“This thing, I don’t have,” the doctor said.
But she had a finger-stick monitor, and she helped Sebastian do a test. Then she read some instructions off her phone and asked Penny how much her brother weighed.
“Forty-five pounds?” Penny said.
“Forty-seven,” Sebastian mumbled, without moving, still collapsed on the couch.
The doctor entered some numbers on the calculator on her phone. Then she peered at the finger-stick monitor.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Penny asked.
“I am not endocrinólogo,” the doctor said. She filled a needle from a glass vial and tapped it, then gave Sebastian an injection. Penny kept her arm around her brother, but he didn’t flinch with the pain.
The doctor took out Sebastian’s port so it wouldn’t get infected.
“But aren’t we going back to our parents?” Penny asked. “They have the pump.”
“This is more safe,” the doctor said. She told Penny she was a good sister, very brave, and she produced a green lollipop from her bag.
Penny wondered if this counted as taking candy from a stranger. Was it okay if the stranger was a doctor? If you were trusting her to put needles in your brother’s arm? She pulled off the clear wrapper and stuck the lollipop in her mouth. It tasted sugary and artificial, just like it was supposed to. “Can I call my parents from your phone?” she asked.
The doctor shook her head. “I am sorry.”
“We’re supposed to ask a woman for help, and you’re a woman. And a doctor.”
“I—can’t.”
The doctor’s phone was still on the couch and Penny put her hand on it. The doctor caught her wrist and took the phone away, but seemed embarrassed. She looked anxious as she put the phone in her bag. Then she looked toward the kitchen.
A TV was on, the volume low with a steady stream of Spanish. A hush had fallen on the house as the adults gathered around. The Jeep woman watched with her arms crossed, and the white-haired man stood beside her. Penny moved toward the TV.
There was a shot of the ship tied up at the pier, huge and white. A reporter with big hair and heavy makeup spoke to the camera in Spanish. Then Penny was startled to see her frantic mother, her short blond hair damp and matted, her eyes red, begging anyone who had seen the children to call the police. Penny almost couldn’t follow what she was saying, it was so disorienting to see her mother on the screen. A Spanish voice came in to translate after the first few words, and she could barely hear her mother’s voice beneath the translation. Then Nora was talking on the screen, but she looked like she’d been hypnotized, like she was in a trance.
“That’s my mom!” Junie said.
There were photos, all taken this week: Penny and Sebastian grinning with ice cream cones from the buffet. June and Marcus together in a deck chair. Isabel and Hector with their arms around each other on the tennis court. There was a video of the clearing in the woods where they had stumbled on the Jeep, except now the clearing was surrounded by police tape. A male reporter was talking over the image.
“What did he say?” Penny whispered to Isabel.
Isabel shook her head.
“Did it say they were coming to get us?” Penny asked.
Isabel shook her head again.
The white-haired man snapped off the TV. Penny could see that his breathing had changed beneath his soft shirt: He was angry and his eyebrows were terrifying. He glared at his son, and at the woman from the Jeep.
Penny stepped forward. “Take us back to the ship,” she said. “Just drop us off, and you’ll never have to see us again.”
The old man frowned, his eyebrows coming together. “Where is the other boy?” he asked.
There was a pause, and then Isabel said in English, “He swam back.”
The old man sized Isabel up, in her yellow bikini. “He is a strong swimmer?”
Isabel nodded.
“You are from Argentina,” the old man said.
Isabel nodded again, and he asked her a few questions in Spanish. Penny thought they were talking about Hector. Hector hadn’t been on the news. She remembered his arms striking through the water. And she remembered the crocodile.
“Please take us back to the ship,” she said.
“Ah, but I can’t,” the old man said.
“Why not?”
None of the adults answered. “Because of the grave,” Isabel said.
“What grave?”
“The police found a grave in the woods,” Isabel said.
Penny remembered the shovels. “But we didn’t see anything!”
The old man shrugged.
“We won’t tell!” she cried. “Cross my heart and hope to die. Please take us back to the ship.”
But the old man paid no attention to her. He began to argue in Spanish with his son, who argued back.
“What are they saying?” Penny asked Isabel.
“I told you we shouldn’t come in here,” Isabel said. “We should have waited for Hector.”
“But Sebastian could’ve died,” Penny said. “And June had to poop.”
The man with the white horse lit a cigarette, a thing Penny had never seen anyone do inside a house. She coughed pointedly, waving her hand in front of her face. He ignored her and smoked.
The old man left the house, and then they were just waiting, but Penny didn’t know what they were waiting for. There were wooden tic-tac-toe pieces in a tray on the coffee table between the red couches, smooth Xs and Os. She played some games with the others, caring less than usual if she won. The older woman’s name was Maria and she gave them a deck of cards. They played some Crazy Eights.
“Where’s Hector?” June asked, sitting on the white plush rug in her swimsuit.
“He swam back to our parents,” Penny said.
“Is he with them now?”
“I think so.”
“Why didn’t we swim back?”
“Because we weren’t strong enough,” Penny said, thinking of the crocodile.
“I wish he’d come with us,” Junie said.
