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 gotten 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.
The boy turned up in a hospital that very same night; they called to tell her while she was patrolling Villa 21, where little girls, twelve-year-old addicts, got into trucks to suck the drivers’ cocks and make enough money for the next fix. He’d been hit by a car while he was high. But he was fine, hadn’t even broken a bone, he was just a little bruised. Paula didn’t go see him; Andrés went to visit. That boy was transferred, too. Paula started to feel like they couldn’t do the job, like the children were slipping right through her fingers.