June, sitting on the ground, sang softly, “Una vieja-ja—mató un gato-to—con la punta-ta—del zapato-to.” She brushed her hands back and forth across her bent knees and clapped her legs. Then they heard the noise of a train in the distance.
It was moving slowly. Penny could see the engineer’s face in the window, shiny with sweat. Penny thought maybe he would recognize them from the TV, but he didn’t seem to see them. It was a freight train, not a passenger train. The first few cars were closed up, but then one passed with an open door. Oscar stood and peered in as it went by. Penny knew about riding trains because they’d done a unit on immigration in school. Some people were so desperate to get to America that they paid strangers called coyotes to take them. Her mother had let her watch a movie about it even though there were things in it that weren’t appropriate. Penny always thought of the actual coyotes that yipped in the distance and sometimes ran down their street at night, skinny and gray-brown and purposeful. The people called the train La Bestia.
Two more closed cars. Then an open one.
“That one,” Oscar said. “Go, go, go!”
It all happened so fast. Isabel and Marcus, who looked as startled as Penny felt, scrambled up onto the bare metal of the train car, with their long legs. Oscar handed June up to them, and they caught her by her elbows and lifted her in. It was too high for Penny to climb. She ran alongside. Oscar grabbed Sebastian and passed him awkwardly up. Then he threw the backpack in.
Penny had always suspected that this moment would come. They would abandon her because she was slow and bossy and annoying. “Don’t leave me!” she screamed.
“Run!” Oscar shouted. His face looked desperate. The train rumbled and creaked, metal on metal.
It was hard to run in flip-flops, and she had never been fast. Oscar grabbed her hand and pulled her forward, limping. She stumbled and went down on her knee.
The others were all shouting, and she heard Sebastian scream her name. Finally Oscar picked her up and heaved her into the train with a grunt. She landed painfully on her side.
“Come on!” June screamed at Oscar.
He ran and struggled to climb up, the others pulling at his clothes. Then he was in. He collapsed on his back, breathing hard and moaning. June unzipped the pocket on the backpack and peered inside, then reached in and pulled out the bunny, like a magic trick. Its nose twitched and she hugged it to her face.
The train jostled its way down the track, with all of them aboard. Penny sat up and looked at her knee. Sticky blood ran down her shin. She wanted to cry, but that didn’t seem right when they had done something so impossible. “Where are we going?” she asked.
Oscar shook his head, still out of breath.
“We’re going northwest,” Marcus said.
“What’s there?” June asked.
“Nicaragua,” Marcus said.
“We’re going to Nicaragua?” his sister said.
“No,” Oscar said. “We’re just resting, and getting to somewhere with food.”
“Will they have insulin, too?” Sebastian asked.
Penny had a terrible thought, and she put her hand on her pocket and felt no paper bag. An icy flush passed through her body, even in the heat. The bag must have fallen out of her pocket when she ran for the train. “I thought we were going to the embassy,” she said.
“We were,” Oscar said. “But people are trying to kill us. And we can’t keep walking. I can’t keep walking. We need to rest.”
Isabel was watching Penny, with flat eyes and a tiny smile—she knew she’d lost the insulin. Penny hated her.
Sebastian unscrewed the pen and took out the old cartridge. “This one is empty,” he said. “Can I have a new one?”
“Just a minute,” Penny said.
He rolled the empty cartridge between his fingers. “Do you think Mom and Dad will find us?”
“Of course.”
“Can we call them?”
“We don’t have a phone.”
“We had a phone,” Isabel said, “but Oscar threw it away.” Penny’s mother would have told her she didn’t like that tone of voice.
“How far is Nicaragua?” June asked.
“We’re not going to Nicaragua,” Oscar said.
“But how far is it?”
“I have no fucking idea.”
June blinked at him.
“Probably about a hundred miles,” Marcus said.
“See, he knows,” Oscar said, and he closed his eyes. “He can be leader now, okay? I quit.”
32.
THE TRAIN HAD a different motion from the truck, and Noemi woke to the new rocking, trying to figure out what was different. It jostled in a different way: more rhythmic.
Chuy had chosen their car and they had climbed in at night in the dark, and then realized it wasn’t empty. A woman and a little boy were inside, hiding against the wall. But Noemi was tired, and she had shrugged her backpack off. She didn’t want to have to go find another car. Her once-pink backpack was scuffed and grayish with dirt. So was the plush pig.
The woman in the train car had seemed nervous. Noemi had tried to be friendly to the little boy, she had showed him the pig, but he didn’t want to talk. She thought maybe in the morning these people would see that they didn’t have to be afraid of Chuy, and then she and the boy could be friends.
Now, as she woke, with her pig as a pillow, she saw that the woman and the little boy were gone. It was light out, and the train was crawling.
“Why does it go so slowly?” she asked Chuy.
