Do Not Become Alarmed(55)

“What did my father say then?”

“He thought you should stay with your grandmother,” Chuy said. “But she’s an old woman. She can only do so much.”

They heard something outside the boxcar: voices. Noemi got up and went to the open door.

“Careful,” Chuy said, and he came to stand beside her.

Some people were climbing into the train, two cars ahead. Kids. A lot of them. They all struggled into the train, an older boy climbing in last.

Noemi couldn’t see them, now that they were in the train car, but she kept watching. They’d all been wearing the same kind of clothes: red shorts, dirty white T-shirts, flip-flops. The oldest boy had a backpack, which he’d thrown into the train. Then he’d helped a girl in. Noemi had seen her face as she grimaced and rolled inside. “That girl,” she said. “I thought I knew her.”

Chuy grunted, stamping out his cigarette.

The recognition shimmered somewhere in the back of her mind, then burst forward, where she could see it. “They’re the kids from the ship!”

Chuy said nothing, so she knew she was right.

She looked out the door again. They weren’t in their swimsuits from the television, but they wore matching outfits. They’d appeared, and she’d been here to see it. She wished she could tell Rosa, but did Rosa even know who the kids were? “Do you think they were on TV at home?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Chuy said.

“Can we go talk to them?”

“No.”

“I want to meet them.”

“Not a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“They have bad luck,” Chuy said. “We don’t want to catch it.”

Noemi looked out again. She couldn’t hear the children over the clank and rumble of the train. Then she saw something emerge from the car. It was a boy’s hips, pushed forward with his red shorts lowered, to pee out the door. Noemi could only see his hand, the arcing stream, and the splash on the rocks below. She pulled her head back inside, giddy with shock. “One of them is peeing,” she whispered.

“Everybody has to,” Chuy said.





33.



WHEN GEORGE wanted help moving Consuelo’s body, Maria refused.

“Do you know how much we pay you?” George demanded. “For making scrambled eggs and sweeping the floor? Help me!”

So she did. There were tiny shards of Consuelo’s skull on the bloody tile floor. It was hard to get the plastic tarp under her, and the body was heavy and awkward. Finally they pulled the tarp out of the doorway and against the wall, and they could close the door again.

Maria mopped the floor, filling buckets with bloody water, dumping the buckets in the bathroom, trying to keep herself from retching. When she was finished, she told George she needed to go home. She wanted her phone.

He said she wasn’t going anywhere.

“Am I a prisoner?”

“As soon as I leave, you can go,” he said.

He went up to the office and she heard him opening drawers and cabinets. A hammer blow, a breaking of glass, the sound of a power drill. She had lived so long in fear of the Herreras, in the habit of loyalty to them, in the habit of fear of the police, that she could not make herself leave when George said she couldn’t. It was as if something physical was stopping her.

She heard his phone ring. She climbed the stairs to listen to George talking, and looked into the office.

George dropped the phone to his side. “He’s dead.”

Her heart pounded. Oscar. “Who?”

“Raúl.”

Maria didn’t know what to say to that. She had thought Raúl was indestructible. “How?”

“Car accident.”

“And the children?”

“I don’t know.”

She slumped down on the stairs.

George seemed dazed. He went to his bedroom and came out with a duffel bag. Then he stepped around her. “Good luck, Maria,” he said. “You should get out of here, too. The police will come.”

“My phone!” she said.

“Sorry. No.”

He was downstairs and out the door. She collected her handbag and a few small things of her own. She left poor Consuelo alone in the entryway, and Sancho in the dog kennel, and the white horse in the stables. The police would come, and someone would look after them all. She locked the door when she left, out of habit.

She eased her car down the driveway and out the gate, as tired as she had ever felt. She could not think of where to go except home.





34.



LIV HAD SAT hunched over her phone in the club room, looking for suspicious Instagram posts, trying different hashtags while her coffee went cold. Now she forked an English muffin into halves. Crumbs dropped onto the table in front of the toaster. That was her, she reflected: soft, white, torn, crumbling. The karmic bus had mowed her down. She was being punished for living in a false world, spongy and insulated from the reality around her. For living in a house with an alarm system, in a neighborhood where the only Latinos were gardeners and day laborers. For sending her kids to a private school that was almost entirely white in a city that wasn’t.

She told herself that she wasn’t being rational, she was being self-aggrandizing. The universe didn’t care what she did. But their life was obscene. Her kids didn’t see anyone except kids like themselves, and kids who were richer.