They sat communing with those facts.
Then Ms. Hong said, “There’s a tribe in the Amazon that has compass points built into their language. I learned this in an anthropology class in college. When the people there are talking to someone, the way they address that person includes their spatial relationship to the speaker—I think I’m remembering this right. So if I were talking to you, I would say, ‘You, Marcus, who are northeast of me, what do you think?’”
“I’m not northeast of you,” he said. “I’m almost exactly south.”
Ms. Hong laughed. “I think you would pick up that language really quickly,” she said. “You always have that bird’s-eye view in your head. Most of us don’t. What I meant was that for those people in the Amazon, the fact that you are almost exactly south of me would be built into the word you, when I was talking to you. And in this conversation, you would refer to me as being almost exactly north of you.”
“I like that language,” he said.
“I thought you would.”
“Where in the Amazon? Brazil or Peru?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Noemi is from Ecuador,” he said. “Maybe she can do it.”
“Maybe,” Ms. Hong said. “But I think it’s a very isolated tribe, and languages there are pretty distinct.”
“Penny wants Noemi to come visit,” he said. “With her parents.”
“Oh?” Ms. Hong said. “How do you feel about that?”
He shrugged. “June wants it, too.”
“And you?”
“I barely know Noemi,” he said. “She doesn’t even speak English.”
“I bet she’s learned some in New York. And you’ve learned some Spanish.”
“We were just on a train together for a little while,” he said. “And Penny wasn’t even there. And then we saw Noemi at the hospital, but she had a fever for half the time.”
Ms. Hong picked at a thread on her skirt. “Sometimes—when we have a very intense experience, we feel close to the people who were there, even if we only knew them for a short time.”
Marcus said nothing, thinking of Isabel.
“And people have different responses to an intense experience,” Ms. Hong said. “I know sometimes it’s hard for you to be in school with Penny, when she’s had a very different response to what happened than you’ve had.”
“She was so mean to Isabel,” Marcus said.
“Tell me about Isabel.”
He shook his head.
“Please, Marcus,” Ms. Hong said. “I think it will help.”
He said nothing.
“I saw that photo of her jumping into a pool, on the news,” she said. “It looked like she was really happy.”
Marcus nodded. “She still posts a lot of pictures looking happy.”
“You follow her?”
“On my mom’s phone.”
“If someone has great capacity for joy, I think they can find it again. Even after something terrible happens.”
“She got a puppy,” he said.
Ms. Hong smiled. “Dogs can be very comforting. I think all of you lost a sense that the world is always safe. That you’re always protected. A dog might help her with that.”
Marcus traced with his eyes the path the loop of cord would take through the wire puzzle. “Actually I think everyone is being kind of overprotective.”
“Well,” Ms. Hong said, “can you understand that, in them?”
“I think they were always like this,” he said. “I just didn’t notice it before.”
“That might be true,” she said. Then, “Do you think Isabel would ever come to Los Angeles to visit?”
Marcus shook his head. “She doesn’t want to see us.”
“And that makes you sad?”
“I guess.” He feared that Ms. Hong could read his mind, and wished she wouldn’t.
“It’s okay to have feelings about what happened,” Ms. Hong said. “In fact, it’s really important to have those feelings.”
“It doesn’t do any good.”
“I think it does,” Ms. Hong said. “Not everyone gets to choose how they respond to a trauma. Isabel might not be able to choose, right now. But you have a really strong mind. She does, too. I think you can decide how you’re going to respond.”
His eyes stung, unexpectedly. “I can’t control it,” he said. “I can’t control anything.”
“If you let yourself have your feelings,” she said, “then I believe you can control what comes next.”
“You don’t know,” he said, angry at her for making him cry. “You don’t know anything!”
“I can make some guesses,” she said.
“You don’t even know that Samoa is on the other side of the International Date Line!”
“I learn something new every day.”
He stood. “I want to go back to class.”
“Please stay,” Ms. Hong said. “I think we’re just getting to the point where you can start feeling better. I really do.”
She was almost exactly north of him. If he spoke that Amazonian language, he would say so when he was talking to her. “You—” he said. “You don’t know anything about it.”
62.
LIV DIDN’T KNOW what to do about Penny’s constant begging for a visit from Noemi, a child they hardly knew. Benjamin had suggested they go to New York for spring break, and invite Noemi’s family to his parents’ apartment for a nice noncommittal lunch.
But Liv couldn’t face another family trip. She had dreams of Sebastian letting go of her hand and disappearing into Times Square—past Batman, the Naked Cowboy, a million strangers. She would wake up drenched in sweat, tangled in damp sheets. Obviously this was an area to work on.
A friend had invited Sebastian to take the Expo Line to downtown LA and the Science Center, but when Sebastian realized the Expo Line was a train, he’d said no. He was not getting on a train. So New York subways were out. Again: something to work on, maybe after a little more time had passed.
So they gave in, and invited Noemi’s family to LA, and bought three plane tickets on JetBlue. It seemed worth it to get Penny off their backs. Liv hoped that seeing people who’d been separated from their daughter for so much longer than she had would help with the anxiety and remind her that everything was relative. Noemi’s parents hadn’t chosen the poverty and violence of the place they came from. They’d been trying to do the best thing for their kid. But to send a child illegally through all those countries—Liv couldn’t imagine it.
She’d invited Nora’s family to join them all for dinner. She hadn’t seen Nora since the all-school meeting. This time of year was busy anyway, with school and sports and work. And there had been so many emails from people she hadn’t talked to in years, who were appalled at such a thing happening on a family vacation. They seemed to expect reassurance from Liv that it would never happen to them. When she responded with a few lines, they wrote right back. But she didn’t have time for an ongoing conversation with everyone she had ever met. So the emails piled up. The best thing she’d done was to leave her Facebook account deleted. The idea of all those messages from half strangers made her feel faint.
She’d said no to all the interview requests, without mentioning anything to the kids. She hoped that Penny would never find out that she could have danced on TV with Ellen DeGeneres but Liv had said no.
They were still waiting to hear what would happen to Oscar and Maria. Sometimes at night, before the Ambien kicked in, Liv wondered if the police might have found the children earlier if Maria hadn’t smuggled them out of the house. But it was impossible to know. Maria had clearly felt the situation was untenable. What would have happened if they’d stayed was the other path, unknowable. Liv just hoped they hadn’t left Maria and her son to suffer for having made the choice.
She’d brought home a pile of scripts to read, and sat with them in her office at home. She heard Sebastian’s plinking piano exercises begin, and felt a flood of love for him. He had a new glucose monitor that sent information to her phone and to Benjamin’s. So even when he was at school, she could see what his levels were. She didn’t think she could function, otherwise. She couldn’t have gone back to work.