Oscar swore, and the car leaped forward and stalled. It was a stick shift. Marcus’s dad had taught him how they worked. You had to let the clutch out, as you pressed the gas.
The boy and the girl ran toward them, across the lawn. Marcus hoped they would step in dog poop.
“Go!” he said. “Slow on the clutch!”
Oscar restarted the car, and gunned it. It jerked once and then pulled miraculously away, swerving down the block, almost taking off the mirror on a parked car. Oscar shifted to second and third. Marcus looked out the back window and saw the couple running behind them. Then they jogged and slowed and receded. Marcus turned forward, his heart pounding.
“Did you just steal this car?” Penny asked.
“It’s my friend’s,” Oscar said.
“Was that your friend chasing us?”
“Yes.”
“Do you even have a driver’s license?”
He said nothing.
“Oh my God,” Penny said.
“It’s okay,” Oscar said, but his voice was shaky. “We go to the embassy now. Let’s not look like the lost kids.”
“We are the lost kids,” Penny said.
“Do you know how to get to the capital?” Marcus asked.
“There’s only one road,” Oscar said.
The sun was coming up, glowing behind the mountains in the east. They left the neighborhood and headed south. Oscar drove in silence for a long time. He might not have a license, but he was an okay driver, once he didn’t have to start and stop. The sky glowed brighter, and lightened to blue. The trees looked dewy and wet. They passed a sign that said INTERSECCION ADELANTE.
June, in a quiet voice, said, “A.”
Marcus was going to tell his sister that this was no time for a game. But it would keep her from being afraid or carsick. And he couldn’t help scanning the signs outside the window for his own A.
“B,” June said after a minute. “Banos.”
“Baños,” Penny corrected.
After a while, they passed a roadside restaurant with a chalk sign. “Arroz con pollo,” Marcus said. “A.”
“Con!” June said. “C!”
“Can I play?” Sebastian asked.
“You have to find your own word that begins with A,” June said.
Marcus scanned for a B, but now they were on a stretch of empty road with no signs. He leaned his head against the glass of the window and wondered if they were going to get breakfast. Arroz con pollo was rice with chicken. There was a car behind them, following too close.
Then the car had pulled alongside them. The road they were on had only two lanes, and it was dangerous to pass. But the car wasn’t passing. It was a Jeep with an open top, and Marcus looked straight into the eyes of the driver.
“It’s him!” he cried.
Oscar must have seen Raúl at the same moment, because they shot forward, leaving the Jeep behind. Isabel grabbed Marcus’s hand.
They sped down the road, but the Jeep caught up. A car came at them in the opposite direction, and Raúl dropped back to let it by. There was a long, annoyed, receding honk from the other car. When the road ahead was empty, the Jeep pulled alongside them again.
“Go faster!” Marcus shouted.
“I can’t!” Oscar said.
Marcus leaned forward and looked across Isabel to see if his sister was okay. June sat clutching the bunny, looking terrified, the alphabet forgotten.
Raúl was shouting something at them from the Jeep. Then Marcus saw him waving something.
“He has a gun!” Marcus shouted.
June screamed.
“Hijo de puta,” Oscar said.
Another car was coming toward them. Oscar swerved to the shoulder, and Raúl fell back, to let the car go by. But the Jeep was faster than their little red car, and was beside them again. Marcus ducked, and heard the crash of glass. He put his hands over his ears. June screamed again. Oscar’s window was out. Raúl had actually shot at them. A man had shot a gun at them, like in a movie. Marcus revised the seriousness of everything in his mind.
Raúl sideswiped them, and Oscar fought to keep the car on the road. Then he swerved toward the Jeep, clipping off its mirror. Marcus heard another shot.