“Me too.”
Isabel said nothing, but sat on the couch with her knees pulled up and stared out the window at the trees.
Maria brought them sandwiches. Sebastian had slowly revived, like a wilting plant that had been watered. Penny wished her mother were here. What was she supposed to do about insulin? Was the doctor coming back? She let her brother have a sandwich.
It grew dark outside the enormous windows. Penny felt her energy leave her body. Being responsible was exhausting. She put her head on her arm on the back of the couch.
“I want my mom,” Junie whimpered.
Marcus put his arm around her. “What should we do now?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Penny said. She was already having a dream. “I don’t think you should say that.”
“Say what?”
But the thing she objected to was in the dream, and was lost.
Later—hours or minutes later, she didn’t know—she felt herself being lifted from the couch and carried down the stairs. Still in her swimsuit, she was put into a bed with cool, tightly drawn sheets. She was just registering the impossible sweetness of the pillow beneath her head when Sebastian was put into the bed beside her. She could see his pale hair in the dark. She didn’t want to share a bed with her brother, but she was too tired to protest.
“Don’t kick,” she murmured, and then she sank away.
10.
RAYMOND HAD GOTTEN the call from Nora on the golf course—a confused call from a strange number, the signal breaking up—and he’d told their host they had to leave. They hailed a golf cart to take them in. The club was outside the city in the wrong direction. Gunther’s friend knew every shortcut, every alley to avoid the crush of cars, but still it took a long tim
e to find the featureless clearing in the trees. A perfect, sunny day on an expanse of springy green lawn had turned into a confused nightmare of police cars and strange explanations.
When Raymond and Benjamin approached their wives, who had blankets around their shoulders, Gunther and Camila split off to talk in Spanish. Nora started crying and couldn’t speak, like she had in the weeks after her mother’s death. Raymond put his arms around her and looked to Liv.
“What happened?” he asked.
Liv’s eyes were red and her hair was salt-dried. “We were at this quiet beach, and then the tide changed, and the river went inland. Sebastian doesn’t have his pump.”
“What happened to the zip line?” Benjamin asked.
“The van got a flat tire,” Liv said. “Then a car hit us. We couldn’t get a taxi, and the road seemed dangerous. I got no signal on my phone.”
Nora sobbed against Raymond’s chest.
“You could have borrowed a phone,” Benjamin said.
“To tell you to come back and go to the beach with us?”
“To tell us you’d been in an accident,” Raymond said. He’d made sure he had an international plan for his phone in case a work call came in, and he was impatient with Benjamin and Liv for thinking the world would take care of them. And was he impatient with Nora? Why hadn’t he gotten a plan for Nora’s phone?
“But no one was hurt, everyone was cheerful,” Liv said. “We could walk to this little beach, we had swimsuits. We were just improvising.”
“But you’re afraid of riptide,” Benjamin said.
“It was this very protected beach. The kids were playing in the water, there was no current. They were on these inner tubes. And the older kids were there. But I guess the tide changed. And I fell asleep. Camila did, too. I thought she was watching.”
Raymond held Nora away from him, to see her face. “And you?”
Nora had gotten the sobbing under control, but she stared at the ground. “I was looking for birds.”
“For birds?”
“I’m so sorry.” A gasp, a half sob. “I thought they were watching. Liv said she would.”
“I wish you’d gone with us,” Liv moaned.
“Don’t do that,” Benjamin said.
“I don’t mean I blame you,” she said. “I just wish.”
“You said you didn’t care.”
“I know,” Liv said. “But I didn’t know what would happen.”
“So, the guide didn’t know the tide would change?” Raymond asked.
Both women shook their heads.
“Where the fuck is he?”
“The police were interviewing him earlier,” Liv said. “We just have to find the kids. Sebastian needs his insulin.”
“You said something on the phone about a grave,” Raymond said.
“They dug up this guy,” Nora said. “They think maybe the kids saw the grave, and that’s why someone took them.”
He stared at her. This was really happening. “So who’s in the grave?”
“We don’t know.”
A short-haired woman in a police windbreaker, as tall as Raymond, approached them. “May I talk to you, sir?”
Nora looked terrified.
“It’s okay,” Raymond told her. He followed the detective, thinking that of course they wanted to talk to the black man first.
The two of them sat in a cruiser, and the butch detective questioned him about his day. She asked for any information, any theories he might have about what had happened to the kids. After a minute he realized she was looking to him for help. He felt the briefest sensation of lightness, a weight lifting off his shoulders. Even with his minor celebrity, even with three solid white alibi witnesses, LAPD would’ve found his actions suspicious. Golfing while black, that would’ve been the first red flag.
What had happened seemed obvious to him: The kids had stumbled on someone getting rid of a body. “Have you figured out who’s in the grave?” he asked the detective.
“We’re working on it.”
“Do you think the guide’s involved?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
She asked him some questions about Gunther, about how long he’d known the others. Then she thanked him and gave him a card in case he learned anything. Her name was Angela Rivera. They were finished. That was it.
