by Maile Meloy
Penny would look after her brother, but she couldn’t do it alone. And what was happening to Penny? She remembered reading about an Amber alert, the police finding the DNA of the little girl’s tears in the abductor’s car. She squeezed her eyes closed to try to make the thought go away.
In her twenties, Liv had not been sure she wanted children. How could you know? It was a decision made at the brink of a widening abyss, based on rumors from the other side. Do you cross over? Do you leap? She hadn’t been sure.
At twenty-two, she’d moved to Los Angeles and got a job at a production company, answering phones and ordering lunch. She didn’t even have a cubicle, just a desk in a hallway. But she worked, and got promoted, and decided she would be vice president of a studio before she had children. When she met Benjamin, he was designing props for a sci-fi movie. In their first years together, they’d never even had a houseplant depending on them. She bought a cactus that shriveled and died. Benjamin had once owned a dog in New York, a Labrador mutt, but gave it to a cousin when he moved. The dog seemed happy in the suburbs, but still: It told.
“To have a child is to open an account at the heartbreak bank,” Liv had said, one night in bed.
“I hear there are some benefits, too,” he’d said.
She got a studio job, and made movies, and read a stack of screenplays on the weekends. Then, one sunny Sunday morning, she and Benjamin went to a brunch at a house where other people’s children were building a fort out of lawn furniture in the backyard. Someone told the children that Benjamin was an engineer, and he was called in as a consultant.
“I don’t do buildings,” he’d said. But he followed the children onto the lawn.
Liv watched from the shaded patio, drinking coffee from an unfamiliar mug. She had no opinion about whether the game was safe, and only mild curiosity about whether the towering fort would stand. But then a chair fell, and Benjamin scooped up a toddler in a yellow sundress to get her out of the chair’s tumbling path. He placed the child on his hip and directed the placement of the chair in a more stable spot.
It had been a golden morning, and the children were lit by sun. Benjamin had saved the little girl without having to think, and now she sat contented in his arms, surveying the progress of the fort from her queenly height. Liv was overcome with a feeling like ravenous hunger, so rooted was it, deep in her abdomen. She set down her mug in surprise. The sticky sweet rolls, the scrambled eggs, the fat red strawberries, they did nothing to curb it. Later she would connect the moment with the fact that Nora had just told her she was six weeks pregnant.
Benjamin drove them home on Sunset Boulevard, dodging the Sunday drivers. Liv watched the trees go by, a sharp-focused, saturated green against the blue sky. She said, “I think we should have a baby.”
“Now?” Benjamin said.
“As soon as possible.”
“I thought you wanted to be a vice president first.”
“I don’t care about that anymore.” She’d never been so sure about anything.
“Okay,” Benjamin had said, still looking at the road, his knuckles gripping the steering wheel. “Okay.”
She was twenty-eight and it was easy. She went off the Pill and got instantly pregnant. They married in Colorado on her parents’ back lawn. Benjamin’s parents came from New York and made awkward conversation with her aunts and uncles. Nora, her only bridesmaid, was already showing, with that radiance that turned out to be a cliché that was also true. Nora and Raymond stayed up with them after the reception, the husbands sober in solidarity. They found the little cake someone had saved to freeze for their first anniversary, but it was the middle of the night and they were starving and ate it with their hands.
She went to prenatal yoga with Nora. Marcus was born first, quiet and watchful, and then Penny arrived screaming, demanding of attention. Sebastian, three years later, was mercifully mellow and cheerful.
But when he was sixteen months old, Sebastian went limp. At first it just seemed like tiredness, a flu. Then it got bad enough that they called a doctor friend at midnight for advice. She said, “Get the baby to the hospital. Not that one, they’ll kill him. Have them test for Kawasaki.”
At the hospital, Sebastian didn’t have any pain response to the needle sticks for his blood. Meg, their doctor friend, sat with them and never left their side.
Those were bad days, the hospital days, and the last ambivalence Liv had felt about Benjamin, all her self-protective distance, burned away. By the time Sebastian was diagnosed and stabilized, the two of them were bound together by terror and love and anticipatory grief. She’d been right about the heartbreak bank. They had a joint account.
The idea that Liv might have forgone these two particular children and taken her chances with some unknown later zygotes sometimes made her catch her breath in the middle of an ordinary task. If she and Benjamin hadn’t gone to that brunch, if the chair hadn’t fallen and he hadn’t swept the toddler onto his hip, then they wouldn’t have started trying when they did, and there would be no Penny. And probably no Sebastian. Certainly no Sebastian with Penny as an older sister, which was part of who he was, and who he would be. Rationally, Liv knew that there would have been other children she would have loved just as much, but it didn’t bear thinking about. Even the hypothetical loss made her dizzy with horror.
But now—how much worse to lose them now.
