Do Not Become Alarmed(23)

A television in a high corner was playing a telenovela. A man changed the channel, and Noemi hoped he would change it to cartoons. But he turned it to news, then stood back to watch. Noemi wondered if her parents had a television. Probably they did, and she could see cartoons. But she was not going to think about things like that. The future. Nueva York.

A reporter with big, wavy hair was talking into a microphone on the television. Then there were some pictures of children. Some were older, but there was a girl with lots of braids who might be Noemi’s age. The reporter said they were Americans, and they had disappeared. The little blond boy needed medicine. They all wore swimsuits.

A red-eyed woman with blond hair, the boy’s mother, came on the screen, crying, begging for anyone who knew where their children were to call a number. Noemi wondered if her parents ever cried like that about her. But she wasn’t missing. She was with Chuy. Her parents knew she was on her way to them.

Chuy came with a tray and set it on the table. They watched the high television together for a little while, and then Chuy turned back to his food and shook hot sauce over the top.

“Those kids are missing,” Noemi said.

“I know.”

“Will their parents find them?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He shook his head.

Noemi watched Chuy fork chicken into his mouth. She thought of Ario, shot in the street. The pool of blood. “Are they dead?”

He shrugged. “Maybe not.”

Noemi watched the TV. “Do their parents know they won’t come back?”

“Their parents are American,” he said. “They don’t know anything.”

“I’m going to be an American,” she said.

He smiled, and took a drink of beer. “It’s okay. You know enough already.”

“Do you know where they are? Those kids?”

“No,” he said. “But I know the kind of people who took them.”

“How do you know?”

“Eat your food.”

She took the paper off her straw and tasted her watermelon agua fresca. It was cold and sweet and thick. “Maybe those people will let them go,” she said. “Maybe they’ll see the mothers crying on TV and feel bad.”

“I’m telling you,” he said, “those people don’t feel bad about anything.”

She looked back up at the television. There was a picture of the oldest girl jumping into a pool, her hair flying out behind her. It could have been a picture in a magazine, the girl was so pretty. Then her mother was talking about her children in strange-sounding Spanish. Noemi’s parents had been gone for two years, and she wondered if they missed her like this woman did. There was a picture of a black man in a white astronaut suit, which was confusing. Did they think the children were in space?

“Do my parents know we’re coming?” Noemi asked.

“They do,” Chuy said.

“Are they excited?”

“Of course.” He shook more hot sauce on his food.

“We have the same name on the papers,” she said. “You and me.”

He said nothing, just scooped up a forkful of arroz con pollo.

“Is that just for the papers?” she asked. “Or is it real?”

Chuy picked up a paper napkin that looked very small in his hands. He wiped his mouth. “It’s real.”

“How is it real?”

“Your father is my little brother. Half brother.”

It was the answer she’d been looking for, but still it surprised her. “Why didn’t I know about you?”

“No one wanted you to know,” Chuy said. “Eat up. We have to go.”





12.



THE POLICE AND Gunther’s friend drove the parents to a local hotel that had Wi-Fi. As soon as her phone was no longer an infuriating paperweight, Liv googled “How long Type 1 diabetes survive without insulin?” She read the results with her breath held, gripped by cold fear. The answer was two weeks, but the second week you’d spend in a coma. Sebastian probably had a couple of days before he would get really sick. She left a message at the doctor’s office in Los Angeles, trying not to sound too panicked. But she was panicked, obsessed with the thought of Sebastian without his pump. Sebastian seizing, dying, ketone bodies poisoning his blood. She lay in the hotel bed, wide awake, with the memory of her son’s body curled into her side, his warm back, his sweet smooth skin. It was like having a phantom limb. A phantom child.

Penny would look after her brother, but she couldn’t do it alone. And what was happening to Penny? She remembered reading about an Amber alert, the police finding the DNA of the little girl’s tears in the abductor’s car. She squeezed her eyes closed to try to make the thought go away.

In her twenties, Liv had not been sure she wanted children. How could you know? It was a decision made at the brink of a widening abyss, based on rumors from the other side. Do you cross over? Do you leap? She hadn’t been sure.

At twenty-two, she’d moved to Los Angeles and got a job at a production company, answering phones and ordering lunch. She didn’t even have a cubicle, just a desk in a hallway. But she worked, and got promoted, and decided she would be vice president of a studio before she had children. When she met Benjamin, he was designing props for a sci-fi movie. In their first years together, they’d never even had a houseplant depending on them. She bought a cactus that shriveled and died. Benjamin had once owned a dog in New York, a Labrador mutt, but gave it to a cousin when he moved. The dog seemed happy in the suburbs, but still: It told.