by Maile Meloy
Liv squinted up at her, astonished. “Okay,” she said.
Then Pedro and Nora walked into the trees. Liv put the magazine down and stared after them.
She wondered, not for the first time, if Nora felt physically eclipsed, being married to Raymond, a man so widely desired. His fans wrote to him online, and openly wished Nora didn’t exist. Liv wondered if the eclipsed feeling was enough to push Nora to go make out with Pedro in the trees, just as proof of her own attractiveness.
She lay on her back on a towel and watched the children from under her sun hat. They were strong swimmers. Hector and Isabel were out there, old enough to babysit. And there was Camila, too, reading a mystery novel in Spanish. And Penny was watching Sebastian. The day was so sultry, the sun so warm, that Liv couldn’t keep her eyes open. If she’d been driving, she would have pulled over. But she wasn’t driving. She blinked, and struggled, and drifted deliciously into sleep.
6.
NORA HAD BEEN aware of Pedro’s attention, and aware that Liv had noticed it. But still she’d followed the guide into the trees looking for a quetzal. She was pretty sure that they wouldn’t see a quetzal, not here by the beach.
She knew what he was actually looking for. She was looking for it, too. Just a little no-strings attention, from someone who thought she was sexy and new. Someone who was handsome without looking better than she did, who smelled salty and warm and—different. She felt hypnotized by the way he smelled.
The trees were hung with parasitic vines that would eventually pull the trees down, to be food for the tiny shoots that would grow up and take their place. She thought of Werner Herzog’s Bavarian voice, talking about the overwhelming misery and fornication of the jungle—something like that. If you stood here long enough you could watch the plants grow. Weird insects buzzed.
She’d never been unfaithful to Raymond, even now that it had started to feel like they had a business partnership, raising children, managing his career. She’d always understood that she was the lucky one. She was an ordinary person, and he was in movies. He could have had anyone. He used to pick her up at her terrible apartment in Los Feliz, or at the public school where she’d worked with kids with learning disabilities. The kids went nuts when they saw him. He was black and famous. He signed autographs and gave dap and they loved him.
She used to cut her own hair, back then, and wore jeans and sneakers to work. When she started seeing Raymond, she began to be photographed in public, and his fans had opinions about her hair and her body. She spent money on haircuts and got a stylist to help her buy clothes. She’d lost the weight instantly after both pregnancies, out of sheer terror of the judgment and nastiness.
She had come to think that actors, the best ones, were not like other people. They were vessels to be filled up with other lives, for the purpose of art. But to be a perfect vessel you had to be empty to begin with. When she saw a child actor at work, Nora thought of human sacrifice, the emptying out of one small soul for the purpose of entertainment. She hated it when agents and casting directors gave her children an appraising eye, admiring the shape of their faces, the warm color of their skin, the length of their limbs. She wanted to tell those vultures to back the fuck off.
She liked to think that Raymond was not a truly great actor, that he was handsome and photogenic and smart and skilled, so he would continue to work, but he would never be one of the uncanny, dissociated ones.
But still—the business did something to a person. There was so much attention, and so much pressure to be young and flawless. Raymond had joked about wanting the dumb reducing treatment in the spa, but she knew he really did want it. She thought she would’ve minded less if he’d been tempted by the Brazilian trainer, and not by the seaweed wrap and the electrodes. At least then the temptation would be about someone else. There was nothing sexy about incipient narcissism.
After June was born, Raymond had asked if she was having an affair, and Nora had realized that she was, in a way, because all of her emotional energy had gone to her children. She was infatuated with them, besotted. But that wasn’t the real reason she wasn’t that into sex anymore. Her therapist said that their situation was pretty normal, for a stable long-term couple in an equitable relationship. Power imbalances were erotically generative. So were fights. Her therapist said she should initiate sex more, maybe think of it like exercise. You didn’t really want to do it beforehand, but it felt good afterward. It raised serotonin levels. It was supposed to be good for your skin.
But Nora always had about twelve other things she wanted or needed to do, at any given time.
She and Pedro were deep in the trees, talking about birds, and he was standing very close to her. She didn’t move away. She felt like she was sixteen. Then he was kissing her against a tree, and she didn’t pull away.
After a minute, he slipped a hand inside her white shorts, and she was embarrassed by the slide, by how wet she was already. There was no fumbling and hunting for the right spot. He made her come so quickly and expertly it took her breath away. It seemed to take about thirty seconds from the moment his hand pushed aside the silky nylon of her shorts. Her whole body was trembling, her legs weak, but he held her up with his other arm. With Raymond she had to really concentrate these days, and she had to be lying down. Was this hotter because it was all so strange and taboo? Or did Pedro have secret powers? He didn’t seem surprised or disappointed by the speed of it. Everything seemed to be going according to his plan: He knew where the switch was, and he knew how to flip it. He did it again, and she found herself gasping, shaking as he held her upright.
She recovered, the world coming back into focus, with a hint of the remorse to come. “What about you?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “No condom. No sexo.”
