“Are you threatening me?” Oscar asked.
“No, I’m explaining to you,” Gunther said. “I’m telling you the future, like a fortune teller, except I am telling the truth.”
“That guy was helping us!” Oscar said. “And Isabel cut his throat wide open, with the knife I used for cheese!”
“I believe you,” Gunther said. “But if you tell this story, it won’t end for my daughter, and it won’t end for you. It will be a hell on this earth. I’m trying to help you. I promise you, my boy, I am.”
Oscar chewed the inside of his cheek.
“I suppose your fingerprints are on the knife,” Gunther said.
“Yes, because I sliced some cheese.”
“I will get you the best lawyer,” Gunther said. “I believe our detective is sympathetic to my daughter. You will back up the children’s story, and the death will be a justifiable homicide. There will be no prosecution. I will make sure.”
“Can I get that in writing?”
“We will shake hands, like gentlemen.”
“But you’re not in charge!” Oscar said. “This is my life! I’ll never get a job!”
“You will,” Gunther said. “People will think you’re a hero, very brave. They will seek you out.”
Oscar shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“If not, come to Argentina, and I will hire you.”
Oscar studied Gunther’s long, tanned, rich man’s face. “What about Noemi?”
Gunther shook his head. “She isn’t a reliable witness. Out of her mind with fever.”
“I mean what will happen to her?”
“She’ll go back to her grandmother. Her parents are illegals in New York.”
“She was trying to get to them.”
“Do you know what happens to these children when they cross into Mexico?” Gunther asked.
Oscar thought of that tiny girl appearing out of the dark, so brave and unafraid when he’d been paralyzed with fear. He was ashamed of his fear, of his inability to act, of his many mistakes. “If you can get the girl to New York, I’ll do it.”
“That’s U.S. Immigration,” Gunther said. “Out of my control.”
“You’re rich, you can pull something. The Americans can.”
“I don’t know.”
“What if her grandmother tries to send her again? Her uncle is dead. She could die.”
“Do you know how many children are on those trains?” Gunther asked.
“She’s the one I know,” Oscar said. “And your daughter killed the guy who was taking care of her. So you owe him.”
Gunther sighed. “I don’t know what I can do.”
Oscar crossed his arms over his chest, trying to look brave. “Then I don’t know either.”
The nurse knocked and pushed open the door again.
59.
BENJAMIN WANTED OUT. Just out. He wanted to hand his family’s passports to immigration and go home.
They’d finally escaped the purgatory of the hospital, extracting a reluctant Penny from a new friendship with Noemi. She’d been visiting Noemi in her hospital room, learning songs in Spanish. Penny seemed to be picking up the girl’s accent, using words Benjamin had never heard before. They were amiguis, the two of them, and Penny had started saying simón for yes and calling him taita.
But then Kenji got them out, arranging flights to LA through Miami. Miami! Benjamin wondered aloud, in the car to the airport, why Florida was on their way home. What had happened to their simple boat ride south from LA?
“Mexico curves to the east,” Marcus said. He approximated the continents with his hands. “And so does the Isthmus of Panama. So South America is much farther east than North America.”
Benjamin had always felt a connection to Marcus. The way his mind worked seemed not unlike Benjamin’s own—a little spacey, enamored of logical systems. Marcus had barely spoken in days, and Benjamin was encouraged by this sudden volubility. “Do you know how the isthmus was formed?” he asked.
“Volcanoes,” Marcus said, and he settled back into a comic book in Spanish. He had broken his silence only to answer an actual question. He was not going to be drawn out by a grown-up’s idea of conversation.
An embassy chaperone took them to the airport terminal, and Benjamin felt curious eyes on them. Most people kept a respectful distance, but one intrepid soul in a swordfish T-shirt put a hand on Benjamin’s shoulder to congratulate him. He wanted to shake this well-meaning tourist and tell him: It was luck! Your car didn’t crash on the way here. This airport hasn’t been attacked. There hasn’t been an earthquake or a tidal wave. We’ve all been really fucking lucky, for one more day. That’s it! That’s all!
The plane took off, separated itself from the tarmac. A motherly flight attendant brought warm nuts in a ceramic dish, and a Bloody Mary. Benjamin didn’t usually drink, but what the hell? Beside him, Liv looked out the window at the retreating country. She and Nora seemed to have reached a détente, and she’d stopped talking about lawsuits. They had all given statements that they didn’t think Oscar should be prosecuted, to be used in the inquest, because Oscar had been protecting the children. Benjamin was secretly glad that Penny had gotten herself and her brother off the train, that his kids hadn’t been there to see the man killed. Not that he wished it on Marcus and June.
There’d been no word of Raúl’s brother yet, except from Penny, who said George was really nice. Hard to judge about that.
So now they would all have to reenter their life, carrying this beast they’d picked up on vacation: a hulking creature of reproach, grief, fear, guilt, and untoward luck, shaggily cloaked in the world’s lurid interest. He didn’t know how they were going to move forward, dragging the thing on their backs.
