The divers stood in their wetsuits on the bank where the inner tubes had been found. If Hector had stayed with his sister, everything might have been different. But you made the decision you could make at the time when you made it. The person Hector was at that moment was someone who would heroically swim back. There was no version of Hector who walked to the Jeep. And if there had been, then maybe Raúl Herrera would have killed him, to get to Isabel. Maybe the Fates snipped with their scissors when they wanted to snip.
The girl diver, who had put on her tank, caught Gunther staring at her. She met his eyes for a moment. She was not going to scold the grieving father for staring. But her eyes held a light reproach. She looked away.
He wanted to tell her he had not been thinking of her neoprene-encased body. How could you seduce someone in a wetsuit? You would be exhausted by the time you peeled the thing off. You would need a cold drink. He’d been thinking of his children, and he’d been thinking of murdering two American women, but he couldn’t explain. And now, of course, he was thinking about her neoprene-encased body. An aquatic, erotic creature. The body responded. It was not a choice.
He turned to peer back into the trees where Isabel and the others had stepped over roots and branches, toward their captors. He imagined them like water sprites in their swimming costumes, flitting through the woods. Their bare footprints obscured now by the boots of the searchers. There was no sign they had been here at all.
There was a splash, then another, three, and the hunters had gone into the water to prove for certain that his son was gone.
56.
CAMILA SAT IN the dark hospital room and imagined the divers killing a crocodile and cutting its belly open, her son stepping out. Gunther, standing on the bank of the river, would welcome his son into his arms. She felt the tears come, at the joy of it. Hector was her secret favorite. Boys were so much less complicated for a mother. They loved you always.
The boy Marcus had come to visit Isabel in their room, the only one of the Americans who had. He seemed to have appointed himself Isabel’s protector. Camila had gone to the toilet and come back to find them whispering together. They’d stopped when she entered.
“What is it?” she’d asked.
“Nothing,” Isabel said.
She knew her daughter a little bit, and knew she was lying. But Isabel now slept like an innocent, under a spell.
Camila had been raised a Catholic, in a white dress at her confirmation, married by a priest, the whole thing. So now she tried to think about God and his intentions, out of habit. Si Dios quiere, her grandmother used to say, about every plan for the future. Shall we meet for breakfast? Si Dios quiere. Ojalá que venga. Why would God want to take Camila’s son? Who was this deity who willed such things?
Gunther said there were no gods. He said that man was a brutal creature in a brutal world. The human race was barely removed from clubbing one another on the head, stealing women and provisions, getting through the winter with violence and blood. In Camila’s lifetime, in her country, people had been thrown from airplanes for being a political inconvenience. Even America, the alleged light of the world, was built on the torture and rape and murder of captive people.
And yet Hector, her son, had risked his life for his sister, and for these children who were near strangers to him. There were noble impulses in this damned species, still. Which meant that they would find him. He would come back, her handsome young river god, reborn.
In the hospital bed, Isabel rolled over and moaned. She needed her brother, as much as Camila needed her son.
In her youth, Camila had a little singing career. It had never been much: a cabaret act, with a boy who played the piano. She sang standards and tango for tourists. Men brought flowers, but not for their love of music. They brought flowers for the dresses she wore, the décolleté, the sway of the hips behind the microphone. And sometimes, to be honest, for the handsome boy at the piano. But then she had married and created this beautiful girl, and she had been replaced. It was Isabel men looked at when they walked down the street. The child was only fourteen but their heads turned, and Isabel felt her power.
It was the most terrifying age. Her daughter was aware of her allure and she was right. And she was convinced of her invincibility and she was wrong. The drifting away on the river, the stumbling onto the grave site, it had all come at a very bad time for her.
Isabel shifted again in the bed, and then was still.
If this Raúl Herrera were alive, Gunther would have wished to kill him, to tear him apart. As it was, Gunther’s rage had no target, no outlet. Camila wondered if it would fester. She wondered if he would blame his daughter, see her as ruined, in some primitive way.
Someone was standing in the light from the doorway. Camila looked up and saw Liv through the gap, peering in.
“Camila?” Liv whispered.
“Yes?”
“How are you doing?”
How was she doing? Camila wanted to laugh. What did they know of the gaping emptiness in her heart that would never be filled until her son came back? The American women would be fine. Their marriages might feel the strain. This hellish trip might expose the cracks in their foundations, and they might crumble. But they had their children, intact. That was all any of them wanted. A voice that she did not recognize came from deep in her chest, and she said, “Go away.”
57.
ANGELA RIVERA LAY in bed, listening to the street outside. Voices from the bar on the corner, a distant siren. A part of her mind was always scanning those sounds for trouble, but she tried to shut that habit down for a little while. She had enough trouble of her own.
She’d been assigned to the missing kids because her English was the best in the department. She’d worked for an uncle in Florida four summers in a row, pumping gas at a marina, making conversation with the boat owners, going out with the local kids at night. Nothing like four beers to loosen the tongue. She’d kept it up by watching American movies, practicing when she could, proud of her fluency. And she’d also, of course, been put on the case because everyone was home with their families for the holiday. Let the dyke work at Christmas—what did she care?
But it wasn’t even her beat. No sex crimes involved, at the time they’d assigned her to it. Unless you counted whatever had happened in the trees, with the guide and the pretty American, but she didn’t count that.
Lexi moved in her sleep, stretched one leg out and left it there, toes against Angela’s calf. Lexi was small and wiry, but she liked to sleep diagonally across the bed or else right in the middle, spread out like a starfish. When she came home from working late, Angela had to push her across the bed with both hands before climbing in. Lexi might mumble a protest but she never woke up. She didn’t have Angela’s insomniac tendencies, her way of worrying a case, turning it over and over in her mind.
They’d found a body near the train tracks where the train had been stopped. Male, thirty to thirty-five, probably dead two days. Old gang tattoos, inked over. His throat had been cut, and they’d found a yellow-handled folding knife with two distinct sets of prints that matched no one in the database. And a child’s pink backpack beneath his body, soaked in blood, with a stuffed pig and some comic books inside.
Angela had asked the older kids, cautiously, about this discovery, and she had gotten the strangest answers. At first, Isabel pretended not to know what she was talking about. Then she said the man had attacked her, and maybe Oscar had fought him, but she couldn’t remember. It was all too terrible. She had started to cry. Angela waited, and then tried to ask more questions. Isabel said she should ask Marcus. He knew.
Marcus didn’t stall. With his mother beside him, he said in a hushed whisper that a man had attacked Isabel, and that Oscar had fought him.
The little one, June, said it was too dark to see. She said there was a man with Noemi, who came to the train car, but then he wasn’t with them anymore. She didn’t know why.
June was the only one Angela believed.