by Maile Meloy
“You’re back so soon!” José said.
“Our dad made us come back,” Marcus said. “Over a stupid joke.”
Junie said, “Yeah.”
José gave Raymond a sympathetic grin.
But as soon as they hit the pool, the kids were happy again. June wanted to have underwater tea parties. Marcus wanted chicken fights. Raymond indulged them both, sitting on the bottom of the pool sipping imaginary tea, feeling their slick bodies on his shoulders. His beautiful children.
They were hungry by the time they got to the lunch buffet, and they piled food on their trays. When it was time to leave port, Raymond ordered wildly expensive blue Sail Away drinks from the pretty Jamaican bartender at the poolside bar—virgin ones for the kids—and they leaned over the rail to watch the bow thrusters push the ship away from the dock, the water churning white, the day fading. In Raymond’s dream, they’d spent an hour and a half on land in this benighted country, and they would never set foot in it again.
But that wasn’t what had happened. Instead, he’d gone golfing with Gunther’s friend, that colonial relic. Benjamin had slathered up with sunscreen in the car, smearing it over his face. He’d offered the bottle, but Raymond had turned it down, and wound up getting a black man’s sunburn. Dumb.
Meanwhile his wife had tolerated the guide pretending to be eaten by a shark. She’d watched the kids play in the water and had some slushy cocktail. And then she’d gone looking for birds and the kids had drifted away and got kidnapped.
He had thought, growing up in Philadelphia, that his own parents were hard on him. Now he understood how deep their desire to protect him was. He understood their anger when his sister stayed out past curfew, when his brother got drunk, when Raymond skipped school with his friend Tyrell. Their fury stemmed from love and fear. They had been vigilant, and had known where their children were, every minute of every day. If they didn’t know, there would be consequences. He had never raised a hand to his children—he had tried to be a conscious, twenty-first-century parent—but he had not been vigilant enough.
He’d loaded too much weight on the machine, he was going to hurt himself. He let the stack clang down and put his forehead against the sweaty vinyl pad. He would never forgive Nora, that was the truth. And he would never forgive himself.
20.
LIV NEEDED TO get out of the hotel for some air. She couldn’t stand the silence in the room. For years, her daily life had been punctuated by the alarm on Sebastian’s glucose monitor going off. The high-pitched beep interrupted sleep, conversation, meals, Penny’s dance recitals. She had wished, in the past, not to have those constant alarms jangling her nervous system. Now all she wanted was to hear that beep, telling her that Sebastian’s blood sugar was high or low, or that the battery was dying, or the sensor signal was lost. But there was nothing, just a rattling fan in the wall from the air conditioning.
She tied a turquoise scarf over her head and put on sunglasses. She felt foolish doing it, like she thought she was some kind of celebrity, but she’d been on the television news with her recognizable hair, too short and too blond. “La madre rubia,” they called her. She couldn’t face the reporters, or the people who came up to her in the hotel lobby, offering condolences and theories on where the children were.
At first she’d thought real information might come from these strangers. She’d been begging Kenji to talk to people, and here they were! But she soon realized that it was all noise, no signal. People thought they could touch her because they understood her grief. They clutched her arm, patted her shoulder, stroked her hand. It was intolerable.
So she went out in her disguise, through a back door, near the hotel’s kitchen. No reporters there. In the alley, she stepped over broken concrete. She heard her mother’s voice in her head, saying that people who complained about litigation should see what the world looked like when the law held no one responsible. Gaping holes in the sidewalk. No railings where there should be railings, on stairways that people could tumble off.
Liv had emailed her mother the ship’s liability waiver, for legal advice, and her mother said it would be tough to go after them. It wasn’t an American company. The ship was registered in the Bahamas, for tax purposes. And the local laws wouldn’t help because there was no tort system. Civilization, her mother had told her since she was small, was a series of agreements about what was good for everyone, enforced by law. And civilization was only a thin veneer over the savagery and greed that were the human default.
She had gone on the Internet this morning, which had been a mistake. On Facebook, people had first sent support and good wishes, although there were a few weird comments she wished she hadn’t read. Someone had linked to a crowd-funding site to help with a reward, which had seemed touching, but ultimately came with weird comments, too. On Twitter, strangers started sending blame, shame, questions about her judgment, remarks on her hair, offers of sexual comfort, and terrible speculation about her children’s whereabouts.
She’d deleted her Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then regretted it. What if someone had actual information, and couldn’t reach her? She could create a new account, only for information about the children. But that would bring on more jokes, and more false information. The Internet would not give you what you wanted. She had talked to the endocrinologist at home, and to her doctor friend Meg who’d stayed with them when Sebastian was first diagnosed. Both of them told her to stay off the medical Internet. No more googling.
Her phone rang in her pocket and her heart jumped. She saw her mother’s name on the screen and put the phone back in her pocket. Her parents had wanted to get on a plane as soon as they heard the news, and she had told them not to. The last thing she needed was to be taking care of them and their needs and opinions. People regressed, around their families, to the age at which they had been angriest. With her mother, Liv was always fifteen.
