13

ADRIANA

Thursday, February 2, 2012

I invited him to come down to my bedroom. Like any tedious cousin with an ounce of self-pride, Marcos had insisted on accompanying me right to my front door—in case I got lost along the way, I suppose.

We had arranged to catch up and share a few pinchos . When I got to the Río de la Pila, Marcos was waiting for me with his arms outstretched like a windmill. His hair was more close-cropped than it had been, and his bull neck had thickened somewhat with age, but other than that he was the Marcos of old. He invariably wore a plaid lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up to biceps that were thicker than my legs. Although we were in constant phone and email contact, this was our first face-to-face meeting since I’d returned to Santander. His practice as a vet took in a large expanse of Cantabria and Asturias, so he was almost always busy. Family genes, I guess: not being available is in our blood.

Once we’d reached the entrance to my building and had gone up to my apartment on the third floor, Marcos followed me down the hallway, presumably checking out a place he hadn’t been inside for years. As we passed the door to my mother’s study, he stopped with a puzzled look on his face.

“What’s this, Dana?”

He was referring to my mother’s consultation notebooks, which were scattered in unstable piles all over the floor of the room. I delved into them every evening in the hope that they’d provide some clues to her last days.

“I need to ask you a favor.”

“Are those your mother’s notebooks?”

“I need you to tell me the name of the police inspector in charge of my mother’s case. I wasn’t paying much attention to anything back then.”

“How the hell would I remember?” he snorted uneasily, avoiding my eyes.

“Do you remember anything? Which police station? Which unit?” I persisted. “I feel lost. I don’t know where to begin.”

“And what exactly is it you’re looking for?”

“I want to speak to the person in charge of the investigation. Grandfather told me that they didn’t reach a definitive conclusion, but I’d like them to reopen the case. I’d like to know if they took a statement from anyone . . . Those sorts of things. I’d also like to talk to your mother, in case she remembers anything.”

Marcos began to move nervously around the room trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to avoid the stacks of notebooks. “Don’t even think about it. Don’t involve my mother in this. Given her delicate health, the last thing she needs is to be reminded of her sister’s death. Anyway, I don’t get it—what do you want to know? Your mother died. Period.”

“No, my mother didn’t ‘die. Period.’ My mother either overdosed accidentally or she committed suicide.”

“And what’s the difference, Dana? She’s not here anymore. You’ve grown up on your own. You’ve experienced lots of ups and downs and found your own way to settle down. End of story.”

“No way. The story will end the day I know for sure what happened.”

He looked at me silently with a mix of impotence and obstinacy, and clenched his jaw.

“Marcos, if you don’t give me what I need, I will go talk to your mother.”

“Dana, I have to go. Elisa is waiting for me at home. And by the way, why don’t you two get together? Whatever the reason you’re avoiding each other, there’s nothing that can’t be sorted out with a chat.”

“Well, remember what I said!” I yelled into the emptiness he’d left in the room.

“And you remember what I said!” he yelled from the passage without turning round.

And he walked out.

I was left picking up the remains of that disaster, putting the notebooks I’d finished reading back on the bookshelf. For years I’d fed the fantasy that my mother kept a personal diary hidden somewhere among her work notebooks. At this stage, that was all it was: a fantasy.

Even so, in less than a week I had managed to search through almost all of the notebooks, as well as in all the drawers, on top of all the cupboards, and in the most unlikely places. But I’d found nothing. There was only one final bookshelf left, and I decided to finish the job that very evening.

The bookshelf had sliding doors that had always been left half-open. So I started to go through the remaining notebooks one by one, though I expected to find little of interest to a layperson like me.

Patient 538: female, 71 years old.

Diagnosis: manic episode present, with no psychotic symptoms.

Previous failure with cognitive behavioral therapy.

Patient 539: male, 21 years old.

Diagnosis: bipolar disorder and other persistent emotional disorders.

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

My mother wrote all her clinical histories by hand—with that ever-so-recognizable, minute, tight handwriting. I kept putting aside finished notebooks until, as I was pushing back one of the sliding doors of the bookshelf, I came across something unexpected.

A small portable safe I’d never seen before with a four-digit combination lock.