The Missing Pages

Calablanca woke up washed clean and hungover from the storm: seaweed on the promenade, a beach-bar parasol on the church roof and the whole town going over the night at the bakery as if it had been a match.

Alba didn’t go to the bakery. She went to Tomás’s house.

He lived in the last house on the cape, a low cottage with shutters painted the same green as the lighthouse door, because when the Port Authority had sent him to paint one, there had been paint left over for the other. He opened the door in his vest with the transistor on, as if he had been expecting her.

"The pages," said Alba, without saying hello. "From the notebook. You know where they are."

Tomás didn’t deny it. That was one of the good things about Tomás: he didn’t waste time denying things. He stood still in the doorway, cap in hand, and all of a sudden he looked much older than he had the afternoon before.

"Come in," he said. "I’ll make you a coffee. This is a long one."

Tomás’s kitchen had a checked oilcloth, a hardware-store calendar from seven years ago and a Danish butter-cookie tin that hadn’t held cookies in decades. He opened it in front of her. Inside, among loose buttons and electricity bills, was a cream-colored envelope with her name written on the front.

Alba recognized the handwriting before she read it. It was her grandmother’s.

"Your grandmother Remedios gave it to me the last winter," said Tomás. "When she already knew what she had. She made me promise to give it to you if the boy came back. 'If he comes back, Tomás. Only if he comes back. And if he doesn’t, you burn it.'." He cleared his throat. "I’ve had it in my hand to burn four times. I’m a cowardly old man."

Inside the envelope were the pages. Three sheets from the lighthouse notebook, torn out flush with the spine, in nineteen-year-old Leo’s slanted, hurried hand:

«Change of plan. My father has seen the tickets and he’ll be at the station. DON’T GO TO THE STATION. I’ll wait for you here, at the lighthouse, at eight, and we’ll walk down along the beach to the nine o’clock train together. If you don’t come, I’ll understand. But come. L.»

And behind them, folded in four, a squared page from the kiosk notebook, the kind her grandmother used for ice-cream orders. The handwriting was shakier than Alba remembered.

«Alba, my girl: I tore them out. I went up to the lighthouse that night because I heard you tossing and turning and I wanted to leave you a good-luck note in your notebook, and I read what the boy had written. I was so frightened of being left alone with the kiosk and with this thing in my chest that I tore them out without thinking. Afterwards I didn’t know how to put it right. I saw you come back from the station and I didn’t dare. Forgive me, if you can. And if he comes back and you still want to, don’t listen to me: listen to the lighthouse. Your grandmother, who loves you badly but very much. R.»

Alba read the note twice. Then she laid it on the oilcloth, very slowly, and covered her face with her hands. She didn’t cry much. She cried just enough, which in her family had always been little and all at once, like August storms.

Tomás put a cup of coffee in front of her that neither of them drank.

"She loved you," he said. "She did an enormous foolish thing because she loved you. Both things are true."

"I know," said Alba. "That’s the worst part."

She found Leo at the Town Hall, in the council chamber, surrounded by plans spread over the long table and empty coffee cups. Mayor Quintana was on the phone in the corridor, in the tone of voice he used for things he didn’t want overheard and which could therefore be heard throughout the building. He was saying «hotel», he was saying «Monday», he was saying «an opportunity for the town».

Alba laid the pages on top of the plans. Leo recognized them at once. He read Remedios’s note without a word, and when he had finished he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger for a long while.

"Ten years," he said.

"Ten years."

There were no embraces, no scenes. There was something better: Leo laid his open hand on the table, on top of the note, and Alba laid hers on top of his, and they stayed like that for a moment, like two people who have finally found the same piece of paper.

Then Leo cleared his throat and pointed at the plans.

"I have to hand in the report tomorrow at twelve," he said. "And I have a problem."

He explained the crack to her in numbers. The cape giving way underneath. A solution that existed —micropiles, a steel belt around the base, two months of work— and that cost forty thousand euros the Town Hall claimed not to have. And the other solution, the one the mayor had spent all morning selling over the phone: declare the lighthouse unsafe, knock it down in the autumn and leave the cape free for whatever came next.

"If I sign that it’s safe as it is, I’m lying," said Leo. "If I sign that it isn’t, on Monday somebody turns up with a bulldozer asking which way in."

Alba looked out of the council chamber window. From there you could see the lighthouse, white at that hour, with its half-painted whale circling the base.

Two days to go until the Night of the Lanterns.