“No,” he said. “Their children are small. They should have stayed watching. It was their responsibility.”
“Perhaps.”
“They know it,” he said. “This is the reason they attack each other now. Nora was with the guide today, I promise you.”
“I don’t think so,” Camila said.
“Taking a taxi, to go for a walk,” he said, with contempt.
Camila knew he was often right, when he took the dark view. He had no illusions about other people. She suspected that his habit of suspicion came from knowledge of his own character. He saw himself clearly, and knew his own impulses were not as reconstructed as people might wish them to be.
The bartender brought the third drink. Gunther raised it to him in a mock toast. “Salud!”
The young man lifted his beer soberly, then moved away to clean something.
“El patán del río,” Gunther muttered.
It took Camila a moment to understand what he was talking about. The lout of the river. He meant Pedro, the guide. And Nora.
“She has no right to do this to her husband,” Gunther said.
“We don’t know anything,” Camila said.
“I do know that,” Gunther said. “It’s the only thing I know.”
42.
PENNY SAT IN the back seat of the yellow car with her brother, watching the woman with the scrunchie drive. The woman’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel and she seemed nervous, but Penny wasn’t sure why. She remembered the nervous doctor at the big house, who was a drug addict, but this woman didn’t seem like a drug addict. She wasn’t skinny like the doctor.
“Are you okay?” Penny asked Sebastian.
He nodded. Tears had cut rivulets in the dust on his cheeks.
“Do you have the finger-stick?”
He seemed confused by the question.
She dug into his pocket and found the little device, poked his finger for him to draw blood, and waited for the numbers. He was really low, lower than she had ever seen him. “Do you have any sugar?” she asked the woman. “Candy?”
The woman reached for a purse on the passenger seat, then rummaged in it with one hand. She came up with half a roll of mints, the foil uncoiling, and passed them back. Penny studied the mints. SIN AZÚCAR! the label said.
“These don’t have sugar,” she said. “Necesito azúcar.” She gave two to Sebastian anyway, and he stuck them in his mouth.
“No tengo nada más,” the woman said. She passed back a water bottle that had probably been sitting in the car a long time, getting cancer toxins from the plastic. Their mother never let them drink from a plastic bottle that had been in the car.
Penny unscrewed the lid and Sebastian drank. She stuck one of the sugar-free candies in her own mouth, feeling the tingling mint. She hadn’t brushed her teeth in a long time. It had gotten dark very fast, like a shade pulled down over the world. Penny had barely noticed, but now the headlights lit up the gray asphalt.
“My stomach hurts,” Sebastian said.
The woman looked at them in the rearview mirror. “Hay una recompensa, verdad?” she asked.
“I don’t know what that means,” Penny said.
“Dinero?” the woman said.
“Sí,” Penny said. “Mis padres pagar.” Of course her parents would give the woman money. They’d already been over that.
“Pagan,” the woman corrected.
“Pagan.”
The woman’s eyes in the mirror looked thoughtful.
Penny wished she would watch where she was going, and drive faster. “You’re taking us to the doctor, right?” she said.
The woman nodded. “Claro,” she said, and her eyes shifted back to the road.
43.
OSCAR COULD BARELY see anything as he stumbled for the trees. His glasses were fogged, and fear had reduced the visible world to a tunnel. The pain in his knee shocked him with every step. In front of him, the strange man, Chuy, carried the little girl, Noemi. Oscar expected to hear shouts behind them, but everything was distant, muffled.
They reached the woods and stopped, in a place that was sheltered and obscured from the view of the train. Oscar, panting, just wanted to be still, to keep the blinding bolts of pain from shooting up his leg.
In the distance he could see the dim forms of people running. Others had fled the train, too, and were here in the woods, afraid. Pollos. Oscar heard a scream.
“Can you keep moving?” Chuy whispered.
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Stay here,” Chuy said, and he ran off, staying low.
Oscar could tell by the kids’ breathing that they were terrified. What was he going to tell his mother? He’d done everything wrong.
“Are people coming to hurt us?” June whispered, huddled against her brother.
“Yes,” Isabel said.
“Shh,” Oscar said. “No.”
“I won’t let them hurt you,” Marcus said.
Noemi was silent.
They waited, trying to interpret the sounds coming from the night. There were more shouts, then three gunshots, and they all flinched. Then the car must have rolled off the tracks, because the idling train started moving again. A moan of protest went up from the trees. People had hoped to get back on the train. Now they would be stranded.
Oscar heard footsteps running toward them. “Shit,” he said. He cowered and shrank into the undergrowth. June whimpered.
A dark figure grabbed Isabel, then Noemi. Oscar braced for someone to grab him, too, but instead he heard a terrible noise. A high grunt of effort and then a kind of choking. He could just make out the shape of the intruder, who had fallen to his knees in the dark clearing. Isabel faced the man. She looked feral, half-crouched. In her hand she held Oscar’s folding knife, with its sharp four-inch blade.
The intruder let Noemi go. From his knees, he slumped sideways to the ground.