“Oh.” She realized she hadn’t actually thought there would be sexo. In her teenage fog, she had reverted to the assumption that sexo itself was off the table. Actual intercourse was something grown-ups did.
“You have condom?” Pedro asked.
“No.” She thought of her daypack full of cheese sticks and crackers. She thought of Raymond’s vasectomy. Raymond out golfing. She shrank away from the guide a little. “No condom.”
“So no sexo,” Pedro said, shrugging. Then he brought himself off in the same quick, expert way he had worked on her, with no shame, convulsing at the end, in broad daylight, while she watched. She noted that his penis—what she could see of it, inside his shorts—was smaller than Raymond’s, but he was smaller than Raymond in every way. He was built on a different scale. She noted it without judgment or even a sense of involvement.
Pedro wiped his hand off on a flat leaf and grinned at her. She’d had spa massages that were more emotionally compromising. It was as if she’d been to the car wash. Just the basic, thanks. No wax. “One more?” he asked.
“No, that’s okay.” She saw her own dazed expression in his mirrored sunglasses. Her legs were still weak. “Thanks. We should get back.”
That was when they heard the first shout.
“Marcus!” she cried.
Later she would wonder why she’d said her son’s name, and not June’s, but in that moment she wasn’t thinking at all. She went crashing back through the brush. They’d walked farther than she’d thought, and must have been gone for longer than she’d realized. Branches hit her face, but she didn’t notice. Later she would see a red welt on her cheek, a scratch near her eyebrow.
Liv was standing alone on the beach in her swimsuit and hat, looking sunstruck, calling the children’s names. The children were nowhere to be seen.
“Where are they?” Nora asked, breathless.
“I don’t know!” Liv said. Camila had hiked back up the trail to the road, in case the children had gone to the van for something they’d left behind.
But Pedro stared at the flowing river. “Oh my God,” he said.
“What?”
Nora said.
“The tide,” he said. “Took them up the river.”
“Where are they?” she screamed. She would kill Pedro, if something had happened to her children. She would break his neck with her hands. Or she would hold him under the water until he drowned.
“That way.” He pointed inland and she ran, blindly, but there was no trail along the river. There was only thick brush and she was fighting her way through it, unaware if the others were behind her. She sank into the mud on the bank, and couldn’t move forward.
She was trying to make her way to clear water when she heard Camila’s voice and turned. The Argentinian woman was standing with a police officer in uniform, who looked concerned and said something in Spanish.
Camila looked ashen. “The officer says there are crocodiles,” she said.
“What?” Nora screamed.
Pedro waded in and put an arm around her waist.
She pulled free, almost losing her balance and falling in. “You said there was nothing dangerous!” She couldn’t seem to speak normally anymore, she could only scream. She thought of the word hysterical, a word for which she had always had a feminist contempt.
“I didn’t know,” Pedro said.
“How could you not know?” she screamed. “How did this happen?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I forget the tide. Come out of the water.”
“Where the fuck are my children?” she screamed.
7.
THE KIDS WERE engrossed in a complicated game with the three inner tubes, making a kind of raft that they could stand on. It required a great deal of concentration. Hector was the master of the game, and he kept everyone involved. He didn’t leave Sebastian and June out, or cut them any slack just because they were little. Penny admired that in him.
He tossed his wet hair off his face. If Hector had been in a band, Penny’s friends would have fainted over him. And he could be in a band. He played guitar that well.
He was good at building a structure, too, like her father was. He gave directions, saying, “Hold there. Now, Penny, you sit there. Okay, now you can stand up there. Now Penny, too.” He kept the whole three-ring raft stable. She loved hearing him say her name. His stomach was tan and slick above his pink-and-green checked shorts.
Every few minutes, someone would slip or step in the wrong place and everyone would go crashing into the water, screaming with delight, the inner tubes flying. Hector would make sure everyone was safe and afloat, and then they would start rebuilding.
They were so focused that they didn’t notice when the tide changed. It must have paused when they were first in the water. Then it reversed, and began to flow inland. No one noticed that the water from the sea was pushing them upstream, slowly at first, and then with surprising force.
When they finally looked up, waterlogged, each with an arm slung over a tube and legs treading the silty water, they were in a different place. There was no beach. There were no mothers on towels. The river was starting to narrow. It was overhung with trees.
Penny squinted against the sun. She was hanging on to an inner tube with Isabel, and had one arm over the smaller tube June and Sebastian were on. Her fingertips were pruned. She felt her little brother’s arm slide against hers. Hector and Marcus were on the third tube. Birds sang, and insects buzzed in the trees, but there were no human sounds.
“What do we do?” she asked.
They all looked to Hector, their leader. He frowned. Then he said, “We hold on and kick back.” He rolled his long body over and started to kick.
They tried, all six of them, to propel themselves back toward the beach. But it was pointless, the tidal current was too strong. The little ones spluttered, water in their faces.
“Stop!” Hector commanded.
The song of insects and birds returned. On they floated, with the muscle of the river.
