Do Not Become Alarmed(75)

“I slept through it.”

“I was awake, but I didn’t feel it,” Nora said. “I was walking around the hotel and these people replacing a carpet asked me if I’d felt the terremoto. I had no idea what they were talking about. It’s like I’ve been in some kind of deep freeze. I keep thinking of that woman who lost her baby to the dingo, and how people thought she wasn’t emotional enough. But you can’t be emotional enough. How could you be?”

“Lindy Chamberlain,” Liv said.

“I was so angry at you when your kids came back,” Nora said. “I thought I could never forgive you for that. Forget the rest.”

“And now?”

“I should go back inside.” Nora tossed the stubbed cigarette into a trash can by the door.

Liv had thought, for a fleeting second, that their old connection might be restored. But it hadn’t been. She felt intensely sad. And she thought she had no right to her sadness, not when Penny and Sebastian had survived. She’d lost a friendship, but Camila had probably lost a child, and Isabel had lost her childhood. But how could you measure your own pain against the pain of the world?

She passed the room where Noemi slept. Penny had wanted to visit, but Noemi wasn’t well enough. There had been other kids on the train. Penny said they had seen a boy peering out. So many kids in peril in the world, in leaky boats, in captivity, trafficked, sick. She remembered her mother talking about the Bhopal gas leak when Liv was—how old? No older than Penny. Her mother at the kitchen table saying that the average payout for Americans killed in plane crashes was $350,000, and that the Union Carbide payout in Bhopal might be a few dollars a life. There had been children killed, pregnant women. She remembered the overhead light in their kitchen, her mother’s bleak and outraged expression at the way lives were valued, her father’s silent agreement, their reflections in the big window with the dark night outside.

So what would Camila be thinking, now that the American kids—or no, the estadounidense kids—were back safely, when Camila’s kids were not?

Liv wasn’t sure which room Isabel had been given, so she stopped at the nurses’ station to ask. The two women at the station kept tapping away at keyboards and didn’t look up. The person Liv was a week ago wouldn’t have let them ignore her. She would have demanded their attention, and the room number. But she was afraid to see Camila. So she left the women to their work and walked on.





54.



NORA STILL FELT sick from the cigarette. She’d brushed her teeth three times to get rid of the taste. June was curled up in one hospital bed with Raymond’s mother. Marcus slept beside Raymond in the other. He still wouldn’t tell her what he was hiding. He’d tossed and turned as Raymond whispered into his hair that it was going to be all right. The hospital was letting them all stay until Sebastian could be discharged, when an American hospital would have kicked them out that afternoon. Nora slipped out and leaned against the wall in the hallway.

After a few minutes, Raymond followed and closed the door behind him. Nora didn’t know what a normal conversation between them sounded like anymore. He asked, “What’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you want to happen?”

She shook her head.

“When my cousins’ baby died, they couldn’t stay together,” he said. “There was too much sadness between them.”

Nora knew the story. “Our babies aren’t dead.”

“You know what I mean,” he said. “Sometimes people don’t make it through a thing like this.”

She nodded.

“So what do you need from me, to stay?” he asked.

She hadn’t formed the question in that way before. She toed the linoleum with her sneaker. “I need to know if you’re going to forgive me.”

Raymond didn’t respond at first, and Nora was afraid he would say he couldn’t forgive her, and they would be done. Instead he said, “Do you forgive me for leaving you and the kids, and going golfing?”

She looked up and met his eyes. She wanted to stay steely and ready for whatever might come. But he was a professional, it was his job to stir up emotions with his eyes, to make people feel his warmth or his seriousness or his anger or his steadfastness or his sorrow or his kindness, or all of those things at once, without saying anything. And she felt all those things. “I do,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “You know what I did. Now I need to know what I’m forgiving you for.”

Nora swallowed. He had to know, to move forward. But if he knew, he wouldn’t forgive her. So she was caught. She thought of Pedro kissing her against the tree, before everything happened. His casual speed and skill, how emotionally unentangled it had seemed. She felt a twitch between her legs, a quickening warmth.

She thought of Pedro leading her away from the café after Liv found them, and her deep sleep in the stale bed in the papaya-colored house. She remembered her humiliating wait in the taxi when she went back the next day. Maybe he’s married, se?ora, the cabbie had said. She would never see Pedro again, she did not want to see him, and yet the damp ache and the shame both grew more insistent.

“Did you fuck him?” Raymond asked.

She shook her head. “No.”