“It’s up to the mother,” Allison said, apologetic.
Liv said, “I think maybe we should talk as a family first.”
Nora stared at her cousin. Liv wouldn’t meet her eye.
“All right,” Allison said, all business.
“Sorry, Nora,” Benjamin said, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“Actually,” Allison said, smiling brightly at him, “it can be easier for children with just the mother there, at first. Do you mind waiting out here?”
Benjamin blinked. Nora thought he would object to being shut out, but he didn’t. He seemed too shocked to protest. It was like childbirth in her parents’ generation: Dads wait outside.
So Liv, Penny, the social worker, and Detective Rivera went into a little room. Nora could see blue plastic chairs and some dolls and stuffed animals inside. They shut the door behind them.
“Fuck,” Benjamin said.
“No fucking kidding,” Nora said.
46.
RAYMOND SAT ON a bench in the hospital hallway, feeling numb. The press hadn’t found them yet. His manager had been trying to work with a local PR person to stem the tide of stories, but it hadn’t worked. The astronaut picture was still running on the news. And the reporters would find them soon. Liv and Benjamin would be on TV, with their kids safe in their arms, and his kids would be gone. He had tried to be big about it. He had tried to see any of the kids’ return as good news, but it was getting hard to keep the optimism going.
Liv came around the corner with her arms full of vending machine snacks. She seemed to consider turning back when she saw him, but it was too late. “Hey,” she said.
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
She sat beside him on the bench, arms full of chips and pistachios. “How’s it going?”
“How do you think?”
“They’re going to find your kids,” she said.
“Sure.”
“I know it doesn’t seem fair that ours are back.”
“I’m glad they’re back.”
“How’s Nora?”
“You could ask her.”
“She’s not really talking to me.”
“I thought you weren’t talking to her.”
Liv adjusted the snacks in her arms. “Listen, I lost my mind, when I said that thing. I’m so sorry. We’ve all lost our minds a little.”
“I haven’t.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said.
He had to assume he had been cuckolded, and he knew that if Liv had said nothing, it still would have happened, he just wouldn’t know it. Could you be humiliated if you didn’t know it? He thought you could, and it was worse, because other people knew. So you were a cuckold and a fool. “I’m glad you said something,” he said, though the words felt like ash in his mouth.
They sat in silence. “So your mom is coming,” she said.
“Yeah. Nora’s dreading it.”
“Nora’s in a terrible place,” Liv said. “She just lost her mom, the kids are missing, she thinks she’s lost you. I mean, imagine.”
“I don’t have to imagine,” he said.
“Oh, Raymond.” Liv dumped the snacks, slid close to him on the bench, and put her arms around him. Her short hair brushed his face and he smelled rosemary shampoo over the disinfectant smell of the hospital. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“I don’t know what we do now,” he said. “Where do we go? What do we try next?”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“You should take Penny and Sebastian home.”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “We’re staying with you.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I mean it,” she said. “Then we’re gonna sue the shit out of the cruise line.”
He laughed. He sometimes forgot that he’d known Liv as a movie executive before he ever met Nora. She’d fought to cast him and to keep him, working around his schedule. She’d introduced him to his wife. She was reliable, brash, sometimes aggravating. Just now she’d put her arms around him only to comfort him. But with her body close against his, with Nora freezing him out, something seemed to shift, the ground moved beneath his feet. He sensed that Liv felt it, too. A stirring.
“I should go,” she said.
“Okay.” But she didn’t leave. His arm was still around her, her head still resting against his chest.
Then Liv stiffened and pushed away from him, staring down the hall. He followed her eyes and saw Nora and his mother silently watching them. His mother looked road-weary, her handbag on a shoulder, her hair smoothed back.
Liv, her movements jerky and agitated, gathered up her snacks from the bench. But nothing had happened! There was a way to play this, to make it explainable—and of course it was explainable, it was fine—but Liv wasn’t doing it. She was making everything worse. She dropped a bag of chips. “Fuck,” she breathed.
Raymond leaned over to pick up the bag from the polished linoleum, placed it on the top of the bundle in Liv’s arms, then stood to welcome his mother to this world-class shit show.
47.
IT STARTED TO rain as they stumbled through the woods. Noemi had a plastic slicker in her backpack, but she didn’t know where her backpack was. Had she dropped it? Chuy would have picked it up, but she wasn’t sure where Chuy was. Something had happened. She felt dizzy. Water squelched in her shoes.
The others were silent, run-walking ahead of her. The toy pig was lost somewhere in the rain, and this made her sadder than it should have. She stumbled on a root and caught herself.
There seemed to be a weight pressing down on her head. The older boy with the glasses, who’d been so afraid on the train, told her to keep up, until he saw that she couldn’t. He’d been carrying the littlest girl, but he put her down and picked up Noemi. It was an uneven ride because he was limping.