The scarf slipped off her hair and she adjusted it, then turned down a side street she didn’t know. There was a café with small black tables on the sidewalk. She could get a coffee and keep her sunglasses on without looking weird. And the street was tiny and secret.
She was thinking how secret it was when she recognized Nora at one of the tables. Or she recognized the salmon-colored running shoes, the ones Nora wore every day because she never had to go to work. Her long hair was tucked up under a baseball cap. Then Liv registered Nora’s companion. Nora was sitting with Pedro.
Pedro, the joker who’d pretended to be sucked under the river’s surface and scared the shit out of them, and then sputtered up laughing at his own hilariousness.
Pedro, who had not warned them that the tide would change and the motionless river would start running inland, fast.
Pedro, who had not known there were crocodiles.
Pedro, who had brought the frozen daiquiris that had put Liv to sleep.
Pedro, who had taken Nora looking for birds, while their children disappeared. Would you like to see a quetzal? Nora had looked Liv in the eye and told her nothing had happened. And now Pedro and Nora were talking intently over the café table. He was holding Nora’s hand, leaning toward her.
Liv found herself standing over the table. “Hola, amigos.”
Pedro glanced up and gave her an uncertain smile. He didn’t recognize her right away: the scarf and glasses. Nora snatched her hand back from Pedro’s and looked down at her lap, the cap hiding her face.
“So,” Liv said. “The plot thickens.”
“There’s no plot,” Nora said.
“Oh, I think there is,” Liv said. “Do the police know about this? I think they might be very interested.”
“Please don’t say anything,” Nora said, looking up and squinting. “It was just a mistake.”
“A mistake,” Liv said. “That the only two people awake while our children disappeared were fucking?” She whispered it, although there was no one i
n earshot.
“We weren’t.”
“Oh, no? Everything but?”
“No!” Nora said. Then, accusingly, “You were asleep.”
“Because of his drink!” Liv said. She turned to Pedro. “Was it drugged?”
“No!”
“Was it all a plan?”
“No!”
“Please,” Nora said. “Do you think I could blame myself any more than I already do?”
“I don’t know,” Liv said. “I don’t understand you at all. Why are you here?”
“I just had to talk it through. See if there was anything we missed. See if he knew anything. Just because he’s local.”
“And?” Liv said, looking to Pedro. “Any hot leads? Any clues?”
He shook his head, looking regretful.
“Okay.” Liv turned to Nora. “So you’re having an affair, while our children are missing. That’s what this is.”
“No!” Nora said. “You would be here, too. Looking for the kids.”
“I would not!” Liv said. “Because I wouldn’t have been off in the trees in the first place!”
“Please don’t say anything,” Nora said. “I can’t bear it if this comes out.”
“Then what the fuck are you doing meeting in public? Are you insane?”
“Yes!” Nora said. “Aren’t you? Our kids are gone. Aren’t you a little bit insane?”
“Yes! But not like this!”
“Well I am like this. And it was your fucking terrible idea, the whole cruise, so back the fuck off.”
“We shouldn’t be here,” Pedro said, in a warning tone.
“I’ll leave,” Liv said, and she turned.
“Liv!” Nora said.
Liv tugged at her headscarf as she walked down the tiny street, no destination in mind. Her sunglasses were so big they touched her cheeks. Her tears pooled inside the frames, against the lenses, then spilled down her face to her chin.
Pedro had looked as wretched as they were. She realized Nora was right: She would have met with Pedro, too. Nora could be fucking him now, as far as Liv was concerned, if he could provide information about these feudal families controlling the interior, paying the police, killing people, stealing children. That was the kind of guide they needed.
She kept her eyes on the ground, watching for holes. She couldn’t break an ankle, not now. No tort system, no procedure for wrongs. No recourse for your pain, when it was someone else’s fault.
She regretted being ugly to Nora. She had learned that mode of attack from her mother, and she hated herself when it came out. She should have been empathetic, understanding. Maybe Nora was right, maybe Pedro could come up with something. But she couldn’t bring herself to go back. And they were more identifiable together, Pedro was right.
Poor Raymond, it would crush him. Embarrass him. A new anger at Nora rose up, for making her part of the secret.
A child selling roses tried to press one on her, and Liv held up a hand in protest. But she fumbled in her pocket and gave the girl a coin. It would go straight to whatever adult was pimping the child out, of course.
“Señora!” another child called after her, but she didn’t turn.
21.
GEORGE WATCHED THE children play tic-tac-toe, and thought about his brother. He thought their mother, before she died, had understood that something was wrong with Raúl. She had been repulsed by him, but that made her feel guilty, because a mother should not be repulsed by her son, so she gave him anything he wanted. He was handsome and charming and manipulative and she never punished him for anything. George—Jorge, then—took the blame for whatever went wrong. A broken fence, a wrecked bicycle, a smashed window. His brother deflected all damage and disruption onto Jorge, who got the reputation as a troublemaker. It didn’t help that he wasn’t as good-looking as Raúl. His forehead was too big. His mother used to smooth his hair and frown at the dome between his temples, so he had taken to wearing baseball caps to hide it.
