she’d gone through all three: her father had died, she’d been fired from her job, and she’d moved. And then there was her idiot of a husband, who thought she could get over it all just by trying. How she despised him sometimes. In the calm afternoons in the new house, while she went on organizing and cleaning and studying, sometimes she thought about leaving him. But she had to get her life together before she made any decisions. Finish her sociology degree, first; a pollster friend had already offered her a job at his consulting firm as soon as she graduated. She could start working sooner, of course, but Paula knew she wasn’t ready. Next year, then. I’ll go back to work, and if things stay the same with Miguel, it’s over.

  She even thought Miguel would be relieved. It had been a year, at least, since they’d had sex. Miguel didn’t seem to mind, and she certainly didn’t want to. Their life together was bearably calm, but it wasn’t friendly. We need time, Paula thought; maybe in a year they would even start fucking again, or they’d end up as friends, not actually a couple, and the thing would relax and they could keep living together, the way things happened with so many people who loved each other but weren’t in love anymore. For now she had to finish her classes—there were only three, and what she’d read so far hadn’t seemed all that complicated.

  When she saw it, she was taking a break between one photocopied paper and another, hanging clean clothes from the line on the terrace. Elly was sleeping in the sun; the cat showed no interest in exploring the neighborhood’s roofs, and Paula was grateful. She peeked into the neighbor’s courtyard, at the maybe five or six flagstones she could see, red and old like those of a colonial house. She was looking for the gray cat she’d never seen again. Could it have died? She never heard it, either. The next-door neighbor was a single man who wore glasses and had a very strange, unpredictable schedule, and who greeted her politely but without warmth. She didn’t see the cat, and as she was turning back to the wet clothes, a movement in the courtyard caught her eye. It wasn’t the cat; it was a leg. A child’s leg, naked, with a chain attached to the ankle. Paula took a deep breath and leaned farther out, almost in danger of falling from the terrace. It was a leg, no doubt about it, and now she could see part of the torso and confirm that it was a child, not an old person. A very thin and completely naked boy; she could see his genitals. His skin was dirty, gray from grime. Paula didn’t know whether to shout at him, to go down immediately, or to call the police…She’d never seen the chain in the yard before—though it was true she didn’t spy on the neighbor’s courtyard every day—and she had never heard a child’s voice when she was on the terrace.

  She clucked as though to call her cat, trying not to alert the boy’s jailers, and then the small body down below moved out of her field of vision. But on the five or six flagstones she could still see the chain, motionless now, as if the boy were intent, waiting for her to call again with no way of escaping.

  Paula brought her hands to her cheeks. She knew what to do in these cases. She had worked for a long time as a social worker. But after what had happened a year ago—after she’d been fired, after the hearing—she didn’t even want to think about taking responsibility again for lost children, damaged children. She ran down the stairs but didn’t make it to the bathroom. She threw up in the living room, spattering one of the boxes of books, and she cried sitting down, her straight, loose hair almost brushing the floor, the cat looking at her with her head cocked and her round, green eyes curious.

  It’s the boy I saw that night, weeks ago, at the foot of the bed, she thought. It’s the same one. What was he doing? They let him out sometimes? What do I do? The first things she did were to clean up the vomit, unload the books, and throw the stinking box into the trash. Then she went back to the terrace to peer into the neighbor’s courtyard. The chain was in the same place, but the boy had moved a little and now she could see his foot. There was no doubt it was a human foot, a child’s foot. She could call child services, the police; there were many options, but first she wanted Miguel to see him. She wanted him to know, to help her: if Miguel shared the responsibility with her and they managed to do something for the boy, she felt like maybe they could recover something of what they used to have: those years of taking the car wherever they felt like on weekends, to provincial villages in the middle of nowhere, to eat good barbecue and take photos of old houses, or the Sundays of sex, with the mattress on the floor and the marijuana cured with honey that her husband’s brother grew.

  Paula resolved to be prudent. In nearly a month, it was the first time she’d seen the boy. She wasn’t going to bring Miguel running up to the terrace to show him the chain, the foot. The boy could move out of sight, and she didn’t want Miguel to doubt her. She would tell him calmly first, and then they’d go up to the terrace together. She was about to call him but she stopped herself. She went up to the terrace several times, and each time she saw the chain or the chain with the foot. She thought of all the stories about children tied to beds, chained up, locked in, that she’d heard in her days as a social worker. She’d never had to work on a case like that; they were rare in the city. People said those children never recovered. That they had terrifying lives and died young; they were too damaged, their scars always visible.

