When they had fought about her job in the past, she’d cried and said she had to put food on the table. He told her never ever to use him as an excuse. He said he didn’t want her food, he would buy his own, he would live on tortas. But she’d worked for the Herreras so long, she was afraid to leave, and they were both used to it. He got hungry and ate what she cooked.
He tried Carmen’s number again, but she didn’t answer. The kids’ flip-flops slapped against the sidewalk.
After another block, they stopped outside a party to which he had not been invited. He knew that it shouldn’t matter, when bigger things were at stake. But it would’ve been easier if he’d been invited. Carmen’s shiny red Fiat was parked on the street outside the house. Reggaeton boomed from the windows, loud enough to piss off the neighbors. It would be morning soon. But it was New Year’s Eve, it was allowed.
“Are we going in there?” Penny asked. She was the one who talked the most.
“No,” he said. “You wait here.”
The littlest girl sat down on the sidewalk with the bunny in her arms and said, “There’s dog poop on this grass.”
He tried to remember that he was more scared of the Herreras than he was of this party, and he walked up to the front door, knocked, and waited.
“Just go in,” the Argentinian girl said. “It’s a party.”
He pushed open the door. The music got louder.
Carmen had been his friend since they were little, when she had thick glasses and a long braid down her back, and he’d thought they would always be together, doing their math homework at his kitchen table. But then she got beautiful all at once, some kind of quinceañera magic. She got boobs and hips and contact lenses, and took out the braid to have masses of wavy hair, and he stayed a skinny nerdy kid. She’d been nice to him about it, but she’d also acted like she had to go hang out with the beautiful stupid people at school. And she started acting dumb, which was the worst part. She wasn’t dumb.
He moved through the drunk, dancing people in the dim living room, and found Carmen on the back patio with her boyfriend, Tito. Oscar had known Tito since fourth grade, when he was fat and his name was Norberto, but Tito had gone through the magical process, too, and got tall and muscled. Fucking Norberto. He and Carmen were dancing slow. Her head with its beautiful hair was on his chest and her eyes closed.
“Carmen,” Oscar said.
She didn’t hear him.
“Carmen!”
She opened her big eyes. He could see, in the patio light, her contact lenses floating on the surface. She was at least a little bit drunk. She stared at him. “Oscar.”
“I need to borrow your car.”
She blinked. “Why?”
“I just do.”
Tito said, “You can’t,” leaning in close and threatening.
“This is none of your business, Norberto.”
“It is when she’s driving me home.”
“This is really important,” Oscar said to Carmen. “You shouldn’t be driving anyway. I’ll bring it back.”
Carmen blinked again, and Oscar remembered the girl with the braid, who’d been better than he was at math. She could’ve been gorgeous and smart! “Please, Carmen,” he said.
“I have to drive Tito home.”
He imagined Raúl pulling up outside and grabbing the children from the sidewalk. Were they still even out there? Had they run away? He gave up on Carmen and made his way back through the living room, defeated, feeling the bass pound in his chest as he passed the speakers.
But then he saw Carmen’s bag on a side table, the shiny red patent leather that matched her car. He looked over his shoulder and saw Carmen and Tito dancing again.
He unbuckled the bag and reached inside: lipstick, wallet, something round and flat, keys. He took the keys and slid the bag back onto the side table, then dodged the drunk and dancing people between him and the front door.
Outside, the air was fresh. He hadn’t realized what a smoky, beery funk he’d been breathing. His kids were all sitting on the sidewalk, watching the front door. They perked up when they saw him. One, two, three, four, five: all there.
He held up the keys and they smiled at him, and he felt like a hero.
“You did it!” the tiny one with the bunny and the braids said.
He unlocked Carmen’s shiny red car. They all piled in and he called his mother, triumphant, to tell her that his uncle’s piece-of-shit car wouldn’t start, but he had figured it out.
28.
MARIA DROVE BACK to the finca with her headlights off. Maybe she shouldn’t be going back to the house. But she needed to give Oscar time to get away. That was all she could think of. And her job was at the house. It had always been her job, since she was twenty years old. She hoped that somehow she could keep it.
She pushed open the gate and parked in her usual spot, then shut off the engine and listened. The house was dark and quiet. The brothers should still be asleep, drink-sick. She went back to close the gate, then walked up to the door and let herself in. Still no sound.
She hated to ask so much of her son. He’d had enough trouble in his life already. He’d been the one to find his sister dead of an overdose, when he was nine years old. He’d tried to shake Ofelia awake. Maria thought that a small part of her son would be frozen forever in that moment. Her remaining child, her baby.
She took her shoes off and crept upstairs to the kitchen, and was just going into her little bedroom when she remembered that she had to turn the power back on. Then she heard a pounding on the door downstairs. A muffled woman’s voice shouting. Maria ran back down in her stockings as quietly as she could. Who had come at this hour of night? How had they gotten through the gate? She had confused thoughts of Isabel, who had taken so long getting the bunny. But why would Isabel come back?
