“Can I have some?”
Camila handed over a metal pill case with painted roses on the lid. Liv shook out a pill and swallowed it dry. They were still waiting for Nora. No one had seen her since the morning in the club room and she hadn’t answered any of Liv’s texts. The husbands were debating leaving without her when a cab pulled up and Nora got out. Liv heard Fleetwood Mac playing on the cab’s radio until Nora slammed the door.
“Where were you?” Raymond asked.
“I went for a walk.” Nora took a seat in the back of the Suburban without looking at Liv.
Unbelievable.
The men got in and Benjamin took shotgun. Penny liked to claim the front seat, and Liv kept seeing her in the passenger seat of a car rolling over. Penny’s desire to assert herself was fine at a progressive LA school with feminist teachers, but was it working for her now? Liv could imagine it not going so well. The obscene jungle rolled by. Liv was so sick of this fucking country, the humidity, the endless green. At least Sebastian had insulin. Sebastian had insulin.
As they drove, Kenji told them what he knew. The dead guy in the Jeep was Raúl Herrera, and he lived at the house where they’d found the swimsuits. His Jeep had collided with another car, which was empty when the police arrived at the scene.
“It belonged to a teenage girl, who reported it stolen by her friend Oscar,” Kenji said. “She said he had a lot of kids in the car.”
“And who’s Oscar?” Raymond asked.
“The son of the Herreras’ housekeeper.”
“I told you!” Liv said. “I said there has to be a woman, who’ll have a conscience.”
“We don’t know yet what the scenario is,” Kenji said. “Here’s the kid.” He passed his phone around, the photograph on the screen of a teenage boy with short dark hair, unfashionable glasses, and a scruffy bit of untended mustache.
“How old is he?” Benjamin asked.
“Sixteen.”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Raymond said.
“Nope,” Kenji said.
“And he’s made six kids disappear?” Benjamin said.
“Not for long, let’s hope,” Kenji said.
They drove. Camila fell asleep.
“Monkeys,” Benjamin said listlessly, and they all looked out the window at some black shapes in the tops of the trees. One swung by the arm from one tree to the next. Liv heard a faint hooting through the window. The monkeys seemed to be mocking her, for once having wanted to see them on a zip-line tour.
The Suburban pulled abruptly across the road, onto the opposite shoulder, then bumped over uneven ground. There was police tape marking off an area in the trees. The Jeep had already been removed, its position marked with police tape, but a small red Fiat remained, upside-down. A police officer stood guard.
Gunther looked at the red car. “You’re saying six kids, plus this Oscar, were in that little thing?”
“I told you,” Kenji said, “we don’t know the scenario.”
“Five in the back?” Gunther said. “Or three in the front?”
“Where did they go?” Raymond asked. “Has there been a search?”
“The police combed a mile radius this morning,” Kenji said.
Liv looked around. “Five minutes into a nature walk, my kids are complaining.”
“Could they have hitchhiked from here?” Benjamin asked. “After the accident?”
“I think we would have heard from a driver,” Kenji said. “Someone would’ve seen them.”
“What of the housekeeper?” Camila asked.
“They found her at home. She’s asked for a lawyer.”
“Can we look inside the car?” Liv asked.
Kenji spoke to the police guard, and said, “You can look, but don’t touch anything.”
They moved closer to the turtled red car. Liv crouched to peer through the windows. She tried to focus, to pay attention, without being overwhelmed by the idea that her kids had been inside. She had a sudden clear memory of the last book she’d read aloud to Sebastian. Benjamin usually did the bedtime reading, but he’d been out of town, and they had started one of those wish-fulfillment kids’ adventure books, where the boy hero has exactly the qualities he needs to triumph, at every moment. You could feel the next beat coming, like the kind of country song where you can guess the next rhyme. She’d been bored and annoyed, and at one point she tried to explain to Sebastian why it wasn’t her favorite of his books. But Sebastian had loved the book unreservedly. Why hadn’t she just read the thing with gusto, and relished every moment with her son? Why had she brought her adult judgment and her professional story opinions to a book her kid loved? Of course the child hero should always triumph! Who wanted a kids’ book to feel like real life? Real life was fucking intolerable.
The windows of the red car were broken but she didn’t see any blood. Something dark moved inside, and Liv jumped backward and fell. The police guard lunged forward. The shadowy thing darted out of the car. It was a striped mammal with a long tail, a little bigger than a house cat. It ambled away.
“Oh, shit,” she said, her heart booming in her ears. “That scared me.”
“It’s just a coatimundi,” Kenji said.
“That’s a coatimundi?” Benjamin said. “That’s what we came ashore for? It’s a fucking raccoon!”
“Please don’t start blaming me for the zip line again,” Liv said. Her tailbone was bruised. She felt woozy and confused, on a cocktail of adrenaline, Xanax, regret, leftover Ambien, and coffee.
“No one is blaming anyone for the zip line,” Benjamin said.
“You are,” she said. “And I’m sick of it.”
“Liv,” he said.
“You all blame me!” she said. “You do! But I’m not the one who was fooling around with the guide, okay?”
There was a silence. She saw a quick look of naked fear on Nora’s face.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Raymond asked.
Liv covered her eyes. “Nothing. I just meant they were off looking for monkeys or whatever. Birds.”
Benjamin turned away and walked back to the Suburban. So did Nora.
Liv’s face burned with shame. She was sure Nora had been with Pedro this morning, but she’d had no right to say anything. Her heart could break for Raymond, but the code of female friendship required her to keep her mouth shut. She had sounded like Penny having a tantrum, blaming anyone but herself. The zip line had been her idea, and she had fallen asleep.
Raymond put out a hand to help her up, and she took it, gasping at the pain in her tailbone. “Oh, fuck,” she said. “Hang on. I really hurt myself.”
“You okay?” Raymond asked.
“Yeah. I will be.” She straightened carefully.
“What happened with the guide?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I got scared by that animal. I took a Xanax with coffee, I’m not used to it. I’m talking shit.”
“You sure? Nothing happened?”
“Positive.”
He studied her face. She turned from him and limped back to the Suburban, wincing with every step. Nora was in the way back, earbuds in. Liv had not thought she could feel more miserable, but here it was. There were always lower circles of hell. Welcome to the next level down. She climbed in.
39.
IT HAD GOTTEN dark outside the train. Isabel sat against the wall as the car rumbled and swayed, and she bit at the skin along her thumbnail. It hurt and bled. If her mother saw her, she would tell her to stop. But her mother wasn’t here. She hadn’t protected Isabel. She’d let her swim in a river that had taken her away.
She tried not to think about Raúl. The pain, or the blood after, or even his eye hanging out and his head half scraped off. She found she could only push him away with another painful idea, so she thought about how much she missed her brother. If they had only waited for Hector to come back, then none of this would have happened. But no one had listened to her.
The brakes of the train screeched, metal against metal. It ground slowly to a halt. Oscar didn’t move, so Isabel stood and looked out into the dark. Men were shouting up ahead.
“There’s a car on the tracks,” she said.