“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because your sister lost them,” Isabel said, from across the train car.
Penny glared at her. “Shut up, Isabel.”
Sebastian looked up. “Is it true?”
“I was running for the train,” Penny said. “They fell out of my pocket.”
There was a mortified silence.
Marcus asked, “Why didn’t you let Oscar carry them in the backpack?”
“Because we don’t even know him.”
Oscar had his eyes closed and seemed to be pretending they weren’t there.
“You let him hang your butt out the train door,” June said.
“I had to pee!”
“That’s crazy!” June said.
“Well, you went in your pants and I can smell it!” Penny said. “That’s crazy!”
There was another silence, in which June looked shocked and betrayed. “Hanging your butt out the door is dangerous,” she finally said, very quietly.
“Everything is dangerous,” Penny said. “I want to go home now.”
“Don’t be a child,” Isabel said.
“Shut up!” Penny felt the tears coming. But tears would just prove Isabel right. Penny wiped her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. “Our parents would have found us at that house.”
“Don’t say that,” Marcus said.
“It’s true! We should have stayed there. We only had to leave because of her.” Penny knew she was onto something, because Isabel’s face had turned a weird color. “We had a doctor there, and food, and bathrooms. But Isabel wouldn’t listen to George and stay downstairs.”
“Leave her alone,” Marcus said.
“You just don’t want to admit it, because you’re in love with her.”
“Shut up!” Marcus said.
“But she’s not in love with you. She was in love with Raúl.”
“I was not!” Isabel hissed.
“Shut up, Penny!” Marcus said.
“Stop!” Oscar said.
“You don’t understand anything,” Isabel said, low and threatening.
“I understand!” Penny said. “I understand it’s your fault that we’re on a stupid train in the middle of nowhere!”
“So go, then.”
“Fine,” Penny said, getting up. “I will.”
She stood, her split knee stinging, and went to the open door. She couldn’t stand to be with Isabel another second.
“Penny, no!” Sebastian said.
“I have to find the insulin.” She sat down at the edge, so she wouldn’t have so far to jump to the ground. It was still alarmingly high, and the ground was moving. She could tell she was about to make a terrible mistake, but she couldn’t help herself.
“Don’t go!” June cried.
“Let her,” Isabel said.
Penny pushed off, hit the ground hard, and fell sideways. The loud wheels of the train went by, too close to her head. The others were shouting. But they couldn’t tell her what to do. Her mind had gone blank with rage and indignation. She stood and brushed off her legs.
“Penny!” Sebastian said. “Wait!”
And he jumped out of the train. He took the landing pretty well, bending his knees, but he still fell over. She ran to help him up. No one had ever risked so much to join her.
“Sebastian!” June shouted.
For a moment Penny thought June might jump, too. But she didn’t. Penny was not as magnetic as all that. June in the train car’s doorway was getting farther away.
Penny took Sebastian’s hand and they set off walking back along the tracks. They would find the insulin, and then they would figure out the next thing. It was good that Sebastian had jumped, because she didn’t know how she would have gotten back to him. It hadn’t been a great plan. The train rumbled alongside.
“Penny?” Sebastian said.
“What.”
“Remember the man with the white horse?”
“Yes.”
“Did he die?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
They walked. “Do you think we’ll die, too?”
“No.”
“Look,” Sebastian whispered, pointing at the train.
Penny turned and saw a little boy peering at them from one of the cars. He was younger than Sebastian. He drew back into the dark and then the car was past.
Penny wondered if the little boy was with his family or with a coyote. Pollos, she remembered they were called, the travelers trying to get to America. Thieves robbed them.
The train’s caboose came past, and a sweating man looked out the window.
“Hey!” Penny shouted up at him. “Can you call the police? La policía?”
The man frowned down at them.
“We’re the kids from the ship!” she shouted. They watched the back of the train pull away, and get smaller. “Los niños del barco!” she said, but there was no way he could hear her.
The world grew quieter, with the train gone. They stood together in the silence.
“Do you know where we are?” Sebastian asked.
“No,” she said.
“Will someone find us?”
“I think so.”
They kept walking. Penny scanned the ground for the paper bag, even though it was probably miles back. There was a wall of green trees on either side, and no sign of a trail.
“Did you hear that?” Sebastian asked.
“What?”
“That,” he said, and he looked toward the trees on their right. It was an engine noise, a car or a truck on a road. The last time they had followed an engine noise, it had been a bad idea. But they couldn’t stay alone here.
They left the tracks and made their way into the trees. It was darker there, and they had to climb over branches. A giant buzzing bug flew at Penny’s face. She swatted it away and wanted to cry.
“Do you think there are snakes?” Sebastian asked.
“Probably not,” Penny said, though they couldn’t even see the ground.
She thought about the time she’d been on an overgrown trail in Colorado with her mom and then reported to her dad that they’d been swashbuckling through the forest. Her mom had laughed and said, “You mean bushwhacking.” They still teased her about it, and would call this swashbuckling if they were here.
