before Ama finds out.”
Ros opens her eyes and pushes herself up on one elbow. She heard everything, but she repeats the question anyway. That’s just how Rosaura is. “Amaia, what’s wrong? Why aren’t you asleep?” She regards Amaia with infinite patience.
“Ros, I’m really, really scared. Let me sleep next to you.” Her voice breaks. She’s about to cry, but she wills herself not to, because Flora makes fun of her whenever she weeps.
“Amaia, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” As usual, Ros speaks slowly to her, as if Amaia is just a baby. “Flora’s bed is by the door, and I’m here too. We’ll protect you.”
“Not me!” Flora contradicts her. “I don’t protect anybody at night. All I do is sleep. And you two had better do that too. I’m going to turn off the light.”
Amaia is terribly tired, and she feels everything slipping away. “No, no, no, don’t turn out the light, don’t do that, don’t turn it off, don’t turn out the light!”
Despite the chill in their bedroom, Amaia is sweating in terror, her eyes squeezed shut. She’s sinking fast. She tries opening her eyes wide, but that triggers the first tears, and after that, they flow freely down her cheeks, a torrent of fear and anguish.
“Please!” she begs in a whisper, so exhausted she’s almost inaudible.
Moved by her weeping, Ros opens the covers and makes room. “Come on. Get in.”
Amaia curls up tight against her sister, making herself as tiny as possible. Ros is talking to her from somewhere far away. “But you’ll have to go back to your own bed before Ama comes to get us up, because she’ll get mad if she sees you here. Amaia? Are you listening?”
Amaia doesn’t hear her. Safe now, she’s sleeping deeply.
Then . . .
Her eyes fly open. Instead of the deep silence she expects, there is a loud pealing in her head. The bells continue, reverberating, ding-dong. She sits up and looks at her sisters, amazed that the deafening clamor hasn’t awakened them. She realizes that behind the tolling, there’s a furious roaring, like gusting wind or a house on fire. She senses something close by; she turns to look at the doorway and glimpses the pearly silk of her mother’s robe, billowing as she walks down the hall. Amaia slips out of bed, and her bare feet encounter the floor, now cold; the house is freezing. She peeks out and sees the amber-colored light reflected from the living room. Her mother is still visible, far away, her back turned to Amaia. The rear hem of the robe floats after her, a ghostly wake. Ding-dong! Amaia tells herself that it has to be a dream. No one in this house, no one in all of Elizondo, could sleep through this tolling.
The ominous insistence of the bells shocks her. She puts her hands over her ears, trying to shut out the sound, and she becomes aware of an evil portent—a loud, dreadful breathing that fills the intervals between the peals. She stares about her. Blood streams from the bedrooms, pooling in the living room. Shaking with cold and fright, she goes slowly down the hall.
She finds an entire family laid out on the floor, first the adults, then the children from oldest to youngest. The littlest one is her own age. Ding-dong! The horrid, deafening tolling erupts from the walls of the music room in an evocation of Judgment Day. Amaia is shaking violently from the cold. The arms of the dead lie lax along their bodies; she avoids looking at their hands. Each head in that precisely laid-out line is oriented toward the river that Amaia knows is north of them. Small-caliber bullets have left a dark circular mark in each forehead. She’s terrified because she knows their wounds are impossibly deep. The hair of the littlest boy, the one closest to her, is tousled and tangled as if he’d squirmed and thrashed under the covers in his sleep. Blood from his broken skull has gushed out and soaked his hair, turning it into a dark, sticky mass that looks like molasses. The blood puddles next to him, slowly oozing toward Amaia. Her heart breaks. She feels an irresistible urge to stanch the flow with her own hands, even though she knows she shouldn’t.
She opens her eyes and sees that Rosario’s face is inches from her own. Her mother’s expression is one of absolute disdain.
“Maybe you think it doesn’t matter when? One night is the same as another?” Rosario