But then he thought of Gunther and Camila, and the grief that they were taking home with them. He kept thinking of old news footage of the fall of Saigon, those last-minute helicopters off the roof. He and his family had escaped, leaving chaos behind them. It was the American way.
60.
THE COUNSELOR, MS. HONG, led a very nonjudgmental discussion at a school meeting in the big hall, and Nora sat reluctantly in a folding chair in a big uneven circle, with kids on the floor and parents in the bleachers and in other chairs. It was the culture of their small school to have meetings like this, and it would have been considered strange to refuse, but she found herself wishing the teachers were a little less dedicated to processing everything, and they could just move on.
She kept waking in the dark of her own bedroom and “seeing” the hotel room where she had spent the worst week of her life. In her mind, she was still there, and so were the bedside tables, the credenza. She moved carefully around them to the door where she knew the hotel bathroom to be, and then she stood there, feeling the blank wall in Los Angeles with her hands, trying to understand where she was.
Raymond had refused to go to the all-school meeting, but his mother came, and sat with Marcus in a far corner. Dianne kept her handbag on her lap, as if she might have to bolt any second. Nora smiled when she caught her son’s eye, but Marcus looked away.
Junie sat beside Nora. She didn’t like to let her mother out of her sight. She followed her to the bathroom, clung to her at the supermarket. Nora had been staying at school all day, experimenting with leaving the classroom once June was engaged, but never going farther than the hallway outside the door.
Sebastian told the assembled circle the story of how his blood sugar had crashed after they left the train, and how he’d had a seizure while a woman was giving them a ride. He was unselfconscious about it, matter-of-fact.
Penny seemed utterly unscathed, enjoying the attention. Nora wondered if the trauma was in hibernation somewhere inside her, if she would have a delayed breakdown at twenty-three. If the rest of them hesitated before answering a question, Penny would jump in.
But then a girl in June’s class, Sunita, asked about the boy who died. Sunita was six years old. What to tell her? Nora expected Penny to speak, but Penny only blinked, and looked as if something had short-circuited in her brain.
Nora turned to the little girl. “You mean did we know him?”
Sunita nodded.
“Yes,” Penny blurted finally. “We knew Hector.”
“Was he nice?” Sunita asked.
“He was the nicest boy I’ve ever met,” Penny said, her eyes filling with tears.
There was silence in the room. Nora realized how struck Penny must have been by Hector—as struck as Marcus had been by Isabel. They had both lost their hearts to the Argentines.
Finally a mother asked, “What about the Ecuadorean girl?”
Liv said, “She’s in New York with her parents. They all have papers.”
A satisfied murmur passed through the room. Nora wanted to shout that there were lots of kids who didn’t get to their parents, who didn’t get papers. But then they had to sing the “Ode to Joy” in Spanish.
As soon as the meeting was over, Nora tried to flee with Dianne and the kids, but people kept stopping to hug her. Finally she made it out of the building, only to end up walking to the parking lot beside Liv.
Penny had recovered from her moment of public grief and was now angling for a puppy. “But we were kidnapped!” she said.
“You have to stop playing that card, Pen,” Liv said, spraying hand sanitizer on her hands.
“It’s not a card!”
“It is if you try to trade it for a dog.”
“I would just feel safer with a dog.”
“I think you get this from my mother,” Liv said. “The lawyering.”
“If I can’t have a dog,” Penny said, “at least let me invite Noemi to visit.”
“That’s more complicated than it sounds.”
“Because the tickets are expensive?”
“Yes,” Liv said. “Among other reasons.”
“But they aren’t expensive for us.”
“Actually, they are.”
“Do you not want them to come because they’re poor?” Penny asked.
“No,” Liv said. “We’re ending this discussion.”
Nora knew she would have craved this moment, when they were stranded in the hotel in the capital with no leads. It would have seemed like paradise, to be picking up her beautiful children, and attending a weird, over-sharing, well-meaning school meeting. She would’ve welcomed the offensive questions and the awkward conversations.
And there had been enormous joy, and enormous relief. But here Nora was, desperate to get away from Penny. One aspect of human resilience, in all its marvelousness, was the ability to recalibrate, to adjust to new circumstances with astonishing speed.
“How are you doing?” Liv asked her.
“I’m okay.”
Penny had dropped behind to talk to some girls her age, and now Sebastian was yelling at his sister in the parking lot.
“Stop telling that story!” he said. “Just stop!”
“It’s my story, too!”
“It is not!”
“Guys,” Liv said. “Let’s go.”
“He’s totally freaking out for no reason!” Penny said.
“Because you won’t stop talking about me!”
“You need to stop telling stories about your brother,” Liv told Penny.
“It’s about me. He wasn’t even conscious.”
“I was there,” Sebastian said. “And I already told it!”
Liv slid open the door of their minivan and gave Nora a drowning look over the children’s heads. “Dinner sometime?”
“Great,” Nora said, with a quick smile, and she moved away toward her own car. She buckled June into her booster seat in the back, even though her daughter could do it herself.
