Do Not Become Alarmed(9)

“Thank you,” she said.

Before they got to the Colombian border, Chuy told her to sit in the front seat. If the border patrol asked, she was his daughter. Did she understand?

She nodded.

When they stopped, he handed papers to the border guard and answered some questions.

The guard asked Noemi questions, and she leaned forward in her seat. Yes, this man was her papa. Yes, she was from Ecuador, and they were visiting her cousins in Cali. Yes, she liked her pig.

She must have done a good job, because afterward, Chuy seemed relieved. He put the papers on the seat and she saw that his last name was the same as hers.

They drove, and drove, and slept in the car, but then they stopped at a hotel. Noemi had never stayed in a hotel before. She pulled back the covers on her bed and saw a dark red smudge. She froze, thinking it was blood, but then she looked closer.

The red mark was really a scorpion, twitching its tail on the smooth white fitted sheet. Its back was crawling with something. “Chuy,” she said.

He came to look. “It’s a mama.”

Now Noemi saw that the mother scorpion had babies all over her back, no bigger than grains of rice. Their tiny tails were waving. “Will they sting me?”

“Not if you don’t scare her,” he said.

“I’m scared.”

He took a glass from the bathroom and trapped the scorpions beneath it. Then he borrowed her comic book and slid it under the upside-down glass, letting the mother scorpion step on. He carried them all outside. He and Noemi inspected the bedsheets together, shaking and smoothing them, to make sure there were no loose baby scorpions.

“She was looking for a warm, dry place for her babies, that’s all,” he said.

Noemi eyed the disordered sheets, uncertain.

“You want to trade?” he asked.

She nodded, and they checked the other bed for scorpions. Nothing was there, and Noemi climbed in. The sheets were cool and the mattress was soft. Chuy sat on the scorpion bed with his back to her and unbuttoned his shirt. He had tattoos on his back and arms. She was going to ask him about those, but decided not to, and she fell asleep.

At the border to Panama, she did a good job again. As a reward, they went to watch the ships go through the locks in the canal. Chuy explained how they worked, how the locks were like stairs, filling with water to float the ships so they could go up over the mountains, and then emptying so the ships could go down again on the other side. He told her thousands of people had died building the canal, because it was so dangerous, but also because they came from France and didn’t know how to live in this country. He bought her an ice cream and they watched some more.

In Panama, they stayed in a room in someone’s house, and the orange car was stolen in the night. Chuy swore and kicked the curb where it had been parked. But he said they weren’t giving up, and they moved to a truck, and rode in the cargo space in the back, with some other people. Chuy was silent, or listened to a little radio, and Noemi spent her time in a made-up world of her own, whispering to the toy pig. She lived in the present now. Her past with her grandmother, her future with her parents, none of it was real.

She thought about the skinny girl on her street who was going to have a baby. She wondered what it would be like to have a baby of your own. Like a doll but real. Who would love you always.

“Crying and shitting all the time,” her grandmother had said. “I promise you, mija, you don’t want that.”

When Chuy brought mangoes or tortas or coconut water in a plastic bag, Noemi ate and drank quickly. She never saved anything, or planned ahead. She didn’t believe in the future anymore. It would come or it wouldn’t. There were an infinite number of directions to go. She told all of this to the pig.





5.



LIV STRETCHED OUT on the bed in the cabin and looked at the list of shore excursions. Benjamin had his feet up on the couch. They were all getting restless on the ship—the balcony episode had proven that. They needed an adventure.

“This is a good country for us to go ashore in,” she said. “They call it the Switzerland of Latin America.”

“Why?” Benjamin asked. “Self-righteousness and shady banking practices?”

“Ha,” she said.

“Or good chocolate?”

“There’s a hummingbird sanctuary,” she said, “but it’s up in the mountains.”

“If hummingbirds were bugs, people would be grossed out by them,” he said.

“You have officially become a spoiled Californian,” she said. “Hummingbirds are magical.”

“They’re like giant flying cockroaches.”

“Except they’re not.”

“I’m not sitting on a bus like a tourist.”

“We are tourists.”

“Still.”

“We can’t just take a random cab on the dock.”

“Why not? They don’t behead people here, right?”

“We’d need a minivan, at least, to fit all of us,” she said. “And I want a driver the cruise ship has vetted.”

“Like they vetted the people in that PR video?”

“Coffee plantation tour,” she read.

“The kids would be bored. And why encourage caffeine? Is there a surfing lesson?”