The two cars approached a blind curve together. As they rounded it, a truck came toward them. There was a blaring horn and squealing brakes. Marcus still had his hands over his ears. Oscar spun the wheel, and the car flew sideways. Then they were rolling off the road. It was too loud. Things were crunching and crashing. The world spun. There were trees. Bright, dark, bright. Isabel was flung against Marcus, and Marcus was flung against her. Then everything stopped, and was silent. Marcus, hanging upside-down in his seatbelt, wondered if he was still alive.
Isabel said something in Spanish under her breath. Her hair hung toward the ceiling, which was now the floor.
“Are you okay?” Marcus asked her.
She nodded. He opened his door, unbuckled his seatbelt carefully, and rolled out. He went around to his sister. He couldn’t get her door open, but her window was gone. Sebastian looked okay.
“Where’s the bunny?” June cried.
“We’ll find him,” he said. “Climb out through the window.”
In the front seat, Penny unbuckled her seatbelt and landed on her head, saying, “Ow!”
Marcus was afraid that Oscar might be dead. Raúl would come with his gun, and there would be no one to save them.
But Oscar was breathing, hanging upside-down in his seatbelt with his eyes closed. He moaned when Marcus touched his shoulder through the broken window. There was a bloody spot on his forehead and little scratches on his cheek. His glasses hung crooked on his face.
“Oscar? Wake up.”
Oscar opened his eyes and looked around. Then he closed them.
Marcus shook his shoulder again. “We have to get out.”
“Where’s Raúl?” Oscar’s voice was hoarse.
“I don’t know.”
“I found the bunny!” June said. “He’s okay!”
Marcus tugged at Oscar’s door until it opened, and Oscar unbuckled his seatbelt and did a bad somersault out of the car. He straightened his glasses, then rubbed his head and cursed. Blood came away on his hand.
They were surrounded by trees, but somehow they hadn’t hit one. The Jeep was also upside-down, closer to the road. Oscar limped toward it, and Marcus followed him. The other kids hung back.
The Jeep’s windshield had shattered. Marcus squatted down and saw Raúl’s upside-down face staring at him, tilted grotesquely, with part of his forehead scraped off so his eye socket was bare and bloody. One of the eyeballs was hanging out.
Marcus felt a hand on his shoulder and he lurched back.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Oscar was saying.
“It’s not!” Marcus said. “It’s not!” He had imagined seeing a dead body before, but he hadn’t thought it would look like that. He started to hyperventilate.
“Shh,” Oscar whispered.
“He’s dead!” Marcus said. “His face!”
“I know.”
Marcus heard a noise and jerked around, expecting to see Raúl’s twisted body, staggering up behind him like a zombie. Instead he saw Isabel. “I want to see,” she said.
“Don’t!”
“I have to.”
Isabel moved toward the Jeep and crouched down to look in the window at Raúl. Marcus held his breath, picturing that bloody eye socket. His sister was walking toward him with hesitant steps.
“Don’t look,” he said.
“I want to see, too!”
“No you don’t.” He held her back.
“I’m not afraid!” June said.
The others were drawing closer.
“Can I see?” Penny asked.
“No
,” Oscar said. “We have to get out of here.”
“Why?” Penny asked. “Raúl is dead, right?”
“There’s still his father,” Oscar said. “And George. They’ll come after us. We know too much.” He limped back to the red car and reached in through the window to pull out his backpack.
“How did Raúl find us?” Marcus asked. “Did he track your phone?”
Oscar fumbled with his phone, tore the back of it open, and took out the battery and the little card. His hands were shaking. He bent the card in half and threw it into the trees.
Isabel watched it go. “You said there was only one road to the capital,” she said. “It was easy to find us.”
Marcus realized that was probably true. He shouldn’t have said anything about the phone. Now Isabel would hold the destroying of it against him. “We could hitchhike to the embassy,” he said.
“We’re not hitchhiking,” Oscar said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“You could have let us call our parents,” Isabel said.
“We haven’t had breakfast,” Penny said.
“I don’t know what to do about any of that, okay?”
They all stared at him.
“I’m sorry,” Oscar said. “We have to go.”
