“You didn’t see his picture on the news?”
“No. I wasn’t watching the news.”
“And your mother didn’t tell you about him?”
“I think she was worried about the kids she had.”
“All right,” the lawyer said, making a note.
“So where is he?” he asked.
“That’s the question.”
“Did Sebastian get insulin? Is he okay?”
“He will be,” the lawyer said. “You’re accused of kidnapping, you know.”
He closed his eyes, his knee throbbing. “I didn’t kidnap the kids.”
“You did take them.”
“I was taking them to the embassy.”
“You chose a roundabout route.”
He opened his eyes. “I was trying to help them. I did the best I could.”
“By climbing on a freight train?”
“My knee hurt. The kids were so tired and hungry. How’s the little girl, Noemi?”
“She’s still in a fever.”
He didn’t know whether to tell the lawyer about Chuy, about Isabel killing Chuy. Should he tell her? Would they arrest Isabel?
But the lawyer had moved on. “A woman was murdered at the Herrera house,” she said. “The widow of the Colombian man whose grave the children found.”
“Jesus.”
“Your mother says Raúl shot her. And Raúl’s brother seems to have left the country.”
“I wish I could leave the country.”
“Don’t even think about it,” she said. “You don’t have his resources. There’s also the car theft for them to charge you with.”
“I asked Carmen if I could borrow it!”
“She said no,” the lawyer said. “And you destroyed it, in an accident resulting in a fatality.”
He pushed himself up in the bed. “He shot at us! He ran us off the road! He could have killed all of us, like he killed that woman!” His head was throbbing now, as much as his knee.
The lawyer stood. “I’ll get the doctor. Try not to agitate yourself. And don’t talk to anyone,” she said.
53.
LIV WALKED THE hospital hallways to stretch her legs. Sebastian was stable again, and an endocrinologist had been summoned. Benjamin was at his bedside with Penny. Liv had been making plans: to cut back her hours at work, volunteer at school. Go to every school dance, chaperone every date. The kids would hate her, but they would be alive. She’d once felt annoyed when they clung or leaned against her in the heat—now she wanted to feel their warm bodies against her all the time.
She found Nora outside in a courtyard, staring at some palm fronds. Cigarette smell wafted from two women in scrubs.
“I’m pretending I still smoke,” Nora said. “How’s Sebastian?”
“Much better.” Liv looked for wood to knock, but everything was concrete. “And Marcus and June?”
Nora hesitated.
“Are they okay?” Liv pressed.
“I think so. I mean, yes. But there’s something they’re not telling me.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have a guess?”
Nora shook her head. “Marcus has started stuttering, and he can barely look at me. He knows Isabel was raped. But there’s something else.”
An orderly came outside, eyed them, and lit a cigarette.
There was a long silence. Liv realized she didn’t know how to talk to her cousin anymore. Their countless hours of batting the conversation back and forth, the examining of small questions, the light Nora shed on everything as they talked it all through—it was gone. Liv wished, fervently, that she hadn’t seen Nora with Pedro at the café table.
Nora walked over to the orderly and gestured to his pack of Marlboros. He shook one out and lit it for her as she cupped her hand around the flame. Then she brought it back to where Liv stood.
Liv felt the words spilling out, she couldn’t stop or filter them. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry about everything. I don’t know why I said that thing to Raymond, about Pedro. I don’t know what came over me.”
“It was really shitty,” Nora said.
“I know. I’d lost my mind.”
Nora looked at the cigarette. “This is going to make me puke.”
“How did Raymond respond?”
Nora tapped the ash loose. “He’s sort of catastrophically disappointed, I think. I refused to talk about it, and then his mother showed up, and then I passed out, and now the kids are with us. So I guess it’s on hold.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s funny,” Nora said, “Marcus keeping some secret—it makes me realize how horrible it is, to suspect there’s something you’re not being told. It’s kind of worse than the news itself. I understand why Raymond is so angry and unhappy. And I’m afraid this will be between us forever. I don’t know if we can stay together, but I don’t know what splitting up looks like. I have no income. Even if I get a teaching job, there’s no way I can live anywhere close to the school. I could barely afford my tiny old apartment, and rents are so much higher now.”
“You’re not really going to split up.”
“I don’t know, Liv!” Nora cried, exasperated. The orderly and the two women in scrubs turned to look at them.
They stood in silence. “You could keep the house,” Liv said finally.
“I can’t do that.”
“It’s a community property state.” Liv sounded like her mother and hated herself for it.
Nora shook her head. “Raymond’s mother has always thought me unworthy of him. And now I’ve proven her right. I’m a terrible mother, who cheated and allowed her children to disappear. I’m not going to take the house.”
“We all let them disappear,” Liv said.
Nora shrugged.
Liv said, “I’m also so sorry Dianne saw that weird thing in the hall. You know Raymond was just being comforting.”
