Do Not Become Alarmed(29)

“You know our kids are missing?” she said. “From the zip-line tour.”

Nora wished Liv wouldn’t do this. Argue, bait people, be her sardonic self.

The man grew instantly solemn. “Of course. I am so sorry. I am sure they will appear.”

“So we don’t need tourism suggestions,” Liv said. “Thank you.”

The agent shrugged as if to say it really was a very nice country, but it was up to her.

“And by the way, we were with your guide,” Liv said. “Who came recommended by the ship.”

Nora felt dizzy, little spots appearing in her vision. “Let’s just go,” she said.

But Liv was warming up, getting ideas. “Are you the one who hires the guides for the shore excursions?”

The agent looked nervous. “I am.”

“So you hired Pedro?”

“There are many Pedros.”

“But this particular Pedro,” she said. “Who took us halfway to the zip-line tour.”

“I would have to check my records,” he said.

“You do that,” Liv said. “Because I think we might have a serious case of negligence on our hands.”

“Liv, please,” Nora said.

“There is a liability waiver,” the agent said.

“Those aren’t binding.”

“I believe they are, se?ora.”

“I want a copy.”

“Of course, se?ora,” the agent said, with a practiced, subservient bow, and he turned to a metal file cabinet and started rummaging through it.

“Can’t you just print one out?” Liv asked.

“I will find it,” he said, raising one hand.

“Please let’s go,” Nora said.

“Ah, here it is!” He flourished a piece of paper in the air. Nora recognized the waiver she had signed like so many in her life, acknowledging the inherent risks, skimming because you would never do anything if you read those things too carefully. Liv snatched it out of his hand.

They set off for the capital in the waiting cab, and Liv took the middle seat this time and read the waiver in silence.

Nora sat as close to the window and as far from her cousin as possible. She pressed her fingers to her temples, which just made the spotty vision worse. If there was a lawsuit, everything would come out. Pedro would have to testify. “I don’t want a lawsuit,” she said. “I just want my kids back. And it wasn’t Pedro’s fault.”

“This thing isn’t binding,” Liv said. “Not if he was criminally negligent.”

“That’s not what matters now,” Nora said.

“People have to be held responsible.”

“We are not so litigious in my country,” Camila said.

Nora waited for the choice things Liv would say about Argentina and its history of wrongs without redress, but instead her cousin pressed her lips together. Nora guessed she was trying to fight her own nature, to maintain peace.

“When we’ve found the kids, we’ll revisit this question,” Liv said. “And then we’ll go after that fucking cruise line and make them pay.”





15.



AFTER GETTING THE women into a taxi, past the clamoring reporters, Benjamin climbed with Raymond and Gunther into a black Suburban sent by the embassy to take them to the capital. He stared out the tinted window at the spreading canopy of trees, the fantastical lushness behind which his children were concealed somewhere. He had been awake all night, searching social media for any hint that someone knew something, hitting SEE TRANSLATION on any post that looked likely. He wished he knew more Spanish.

His mother had been worried, his whole childhood, about things going wrong. Pillows could suffocate you, acid rain was falling from the sky, going barefoot gave you pneumonia. She wouldn’t go to the doctor because she might find out that something was wrong. She’d inherited fear from her own parents the way other people got piano lessons.

His father, on the other hand, was constitutionally unafraid, and could never take Benjamin’s problems seriously. He was bullied at school? Ignore it. He was mugged on the way home? So he lost a couple of bucks, those kids who’d taken it must need it more. The scale was permanently zeroed out, for his father. Even as the Internet grew rabid with anti-Semitism, his father had the unanswerable test case: Are you escaping Nazis on foot, as Benjamin’s grandfather had done at nine, hiding in a wagon with his brother? Are you living in a hole in the ground in Silesia? No? Then enjoy your phenomenal luck.

Benjamin had never really understood how his mother and father got along, but he guessed that they tempered each other, in both senses of the word. The baffling example of the other person hardened each of them in their convictions, but together they reached some kind of livable compromise.

Now he had a problem that even his father would recognize as a problem, and he had come to a new understanding of the paternal disaster scale of his childhood. If he tried to remember frustrations at work, or disagreements with Liv that had once absorbed his attention, he could not even fathom them. All minor regrets had been burned away. Those were the pain of touching a hot pan, this was a blowtorch.

His parents were in Cuba until after New Year’s, and he hoped his life might be set right before his mother got back to the news. He wanted to protect her from the knowledge that the sky had actually fallen, this time. The thought of telling her put him in a cold sweat.