Maria unlocked the door with the key around her neck and blindly put a hand out to stop the shouting voice. It wasn’t Isabel. It was a woman, and she’d been crying.
She pushed Maria’s hand away from her mouth. “Let me in!”
“Shut up!” Maria whispered. “Stop it!”
“They owe me,” the woman whispered back, matching Maria’s undertone. She had dyed red hair and she seemed to be drunk. “I saw you drive in.”
“Who are you?”
“Consuelo Bolaños. They took my husband.”
Maria understood. The Colombian courier was called Bolaños. The widow must have followed Maria in through the unlocked gate. It was such terrible timing that Maria wanted to sit on the stoop and weep.
She heard footsteps on the stairs and prayed it was George. Please, God, let it be George.
He came downstairs shirtless, in pajama pants. “What is this?” he asked.
“Consuelo Bolaños,” Maria said.
“You took my husband,” Consuelo said. “You owe me money.”
But George was looking at Maria. “Why are you dressed?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
He focused on Consuelo again. “How did you get past the gate?”
The woman opened her mouth and Maria stared at her, willing her not to tell him that the gate had been unlocked, that she had watched Maria drive through. But Consuelo didn’t notice. She was preoccupied with her own story.
“You killed my husband,” she said, pointing at George. “I have nothing now.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said.
“My child’s father is dead.”
But George seemed to be listening to the room, to the silence. He held up a finger to Consuelo to wait, then went to the first of the children’s bedrooms and opened the door. Maria felt her stomach clench. Moving faster, he ran to the other bedroom.
“Where are they?” he demanded.
Maria made her voice calm. “Not in bed?”
“Where are they?” he said, h
is voice rising, frantic.
“I don’t know!” she said. “I thought they were here!”
George turned to Consuelo. “Did you let them out?”
“What?” she said.
Maria heard Raúl upstairs. He stumbled down to the entryway, shirtless in jeans. He had a mark on his face from the fight. “What’s going on?”
Maria could smell the booze on his breath from six feet away, and feel his foul mood. “I don’t know.”
“Who’s she?” Raúl asked, pointing his chin at the woman in the doorway.
“This is Consuelo Bolaños,” George said, his voice rich with meaning.
“Bolaños,” Raúl said, as if it rang a distant bell. Then his face shifted, and he glowered at Consuelo.
“Also the kids are gone.”
“Gone?” Raúl turned his glower to his brother.
“Yep.”
“Where are they?” Raúl asked the intruder.
Consuelo shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“How did you get through the gate?” George asked.
“She was pounding on the door,” Maria said quickly, before the woman could answer.
“Was the door locked?” he asked.
“Yes,” Maria said.
George was clearly trying to think it through.
Raúl was staring at Maria. “I saw the boy talking to you yesterday,” he said.
“About nothing,” she said. “We talked about the bunny.”
“Nothing else?”
She shook her head.
Raúl took a pistol out of the back of his jeans and stepped toward Consuelo. He held the barrel to her forehead, pressed against her skin. Consuelo gasped. Raúl looked to Maria. “Tell me where the children are or I kill this woman.”
“Stop it, Raúl,” George said.
“I don’t know!” Maria cried. If she told the truth, he would go after her son, and he would kill Oscar. The children needed more time to get away. She wished Consuelo hadn’t come. “Please put the gun down.”
“Tell me where they are,” Raúl said.
“Please,” she begged. “This woman has a little boy.”
Maria thought he couldn’t kill the mother of a child. And because of that tiny sliver of decency, because Raúl would let her live, Consuelo would give Maria away, and tell him she had just seen Maria driving through the gate. And then they would know everything.
The report of the gun made her jump. Consuelo’s body jerked and slumped to the terra cotta floor. A red circle bloomed on her forehead.
Maria fell to her knees at the woman’s side.
“What the fuck did you do?” George shouted at his brother. “Why did you do that?”
Maria grabbed Consuelo’s limp hand. It was warm. “I’m so sorry,” she said, sobbing. “I’m so sorry.”
Raúl shouted, “I have to do everything around here!”
“You can’t just kill people for no reason!” George shouted back.
“There was a reason!”
“Oh, what was it?”
“To get Maria to talk!” The gun was against Maria’s forehead now. “Where are the kids?”
“I don’t know!” she cried. He could kill her, but he could not go after Oscar and the children.
“She doesn’t know!” George said. “And now we have another fucking body to deal with! That’s how we got into this mess in the first place!”
“Please,” Maria begged, “give her to her family. She has a son.”
“We can’t,” George said wearily. “Not with a bullet in the head.”
Raúl dropped the gun from Maria’s forehead to turn to his brother. “You do nothing but criticize me!”
“You do nothing but give me reasons!”
