Do Not Become Alarmed, Page 3

  “Were you napping?”

  “Yes,” her mother said.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Is everything all right?” her mother asked.

  “Is it just you and Dad in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh,” Penny said. “Okay. We’ll go back to the Kids’ Club.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the little ones?”

  “Yes.” It was probably true. As long as they didn’t climb over the railings—which no one would anyway, because it made your stomach do crazy flips just to put your feet on the lowest rung—nothing was going to happen.

  “Then we’ll see you later,” her mother said. “Go straight back to the Kids’ Club.” The door closed with a click.

  “Why didn’t you tell her?” Marcus whispered, as they headed back down the corridor.

  “Because they’re napping,” Penny said. She knew there was something else going on, and she didn’t. “Let’s try the tennis court!”

  They ran back up the staircase, to the very top of the ship. The court was smaller than for normal tennis, and had nets around it to keep the balls from flying into the sea. The racquets were flat and wooden, with little holes to let the air through. Penny and Marcus were both breathing hard by the time they got there.

  The family from Argentina was playing doubles. The brother, Hector, was about to serve, his dark gold hair pushed back from his forehead. Penny watched his long, tan arm go up, and the swing of his racquet coming down. His sister whacked it back to him across the net. Their father’s silver hair was damp with sweat. Their mother wore necklaces and bracelets with big colored stones in them. A jeweled family. Penny thought they looked like royalty. Hector and his mother won the point.

  When the ball was dead, Penny asked, “Have you seen my little brother, and June?”

  They hadn’t. Hector walked over. “Did you try the basketball court?”

  Penny felt a little dizzy, with his kind eyes looking down at her. Her stomach did one of those flips. “No.”

  They tried the basketball court, where the Filipino crewmen played at night. No one was there.

  They checked all three swimming pools, even the one where kids weren’t allowed. Penny experienced a thrill of fear, not entirely unpleasant, at the idea of seeing Sebastian’s blond hair at the bottom of a pool, beneath the rippling water, like pale seaweed. She would have to dive in and swim to the bottom, through the blue silence. Then she would pull him up into the sunlight above. She was a good swimmer, with a strong kick. She longed to rescue someone. Would there be hope for Sebastian, underwater so long? She shivered, delighted and horrified. He would lie motionless on the deck, and then he would cough and start to breathe.

  But Sebastian and June weren’t in the pools or the hot tubs.

  The Russian steward, Yuri, was working in the humid glassed-in spa café. “Ah, the little astronaut,” he said to Marcus, and he patted his hair.

  Marcus flinched. “We’re looking for my sister,” he said. “And Penny’s brother.”

  Yuri frowned. “When did you see them?”

  “At lunch,” Penny said. “They didn’t check back into the Kids’ Club.”

  “I call security,” Yuri said.

  “No!” Penny said. “They’ll tell our parents!”

  Yuri raised his bushy black eyebrows. “Yes, of course.”

  A security officer in a white uniform and a white belt answered the call. He led Penny and Marcus to a huge cabin at the end of their own corridor. It was enormous, with a shiny black grand piano, and a bar with a green glass top. This must be where the rich people stayed. Sebastian and June were outside on the big balcony, on the other side of the sliding glass door. A kneeling man in coveralls was doing something with a screwdriver to the door’s lower track.

  Sebastian and June pounded on the glass with their flat palms.

  “Tell them to stop that,” the security officer said.

  “Shh!” Penny said, making gestures and waving. “It’s okay!”

  The little ones calmed down and returned to watching the man work, through the glass.

  The security officer said the children must have wandered into the suite, which had the door open. But the workman coming to fix the slider had been delayed, and the children had gone out through the balcony door. It had slid shut behind them and stuck.

  “We’re not supposed to be alone on our balcony,” Penny reported. “My mother doesn’t think it’s safe.”

  “That’s true,” the security officer said. “She could keep better track of her children.”

  “It’s not her fault,” Penny said, feeling loyal. “They were supposed to be at the Kids’ Club.”

  The man in coveralls got the sliding door open, and Sebastian and June tumbled into the cabin, talking over each other. They’d gone in to see the piano and then they wanted to see if there were dolphins, because someone said there were dolphins, and the door got stuck, and they had shouted and shouted for so long before anyone came. And now they were hungry. Could they go to the buffet?

  “First, we go to see your parents,” the security officer said.

  “They’re taking a nap,” Penny said.

  The officer raised his eyebrows. “Time to wake up.”

  So they all trooped off to the cabin. The officer rapped loudly on the door, and Penny’s mother answered—dressed, to Penny’s relief. Her hair was only a normal amount of messy. Sebastian charged into her arms. Nora and Raymond arrived next, in gym clothes. There were apologies, and a few belated tears.

  “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.

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sp; 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.

  “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.”

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bsp; “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?”

  “Everyone on the ship is too ancient for that. And there are sharks here. And riptides.” Liv had once been caught in a riptide, at a beach with no lifeguard, on a Hawaiian vacation with her parents when she was fifteen. She had watched the beach getting farther away, and thought This is how it ends. When she finally made her way in, she’d collapsed exhausted on the sand. “There’s an animal preserve,” she said, “with howler monkeys and coatimundis.”

  “What’s a coatimundi?”

  “A small mammal with a stripy tail.”

  “We have skunks in LA.”

  “Wait, that’s four hours in a bus.”

  “Just shoot me now.”

  “How about a zip-line tour of the rain forest canopy?” she asked. “Forty-five minutes by bus each way.”

  Benjamin perked up. “Seriously? I wonder what kind of rig they use.”

  She should have known it would be cables and carabiners that would lure him, not monkeys. She swung her legs off the bed and headed out of the cabin before he changed his mind. In the corridor, she ran into Perla, their stewardess.

  “Will you go outside tomorrow, ma’am?” Perla asked.

  Liv felt a guilty twinge. “Going outside” meant getting off the ship, which for Perla meant a chance to use a phone card to call her kids in Manila. Every time Liv saw a stewardess plumping pillows in an open cabin, she was stunned by the heartache of it. Never seeing her kids. Missing out on the tiny changes, the lost teeth, the dawning look of some small discovery on their faces. Making strangers’ beds while your children learned to read. Perla didn’t need praise for her towel-animal skills or questions about her kids’ ages. She needed Liv to get out of the cabin so she could get her work done early and call home.