Do Not Become Alarmed(34)
She felt the collected, competent person she had always been starting to dissolve. Why was she swearing at Kenji? The observing part of her brain wondered if this was a psychotic break. But if the observing part still functioned, could it be a psychotic break? She thought she might just collapse in his office, like those toy figures that buckled when you pressed the button at the base.
“Honey,” Benjamin said. “Let’s go.”
“Don’t fucking touch me!” He was still trying to play the reasonable, calm man, and she hated him for it.
“I’m sorry,” Benjamin said to Kenji.
“Don’t apologize to him! He is not our friend!”
“Liv. This isn’t helping.”
“Nothing is helping! No one is helping!”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
Benjamin steered her out of the office as she started to hyperventilate. She caught Kenji’s concerned gaze as Benjamin closed the door. His concerned, sad, compassionate face. She wanted to tear it off.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” she whispered, when she could breathe.
Benjamin put his arms around her. “We’ll find them,” he said. “I promise you, we’ll find them.”
18.
BENJAMIN LAY IN bed, unable to sleep, watching the video feed from the security cameras at their house in Los Angeles. The light from his phone gave the rumpled hotel blankets a cool digital glow. The cameras had been installed right before they left on the cruise. Their old security system had been a glass break alarm with a loud robotic voice, and it had started to malfunction, going off when no glass had broken, scaring the shit out of him in the middle of the night. He would leap out of bed and stumble downstairs in his underwear, his heart racing. After it happened twice, he bought a wooden baseball bat and kept it under his side of the bed.
“Are you really going to club someone with that?” Liv had asked.
“I just want to have something,” he said. “I hate being empty-handed.”
“Maybe we should get rid of the alarm.”
Liv had grown up in a small Colorado town with unlocked doors. When the alarm went off, she rolled over and went back to sleep. Benjamin had grown up in Manhattan in the last days of getting mugged for your pocket money on the way home from school. It made your brain different. The next time the alarm went off he’d prowled the house with the bat and stayed awake until morning. Then he’d ordered a new alarm system with cameras.
The feed went straight to a server, so he could see their quiet house in real time from six angles on his phone. Nothing was happening. The street and the backyard and the covered pool were empty and quiet. His heart rate jumped once, when a skunk scurried past the lemon tree by the front door. And meanwhile his kids were missing, on the least adventurous vacation possible, in a supposedly safe country. He was convinced, now, that if he’d been the one at the beach, their kids would still be here. Liv’s nervous system was not trained for real fear.
They’d tried having sex, which might have been reassuring, but it had gone horribly wrong. Liv had ended up crying, and Benjamin had felt guilty and weird. Now she’d taken an Ambien, and was comatose next to him. One of them needed to stay clearheaded, in case some news came in the night. But at 2:00 A.M. it was tempting to take something. He refreshed the video feed on his phone. The back door in Los Angeles, the empty street, the lemon tree, no skunk. He thought about jerking off.
“That light,” Liv muttered. “It’s so bright.”
So she wasn’t comatose. He turned off the screen and put the phone on his chest.
The clock radio on the bedside table glowed red—2:27—and a faint line seeped under the door from the hotel hallway. They were past the first forty-eight hours now, in which crimes were usually solved. They were almost at sixty-four hours. He had been obsessively googling kidnapping statistics and knew the chances were grim.
Liv’s breathing was regular again, and Benjamin picked up his phone. He had heard the guide’s full name on that first night, but he couldn’t remember it now. He searched online, starting with the cruise line website, and then with the zip-line company. Pedro wasn’t there, but Benjamin followed a link to another ecotourism website. There he found a photo of a grinning asshole in sunglasses, giving a double thumbs-up. Pedro Navares.
Next he searched Facebook and Twitter, and there were lots of accounts with that name, but none of the profile photos seemed to be the right one. He searched Instagram, and one unlocked account looked promising, the bio in Spanish, the tiny photo possibly of Pedro. The posts were of sunsets, beaches, pints of beer. A young man enjoying his life; nothing incriminating. But what had Benjamin expected to find? Photos of the children? Pedro didn’t have the children. He was just the closest person to blame.
Benjamin had asked his wife about Nora wandering off with Pedro. She said they’d been looking for birds. Nora had told her so, and she believed it. But Liv seemed mildly evasive, and then changed the subject.
Finally he fell asleep, and had a dream. He was standing with his arms around Liv at a party, looking at Nora standing behind her. Nora was facing away from him, and her hair was put up in some complicated way, with twists at the nape of her neck. He realized that his mind must be creating each of those strands of hair, because he was in a dream. He was creating every person at the party. He took Liv by the hand and said, “Let’s go find the kids.” They left the house and went outside. They needed to get in a car and go, but there were no cars in the driveway. He knew he should be able to create a car in the driveway with his mind, because this was a dream, but no car appeared.