Amaia’s childhood trauma and fear resurfacing

Amaia’s childhood trauma and fear resurfacing marks the collapse of a fragile peace: near the end of pregnancy, physical pain and disturbing visions bring back a terror she had spent years learning to face. The fear is not simply anxiety about childbirth. It is an old response to her mother’s menace, returning through dreams and bodily episodes at the very moment Amaia’s life seems most secure.

Identity and Trigger

Amaia recognizes that the fear accompanying her contractions is deeper than ordinary apprehension about giving birth. As the pain tightens around her body, she recalls carrying this fear for years like an unwelcome, invisible traveler that appeared when she was most vulnerable. The episode makes the past felt in the present: her body is in labor, but the terror has a history that childbirth alone cannot explain.

The recurrence comes after a notably peaceful pregnancy. Amaia had slept without nightmares or sudden alarms and felt unusually energetic during the day. She had also experienced the pregnancy as a source of calm, following years of work to confront what had happened to her and to keep the defenses she had built from closing again. That calm begins to break about a week before the labor scene, when the old fear returns. Its timing gives the recurrence its force: an apparent interval of safety proves not to be a permanent cure.

The Earlier Fear and Its Name

Amaia’s memory reaches back to childhood, when she was five and her sister Rosaura, then ten, came to tell her to return to her own bed before their mother found them. The warning opens onto the particular terror of Amaia’s bedroom: she dreaded sleeping in her own bed because she expected her mother to come and watch her in the night. She imagined the coldness in her mother’s eyes and the contempt in her expression, and believed she would sense her mother’s contained hatred in the rhythm of her breathing.

The child’s fear is rendered as a state of enforced stillness. Amaia would lie with her eyes shut, pretending to sleep while knowing that her mother knew she was pretending. Tension gradually seized her limbs; fear became so bodily that even her need to urinate threatened to betray her. The remembered command not to open her eyes repeats insistently in her mind. The memory gives the adult recurrence its shape: helplessness, anticipation, and the effort to remain motionless rather than draw danger closer.

Amaia’s grandmother Juanita had given the night terror a name, Gaueko night presence, the being of the night. In Amaia’s recollection, fear takes the form of a presence hovering above the bed and filling dreams with terrifying figures. Later, understanding what had happened and facing the truth allowed Amaia to open a breach in the defenses that had kept those events buried. Yet she understands that this was a battle won, not a final victory. Her recovery depends on keeping that breach open, and the return of fear shows how vulnerable that work remains.

The Dead Return in a Dream

The renewed fear is also given a face. Before the labor scene, Amaia dreams of Lucía Aguirre, the woman whose disappearance she has been investigating. Lucía appears in the red-and-white knitted sweater seen in a photograph at her home, with a gold crucifix on her chest and short blond hair. The figure is not the smiling, confident woman in the photograph: she stands bewildered and apathetic, shivering as if buffeted by a wind that comes from every direction.

Lucía does not cry out or plead. Her blue eyes convey pain and confusion, and she looks around as though searching until she finds Amaia. Lucía’s lips move, but Amaia cannot hear or understand her words; the wind carries away the faint sounds. Amaia wakes unsettled by the distress of the encounter. The dream breaks the near-grace in which she had lived since conceiving her daughter, a period in which nightmares and the night presences seemed banished. The dream therefore joins Amaia’s detective work to her private vulnerability without resolving what Lucía was trying to communicate.

Labor, the River, and the Demand to Act

As labor advances, contractions repeatedly pull Amaia between partial consciousness and visions. In one river scene, the dead raise their hands together and point toward her pregnant belly. The image makes her pregnancy the focus of the encounter, but the evidence does not explain the gesture as a literal prediction or message. The bodies then become still again as wind rises from the river, ruffling their hair and disturbing the water. Amaia hears her own childhood crying mingled with the cries of the dead girls, whose tears shine on their faces in the moonlight.

The scene turns fear outward as well as inward. Amaia feels the dead children’s pain in her own chest and cries that she cannot help them. Their voices demand that she clean the river and valley and wash away an offense. The demand fuses with her scream as another contraction takes hold. It is at once an image of helplessness and a command to respond: the dream makes the suffering she witnesses difficult to separate from her own remembered suffering.

The abrupt return to the delivery room keeps these layers in tension. A midwife tells Amaia to focus on the next contraction and push, while James stands behind her, supporting her in silence. The practical urgency of childbirth does not dispel the visions; it interrupts them and requires Amaia to act within her body’s immediate demands. The sequence ends with labor still underway, not with a demonstrated resolution of the old fear. Its significance lies in that unfinished return: the terror she had mastered once again occupies her present, while the work of facing it continues alongside the birth of her child.