Do Not Become Alarmed(65)

The store was tiny, with unfamiliar packages crowded into racks hanging from the walls. She picked a bag of candy that looked sugary. “These, please,” she said. “And can you call our parents?”

The old man behind the counter was looking at Sebastian, who let go of her hand and slid to the floor. His whole body started twitching. There was foam around his mouth.

Penny kneeled beside him. “Help!” she said. “Get a doctor!”

But the adults just stared down. Sebastian’s body kept jerking on the floor.

“Help me!” Penny screamed.

Finally the man behind the counter spoke. Penny heard him say the word “hospital.” He came around the counter and crouched to lift Sebastian in his arms. The woman ran to her car and threw open the back door.

Penny climbed in beside her brother. The woman got in front and the car peeled out, and Penny clutched Sebastian’s head to keep him from rolling to the floor. She must have dropped the candy, but she didn’t think he could eat it now anyway.

The woman was driving fast. Sebastian had stopped jerking. Penny shook his shoulder. “Stay awake.”

They drove past two hotels, some more closed storefronts, and a swimsuit shop with mannequins in the window. The woman was crying as she drove. “No es mi culpa,” she said. “No es mi culpa.”

Then they stopped under a bright fluorescent light. The woman jumped out again and helped Penny pull Sebastian out of the car. “No quiero problemas,” she said. “Lo siento. Lo siento.”

She backed away with her hands up, then got in the car. The tires squealed in protest as she pulled away.

Penny was alone with her limp brother on the concrete at her feet. She couldn’t lift him, so she got her arms under his head and shoulders and started to drag him. She thought of playing Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, willing her brother to be lighter, but that would mean he was dead.

She walked backward, dragging Sebastian, struggling to keep her hold. His flip-flops came off on the concrete, so she left them behind. Someone was going to come help them, any second now. A doctor, a nurse. And those people would finally, finally call her parents.

“It’s okay,” she said, to herself as much as to Sebastian. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”





45.



NORA WOKE TO Raymond’s phone ringing in the early hours of the morning. She tried to swim up out of sleep, through the dark water of unconsciousness, into the painful light. The hotel room. The wreck of her marriage and her life. Raymond was awake and dressing. He said they were going to a hospital on the coast.

“Why a hospital?” Nora asked. “What happened?”

“No idea,” he said, pulling on a shirt.

“Should we pack? Are we staying there?”

“Don’t know.”

She pulled on jeans, threw some things in a bag—a toothbrush, underwear, her phone—and climbed into the black Suburban with the diplomatic plates waiting outside the hotel. If she never saw another Suburban she would be happy. Benjamin and Liv were in the car. Benjamin said good morning, Liv said nothing. Raymond got in and read a text from Detective Rivera aloud, saying that two of the kids had turned up at an emergency room in a resort town.

“Which two kids?” Nora asked.

“She doesn’t know,” Raymond said.

“How do they know they’re our kids, if they don’t know which ones?”

“They saw them on TV.”

“But then, which ones? Are they white or brown? Do they speak Spanish?”

“She doesn’t know.”

Nora sat back in her seat. Of course she should be happy that any of the kids had turned up. But why only two? How could the police not know which ones? People were obsessed with physical descriptions here. They called each other negra, gordo, flaca, chino, morena. If they hadn’t specifically said it was the moreno kids, then it wasn’t. But maybe brown was the default here? Either way, two parents had won the lottery, and four had lost. Unless the kids had split up. It could be Penny and Hector, or Marcus and Sebastian. That was too complicated to think about.

Camila and Gunther hadn’t answered any calls or texts, and there was a question of whether to wait for them. Raymond was texting with Kenji about a car to pick up his mother at the airport. He told the driver it was okay to go. Nora had forgotten, in the depth of her sleep, about Raymond’s mother. Her heart sank anew.

On the drive, she tried to think of a question that would produce information, whichever kids were at the hospital. Like those logic tests, trying to figure out who the liar is. What had the kids who’d been found said about the kids who hadn’t?

But what if the kids said that the others were dead? She thought of Schr?dinger’s Cat, a problem she had never understood, because the cat was either dead or it wasn’t. It didn’t matter if you looked in the box. Now she finally understood it. Until they got to the hospital, her children were alive. And they were dead. But once they got to the hospital, it would be one or the other. She didn’t want to arrive.

What she knew for certain was that she had brought this punishment on her family. She didn’t know what the punishing entity was—God? Karma? The Furies?—but its sharp talons were shredding her heart. She wanted to bargain, to promise sacrifice or good behavior, but what more could she sacrifice than her children? How could she imagine living righteously without knowing what she had to live for?