“You did?”
“What do you think?”
She grinned up at him. “No.”
Marcus climbed out, too. He’d grown taller and skinnier and his hair was longer, the curls twisted into points.
“Dude,” Benjamin said. “Cool hair.”
Marcus smiled a noncommittal smile.
“I’m getting a new bunny!” June said.
“Hey, that’s great!” Benjamin said.
Liv pulled into the driveway in the minivan, and Penny hopped down from the passenger seat. Noemi, the guest of honor, wore a pink dress and white tights. Her parents were dressed up, too: the mother in a silky blue patterned dress, the father in pressed trousers and dress shoes. They were small and looked shockingly young. Benjamin felt self-conscious in his shorts and T-shirt.
Raymond was wearing, Benjamin noticed now, a button-down shirt. He’d known what to do. He shook Noemi’s father’s hand. “Welcome to Los Angeles,” he said.
“You are the astronaut,” Noemi’s father said, beaming.
“You don’t really want to trust me with your spaceship,” Raymond said.
There were introductions all around, in English and halting Spanish. The father’s name was Miguel and he admired the Tesla. They carried the food inside. Liv had first considered putting Noemi’s family up in a hotel, but all the hotels were so far away, and so expensive. It would be a lot of driving to pick the visitors up and drop them off, and it might seem like they were afraid to have them in their house, where there was plenty of room.
Benjamin took a suitcase to the guest room and saw that Penny had put cut flowers in a glass, and placed stolen hotel soap in paper wrappers by the sink and bath, to make it all properly fancy. He demonstrated the tricky handle on the shower.
Then they showed Noemi to Penny’s room, where there was an extra twin bed. “Or you can go with your parents,” Liv said.
Noemi sat happily on Penny’s spare twin bed, and bounced a little. “Here.” She was admirable and unsettling, this child who had traveled across borders and ridden trains and lost her uncle and seemed so untroubled. Benjamin wondered what she remembered, from her fever. He wanted to get some air.
“I’ll get the pool cover off.”
Raymond joined him. There were still a few hours of light yet, for the kids to play in. Please, God, Benjamin thought. Don’t let anyone drown. They rolled up the insulated tarp, and Marcus came and stood at the edge of the pool deck, looking down through the rippling surface. He took a sleek new phone out of his jeans pocket.
“Oh, wait a minute!” Benjamin said, and he looked to Raymond. “I thought we were waiting!”
“I got it for my birthday,” Marcus said.
“Sorry, man, we caved,” Raymond said.
“Does Penny know you have it?”
“Not yet,” Marcus said.
“Put it away,” his father said. “Ringer off.”
Marcus slipped the phone back into his pocket. “She’s going to notice.”
Benjamin shook his head. “Maybe it’ll distract her from asking for a puppy.”
“Isabel got a puppy,” Marcus said. “It’s called a blue shar-pei, but it’s gray.”
It was the first time Benjamin had heard him bring up Isabel, or not change the subject when her name came up. “Yeah, I heard,” he said. “So what, you’re on Instagram now? Snapchat?” Just saying those words he felt like such a dad.
Marcus nodded.
“Does Isabel respond if you comment?”
“Sometimes,” Marcus said. Pride and pleasure glowed in the kid’s face, at this tiny attention from Isabel. She’d killed a man, and Marcus had covered for her, and she’d done him the great favor of responding—sometimes—online.
But she was just a kid. She was fourteen years old. She’d been raped, and had lost her brother. Was she suffering for the lie? Or just living her wounded, photogenic life? Presumably there would be a price to pay someday, it was just a question of what it would be.
He wondered if this sweet, serious kid had understood how it would play out, if Marcus had known he’d hit on a story that the grown-ups would accept, that would let everyone move on. Or if he’d stumbled on it blindly, desperate to protect Isabel, and had lucked into success. Benjamin wanted to ask what he’d been thinking, but he couldn’t. If he was honest, he was a little afraid.
65.
NOEMI’S PARENTS HAD prepared her for Penny’s parents to be very rich, but it still took her a little while to realize that this was all Penny’s house. It wasn’t like New York, where the spaces she moved through were connected to each other, stacked on top of each other, communal. She and her parents shared their apartment with two other families, with curtains and plywood dividers in the rooms.
Penny’s house stood apart from the other houses around it, on a strangely silent street lined with spreading trees. The stillness was unsettling, and Noemi wasn’t sure she liked it. There weren’t any other people outside—no one walking by or playing music. Over the houses was sky. The adults each had their own cars, except the American husbands, who arrived together in the shiny black one. She still thought of Marcus and June’s father as an astronaut, as someone who’d been to space.
She had been to space, sort of. She had flown in a plane. Her mother had held her hand as they looked out the window at the dizzying world below, at the city and the ocean, and then fields and more cities, all the way across a country that was too big to keep at once in your mind. She wanted to fall into the soft clouds, but her father said they were made of water, you would fall through. Her parents were excited and afraid on the plane, too, but they tried to act like they weren’t.
