He took his phone out of his pocket and made a call. Penny heard the tiny recording of a girl’s voice, against his ear. He hung up. “Vámonos,” he said.
They got out of the dusty car and walked down the dark road, past the other houses. The flip-flops slapped against the sidewalk. They wouldn’t be able to sneak up on anyone. June carried the bunny in a makeshift pouch in the front of her T-shirt.
“Where are we going?” Penny asked Oscar.
“To find a car.”
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Sixteen.”
Penny blinked. Her cousin Winston was sixteen, and he still played “Jump or Dive” in the swimming pool, contorting himself in midair to obey the commands. He had a soft pale body, and pimples on his shoulders, and he refused to eat anything but turkey sandwiches and junk food. “Oh,” she said.
26.
RAYMOND LAY AWAKE in the hotel. He had a travel alarm clock that projected on the ceiling, and the red numbers said 3:03 A.M. New Year’s Day. He liked the projection, usually, but now it just reminded him that he couldn’t sleep. The earthquake had unsettled him. What was next: Pestilence? Famine?
He was disturbed by how paralyzed he’d been, during the earthquake. He should have known what to do. Had someone disproven the “triangle of life”? They didn’t even have an earthquake kit at home. They had some big bottles of water, and a lot of flashlights, and some bags of rice and quinoa that Nora had overbought. Pantry moths had gotten into the last stash.
A movie director had once bragged to Raymond about keeping a “ditch bag”: a backpack filled with dried food, antibiotics, a space blanket, and $20,000 cash, for when the big one came and all hell broke loose. Also a dirt bike. The director was a fiftyish English guy who lived in Santa Monica Canyon.
Raymond had laughed. “I give you three minutes. Someone’ll shoot you and take your ditch bag and your bike.”
“I have a .38,” the director had said.
“I hope you’re a good shot.”
“I should practice more,” the director had admitted. “It’s a hassle to get to the range.”
Raymond could store more water, if they ever got home, but there was no preparing for what actually happened. A ditch bag was not going to protect you. Nothing was going to protect you.
He got up to pee, and walked around the bed. Nora seemed to be asleep, after her obsessive pacing of the hotel hallways, oblivious to the earthquake, and her forty-five minutes in the bathroom, doing her best imitation of her crazy depressive mother. It was the thing she always talked about, the thing that had scarred her most as a kid: her mother holing up in the bathroom and crying. It was worrying to see her do it herself.
When he came back, Nora’s phone screen was lit up on the night table. Who was texting her at 3:15 in the morning? Four white lines glowed on the screen. She didn’t wake up.
He moved closer. The screen went dark. He pushed the button to light it up again. The sender was “Pedro.” The fucking guide. He picked up the phone to read the text.
I haven’t herd anything ether. Sorry. I would tell You if I did. Hope your doing OK or good as possible. Con . . .
The notification cut off there. Raymond thought about unlocking the phone to see the whole thread, but then Nora would know he’d read it. His sister kept an eye on her husband’s phone. She said it would be naive not to, if you could. But he was not someone who snooped, that was not part of his sense of himself. He could ask Nora about it, but then she would know he’d been looking. The screen went dark again.
He put the phone back down on the night table. It made a light click. He waited, but Nora didn’t move, and her breathing was steady. He stepped back around the bed and climbed under the sheet, careful not to bounce the mattress. The projection on the ceiling said 3:19 A.M.
So what did he know?
That Nora was looking for information. Fair enough. She must have asked the guide if he’d heard anything about the kids.
That Pedro knew nothing, and had pretty good English, even if his spelling wasn’t great. “I would tell you if I did” was not something Raymond could say in Spanish.
That Nora was depressed, but of course she was depressed. Their kids were missing.
That he could pretend to be a cop, he could make a living doing it, but he had no idea what to do in an emergency, when the chips were down. No idea at all.
27.
OSCAR LED THE children down the quiet street. Under his breath, he cursed the fucking Herreras, and the fucking luck that led the kids to that grave, and his mother’s fucking conscience, and his uncle’s car that wouldn’t start. Five kids, who had been all over the television! And no car! What kind of magician did his mother think he was? And why did she even still work for those assholes?
When they had fought about her job in the past, she’d cried and said she had to put food on the table. He told her never ever to use him as an excuse. He said he didn’t want her food, he would buy his own, he would live on tortas. But she’d worked for the Herreras so long, she was afraid to leave, and they were both used to it. He got hungry and ate what she cooked.
He tried Carmen’s number again, but she didn’t answer. The kids’ flip-flops slapped against the sidewalk.
After another block, they stopped outside a party to which he had not been invited. He knew that it shouldn’t matter, when bigger things were at stake. But it would’ve been easier if he’d been invited. Carmen’s shiny red Fiat was parked on the street outside the house. Reggaeton boomed from the windows, loud enough to piss off the neighbors. It would be morning soon. But it was New Year’s Eve, it was allowed.
“Are we going in there?” Penny asked. She was the one who talked the most.
“No,” he said. “You wait here.”
The littlest girl sat down on the sidewalk with the bunny in her arms and said, “There’s dog poop on this grass.”
He tried to remember that he was more scared of the Herreras than he was of this party, and he walked up to the front door, knocked, and waited.
“Just go in,” the Argentinian girl said. “It’s a party.”
He pushed open the door. The music got louder.
Carmen had been his friend since they were little, when she had thick glasses and a long braid down her back, and he’d thought they would always be together, doing their math homework at his kitchen table. But then she got beautiful all at once, some kind of quincea?era magic. She got boobs and hips and contact lenses, and took out the braid to have masses of wavy hair, and he stayed a skinny nerdy kid. She’d been nice to him about it, but she’d also acted like she had to go hang out with the beautiful stupid people at school. And she started acting dumb, which was the worst part. She wasn’t dumb.
He moved through the drunk, dancing people in the dim living room, and found Carmen on the back patio with her boyfriend, Tito. Oscar had known Tito since fourth grade, when he was fat and his name was Norberto, but Tito had gone through the magical process, too, and got tall and muscled. Fucking Norberto. He and Carmen were dancing slow. Her head with its beautiful hair was on his chest and her eyes closed.
“Carmen,” Oscar said.
She didn’t hear him.
“Carmen!”
She opened her big eyes. He could see, in the patio light, her contact lenses floating on the surface. She was at least a little bit drunk. She stared at him. “Oscar.”
“I need to borrow your car.”
She blinked. “Why?”
“I just do.”
Tito said, “You can’t,” leaning in close and threatening.
“This is none of your business, Norberto.”
“It is when she’s driving me home.”
“This is really important,” Oscar said to Carmen. “You shouldn’t be driving anyway. I’ll bring it back.”
Carmen blinked again, and Oscar remembered the girl with the braid, who’d been better than he was at math. She could’ve been gorgeous and smart! “Please, Carmen,” he said.