“Penny wants Noemi to come visit,” he said. “With her parents.”
“Oh?” Ms. Hong said. “How do you feel about that?”
He shrugged. “June wants it, too.”
“And you?”
“I barely know Noemi,” he said. “She doesn’t even speak English.”
“I bet she’s learned some in New York. And you’ve learned some Spanish.”
“We were just on a train together for a little while,” he said. “And Penny wasn’t even there. And then we saw Noemi at the hospital, but she had a fever for half the time.”
Ms. Hong picked at a thread on her skirt. “Sometimes—when we have a very intense experience, we feel close to the people who were there, even if we only knew them for a short time.”
Marcus said nothing, thinking of Isabel.
“And people have different responses to an intense experience,” Ms. Hong said. “I know sometimes it’s hard for you to be in school with Penny, when she’s had a very different response to what happened than you’ve had.”
“She was so mean to Isabel,” Marcus said.
“Tell me about Isabel.”
He shook his head.
“Please, Marcus,” Ms. Hong said. “I think it will help.”
He said nothing.
“I saw that photo of her jumping into a pool, on the news,” she said. “It looked like she was really happy.”
Marcus nodded. “She still posts a lot of pictures looking happy.”
“You follow her?”
“On my mom’s phone.”
“If someone has great capacity for joy, I think they can find it again. Even after something terrible happens.”
“She got a puppy,” he said.
Ms. Hong smiled. “Dogs can be very comforting. I think all of you lost a sense that the world is always safe. That you’re always protected. A dog might help her with that.”
Marcus traced with his eyes the path the loop of cord would take through the wire puzzle. “Actually I think everyone is being kind of overprotective.”
“Well,” Ms. Hong said, “can you understand that, in them?”
“I think they were always like this,” he said. “I just didn’t notice it before.”
“That might be true,” she said. Then, “Do you think Isabel would ever come to Los Angeles to visit?”
Marcus shook his head. “She doesn’t want to see us.”
“And that makes you sad?”
“I guess.” He feared that Ms. Hong could read his mind, and wished she wouldn’t.
“It’s okay to have feelings about what happened,” Ms. Hong said. “In fact, it’s really important to have those feelings.”
“It doesn’t do any good.”
“I think it does,” Ms. Hong said. “Not everyone gets to choose how they respond to a trauma. Isabel might not be able to choose, right now. But you have a really strong mind. She does, too. I think you can decide how you’re going to respond.”
His eyes stung, unexpectedly. “I can’t control it,” he said. “I can’t control anything.”
“If you let yourself have your feelings,” she said, “then I believe you can control what comes next.”
“You don’t know,” he said, angry at her for making him cry. “You don’t know anything!”
“I can make some guesses,” she said.
“You don’t even know that Samoa is on the other side of the International Date Line!”
“I learn something new every day.”
He stood. “I want to go back to class.”
“Please stay,” Ms. Hong said. “I think we’re just getting to the point where you can start feeling better. I really do.”
She was almost exactly north of him. If he spoke that Amazonian language, he would say so when he was talking to her. “You—” he said. “You don’t know anything about it.”
62.
LIV DIDN’T KNOW what to do about Penny’s constant begging for a visit from Noemi, a child they hardly knew. Benjamin had suggested they go to New York for spring break, and invite Noemi’s family to his parents’ apartment for a nice noncommittal lunch.
But Liv couldn’t face another family trip. She had dreams of Sebastian letting go of her hand and disappearing into Times Square—past Batman, the Naked Cowboy, a million strangers. She would wake up drenched in sweat, tangled in damp sheets. Obviously this was an area to work on.
A friend had invited Sebastian to take the Expo Line to downtown LA and the Science Center, but when Sebastian realized the Expo Line was a train, he’d said no. He was not getting on a train. So New York subways were out. Again: something to work on, maybe after a little more time had passed.
So they gave in, and invited Noemi’s family to LA, and bought three plane tickets on JetBlue. It seemed worth it to get Penny off their backs. Liv hoped that seeing people who’d been separated from their daughter for so much longer than she had would help with the anxiety and remind her that everything was relative. Noemi’s parents hadn’t chosen the poverty and violence of the place they came from. They’d been trying to do the best thing for their kid. But to send a child illegally through all those countries—Liv couldn’t imagine it.
She’d invited Nora’s family to join them all for dinner. She hadn’t seen Nora since the all-school meeting. This time of year was busy anyway, with school and sports and work. And there had been so many emails from people she hadn’t talked to in years, who were appalled at such a thing happening on a family vacation. They seemed to expect reassurance from Liv that it would never happen to them. When she responded with a few lines, they wrote right back. But she didn’t have time for an ongoing conversation with everyone she had ever met. So the emails piled up. The best thing she’d done was to leave her Facebook account deleted. The idea of all those messages from half strangers made her feel faint.
She’d said no to all the interview requests, without mentioning anything to the kids. She hoped that Penny would never find out that she could have danced on TV with Ellen DeGeneres but Liv had said no.
