by Maile Meloy
The man with the white horse—Raúl—came upstairs. “Ah, you are already friends,” he said. “His name is Sancho. He is very stupid.”
“Hi, Sancho,” Marcus said. “Hi, Sancho.” The dog rolled its eyes with happiness, tongue out. “I love him,” Marcus said passionately.
“He loves you, too, I think,” Raúl said.
“Will he eat the bunny?” June asked, still standing on the chair.
“Maybe,” Raúl said. “Maybe no.”
Isabel was acting weird. With the duvet around her shoulders like a robe, still in her bikini, she sat with cold composure and began to eat her cereal, as if Raúl and the dog didn’t exist. She wasn’t trembling or cowering anymore.
George came back down from the third floor, and the two brothers talked quietly together in Spanish. They didn’t look much alike. Raúl wore cowboy boots, his buttoned shirt tucked into tight jeans, his black hair swept back. George, in his khaki shorts and baseball cap, could have been one of her parents’ friends.
Penny tried to follow what they said, but they spoke too fast. The only thing she could say that fast in Spanish was a song that her friend Sasha’s nanny had taught them. It went with a hand-clapping game:
Una vieja-ja
mató un gato-to
con la punta-ta
del zapato-to
Pobre vieja-ja
pobre gato-to
pobre punta-ta
del zapato-to
It didn’t really make any sense. An old lady killed a cat with the point of her shoe. Poor old lady, poor cat, poor point of the shoe. The cat was the one who was killed, so why feel sorry for the point of the old lady’s shoe?
The conversation between the brothers had become an argument. Raúl smacked the wall with his open palm. Then he went downstairs, his boot heels striking hard. He shouted to the dog, who chased after him. The lock scraped and he went out. The lock scraped again.
“Fuck me,” George said, leaning his head against the wall.
“He said the F-word,” June whispered.
George went back up to the third floor.
Things got quiet again, with Raúl gone. The wind picked up outside the big windows, whipping the treetops. The living room had a high ceiling, and sometimes a big gust would shake the windows. The children all looked at the ceiling and waited.
The morning passed, and Penny taught June the clapping game and the song. Maria smiled at Penny and said, “No parece gringa.” Then she taught them another clapping song, but it was more babyish: “Tortillitas para Mama, Tortillitas para Papa.”
June dropped her hands to her lap. “I want my mom and dad.”
Later, Maria brought them grass and carrot tops and sweet peas for the bunny, and more fruit and cheese. Marcus said the cubes of mango were like the Turkish delight the White Queen gives Edmund in Narnia: a trick to win them over. But Penny thought Maria really felt sorry for them, stuck here like this.
They played tic-tac-toe with the wooden pieces until that got boring. Marcus fixed June’s braids that were coming undone. Penny offered to help.
“I can do it,” Marcus said. He frowned with concentration over the tiny, wavy strands.
The TV in the kitchen had been turned off ever since they saw their parents on the news. Penny wished she’d brought a book. There weren’t any in this whole house.
Sebastian whispered into the bunny’s white fur.
“What are you saying?” she asked.
“I’m talking to the bunny,” her brother said.
“About what?”
“None of your business.”
In the afternoon, the drug-addict doctor returned. George let her in downstairs, and she sat on one of the red couches with Penny and Sebastian, her bony knees sticking out from her skirt. She gave Penny a small box to open. The writing on the box was in Spanish, and inside was something that looked like a fat pen. The doctor showed them how to use it. It was electronic and had a cartridge of insulin inside, instead of ink.
There was also a little solar calculator, and the doctor showed Penny how to do the math based on Sebastian’s blood sugar, his weight, and how many carbs he was eating.
“A piece of bread or fruit is fifteen grams,” she said. “A glass of juice is thirty. A cup of rice is forty-five.”
“This is too hard,” Penny said.
“You need to learn,” the doctor said.
Penny watched, miserable, as she gave Sebastian the finger-stick test. Then together they did the math on the calculator, and the doctor showed her how to use the pen to give Sebastian the injection. She’d brought another little box with extra insulin cartridges, in a paper bag.
Penny tried to concentrate on the math, so she could remember how to do it, but she felt scared and overwhelmed. “I don’t know if we can do this,” she said.
“I think you can,” the doctor said.
Sebastian put the finger-stick monitor and the insulin pen in the pocket of his red shorts. “You keep the calculator,” he said. “I don’t know how to do the math.”
“I don’t either!” Penny grabbed the doctor’s skinny hand. “You have to call our parents. I can give you their number.”
The doctor looked embarrassed and shook her head.
“You’re supposed to help people,” Penny said. “You took an oath.”
“I am sorry. It is a bad situation.”
“Because you’re a drug addict?”
The woman stared at her with hopeless eyes, then pulled her hand free.
“Are you even a real doctor?” Penny asked.
“I have to go.” The woman gathered her bag.
“How can you say it’s a bad situation? We’re kids!”
The woman backed away. It was the stupidest thing Penny had ever heard. Her parents probably thought Sebastian was dead, and would be seriously freaking out by now. She slumped back into the couch. George let the doctor out and locked the door again.
14.