“Will they come find us?” Sebastian asked, in a small voice.
“Of course they will,” Penny said. And really, what was keeping them? The jungle on the bank looked impenetrable, but their mothers would find a way.
“Should we shout?” Marcus asked.
Together they cried, “Mom,” “Mommy,” “Mami,” in one shrill, beseeching voice. Then they stopped, as if with the swipe of a conductor’s wand, and waited in the silence. There was no response. The river swirled around them.
“I have to pee,” June said.
“Just go in the water,” her brother said.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t. What about those fish that swim up the pee, inside you?”
“That’s in the Amazon,” Marcus said.
“Why couldn’t they be here?” June asked.
“Because the Amazon doesn’t connect to here,” he said.
Penny already had peed, and hoped those fish really weren’t in the water. On the left bank, there was a tiny sloping place. They all kicked to it and clambered out.
It felt good to be on solid ground. As soon as they stood up, it seemed clear that they should wait here, rather than traveling ever farther away from their mothers. It had been smart to get out.
Penny helped June find a place to peel down her wet bathing suit, behind a tree. The trees were like something out of fairy tales: thick, twisted, hung with vines. June peed into the damp ground, looking up.
“Are you scared, Penny?” she asked.
“No,” Penny lied.
“Because they’re going to find us?”
“Yes,” Penny said. She helped June pull up her swimsuit straps and felt very grown-up. Isabel might be the oldest girl, but Penny was the one June knew and trusted. Her mother had told her to keep an eye on Sebastian and she had, but she hadn’t known this would happen.
“I’m hungry,” June said.
“We can go back to the buffet on the ship,” Penny said. “When they find us.”
They rejoined the group, and Hector announced, “I’m going to swim back.”
“You can’t swim against the river,” Marcus said.
“I can,” he said. “If I stay to the sides. Where the water goes the other direction.”
Penny had been whitewater rafting with her grandparents. “You mean in the eddies,” she said.
Isabel said something protesting.
“I’ll come back for you,” Hector said. He waded out, lowered his body in near the bank, and started swimming. He was very strong. His arms slashed through the water. They watched in silence as he disappeared around a bend. Then they were alone.
“We should be on the other side of the river,” Marcus said.
“We can’t get up that bank,” Penny said.
They studied the other side of the river and the steep mud bank. And then the bank moved. At least it seemed to move. There were tangled roots, and a section of the mottled mud was sliding.
“Oh!” Penny said.
Isabel said something under her breath.
It was not mud sliding, but an enormous crocodile, sunning itself on the bank. It had moved its big sinister head, split by a row of teeth, but now it settled again, motionless.
Isabel put a hand over her mouth.
“Hector will be okay,” Marcus said.
Sebastian and June weren’t paying attention. They had started making a small mud castle in the soft ground. No one said anything more to alarm them. Penny imagined her mother picking her way through the trees on the opposite bank and coming across that monster. They had to get back before that happened. But there was no reason crocodiles wouldn’t be on this side of the river, too. Penny stepped backward. She wanted to get away from the water, away from the muddy banks.
In the trees behind them, they heard an engine noise, and turned. “There’s a road!” Penny said. She started toward it.
“We have to s
tay here,” Isabel said. “And wait for Hector.”
“We should find the road,” Penny said.
They looked at each other. A battle of wills. Penny had read the phrase in books and knew that this was what it meant. Isabel was older. But Penny was smarter. She could not say in front of the little ones that they might be eaten by a crocodile if they stayed here, but she beamed the argument into Isabel’s eyes.
“I’m hungry,” Sebastian said.
“Me too,” June said.
Penny thought of how her mother would panic when she saw they were gone. Sebastian needed food or his blood sugar would drop, but he also needed insulin or his blood sugar might go too high. And he didn’t have his pump.
Marcus said they should hang the inner tubes on a branch, to show where they had left the river. Isabel clearly wasn’t happy about the plan, but she didn’t want to stay alone, so the five of them set off into the dense forest. The crocodile on the other bank hadn’t moved again. Hector would be fine, Penny told herself.
There was no trail, and it was painful, climbing barefoot over roots and fallen trees. Beneath the undergrowth, things scuttled away. Penny saw ants marching in a column, carrying green pieces of leaves over their heads like sails. She took Sebastian’s hand, a thing he would not usually tolerate.
They stumbled out into a clearing, where a Jeep was parked. Two men sat on the ground drinking bottles of Coke. They stared as if the children were fairies, materialized from the woods.
“Say something Spanish,” Penny whispered to Isabel.
“No,” Isabel whispered back.
“Hola!” Penny called.
The men just stared. There were two shovels on the ground and their clothes were dirty.
“Can I have a Coke?” Sebastian whispered to Penny.
The door of the Jeep opened, and a woman got out. She had strong brown arms, and she wore a beige tank top and cargo pants. Penny thought she looked like the girl action figure that goes with the toy Jeep. The woman asked them a question in too-fast Spanish.