They reached a road. Noemi’s eyes felt gummy, her head confused. A pair of headlights came out of the gloom and blinded her. The other children looked like ghosts on the roadside. There was a long wait and another set of headlights went past, red taillights vanishing into the dark again. A third car stopped, and the boy with the glasses leaned over to speak into the window.
Noemi lost track again, because now she was inside the car and she was sweating. The woman driver was talking about Jesus. Maybe they were all on the way to heaven, maybe this was how you got there. In a car in the rain. Noemi fell asleep.
Then they were in a building, but she couldn’t tell what it was. She heard Isabel tell someone that they needed dry clothes. Noemi was afraid of Isabel, but only a little, because the older girl seemed more afraid than she was. They were in a bathroom and Noemi’s fingers didn’t seem to be working, so the older girl helped her undo her pants and steadied her while she sat on the toilet, and helped her change. Noemi watched, dazed, as the girl stuffed Noemi’s clothes, the clothes her grandmother had washed and folded, into the garbage in the bathroom. She stuffed something yellow in, too—the bikini from the TV. She gave Noemi strange new clothes, a blue sweatshirt and a dry pair of jeans with an elastic waist. Noemi remembered asking where the clothes came from and the girl saying something about a church. So maybe they were in a church. It didn’t look like the church at home.
Then they were in a car again.
Noemi dreamed that the white bunny grew as big as a house. She was sweating again, and then she was shivering. Someone put a jacket over her. The car was moving. She woke up enough to think that she would never see her grandmother again.
She heard the littlest girl ask, “Will she be okay?”
“Shhh,” the girl’s brother said.
That seemed to go on, the dreaming and sweating and shivering and the voices, for a long time. She thought she was in her friend Rosa’s dollhouse. In her dream, the kids from the ship were the tiny dolls, all in white shirts and
red shorts.
She knew a phone number where someone would go and get her grandmother, but she couldn’t remember it. And what could her grandmother do? Travel through all these countries to find her? It wasn’t possible. And her parents couldn’t come get her. If they did, they couldn’t go back to Nueva York. So would someone put her in an orphanage? In this country? What country was she in?
She wondered if the bunny had been lost in the woods, like the pig. Maybe it was alive in the underbrush, foraging for grass and seeds, its coat dirty, its fluffy tail gone gray with dust. The wild rabbits would sniff at it with suspicion. Or an owl out night-hunting might eat it. She was the bunny, hiding in the brush, hoping that no one would find her.
48.
MARIA SAT WITH her lawyer in a small room at the police station. The police had promised they would tell her if they learned anything about her son. The lawyer had dyed black hair in a tight ponytail, thick mascara, and eyebrows drawn on. Maria felt faded by contrast.
“I’m not in contact with my son,” she said. “I took the children to my house, and told him to take them to the United States embassy. I don’t know what happened after that. I couldn’t reach his phone. We were trying to rescue the children.”
“But you didn’t know anything about the Herreras’ criminal enterprise,” the lawyer prompted.
“Right,” Maria said, chastened.
“So what were you rescuing the children from?”
Maria hesitated. “Raúl.”
“You feared he would abuse the children.”
“I think perhaps he did.” She remembered George shouting at Raúl, the girl upstairs.
The lawyer shook her head. “You don’t know that. If you’d known that, you would have taken the child to a hospital, or to the police.”
Maria hung her head. She had been so afraid, and there’d been all the other children to deal with, and so little time. Why had she gone back to the Herreras’ house? Out of habit? No, she was afraid that Raúl would discover her and the children missing, and come after them.
“You only had a fear that Raúl might abuse them,” the lawyer said.
“Yes, okay.”
“And why didn’t you go to the police?”
“Because the Herreras pay the police.”
The lawyer dropped her pen to her yellow notepad in exasperation. “But you don’t know that.”
“Everyone knows,” Maria said tiredly.
“You don’t,” the lawyer said. “Because you didn’t know the Herreras had a criminal enterprise, as you have told me. And you are not involved or complicit in that criminal enterprise. I’m just trying to help you account for your unaccountable actions.”
Maria nodded, and began again. “They are American children, so I was trying to get them to their embassy.”
“Okay,” the lawyer said, picking up her pen.
“I knew I could trust my son. Oscar is a very responsible boy.”
“Okay,” the lawyer said. “And Oscar knows the Herreras?”
“Yes. They have been my employers for many years.”
“Was your son involved in their work?”
“No!” Maria said. “Never.”
The lawyer raised a painted eyebrow. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
“And will he ask for a lawyer?”
Maria considered. He knew to be wary around the police. But this was a stressful situation, and Oscar would be frightened. He might not remember to ask. “Perhaps.”
The lawyer sighed. “And you believe George Herrera has left the country.”
“I do.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone he was leaving?”
“I did.”
“But before, when they could have stopped him at the airport.”
“I was in shock,” Maria said. “I had seen a woman murdered. I had seen her body. All I could think of was finding my son.”
The lawyer nodded and made a note. “You weren’t thinking clearly. You were panicked about your son. He’s your only child?”
