Do Not Become Alarmed(74)

“I asked Carmen if I could borrow it!”

“She said no,” the lawyer said. “And you destroyed it, in an accident resulting in a fatality.”

He pushed himself up in the bed. “He shot at us! He ran us off the road! He could have killed all of us, like he killed that woman!” His head was throbbing now, as much as his knee.

The lawyer stood. “I’ll get the doctor. Try not to agitate yourself. And don’t talk to anyone,” she said.





53.



LIV WALKED THE hospital hallways to stretch her legs. Sebastian was stable again, and an endocrinologist had been summoned. Benjamin was at his bedside with Penny. Liv had been making plans: to cut back her hours at work, volunteer at school. Go to every school dance, chaperone every date. The kids would hate her, but they would be alive. She’d once felt annoyed when they clung or leaned against her in the heat—now she wanted to feel their warm bodies against her all the time.

She found Nora outside in a courtyard, staring at some palm fronds. Cigarette smell wafted from two women in scrubs.

“I’m pretending I still smoke,” Nora said. “How’s Sebastian?”

“Much better.” Liv looked for wood to knock, but everything was concrete. “And Marcus and June?”

Nora hesitated.

“Are they okay?” Liv pressed.

“I think so. I mean, yes. But there’s something they’re not telling me.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have a guess?”

Nora shook her head. “Marcus has started stuttering, and he can barely look at me. He knows Isabel was raped. But there’s something else.”

An orderly came outside, eyed them, and lit a cigarette.

There was a long silence. Liv realized she didn’t know how to talk to her cousin anymore. Their countless hours of batting the conversation back and forth, the examining of small questions, the light Nora shed on everything as they talked it all through—it was gone. Liv wished, fervently, that she hadn’t seen Nora with Pedro at the café table.

Nora walked over to the orderly and gestured to his pack of Marlboros. He shook one out and lit it for her as she cupped her hand around the flame. Then she brought it back to where Liv stood.

Liv felt the words spilling out, she couldn’t stop or filter them. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry about everything. I don’t know why I said that thing to Raymond, about Pedro. I don’t know what came over me.”

“It was really shitty,” Nora said.

“I know. I’d lost my mind.”

Nora looked at the cigarette. “This is going to make me puke.”

“How did Raymond respond?”

Nora tapped the ash loose. “He’s sort of catastrophically disappointed, I think. I refused to talk about it, and then his mother showed up, and then I passed out, and now the kids are with us. So I guess it’s on hold.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s funny,” Nora said, “Marcus keeping some secret—it makes me realize how horrible it is, to suspect there’s something you’re not being told. It’s kind of worse than the news itself. I understand why Raymond is so angry and unhappy. And I’m afraid this will be between us forever. I don’t know if we can stay together, but I don’t know what splitting up looks like. I have no income. Even if I get a teaching job, there’s no way I can live anywhere close to the school. I could barely afford my tiny old apartment, and rents are so much higher now.”

“You’re not really going to split up.”

“I don’t know, Liv!” Nora cried, exasperated. The orderly and the two women in scrubs turned to look at them.

They stood in silence. “You could keep the house,” Liv said finally.

“I can’t do that.”

“It’s a community property state.” Liv sounded like her mother and hated herself for it.

Nora shook her head. “Raymond’s mother has always thought me unworthy of him. And now I’ve proven her right. I’m a terrible mother, who cheated and allowed her children to disappear. I’m not going to take the house.”

“We all let them disappear,” Liv said.

Nora shrugged.

Liv said, “I’m also so sorry Dianne saw that weird thing in the hall. You know Raymond was just being comforting.”

The orderly went inside, and Nora bent and stubbed her borrowed cigarette out on the concrete. “Jesus, that was disgusting.”

Liv was fairly sure she meant the cigarette, but she wouldn’t have put a lot of money on it. “Have you talked to Camila?” she asked.

Nora shook her head. “They’re looking for Hector. You know, I keep thinking how we live in this weird ahistorical bubble, a time and place when it seems unthinkable, impossible, to lose a child. But it happens all the time, all over the world. It always has. And people go on. They can’t just drop to the floor and scream for the rest of their lives.”

“I might have,” Liv said. “If we’d lost Sebastian.”

“You wouldn’t, though,” Nora said. “I think my brain has been preparing all week, making the insulation that lets you go on. You know that earthquake the other night?”