“You in a hurry?” he asked. He was rolling loose tobacco in a piece of paper.
“I just wanted to know.”
Chuy licked the paper to seal the cigarette.
She sat up and watched the trees go by, thick and green and tangled. After a while, she asked, “Where do you think the woman and the little boy went?”
“To find another car.”
“She was afraid of you.”
Chuy lit his cigarette. “Not my fault.”
“Did you talk to them?”
He nodded.
“Where are they going?”
“Texas.”
“Maybe we’ll see them there.”
“They won’t make it.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head and blew out smoke.
Noemi searched Chuy’s broad face. “Why didn’t my parents want me to know about you?”
“They think I went bad.”
“Did you?”
He paused, then said, “For a while.”
“So why did they change their minds?”
“Because your grandmother couldn’t keep you.”
“What did my father say then?”
“He thought you should stay with your grandmother,” Chuy said. “But she’s an old woman. She can only do so much.”
They heard something outside the boxcar: voices. Noemi got up and went to the open door.
“Careful,” Chuy said, and he came to stand beside her.
Some people were climbing into the train, two cars ahead. Kids. A lot of them. They all struggled into the train, an older boy climbing in last.
Noemi couldn’t see them, now that they were in the train car, but she kept watching. They’d all been wearing the same kind of clothes: red shorts, dirty white T-shirts, flip-flops. The oldest boy had a backpack, which he’d thrown into the train. Then he’d helped a girl in. Noemi had seen her face as she grimaced and rolled inside. “That girl,” she said. “I thought I knew her.”
Chuy grunted, stamping out his cigarette.
The recognition shimmered somewhere in the back of her mind, then burst forward, where she could see it. “They’re the kids from the ship!”
Chuy said nothing, so she knew she was right.
She lo
oked out the door again. They weren’t in their swimsuits from the television, but they wore matching outfits. They’d appeared, and she’d been here to see it. She wished she could tell Rosa, but did Rosa even know who the kids were? “Do you think they were on TV at home?” she asked.
“Maybe,” Chuy said.
“Can we go talk to them?”
“No.”
“I want to meet them.”
“Not a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“They have bad luck,” Chuy said. “We don’t want to catch it.”
Noemi looked out again. She couldn’t hear the children over the clank and rumble of the train. Then she saw something emerge from the car. It was a boy’s hips, pushed forward with his red shorts lowered, to pee out the door. Noemi could only see his hand, the arcing stream, and the splash on the rocks below. She pulled her head back inside, giddy with shock. “One of them is peeing,” she whispered.
“Everybody has to,” Chuy said.
33.
WHEN GEORGE wanted help moving Consuelo’s body, Maria refused.
“Do you know how much we pay you?” George demanded. “For making scrambled eggs and sweeping the floor? Help me!”
So she did. There were tiny shards of Consuelo’s skull on the bloody tile floor. It was hard to get the plastic tarp under her, and the body was heavy and awkward. Finally they pulled the tarp out of the doorway and against the wall, and they could close the door again.
Maria mopped the floor, filling buckets with bloody water, dumping the buckets in the bathroom, trying to keep herself from retching. When she was finished, she told George she needed to go home. She wanted her phone.
He said she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Am I a prisoner?”
“As soon as I leave, you can go,” he said.
He went up to the office and she heard him opening drawers and cabinets. A hammer blow, a breaking of glass, the sound of a power drill. She had lived so long in fear of the Herreras, in the habit of loyalty to them, in the habit of fear of the police, that she could not make herself leave when George said she couldn’t. It was as if something physical was stopping her.
She heard his phone ring. She climbed the stairs to listen to George talking, and looked into the office.
George dropped the phone to his side. “He’s dead.”
Her heart pounded. Oscar. “Who?”
“Raúl.”
Maria didn’t know what to say to that. She had thought Raúl was indestructible. “How?”
“Car accident.”
“And the children?”
“I don’t know.”
She slumped down on the stairs.
George seemed dazed. He went to his bedroom and came out with a duffel bag. Then he stepped around her. “Good luck, Maria,” he said. “You should get out of here, too. The police will come.”
“My phone!” she said.
“Sorry. No.”
He was downstairs and out the door. She collected her handbag and a few small things of her own. She left poor Consuelo alone in the entryway, and Sancho in the dog kennel, and the white horse in the stables. The police would come, and someone would look after them all. She locked the door when she left, out of habit.
She eased her car down the driveway and out the gate, as tired as she had ever felt. She could not think of where to go except home.
34.
LIV HAD SAT hunched over her phone in the club room, looking for suspicious Instagram posts, trying different hashtags while her coffee went cold. Now she forked an English muffin into halves. Crumbs dropped onto the table in front of the toaster. That was her, she reflected: soft, white, torn, crumbling. The karmic bus had mowed her down. She was being punished for living in a false world, spongy and insulated from the reality around her. For living in a house with an alarm system, in a neighborhood where the only Latinos were gardeners and day laborers. For sending her kids to a private school that was almost entirely white in a city that wasn’t.
