Do Not Become Alarmed(87)

As they were unloading the bags in the driveway, Nora pulled up, and June tumbled out of the back, braids flying. “Hi, Benjamin!” she shouted, and she tackled his knees.

“Hey, kiddo.”

“Did you get hummus?”

“Oh, no, we forgot hummus!”

“You did?”

“What do you think?”

She grinned up at him. “No.”

Marcus climbed out, too. He’d grown taller and skinnier and his hair was longer, the curls twisted into points.

“Dude,” Benjamin said. “Cool hair.”

Marcus smiled a noncommittal smile.

“I’m getting a new bunny!” June said.

“Hey, that’s great!” Benjamin said.

Liv pulled into the driveway in the minivan, and Penny hopped down from the passenger seat. Noemi, the guest of honor, wore a pink dress and white tights. Her parents were dressed up, too: the mother in a silky blue patterned dress, the father in pressed trousers and dress shoes. They were small and looked shockingly young. Benjamin felt self-conscious in his shorts and T-shirt.

Raymond was wearing, Benjamin noticed now, a button-down shirt. He’d known what to do. He shook Noemi’s father’s hand. “Welcome to Los Angeles,” he said.

“You are the astronaut,” Noemi’s father said, beaming.

“You don’t really want to trust me with your spaceship,” Raymond said.

There were introductions all around, in English and halting Spanish. The father’s name was Miguel and he admired the Tesla. They carried the food inside. Liv had first considered putting Noemi’s family up in a hotel, but all the hotels were so far away, and so expensive. It would be a lot of driving to pick the visitors up and drop them off, and it might seem like they were afraid to have them in their house, where there was plenty of room.

Benjamin took a suitcase to the guest room and saw that Penny had put cut flowers in a glass, and placed stolen hotel soap in paper wrappers by the sink and bath, to make it all properly fancy. He demonstrated the tricky handle on the shower.

Then they showed Noemi to Penny’s room, where there was an extra twin bed. “Or you can go with your parents,” Liv said.

Noemi sat happily on Penny’s spare twin bed, and bounced a little. “Here.” She was admirable and unsettling, this child who had traveled across borders and ridden trains and lost her uncle and seemed so untroubled. Benjamin wondered what she remembered, from her fever. He wanted to get some air.

“I’ll get the pool cover off.”

Raymond joined him. There were still a few hours of light yet, for the kids to play in. Please, God, Benjamin thought. Don’t let anyone drown. They rolled up the insulated tarp, and Marcus came and stood at the edge of the pool deck, looking down through the rippling surface. He took a sleek new phone out of his jeans pocket.

“Oh, wait a minute!” Benjamin said, and he looked to Raymond. “I thought we were waiting!”

“I got it for my birthday,” Marcus said.

“Sorry, man, we caved,” Raymond said.

“Does Penny know you have it?”

“Not yet,” Marcus said.

“Put it away,” his father said. “Ringer off.”

Marcus slipped the phone back into his pocket. “She’s going to notice.”

Benjamin shook his head. “Maybe it’ll distract her from asking for a puppy.”

“Isabel got a puppy,” Marcus said. “It’s called a blue shar-pei, but it’s gray.”

It was the first time Benjamin had heard him bring up Isabel, or not change the subject when her name came up. “Yeah, I heard,” he said. “So what, you’re on Instagram now? Snapchat?” Just saying those words he felt like such a dad.

Marcus nodded.

“Does Isabel respond if you comment?”

“Sometimes,” Marcus said. Pride and pleasure glowed in the kid’s face, at this tiny attention from Isabel. She’d killed a man, and Marcus had covered for her, and she’d done him the great favor of responding—sometimes—online.

But she was just a kid. She was fourteen years old. She’d been raped, and had lost her brother. Was she suffering for the lie? Or just living her wounded, photogenic life? Presumably there would be a price to pay someday, it was just a question of what it would be.

He wondered if this sweet, serious kid had understood how it would play out, if Marcus had known he’d hit on a story that the grown-ups would accept, that would let everyone move on. Or if he’d stumbled on it blindly, desperate to protect Isabel, and had lucked into success. Benjamin wanted to ask what he’d been thinking, but he couldn’t. If he was honest, he was a little afraid.





65.



NOEMI’S PARENTS HAD prepared her for Penny’s parents to be very rich, but it still took her a little while to realize that this was all Penny’s house. It wasn’t like New York, where the spaces she moved through were connected to each other, stacked on top of each other, communal. She and her parents shared their apartment with two other families, with curtains and plywood dividers in the rooms.

Penny’s house stood apart from the other houses around it, on a strangely silent street lined with spreading trees. The stillness was unsettling, and Noemi wasn’t sure she liked it. There weren’t any other people outside—no one walking by or playing music. Over the houses was sky. The adults each had their own cars, except the American husbands, who arrived together in the shiny black one. She still thought of Marcus and June’s father as an astronaut, as someone who’d been to space.