He hated that he’d been worrying that he might be a suspect, when his kids might be dead. He hated that there was no way for him not to worry about being a suspect. He went back to look for his wife. She was standing beside Liv and Benjamin, still wrapped in the gray blanket.
Raymond felt a shift, now that he was out of the cruiser. He went from feeling like a suspect to feeling like a cop, a role he’d played a lot. The corrupt cop, the noble cop, the jaded cop who saw what his white colleagues had missed.
“We have to find out who the guy in the grave is,” he said, after Benjamin followed the detective away.
“I saw the body,” Liv said.
“What did he look like?”
“He’d been dead a while. Dark hair. Not that old.”
“And why were you at the beach, again?”
The women stared bleakly at him. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Liv said, in a small voice. Nora was shivering, probably from exhaustion.
“We should get you inside,” he said.
“I’m not leaving until we find them.”
“Well, we’re not going to find them here. This is the one place they won’t be. We need to call the embassy, and we need a place to stay.”
The women looked drained, ready to let him make decisions, and Raymond saw himself from a distance, dissociated from his own performance. Taking charge. But this wasn’t a role. The director wasn’t about to turn the cameras around and shoot the scene from the other side. His kids were really missing. He got on the phone and started making calls.
11.
NOEMI SAT AT a scratched table, waiting for Chuy to bring her rice with chicken. The restaurant was big and no one paid them any attention. The table was a little bit sticky and people had carved their initials into it. RN + JP. She was hungry and excited for the food. She never went to restaurants with her grandmother.
A television in a high corner was playing a telenovela. A man changed the channel, and Noemi hoped he would change it to cartoons. But he turned it to news, then stood back to watch. Noemi wondered if her parents had a television. Probably they did, and she could see cartoons. But she was not going to think about things like that. The future. Nueva York.
A reporter with big, wavy hair was talking into a microphone on the television. Then there were some pictures of children. Some were older, but there was a girl with lots of braids who might be Noemi’s age. The reporter said they were Americans, and they had disappeared. The little blond boy needed medicine. They all wore swimsuits.
A red-eyed woman with blond hair, the boy’s mother, came on the screen, crying, begging for anyone who knew where their children were to call a number. Noemi wondered if her parents ever cried like that about her. But she wasn’t missing. She was with Chuy. Her parents knew she was on her way to them.
Chuy came with a tray and set it on the table. They watched the high television together for a little while, and then Chuy turned back to his food and shook hot sauce over the top.
“Those kids are missing,” Noemi said.
“I know.”
“Will their parents find them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head.
Noemi watched Chuy fork chicken into his mouth. She thought of Ario, shot in the street. The pool of blood. “Are they dead?”
He shrugged. “Maybe not.”
Noemi watched the TV. “Do their parents know they won’t come back?
”
“Their parents are American,” he said. “They don’t know anything.”
“I’m going to be an American,” she said.
He smiled, and took a drink of beer. “It’s okay. You know enough already.”
“Do you know where they are? Those kids?”
“No,” he said. “But I know the kind of people who took them.”
“How do you know?”
“Eat your food.”
She took the paper off her straw and tasted her watermelon agua fresca. It was cold and sweet and thick. “Maybe those people will let them go,” she said. “Maybe they’ll see the mothers crying on TV and feel bad.”
“I’m telling you,” he said, “those people don’t feel bad about anything.”
She looked back up at the television. There was a picture of the oldest girl jumping into a pool, her hair flying out behind her. It could have been a picture in a magazine, the girl was so pretty. Then her mother was talking about her children in strange-sounding Spanish. Noemi’s parents had been gone for two years, and she wondered if they missed her like this woman did. There was a picture of a black man in a white astronaut suit, which was confusing. Did they think the children were in space?
“Do my parents know we’re coming?” Noemi asked.
“They do,” Chuy said.
“Are they excited?”
“Of course.” He shook more hot sauce on his food.
“We have the same name on the papers,” she said. “You and me.”
He said nothing, just scooped up a forkful of arroz con pollo.
“Is that just for the papers?” she asked. “Or is it real?”
Chuy picked up a paper napkin that looked very small in his hands. He wiped his mouth. “It’s real.”
“How is it real?”
“Your father is my little brother. Half brother.”
It was the answer she’d been looking for, but still it surprised her. “Why didn’t I know about you?”
“No one wanted you to know,” Chuy said. “Eat up. We have to go.”
12.
THE POLICE AND Gunther’s friend drove the parents to a local hotel that had Wi-Fi. As soon as her phone was no longer an infuriating paperweight, Liv googled “How long Type 1 diabetes survive without insulin?” She read the results with her breath held, gripped by cold fear. The answer was two weeks, but the second week you’d spend in a coma. Sebastian probably had a couple of days before he would get really sick. She left a message at the doctor’s office in Los Angeles, trying not to sound too panicked. But she was panicked, obsessed with the thought of Sebastian without his pump. Sebastian seizing, dying, ketone bodies poisoning his blood. She lay in the hotel bed, wide awake, with the memory of her son’s body curled into her side, his warm back, his sweet smooth skin. It was like having a phantom limb. A phantom child.