“That one,” Oscar said. “Go, go, go!”
It all happened so fast. Isabel and Marcus, who looked as startled as Penny felt, scrambled up onto the bare metal of the train car, with their long legs. Oscar handed June up to them, and they caught her by her elbows and lifted her in. It was too high for Penny to climb. She ran alongside. Oscar grabbed Sebastian and passed him awkwardly up. Then he threw the backpack in.
Penny had always suspected that this moment would come. They would abandon her because she was slow and bossy and annoying. “Don’t leave me!” she screamed.
“Run!” Oscar shouted. His face looked desperate. The train rumbled and creaked, metal on metal.
It was hard to run in flip-flops, and she had never been fast. Oscar grabbed her hand and pulled her forward, limping. She stumbled and went down on her knee.
The others were all shouting, and she heard Sebastian scream her name. Finally Oscar picked her up and heaved her into the train with a grunt. She landed painfully on her side.
“Come on!” June screamed at Oscar.
He ran and struggled to climb up, the others pulling at his clothes. Then he was in. He collapsed on his back, breathing hard and moaning. June unzipped the pocket on the backpack and peered inside, then reached in and pulled out the bunny, like a magic trick. Its nose twitched and she hugged it to her face.
The train jostled its way down the track, with all of them aboard. Penny sat up and looked at her knee. Sticky blood ran down her shin. She wanted to cry, but that didn’t seem right when they had done something so impossible. “Where are we going?” she asked.
Oscar shook his head, still out of breath.
“We’re going northwest,” Marcus said.
“What’s there?” June asked.
“Nicaragua,” Marcus said.
“We’re going to Nicaragua?” his sister said.
“No,” Oscar said. “We’re just resting, and getting to somewhere with food.”
“Will they have insulin, too?” Sebastian asked.
Penny had a terrible thought, and she put her hand on her pocket and felt no paper bag. An icy flush passed through her body, even in the heat. The bag must have fallen out of her pocket when she ran for the train. “I thought we were going to the embassy,” she said.
“We were,” Oscar said. “But people are trying to kill us. And we can’t keep walking. I can’t keep walking. We need to rest.”
Isabel was watching Penny, with flat eyes and a tiny smile—she knew she’d lost the insulin. Penny hated her.
Sebastian unscrewed the pen and took out the old cartridge. “This one is empty,” he said. “Can I have a new one?”
“Just a minute,” Penny said.
He rolled the empty cartridge between his fingers. “Do you think Mom and Dad will find us?”
“Of course.”
“Can we call them?”
“We don’t have a phone.”
“We had a phone,” Isabel said, “but Oscar threw it away.” Penny’s mother would have told her she didn’t like that tone of voice.
“How far is Nicaragua?” June asked.
“We’re not going to Nicaragua,” Oscar said.
“But how far is it?”
“I have no fucking idea.”
June blinked at him.
“Probably about a hundred miles,” Marcus said.
“See, he knows,” Oscar said, and he closed his eyes. “He can be leader now, okay? I quit.”
32.
THE TRAIN HAD a different motion from the truck, and Noemi woke to the new rocking, trying to figure out what was different. It jostled in a different way: more rhythmic.
Chuy had chosen their car and they had climbed in at night in the dark, and then realized it wasn’t empty. A woman and a little boy were inside, hiding against the wall. But Noemi was tired, and she had shrugged her backpack off. She didn’t want to have to go find another car. Her once-pink backpack was scuffed and grayish with dirt. So was the plush pig.
The woman in the train car had seemed nervous. Noemi had tried to be friendly to the little boy, she had showed him the pig, but he didn’t want to talk. She thought maybe in the morning these people would see that they didn’t have to be afraid of Chuy, and then she and the boy could be friends.
Now, as she woke, with her pig as a pillow, she saw that the woman and the little boy were gone. It was light out, and the train was crawling.
“Why does it go so slowly?” she asked Chuy.
“You in a hurry?” he asked. He was rolling loose tobacco in a piece of paper.
“I just wanted to know.”
Chuy licked the paper to seal the cigarette.
She sat up and watched the trees go by, thick and green and tangled. After a while, she asked, “Where do you think the woman and the little boy went?”
“To find another car.”
“She was afraid of you.”
Chuy lit his cigarette. “Not my fault.”
“Did you talk to them?”
He nodded.
“Where are they going?”
“Texas.”
“Maybe we’ll see them there.”
“They won’t make it.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head and blew out smoke.
Noemi searched Chuy’s broad face. “Why didn’t my parents want me to know about you?”
“They think I went bad.”
“Did you?”
He paused, then said, “For a while.”
“So why did they change their minds?”
“Because your grandmother couldn’t keep you.”
“What did my father say then?”
“He thought you should stay with your grandmother,” Chuy said. “But she’s an old woman. She can only do so much.”
They heard something outside the boxcar: voices. Noemi got up and went to the open door.
“Careful,” Chuy said, and he came to stand beside her.
Some people were climbing into the train, two cars ahead. Kids. A lot of them. They all struggled into the train, an older boy climbing in last.
Noemi couldn’t see them, now that they were in the train car, but she kept watching. They’d all been wearing the same kind of clothes: red shorts, dirty white T-shirts, flip-flops. The oldest boy had a backpack, which he’d thrown into the train. Then he’d helped a girl in. Noemi had seen her face as she grimaced and rolled inside. “That girl,” she said. “I thought I knew her.”
Chuy grunted, stamping out his cigarette.
The recognition shimmered somewhere in the back of her mind, then burst forward, where she could see it. “They’re the kids from the ship!”
Chuy said nothing, so she knew she was right.
She looked out the door again. They weren’t in their swimsuits from the television, but they wore matching outfits. They’d appeared, and she’d been here to see it. She wished she could tell Rosa, but did Rosa even know who the kids were? “Do you think they were on TV at home?” she asked.
“Maybe,” Chuy said.
“Can we go talk to them?”
“No.”
“I want to meet them.”
“Not a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“They have bad luck,” Chuy said. “We don’t want to catch it.”
Noemi looked out again. She couldn’t hear the children over the clank and rumble of the train. Then she saw something emerge from the car. It was a boy’s hips, pushed forward with his red shorts lowered, to pee out the door. Noemi could only see his hand, the arcing stream, and the splash on the rocks below. She pulled her head back inside, giddy with shock. “One of them is peeing,” she whispered.
“Everybody has to,” Chuy said.
33.
WHEN GEORGE wanted help moving Consuelo’s body, Maria refused.
“Do you know how much we pay you?” George demanded. “For making scrambled eggs and sweeping the floor? Help me!”
So she did. There were tiny shards of Consuelo’s skull on the bloody tile floor. It was hard to get the plastic tarp under her, and the body was heavy and awkward. Finally they pulled the tarp out of the doorway and against the wall, and they could close the door again.
Maria mopped the floor, filling buckets with bloody water, dumping the buckets in the bathroom, trying to keep herself from retching. When she was finished, she told George she needed to go home. She wanted her phone.
He said she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Am I a prisoner?”