“Where were you?” Raymond asked.
“I went for a walk.” Nora took a seat in the back of the Suburban without looking at Liv.
Unbelievable.
The men got in and Benjamin took shotgun. Penny liked to claim the front seat, and Liv kept seeing her in the passenger seat of a car rolling over. Penny’s desire to assert herself was fine at a progressive LA school with feminist teachers, but was it working for her now? Liv could imagine it not going so well. The obscene jungle rolled by. Liv was so sick of this fucking country, the humidity, the endless green. At least Sebastian had insulin. Sebastian had insulin.
As they drove, Kenji told them what he knew. The dead guy in the Jeep was Raúl Herrera, and he lived at the house where they’d found the swimsuits. His Jeep had collided with another car, which was empty when the police arrived at the scene.
“It belonged to a teenage girl, who reported it stolen by her friend Oscar,” Kenji said. “She said he had a lot of kids in the car.”
“And who’s Oscar?” Raymond asked.
“The son of the Herreras’ housekeeper.”
“I told you!” Liv said. “I said there has to be a woman, who’ll have a conscience.”
“We don’t know yet what the scenario is,” Kenji said. “Here’s the kid.” He passed his phone around, the photograph on the screen of a teenage boy with short dark hair, unfashionable glasses, and a scruffy bit of untended mustache.
“How old is he?” Benjamin asked.
“Sixteen.”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Raymond said.
“Nope,” Kenji said.
“And he’s made six kids disappear?” Benjamin said.
“Not for long, let’s hope,” Kenji said.
They drove. Camila fell asleep.
“Monkeys,” Benjamin said listlessly, and they all looked out the window at some black shapes in the tops of the trees. One swung by the arm from one tree to the next. Liv heard a faint hooting through the window. The monkeys seemed to be mocking her, for once having wanted to see them on a zip-line tour.
The Suburban pulled abruptly across the road, onto the opposite shoulder, then bumped over uneven ground. There was police tape marking off an area in the trees. The Jeep had already been removed, its position marked with police tape, but a small red Fiat remained, upside-down. A police officer stood guard.
Gunther looked at the red car. “You’re saying six kids, plus this Oscar, were in that little thing?”
“I told you,” Kenji said, “we don’t know the scenario.”
“Five in the back?” Gunther said. “Or three in the front?”
“Where did they go?” Raymond asked. “Has there been a search?”
“The police combed a mile radius this morning,” Kenji said.
Liv looked around. “Five minutes into a nature walk, my kids are complaining.”
“Could they have hitchhiked from here?” Benjamin asked. “After the accident?”
“I think we would have heard from a driver,” Kenji said. “Someone would’ve seen them.”
“What of the housekeeper?” Camila asked.
“They found her at home. She’s asked for a lawyer.”
“Can we look inside the car?” Liv asked.
Kenji spoke to the police guard, and said, “You can look, but don’t touch anything.”
They moved closer to the turtled red car. Liv crouched to peer through the windows. She tried to focus, to pay attention, without being overwhelmed by the idea that her kids had been inside. She had a sudden clear memory of the last book she’d read aloud to Sebastian. Benjamin usually did the bedtime reading, but he’d been out of town, and they had started one of those wish-fulfillment kids’ adventure books, where the boy hero has exactly the qualities he needs to triumph, at every moment. You could feel the next beat coming, like the kind of country song where you can guess the next rhyme. She’d been bored and annoyed, and at one point she tried to explain to Sebastian why it wasn’t her favorite of his books. But Sebastian had loved the book unreservedly. Why hadn’t she just read the thing with gusto, and relished every moment with her son? Why had she brought her adult judgment and her professional story opinions to a book her kid loved? Of course the child hero should always triumph! Who wanted a kids’ book to feel like real life? Real life was fucking intolerable.
The windows of the red car were broken but she didn’t see any blood. Something dark moved inside, and Liv jumped backward and fell. The police guard lunged forward. The shadowy thing darted out of the car. It was a striped mammal with a long tail, a little bigger than a house cat. It ambled away.
“Oh, shit,” she said, her heart booming in her ears. “That scared me.”
“It’s just a coatimundi,” Kenji said.
“That’s a coatimundi?” Benjamin said. “That’s what we came ashore for? It’s a fucking raccoon!”
“Please don’t start blaming me for the zip line again,” Liv said. Her tailbone was bruised. She felt woozy and confused, on a cocktail of adrenaline, Xanax, regret, leftover Ambien, and coffee.
“No one is blaming anyone for the zip line,” Benjamin said.
“You are,” she said. “And I’m sick of it.”
“Liv,” he said.
“You all blame me!” she said. “You do! But I’m not the one who was fooling around with the guide, okay?”
There was a silence. She saw a quick look of naked fear on Nora’s face.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Raymond asked.
Liv covered her eyes. “Nothing. I just meant they were off looking for monkeys or whatever. Birds.”
Benjamin turned away and walked back to the Suburban. So did Nora.
