Do Not Become Alarmed(78)

It was the most terrifying age. Her daughter was aware of her allure and she was right. And she was convinced of her invincibility and she was wrong. The drifting away on the river, the stumbling onto the grave site, it had all come at a very bad time for her.

Isabel shifted again in the bed, and then was still.

If this Raúl Herrera were alive, Gunther would have wished to kill him, to tear him apart. As it was, Gunther’s rage had no target, no outlet. Camila wondered if it would fester. She wondered if he would blame his daughter, see her as ruined, in some primitive way.

Someone was standing in the light from the doorway. Camila looked up and saw Liv through the gap, peering in.

“Camila?” Liv whispered.

“Yes?”

“How are you doing?”

How was she doing? Camila wanted to laugh. What did they know of the gaping emptiness in her heart that would never be filled until her son came back? The American women would be fine. Their marriages might feel the strain. This hellish trip might expose the cracks in their foundations, and they might crumble. But they had their children, intact. That was all any of them wanted. A voice that she did not recognize came from deep in her chest, and she said, “Go away.”





57.



ANGELA RIVERA LAY in bed, listening to the street outside. Voices from the bar on the corner, a distant siren. A part of her mind was always scanning those sounds for trouble, but she tried to shut that habit down for a little while. She had enough trouble of her own.

She’d been assigned to the missing kids because her English was the best in the department. She’d worked for an uncle in Florida four summers in a row, pumping gas at a marina, making conversation with the boat owners, going out with the local kids at night. Nothing like four beers to loosen the tongue. She’d kept it up by watching American movies, practicing when she could, proud of her fluency. And she’d also, of course, been put on the case because everyone was home with their families for the holiday. Let the dyke work at Christmas—what did she care?

But it wasn’t even her beat. No sex crimes involved, at the time they’d assigned her to it. Unless you counted whatever had happened in the trees, with the guide and the pretty American, but she didn’t count that.

Lexi moved in her sleep, stretched one leg out and left it there, toes against Angela’s calf. Lexi was small and wiry, but she liked to sleep diagonally across the bed or else right in the middle, spread out like a starfish. When she came home from working late, Angela had to push her across the bed with both hands before climbing in. Lexi might mumble a protest but she never woke up. She didn’t have Angela’s insomniac tendencies, her way of worrying a case, turning it over and over in her mind.

They’d found a body near the train tracks where the train had been stopped. Male, thirty to thirty-five, probably dead two days. Old gang tattoos, inked over. His throat had been cut, and they’d found a yellow-handled folding knife with two distinct sets of prints that matched no one in the database. And a child’s pink backpack beneath his body, soaked in blood, with a stuffed pig and some comic books inside.

Angela had asked the older kids, cautiously, about this discovery, and she had gotten the strangest answers. At first, Isabel pretended not to know what she was talking about. Then she said the man had attacked her, and maybe Oscar had fought him, but she couldn’t remember. It was all too terrible. She had started to cry. Angela waited, and then tried to ask more questions. Isabel said she should ask Marcus. He knew.

Marcus didn’t stall. With his mother beside him, he said in a hushed whisper that a man had attacked Isabel, and that Oscar had fought him.

The little one, June, said it was too dark to see. She said there was a man with Noemi, who came to the train car, but then he wasn’t with them anymore. She didn’t know why.

June was the only one Angela believed.

Noemi was still in a fever, and Angela hadn’t talked to Oscar yet, because she wanted to think some more about what the kids had said, and what they weren’t telling her.

Then word had come that the divers found a scrap of the Argentinian boy’s shorts on the bottom of the river, snagged on a branch. Pink-and-green cloth. Was it better to see your kid half-eaten, or better not to find him at all, always to have that sliver of hope that he was still out there somewhere, in torn swim trunks?

Lexi rolled over to the middle of the bed, her forehead against Angela’s shoulder. It was too hot to sleep so close, each breath on her skin. Lexi ran a rape crisis center, and Angela thought about the way she talked to the women there, how calm and practical she was. She helped them navigate the worst thing that had ever happened to them—except when it wasn’t the worst thing, or the first time. She had an evenhanded sensibility, a businesslike response to trauma. And still she slept so deeply, so unafraid.

Angela herself had forty rape cases open, and hundreds more closed. Most of the rapists were relatives. The youngest victim in her current stack was two years old. Sometimes the families didn’t want to prosecute. Sometimes the men disappeared across borders and she couldn’t find them. It was so hard to get justice of any kind. She thought about Isabel’s tormented look in the hospital bathroom, her weeping in her mother’s arms. How was it possible to be calm and reasonable about a child’s pain? It was a nightmare.

A hundred reporters with cameras had gone to the river. They’d done a special report on the weapon the divers carried for crocodiles, the bang-stick. They’d already interviewed the grieving sister of Consuelo Bola?os, holding the orphaned little boy on her lap. No mystery there: They had the gun that had killed Consuelo, and the gunshot residue on Raúl’s fingers and clothes, and an eyewitness. And Raúl was dead. That particular chapter had exhausted its shock value, and the news cameras would be on the prowl for the next one.