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 think. 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.