“Will they come find us?” Sebastian asked, in a small voice.
“Of course they will,” Penny said. And really, what was keeping them? The jungle on the bank looked impenetrable, but their mothers would find a way.
“Should we shout?” Marcus asked.
Together they cried, “Mom,” “Mommy,” “Mami,” in one shrill, beseeching voice. Then they stopped, as if with the swipe of a conductor’s wand, and waited in the silence. There was no response. The river swirled around them.
“I have to pee,” June said.
“Just go in the water,” her brother said.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t. What about those fish that swim up the pee, inside you?”
“That’s in the Amazon,” Marcus said.
“Why couldn’t they be here?” June asked.
“Because the Amazon doesn’t connect to here,” he said.
Penny already had peed, and hoped those fish really weren’t in the water. On the left bank, there was a tiny sloping place. They all kicked to it and clambered out.
It felt good to be on solid ground. As soon as they stood up, it seemed clear that they should wait here, rather than traveling ever farther away from their mothers. It had been smart to get out.
Penny helped June find a place to peel down her wet bathing suit, behind a tree. The trees were like something out of fairy tales: thick, twisted, hung with vines. June peed into the damp ground, looking up.
“Are you scared, Penny?” she asked.
“No,” Penny lied.
“Because they’re going to find us?”
“Yes,” Penny said. She helped June pull up her swimsuit straps and felt very grown-up. Isabel might be the oldest girl, but Penny was the one June knew and trusted. Her mother had told her to keep an eye on Sebastian and she had, but she hadn’t known this would happen.
“I’m hungry,” June said.
“We can go back to the buffet on the ship,” Penny said. “When they find us.”
They rejoined the group, and Hector announced, “I’m going to swim back.”
“You can’t swim against the river,” Marcus said.
“I can,” he said. “If I stay to the sides. Where the water goes the other direction.”
Penny had been whitewater rafting with her grandparents. “You mean in the eddies,” she said.
Isabel said something protesting.
“I’ll come back for you,” Hector said. He waded out, lowered his body in near the bank, and started swimming. He was very strong. His arms slashed through the water. They watched in silence as he disappeared around a bend. Then they were alone.
“We should be on the other side of the river,” Marcus said.
“We can’t get up that bank,” Penny said.
They studied the other side of the river and the steep mud bank. And then the bank moved. At least it seemed to move. There were tangled roots, and a section of the mottled mud was sliding.
“Oh!” Penny said.
Isabel said something under her breath.
It was not mud sliding, but an enormous crocodile, sunning itself on the bank. It had moved its big sinister head, split by a row of teeth, but now it settled again, motionless.
Isabel put a hand over her mouth.
“Hector will be okay,” Marcus said.
Sebastian and June weren’t paying attention. They had started making a small mud castle in the soft ground. No one said anything more to alarm them. Penny imagined her mother picking her way through the trees on the opposite bank and coming across that monster. They had to get back before that happened. But there was no reason crocodiles wouldn’t be on this side of the river, too. Penny stepped backward. She wanted to get away from the water, away from the muddy banks.
In the trees behind them, they heard an engine noise, and turned. “There’s a road!” Penny said. She started toward it.
“We have to stay here,” Isabel said. “And wait for Hector.”
“We should find the road,” Penny said.
They looked at each other. A battle of wills. Penny had read the phrase in books and knew that this was what it meant. Isabel was older. But Penny was smarter. She could not say in front of the little ones that they might be eaten by a crocodile if they stayed here, but she beamed the argument into Isabel’s eyes.
“I’m hungry,” Sebastian said.
“Me too,” June said.
Penny thought of how her mother would panic when she saw they were gone. Sebastian needed food or his blood sugar would drop, but he also needed insulin or his blood sugar might go too high. And he didn’t have his pump.
Marcus said they should hang the inner tubes on a branch, to show where they had left the river. Isabel clearly wasn’t happy about the plan, but she didn’t want to stay alone, so the five of them set off into the dense forest. The crocodile on the other bank hadn’t moved again. Hector would be fine, Penny told herself.
There was no trail, and it was painful, climbing barefoot over roots and fallen trees. Beneath the undergrowth, things scuttled away. Penny saw ants marching in a column, carrying green pieces of leaves over their heads like sails. She took Sebastian’s hand, a thing he would not usually tolerate.
They stumbled out into a clearing, where a Jeep was parked. Two men sat on the ground drinking bottles of Coke. They stared as if the children were fairies, materialized from the woods.
“Say something Spanish,” Penny whispered to Isabel.
“No,” Isabel whispered back.
“Hola!” Penny called.
The men just stared. There were two shovels on the ground and their clothes were dirty.
“Can I have a Coke?” Sebastian whispered to Penny.
The door of the Jeep opened, and a woman got out. She had strong brown arms, and she wore a beige tank top and cargo pants. Penny thought she looked like the girl action figure that goes with the toy Jeep. The woman asked them a question in too-fast Spanish.
Isabel didn’t answer.
Penny said, “We’re Americans.” That seemed important to say.
“How long you stand here?” the woman asked in English.
“We just got here,” Penny said. “We walked from the river.”
“Why?”
“We were looking for a road.”
“Is no road,” the woman said.
“We heard an engine,” Penny said, looking pointedly at the Jeep.
“Where are your parents?”
“At the big beach, down the river,” Penny said. “We came from the ship, a big cruise ship, but then we had a car accident. We were swimming. Mi hermano es diabético.” She’d been taught that sentence before they left, for emergencies.
Sebastian leaned into her. “Can I have a Coke?” he asked, louder than before.
The woman in the tank top frowned, then reached into the Jeep, brought out a bottle, and twisted off the top. Sebastian ran forward to grab it, then ran back to Penny’s side and drank.
She wished her mother were here. If Sebastian was low, the Coke would be good, but if he was high, it could make him feel worse.
“Will you give us a ride?” Penny asked.
They were not supposed to get in cars with strangers, but there were five of them. And they were asking for a ride. That seemed to make it safer. And the driver was a woman. You were supposed to ask a woman for help, if you got in trouble. Preferably a mother, but this was who they had. And maybe she was a mother. Although Penny doubted it.
“Okay,” the woman said, waving toward the Jeep.
Penny and Sebastian got in front together. The Jeep had an open top. Isabel looked toward the river and seemed like she might run, then got in the back seat with Marcus and June. The two men with the shovels crouched in the cargo area behind them. The woman reversed the Jeep.
Penny pulled the seatbelt over Sebastian’s bare chest and buckled it over herself, too. “Are you okay?” she asked him.
“I’m a little sleepy.”
“You should stay awake.”
“Okay.”
His blond hair was limp and damp on his forehead. Penny pushed it off his face.
“I have to poop,” June said, in the back seat.
“Hold it,” her brother said.