Do Not Become Alarmed(47)

He tried Carmen’s number again, but she didn’t answer. The kids’ flip-flops slapped against the sidewalk.

After another block, they stopped outside a party to which he had not been invited. He knew that it shouldn’t matter, when bigger things were at stake. But it would’ve been easier if he’d been invited. Carmen’s shiny red Fiat was parked on the street outside the house. Reggaeton boomed from the windows, loud enough to piss off the neighbors. It would be morning soon. But it was New Year’s Eve, it was allowed.

“Are we going in there?” Penny asked. She was the one who talked the most.

“No,” he said. “You wait here.”

The littlest girl sat down on the sidewalk with the bunny in her arms and said, “There’s dog poop on this grass.”

He tried to remember that he was more scared of the Herreras than he was of this party, and he walked up to the front door, knocked, and waited.

“Just go in,” the Argentinian girl said. “It’s a party.”

He pushed open the door. The music got louder.

Carmen had been his friend since they were little, when she had thick glasses and a long braid down her back, and he’d thought they would always be together, doing their math homework at his kitchen table. But then she got beautiful all at once, some kind of quincea?era magic. She got boobs and hips and contact lenses, and took out the braid to have masses of wavy hair, and he stayed a skinny nerdy kid. She’d been nice to him about it, but she’d also acted like she had to go hang out with the beautiful stupid people at school. And she started acting dumb, which was the worst part. She wasn’t dumb.

He moved through the drunk, dancing people in the dim living room, and found Carmen on the back patio with her boyfriend, Tito. Oscar had known Tito since fourth grade, when he was fat and his name was Norberto, but Tito had gone through the magical process, too, and got tall and muscled. Fucking Norberto. He and Carmen were dancing slow. Her head with its beautiful hair was on his chest and her eyes closed.

“Carmen,” Oscar said.

She didn’t hear him.

“Carmen!”

She opened her big eyes. He could see, in the patio light, her contact lenses floating on the surface. She was at least a little bit drunk. She stared at him. “Oscar.”

“I need to borrow your car.”

She blinked. “Why?”

“I just do.”

Tito said, “You can’t,” leaning in close and threatening.

“This is none of your business, Norberto.”

“It is when she’s driving me home.”

“This is really important,” Oscar said to Carmen. “You shouldn’t be driving anyway. I’ll bring it back.”

Carmen blinked again, and Oscar remembered the girl with the braid, who’d been better than he was at math. She could’ve been gorgeous and smart! “Please, Carmen,” he said.

“I have to drive Tito home.”

He imagined Raúl pulling up outside and grabbing the children from the sidewalk. Were they still even out there? Had they run away? He gave up on Carmen and made his way back through the living room, defeated, feeling the bass pound in his chest as he passed the speakers.

But then he saw Carmen’s bag on a side table, the shiny red patent leather that matched her car. He looked over his shoulder and saw Carmen and Tito dancing again.

He unbuckled the bag and reached inside: lipstick, wallet, something round and flat, keys. He took the keys and slid the bag back onto the side table, then dodged the drunk and dancing people between him and the front door.

Outside, the air was fresh. He hadn’t realized what a smoky, beery funk he’d been breathing. His kids were all sitting on the sidewalk, watching the front door. They perked up when they saw him. One, two, three, four, five: all there.

He held up the keys and they smiled at him, and he felt like a hero.

“You did it!” the tiny one with the bunny and the braids said.

He unlocked Carmen’s shiny red car. They all piled in and he called his mother, triumphant, to tell her that his uncle’s piece-of-shit car wouldn’t start, but he had figured it out.





28.



MARIA DROVE BACK to the finca with her headlights off. Maybe she shouldn’t be going back to the house. But she needed to give Oscar time to get away. That was all she could think of. And her job was at the house. It had always been her job, since she was twenty years old. She hoped that somehow she could keep it.

She pushed open the gate and parked in her usual spot, then shut off the engine and listened. The house was dark and quiet. The brothers should still be asleep, drink-sick. She went back to close the gate, then walked up to the door and let herself in. Still no sound.

She hated to ask so much of her son. He’d had enough trouble in his life already. He’d been the one to find his sister dead of an overdose, when he was nine years old. He’d tried to shake Ofelia awake. Maria thought that a small part of her son would be frozen forever in that moment. Her remaining child, her baby.

She took her shoes off and crept upstairs to the kitchen, and was just going into her little bedroom when she remembered that she had to turn the power back on. Then she heard a pounding on the door downstairs. A muffled woman’s voice shouting. Maria ran back down in her stockings as quietly as she could. Who had come at this hour of night? How had they gotten through the gate? She had confused thoughts of Isabel, who had taken so long getting the bunny. But why would Isabel come back?