Both Perla and Inés look toward the doorway. In their tumult, in their madness, they have not been able to hear the unsteady tapping of the cane as the old man walked down the hallway. By the cold fury in his face Perla knows he’s heard everything, and what’s more, he knows it’s true. Perla is hardly able to stand in place and must clutch the arm of a sofa to steady herself.
Osorio glares at the women.
“Both of you should go to your rooms,” he says.
—
The salesman is no longer welcome at the house. Her father does not order him barred from the premises, but Perla knows he can’t set foot again in this place.
In the evenings, when Perla reads to her father, she feels the weight of his gaze on her, the leaden anger. She is ashamed and she is alone once again, counting the days, watching the rain drip down the windowpanes. Her blood is frozen solid, her heart is a block of ice.
That summer is hard on her father, and his body seems to grow frailer as the weeks go by. The doctor does not think he’ll make it another year, but then again, Perla has heard this prophecy before.
Perla waits. Her whole life is waiting. Sometimes she feels she is always waiting for death, for the gravedigger.
Yet he lingers, clings to life. Perla sleeps in a cot next to his bed now, in case he should need something during the night. She spoons broth into his mouth and combs his hair and she waits.
God, this waiting, it’s too long.
He mutters recriminations, always sour about the past.
“I could have kept the business if you useless girls had done as you were told,” he says. “Silly hussies, the lot of you.”
Sometimes he doesn’t rage, he weeps, and that’s even worse than his anger.
One day, when the rain falls light upon the roof, and his breathing islabored, her father clutches her hand and looks at her with wide, scared eyes.
“Don’t leave my side, Perla,” he whispers.
He’s going to die,she thinks.Today is the day he dies.
Perla stares into his eyes, and she knows all he wants in those final moments is to have her there, holding his hand. To not be alone in those last, dreadful few minutes.
She’s waited for this. And yet she is suddenly unprepared for it. She is suddenly afraid. She feels death brushing her skin, closer than it’s ever been before, more tender than any lover.
And she fears it. She cannot bear to sit in that room with death, she cannot breathe. She thinks of black lace and coffins and the gravedigger with his spade. Her father stares at her and she is reminded of her sister.
No wonder her blood has turned to ice. This is a house of ghosts. This is a house of echoes.
She wants to run out of that room, that house, but she remains steadfast, holding his hand even as she thinks of another death, of another pair of eyes, of her sister at the foot of the stairs.
—
When her father dies, relief mingles with grief. She had grown to despise him, her resentment nourished day by day, and yet she misses him.
It’s her and Inés now. Her and that recalcitrant girl.
A letter arrives one day not long after Osorio’s passing. Perla opens it and is surprised to see it’s from Inés’s father. He is ill and wishes to reconcile with his daughter; he wants her to join him in Mexico City.
Perla knows what will happen if Inés reads this letter: she will go to him. Her niece has longed to escape the confines of the guesthouse for a while now, ever since Salvador rushed off to the city. Perhaps since before that. Should this opportunity present itself, Perla does not doubt the girl will never return.
What will Perla do then? She’d be all alone in this musty guesthousewith its sepia portraits and its furniture of a previous epoch. When she grows old and frail, nobody will hold her hand as she lies in bed dying.
The eyes of her sister flash in her mind, searing and accusing, and Perla shoves the letter into a drawer of her desk, underneath the watchful picture of her father.
It’s not that she intends to keep the letters from her niece. The first time it is a nameless fear that forces her to conceal the letter. The second time she cannot begin to imagine an explanation about why she’d kept the first letter hidden, and it is easier to place the second one in the desk than to try to justify her thoughts to Inés.
By the third letter she knows she’ll never let her niece look at the missives, but still she guards them carefully, pretending she needs the right moment to speak to Inés about this delicate matter.
