His mother had been worried, his whole childhood, about things going wrong. Pillows could suffocate you, acid rain was falling from the sky, going barefoot gave you pneumonia. She wouldn’t go to the doctor because she might find out that something was wrong. She’d inherited fear from her own parents the way other people got piano lessons.
His father, on the other hand, was constitutionally unafraid, and could never take Benjamin’s problems seriously. He was bullied at school? Ignore it. He was mugged on the way home? So he lost a couple of bucks, those kids who’d taken it must need it more. The scale was permanently zeroed out, for his father. Even as the Internet grew rabid with anti-Semitism, his father had the unanswerable test case: Are you escaping Nazis on foot, as Benjamin’s grandfather had done at nine, hiding in a wagon with his brother? Are you living in a hole in the ground in Silesia? No? Then enjoy your phenomenal luck.
Benjamin had never really understood how his mother and father got along, but he guessed that they tempered each other, in both senses of the word. The baffling example of the other person hardened each of them in their convictions, but together they reached some kind of livable compromise.
Now he had a problem that even his father would recognize as a problem, and he had come to a new understanding of the paternal disaster scale of his childhood. If he tried to remember frustrations at work, or disagreements with Liv that had once absorbed his attention, he could not even fathom them. All minor regrets had been burned away. Those were the pain of touching a hot pan, this was a blowtorch.
His parents were in Cuba until after New Year’s, and he hoped his life might be set right before his mother got back to the news. He wanted to protect her from the knowledge that the sky had actually fallen, this time. The thought of telling her put him in a cold sweat.
When they got to the capital, they stopped at the Argentinian embassy, which was a small office, closed for the Christmas week, but someone was coming in. The heat when they let Gunther out of the Suburban was intense. Then Benjamin and Raymond were sealed back in for the drive to their own embassy.
There was constraint between them now. Raymond had apologized for wanting to play golf, and Benjamin had told him that of course he didn’t need to be sorry. Benjamin had wanted to go, too.
But in truth, he had agreed to let his family go off alone in a strange country because he would’ve felt unmanly turning down the golf. He hadn’t wanted to say to Raymond, “No, I’ll go on the zip-line tour with the ladies, and be strapped into a diaper harness and flung from tree to tree. You men go off in the luxury vehicle to the exclusive sporting club.” He hadn’t even been conscious of the implication, in the moment. He never thought, in his daily life, about being masculine or manly. But now he understood that on some primitive, atavistic level, he had gone to play golf to be a man among men, which in itself was ridiculous.
He kept returning to the idea that Liv would never have let him take the children by himself on an excursion in a foreign country. She didn’t have his mother’s fear, but she did think he was too spacey, he didn’t pay enough attention, he lived too much in his mind. He would never have guessed that the kids would disappear on her watch.
“I wish you’d been here,” she’d said in that clearing, wrapped in a blanket. She thought they’d still have their kids if he had gone along. And it was probably true. It was just a matter of numbers. If there’d been more eyeballs on them, they couldn’t have drifted away.
Instead, he’d been out whacking that infuriating little white ball across the vast green lawn in the sunshine. And he’d enjoyed it. He’d taken an anthropological interest in Gunther’s friend, who had the self-effacing manner of the British upper class in the aftermath of empire. A vague sadness about diminished expectations, although he’d made a fortune in ecotourism.
The conversation took a different tone in the absence of the women. Gunther didn’t show off like he had at dinner on the ship; he’d stopped acting the South American swell. He seemed much more relaxed without any women around to charm. And Benjamin had enjoyed watching Raymond’s absorption in the game. Usually Raymond had an actor’s awareness of people looking at him. On the golf course, he furrowed his brow at the ball at his feet, oblivious to any eyes on him.
Benjamin had been absorbed, too, if less skilled. He’d thought about the arc of the ball’s flight, and the obsessive quality of the desire to hit it correctly, with the correct tool. The different sounds it made: the resounding thwock, or the light tap. He had barely given a thought to Liv and the children until Nora’s desperate call came in.
The truly manly move, of course, would have been to protect his family, guard his tribe, ensure his reproductive success. And now the bearer of his name, his treasure, the child who had, with total faith, watched Benjamin inexpertly tie his necktie for Christmas dinner, was out there in diabetic ketoacidosis, beginning to die. If he wasn’t already dead.
The feeling of rage and impotence that welled up at this thought was overwhelming, and Benjamin tried to tamp it down. They rolled past enormous trees along the parkway, with huge spreading roots. It was true that Raymond’s enthusiasm had given the golfing idea momentum. It was insane to hold that against him, but Benjamin secretly did.
“How long can Sebastian go without insulin?” Raymond asked.
“Two weeks max,” Benjamin said, looking out the window. “But he’ll be really sick after a couple of days.”
It made him nauseated just to say it. His mouth felt dry. Even on the insulin pump, Sebastian had swings in the night. Benjamin would hear the alarm and walk down the hall half-asleep, do a test, adjust the pump, wait until the levels evened out. Sebastian could be having a seizure right now, with no one to help him. They’d taught Penny the basics, but all that meant was that she knew how to ask for help, in English and Spanish. And in French, for good measure. At home she had a brother “with diabetes” but in other languages they had cleared her to use the adjective. She knew to give him sugar in an emergency if she didn’t know if he was high or low, and she knew how to use the pump, which was now useless in Liv’s bag. Without insulin, Sebastian would eventually start to seize; he would go into a coma. Benjamin saw his son’s small blond head lolling, hair flopping, the limp body getting dumped on a roadside. He tasted bile in the back of his throat.
They arrived at a brutalist concrete building, behind solid walls and black-barred gates. The small, high windows had slanting sills. The driver spoke to someone in a guard station and told them where to check in. The heat outside the air-conditioned car was oppressive. As Benjamin and Raymond walked toward the building, a young woman approached them, holding a little boy by the hand. She had dyed red hair with dark roots. The kid had a runny nose.
“Excuse me,” she said, in accented English. “I have seen you on television.”
Raymond gave her the vague smile he gave to crazy fans.
“My name is Consuelo Bola?os,” the woman said. “My husband was in this grave. The one your children found.”
“Oh,” Raymond said, shifting gears. “I’m so sorry.”
“I made an appointment,” she said. “I was hoping to reach you.”
“Walk inside with us,” Benjamin said. “It’s too hot out here.”
Consuelo Bola?os glanced around, as if she expected security to throw her out. She pulled the kid beside her. He stuck a finger into his nose and then in his mouth.
“My husband disappeared, since three weeks,” she said. “I could not find him. Everything seemed impossible.”
Benjamin realized that in his mind, the tragic accident of the grave had been that his children had stumbled onto it. Not that a husband and father had been murdered. That had not been his concern. But here was Consuelo Bola?os, bereft and angry. He tried to imagine how it would feel to have your loved one pulled from the ground, wrapped in a tarp. His intestines seemed to liquefy and his head went light. He wasn’t sure he could carry on this conversation.
“Why do you think he was killed?” Raymond asked.