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 in 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!”