“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 time 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.”