Do Not Become Alarmed(53)

“How do you know it’s her?” Nora asked.

“I know,” Camila said stiffly, taking the phone back and putting it in her pocket, as if her privacy had been violated, which it had. “I tell you, I do.”

Liv imagined a similar photograph of Penny or Sebastian and nearly tumbled down one of the Swiss cheese tunnels in her brain. Of course she would know their backs, recognize the shoulders she had bathed and toweled and covered in sunscreen. “Will you tell us, if they learn anything?” she asked.

Camila nodded and sat for a moment with her hands clasped on her knees. “Isabel loves photographs of herself looking sexy,” she said. “I always try to keep them from her. But now I look at those photographs and they look so innocent. A child’s pictures. Her body is like a new toy.” Her jaw was shaking. “But this one—” She faltered.

“Camila, I’m so sorry,” Liv said.

They sat in silence for another moment, and then Camila stood. “Thank you for the coffee.”

Liv imagined that polite reserve was the only thing holding Camila together. She seemed to carry herself carefully. Any minute the shell of her formality might break.

“You’ll let us know what you find out?” Liv asked.

Camila gave an austere little drop of her chin and left the room.





31.



PENNY STALKED DOWN the trail, nursing her resentments. Oscar had yelled at her, when all she’d said was that they hadn’t had breakfast. But then he seemed to feel bad about it, and cut up the apples and cheese, and passed them out on the trail as they walked. Penny did the calculation, watched Sebastian give himself his shot, stuffed the calculator back in her pocket with the paper bag of insulin cartridges, and ran to catch up. If Oscar were a babysitter, her mother would fire him.

They walked a long time. Oscar was limping badly. They saw a tree made of tiny trunks and a long sloping neck like a giraffe’s. Oscar said it was called a walking tree. They all stopped and stared at it. Penny’s legs were tired.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Oscar said.

“We should find a road and stop a car.”

“Okay. Where?”

“There was a road,” she said. “We were on it.”

“It was too dangerous there.”

“Is there another one?”

“In this country? Yes.”

“I could get us back to the road we were on,” Marcus said.

“That’s so far!” June said.

“I’m hungry,” Sebastian said.

“He could collapse, without food,” Penny said. “Then you’ll have to carry him.”

Oscar looked miserable. “We keep walking,” he said, but he grimaced when he put his weight on his bad leg.

They trudged on. Penny considered the benefits of complaining some more. But then the trail through the trees opened up into a cleared area. There were train tracks running through it.

“Come on,” Oscar said. He led them toward the tracks.

“What are we doing?” Penny asked.

“Waiting,” he said.

They sat on the ground near the tracks, and Penny looked at the big tarred railroad ties. Her mother used to put pennies on the rails when she was a kid, so they would get flattened by the train, but you weren’t supposed to do it now. It was like not wearing a seatbelt, and climbing from the front seat to the back, and other things her mother had done when she was little that no one was allowed to do anymore.

Penny didn’t really like taking trains. First you had to find the right track at the station, and it was always confusing. Then you didn’t have an assigned seat. Penny got sick if she sat facing backward, so she had to guess which way the train was going to go. Her parents were always looking for four empty seats facing each other, and people glared at you like they were afraid you would sit next to them, and it was stressful.

June, sitting on the ground, sang softly, “Una vieja-ja—mató un gato-to—con la punta-ta—del zapato-to.” She brushed her hands back and forth across her bent knees and clapped her legs. Then they heard the noise of a train in the distance.

It was moving slowly. Penny could see the engineer’s face in the window, shiny with sweat. Penny thought maybe he would recognize them from the TV, but he didn’t seem to see them. It was a freight train, not a passenger train. The first few cars were closed up, but then one passed with an open door. Oscar stood and peered in as it went by. Penny knew about riding trains because they’d done a unit on immigration in school. Some people were so desperate to get to America that they paid strangers called coyotes to take them. Her mother had let her watch a movie about it even though there were things in it that weren’t appropriate. Penny always thought of the actual coyotes that yipped in the distance and sometimes ran down their street at night, skinny and gray-brown and purposeful. The people called the train La Bestia.

Two more closed cars. Then an open one.

“That one,” Oscar said. “Go, go, go!”

It all happened so fast. Isabel and Marcus, who looked as startled as Penny felt, scrambled up onto the bare metal of the train car, with their long legs. Oscar handed June up to them, and they caught her by her elbows and lifted her in. It was too high for Penny to climb. She ran alongside. Oscar grabbed Sebastian and passed him awkwardly up. Then he threw the backpack in.