They were still waiting to hear what would happen to Oscar and Maria. Sometimes at night, before the Ambien kicked in, Liv wondered if the police might have found the children earlier if Maria hadn’t smuggled them out of the house. But it was impossible to know. Maria had clearly felt the situation was untenable. What would have happened if they’d stayed was the other path, unknowable. Liv just hoped they hadn’t left Maria and her son to suffer for having made the choice.
She’d brought home a pile of scripts to read, and sat with them in her office at home. She heard Sebastian’s plinking piano exercises begin, and felt a flood of love for him. He had a new glucose monitor that sent information to her phone and to Benjamin’s. So even when he was at school, she could see what his levels were. She didn’t think she could function, otherwise. She couldn’t have gone back to work.
Penny marched in, without knocking. “Grace is getting a schnoodle puppy,” she said. “It looks exactly like a teddy bear.”
Grace was getting a schnoodle because her father was having an affair, but Grace didn’t know that, and didn’t know about the impending divorce. “You have lots of teddy bears,” Liv said.
“She’s also getting a phone.”
“You’ll get one for sixth grade graduation.”
Penny draped herself over the Aeron chair. “If I had a phone, you would always know where I was.” A transparently deceitful tactic, when Penny didn’t want Liv to know where she was.
“Are you excited to have your cousins over?” Liv asked.
Penny lifted her feet in the chair and spun. “I see them every day.”
“How are they?”
“June’s better. Marcus is still pining for Isabel. He’s dying of love. It’s like Rent.”
“They were dying of AIDS
in Rent.”
“Well, that’s what it’s like.”
“No one dies of love at eleven.”
“He’s twelve.”
“What?” Liv had forgotten the birthday. “He didn’t have a party?”
“We had cupcakes at school.”
“Well, no one dies of love at twelve either.”
“Romeo and Juliet were thirteen,” Penny said.
“Thirteen was different back then.”
“Thirteen is always the same,” Penny said. She pushed herself out of the chair. With a triumphant little kick of her foot, she was out the door.
Liv wondered if Nora hadn’t had a party for Marcus so they wouldn’t have to invite her family, and be reminded of everything that had happened. She remembered Nora saying, “It was your fucking idea, this whole cruise!”
The halting notes of “Für Elise” came from the piano in the living room. Liv was trying not to cry every single day. She didn’t want the kids’ childhoods to be divided into pre-cruise and post-cruise, although she supposed they already had been. She picked up the script and tried to focus on the swimming words on the page.
63.
ISABEL LAY BY the pool with her puppy on her chest. He was sleeping, his velvety jowls draped over his oversized paws. Her heart was so filled with love for him that it hurt. She held up her phone to take a picture. You could tell she was wearing a bikini, if you looked carefully. Her mother let her post bikini pics now—her mother let her do anything she wanted now—but Isabel didn’t post them, mostly. Anyway, this wasn’t a bikini picture. It was just a picture of his beautiful soft gray face.
Her mother was afraid of her, afraid that Isabel would reject her, or that Isabel might be broken forever. The one thing she wouldn’t let her do was name the puppy after her brother. So Isabel called him Toby, but in her mind it was short for Hector.
She took another picture that showed Toby’s face better. Her father said the wrinkly jowls were for fighting. If another dog grabbed them with his teeth, Toby could still turn his head and bite the dog back. Her father was trying to say something to her, by talking about the dog. But Isabel pretended she didn’t understand. She wasn’t going to give him an opening like that.
Her parents would never be the same again. They worked and went out and they could hold a conversation, but she saw the permanent sadness in their eyes, even when something made them laugh. Hector had been the great love of their lives—both of them. They’d loved her brother far more than they loved each other.
On the ship, she’d tried to be as nice to the American kids as Hector was, painting their toenails. She’d always measured herself against him, knowing she would come up short. But now Hector was dead, and his bedroom was like a shrine. Her parents actually worshipped him. She would never be able to live up to his example. You couldn’t compete with a saint.
She stroked Toby’s back, sliding his loose skin, and he wriggled in pleasure in his sleep. He made a funny little noise and she wondered if he was dreaming. The first time she ever picked him up, he lay back in her hands with his belly exposed, waving his paws. Her father said that was a good sign, it meant the dog was submissive and trainable, and would never hurt anyone. She had rubbed the puppy’s soft belly and said that this was the one.
The detective had told her, in front of her parents and the social worker, that there would be an inquest and they probably wouldn’t prosecute Oscar, so Isabel didn’t need to stay as a witness, and could go home. At the time, they were sitting in a room with a window, and the detective’s eyes were almost golden, lit from the side. Isabel could feel meaning beaming from them. The detective was not stupid. She was accepting Isabel’s account of things, but she was telling Isabel with her eyes that she’d better stick to the story she’d decided to tell.
The social worker had looked concerned and compassionate, understanding nothing. Isabel could have turned to her and said, “I did it. Oscar didn’t do it. I shouldn’t be protected, because I’m shit. I let Hector swim away. I went upstairs in that house and I made everything happen. And I killed an innocent man because I was scared.”