She wished they were here.
Abruptly they came out on the side of a narrow dirt road, but there were no cars.
“Should we walk?” Sebastian asked.
“Yes.”
“Which way?”
Marcus would know. But she’d left Marcus in the train. If they turned right, they would be going the same direction the train had gone, and she wasn’t sure that was a good idea. She didn’t want to go to Nicaragua. So she turned left, and Sebastian followed her.
An old red truck came toward them and Penny instinctively stepped back into the trees. Sebastian followed her. There was a man in the cab of the truck, who didn’t seem to see them. When it was past, Sebastian said, “Why didn’t we wave?”
“I don’t know,” Penny said.
“Someone has to find us,” he said.
“I know.”
They walked. Penny felt sweaty and miserable. Now that they had left the tracks, she would never find the bag of insulin.
A small yellow car came along and slowed when it passed them, then stopped. A woman looked back. Penny jogged toward the car.
The woman rolled down the window. “Por dónde van?”
“A mi casa,” Penny said, because she couldn’t remember how to say parents.
“Eres americana?” the woman asked. She had her hair up in a scrunchie and wore no makeup.
“Sí,” Penny said
. There was something about speaking Spanish that made this feel like a game, like a test she could pass. “Somos los niños del barco.”
The woman looked startled. She looked around, into the woods. “Dónde están los otros?” she asked.
“On the train,” Penny said.
The woman reached over and pulled the handle to open the car’s door, but Penny moved toward the back seat.
“Can we sit together? In the back?” Sebastian was moving slowly, but Penny got him in. “Will you call our parents?” She mimed a phone at her ear. “Mis padres?”
The woman made an apologetic face. “No tengo teléfono. No podía pagar. No phone. No pay. Me entiendes?”
“Oh,” Penny said. “My parents will pay you.”
“I don’t feel good,” Sebastian said.
The woman looked worried.
“We need a doctor,” Penny said. “Please.”
The woman turned in her seat and started to drive.
36.
NORA TEXTED PEDRO to ask if he knew anything about the Herrera family. It was a perfectly rational, understandable thing to do. He might know something now that they had a name. But texting him still felt compulsive and shameful.
He didn’t respond, and she took the stairs down to the lobby and stepped into the heat.
Outside, it looked like some catastrophe had happened, and for a moment Nora was confused. It was as if her inner life had been suddenly externalized. The streets were deserted, postapocalyptic. The sidewalk was sticky with dried liquid. There were pieces of paper everywhere, stuck to the pavement, blowing down the empty street in the hot wind. Nora looked at one and saw it was a Page-a-Day calendar. Everything smelled like old beer. A man staggered up the block. New Year’s Day.
At least there were no reporters. A cab cruised by, the driver eyeing Nora, the only person on the street who might not puke in his car. She climbed in. She didn’t have Pedro’s address, but she had paid attention returning to the hotel, the last time. And her high school Spanish had come back to the surface. She explained where she thought she was going. They found the papaya-colored house together, no trouble, and she asked the cabbie to wait. She knocked at the barred door of the house. No answer.
She got back in the cab. “Momentito,” she said. “Por favor.”
They watched the house. No one came. The cabbie was playing American oldies on the radio. He turned up the volume and said he liked this song and asked her to translate it.
“Caballeros en satina blanca,” she began, then realized it probably wasn’t “knights” in white satin. “Nights” made more sense. “Wait, noches en satina blanca. Nunca llegando al fin.” She’d lost some lyrics and tried to catch up. “Lo que es la verdad, no puedo decir—um—de nuevo. Porque te amo. O, como te amo.”
“It’s a love song,” the cabbie said.
“Exactly.”
They sat in silence for a while, listening. Sappy mustache rock, it never died.
“Can I say something, señora?” the cabbie asked.
“Yes.”
“Maybe he’s married.”
She had to think about the word he used, casado, before she understood it. Housed. To be married was to make a home together. “I don’t think so.”
“A lot of men are married,” he said. “But they don’t say it to a woman.”
“He’s only a friend.”
The cabbie said, “Oh, yes?”
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” she said.
“Can I say something more, señora?”
“Okay.”
“I hope you find your kids.”
Her face got hot. She thought of denying that she was that person. She only looked like the American woman who had lost her children.
She knew that cab drivers in LA sold stories to gossip sites, and she wondered if there were local news outlets that would pay for the story of the mother of los niños del barco waiting outside a man’s house. She thought of asking the cabbie not to tell, but that would be admitting that she was doing something wrong. So she was looking for her friend, so what? “I hope we find them, too,” she said.
The driver pulled a U-turn on the quiet street, and left the little papaya-colored house behind. “He is not worth it, señora,” he said.
Her phone whistled with the arrival of a text and she felt a dopamine jolt, the thrill of Pedro responding. But the text was from Liv:
Where ARE you? Call me.
