Someone in a striped shirt appeared outside the train car, a small girl with black hair, a little Mayan-looking kid.
“We’re friends!” the girl said breathlessly, holding up her hands to show they were empty. “My name is Noemi. This is my uncle, Chuy.”
A man emerged from the dark beside her. He had a square, solid face. “You have to get off the train,” he said quietly, in the same strangely accented Spanish as the girl’s.
Isabel looked to Oscar to confront these people, but he sat curled up and frozen, after leading them thrashing through the woods. He was so useless. She turned back to the man. “Who stopped the train?”
“Thieves,” Chuy said.
“We don’t have any money.”
“They’ll recognize you. Rich Americans are looking for you.”
“You’re on television,” the little indio girl said shyly. “You’re famous.”
Isabel had heard about these migrant kids, and she’d seen pictures. When she hadn’t wanted to go to the passport office, her mother had lectured her about what a privilege it was to have a passport, to be able to go anywhere you liked. Those migrant children would do anything for a luxury like that. The passport office would be exciting to them. It occurred to Isabel that if she made it home, her mother would never lecture her ever again. She looked ahead, to where the car had stopped on the tracks. “Maybe they’ll take us to our parents,” she said. “For the money.”
“You want to trust those men?” Chuy said.
Isabel felt a roiling in her empty stomach. She remembered the weight of Raúl’s body, the tearing feeling, the blood. She couldn’t have it happen again, and her legs started to tremble.
Oscar spoke up. “Where would we go?” His voice was small and whiny, but at least he’d snapped out of his silence.
“Into the trees.”
“But my knee.”
“You’ll be dead if you stay here, ?a?o,” the man said. “They don’t need you.”
“Okay,” Oscar said, and he started shoving things into his backpack.
June handed him the bunny, saying, “Don’t hurt him!”
Oscar’s yellow folding knife was on the floor of the train car, forgotten. Isabel stuck it in her pocket.
Chuy lifted June down from the car, as if she weighed nothing.
Marcus edged out and dropped. Then the man helped Oscar down, so he wouldn’t land so hard on his knee, but Oscar still grunted with pain. Isabel slid out after them, and then they were all outside in the dark.
40.
ON THE DRIVE back to the capital, Raymond made a point of sitting next to his wife in the Suburban. Nora kept her earbuds in, and stared out the window at the trees going by. Raymond didn’t buy that Liv had made up what she’d said about the guide. You didn’t get two children to school age together without knowing a thing or two about a person’s moods.
He had taken all the shit about marrying a white girl. He would catch, from black women, a barely raised eyebrow, a subtle reproach. He felt it in airports, on subways, any time he was in a not-all-white public setting with his wife. And he thought they were right to hold it against him. But you didn’t get to choose. Love seized you, or it didn’t. He wouldn’t say that aloud, not even to his own sister, who would laugh at him. She and his brother had both found black partners, and he’d ceded the moral high ground to them. But he knew Nora was the person he was supposed to be with. They fit in some chemical, physical way.
Aside from girls in high school, which hardly counted, he’d never loved anyone else. He loved the smell of her, the sight of her getting out of the shower. Twelve years and two kids later, he still craved her. When he jerked off, it was Nora he thought about.
He’d had other offers, of course. There was always someone flirting on the set. The black-man roles he got didn’t usually have a love interest, so he’d been protected from too much gazing into each other’s eyes while the whole crew watched, the kind of gazing that made your brain chemistry start saying THIS IS LOVE. When he did get a part with a romance, or when someone hung around his trailer during the endless downtime, his brain had never fallen for it. He’d been faithful, a hundred percent, and now Nora had not. At the precise moment when it mattered most.
The sun had gone down in that abrupt equatorial way, and now it was late. At the hotel, Camila and Gunther went off to the bar, and the rest of them rode the elevator in silence. Benjamin and Liv, shifting uncomfortably, got off on five. Then it was just Raymond and Nora in the steep fluorescent light and the unforgiving elevator mirrors, riding up to their room on six.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. The elevator door opened on their floor, and he held it for her, but she stayed where she was. “I’m going up to the club room,” she said.
“First we talk.”
“I need something to eat.”
So Raymond let the door close.
“You don’t have to come with me,” Nora said.
“Oh, yes, I do.”
When the door opened again on the top floor, she stepped out past him. She was wearing the white shorts she’d worn on the day the kids had vanished. He’d thought she might not wear them again, although he was wearing his stupid golfing shirt, the stress stink washed out of it by the hotel laundry.
In the empty club room, lunch was over. Tea had been laid out: little triangular sandwiches and cookies, a silver urn of hot water. Small white ceramic pitchers of milk.
“So,” Raymond began, and he cleared his throat. “What Liv said.”
He saw a flash of anger cross his wife’s face. He could tell she wanted to attack Liv, but that would give weight to the accusation. Nora was seriously pissed.
“What did she mean?” he pressed.
“How should I know?”
“What happened with the guide?”
She shook her head.
“Nora.”
“What.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked.
“Nothing!” she said. “Nothing! I went looking for birds. The tide changed. None of us was paying attention. That’s what happened. That’s all.”
She was lying. He absorbed the blow, and the room seemed to spin. Tea sandwiches and milk pitchers caught in a slow cyclone. Was she going to say more? Was she going to cave and tell him the truth? He didn’t want her to speak. And he did.
“You have to tell me, if we’re going to get through this.”
She said nothing.
The silence went on too long and finally he said, “My mother is coming.”
“She’s what?”
“She’s on her way. I couldn’t hold her off anymore. But I need to know what’s going on, before she gets here. I need to know where we stand.” He needed to know how humiliated he was, before his mother arrived. He waited for Nora’s answer.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “That’s the last thing we need.”
He felt he had offered her his exposed chest and a knife, in exchange for information. And instead she was acting wronged. As if he had let her down. He had been so lucky in his life, but his good fortune had somehow run out. The love of his life, the mother of his vanished children, walked away from him, out of the room.
41.
CAMILA TRAILED GUNTHER to the hotel bar, which was dim with dark green walls. “Let’s go upstairs,” she pleaded. “Please.”
“The minibar is empty,” he said. He slid onto a stool and ordered a scotch.
The young bartender, balding in his twenties, glanced at Camila, then turned away for a glass. The bar was deserted, everyone worn out from the night before. Nursing hangovers, making resolutions.
“Just one,” Gunther said.
She climbed onto a stool beside him and ordered a gin and tonic.
Gunther’s drink arrived, and he nodded at the bartender. “I keep thinking,” he said in English, for privacy. “This photograph, on the Instagram.”
Camila closed her eyes.
“It could not happen, with Hector there,” he said.
Camila had thought the same thing.
“So either they have done something to him,” he said, “or the two of them are not together.”
The bartender slid Camila’s gin and tonic toward her. It was cold and bitter and lovely: quinine, juniper, lime.