But she didn’t say anything.
Because what was the alternative? Being a murderer. Ending up in some juvenile justice system, but where? Her parents drowning in their sadness. The news cameras camping outside, as they had at the river where the divers pulled up the scrap of Hector’s shorts.
Her father and Detective Rivera said it would all be fine, and Isabel believed them. They thought she was worth rescuing, and Isabel held on to that.
Her mother wanted her to see a therapist, but Isabel didn’t need one. She had Toby. Talking to a therapist would be too much work, keeping everything straight, telling only the things she was supposed to tell. She understood it all, anyway. Better than a therapist could. She could whisper the truth to Toby, and he would love her anyway. She whispered it now, and kissed his soft, dreaming head.
64.
BENJAMIN WAS CHECKING Sebastian’s blood sugar on his phone when Raymond’s name came up on the screen, and Benjamin felt a slight dread. He wished they weren’t having this uncomfortable dinner, this extended visit from the Ecuadorean strangers, who were right now in the air. He’d dealt with reentry by spending too much time on a new project made of high-tensile aluminum that could not die or wander off. He hadn’t kept his vow to stalk the kids at school, but he checked Sebastian’s blood sugar more than he really needed to.
He took the call. “Hey.”
“Dinner’s takeout, right?” Raymond asked.
“It’s Zankou Chicken.”
“I’ll come get you,” Raymond said. “We can pick it up.”
He turned up at the house in a shiny black Tesla. “So you’ve decided life is brutish and short, and you might as well spend it all?” Benjamin said.
“It’s a safer car,” Raymond said. “And no emissions.”
“You’re just thinking of the polar ice caps and the kids.”
“I am!”
Benjamin rubbed a hand over the soft leather seat. He drove a seventeen-year-old Volvo with cracking upholstery and old yogurt spills. Fixing it no longer made financial sense, but he didn’t want to be the asshole in the new car. He understood that his was just a different kind of pose, and it was part of Raymond’s job to be glamorous. They rode in the eerie electric silence.
“I need to tell you something,” Raymond said.
Benjamin felt queasy. “You’re getting divorced.”
“What?” Raymond said. “No!”
“Oh, thank God.” Benjamin was enormously relieved. He wondered what the strength or fragility of Raymond and Nora’s marriage indicated about his own. “Sorry. What did you want to say?”
“You know Marcus has been talking to the counselor at school.”
“Yeah.” Ms. Hong had tactfully released Penny after two sessions. She said maybe they could revisit it later, but Penny really seemed fine.
“Marcus told her it was Isabel,” Raymond said. “Who killed that guy.”
“Wait, what?”
“Cut the guy’s throat. Marcus says it was a mistake, that Isabel was scared and thought someone was attacking her.”
“But they said it was Oscar.”
“I called the detective. She was cagey. I think Oscar took the fall somehow and she knows it.”
Benjamin thought about his own teenage arrest, the nolo contendere plea, the detectives showing up at the hotel twenty years later to interrogate him about it. What if the crime had been murder? What if he’d been poor? “What if they prosecute?” he asked.
“She says the inquest is almost over, and they won’t.”
“Oh, shit,” Benjamin said. “Oscar’s going to live with that for the rest of his life.”
“Imagine the news, though, if it was Isabel,” Raymond said. “That bikini picture, with a murder h
eadline?”
“Marcus loves the truth,” Benjamin said. He’d never known a kid with such rigorous devotion to facts.
“He also knows what it’s like to have photographers waiting for you when you go for pizza. I think he waited for my mother to go home before he said anything. She kept taking him to church, and all the talk about sin was freaking him out.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s not like Isabel will kill again, right?” Raymond said. “She’s just a kid.”
“I guess.” Benjamin felt dazed.
“The detective said it was Oscar who pushed for Noemi to get to New York,” Raymond said.
“Wait—what does that mean?”
“She was cagey as hell. But I think Oscar made some kind of deal.”
They had pulled up outside Zankou Chicken, and went in to collect the food Liv had ordered, as if everything were normal. They loaded the bags into the Tesla’s front trunk, the smooth unnatural compartment where the engine should have been.
“What about June?” Benjamin asked when they were on the freeway. “What does she say?”
“That it was dark. That she didn’t see anything.”
“You believe her?”
“I think so. But she’s been so freaked out. I wonder if she knew it was a lie.”
The smell of garlic sauce and roasted meat smothered the smell of new leather. “Should we try to get Oscar some money?” Benjamin asked.
“You want that to come out in the press?”
“Or some legal help?”
“We could talk to Gunther,” Raymond said. “The detective said he was already doing that.”
They rode in silence, feeling the dread of calling a man who had lost so much.
As they were unloading the bags in the driveway, Nora pulled up, and June tumbled out of the back, braids flying. “Hi, Benjamin!” she shouted, and she tackled his knees.
“Hey, kiddo.”
“Did you get hummus?”
“Oh, no, we forgot hummus!”