The young officer shrugged. “Don’t know.”
The lawyer slid her notepad into her briefcase. “I’m going there. No one questions Oscar until I arrive.”
“I’m going with you,” Maria said.
“Let me handle this.”
“Are you keeping me here?” Maria asked the cop.
He looked uncertain.
“Someone needs to take her home,” the lawyer said. “She’s not under arrest.”
The cop nodded. “I’ll get someone.”
“I want to see my son!” Maria said.
“I’ll call you,” the lawyer told her. “Right now you need to sleep, and be quiet.” She said it with a significant look.
The door closed behind them and Maria was alone. She slumped to the table, exhausted. She should have fought harder to go along. But Oscar was alive. That was enough for now.
49.
NORA SAT WITH her mother-in-law in the hospital’s little café, over coffee. Liv sometimes talked about what a cliché it was to feel oppressed by her own mother-in-law. Someday, she said, Sebastian would fall in love, and when that happened, the person he loved would feel oppressed by Liv, and she wouldn’t be able to catch a break. But Nora didn’t feel that way.
She loved Dianne, who was sixty-three, with a majestic bosom and an excellent poker face. She was a middle school principal, and Nora had spent her professional life working with middle school principals, trying to please them. She did not want to seem like a failure in Dianne’s eyes—in her marriage, in her parenting, in anything. And she did not want Raymond to seem like a failure. Dianne expected a lot of her son, and now Nora had to explain what he’d been doing in the hallway with his arms around Liv.
“It’s been really tough,” Nora said. “I think we’re all in need of comfort.”
“You and Raymond don’t comfort each other?”
“That’s been hard to do lately.”
“Why?”
It was impossible to explain. The guide, the disappearance, Liv’s blurted accusation, Raymond’s baffled hurt. And before that, the way things had cooled between them, incrementally, so she’d barely noticed until it was done. “It’s a long story,” Nora said.
“I have time,” Dianne said.
Nora felt restless and itchy. She wished she could crawl right out of her skin. “Can I tell you what I’m afraid of?” she asked.
Dianne nodded.
“I’m afraid I’ve taught my children to be too good,” Nora said. “I wanted to keep them safe. I taught them that they can’t play with plastic guns, ever. And they can’t lose their tempers. I wanted them not to draw attention to themselves. I wanted them to be small targets.”
Dianne was listening.
“My niece, Penny, her personality is to be a big target,” Nora said. “And Liv encourages it, because she’s a good feminist, mostly. And I know that people are going to hate that quality in Penny, because she’s a girl. She’s assertive and she wants things, and she doesn’t care about being polite, and it comes off bossy and greedy. I want to be a good feminist, and I hate it in Penny. But I also know she can get away with it, because she’s white.”
Dianne drank her coffee and gave nothing away.
Nora took a deep breath. “So Penny got pissed off and jumped out of the train. It was so insanely stupid. But then it got her rescued. I’m afraid that Marcus and June are huddled somewhere being good, like I taught them. And they won’t take a chance and they would never do anything that dumb, and so they won’t be rescued, like Penny was. And it will be my fault.”
Dianne considered her for a long minute, then said, “They’ll be all right.”
Nora was bursting to say that there was no way of knowing that! Kids died and were hurt all the time! Instead she looked at her hands. If Dianne said something about God, about prayer, she didn’t know if she could trust herself to be tactful in response. “I do know Marcus will take care of his sister, if he can,” she said.
“Of course he will.”
“But what if he can’t?” Her voice cracked.
“He will. Those children are strong.”
Nora blew her nose in the paper napkins from her cafeteria tray. “I miss my kids so much,” she said, through snotty tears. “And I miss my mom.”
“I know, sweetheart,” Dianne said. “I know.”
Loud voices echoed down the hall, and Nora recognized Liv’s. She jumped up and ran toward the noise, with Dianne behind her. They found Liv outside Sebastian’s hospital room.
“Get the doctor!” her cousin was shouting at a nurse. “Do something!”
“What happened?” Nora asked.
Liv was frantic. “I can’t believe this. After all that. Oh, my God.”
A ponytailed doctor ran into the room, and Liv followed her. What had they done to sweet Sebastian? He was supposed to be all right.
Nora turned and walked blindly away, toward the exit. She needed to get some air. She rounded a corner and saw Detective Rivera walking toward her, raising her hand in greeting. Nora wheeled, afraid of the detective, and almost bumped into her mother-in-law behind her.
Dianne grabbed her by the shoulders. “Where are you going? What are you doing?”
“I can’t.”
“I came to find you,” the detective said.
Nora stood still. She wouldn’t turn. She wouldn’t look. She felt a flush, a prickling of sweat all over her body.
“That woman is talking to you,” Dianne said.
“I can’t,” Nora whispered. “I can’t hear it.”
“We found them,” the detective said.
Nora saw bodies in her mind, and she started to shake.
“They walked into a police station,” the detective said. “They’re okay.”
Nora stared at her mother-in-law. “What did she say?”
“That they’re okay,” Dianne said.
Nora turned, finally, to face the detective. “What?”
“They’re okay.”
Nora felt like she was at the bottom of a pool, and the tall detective was standing on the side, trying to communicate. The words couldn’t make it down through the water. “How?” she heard herself ask. But that wasn’t the right question.
“They just walked into the station.”
“Where?” Nora mouthed. She couldn’t hear herself.
“They’re coming here. One of the officers is driving them, in a police car.”
“No!” Nora cried.
The detective looked confused.
Nora couldn’t find the words to explain that the car would crash, that cars kept crashing. She remembered the scene she’d been running from. She had the terrible thought that she had hurt Sebastian, by wanting her own children to be safe instead of Liv’s. She had wished it into being. The power of prayer. “Sebastian,” she whispered.
The detective frowned. “What happened?”
Nora was hit with a wave of vertigo so strong that the hallway spun. The floor moved to her left beneath her, the ceiling moved to her right. She tilted with the motion and put a hand out. Her mother-in-law caught one arm and the detective took the other.
The three of them staggered down the hallway to Sebastian’s room and found Raymond standing outside it. Nora managed to say, “Marcus and June. They’re coming here.”
“An officer is bringing them now,” Detective Rivera said. “But I’m worried about your wife.”
White lights flashed at the corners of Nora’s vision. “I’m okay,” she said. “I’m okay.”
They lowered her to a bench.
“Put your head between your knees,” Dianne said.
That just made it worse. Nora put her elbows on her knees and her hands over her eyes, willing the room to stop moving.
“They gave him too much insulin,” she heard Raymond say.
She tried to breathe. Sebastian was in a hospital with his parents, where he was supposed to be safe, and they were going to kill him. And Marcus and June were in a car with a cop and they would never make it here alive. And she—she was not responding well, she was becoming yet another patient, she needed to get her shit together. But instead everything whited out and she slid off the bench to the floor.
50.