Do Not Become Alarmed(52)

“You could have let us call our parents,” Isabel said.

“We haven’t had breakfast,” Penny said.

“I don’t know what to do about any of that, okay?”

They all stared at him.

“I’m sorry,” Oscar said. “We have to go.”

“Do you have sunscreen?” Penny asked, squinting up at the climbing sun.

“No,” he snapped. “Let’s go.”





30.



LIV WOKE, AMBIEN-GROGGY, with only a vague sense of dread and foreboding. Something was beeping, and her heart started to race. She sat up to listen. The beeping was outside in the hotel hallway, and then it passed by. It wasn’t the right tone for Sebastian’s glucose monitor. It was someone carrying some other device. The memories came flooding back, and the pain.

She reached for her phone and peered at the blurry screen. It didn’t used to be so blurry. She’d gotten old, in the last few days. No messages. 7:00 A.M.

She pressed her hands into her eyes and wished she could go back to the unconscious forgetting. She needed coffee. There was a club room on the top floor of the hotel, with food. She pulled on clothes at random and took the elevator up, reading the engraved panel with the emergency instructions in English: IF THE ELEVATOR DOORS FAIL TO OPEN, DO NOT BECOME ALARMED.

PLEASE USE BUTTON MARKED “ALARM” TO SUMMON HELP.

She remembered the first time Penny had pointed out the instructions in the elevator at the UCLA Medical Center and explained how funny and contradictory they were. Liv remembered the building because Sebastian had been having big blood sugar swings, and was leaning exhausted against her hip, so the elevator advice had seemed particularly poignant and impossible.

In the club room, she surveyed the coffee and pastries. It was a pale imitation of the ship’s buffet, but it would have been very useful for feeding children. Penny would have loved the tall Plexiglas cylinders of cereal, the little knob to fill your bowl. Sebastian would have peeled himself a hard-boiled egg.

Camila came in, looking haggard and tired. She no longer looked like she’d stepped out of a glossy ad for the cruise ship.

“Coffee?” Liv asked.

“Thank you,” Camila said.

Liv poured two cups. “Is your embassy being helpful?”

“I suppose.”

“Any news?”

Camila hesitated. “Isabel logged in to her Facebook account.”

Liv put down the coffee pot and stared. “She did?”

Nora had appeared in the doorway, her dark hair unwashed, scraped back in a ponytail. “Did what?”

Nora looked—Icelandic. That was the word that came to Liv. Like a character in a saga, living alone on a windswept crag, trying to survive against the elements, battered by cold and want. She didn’t belong in the club room of an equatorial hotel. Liv hated her cousin for whatever was going on with Pedro, but she did feel a pang at how miserable Nora was.

“Isabel logged in to her Facebook account,” Camila repeated.

“Did she write a message?” Liv asked.

“No,” Camila said, taking a seat on a couch. “She just signed in.”

“Are they sure it was really her?”

“I suppose they can’t be,” Camila said. “But who else? Someone with her password? And why not send a message, if it is someone else? I mean, what do they want?”

“Maybe she was trying to give her location,” Nora said.

“So why not give it?”

“But this is good news, right?” Liv said. “I mean—she’s alive. They’re in a place with a computer.”

“Unless it was a phone,” Nora said.

“They say it wasn’t,” Camila said. She looked at the coffee cup on her knees. “There is something else. They found a photograph.”

“Where?” Nora asked, in a strained voice.

“Instagram. They have been tracking the account. They thought it might be her.”

Liv didn’t want to know. Her legs felt weak.

“You cannot see her face,” Camila said. “But I know it is her. They are searching the—metadata, I think it is called.”

“But is she okay?” Nora asked. “In the photo?”

“It is a trophy, I think,” Camila said. “A boast, you know.”

“Oh, no,” Liv said, sinking to the couch. A trophy. She could not think about what that meant for her own children. She would not. She put her arms around Camila, whose shoulders felt like a bird’s wings. Slight, hollow bones. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

Camila submitted to be held.

Liv kept stumbling over blank spots in her mind. She remembered reading about mad cow disease, how prions ate holes in the brain, left it like Swiss cheese. Her brain felt like that. There were places where fear had created a gap, places she could not go.

Nora sat across from them, perfectly still. “Do you have the picture?”

Camila pulled free from Liv. She produced a phone and touched uncertainly at the screen. An Instagram post—or a screenshot of one—appeared. She offered the phone, then looked away as Liv and Nora leaned over it.

The photograph was of a girl in a bed, face down. She seemed to be naked, but only her back was visible. Her long hair was loose and damp over her face. It looked horrifyingly postcoital, but there were no identifying marks. No moles, no scars. Nothing on the smooth, lovely skin to prove that it was Isabel. The photograph had a filter on it, fading the edges dark, and Liv thought about the person who had taken it choosing a filter, trying Clarendon, X-Pro, Lo-Fi.