Maria was panting with nausea. She thought that George should not speak to his brother that way, not when Raúl had a gun in his hand. Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She put a hand there to muffle the sound, but George heard it and crouched beside her.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Give me the phone.”
Maria stared at him, paralyzed.
“Give it to me!”
She handed it over, but not before seeing Oscar’s name on the screen. George accepted the call and put it to his ear. “Hello, Oscar,” he said calmly. “I’m here with your mother. Where are the kids?”
Maria waited.
“You sure?” George said, eyes on Maria. “You have no idea?”
Dark blood was pooling on the stone floor around Consuelo’s head.
“You’re a bad liar,” George said. “You will return the children to me now, do you understand?”
Maria could hear Oscar’s tinny voice, pretending ignorance.
“Don’t fuck with me, Oscar,” George said, and his voice was all threat.
She heard Oscar say he didn’t know anything, and then he must have hung up. Maria prayed that he wouldn’t be lured back here by worry for her. She’d had her life. She couldn’t bear to lose her son.
George stared at her with wonder. “So you took the children.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“I was trying to help them,” he said. “And now this woman is dead, because of your stupid plan, because of your lies. Is that what you wanted?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Where is Oscar taking the children?”
“He doesn’t have them.”
Raúl shouted, “We’ve always been good to you! And this is how you repay us? We even paid for the funeral for your slut daughter!”
Maria started to weep. But Raúl didn’t shoot her. He stomped upstairs.
George reached out and flipped a light switch. Nothing happened. He flipped it again. She watched him, holding her breath, and she saw him understand. “You turned the power off,” he said.
“It went out. It goes out.”
“You turned it off,” he said, amazed.
She said nothing.
“For the gate!” he said. “And that’s how Consuelo got in.” George laughed, and leaned back against the wall, and the laugh became a groan. “Tell me what you did, Maria. I want to help the children. As much as you do. Just tell me what you did.”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“You can’t do this alone,” he said. “You need my help. You couldn’t save Ofelia alone.”
Her breath caught at the pain and truth of that.
George crouched beside her in his pajamas and looked at her with the frustrated, thwarted brown eyes she had known since he was a child, as he watched his brother get away with everything. “Maria,” he said. “Tell me. You can tell me. Raúl isn’t here.”
“Oscar is taking them to the embassy,” she whispered.
He nodded, and put a hand on her shoulder. It was warm. “Good,” he said. “That’s good. That’s what I was going to do, in the morning. Does he have a good car?”
“No,” she said. “His uncle’s Impala. I’m worried it won’t run. Don’t tell Raúl.”
George nodded and squeezed her shoulder.
Raúl came back downstairs with a shirt on, boot heels striking the stairs. “I’m going to find them.”
George stood, stretching his knees. “Oscar’s driving them to the embassy.”
“No!” Maria cried.
“Oscar?” Raúl said.
“In an old Impala,” George said.
Maria stared up at him. The good brother.
George pointed his finger at her. “That’s for fucking with me, Maria,” he said. He had a strange look in his eye, one she had never seen before.
Raúl stepped over Consuelo’s body in the doorway and staggered out into the night. There was the sound of the Jeep engine startin
g up.
Maria had always thought George was better and nobler than his brother. But it turned out he was worse. There was something missing in Raúl. He felt nothing, he couldn’t even help it. But George knew he had just cleaved her heart in two.
“The children,” she said. “My son.”
“They have a long head start,” George said. “They’ll be fine.”
“Please stop your brother,” she said. “Please.”
“Raúl’s drunk. He’ll roll over in a ditch.”
“I thought you wanted to help the children,” she said.
“I did!” he shouted, right in her face, a fleck of spit in the corner of his mouth. “But you fucked that up for me, didn’t you? I was going to turn him in, with the children!”
“You still can!” she said. “Go after him!”
He seemed to think about it for a moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “He’s fucking crazy. I’m getting out of here, before he comes back.”
“Oh, God,” she moaned.
George stopped pacing and studied Consuelo’s bleeding body draped over the threshold. He asked, “Do we have a tarp?”
29.
MARCUS SAT BEHIND Oscar in the red car. It was not a very big car. They were four in the back, with Isabel squished next to Marcus, which made his heart skip and tumble over itself. June and Sebastian were buckled under the other seatbelt, next to them. Penny had grabbed the front seat, of course.
Oscar hung up the phone. “They have my mother,” he said.
They all sat silent. Then Isabel said something urgent in Spanish. Marcus guessed she was saying that Oscar couldn’t take them back to that house, not even for his mother. That’s what Marcus would have said if he could speak Spanish. They needed to go to the embassy.
Oscar nodded. He was trying to act calm. “Okay,” he said, and he started the engine. It caught and purred lightly. “Okay, okay.”
Marcus heard a shout, through the window. A girl and a boy had come out of the house with the party in it. The girl had long black hair and a red bag slung across her chest.