Do Not Become Alarmed(22)

Nora sobbed against Raymond’s chest.

“You could have borrowed a phone,” Benjamin said.

“To tell you to come back and go to the beach with us?”

“To tell us you’d been in an accident,” Raymond said. He’d made sure he had an international plan for his phone in case a work call came in, and he was impatient with Benjamin and Liv for thinking the world would take care of them. And was he impatient with Nora? Why hadn’t he gotten a plan for Nora’s phone?

“But no one was hurt, everyone was cheerful,” Liv said. “We could walk to this little beach, we had swimsuits. We were just improvising.”

“But you’re afraid of riptide,” Benjamin said.

“It was this very protected beach. The kids were playing in the water, there was no current. They were on these inner tubes. And the older kids were there. But I guess the tide changed. And I fell asleep. Camila did, too. I thought she was watching.”

Raymond held Nora away from him, to see her face. “And you?”

Nora had gotten the sobbing under control, but she stared at the ground. “I was looking for birds.”

“For birds?”

“I’m so sorry.” A gasp, a half sob. “I thought they were watching. Liv said she would.”

“I wish you’d gone with us,” Liv moaned.

“Don’t do that,” Benjamin said.

“I don’t mean I blame you,” she said. “I just wish.”

“You said you didn’t care.”

“I know,” Liv said. “But I didn’t know what would happen.”

“So, the guide didn’t know the tide would change?” Raymond asked.

Both women shook their heads.

“Where the fuck is he?”

“The police were interviewing him earlier,” Liv said. “We just have to find the kids. Sebastian needs his insulin.”

“You said something on the phone about a grave,” Raymond said.

“They dug up this guy,” Nora said. “They think maybe the kids saw the grave, and that’s why someone took them.”

He stared at her. This was really happening. “So who’s in the grave?”

“We don’t know.”

A short-haired woman in a police windbreaker, as tall as Raymond, approached them. “May I talk to you, sir?”

Nora looked terrified.

“It’s okay,” Raymond told her. He followed the detective, thinking that of course they wanted to talk to the black man first.

The two of them sat in a cruiser, and the butch detective questioned him about his day. She asked for any information, any theories he might have about what had happened to the kids. After a minute he realized she was looking to him for help. He felt the briefest sensation of lightness, a weight lifting off his shoulders. Even with his minor celebrity, even with three solid white alibi witnesses, LAPD would’ve found his actions suspicious. Golfing while black, that would’ve been the first red flag.

What had happened seemed obvious to him: The kids had stumbled on someone getting rid of a body. “Have you figured out who’s in the grave?” he asked the detective.

“We’re working on it.”

“Do you think the guide’s involved?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

She asked him some questions about Gunther, about how long he’d known the others. Then she thanked him and gave him a card in case he learned anything. Her name was Angela Rivera. They were finished. That was it.

He hated that he’d been worrying that he might be a suspect, when his kids might be dead. He hated that there was no way for him not to worry about being a suspect. He went back to look for his wife. She was standing beside Liv and Benjamin, still wrapped in the gray blanket.

Raymond felt a shift, now that he was out of the cruiser. He went from feeling like a suspect to feeling like a cop, a role he’d played a lot. The corrupt cop, the noble cop, the jaded cop who saw what his white colleagues had missed.

“We have to find out who the guy in the grave is,” he said, after Benjamin followed the detective away.

“I saw the body,” Liv said.

“What did he look like?”

“He’d been dead a while. Dark hair. Not that old.”

“And why were you at the beach, again?”

The women stared bleakly at him. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Liv said, in a small voice. Nora was shivering, probably from exhaustion.

“We should get you inside,” he said.

“I’m not leaving until we find them.”

“Well, we’re not going to find them here. This is the one place they won’t be. We need to call the embassy, and we need a place to stay.”

The women looked drained, ready to let him make decisions, and Raymond saw himself from a distance, dissociated from his own performance. Taking charge. But this wasn’t a role. The director wasn’t about to turn the cameras around and shoot the scene from the other side. His kids were really missing. He got on the phone and started making calls.





11.



NOEMI SAT AT a scratched table, waiting for Chuy to bring her rice with chicken. The restaurant was big and no one paid them any attention. The table was a little bit sticky and people had carved their initials into it. RN + JP. She was hungry and excited for the food. She never went to restaurants with her grandmother.