When Raúl was eight, he caught small emerald green frogs in the forest and cut them up with razor blades while they were still alive. He showed Jorge how they twitched and wriggled until the very end.
Then they got a small capuchin monkey for a pet, and Raúl tormented it with mind games until it went insane, baring its teeth and screaming when anyone tried to get close. The monkey was sent away somewhere, and no one spoke of it again.
An aneurysm killed their mother when George was twelve, and he thought things would shift then. Their father did not understand Raúl well enough to be distressed by his feelings about him, and he tried to treat his sons equally; it was a point of principle. But even equal wasn’t right, when it came to Raúl.
George went away to boarding school in Santa Barbara and decided to remake himself as an American. He worked at cultivating his mother’s California accent. When he got to Berkeley, he played Truco sometimes with the South Americans, with the Spanish cards and the elaborate system of tiny facial gestures to communicate across the table, but mostly he tried to abandon his past. He tried to become interested in finance, in business consulting, in law, in anything that might create for him a new life.
But there was so much money to be made at home. And Raúl had no business mind at all. He just rode around on his white horse, and got girls pregnant. The daughter of the local grocer almost bled to death delivering Raúl’s baby. The grocer called George, who sat with the girl in the hospital all night. She was nineteen years old and looked gray, all the blood and warmth drained out of her. She’d survived, and so had the baby, but Raúl never even went to see them.
Raúl’s ruthlessness might have helped in their father’s business, except he was not ambitious in that way. He didn’t know how to make money. He made mistakes, alienated allies. He bragged on Instagram about his exploits until George made him shut down his account, but then he would start another. He drank too much of the local guaro. Eventually, it would kill him, but that might be twenty years from now. Who could wait?
And then Raúl had shot the Colombian courier. He said Bolaños was cheating them, but George suspected that Raúl owed the man money on a side deal and didn’t want to pay. So he shot Bolaños in the head. But this was not Colombia. They lived in a country with almost perfect literacy, with excellent medical care, and they had a profitable little business that the police ignored. You could not shoot people in the head. They were not butchers or desperadoes. The death had been stupid, unnecessary.
George had been in California at the time. Something always went tits-up when he was away. So he’d been flying home to do damage control when Luz Alvaros, working for his brother, brought those fucking kids to the house in the Jeep and caused an international incident.
George did not consider himself a moral paragon. He understood that his father’s business was illegal, and that he had taken part in it. He had certainly lived off the spoils. But most business was in some way unethical. Look at DuPont dumping poison in drinking water, look at big pharma, look at subprime mortgages. It was just the nature of making money. Everyone profited at someone else’s expense. But Raúl was unredeemably bad.
And stupid. Raúl had decided that the solution was to ransom the children. There had been a reward offered, fifty thousand dollars for information. Raúl thought they could get more. “People kidnap Americans on purpose,” he told George. “We could make so much money!”
“That is not what we do!” George said. “Do you understand the shit-storm you would bring down on our heads?”
“Your problem is that you have small ideas,” Raúl said.
If Raúl just disappeared, no one would miss him. Their father would mourn the loss of a son, but he would get over it.
Their father was in hiding now, and hadn’t told George where he’d gone, so it couldn’t be beaten or threatened out of him. His dear father, always considerate. He’d taken two
of his men with him, and the other two had quit when they realized the shit they were in. Luz Alvaros had bolted, too, after starting all of this with her shitty choice of a grave site. And now two tame cops had heard Marcus pounding on the window. Even Raúl should understand that this was a big fucking problem. But he didn’t. When he came in from bribing those cops, he’d smiled an oily, frog-murdering smile, as if everything was under control.
George’s first idea had been a return through intermediaries. Find someone to dump the kids outside the Argentinian embassy office. The van that dropped the kids would have no license plate, they would be unhurt. Return the kids unscathed, and maybe the Americans wouldn’t come after them in helicopters.
But after he saw that smile on his brother’s face, he changed his mind. His new, bigger idea was to take the kids to the capital himself, and turn his brother in. He could rid himself of two problems at once. He would be the hero, and surround himself with the family’s lawyers, and they would let Raúl take the fall. He’d caused them enough trouble already.
“Can we go outside?” Penny asked, snapping George from his reverie. He’d been standing over the children, watching them play, and now they were all staring up at him.
“No,” George said.
“Why not?”
“Satellites,” Marcus said. That kid was not stupid at all.
22.
ISABEL SCRATCHED HER head. It was starting to itch. She still had the salty river water dried on her hair. She’d given up thinking about getting a key to the door, because she was barefoot and wouldn’t get far. Instead, she’d been focusing on a computer or a phone. Raúl and George had the outlines of phones in their pockets, but they never took them out, or left them on a table. And they hadn’t turned on a TV since the old man turned it off on the first day.