IN THE MORNING, at the terrible hotel, Nora got a text message asking her to pick up her family’s passports at the port. Liv had the same message. The ship had sailed away on schedule, dumping their stuff unceremoniously onshore. Other people had a cruise to take. Nora was filled with rage at those people, eating their mediocre buffet food, playing the poker machines in the noisy casino, swimming in the pool. How could they just go on with their cruise when Marcus and June were missing? She craved her children, wanted to feel their bodies against her.
She found herself wanting a cigarette, a thing she hadn’t had in years. She used to keep a pack in the freezer, when she was living alone and teaching, so she could smoke one on her apartment balcony when she’d had a hard day.
She’d listened to Raymond on the phone with the detective, asking about the best use of their time. Together they decided that the men would go to the capital to meet with someone at the embassy, and the women would go to the ship’s agent. Because someone from each family had to go collect the passports. They would meet up in the capital, where there were more police resources.
The press was camped outside the little hotel, and the three couples walked out together into a barrage of news cameras, a chorus of people calling them by their names and asking for comment. One man got very close, and Gunther shouted at him in Spanish. Raymond was more practiced at evasion—he shielded her and steered her to a cab, asking the reporters please to give them some privacy. Nora was embarrassed at how she’d spilled her guts to those people last night. She’d been horrified by the sight of herself on the TV in the hotel room, and had to turn it off.
Then she found herself in the back seat of a moving taxi, sitting between Liv and Camila, trying to behave like a rational human being. A small part of her mind observed that she was probably in shock.
She imagined Perla, the stewardess, packing up their cabin, gathering the di
rty laundry from the floor of the closet. She wondered if anyone had told Perla what had happened, why her passengers had never come back. Her kids might be far away in Manila, but at least she knew where they were.
Liv looked drawn and sleepless in the taxi, silent in her misery. Nora had such complicated feelings about her cousin now. She had not forgiven her for failing to watch the children when she’d said she would. But she was grateful to her for not saying anything to Raymond about her flirtation with the guide. Nora had told Liv nothing had happened, and she was ashamed of the lie, and ashamed of her gratitude to Liv for keeping a false secret, to protect her from being misunderstood. When the misunderstanding, of course, would be the truth.
Camila sat on Nora’s right, a woman she was bound to only by tragedy.
“I am a piece of dirt, to Isabel, right now,” Camila said to the cab window. “She treats me like you would not believe. It is just—she is fourteen, I know. Girls need to separate from their mother. But it is so painful, when this child who has depended on you wants nothing to do with you. She thinks you know nothing. You are in her way. So you tell yourself it is a necessary stage, it will pass. And it will pass.” Her voice started to break. “Unless you never see her again. And then what you will remember is this time when she is awful. Simply awful. And you are sometimes awful back, because it is very hard not to respond. To be the adult. And that is the memory I will have, for the rest of my life. This is what I fear.”
Nora closed her eyes and wished Camila wouldn’t talk this way, as if the children might actually be gone. She thought of Marcus, her beautiful boy, nearly as tall as she was but just a child, not equipped to be on his own. He would be so anxious about taking care of June. They had spent one night alone now. Her hands started to shake and she held them tightly in her lap.
“And Hector,” Camila went on. “My son. If I don’t have my son, I do not know what I will do.”
The taxi stopped at the address they’d been given, but they couldn’t find the ship’s agent at first. The driver peered at the address on Liv’s phone screen. They tried two different buildings and walked a confusing hallway, and finally found the agent’s glass-walled office.
The agent was a small, round man with wire-rimmed glasses and a blue suit that seemed too heavy for this weather. He acted as if nothing drastic had happened. He gave them each a form, to confirm that they’d received their passports and had left the ship voluntarily. When really the ship had jettisoned them. Nora signed her name to her own abandonment.
“There are many nice things to do in my country,” the agent said.
“Yeah, like a zip-line tour,” Liv said.
“Exactly!” the agent said. “Have you done this?”
Liv stared at him. “No.”
“It’s very good!” he said.
“You know our kids are missing?” she said. “From the zip-line tour.”
Nora wished Liv wouldn’t do this. Argue, bait people, be her sardonic self.
The man grew instantly solemn. “Of course. I am so sorry. I am sure they will appear.”
“So we don’t need tourism suggestions,” Liv said. “Thank you.”
The agent shrugged as if to say it really was a very nice country, but it was up to her.
“And by the way, we were with your guide,” Liv said. “Who came recommended by the ship.”
Nora felt dizzy, little spots appearing in her vision. “Let’s just go,” she said.
But Liv was warming up, getting ideas. “Are you the one who hires the guides for the shore excursions?”
The agent looked nervous. “I am.”
“So you hired Pedro?”
“There are many Pedros.”
“But this particular Pedro,” she said. “Who took us halfway to the zip-line tour.”
“I would have to check my records,” he said.
“You do that,” Liv said. “Because I think we might have a serious case of negligence on our hands.”
“Liv, please,” Nora said.
“There is a liability waiver,” the agent said.
“Those aren’t binding.”
“I believe they are, señora.”
“I want a copy.”
