The Room She Left

Constanza had promised herself that she would not cry before she was even through the door. After ten years in Germany, the long flight to Santiago and the bus to Valparaíso had taken almost a whole day. The December sun was so bright after the northern winter that she had to shade her eyes. The house was exactly where she had left it, halfway up one of the steep hills above the harbour, its blue paint a little more faded than she remembered. Her younger brother, Ignacio, was waiting on the step.

They hugged awkwardly, the way people do when neither of them knows how long the hug should last. Her little brother had become a man with a beard, and she noticed with a pang that he stood exactly as their mother used to, arms folded, head slightly on one side. "You've lost weight," he said. "You've grown a beard," she said. Neither of them mentioned their mother's funeral four years earlier, the one she had not managed to fly home for.

He carried her suitcase up the narrow staircase and, without a word, opened the door at the end of the corridor. Constanza stopped on the threshold. Nothing had changed. Her old posters were still on the walls, and her paintbrushes still stood in a jam jar on the windowsill. The bedspread with the yellow flowers was the one she had slept under at seventeen. Yet there was not a speck of dust anywhere. The window had been cleaned, the sheets smelled of soap, and a sprig of jasmine had been put in a glass by the bed.

The door, of course, still had no lock. At fifteen she had begged for one for months. When their parents refused, Ignacio, who was seven at the time, had made her a key out of cardboard and silver paper so that, as he put it, the room would be properly hers. She had left it on the shelf the day she went away. Now she looked at the shelf. The cardboard key wasn't there.

"You've kept everything," she said slowly. "Ten years, Ignacio. You could have turned this into an office, or a room for guests. Why didn't you?" He looked at the window, then at the floor. "Dinner's at nine," he said. "I've made cazuela." "That's not an answer." For a long moment, he said nothing at all.

Then he took out his wallet and, from behind his ID card, pulled out something flat and soft with age. It was the cardboard key, its silver paper almost worn away. He put it in her hand, closed her fingers around it, and went downstairs to see to the dinner.