Do Not Become Alarmed(8)

“How did you get out of the Kids’ Club?” her mother asked.

“We said we were looking for Sebastian and June,” Penny said.

“But how did you not notice they weren’t there?”

“We did!” Penny said. “And we went looking for them!”

Penny’s dad said that if they only had a grand piano in their suite, none of this would have happened. The security officer laughed and everything was all right.

Her mother lifted Sebastian’s shirt to check his glucose monitor. “Okay, guys,” she said, “let’s go get a snack.”





4.



NOEMI WAS TEN, but she was small for her age. She lived with her grandmother in a house with a corrugated steel roof and three rooms: kitchen, living room, and the bedroom they shared. An outhouse across the backyard. She hadn’t seen her parents in two years. They lived in Nueva York.

Her grandmother was old, and she was tired of taking care of Noemi. She said it was too hard. Noemi’s parents sent money, but by the end of the month there was no food. Sometimes the neighbors helped, but sometimes they had no food, either. Her grandmother couldn’t read, so she couldn’t help Noemi with her schoolwork. Noemi tried to teach her to read, but her grandmother said it was too late. It was better that Noemi go to her parents. There she would go to an American school, and learn. Her parents could help, and feed her better. Noemi said her parents might stop sending money, if she went, but her grandmother said that didn’t matter.

Still, her grandmother might have kept her, and life might have gone on as it was, except that a twelve-year-old girl on their street was having a baby. Noemi thought it was exciting news, but her grandmother did not. She made a potion on the kitchen stove, and made Noemi drink it to protect her from harm. It was bitter and dark. Noemi wanted to spit the liquid out, but she obeyed her grandmother and swallowed, and felt ill.

Then Ario, who lived next door and was only nine, was shot to death in their street. People said it was a warning to his father, or his uncle, or both. Noemi had seen him lying on the ground afterward, the blood dark and pooling around his head, and she sometimes saw him in her mind before she went to sleep. She and her friend Rosa walked around that part of the street when they came home from school.

Christmas was coming, and Noemi hoped for a dollhouse like the one Rosa’s uncle had made for her. Her grandmother said nothing, but on Christmas Eve there were no presents. Her grandmother said Noemi had to go to her parents.

“That costs money,” Noemi said. “Why can’t we use the money so I can stay here?”

Her grandmother just shook her head.

A man came to the house, one Noemi had never seen before. He said his name was Chuy, but her grandmother called him Jesùs. He wore jeans and a shirt with buttons, the cuffs done up at the wrist, and a black leather jacket. He seemed older than her father, but it was hard to remember her father clearly now. She looked to her grandmother, who was stone-faced and determined.

So Noemi packed a small pink backpack with the things her grandmother told her to take: a change of clothes, a small hand towel, extra socks. Plus two comic books, her own idea. She shrugged the backpack straps onto her shoulders and followed the man out of the house she had always lived in, looking back to see if her grandmother would cry. Her wrinkled face crumpled with pain, but Noemi saw no tears, so she would not cry, either.

The man had an orange car, and Noemi sat in the back seat, as her grandmother had told her to. She had rarely been in a car before, and she inspected the door handle, the seatbelt, the pocket in the seat in front of her. She and her grandmother always took the bus, or went on foot.

“Do you know my parents?” she asked.

There was a pause. “I know your father.”

“How?”

The man didn’t answer.

“Why are you taking me to them?”

“It’s my job.”

“Do you make a lot of money?”

He snorted. “Not enough.”

“Do you have a family?”

He didn’t answer.

Noemi watched the back of his head, the side of his square cheek, his short hair and broad forehead in the mirror. Then she got out a comic book and tried to read, but she felt sick to her stomach.

“You have to look out the window at one thing that isn’t moving,” the man said.

So she put the comic away and stared out the windshield at the distant mountains. She guessed they must be driving north. That was the way everyone went. She got to thinking about whether there were other directions to go.

“What’s other from north?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

She wasn’t sure. “I mean, is there a different one?”

“There’s south,” he said. “And east and west.”

She counted. “There are four?”

He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “What the hell do they teach you in school?”

She was silent, embarrassed. “My grandmother can’t help me with my homework.”

“There are four points of the compass,” he said. “And also an infinite number. Because you can have southeast and northwest and every direction in between.”

“Oh.” That didn’t make any sense at all.

“I got you a Christmas present,” he said, and he handed something back to her. It was a plush toy pig, very pink, with tiny black eyes and a curly tail. She squeezed it and felt its softness.