“Of course, señora,” the agent said, with a practiced, subservient bow, and he turned to a metal file cabinet and started rummaging through it.
“Can’t you just print one out?” Liv asked.
“I will find it,” he said, raising one hand.
“Please let’s go,” Nora said.
“Ah, here it is!” He flourished a piece of paper in the air. Nora recognized the waiver she had signed like so many in her life, acknowledging the inherent risks, skimming because you would never do anything if you read those things too carefully. Liv snatched it out of his hand.
They set off for the capital in the waiting cab, and Liv took the middle seat this time and read the waiver in silence.
Nora sat as close to the window and as far from her cousin as possible. She pressed her fingers to her temples, which just made the spotty vision worse. If there was a lawsuit, everything would come out. Pedro would have to testify. “I don’t want a lawsuit,” she said. “I just want my kids back. And it wasn’t Pedro’s fault.”
“This thing isn’t binding,” Liv said. “Not if he was criminally negligent.”
“That’s not what matters now,” Nora said.
“People have to be held responsible.”
“We are not so litigious in my country,” Camila said.
Nora waited for the choice things Liv would say about Argentina and its history of wrongs without redress, but instead her cousin pressed her lips together. Nora guessed she was trying to fight her own nature, to maintain peace.
“When we’ve found the kids, we’ll revisit this question,” Liv said. “And then we’ll go after that fucking cruise line and make them pay.”
15.
AFTER GETTING THE women into a taxi, past the clamoring reporters, Benjamin climbed with Raymond and Gunther into a black Suburban sent by the embassy to take them to the capital. He stared out the tinted window at the spreading canopy of trees, the fantastical lushness behind which his children were concealed somewhere. He had been awake all night, searching social media for any hint that someone knew something, hitting SEE TRANSLATION on any post that looked likely. He wished he knew more Spanish.
His mother had been worried, his whole childhood, about things going wrong. Pillows could suffocate you, acid rain was falling from the sky, going barefoot gave you pneumonia. She wouldn’t go to the doctor because she might find out that something was wrong. She’d inherited fear from her own parents the way other people got piano lessons.
His father, on the other hand, was constitutionally unafraid, and could never take Benjamin’s problems seriously. He was bullied at school? Ignore it. He was mugged on the way home? So he lost a couple of bucks, those kids who’d taken it must need it more. The scale was permanently zeroed out, for his father. Even as the Internet grew rabid with anti-Semitism, his father had the unanswerable test case: Are you escaping Nazis on foot, as Benjamin’s grandfather had done at nine, hiding in a wagon with his brother? Are you living in a hole in the ground in Silesia? No? Then enjoy your phenomenal luck.
Benjamin had never really understood how his mother and father got along, but he guessed that they tempered each other, in both senses of the word. The baffling example of the other person hardened each of them in their convictions, but together they reached some kind of livable compromise.
Now he had a problem that even his father would recognize as a problem, and he had come to a new understanding of the paternal disaster scale of his childhood. If he tried to remember frustrations at work, or disagreements with Liv that had once absorbed his attention, he could not even fathom them. All minor regrets had been burned away. Those were the pain o
f touching a hot pan, this was a blowtorch.
His parents were in Cuba until after New Year’s, and he hoped his life might be set right before his mother got back to the news. He wanted to protect her from the knowledge that the sky had actually fallen, this time. The thought of telling her put him in a cold sweat.
When they got to the capital, they stopped at the Argentinian embassy, which was a small office, closed for the Christmas week, but someone was coming in. The heat when they let Gunther out of the Suburban was intense. Then Benjamin and Raymond were sealed back in for the drive to their own embassy.
There was constraint between them now. Raymond had apologized for wanting to play golf, and Benjamin had told him that of course he didn’t need to be sorry. Benjamin had wanted to go, too.
But in truth, he had agreed to let his family go off alone in a strange country because he would’ve felt unmanly turning down the golf. He hadn’t wanted to say to Raymond, “No, I’ll go on the zip-line tour with the ladies, and be strapped into a diaper harness and flung from tree to tree. You men go off in the luxury vehicle to the exclusive sporting club.” He hadn’t even been conscious of the implication, in the moment. He never thought, in his daily life, about being masculine or manly. But now he understood that on some primitive, atavistic level, he had gone to play golf to be a man among men, which in itself was ridiculous.
He kept returning to the idea that Liv would never have let him take the children by himself on an excursion in a foreign country. She didn’t have his mother’s fear, but she did think he was too spacey, he didn’t pay enough attention, he lived too much in his mind. He would never have guessed that the kids would disappear on her watch.
“I wish you’d been here,” she’d said in that clearing, wrapped in a blanket. She thought they’d still have their kids if he had gone along. And it was probably true. It was just a matter of numbers. If there’d been more eyeballs on them, they couldn’t have drifted away.
Instead, he’d been out whacking that infuriating little white ball across the vast green lawn in the sunshine. And he’d enjoyed it. He’d taken an anthropological interest in Gunther’s friend, who had the self-effacing manner of the British upper class in the aftermath of empire. A vague sadness about diminished expectations, although he’d made a fortune in ecotourism.