Liv’s face burned with shame. She was sure Nora had been with Pedro this morning, but she’d had no right to say anything. Her heart could break for Raymond, but the code of female friendship required her to keep her mouth shut. She had sounded like Penny having a tantrum, blaming anyone but herself. The zip line had been her idea, and she had fallen asleep.
Raymond put out a hand to help her up, and she took it, gasping at the pain in her tailbone. “Oh, fuck,” she said. “Hang on. I really hurt myself.”
“You okay?” Raymond asked.
“Yeah. I will be.” She straightened carefully.
“What happened with the guide?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I got scared by that animal. I took a Xanax with coffee, I’m not used to it. I’m talking shit.”
“You sure? Nothing happened?”
“Positive.”
He studied her face. She turned from him and limped back to the Suburban, wincing with every step. Nora was in the way back, earbuds in. Liv had not thought she could feel more miserable, but here it was. There were always lower circles of hell. Welcome to the next level down. She climbed in.
39.
IT HAD GOTTEN dark outside the train. Isabel sat against the wall as the car rumbled and swayed, and she bit at the skin along her thumbnail. It hurt and bled. If her mother saw her, she would tell her to stop. But her mother wasn’t here. She hadn’t protected Isabel. She’d let her swim in a river that had taken her away.
She tried not to think about Raúl. The pain, or the blood after, or even his eye hanging out and his head half scraped off. She found she could only push him away with another painful idea, so she thought about how much she missed her brother. If they had only waited for Hector to come back, then none of this would have happened. But no one had listened to her.
The brakes of the train screeched, metal against metal. It ground slowly to a halt. Oscar didn’t move, so Isabel stood and looked out into the dark. Men were shouting up ahead.
“There’s a car on the tracks,” she said.
Someone in a striped shirt appeared outside the train car, a small girl with bla
ck hair, a little Mayan-looking kid.
“We’re friends!” the girl said breathlessly, holding up her hands to show they were empty. “My name is Noemi. This is my uncle, Chuy.”
A man emerged from the dark beside her. He had a square, solid face. “You have to get off the train,” he said quietly, in the same strangely accented Spanish as the girl’s.
Isabel looked to Oscar to confront these people, but he sat curled up and frozen, after leading them thrashing through the woods. He was so useless. She turned back to the man. “Who stopped the train?”
“Thieves,” Chuy said.
“We don’t have any money.”
“They’ll recognize you. Rich Americans are looking for you.”
“You’re on television,” the little indio girl said shyly. “You’re famous.”
Isabel had heard about these migrant kids, and she’d seen pictures. When she hadn’t wanted to go to the passport office, her mother had lectured her about what a privilege it was to have a passport, to be able to go anywhere you liked. Those migrant children would do anything for a luxury like that. The passport office would be exciting to them. It occurred to Isabel that if she made it home, her mother would never lecture her ever again. She looked ahead, to where the car had stopped on the tracks. “Maybe they’ll take us to our parents,” she said. “For the money.”
“You want to trust those men?” Chuy said.
Isabel felt a roiling in her empty stomach. She remembered the weight of Raúl’s body, the tearing feeling, the blood. She couldn’t have it happen again, and her legs started to tremble.
Oscar spoke up. “Where would we go?” His voice was small and whiny, but at least he’d snapped out of his silence.
“Into the trees.”
“But my knee.”
“You’ll be dead if you stay here, ñaño,” the man said. “They don’t need you.”
“Okay,” Oscar said, and he started shoving things into his backpack.
June handed him the bunny, saying, “Don’t hurt him!”
Oscar’s yellow folding knife was on the floor of the train car, forgotten. Isabel stuck it in her pocket.
Chuy lifted June down from the car, as if she weighed nothing.
Marcus edged out and dropped. Then the man helped Oscar down, so he wouldn’t land so hard on his knee, but Oscar still grunted with pain. Isabel slid out after them, and then they were all outside in the dark.
40.
ON THE DRIVE back to the capital, Raymond made a point of sitting next to his wife in the Suburban. Nora kept her earbuds in, and stared out the window at the trees going by. Raymond didn’t buy that Liv had made up what she’d said about the guide. You didn’t get two children to school age together without knowing a thing or two about a person’s moods.
He had taken all the shit about marrying a white girl. He would catch, from black women, a barely raised eyebrow, a subtle reproach. He felt it in airports, on subways, any time he was in a not-all-white public setting with his wife. And he thought they were right to hold it against him. But you didn’t get to choose. Love seized you, or it didn’t. He wouldn’t say that aloud, not even to his own sister, who would laugh at him. She and his brother had both found black partners, and he’d ceded the moral high ground to them. But he knew Nora was the person he was supposed to be with. They fit in some chemical, physical way.
Aside from girls in high school, which hardly counted, he’d never loved anyone else. He loved the smell of her, the sight of her getting out of the shower. Twelve years and two kids later, he still craved her. When he jerked off, it was Nora he thought about.
