“Do you have a guess?”
Nora shook her head. “Marcus has started stuttering, and he can barely look at me. He knows Isabel was raped. But there’s something else.”
An orderly came outside, eyed them, and lit a cigarette.
There was a long silence. Liv realized she didn’t know how to talk to her cousin anymore. Their countless hours of batting the conversation back and forth, the examining of small questions, the light Nora shed on everything as they talked it all through—it was gone. Liv wished, fervently, that she hadn’t seen Nora with Pedro at the café table.
Nora walked over to the orderly and gestured to his pack of Marlboros. He shook one out and lit it for her as she cupped her hand around the flame. Then she brought it back to where Liv stood.
Liv felt the words spilling out, she couldn’t stop or filter them. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry about everything. I don’t know why I said that thing to Raymond, about Pedro. I don’t know what came over me.”
“It was really shitty,” Nora said.
“I know. I’d lost my mind.”
Nora looked at the cigarette. “This is going to make me puke.”
“How did Raymond respond?”
Nora tapped the ash loose. “He’s sort of catastrophically disappointed, I think. I refused to talk about it, and then his mother showed up, and then I passed out, and now the kids are with us. So I guess it’s on hold.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s funny,” Nora said, “Marcus keeping some secret—it makes me realize how horrible it is, to suspect there’s something you’re not being told. It’s kind of worse than the news itself. I understand why Raymond is so angry and unhappy. And I’m afraid this will be between us forever. I don’t know if we can stay together, but I don’t know what splitting up looks like. I have no income. Even if I get a teaching job, there’s no way I can live anywhere close to the school. I could barely afford my tiny old apartment, and rents are so much higher now.”
“You’re not really going to split up.”
“I don’t know, Liv!” Nora cried, exasperated. The orderly and the two women in scrubs turned to look at them.
They stood in silence. “You could keep the house,” Liv said finally.
“I can’t do that.”
“It’s a community property state.” Liv sounded like her mother and hated herself for it.
Nora shook her head. “Raymond’s mother has always thought me unworthy of him. And now I’ve proven her right. I’m a terrible mother, who cheated and allowed her children to disappear. I’m not going to take the house.”
“We all let them disappear,” Liv said.
Nora shrugged.
Liv said, “I’m also so sorry Dianne saw that weird thing in the hall. You know Raymond was just being comforting.”
The orderly went inside, and Nora bent and stubbed her borrowed cigarette out on the concrete. “Jesus, that was disgusting.”
Liv was fairly sure she meant the cigarette, but she wouldn’t have put a lot of money on it. “Have you talked to Camila?” she asked.
Nora shook her head. “They’re looking for Hector. You know, I keep thinking how we live in this weird ahistorical bubble, a time and place when it seems unthinkable, impossible, to lose a child. But it happens all the time, all over the world. It always has. And people go on. They can’t just drop to the floor and scream for the rest of their lives.”
“I might have,” Liv said. “If we’d lost Sebastian.”
“You wouldn’t, though,” Nora said. “I think my brain has been preparing all week, making the insulation that lets you go on. You know that earthquake the other night?”
“I slept through it.”
“I was awake, but I didn’t feel it,” Nora said. “I was walking around the hotel and these people replacing a carpet asked me if I’d felt the terremoto. I had no idea what they were talking about. It’s like I’ve been in some kind of deep freeze. I keep thinking of that woman who lost her baby to the dingo, and how people thought she wasn’t emotional enough. But you can’t be emotional enough. How could you be?”
“Lindy Chamberlain,” Liv said.
“I was so angry at you when your kids came back,” Nora said. “I thought I could never forgive you for that. Forget the rest.”
“And now?”
“I should go back inside.” Nora tossed the stubbed cigarette into a trash can by the door.
Liv had thought, for a fleeting second, that their old connection might be restored. But it hadn’t been. She felt intensely sad. And she thought she had no right to her sadness, not when Penny and Sebastian had survived. She’d lost a friendship, but Camila had probably lost a child, and Isabel had lost her childhood. But how could you measure your own pain against the pain of the world?
She passed the room where Noemi slept. Penny had wanted to visit, but Noemi wasn’t well enough. There had been other kids on the train. Penny said they had seen a boy peering out. So many kids in peril in the world, in leaky boats, in captivity, trafficked, sick. She remembered her mother talking about the Bhopal gas leak when Liv was—how old? No older than Penny. Her mother at the kitchen table saying that the average payout for Americans killed in plane crashes was $350,000, and that the Union Carbide payout in Bhopal might be a few dollars a life. There had been children killed, pregnant women. She remembered the overhead light in their kitchen, her mother’s bleak and outraged expression at the way lives were valued, her father’s silent agreement, their reflections in the big window with the dark night outside.
So what would Camila be thinking, now that the American kids—or no, the estadounidense kids—were back safely, when Camila’s kids were not?
Liv wasn’t sure which room Isabel had been given, so she stopped at the nurses’ station to ask. The two women at the station kept tapping away at keyboards and didn’t look up. The person Liv was a week ago wouldn’t have let them ignore her. She would have demanded their attention, and the room number. But she was afraid to see Camila. So she left the women to their work and walked on.
54.
NORA STILL FELT sick from the cigarette. She’d brushed her teeth three times to get rid of the taste. June was curled up in one hospital bed with Raymond’s mother. Marcus slept beside Raymond in the other. He still wouldn’t tell her what he was hiding. He’d tossed and turned as Raymond whispered into his hair that it was going to be all right. The hospital was letting them all stay until Sebastian could be discharged, when an American hospital would have kicked them out that afternoon. Nora slipped out and leaned against the wall in the hallway.
After a few minutes, Raymond followed and closed the door behind him. Nora didn’t know what a normal conversation between them sounded like anymore. He asked, “What’s going to happen to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you want to happen?”
She shook her head.
“When my cousins’ baby died, they couldn’t stay together,” he said. “There was too much sadness between them.”
Nora knew the story. “Our babies aren’t dead.”
“You know what I mean,” he said. “Sometimes people don’t make it through a thing like this.”
She nodded.
“So what do you need from me, to stay?” he asked.
She hadn’t formed the question in that way before. She toed the linoleum with her sneaker. “I need to know if you’re going to forgive me.”
Raymond didn’t respond at first, and Nora was afraid he would say he couldn’t forgive her, and they would be done. Instead he said, “Do you forgive me for leaving you and the kids, and going golfing?”
She looked up and met his eyes. She wanted to stay steely and ready for whatever might come. But he was a professional, it was his job to stir up emotions with his eyes, to make people feel his warmth or his seriousness or his anger or his steadfastness or his sorrow or his kindness, or all of those things at once, without saying anything. And she felt all those things. “I do,” she said.