  When Miguel came home, a little earlier than usual, she didn’t even wait for him to drop his bag on the sofa before she started telling him about the boy. He just kept saying, “What? What?” And she repeated, “The neighbor has a boy chained up in the courtyard, no, it’s not that strange, there are a lot of cases like that, it’s not crazy, let’s go up, let’s go up, you’ll see, we have to figure out what to do.” But when they went together up to the terrace and peered into the neighbor’s courtyard, the chain wasn’t there anymore. No boy and no leg. Paula whistled, but the only thing that happened was that Elly turned up, meowing happily, thinking she was being called to eat. Miguel did what Paula feared most.

  “You’re crazy,” he said, and went downstairs.

  In the kitchen he threw a glass against the wall, and when Paula came in she was met by the glint of glass shards.

  “You don’t even realize!” he shouted. “You don’t realize you’re hallucinating! Right, there’s going to be a boy chained up in the courtyard. Obviously. You don’t get that it’s because of your job; you’re obsessed.”

  Paula yelled too, she didn’t know what. Insults, justifications. She wanted to stop him when he stormed out and left the door open, but then a luminous calm settled over her. Why was she acting like she really was crazy? Why was she giving Miguel more fuel? He had decided for no reason not to trust her, probably because he wanted to leave her, too. Why was she acting like there was something rational in that argument over her mental health? She had seen a boy in the neighbor’s courtyard, and he was in chains. She had never hallucinated before. If Miguel didn’t believe her, that was his problem. She went up to the terrace one more time and sat on the wall to wait for the boy to come back into view. Miguel wouldn’t come back that night. She didn’t care. She had someone to save. She found a flashlight in a box and settled in.

  The incident Paula had been fired for was also the result of stress, but sometimes it seemed as though Miguel just couldn’t forgive her. As though he’d written her off as a worthless piece of shit, just like her former employers had, like she herself was tempted, at times, to do. That week had gotte
n off to a terrible start. Paula was the director of a children’s shelter on the city’s south side. It was a fairly small house, with a damp game room almost empty of games, a TV that provided the only entertainment, a kitchen, and a bedroom with three bunk beds, only six beds in total. That was good; it was too complicated to deal with many young children. Friday night, always a difficult night, they’d called her at home. She was fast asleep, she was tired. They asked her to come in right away because there was a serious problem. She drove there half asleep and found a scene that was unbelievable in its stupidity. One of the kids, around six years old, was very high—he’d arrived the day before when she wasn’t working, and no one had searched him carefully; he must have had the drugs on him. He’d shat himself while watching TV. The boy had diarrhea and the game room stank. One of the two supervisors on duty, who was an imbecile, wanted to put the boy back out on the street. According to her the rules said that they didn’t have the capacity to deal with addicted children. The fight with the other supervisor, who insisted that throwing the boy out was cruelty, first of all, and abandonment to boot, had almost come to blows. The boy, meanwhile, was drooling in his bed and smearing shit all over the sheets. When Paula arrived she had to yell at the supervisors, explain to the two women how to do their jobs, and then help them clean up—the janitors wouldn’t come until the next day. The boy was transferred, and so was the supervisor who’d wanted to throw him out. But, as tends to happen in social services, it would take them a long time to find a replacement. So Paula decided to take over until the new person arrived: twelve-hour shifts that she alternated with the other supervisor and a substitute, an eager young guy named Andrés.

  On Wednesday, one of the boys escaped. He managed to climb up to the roof from the kitchen window. It was noon when they realized he’d fled, but they didn’t know how long he’d been gone. Paula could clearly remember how she trembled from head to foot thinking about the boy, out in the street again, dodging cars, stealing half-eaten hamburgers. He was a boy from the bus station who surely turned tricks in the bathroom and who, though he was only six, knew all the city’s nooks and crannies, down to the criminals’ hideouts. A boy who was hard like a war veteran—worse, because he lacked a veteran’s pride—and who spoke a deep dialect understood only by the other children and some social workers more experienced than her.