Oscar flinched.
“And then,” Gunther went on, “you either killed an innocent man for no reason and tried to pin it on a girl, or you didn’t say anything when the girl killed him. That looks really fucking suspicious to me, my friend.”
“Are you threatening me?” Oscar asked.
“No, I’m explaining to you,” Gunther said. “I’m telling you the future, like a fortune teller, except I am telling the truth.”
“That guy was helping us!” Oscar said. “And Isabel cut his throat wide open, with the knife I used for cheese!”
“I believe you,” Gunther said. “But if you tell this story, it won’t end for my daughter, and it won’t end for you. It will be a hell on this earth. I’m trying to help you. I promise you, my boy, I am.”
Oscar chewed the inside of his cheek.
“I suppose your fingerprints are on the knife,” Gunther said.
“Yes, because I sliced some cheese.”
“I will get you the best lawyer,” Gunther said. “I believe our detective is sympathetic to my daughter. You will back up the children’s story, and the death will be a justifiable homicide. There will be no prosecution. I will make sure.”
“Can I get that in writing?”
“We will shake hands, like gentlemen.”
“But you’re not in charge!” Oscar said. “This is my life! I’ll never get a job!”
“You will,” Gunther said. “People will think you’re a hero, very brave. They will seek you out.”
Oscar shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“If not, come to Argentina, and I will hire you.”
Oscar studied Gunther’s long, tanned, rich man’s face. “What about Noemi?”
Gunther shook his head. “She isn’t a reliable witness. Out of her mind with fever.”
“I mean what will happen to her?”
“She’ll go back to her grandmother. Her parents are illegals in New York.”
“She was trying to get to them.”
“Do you know what happens to these children when they cross into Mexico?” Gunther asked.
Oscar thought of that tiny girl appearing out of the dark, so brave and unafraid when he’d been paralyzed with fear. He was ashamed of his fear, of his inability to act, of his many mistakes. “If you can get the girl to New York, I’ll do it.”
“That’s U.S. Immigration,” Gunther said. “Out of my control.”
“You’re rich, you can pull something. The Americans can.”
“I don’t know.”
“What if her grandmother tries to send her again? Her uncle is dead. She could die.”
“Do you know how many children are on those trains?” Gunther asked.
“She’s the one I know,” Oscar said. “And your daughter killed the guy who was taking care of her. So you owe him.”
Gunther sighed. “I don’t know what I can do.”
Oscar crossed his arms over his chest, trying to look brave. “Then I don’t know either.”
The nurse knocked and pushed open the door again.
59.
BENJAMIN WANTED OUT. Just out. He wanted to hand his family’s passports to immigration and go home.
They’d finally escaped the purgatory of the hospital, extracting a reluctant Penny from a new friendship with Noemi. She’d been visiting Noemi in her hospital room, learning songs in Spanish. Penny seemed to be picking up the girl’s accent, using words Benjamin had never heard before. They were amiguis, the two of them, and Penny had started saying simón for yes and calling him taita.
But then Kenji got them out, arranging flights to LA through Miami. Miami! Benjamin wondered aloud, in the car to the airport, why Florida was on their way home. What had happened to their simple boat ride south from LA?
“Mexico curves to the east,” Marcus said. He approximated the continents with his hands. “And so does the Isthmus of Panama. So South America is much farther east than North America.”
Benjamin had always felt a connection to Marcus. The way his mind worked seemed not unlike Benjamin’s own—a little spacey, enamored of logical systems. Marcus had barely spoken in days, and Benjamin was encouraged by this sudden volubility. “Do you know how the isthmus was formed?” he asked.
“Volcanoes,” Marcus said, and he settled back into a comic book in Spanish. He had broken his silence only to answer an actual question. He was not going to be drawn out by a grown-up’s idea of conversation.
An embassy chaperone took them to the airport terminal, and Benjamin felt curious eyes on them. Most people kept a respectful distance, but one intrepid soul in a swordfish T-shirt put a hand on Benjamin’s shoulder to congratulate him. He wanted to shake this well-meaning tourist and tell him: It was luck! Your car didn’t crash on the way here. This airport hasn’t been attacked. There hasn’t been an earthquake or a tidal wave. We’ve all been really fucking lucky, for one more day. That’s it! That’s all!
The plane took off, separated itself from the tarmac. A motherly flight attendant brought warm nuts in a ceramic dish, and a Bloody Mary. Benjamin didn’t usually drink, but what the hell? Beside him, Liv looked out the window at the retreating country. She and Nora seemed to have reached a détente, and she’d stopped talking about lawsuits. They had all given statements that they didn’t think Oscar should be prosecuted, to be used in the inquest, because Oscar had been protecting the children. Benjamin was secretly glad that Penny had gotten herself and her brother off the train, that his kids hadn’t been there to see the man killed. Not that he wished it on Marcus and June.
There’d been no word of Raúl’s brother yet, except from Penny, who said George was really nice. Hard to judge about that.
So now they would all have to reenter their life, carrying this beast they’d picked up on vacation: a hulking creature of reproach, grief, fear, guilt, and untoward luck, shaggily cloaked in the world’s lurid interest. He didn’t know how they were going to move forward, dragging the thing on their backs.
But then he thought of Gunther and Camila, and the grief that they were taking home with them. He kept thinking of old news footage of the fall of Saigon, those last-minute helicopters off the roof. He and his family had escaped, leaving chaos behind them. It was the American way.
60.
THE COUNSELOR, MS. HONG, led a very nonjudgmental discussion at a school meeting in the big hall, and Nora sat reluctantly in a folding chair in a big uneven circle, with kids on the floor and parents in the bleachers and in other chairs. It was the culture of their small school to have meetings like this, and it would have been considered strange to refuse, but she found herself wishing the teachers were a little less dedicated to processing everything, and they could just move on.
She kept waking in the dark of her own bedroom and “seeing” the hotel room where she had spent the worst week of her life. In her mind, she was still there, and so were the bedside tables, the credenza. She moved carefully around them to the door where she knew the hotel bathroom to be, and then she stood there, feeling the blank wall in Los Angeles with her hands, trying to understand where she was.
Raymond had refused to go to the all-school meeting, but his mother came, and sat with Marcus in a far corner. Dianne kept her handbag on her lap, as if she might have to bolt any second. Nora smiled when she caught her son’s eye, but Marcus looked away.
Junie sat beside Nora. She didn’t like to let her mother out of her sight. She followed her to the bathroom, clung to her at the supermarket. Nora had been staying at school all day, experimenting with leaving the classroom once June was engaged, but never going farther than the hallway outside the door.
Sebastian told the assembled circle the story of how his blood sugar had crashed after they left the train, and how he’d had a seizure while a woman was giving them a ride. He was unselfconscious about it, matter-of-fact.