“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.