He’d had other offers, of course. There was always someone flirting on the set. The black-man roles he got didn’t usually have a love interest, so he’d been protected from too much gazing into each other’s eyes while the whole crew watched, the kind of gazing that made your brain chemistry start saying THIS IS LOVE. When he did get a part with a romance, or when someone hung around his trailer during the endless downtime, his brain had never fallen for it. He’d been faithful, a hundred percent, and now Nora had not. At the precise moment when it mattered most.
The sun had gone down in that abrupt equatorial way, and now it was late. At the hotel, Camila and Gunther went off to the bar, and the rest of them rode the elevator in silence. Benjamin and Liv, shifting uncomfortably, got off on five. Then it was just Raymond and Nora in the steep fluorescent light and the unforgiving elevator mirrors, riding up to their room on six.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. The elevator door opened on their floor, and he held it for her, but she stayed where she was. “I’m going up to the club room,” she said.
“First we talk.”
“I need something to eat.”
So Raymond let the door close.
“You don’t have to come with me,” Nora said.
“Oh, yes, I do.”
When the door opened again on the top floor, she stepped out past him. She was wearing the white shorts she’d worn on the day the kids had vanished. He’d thought she might not wear them again, although he was wearing his stupid golfing shirt, the stress stink washed out of it by the hotel laundry.
In the empty club room, lunch was over. Tea had been laid out: little triangular sandwiches and cookies, a silver urn of hot water. Small white ceramic pitchers of milk.
“So,” Raymond began, and he cleared his throat. “What Liv said.”
He saw a flash of anger cross his wife’s face. He could tell she wanted to attack Liv, but that would give weight to the accusation. Nora was seriously pissed.
“What did she mean?” he pressed.
“How should I know?”
“What happened with the guide?”
She shook her head.
“Nora.”
“What.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked.
“Nothing!” she said. “Nothing! I went looking for birds. The tide changed. None of us was paying attention. That’s what happened. That’s all.”
She was lying. He absorbed the blow, and the room seemed to spin. Tea sandwiches and milk pitchers caught in a slow cyclone. Was she going to say more? Was she going to cave and tell him the truth? He didn’t want her to speak. And he did.
“You have to tell me, if we’re going to get through this.”
She said nothing.
The silence went on too long and finally he said, “My mother is coming.”
“She’s what?”
“She’s on her way. I couldn’t hold her off anymore. But I need to know what’s going on, before she gets here. I need to know where we stand.” He needed to know how humiliated he was, before his mother arrived. He waited for Nora’s answer.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “That’s the last thing we need.”
He felt he had offered her his exposed chest and a knife, in exchange for information. And instead she was acting wronged. As if he had let her down. He had been so lucky in his life, but his good fortune had somehow run out. The love of his life, the mother of his vanished children, walked away from him, out of the room.
41.
CAMILA TRAILED GUNTHER to the hotel bar, which was dim with dark green walls. “Let’s go upstairs,” she pleaded. “Please.”
“The minibar is empty,” he said. He slid onto a stool and ordered a scotch.
The young bartender, balding in his twenties, glanced at Camila, then turned away for a glass. The bar was deserted, everyone worn out from the night before. Nursing hangovers, making resolutions.
“Just one,” Gunther said.
She climbed onto a stool beside him and ordered a gin and tonic.
Gunther’s drink arrived, and he nodded at the bartender. “I keep thinking,” he said in English, for privacy. “This photograph
, on the Instagram.”
Camila closed her eyes.
“It could not happen, with Hector there,” he said.
Camila had thought the same thing.
“So either they have done something to him,” he said, “or the two of them are not together.”
The bartender slid Camila’s gin and tonic toward her. It was cold and bitter and lovely: quinine, juniper, lime.
“Their bathing suits were not at the house,” Gunther said. “Why is that?”
“Perhaps they’re still wearing them.”
“And this tiny car,” he said. “I do not believe they were six, plus the housekeeper’s son, in that toy car. It makes no sense. They have been separated.”
“You think Isabel is alone?”
He drank. “I don’t know.”
“I have to believe they’re together.”
“No.” He shook his head. “If they are together, and if Hector could not protect his sister, he can never live with this. It will be terrible for him.” He drained the scotch and pushed the glass toward the bartender.
Camila knew Gunther was really speaking of himself. The bartender poured him a second scotch. “You said just one,” she said.
“Please don’t begin this,” Gunther said.
Camila sipped her drink and felt the beginnings of the numbness she knew Gunther was looking for. But there was no numbing this pain, this fear, not truly. She could only smooth the edges.
“This tortillera detective, she has done nothing,” Gunther said.
“Don’t call her that.”
“It’s what she is.”
“She seems very good, to me.”
“Incompetent. Five days they have been missing.” He drained his new drink, blinked and grimaced, and pushed it back across the bar. The bartender looked to her. Gunther tapped the base of the glass on the wood to retrieve his attention.
The bartender poured.
“These American women,” Gunther said. “They are at fault.”
“I was there, too,” she said quietly.