She told herself that she wasn’t being rational, she was being self-aggrandizing. The universe didn’t care what she did. But their life was obscene. Her kids didn’t see anyone except kids like themselves, and kids who were richer.
And now her kids were where? Seeing what? With Sebastian so fragile and dependent on first-world medicine. Sebastian, who, if he was in Treasure Island, would run home when the first scary thing happened. The thought nearly buckled Liv’s knees and sent her to the floor in the middle of the club room.
She waited for the toaster. The kitchen had no reason to change up the food, because most people didn’t stay this long. Tourists were here overnight before going somewhere beautiful. Business people stayed for a meeting. If you stayed long enough to notice that the breakfast-makings never changed, something was deeply wrong.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from Kenji, at the embassy:
On my way to hotel with news. You there?
Liv’s hand started to shake, holding the phone. She hit the microphone and dictated a text. “Good or bad news—question mark.” She waited for his answer, and it popped up:
Gather the others?
Fuck you, Kenji, she thought. “GOOD OR BAD?” she wrote, with one thumb.
The three little gray dots appeared, pulsing on the screen. She waited. Then the reply:
Good I think.
The English muffin popped out of the toaster. She left it there and texted the others.
They gathered in the empty club room, and Benjamin took her hand. Raymond sat opposite them, clearly jittery. Nora stood, with that Icelandic saga air. Gunther, so outsized and jovial a week ago, seemed to be shrinking, his spine compressing day by day, his face graven with lines.
Kenji Kirby arrived, polished and hale. He sat in a leather chair and clasped his hands together. The parents mirrored him instinctively, clasping their own hands, leaning forward on the couches. They were praying, in their way.
“They’ve narrowed down the Facebook login to one area,” Kenji said.
“Why is it taking so long?” Camila asked.
“The computer had good security.”
“Also the police are incompetent,” Gunther said, his voice startlingly loud. Liv wondered if he was drunk.
Kenji ignored him. “The police have also been tracking down the contacts of Luis Bolaños. Bolaños is the dead Colombian man who was found—”
“We know,” Gunther said.
“The Herrera family lives in the right area for the login and had contact with Bolaños,” Kenji said. “That’s a house they thought they’d ruled out, but now a tactical team is going back with a search warrant.”
“Wait, like a raid?” Liv said.
“Something like that.”
“And you think our kids are there?”
“We certainly hope so.”
Benjamin said, “Couldn’t a raid put them in danger?”
“Not more danger than they’re already in,” Kenji said. “In the official estimation.”
“When’s the raid happening?” Benjamin asked.
Kenji looked at his watch. “Right now.”
“Oh fuck,” Nora said.
“Now?” Liv said. “No one thought to consult us about this? What if the kids become hostages, or—or human shields?”
“You’ve been urging speed and action all week,” Kenji said. “And now you’ve got it.”
“But we thought you’d let us know!”
“Can we go to the house?” Raymond asked.
“It’s too dangerous,” Kenji said.
“Our children are there.”
“The team will keep us apprised.”
Liv leaned into her husband’s side, and he locked his arms around her. She tried not to think about Penny and Sebastian seeing men with masks and guns a
nd bulletproof vests rushing into a house. Or about the lengths to which desperate kidnappers might be driven. How did hostages ever survive? It seemed unlikely, impossible.
“This took a lot of work on a lot of people’s part,” Kenji said, sounding peevish.
“You might have told us,” Camila said.
“That’s what I’m doing, right now.”
They glared at him and sat in silence.
Kenji’s phone rang, and Liv jumped. He turned away for privacy, but they all watched him. He spoke in monosyllables, in Spanish, and hung up. Then he stared around at the parents as if he didn’t quite see them. “The children weren’t there,” he said.
“What does that mean?” Liv asked.
“I don’t know.” Kenji looked stunned.
“Who was there?” Raymond asked.
“No one.” This wasn’t the outcome he’d expected.
Liv wondered if Kenji had imagined himself some kind of action hero, directing his armored team to the villain’s lair to rescue the adorable children, who would be huddled in a room full of toys, frightened but unscathed.
“Was there evidence that the kids were there?” Benjamin asked.
“I don’t know.” He looked down at his phone.
“Find out,” Raymond said.
“Okay,” Kenji said, backing out of the room. “I will.”
35.
EVERY TIME PENNY closed her eyes, she saw herself running for the train, tripping over rocks, stumbling in flip-flops, losing the insulin, the paper bag disappearing behind her. Then she opened her eyes again. The train rumbled along.
“I’m hungry,” Sebastian said.
“We don’t have any food,” she said.
“Can I have a new cartridge, for when there is food?”