“Do you have sunscreen?” Penny asked, squinting up at the climbing sun.
“No,” he snapped. “Let’s go.”
30.
LIV WOKE, AMBIEN-GROGGY, with only a vague sense of dread and foreboding. Something was beeping, and her heart started to race. She sat up to listen. The beeping was outside in the hotel hallway, and then it passed by. It wasn’t the right tone for Sebastian’s glucose monitor. It was someone carrying some other device. The memories came flooding back, and the pain.
She reached for her phone and peered at the blurry screen. It didn’t used to be so blurry. She’d gotten old, in the last few days. No messages. 7:00 A.M.
She pressed her hands into her eyes and wished she could go back to the unconscious forgetting. She needed coffee. There was a club room on the top floor of the hotel, with food. She pulled on clothes at random and took the elevator up, reading the engraved panel with the emergency instructions in English:
IF THE ELEVATOR DOORS FAIL TO OPEN, DO NOT BECOME ALARMED.
PLEASE USE BUTTON MARKED “ALARM” TO SUMMON HELP.
She remembered the first time Penny had pointed out the instructions in the elevator at the UCLA Medical Center and explained how funny and contradictory they were. Liv remembered the building because Sebastian had been having big blood sugar swings, and was leaning exhausted against her hip, so the elevator advice had seemed particularly poignant and impossible.
In the club room, she surveyed the coffee and pastries. It was a pale imitation of the ship’s buffet, but it would have been very useful for feeding children. Penny would have loved the tall Plexiglas cylinders of cereal, the little knob to fill your bowl. Sebastian would have peeled himself a hard-boiled egg.
Camila came in, looking haggard and tired. She no longer looked like she’d stepped out of a glossy ad for the cruise ship.
“Coffee?” Liv asked.
“Thank you,” Camila said.
Liv poured two cups. “Is your embassy being helpful?”
“I suppose.”
“Any news?”
Camila hesitated. “Isabel logged in to her Facebook account.”
Liv put down the coffee pot and stared. “She did?”
Nora had appeared in the doorway, her dark hair unwashed, scraped back in a ponytail. “Did what?”
Nora looked—Icelandic. That was the word that came to Liv. Like a character in a saga, living alone on a windswept crag, trying to survive against the elements, battered by cold and want. She didn’t belong in the club room of an equatorial hotel. Liv hated her cousin for whatever was going on with Pedro, but she did feel a pang at how miserable Nora was.
“Isabel logged in to her Facebook account,” Camila repeated.
“Did she write a message?” Liv asked.
“No,” Camila said, taking a seat on a couch. “She just signed in.”
“Are they sure it was really her?”
“I suppose they can’t be,” Camila said. “But who else? Someone with her password? And why not send a message, if it is someone else? I mean, what do they want?”
“Maybe she was trying to give her location,” Nora said.
“So why not give it?”
“But this is good news, right?” Liv said. “I mean—she’s alive. They’re in a place with a computer.”
“Unless it was a phone,” Nora said.
“They say it wasn’t,” Camila said. She looked at the coffee cup on her knees. “There is something else. They found a photograph.”
“Where?” Nora asked, in a strained voice.
“Instagram. They have been tracking the account. They thought it might be her.”
Liv didn’t want to know. Her legs felt weak.
“You cannot see her face,” Camila said. “But I know it is her. They are searching the—metadata, I think it is called.”
“But is she okay?” Nora asked. “In the photo?”
“It is a trophy, I think,” Camila said. “A boast, you know.”
“Oh, no,” Liv said, sinking to the couch. A trophy. She could not think about what that meant for her own children. She would not. She put her arms around Camila, whose shoulders felt like a bird’s wings. Slight, hollow bones. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
Camila submitted to be held.
Liv kept stumbling over blank spots in her mind. She remembered reading about mad cow disease, how prions ate holes in the brain, left it like Swiss cheese. Her brain felt like that. There were places where fear had created a gap, places she could not go.