“When can I stop having a booster seat?” June asked.
“When you’re eight,” Nora said. “Or if you get really tall.”
“We didn’t have them on the trip.”
“One of the many things wrong with that trip.”
“Do you think Penny will really get a puppy?”
“No.”
“Oh, she will,” Dianne said from the front seat. “Liv doesn’t know how to say no to those children.”
“I wish I could’ve kept my bunny,” June said.
“I know, sweetheart,” Nora said. “I’m sorry.”
Even brilliant Kenji, who’d gotten Noemi the papers to go to New York, hadn’t been able to get them permission to take the bunny, so it was living with Oscar. If the inquest went badly and Oscar went to prison, Nora guessed the bunny would stay with his mother. Unless Maria went to prison, too.
“Mom,” June asked, as Nora backed out of the parking space, “do you think Noemi will come visit?”
“I don’t know.”
“I hope so,” June said. “What about Isabel?”
Nora saw Marcus stiffen in the back seat. “She’s with her parents now,” she said. “I think it’s important for all of us to be with our families for a while.”
“That poor woman,” Dianne said.
Nora remembered Camila leaving the hospital on Gunther’s arm. She’d looked like a husk of herself, as if she’d been caught in a giant spiderweb and drained of blood. Nora could not extract her gratitude that she was not in Camila’s shoes from her ability to imagine Camila’s pain.
“What are we having for dinner?” Marcus asked.
Nora caught his eye in the rearview mirror. She had talked to Ms. Hong about the way Marcus changed the subject whenever Isabel’s name came up. It was as if he’d put up a force field around himself. He went to see Ms. Hong because they asked him to, but he didn’t like to talk about the trip, and he avoided Penny and Sebastian at school. Ms. Hong said they had to trust his process, and follow his lead.
“Pesto pasta with chicken,” she said.
“I’m making a key lime pie,” Dianne said.
“Hooray!” June said.
Marcus nodded and looked out the window, and Nora drove home.
61.
MARCUS SAT IN the counselor’s office and stared at a puzzle on the table. It was made of wire and wood with a loop of cord, and you had to get the cord off. He’d already solved the puzzle in his head, without picking it up. He went back to looking at the map of the world on the wall behind Ms. Hong’s head.
“Did your grandmother go home?” Ms. Hong asked.
“Yes.”
“How does that feel?”
“It’s okay,” he said. “She likes to take us to church.”
“Do you like to go?”
“It’s okay,” he said. “They have codes to live by.”
“Like what?”
“Like the Golden Rule. And that you shouldn’t lie. That map is wrong.”
“Oh?” Ms. Hong said, turning to look. Her hair was perfectly straight, and the tips of it brushed her shoulders.
“It still has Yugoslavia on it,” he said. “And Samoa is now on the other side of the International Date Line.”
“I guess it’s old.”
“There are other mistakes, I just haven’t found them yet,” he said. “Some of the city names I can’t see from here.”
“You like geography.”
“They skipped December thirtieth, when they moved the date line.”
“Who did?”
“Samoa. Also Tokelau, that’s another island.”
“So December thirtieth just didn’t happen for them that year?”
“Right.”
Ms. Hong smiled. “There are some days I would have liked to skip over, in my life.”
Marcus narrowed his eyes at her. She was trying to get him to talk about stuff, but he wasn’t f
ooled. On December 30 of this year, he had been in the house with the red couches and the wooden tic-tac-toe board, and he had not meant to bring up that house. “Everything still happened in Samoa,” he said. “It’s not like they could skip stuff that happened. They just called it a different day.”
“I know,” she said. “I was using the idea as a metaphor.”
“I don’t like metaphors.”
“Why not?”
“Because they aren’t real.”
She hesitated. “But maps are metaphors. The world isn’t really laid out flat. Imagining our world seen from above is a way of abstract thinking.”
“Satellites see it from above.”
“True.”
“But not with a Mercator projection,” he admitted.
They sat communing with those facts.
Then Ms. Hong said, “There’s a tribe in the Amazon that has compass points built into their language. I learned this in an anthropology class in college. When the people there are talking to someone, the way they address that person includes their spatial relationship to the speaker—I think I’m remembering this right. So if I were talking to you, I would say, ‘You, Marcus, who are northeast of me, what do you think?’”
“I’m not northeast of you,” he said. “I’m almost exactly south.”
Ms. Hong laughed. “I think you would pick up that language really quickly,” she said. “You always have that bird’s-eye view in your head. Most of us don’t. What I meant was that for those people in the Amazon, the fact that you are almost exactly south of me would be built into the word you, when I was talking to you. And in this conversation, you would refer to me as being almost exactly north of you.”
“I like that language,” he said.
“I thought you would.”
“Where in the Amazon? Brazil or Peru?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Noemi is from Ecuador,” he said. “Maybe she can do it.”
“Maybe,” Ms. Hong said. “But I think it’s a very isolated tribe, and languages there are pretty distinct.”