Do Not Become Alarmed(77)

He had come to despise the American parents, who thought nothing terrible could happen to them, even in these days of debt and war and warming seas, much of it visited on the world by their own rich, childish country. They did not even know what they did not know.

He had joined the search effort not only because he hoped to find his son, but because he needed to get away from the American women, who had let this thing happen. As he watched the somber team with their deliberate movements, no one hurrying, no one thinking the boy was still alive, his hope began to flag, leaving only his hatred. He knew that if he had been on the beach with a drink in the hot sun, he would have fallen asleep. But his children were teenagers. He and Camila had worked at parenthood longer than the others, and had earned the right to a nap. If your children were small, then it was your job to stay awake, and not to go off fucking strangers in the trees. This was universally understood. And now his daughter had returned traumatized and withdrawn, and he was standing by this brackish river waiting for divers to find scraps of his son. He could kill those women with his bare hands.

One of the three divers was a muscular girl, perhaps twenty-five years old. She looked sleek and amphibious in her black wetsuit. She laid out her gear: mask, fins, bang-stick. A knife, an underwater light, a mesh bag.

A mesh bag.

The divers stood in their wetsuits on the bank where the inner tubes had been found. If Hector had stayed with his sister, everything might have been different. But you made the decision you could make at the time when you made it. The person Hector was at that moment was someone who would heroically swim back. There was no version of Hector who walked to the Jeep. And if there had been, then maybe Raúl Herrera would have killed him, to get to Isabel. Maybe the Fates snipped with their scissors when they wanted to snip.

The girl diver, who had put on her tank, caught Gunther staring at her. She met his eyes for a moment. She was not going to scold the grieving father for staring. But her eyes held a light reproach. She looked away.

He wanted to tell her he had not been thinking of her neoprene-encased body. How could you seduce someone in a wetsuit? You would be exhausted by the time you peeled the thing off. You would need a cold drink. He’d been thinking of his children, and he’d been thinking of murdering two American women, but he couldn’t explain. And now, of course, he was thinking about her neoprene-encased body. An aquatic, erotic creature. The body responded. It was not a choice.

He turned to peer back into the trees where Isabel and the others had stepped over roots and branches, toward their captors. He imagined them like water sprites in their swimming costumes, flitting through the woods. Their bare footprints obscured now by the boots of the searchers. There was no sign they had been here at all.

There was a splash, then another, three, and the hunters had gone into the water to prove for certain that his son was gone.





56.



CAMILA SAT IN the dark hospital room and imagined the divers killing a crocodile and cutting its belly open, her son stepping out. Gunther, standing on the bank of the river, would welcome his son into his arms. She felt the tears come, at the joy of it. Hector was her secret favorite. Boys were so much less complicated for a mother. They loved you always.

The boy Marcus had come to visit Isabel in their room, the only one of the Americans who had. He seemed to have appointed himself Isabel’s protector. Camila had gone to the toilet and come back to find them whispering together. They’d stopped when she entered.

“What is it?” she’d asked.

“Nothing,” Isabel said.

She knew her daughter a little bit, and knew she was lying. But Isabel now slept like an innocent, under a spell.

Camila had been raised a Catholic, in a white dress at her confirmation, married by a priest, the whole thing. So now she tried to think about God and his intentions, out of habit. Si Dios quiere, her grandmother used to say, about every plan for the future. Shall we meet for breakfast? Si Dios quiere. Ojalá que venga. Why would God want to take Camila’s son? Who was this deity who willed such things?

Gunther said there were no gods. He said that man was a brutal creature in a brutal world. The human race was barely removed from clubbing one another on the head, stealing women and provisions, getting through the winter with violence and blood. In Camila’s lifetime, in her country, people had been thrown from airplanes for being a political inconvenience. Even America, the alleged light of the world, was built on the torture and rape and murder of captive people.

And yet Hector, her son, had risked his life for his sister, and for these children who were near strangers to him. There were noble impulses in this damned species, still. Which meant that they would find him. He would come back, her handsome young river god, reborn.

In the hospital bed, Isabel rolled over and moaned. She needed her brother, as much as Camila needed her son.

In her youth, Camila had a little singing career. It had never been much: a cabaret act, with a boy who played the piano. She sang standards and tango for tourists. Men brought flowers, but not for their love of music. They brought flowers for the dresses she wore, the décolleté, the sway of the hips behind the microphone. And sometimes, to be honest, for the handsome boy at the piano. But then she had married and created this beautiful girl, and she had been replaced. It was Isabel men looked at when they walked down the street. The child was only fourteen but their heads turned, and Isabel felt her power.