She wished her grandmother could come see all of this. Not having her grandmother felt like a cold, round stone in her heart. Her parents said they were lucky that Noemi had been able to come to them, and anyway her grandmother wouldn’t like New York. It would be too much for her. Noemi thought she would just stay in the apartment and argue with the other grandmother who lived there, and use the flush toilet, and cook things when they came home. But it wasn’t allowed.
Noemi didn’t want to ask, “Is that expensive?” about everything in Penny’s room, with the two beds, but she did wonder it. There were books and toys and a silver scooter. A doll with round eyes and silky brown hair, and so many stuffed animals. She remembered Chuy handing her the stuffed pig from the front seat. Her memories of Chuy had been absorbed in the strangeness of her fever and the dislocation of their journey, but she saw his face very clearly for a moment, giving her the Christmas present. She regretted losing the pig. Chuy had carried the baby scorpions outside—or had she imagined that?
“Take off your shoes,” Penny said, demonstrating with her own. “We have a really good game.”
66.
LIV FINISHED UNPACKING the Zankou Chicken, still trying to sort out what Nora had told her. It was hard enough to try to live a moral life when it was just a question of public or private school. Now it was a question of someone else’s child taking the blame for a murder he hadn’t committed.
Noemi’s parents, Miguel and Lucía, came from the guest room, looking freshly scrubbed. They were so young. Liv knew from booking their tickets that they were both twenty-five. Which meant they’d been seventeen-year-old parents. She tried to put an expression on her face that wouldn’t look too ghastly, but she saw their eyes widen at the amount of food, and she winced. She’d been afraid of not having enough.
There was shrieking from Penny’s room that Liv should probably attend to, but it sounded like happy shrieking.
“Is this game okay?” Lucía asked, with a worried look.
“I hope so,” Liv said. “I’ll call them to dinner.”
Marcus had appeared from the backyard. “I’ll go,” he said.
The adults smiled at one another awkwardly. Liv was about to offer drinks, but the
n the kids came running: Noemi in her candy-pink dress, Sebastian with his hair falling in his eyes, Penny’s face shining with the glory of having her very own guests.
June said, “We were playing Sharkies! The floor between the beds is the water! You might fall in!”
Penny whirled on her. “You’re not supposed to tell the rules, Junie!”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re secret!”
“Well, you’re not supposed to jump on the beds,” Liv said.
“It’s okay,” Benjamin said.
She raised an eyebrow at him. They were supposed to back each other up. But she couldn’t stop an activity that had been generating so much noisy happiness. And that seemed to be about processing deep, elemental fear. How to forbid Sharkies?
“So how does the game work?” Benjamin asked.
Penny stood up straighter. “We can’t tell you.”
“Ah,” Raymond said. “The first rule of Sharkies is you don’t talk about Sharkies.”
There was a feeling Liv had been having for about a month now that she had not yet articulated to Benjamin, or to her therapist. She had just articulated it to herself, but she felt it very strongly. It was this: Now that she had her kids back, she also had the terror that went along with them, the need to keep them healthy and alive and happy.
She could barely formulate this thought without shame, but in those scorched-earth moments when she’d believed that Penny and Sebastian were dead, there had been a kind of stillness in the primitive parts of her mind. There’d been nothing more to be afraid of, because there’d been nothing more to lose. She had cleaned out the heartbreak account. The worst thing had happened, and nothing else could.
Now she had her joy back, and also her fear. She warily opened her arms to both, in the clear and vivid knowledge that her heart could be ripped out of her chest again. It could happen any day.
Penny was explaining the finer points of Zankou Chicken to the guests. “I like the mutabbal but not the tabbouleh,” she was saying to Noemi, who nodded agreeably.
Sebastian was vibrating with excitement from the game. Liv checked his levels and pushed his hair off his face. “Sharkies, huh?”
“It’s so fun, Mom,” he whispered, so Penny wouldn’t hear him.
But his sister was busy giving orders on where to sit at the dining room table, like a duchess, arranging everyone by relative importance. She seated Noemi next to her, in the place of honor. Liv was at the far end, in Siberia, but that was fine.
She felt the old vertiginous horror at the thought that she might never have had these children. If the chair hadn’t fallen from the fort at brunch, if they hadn’t started trying when they did. One wrong step and then the endless drop. It was like that now, the woozy fear of losing them. The floor between the beds is the water. You might fall in.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MAILE MELOY is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, the short-story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review), and the award-winning Apothecary middle-grade trilogy. She has received the PEN/Malamud Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.
mailemeloy.com
Twitter: @mailemeloy
Instagram: maile.meloy
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Maile Meloy, Do Not Become Alarmed
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