Do Not Become Alarmed(67)

So Liv, Penny, the social worker, and Detective Rivera went into a little room. Nora could see blue plastic chairs and some dolls and stuffed animals inside. They shut the door behind them.

“Fuck,” Benjamin said.

“No fucking kidding,” Nora said.





46.



RAYMOND SAT ON a bench in the hospital hallway, feeling numb. The press hadn’t found them yet. His manager had been trying to work with a local PR person to stem the tide of stories, but it hadn’t worked. The astronaut picture was still running on the news. And the reporters would find them soon. Liv and Benjamin would be on TV, with their kids safe in their arms, and his kids would be gone. He had tried to be big about it. He had tried to see any of the kids’ return as good news, but it was getting hard to keep the optimism going.

Liv came around the corner with her arms full of vending machine snacks. She seemed to consider turning back when she saw him, but it was too late. “Hey,” she said.

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

She sat beside him on the bench, arms full of chips and pistachios. “How’s it going?”

“How do you think?”

“They’re going to find your kids,” she said.

“Sure.”

“I know it doesn’t seem fair that ours are back.”

“I’m glad they’re back.”

“How’s Nora?”

“You could ask her.”

“She’s not really talking to me.”

“I thought you weren’t talking to her.”

Liv adjusted the snacks in her arms. “Listen, I lost my mind, when I said that thing. I’m so sorry. We’ve all lost our minds a little.”

“I haven’t.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” she said.

He had to assume he had been cuckolded, and he knew that if Liv had said nothing, it still would have happened, he just wouldn’t know it. Could you be humiliated if you didn’t know it? He thought you could, and it was worse, because other people knew. So you were a cuckold and a fool. “I’m glad you said something,” he said, though the words felt like ash in his mouth.

They sat in silence. “So your mom is coming,” she said.

“Yeah. Nora’s dreading it.”

“Nora’s in a terrible place,” Liv said. “She just lost her mom, the kids are missing, she thinks she’s lost you. I mean, imagine.”

“I don’t have to imagine,” he said.

“Oh, Raymond.” Liv dumped the snacks, slid close to him on the bench, and put her arms around him. Her short hair brushed his face and he smelled rosemary shampoo over the disinfectant smell of the hospital. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“I don’t know what we do now,” he said. “Where do we go? What do we try next?”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“You should take Penny and Sebastian home.”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “We’re staying with you.”

“That’s crazy.”

“I mean it,” she said. “Then we’re gonna sue the shit out of the cruise line.”

He laughed. He sometimes forgot that he’d known Liv as a movie executive before he ever met Nora. She’d fought to cast him and to keep him, working around his schedule. She’d introduced him to his wife. She was reliable, brash, sometimes aggravating. Just now she’d put her arms around him only to comfort him. But with her body close against his, with Nora freezing him out, something seemed to shift, the ground moved beneath his feet. He sensed that Liv felt it, too. A stirring.

“I should go,” she said.

“Okay.” But she didn’t leave. His arm was still around her, her head still resting against his chest.

Then Liv stiffened and pushed away from him, staring down the hall. He followed her eyes and saw Nora and his mother silently watching them. His mother looked road-weary, her handbag on a shoulder, her hair smoothed back.

Liv, her movements jerky and agitated, gathered up her snacks from the bench. But nothing had happened! There was a way to play this, to make it explainable—and of course it was explainable, it was fine—but Liv wasn’t doing it. She was making everything worse. She dropped a bag of chips. “Fuck,” she breathed.

Raymond leaned over to pick up the bag from the polished linoleum, placed it on the top of the bundle in Liv’s arms, then stood to welcome his mother to this world-class shit show.





47.



IT STARTED TO rain as they stumbled through the woods. Noemi had a plastic slicker in her backpack, but she didn’t know where her backpack was. Had she dropped it? Chuy would have picked it up, but she wasn’t sure where Chuy was. Something had happened. She felt dizzy. Water squelched in her shoes.

The others were silent, run-walking ahead of her. The toy pig was lost somewhere in the rain, and this made her sadder than it should have. She stumbled on a root and caught herself.

There seemed to be a weight pressing down on her head. The older boy with the glasses, who’d been so afraid on the train, told her to keep up, until he saw that she couldn’t. He’d been carrying the littlest girl, but he put her down and picked up Noemi. It was an uneven ride because he was limping.