Nora sat across from them, perfectly still. “Do you have the picture?”
Camila pulled free from Liv. She produced a phone and touched uncertainly at the screen. An Instagram post—or a screenshot of one—appeared. She offered the phone, then looked away as Liv and Nora leaned over it.
The photograph was of a girl in a bed, face down. She seemed to be naked, but only her back was visible. Her long hair was loose and damp over her face. It looked horrifyingly postcoital, but there were no identifying marks. No moles, no scars. Nothing on the smooth, lovely skin to prove that it was Isabel. The photograph had a filter on it, fading the edges dark, and Liv thought about the person who had taken it choosing a filter, trying Clarendon, X-Pro, Lo-Fi.
“How do you know it’s her?” Nora asked.
“I know,” Camila said stiffly, taking the phone back and putting it in her pocket, as if her privacy had been violated, which it had. “I tell you, I do.”
Liv imagined a similar photograph of Penny or Sebastian and nearly tumbled down one of the Swiss cheese tunnels in her brain. Of course she would know their backs, recognize the shoulders she had bathed and toweled and covered in sunscreen. “Will you tell us, if they learn anything?” she asked.
Camila nodded and sat for a moment with her hands clasped on her knees. “Isabel loves photographs of herself looking sexy,” she said. “I always try to keep them from her. But now I look at those photographs and they look so innocent. A child’s pictures. Her body is like a new toy.” Her jaw was shaking. “But this one—” She faltered.
“Camila, I’m so sorry,” Liv said.
They sat in silence for another moment, and then Camila stood. “Thank you for the coffee.”
Liv imagined that polite reserve was the only thing holding Camila together. She seemed to carry herself carefully. Any minute the shell of her formality might break.
“You’ll let us know what you find out?” Liv asked.
Camila gave an austere little drop of her chin and left the room.
31.
PENNY
STALKED DOWN the trail, nursing her resentments. Oscar had yelled at her, when all she’d said was that they hadn’t had breakfast. But then he seemed to feel bad about it, and cut up the apples and cheese, and passed them out on the trail as they walked. Penny did the calculation, watched Sebastian give himself his shot, stuffed the calculator back in her pocket with the paper bag of insulin cartridges, and ran to catch up. If Oscar were a babysitter, her mother would fire him.
They walked a long time. Oscar was limping badly. They saw a tree made of tiny trunks and a long sloping neck like a giraffe’s. Oscar said it was called a walking tree. They all stopped and stared at it. Penny’s legs were tired.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Oscar said.
“We should find a road and stop a car.”
“Okay. Where?”
“There was a road,” she said. “We were on it.”
“It was too dangerous there.”
“Is there another one?”
“In this country? Yes.”
“I could get us back to the road we were on,” Marcus said.
“That’s so far!” June said.
“I’m hungry,” Sebastian said.
“He could collapse, without food,” Penny said. “Then you’ll have to carry him.”
Oscar looked miserable. “We keep walking,” he said, but he grimaced when he put his weight on his bad leg.
They trudged on. Penny considered the benefits of complaining some more. But then the trail through the trees opened up into a cleared area. There were train tracks running through it.
“Come on,” Oscar said. He led them toward the tracks.
“What are we doing?” Penny asked.
“Waiting,” he said.
They sat on the ground near the tracks, and Penny looked at the big tarred railroad ties. Her mother used to put pennies on the rails when she was a kid, so they would get flattened by the train, but you weren’t supposed to do it now. It was like not wearing a seatbelt, and climbing from the front seat to the back, and other things her mother had done when she was little that no one was allowed to do anymore.
Penny didn’t really like taking trains. First you had to find the right track at the station, and it was always confusing. Then you didn’t have an assigned seat. Penny got sick if she sat facing backward, so she had to guess which way the train was going to go. Her parents were always looking for four empty seats facing each other, and people glared at you like they were afraid you would sit next to them, and it was stressful.