She remembered talking to the news cameras in that clearing in the trees. Babbling, crying, begging. If she had seen these parents on TV, these parents who had lost their children on a cruise, she would have thought how irresponsible they were, how careless. No one deserved such a fate, of course, but she would have judged them, and found them wanting.
She knew that Nora must be suffering the tortures of the damned for wandering off looking for quetzals with the flirty guide, but all she could think was that Nora, her best friend, her almost-sister, should suffer.
Some part of her brain still believed this was all a mistake, one of those panicky moments when the kids wander away to the candy aisle, or hide as a joke, and your heart races and your armpits sweat. And you search, and call their names, and imagine the worst. And then there they are! Safe and sound, asking for Twizzlers, or giggling at having tricked you. And you want to shake them, but you have to keep your voice under control, calm and in command, telling them, “You have to stay near me. You cannot walk away.”
But this was not a mistake or a moment in the grocery store. She had seen a decaying dead body. She kept seeing the children in their swimsuits, playing in the water, and she kept trying in her mind to wade in after them, to pull them back to shore. Benjamin put his arms around her in the lumpy hotel bed. She tolerated it for a few minutes and then felt claustrophobic, suffocated.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” And she rolled away, wrapped in the cheap comforter and her pain.
13.
IN THE MORNING, there were clothes folded at the end of Penny’s bed: a too-big white T-shirt and a pair of red shorts. And a second set of matching clothes for Sebastian, who was still asleep. Penny leaned close to his face to see if he smelled sugary, a thing she had seen her mother do. He smelled like river water and cheese, and his breathing was deep and regular.
In the clean, white-tiled bathroom, she peeled off her swimsuit. There were grooves around her legs and over her shoulders, from the elastic seams. She peed and put the T-shirt on. It was as long as a dress, and she pulled the red shorts on under it. It felt weird not to have on underwear, but she didn’t want to put the swimsuit back on, and the shorts fit. She went out into the entryway.
The door to the outside was locked with a deadbolt, with the key taken out. Penny pulled on the knob a few times, but the door just thumped against the solid lock.
Then she went upstairs, and found a new man eating cereal at the breakfast table. He wore a white polo shirt, long khaki shorts, and a baseball
cap that said Cal. He gave her a friendly smile.
“Trying to get out?” he asked.
Penny felt her face get hot. She sat down at the table. “My dad went to Berkeley,” she said.
“No way!” he said. “When?”
“I don’t know. He’s forty-one.”
“He was ahead of me, then,” the man said. “I’m George.”
“Do you live here?”
“Sometimes. Until my brother drives me batshit. Then I leave.”
“Is your brother the one with the white horse?”
George pointed his finger at her like a gun. “Smart kid.”
“You don’t have an accent.”
“We all have accents,” George said. “You, too, sweetheart.”
“I mean like your brother’s,” Penny said. “You sound American.”
“Raúl doesn’t want to talk like a gabacho. I find it useful. You want cereal? Or Maria can make you eggs.”
“Cereal,” Penny said.
George pushed an unfamiliar box toward her, and a bottle of milk. “So you got a little bit lost, I hear.”
“The river took us away from our parents.”
“Bad luck. Why’d you go to that beach?”
“The guide said it was nice. We were supposed to go zip-lining.”
“Huh,” he said. “Some guide.”
“I miss my parents,” she said. She picked up the cereal and studied the picture of the golden flakes. George’s hand dropped down on the top of the box. He had clean fingernails.
“Wait,” he said. “Are you allergic to nuts?”
“No.”
“I thought all American kids were.”
“You’re stereotyping,” she said. He let go of the box and she poured the flakes, watching them slide into the bowl just like they did at home.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Eleven.”
“What about the others?”
“My brother, Sebastian, is eight. Marcus is eleven, too. June is six. Isabel is fourteen.”
“Oh, man.” George rubbed his eyes with his fingers and thumb.
“We didn’t see anything,” Penny said. “We just saw the Jeep.”
He nodded, his eyes red where he had rubbed them. “So much trouble could’ve been avoided.”
The glass bottle was heavy when she picked it up. “It’s real milk?”
“Straight from the cow.”
She sniffed it. It seemed fine. And it was cold, so it couldn’t be straight from the cow. “Why was there a grave?”
“Stop being curious,” he said. “That’s how you ended up here.”
“It’s good to be curious.”
“Tell that to the cat.”
“What cat?”
“Never mind.”
“Oh!” she said. “I get it now.”
He drank his coffee, watching her. He had dark brown eyes and they looked amused.
“What’s a gabacho?” she asked.
George put his feet up on one of the kitchen chairs. “It’s an old word from Spain, for the people who lived in southern France. It means something like ‘diseased people of the north.’ It’s like gringo, but fancier.”
“So I’m a gabacho?”
“You’re a gabacha,” he said. “My mother was one, too.”
“I’m not diseased.”
“Of course not.”
“But my brother has diabetes,” she said. “He needs insulin.”
