Do Not Become Alarmed(43)

“What happened?” Marcus asked.

“Nothing.”

She was losing track of time again, because Raúl had come downstairs, and was yelling at George in Spanish.

“What are they saying?” Marcus asked.

But she couldn’t tell him, because George was shouting that he’d been going to take the children back, and now he couldn’t. Because now the cops were going to crawl up George’s ass and they were going to prison and it was all Raúl’s fucking fault, he was a fucking psychopath and a fucking idiot. George shouted other things, insults, curses.

Raúl took a beer bottle by the neck and smashed it on the table with a bright crash. He lunged at his brother with the jagged, broken end, but George stepped deftly away. When Raúl came at him again, George grabbed his brother’s arm and took the bottle, dropping it in the kitchen sink, where it clattered. They grappled, clumsily.

The other children drew close to Isabel in the corner of the sofa. Marcus took her hand. The brothers looked like dancing drunks. There was broken glass on the floor, and spilled beer. Raúl hit George hard in the stomach and he wheezed and staggered. Isabel’s heart tripped over itself. Raúl couldn’t win.

But then George had his brother in a headlock, and Raúl’s face turned red as he struggled, his windpipe cut off. Raúl reached for the table, for anything to give him leverage. Her heart was pounding. She thought George might kill him.

Then George released his brother’s head. He told him to go to bed, to sleep it off, they would talk about it in the morning.

Isabel thought Raúl might take a swing, but he seemed to accept that he was beaten. He gave Isabel a long, reproachful stare. Then he staggered upstairs, wheezing, muttering something she couldn’t understand, except that “puta” was in there. George started to clean up the kitchen, picking up pieces of broken glass in a cupped hand. Maria appeared, and together they swept up the glass, and wiped away the spilled beer.

George seemed to notice the kids in the corner for the first time since the argument had begun. “Watch your feet in here,” he said.





23.



NORA WANDERED THE halls of the hotel in the middle of the night, taking the stairs from one floor to the next, thinking about depression.

Her mother had probably had a serious bout of postpartum, from her description of the time after Nora was born, although no one called it that at the time. It was just “feeling blue,” listening to too much Joni Mitchell, locking herself in the bathroom sometimes. Nora’s earliest memories were of sitting by the bathroom door listening to her mother cry, not knowing what to do.

As an adult, Nora had thought her mother’s problem was tricky brain chemistry, but now she wondered if the family depression was just a rational response to the facts on the ground. The brutality of the world. She was standing at the edge of the yawning pit of her hereditary sadness, and might slip in.

She’d been frantic after Liv busted her at the café. She wished she’d told Liv earlier what had happened, and trusted their friendship, instead of startling her into rage. She was sure Liv would go straight to Raymond, and he would never forgive her. He was a man of great moral clarity. Things were right or they were wrong; he had no patience for gray areas. It would be over now.

But it couldn’t be over, because they had two children.

Unless they didn’t. And if they didn’t have their children, then nothing mattered, or would ever matter again.

Nora had started to tremble at the café table and talk too fast, turning it over and over in her mind, and Pedro had guided her down the street and into a cab. She’d cried silently in the back seat, not seeing the streets outside. Then he had led her into a small papaya-colored house where she could talk and pace and regret and rehash without anyone watching. She kept trying to find new words to explain herself to Liv.

Pedro let her rant. He straightened a few things in the kitchen and put on a kettle to boil. Then he led her into the bedroom. He had a rumpled, unmade bed, a surfboard in a rack over the window, posters on the walls.

“I can’t,” she said. Whatever desire she had once had for him had been blasted by guilt.

“No sexo,” he’d said. “Don’t worry.”

He sat her on his bed and the kettle started to whistle. He went to make tea. A few shirts hung in the open closet. Nora had tipped over in his stale-smelling bed, onto his pillow, and slept for fifteen oblivious minutes, as she hadn’t slept in days. When she woke, she drank the lukewarm tea he’d brought her. Then she took a cab back to the hotel and told Raymond she’d been for a long walk.

But now, while Raymond slept, Nora stalked the hotel halls. She thought about how smart her son was. And how good his sense of direction—it went with his love of maps. She used to take him to a park with a blank map of the United States painted on the asphalt, and he could name every state by the time he was three. He used to narrate their drive back from preschool, turn by turn. She truly believed that if the children could escape from wherever they were, Marcus could walk them to safety, he could get them to the police.

On the third floor, she came upon a man in blue coveralls and a woman in a maid’s dress, carrying a rolled carpet between them. Nora wondered why a carpet needed to be replaced in the middle of the night. Had something terrible happened?