“Okay,” he said. “You know what I did. Now I need to know what I’m forgiving you for.”
Nora swallowed. He had to know, to move forward. But if he knew, he wouldn’t forgive her. So she was caught. She thought of Pedro kissing her against the tree, before everything happened. His casual speed and skill, how emotionally unentangled it had seemed. She felt a twitch between her legs, a quickening warmth.
She thought of Pedro leading her away from the café after Liv found them, and her deep sleep in the stale bed in the papaya-colored house. She remembered her humiliating wait in the taxi when she went back the next day. Maybe he’s married, se?ora, the cabbie had said. She would never see Pedro again, she did not want to see him, and yet the damp ache and the shame both grew more insistent.
“Did you fuck him?” Raymond asked.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Did you suck him off?”
She shook her head again, a little shocked. That seemed impossible, too much of a betrayal. She had not known she had made such distinctions until now.
“Did he go down on you?” Raymond asked.
She shook her head a third time.
Raymond looked confused. “So then what happened?”
A nurse walked by in purple scrubs, glanced at them and strode purposefully on, in case they might want something from her. Nora watched her go, then turned back to Raymond. She was afraid.
“He kissed me,” she said.
“Okay,” Raymond said. His breathing had changed, the way it did when he was upset. She could see the uneven rising in his chest, hear the stilted rhythm.
“And then he just—used his hand,” she said. “His fingers. It took about thirty seconds. I was wearing my shorts.” She wanted to tell him that she had thought of the car wash, but it might seem like she was letting herself off the hook. The non-apology apology. He hated that.
“But you came?” Raymond said.
She nodded, miserable.
Raymond’s eyes went from confusion to a different look. “Did you like it?”
She hesitated, then nodded.
“What about him?” Raymond asked. His voice had gone hoarse.
Another nurse walked by. They waited for her to pass.
Nora was aware that she was standing closer to Raymond now, so she could keep her voice low. “He jerked himself off,” she said. “It was just as fast. He wiped his hand on a leaf.”
Raymond stared at her. She could feel a laugh rising, and she tried to hold it back in case it might make him angry, but there was a smile lurking around the corners of his mouth, too, and they both burst into laughter. He put an arm around her waist and pulled her to him and grew serious again. “What was his cock like?”
“Not as big as yours.” She felt it flex, hard, against her stomach. She felt dizzy, as if all the blood in her body had gone to her pelvis and was waiting there, pulsing, leaving her light-headed and stupid.
“Where can we go?” he asked.
“There’s a supply closet.” She’d seen the nurses go in for boxes of latex gloves.
They waited until the hallway was clear. Then they were in the closet, and her back was against the door, and they were tugging at clothes, surrounded by boxes of gauze and toilet paper. Raymond’s mouth was hot on hers and he had a hand on her breast. “Did he touch you like this?”
“No.”
“No? What the fuck is wrong with him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
His fingers went inside her underwear and slid. “Oh, Jesus, you’re wet.”
“I need you to fuck me.”
“First I need to know,” he said. “Did he touch you like this?”
“Yes,” she said, clinging to him, trembling. “Please,” she said. “Please.”
“Not yet,” he said. “Did he do this?”
“Yes,” she said. He had to hold her upright as she came.
Then he relented. She kicked the underwear off and he lifted her by the waist so she could wrap her legs around him. His cock slid inside her and she gasped with relief. Her face was wet with tears and he kissed them away. Someone was going to hear them, against the door. She wanted to ask again if he would forgive her, because he’d never answered, but no one could be held accountable for anything said now.
55.
THE SEARCH AND rescue team was very professional, very organized. They set out through the woods near the river in a row. Two of the men carried rifles for crocodiles. Gunther walked in step with them, looking for his son.
He supposed all fathers thought their children the best, the most delightful, the most attractive. But most of them were wrong. Hector carried himself like a prince, a leader, a man already. So why hadn’t Gunther taken him golfing, instead of leaving him with the women and children? They could have fit one more in the car.
Because they’d had a foursome already, he supposed. And Hector wasn’t interested in golf: not enough action for him. Plus—and this made Gunther feel craven—it was easier to have a drink or two at lunch without his son’s eyes on him. And the other men might also have felt constrained in the company of a boy.
They found no sign of Hector in the woods, so a team of divers arrived to search the river. Gunther found himself speaking of his son in the present tense, as if he were still alive. He couldn’t do otherwise. He talked about Hector’s swimming ability as if it were a factor. He knew that crocodiles rolled you over, again and again, to drown you. He tried not to think of Hector gasping, drowning, his lungs filling with the half-salt river water. It had been seven days now. He knew the chances of finding his son were infinitesimal. But still he hoped.
The divers, preparing on the bank, had a device on the end of a long spear. It held a .357 Magnum bullet in one end of a tube, and a charge. The bang-stick could be used at close quarters, underwater, in direct contact with an animal. Someone explained that the blast would do most of the damage, not the bullet itself.
They were looking for traces of his son. That was the only point now: to find proof that Hector was dead, and they could stop looking. Gunther’s mind resisted such pain. It recoiled. He became interested in the engineering and the innovation—a layer of nail polish painted on the charge as waterproofing.
He had come to despise the American parents, who thought nothing terrible could happen to them, even in these days of debt and war and warming seas, much of it visited on the world by their own rich, childish country. They did not even know what they did not know.
He had joined the search effort not only because he hoped to find his son, but because he needed to get away from the American women, who had let this thing happen. As he watched the somber team with their deliberate movements, no one hurrying, no one thinking the boy was still alive, his hope began to flag, leaving only his hatred. He knew that if he had been on the beach with a drink in the hot sun, he would have fallen asleep. But his children were teenagers. He and Camila had worked at parenthood longer than the others, and had earned the right to a nap. If your children were small, then it was your job to stay awake, and not to go off fucking strangers in the trees. This was universally understood. And now his daughter had returned traumatized and withdrawn, and he was standing by this brackish river waiting for divers to find scraps of his son. He could kill those women with his bare hands.
One of the three divers was a muscular girl, perhaps twenty-five years old. She looked sleek and amphibious in her black wetsuit. She laid out her gear: mask, fins, bang-stick. A knife, an underwater light, a mesh bag.
A mesh bag.