“Yeah, I’m working on that.”
“Like, he needs it so he can have breakfast. I don’t think that doctor understood that.”
“She does understand.”
“Why is she so nervous?”
“Because she’s a drug addict.”
“Oh.” Penny tried to make sense of this news, tried to square it with her understanding of doctors and her experience of the thin woman who had grabbed her wrist when she reached for her phone. “And the white-haired man is your father.”
“He is.”
“He doesn’t think we should be here.”
“He didn’t,” George admitted. “But he doesn’t know what to do, so he left me to deal with it. As usual.”
“Are you going to take us back to our parents?”
“I’m working on it.”
“We won’t say anything about the grave.”
“Hm,” George said.
Penny ate her cereal, then went downstairs. Sebastian wasn’t in their room so she went to the other. He was sitting on Marcus and June’s twin bed, at their feet. They were still under the white duvet. Isabel was in the other bed, her long hair messy. They all looked disoriented and sleepy. Isabel looked Penny up and down in the new clothes, as if she’d let them all down by putting them on. There were folded clothes at the end of their beds, too.
“I want to go see Mom and Dad,” Junie said.
“There’s a new man upstairs,” Penny said. “He says he’s working on it.”
“Who is he?” Marcus asked.
“The brother of the man with the horse. His name is George and he talks like an American. He went to Berkeley.”
Sebastian brightened. “He knows Dad?”
“No,” Penny said. “He’s younger. I told him we wouldn’t say anything about the grave, so we can’t. Okay?”
Isabel flopped sideways on her pillow. “But everyone already knows about the grave!” she said. “So it doesn’t matter what we promise!”
“They could still take us back to the ship,” Penny said, uncertainly.
“Don’t be stupid,” Isabel said, into the pillow.
Penny was stung. “Do you guys want breakfast?”
June and Marcus put on their new clothes in the bathroom. The clothes were all exactly the same, as if someone had gone to a store and picked up a stack of the first thing they saw, in different sizes. June ran upstairs first.
“Wait!” Isabel said. “Don’t leave me alone!” She wrapped the white duvet around her bikini and dragged it after her.
Penny would have expected Isabel to be braver, with her green nail polish and her two languages. This was just like a sleepover in a new house, where you had to figure out all the rules.
Her heart sank a little when she saw June sitting on George’s knees at the breakfast table. June had been upstairs for like two minutes! And George was really Penny’s discovery. But no one was ever going to take Penny on their lap on first meeting her. She wasn’t adorable like June. She knew that feminism was freedom—she had the T-shirt—but still the sight of June and George being such pals made her unhappy.
“Nice toes,” George was saying. “They have medicine for that, you know.”
“It’s nail polish!” June said, laughing.
“Junie, get down,” Marcus said.
“Why?”
“Just do.”
June didn’t.
“There’s cereal,” George said. “Or you can wait for Maria to make eggs.”
No one moved forward.
“I had cereal,” Penny said, in the awkward silence. “Sebastian, you should have eggs.”
George lifted June to one shoulder, and she sat sidesaddle, clutching his head and laughing. George went to a cupboard, took out more bowls, and slid them onto the table with his free hand. Then he lowered June back down to his lap.
Penny’s father carried Sebastian sometimes, but no one ever carried Penny anymore. She had once pretended to fall asleep in the car so her father would have to take her in, but he had known she was faking and left her in the garage, to come in when she was ready.
“I won’t pour you cereal until you get down,” Marcus said to his sister.
“Fine,” June said, and she slid off George’s knee.
Sebastian said he woul
d wait for eggs.
“If you’ll excuse me, I have some things to figure out,” George said, raising an eyebrow at Penny, and he went up to the third floor they hadn’t been to yet.
She felt a little better then. George had singled her out as the leader. It was better to be a leader than a lap-sitter.
Maria, the housekeeper, appeared with shopping bags and a small white bunny, which she lowered carefully into Sebastian’s arms. June ran to Sebastian’s side and they huddled together, cooing about the bunny’s softness. Maria put a hand on June’s head and then went to unpack the groceries. Penny wanted to pet the rabbit, but she didn’t want to seem like a little kid, so she just stood watching. June wanted to call the bunny Baby Rabbit. Sebastian said it wouldn’t be a baby forever, and they should call it Thumper or Puffball.
Maria broke eggs into a bowl.
Isabel leaned forward across the table. “Listen to me!” she whispered to Penny. “We have to escape.”
“George will help us,” Penny said.
“He won’t,” Isabel said. “You don’t understand.”
They heard voices below and a sharp bark, then toenails clicking on the stairs. A black dog came bounding up into the room where they sat. He ran to the table and greeted each of them in turn, panting. June shrieked and stood on a chair to protect the bunny. Marcus rubbed the dog’s black ears and said, “Hello, hello, hello, hello.” The dog’s whole butt wagged back and forth, ecstatic.
