“Thank you,” Camila said.
Liv poured two cups. “Is your embassy being helpful?”
“I suppose.”
“Any news?”
Camila hesitated. “Isabel logged in to her Facebook account.”
Liv put down the coffee pot and stared. “She did?”
Nora had appeared in the doorway, her dark hair unwashed, scraped back in a ponytail. “Did what?”
Nora looked—Icelandic. That was the word that came to Liv. Like a character in a saga, living alone on a windswept crag, trying to survive against the elements, battered by cold and want. She didn’t belong in the club room of an equatorial hotel. Liv hated her cousin for whatever was going on with Pedro, but she did feel a pang at how miserable Nora was.
“Isabel logged in to her Facebook account,” Camila repeated.
“Did she write a message?” Liv asked.
“No,” Camila said, taking a seat on a couch. “She just signed in.”
“Are they sure it was really her?”
“I suppose they can’t be,” Camila said. “But who else? Someone with her password? And why not send a message, if it is someone else? I mean, what do they want?”
“Maybe she was trying to give her location,” Nora said.
“So why not give it?”
“But this is good news, right?” Liv said. “I mean—she’s alive. They’re in a place with a computer.”
“Unless it was a phone,” Nora said.
“They say it wasn’t,” Camila said. She looked at the coffee cup on her knees. “There is something else. They found a photograph.”
“Where?” Nora asked, in a strained voice.
“Instagram. They have been tracking the account. They thought it might be her.”
Liv didn’t want to know. Her legs felt weak.
“You cannot see her face,” Camila said. “But I know it is her. They are searching the—metadata, I think it is called.”
“But is she okay?” Nora asked. “In the photo?”
“It is a trophy, I think,” Camila said. “A boast, you know.”
“Oh, no,” Liv said, sinking to the couch. A trophy. She could not think about what that meant for her own children. She would not. She put her arms around Camila, whose shoulders felt like a bird’s wings. Slight, hollow bones. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
Camila submitted to be held.
Liv kept stumbling over blank spots in her mind. She remembered reading about mad cow disease, how prions ate holes in the brain, left it like Swiss cheese. Her brain felt like that. There were places where fear had created a gap, places she could not go.
Nora sat across from them, perfectly still. “Do you have the picture?”
Camila pulled free from Liv. She produced a phone and touched uncertainly at the screen. An Instagram post—or a screenshot of one—appeared. She offered the phone, then looked away as Liv and Nora leaned over it.
The photograph was of a girl in a bed, face down. She seemed to be naked, but only her back was visible. Her long hair was loose and damp over her face. It looked horrifyingly postcoital, but there were no identifying marks. No moles, no scars. Nothing on the smooth, lovely skin to prove that it was Isabel. The photograph had a filter on it, fading the edges dark, and Liv thought about the person who had taken it choosing a filter, trying Clarendon, X-Pro, Lo-Fi.
“How do you know it’s her?” Nora asked.
“I know,” Camila said stiffly, taking the phone back and putting it in her pocket, as if her privacy had been violated, which it had. “I tell you, I do.”
Liv imagined a similar photograph of Penny or Sebastian and nearly tumbled down one of the Swiss cheese tunnels in her brain. Of course she would know their backs, recognize the shoulders she had bathed and toweled and covered in sunscreen. “Will you tell us, if they learn anything?” she asked.
Camila nodded and sat for a moment with her hands clasped on her knees. “Isabel loves photographs of herself looking sexy,” she said. “I always try to keep them from her. But now I look at those photographs and they look so innocent. A child’s pictures. Her body is like a new toy.” Her jaw was shaking. “But this one—” She faltered.
“Camila, I’m so sorry,” Liv said.
They sat in silence for another moment, and then Camila stood. “Thank you for the coffee.”
Liv imagined that polite reserve was the only thing holding Camila together. She seemed to carry herself carefully. Any minute the shell of her formality might break.
“You’ll let us know what you find out?” Liv asked.
Camila gave an austere little drop of her chin and left the room.
31.
PENNY STALKED DOWN the trail, nursing her resentments. Oscar had yelled at her, when all she’d said was that they hadn’t had breakfast. But then he seemed to feel bad about it, and cut up the apples and cheese, and passed them out on the trail as they walked. Penny did the calculation, watched Sebastian give himself his shot, stuffed the calculator back in her pocket with the paper bag of insulin cartridges, and ran to catch up. If Oscar were a babysitter, her mother would fire him.
They walked a long time. Oscar was limping badly. They saw a tree made of tiny trunks and a long sloping neck like a giraffe’s. Oscar said it was called a walking tree. They all stopped and stared at it. Penny’s legs were tired.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Oscar said.
“We should find a road and stop a car.”
“Okay. Where?”
“There was a road,” she said. “We were on it.”
“It was too dangerous there.”
“Is there another one?”
“In this country? Yes.”
“I could get us back to the road we were on,” Marcus said.
“That’s so far!” June said.
“I’m hungry,” Sebastian said.
“He could collapse, without food,” Penny said. “Then you’ll have to carry him.”
Oscar looked miserable. “We keep walking,” he said, but he grimaced when he put his weight on his bad leg.
They trudged on. Penny considered the benefits of complaining some more. But then the trail through the trees opened up into a cleared area. There were train tracks running through it.
“Come on,” Oscar said. He led them toward the tracks.
“What are we doing?” Penny asked.
“Waiting,” he said.
They sat on the ground near the tracks, and Penny looked at the big tarred railroad ties. Her mother used to put pennies on the rails when she was a kid, so they would get flattened by the train, but you weren’t supposed to do it now. It was like not wearing a seatbelt, and climbing from the front seat to the back, and other things her mother had done when she was little that no one was allowed to do anymore.
Penny didn’t really like taking trains. First you had to find the right track at the station, and it was always confusing. Then you didn’t have an assigned seat. Penny got sick if she sat facing backward, so she had to guess which way the train was going to go. Her parents were always looking for four empty seats facing each other, and people glared at you like they were afraid you would sit next to them, and it was stressful.
June, sitting on the ground, sang softly, “Una vieja-ja—mató un gato-to—con la punta-ta—del zapato-to.” She brushed her hands back and forth across her bent knees and clapped her legs. Then they heard the noise of a train in the distance.
It was moving slowly. Penny could see the engineer’s face in the window, shiny with sweat. Penny thought maybe he would recognize them from the TV, but he didn’t seem to see them. It was a freight train, not a passenger train. The first few cars were closed up, but then one passed with an open door. Oscar stood and peered in as it went by. Penny knew about riding trains because they’d done a unit on immigration in school. Some people were so desperate to get to America that they paid strangers called coyotes to take them. Her mother had let her watch a movie about it even though there were things in it that weren’t appropriate. Penny always thought of the actual coyotes that yipped in the distance and sometimes ran down their street at night, skinny and gray-brown and purposeful. The people called the train La Bestia.
Two more closed cars. Then an open one.