Oscar crawled toward him, his mind blank with horror. The wounded man was Chuy, and there was dark blood beneath his chin. His throat had been opened from side to side, an extra mouth. He made a gurgling noise that might have been a command. Oscar could still hear people moving through the trees. When he grabbed Chuy’s wrist to look for a pulse, his own blood was pounding too loudly in his ears for him to feel anything.
“He wanted us to run,” Marcus said.
Chuy’s throat was slashed wide open. You couldn’t press on a wound like that.
“We have to go!” Marcus said.
The kid was right.
Oscar staggered to his feet and took Noemi’s hand. He felt dizzy and sick. The bright pain shot up his leg with every step.
Marcus darted through the woods ahead of them, his sister in tow, as if he knew where he was going. Oscar managed to limp after him, pulling Noemi, who seemed strangely listless. Had she seen? Did she understand? Isabel followed, an ominous presence. Oscar half feared she would leap on him and cut his throat, too. He was more deserving of it than Chuy was. Chuy had tried to help them, and Oscar had only made mistakes. He limped on, dragging Noemi by the hand.
44.
PENNY WATCHED THE road in the yellow car’s headlights as they came into a town. Sebastian had fallen asleep, his head heavy against her arm. There were streetlights and other cars. They passed businesses that looked like shops and restaurants, closed up with metal shutters. Then she saw a little store with a glass door and a light on.
“There!” she said. “Candy. Phone. Stop!”
The woman slowed the car and parked beside the store.
Penny jostled Sebastian. “We have to get you something to eat.”
Sebastian rubbed his eyes and mumbled a protest. His hair was damp. They climbed out onto the sidewalk and Penny’s legs felt stiff. Sebastian stumbled like he was still asleep. Penny took his hand so he wouldn’t walk rig
ht off the curb into the street.
The store was tiny, with unfamiliar packages crowded into racks hanging from the walls. She picked a bag of candy that looked sugary. “These, please,” she said. “And can you call our parents?”
The old man behind the counter was looking at Sebastian, who let go of her hand and slid to the floor. His whole body started twitching. There was foam around his mouth.
Penny kneeled beside him. “Help!” she said. “Get a doctor!”
But the adults just stared down. Sebastian’s body kept jerking on the floor.
“Help me!” Penny screamed.
Finally the man behind the counter spoke. Penny heard him say the word “hospital.” He came around the counter and crouched to lift Sebastian in his arms. The woman ran to her car and threw open the back door.
Penny climbed in beside her brother. The woman got in front and the car peeled out, and Penny clutched Sebastian’s head to keep him from rolling to the floor. She must have dropped the candy, but she didn’t think he could eat it now anyway.
The woman was driving fast. Sebastian had stopped jerking. Penny shook his shoulder. “Stay awake.”
They drove past two hotels, some more closed storefronts, and a swimsuit shop with mannequins in the window. The woman was crying as she drove. “No es mi culpa,” she said. “No es mi culpa.”
Then they stopped under a bright fluorescent light. The woman jumped out again and helped Penny pull Sebastian out of the car. “No quiero problemas,” she said. “Lo siento. Lo siento.”
She backed away with her hands up, then got in the car. The tires squealed in protest as she pulled away.
Penny was alone with her limp brother on the concrete at her feet. She couldn’t lift him, so she got her arms under his head and shoulders and started to drag him. She thought of playing Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, willing her brother to be lighter, but that would mean he was dead.
She walked backward, dragging Sebastian, struggling to keep her hold. His flip-flops came off on the concrete, so she left them behind. Someone was going to come help them, any second now. A doctor, a nurse. And those people would finally, finally call her parents.
“It’s okay,” she said, to herself as much as to Sebastian. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
45.
NORA WOKE TO Raymond’s phone ringing in the early hours of the morning. She tried to swim up out of sleep, through the dark water of unconsciousness, into the painful light. The hotel room. The wreck of her marriage and her life. Raymond was awake and dressing. He said they were going to a hospital on the coast.
“Why a hospital?” Nora asked. “What happened?”
“No idea,” he said, pulling on a shirt.
“Should we pack? Are we staying there?”
“Don’t know.”
She pulled on jeans, threw some things in a bag—a toothbrush, underwear, her phone—and climbed into the black Suburban with the diplomatic plates waiting outside the hotel. If she never saw another Suburban she would be happy. Benjamin and Liv were in the car. Benjamin said good morning, Liv said nothing. Raymond got in and read a text from Detective Rivera aloud, saying that two of the kids had turned up at an emergency room in a resort town.
“Which two kids?” Nora asked.
“She doesn’t know,” Raymond said.
“How do they know they’re our kids, if they don’t know which ones?”
“They saw them on TV.”
“But then, which ones? Are they white or brown? Do they speak Spanish?”
“She doesn’t know.”
Nora sat back in her seat. Of course she should be happy that any of the kids had turned up. But why only two? How could the police not know which ones? People were obsessed with physical descriptions here. They called each other negra, gordo, flaca, chino, morena. If they hadn’t specifically said it was the moreno kids, then it wasn’t. But maybe brown was the default here? Either way, two parents had won the lottery, and four had lost. Unless the kids had split up. It could be Penny and Hector, or Marcus and Sebastian. That was too complicated to think about.