The orderly went inside, and Nora bent and stubbed her borrowed cigarette out on the concrete. “Jesus, that was disgusting.”
Liv was fairly sure she meant the cigarette, but she wouldn’t have put a lot of money on it. “Have you talked to Camila?” she asked.
Nora shook her head. “They’re looking for Hector. You know, I keep thinking how we live in this weird ahistorical bubble, a time and place when it seems unthinkable, impossible, to lose a child. But it happens all the time, all over the world. It always has. And people go on. They can’t just drop to the floor and scream for the rest of their lives.”
“I might have,” Liv said. “If we’d lost Sebastian.”
“You wouldn’t, though,” Nora said. “I think my brain has been preparing all week, making the insulation that lets you go on. You know that earthquake the other night?”
“I slept through it.”
“I was awake, but I didn’t feel it,” Nora said. “I was walking around the hotel and these people replacing a carpet asked me if I’d felt the terremoto. I had no idea what they were talking about. It’s like I’ve been in some kind of deep freeze. I keep thinking of that woman who lost her baby to the dingo, and how people thought she wasn’t emotional enough. But you can’t be emotional enough. How could you be?”
“Lindy Chamberlain,” Liv said.
“I was so angry at you when your kids came back,” Nora said. “I thought I could never forgive you for that. Forget the rest.”
“And now?”
“I should go back inside.” Nora tossed the stubbed cigarette into a trash can by the door.
Liv had thought, for a fleeting second, that their old connection might be restored. But it hadn’t been. She felt intensely sad. And she thought she had no right to her sadness, not when Penny and Sebastian had survived. She’d lost a friendship, but Camila
had probably lost a child, and Isabel had lost her childhood. But how could you measure your own pain against the pain of the world?
She passed the room where Noemi slept. Penny had wanted to visit, but Noemi wasn’t well enough. There had been other kids on the train. Penny said they had seen a boy peering out. So many kids in peril in the world, in leaky boats, in captivity, trafficked, sick. She remembered her mother talking about the Bhopal gas leak when Liv was—how old? No older than Penny. Her mother at the kitchen table saying that the average payout for Americans killed in plane crashes was $350,000, and that the Union Carbide payout in Bhopal might be a few dollars a life. There had been children killed, pregnant women. She remembered the overhead light in their kitchen, her mother’s bleak and outraged expression at the way lives were valued, her father’s silent agreement, their reflections in the big window with the dark night outside.
So what would Camila be thinking, now that the American kids—or no, the estadounidense kids—were back safely, when Camila’s kids were not?
Liv wasn’t sure which room Isabel had been given, so she stopped at the nurses’ station to ask. The two women at the station kept tapping away at keyboards and didn’t look up. The person Liv was a week ago wouldn’t have let them ignore her. She would have demanded their attention, and the room number. But she was afraid to see Camila. So she left the women to their work and walked on.
54.
NORA STILL FELT sick from the cigarette. She’d brushed her teeth three times to get rid of the taste. June was curled up in one hospital bed with Raymond’s mother. Marcus slept beside Raymond in the other. He still wouldn’t tell her what he was hiding. He’d tossed and turned as Raymond whispered into his hair that it was going to be all right. The hospital was letting them all stay until Sebastian could be discharged, when an American hospital would have kicked them out that afternoon. Nora slipped out and leaned against the wall in the hallway.
After a few minutes, Raymond followed and closed the door behind him. Nora didn’t know what a normal conversation between them sounded like anymore. He asked, “What’s going to happen to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you want to happen?”
She shook her head.
“When my cousins’ baby died, they couldn’t stay together,” he said. “There was too much sadness between them.”
Nora knew the story. “Our babies aren’t dead.”
“You know what I mean,” he said. “Sometimes people don’t make it through a thing like this.”
She nodded.
“So what do you need from me, to stay?” he asked.
She hadn’t formed the question in that way before. She toed the linoleum with her sneaker. “I need to know if you’re going to forgive me.”
Raymond didn’t respond at first, and Nora was afraid he would say he couldn’t forgive her, and they would be done. Instead he said, “Do you forgive me for leaving you and the kids, and going golfing?”
She looked up and met his eyes. She wanted to stay steely and ready for whatever might come. But he was a professional, it was his job to stir up emotions with his eyes, to make people feel his warmth or his seriousness or his anger or his steadfastness or his sorrow or his kindness, or all of those things at once, without saying anything. And she felt all those things. “I do,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “You know what I did. Now I need to know what I’m forgiving you for.”
Nora swallowed. He had to know, to move forward. But if he knew, he wouldn’t forgive her. So she was caught. She thought of Pedro kissing her against the tree, before everything happened. His casual speed and skill, how emotionally unentangled it had seemed. She felt a twitch between her legs, a quickening warmth.