“I had a daughter.”
“Had?”
“She’s dead.”
“How?” the lawyer asked.
Maria could not bear these questions. “Drugs,” she said. “An overdose.”
The lawyer sighed. “If you get charged, they’ll go after that.”
“Why?”
“Character.”
Maria drew herself up. “What happened to my daughter had nothing to do with my character.”
“That’s not what people will think. You worked for drug dealers, your daughter died of an overdose. A simple equation.”
“That isn’t true.” Though she did wonder, sometimes. Raúl had called Ofelia her “slut daughter” just this morning.
The lawyer was writing on her notepad. “We’ll see what happens, if they charge you. We’ll talk about it then.”
Maria was astonished at such matter-of-factness about the deepest wounds of her heart.
There was a knock at the door, and a young Caribbean officer came in. “They found the kid,” he said.
Maria leaped to her feet. “Where?”
“At a police station, not far.”
“Why at a police station?”
“He walked in.”
“And the children?”
“Some of them.”
“Not all?”
The young officer shrugged. “Don’t know.”
The lawyer slid her notepad into her briefcase. “I’m going there. No one questions Oscar until I arrive.”
“I’m going with you,” Maria said.
“Let me handle this.”
“Are you keeping me here?” Maria asked the cop.
He looked uncertain.
“Someone needs to take her home,” the lawyer said. “She’s not under arrest.”
The cop nodded. “I’ll get someone.”
“I want to see my son!” Maria said.
“I’ll call you,” the lawyer told her. “Right now you need to sleep, and be quiet.” She said it with a significant look.
The door closed behind them and Maria was alone. She slumped to the table, exhausted. She should have fought harder to go along. But Oscar was alive. That was enough for now.
49.
NORA SAT WITH her mother-in-law in the hospital’s little café, over coffee. Liv sometimes talked about what a cliché it was to feel oppressed by her own mother-in-law. Someday, she said, Sebastian would fall in love, and when that happened, the person he loved would feel oppressed by Liv, and she wouldn’t be able to catch a break. But Nora didn’t feel that way.
She loved Dianne, who was sixty-three, with a majestic bosom and an excellent poker face. She was a middle school principal, and Nora had spent her professional life working with middle school principals, trying to please them. She did not want to seem like a failure in Dianne’s eyes—in her marriage, in her parenting, in anything. And she did not want Raymond to seem like a failure. Dianne expected a lot of her son, and now Nora had to explain what he’d been doing in the hallway with his arms around Liv.
“It’s been really tough,” Nora said. “I think we’re all in need of comfort.”
“You and Raymond don’t comfort each other?”
“That’s been hard to do lately.”
“Why?”
It was impossible to explain. The guide, the disappearance, Liv’s blurted accusation, Raymond’s baffled hurt. And before that, the way things had cooled between them, incrementally, so she’d barely noticed until it was done. “It’s a long story,” Nora said.
“I have time,” Dianne said.
Nora felt restless and itchy. She wished she could crawl right out of her skin. “Can I tell you what I’m afraid of?” she asked.
Dianne nodded. r />
“I’m afraid I’ve taught my children to be too good,” Nora said. “I wanted to keep them safe. I taught them that they can’t play with plastic guns, ever. And they can’t lose their tempers. I wanted them not to draw attention to themselves. I wanted them to be small targets.”
Dianne was listening.
“My niece, Penny, her personality is to be a big target,” Nora said. “And Liv encourages it, because she’s a good feminist, mostly. And I know that people are going to hate that quality in Penny, because she’s a girl. She’s assertive and she wants things, and she doesn’t care about being polite, and it comes off bossy and greedy. I want to be a good feminist, and I hate it in Penny. But I also know she can get away with it, because she’s white.”
Dianne drank her coffee and gave nothing away.
Nora took a deep breath. “So Penny got pissed off and jumped out of the train. It was so insanely stupid. But then it got her rescued. I’m afraid that Marcus and June are huddled somewhere being good, like I taught them. And they won’t take a chance and they would never do anything that dumb, and so they won’t be rescued, like Penny was. And it will be my fault.”
Dianne considered her for a long minute, then said, “They’ll be all right.”
Nora was bursting to say that there was no way of knowing that! Kids died and were hurt all the time! Instead she looked at her hands. If Dianne said something about God, about prayer, she didn’t know if she could trust herself to be tactful in response. “I do know Marcus will take care of his sister, if he can,” she said.
“Of course he will.”
“But what if he can’t?” Her voice cracked.
“He will. Those children are strong.”
Nora blew her nose in the paper napkins from her cafeteria tray. “I miss my kids so much,” she said, through snotty tears. “And I miss my mom.”
“I know, sweetheart,” Dianne said. “I know.”
Loud voices echoed down the hall, and Nora recognized Liv’s. She jumped up and ran toward the noise, with Dianne behind her. They found Liv outside Sebastian’s hospital room.