Nora put the phone in her pocket and sat back in the cab with her shame.
37.
OSCAR DIDN’T KNOW what to do about Penny and Sebastian jumping out of the train. Was he supposed to go after them, and abandon the other three? Having three kids was better than having two, right? His knee ached, and the stress made it harder to breathe. He knew he was panicking, but he couldn’t help it. The adrenaline in his body made him feel sick.
He’d had throat infections when he was little, and his mother had taken him to the hospital to have his tonsils out. He was to stay overnight. She’d kissed him and told him she would see him in the morning.
Then someone had made a mistake, and put him on the children’s psychiatric floor. The kids were all older than he was, screaming and violent, or silent and catatonic and staring. It was like something from a nightmare. He’d begun to scream, which convinced the nurses that he was supposed to be there. They put him in restraints, gave him a sedative, bound him to a bed. He was seven years old.
When his mother showed up in the morning, the hospital told her she couldn’t see her son yet. She thought they meant he was still recovering from the surgery. She’d been up all night long, hauling his chaotic teenage sister out of some shitty drug house where Ofelia had gone as soon as they left for the hospital. So his mother had been grateful that the doctors were keeping Oscar and she could sleep.
Three days he’d stayed in that medieval crazy ward. The drugs wore off and they untied him, but then a child had bitten him, and another had hit him in the head with a tray. He’d started to scream and thrash again. The more he said he shouldn’t be there, the more the nurses thought he should. They’d seen it all before.
His defense had been to withdraw into himself. He made himself as small as possible, against the headboard of his bed. He kept his terror inside his chest, said nothing, closed it all out. By the time his mother was able to navigate the hospital bureaucracy—people assuming she was wrong, telling her administrative lies—he almost belonged on the psych ward. He was completely unresponsive. He could not stand or dress or unfold his knees from his chest. His mother carried him to the car in a ball, shivering with fear in his hospital gown, his swollen tonsils still in his throat. After that, he didn’t speak for weeks. Even Ofelia, appalled at what had happened, briefly sobered up. She tried to take care of him, heated soup on the stove, drew him out with games.
Oscar felt himself going back to that state of unresponsive immobility now, sitting in the train car with his knees pulled up. The remaining children shouted at him to do something, but he couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t move. His heart raced, but his muscles were locked down.
Marcus was yelling in his face, telling him to wake up. But if Oscar woke, he would have to live in this world in which he had fucked everything up. From here, the voices were muffled, the problems unreal. June was standing in front of him, staring dolefully, holding her bunny. Isabel sat against the wall, as withdrawn as Oscar was. She understood how bad it was. She knew there was no point yelling. She just watched him with hollow eyes.
38.
IT TURNED OUT the police had found a dead woman at the Herrera house, in their raid, which a week ago would have made Liv lose her mind, but how many times could you lose your mind? Eventually you had to adjust to the out-of-body experience that was the worst possible thing happening. Your lost mind followed you around on a tether, floating above you, reporting on e
ach new outrage. The police are raiding the house where the kids are, with guns—Fuck! That sucks! Oops, no kids there. But a dead body! Okay! Let’s discuss what that means.
The body at the house belonged to Consuelo Bolaños, the widow of the Colombian courier. She’d been shot through the head and rolled in a tarp, like her husband. That meant that Consuelo had figured out who killed her husband before the police did, and instead of going to the police, she had gone to the house to—what? Complain? Take vengeance? Demand recompense? No one knew, because she was dead. Whatever she’d done, it had pissed off the Herreras.
The police found Penny’s and Sebastian’s swimsuits at the house, and Marcus’s and June’s, but not Isabel’s yellow bikini or Hector’s madras shorts. They’d also found two computers, but the hard drives had been destroyed.
Most important to Liv, they had found the empty boxes for a finger-stick monitor and an insulin pen, which meant that someone had wanted the children to stay alive. That was the hope she was clinging to.
Next they learned that one of the Herreras had been killed in a car accident, on the road between the house and the capital. There was another car involved, but no sign of the kids. Raymond got permission to go to the accident site, and Kenji sent another Suburban for them. The press must not have learned of the new developments yet, or else they were all still drunk from New Year’s, because the street outside the hotel was deserted, shiny and tacky underfoot. There were white squares of paper everywhere and the air smelled of hot beer.
Camila still had that careful stillness, like she was holding herself together with great effort. She slid into the middle row of the Suburban, next to Liv.
“Are you taking something?” Liv asked.
Camila nodded. “Xanax.”
“Can I have some?”
Camila handed over a metal pill case with painted roses on the lid. Liv shook out a pill and swallowed it dry. They were still waiting for Nora. No one had seen her since the morning in the club room and she hadn’t answered any of Liv’s texts. The husbands were debating leaving without her when a cab pulled up and Nora got out. Liv heard Fleetwood Mac playing on the cab’s radio until Nora slammed the door.