She thought of Pedro leading her away from the café after Liv found them, and her deep sleep in the stale bed in the papaya-colored house. She remembered her humiliating wait in the taxi when she went back the next day. Maybe he’s married, señora, the cabbie had said. She would never see Pedro again, she did not want to see him, and yet the damp ache and the shame both grew more insistent.
“Did you fuck him?” Raymond asked.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Did you suck him off?”
She shook her head again, a little shocked. That seemed impossible, too much of a betrayal. She had not known she had made such distinctions until now.
“Did he go down on you?” Raymond asked.
She shook her head a third time.
Raymond looked confused. “So then what happened?”
A nurse walked by in purple scrubs, glanced at them and strode purposefully on, in case they might want something from her. Nora watched her go, then turned back to Raymond. She was afraid.
“He kissed me,” she said.
“Okay,” Raymond said. His breathing had changed, the way it did when he was upset. She could see the uneven rising in his chest, hear the stilted rhythm.
“And then he just—used his hand,” she said. “His fingers. It took about thirty seconds. I was wearing my shorts.” She wanted to tell him that she had thought of the car wash, but it might seem like she was letting herself off the hook. The non-apology apology. He hated that.
“But you came?” Raymond said.
She nodded, miserable.
Raymond’s eyes went from confusion to a different look. “Did you like it?”
She hesitated, then nodded.
“What about him?” Raymond asked. His voice had gone hoarse.
Another nurse walked by. They waited for her to pass.
Nora was aware that she was standing closer to Raymond now, so she could keep her voice low. “He jerked himself off,” she said. “It was just as fast. He wiped his hand on a leaf.”
Raymond stared at her. She could feel a laugh rising, and she tried to hold it back in case it might make him angry, but there was a smile lurking around the corners of his mouth, too, and they both burst into laughter. He put an arm around her waist and pulled her to him and grew serious again. “What was his cock like?”
“Not as big as yours.” She felt it flex, hard, against her stomach. She felt dizzy, as if all the blood in her body had gone to her pelvis and was waiting there, pulsing, leaving her light-headed and stupid.
“Where can we go?” he asked.
“There’s a supply closet.” She’d seen the nurses go in for boxes of latex gloves.
They waited until the hallway was clear. Then they were in the closet, and her back was against the door, and they were tugging at clothes, surrounded by boxes of gauze and toilet paper. Raymond’s mouth was hot on hers and he had a hand on her breast. “Did he touch you like this?”
“No.”
“No? What the fuck is wrong with him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
His fingers went inside her underwear and slid. “Oh, Jesus, you’re wet.”
“I need you to fuck me.”
“First I need to know,” he said. “Did he touch you like this?”
“Yes,” she said, clinging to him, trembling. “Please,” she said. “Please.”
“Not yet,” he said. “Did he do this?”
“Yes,” she said. He had to hold her upright as she came.
Then he relented. She kicked the underwear off and he lifted her by the waist so she could wrap her legs around him. His cock slid inside her and she gasped with relief. Her face was wet with tears and he kissed them away. Someone was going to hear them, against the door. She wanted to ask again if he would forgive her, because he’d never answered, but no one could be held accountable for anything said now.
55.
THE SEARCH AND rescue team was very professional, very organized. They set out through the woods near the river in a row. Two of the men carried rifles for crocodiles. Gunther walked in step with
them, looking for his son.
He supposed all fathers thought their children the best, the most delightful, the most attractive. But most of them were wrong. Hector carried himself like a prince, a leader, a man already. So why hadn’t Gunther taken him golfing, instead of leaving him with the women and children? They could have fit one more in the car.
Because they’d had a foursome already, he supposed. And Hector wasn’t interested in golf: not enough action for him. Plus—and this made Gunther feel craven—it was easier to have a drink or two at lunch without his son’s eyes on him. And the other men might also have felt constrained in the company of a boy.
They found no sign of Hector in the woods, so a team of divers arrived to search the river. Gunther found himself speaking of his son in the present tense, as if he were still alive. He couldn’t do otherwise. He talked about Hector’s swimming ability as if it were a factor. He knew that crocodiles rolled you over, again and again, to drown you. He tried not to think of Hector gasping, drowning, his lungs filling with the half-salt river water. It had been seven days now. He knew the chances of finding his son were infinitesimal. But still he hoped.
The divers, preparing on the bank, had a device on the end of a long spear. It held a .357 Magnum bullet in one end of a tube, and a charge. The bang-stick could be used at close quarters, underwater, in direct contact with an animal. Someone explained that the blast would do most of the damage, not the bullet itself.
They were looking for traces of his son. That was the only point now: to find proof that Hector was dead, and they could stop looking. Gunther’s mind resisted such pain. It recoiled. He became interested in the engineering and the innovation—a layer of nail polish painted on the charge as waterproofing.
He had come to despise the American parents, who thought nothing terrible could happen to them, even in these days of debt and war and warming seas, much of it visited on the world by their own rich, childish country. They did not even know what they did not know.