Camila and Gunther hadn’t answered any calls or texts, and there was a question of whether to wait for them. Raymond was texting with Kenji about a car to pick up his mother at the airport. He told the driver it was okay to go. Nora had forgotten, in the depth of her sleep, about Raymond’s mother. Her heart sank anew.
On the drive, she tried to think of a question that would produce information, whichever kids were at the hospital. Like those logic tests, trying to figure out who the liar is. What had the kids who’d been found said about the kids who hadn’t?
But what if the kids said that the others were dead? She thought of Schrödinger’s Cat, a problem she had never understood, because the cat was either dead or it wasn’t. It didn’t matter if you looked in the box. Now she finally understood it. Until they got to the hospital, her children were alive. And they were dead. But once they got to the hospital, it would be one or the other. She didn’t want to arrive.
What she knew for certain was that she had brought this punishment on her family. She didn’t know what the punishing entity was—God? Karma? The Furies?—but its sharp talons were shredding her heart. She wanted to bargain, to promise sacrifice or good behavior, but what more could she sacrifice than her children? How could she imagine living righteously without knowing what she had to live for?
The drive was endless, and Raymond sat beside her, as wretched as she was. His mother, a woman Nora admired, was on a plane somewhere overhead, about to witness their failure as parents. Benjamin and Liv sat close together and seemed to be leaning slightly forward, as if that might get them to the hospital faster. They couldn’t wait to open the box.
When the Suburban finally parked, the morning was oppressively sunny. Benjamin and Liv climbed out.
“I don’t know if I can go in there,” Nora said.
“You can,” Raymond said.
“Come back and tell me who it is.”
“You’re going with me.”
So she climbed down into the parking lot, her legs weak. Benjamin and Liv were already halfway to the door. Nora gripped Raymond’s arm. “Someone would’ve said it was our kids, if it was,” she said.
“If that’s true,” Raymond said, “you’re going to be happy for Benjamin and Liv, do you hear me?”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. She’s your family. Her kids are your family. And whoever’s in there, they’re going to know something. They’re going to have information, and we’re going to get it.”
She held his arm and they passed through the doors, just in time to see Penny fly into Liv’s arms. Liv was kneeling, laughing, kissing her daughter’s face, holding her head as if she couldn’t believe Penny was real, as if she might be an illusion or a dream. Then hugging her again, so tightly that Penny laughed and said, “Mom!”
Nora felt a physical revulsion, and turned to go back out the door, but Raymond blocked her way. She looked up into his eyes. They were hard.
“Happy,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
So Nora followed Liv into a hospital room where Sebastian was hooked up to an IV. He looked angelic and wan. Liv was sobbing. It was hard enough to keep Sebastian alive at home. Of course if there were two kids in the hospital, it would be the kid with the chronic illness and his self-important sister. Nora had been insane to hope at all.
Penny seemed healthy and fine, radiant from the attention, no surprise. She’d apparently carried Sebastian into the emergency room, like some sort of kiddie pietà, and she’d been petted and praised for it by nurses and doctors. Nora remembered that Raymond had said the kids would have information, and she crouched down in front of the child she had held as an infant in her arms.
“Where are your cousins?” s
he asked.
Penny looked at the floor. “I don’t know.”
“Where did you last see them?”
“On the train.”
“What train?”
Penny blew her bangs off her forehead in exasperation. “The train we were on. Before we went to the road and the woman left me here with Sebastian, who was really heavy.”
Nora recognized this for the humblebrag it was, and thought she had never known a more slappable child. “Were Marcus and June alone on the train?”
“No,” Penny said. “They’re with the others. It’s not my fault.”
Nora felt a cold certainty that it was Penny’s fault, whatever “it” was. But the detective had arrived, and she took Nora aside. She said that a social worker was coming so they could do a proper debrief of the children. Could Nora wait? It was easy for kids to get confused or dug in about details.
“A social worker,” Nora said. “Why?”
“She’s specially trained to do these interviews.”
Something about her tone was odd, and Nora moved to make sure they were out of earshot. “Are you looking for sex crimes?” she whispered.
“We’re just being careful.”
“Did you hear Penny? Have you ever seen a child who’s been assaulted be that smug?”
“Please, just wait,” Detective Rivera said. “She’s not the only child involved.”
So Nora sat on a bench on her hands, to keep them from trembling. When the social worker arrived, she was slight and gray-haired, in a lavender dress.
“You’ve had a terrible time,” she said, holding Nora’s hand in hers. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’re American,” Nora said.
“I came here in the Peace Corps and never left,” the woman said. “My name is Allison.”
Nora asked if she could listen during Penny’s interview.
“Are you the mother?” Allison asked.
“No, I am,” Liv said, raising her hand.
Nora had a sudden flash of Liv at nine, always having the right answer in class, always getting the best grades. “But I’ve known Penny all her life,” she said. “And my children were with her.”