The Whisperer Read Online Free PDF Page B

but to be able to stop hoping. Because hope kills more slowly.
    But Mila didn’t believe the story of “liberating truth.” She had learned that by heart, the first time she had found a missing person. She had felt it that afternoon, after bringing Pablo and Elisa home.
    For the little boy there were cries of joy in the district, festive car horns and parades of cars.
    Not for Elisa; too much time had passed.
    After saving her, Mila had brought her to a specialist center where social workers had taken care of her. They had given her food and clean clothes. For some reason they’re always one or two sizes too big, Mila thought. Perhaps because the people they were meant for wasted away during those years of oblivion, and had been found just before they vanished away entirely.
    Elisa hadn’t said a word all that time. She had allowed herself to be looked after, accepting everything they did to her. Even when Mila had told her she would bring her home, she had said nothing.
    Staring at her locker, the young officer couldn’t help seeing in her mind the faces of Elisa Gomes’s parents when she had turned up with Elisa at their door. They were unprepared, and even a little embarrassed. Perhaps they thought she would be bringing them a ten-year-old child, and not that fully grown girl with whom they no longer had anything in common.
    Elisa had been an intelligent and very precocious little girl. She had started talking early. The first word she had said had been “May”—the name of her teddy bear. Her mother, however, would also remember her last one: “tomorrow,” the end of the phrase “see you tomorrow,” uttered in the doorway before she went off for a sleepover at a friend’s house. But that tomorrow had taken too long to arrive. And her yesterday was a very long day that showed no sign of coming to an end.
    In her parents’ minds Elisa had gone on living like a ten-year-old girl, with her bedroom full of dolls and Christmas presents piled up around the fireplace. This was immortalized like a photograph in their memory, imprisoned as if by a magic spell.
    And even though Elisa had returned, they would go on waiting for the little girl they had lost. Without ever finding peace.
    After a teary hug and a predictable emotional outburst, Mrs. Gomes had brought them in and offered them tea and biscuits. She had treated her daughter as you would treat a guest. Perhaps secretly hoping that she would leave at the end of the visit, letting her and her husband return to the sense of deprivation that they had come to find so comfortable.
    Mila had always compared sadness to an old cupboard that you’d like to get rid of but which ends up staying where it is, and after a while emanates a certain smell that fills the room. And over time you get used to it and you end up being a part of the smell yourself.
    Elisa had come back, and her parents would have liked to shake off their own mourning, and give back all the compassion bestowed on them during those years. Never again would they have a reason to be sad. How much courage would it take to tell the rest of the world about their new unhappiness at having a stranger walking around the house?
    After an hour of civilities, Mila had said good-bye, and she had felt as if she had noticed a plea for help on Elisa’s mother’s face. “Now what do I do?” the woman cried mutely, terrified about coming to terms with this new reality.
    Mila too had a truth to confront: the fact that Elisa Gomes had been found purely by chance. If her abductor had not felt a need to enlarge the “family” by taking Pablito as well, no one would ever have known what had happened. And Elisa would have remained closed away in that world created for her alone, and for the obsession of her jailer. First as a daughter, then as a faithful bride.
    Mila closed the locker on those thoughts. Forgetting, forgetting, she said to herself. That’s the only medicine.
    The district was emptying, and she felt