Seven Minutes to Noon

“Unless I took her with me. She was waiting.”
    “She’s gone.”
    “I know. I came back to bring Austin. He can’t live this way.” A tremor of shame passed over Tim’s gaunt face.
    “I should kill you.”
    “Let me find my daughter and then this will all be over. I promise you. Please, Alice, let me go so I can find her.”
    There was a sound on the stairs. Austin had come halfway down and was watching them.
    Alice lowered the gun to her side, slipped it into her pocket.
    “Her name is Ivy,” she told Tim, just before he left.

EPILOGUE
    Two years later
    The minivan bumped and careened along Mexico’s Pacific coast, heading south from Puerto Vallarta to Cruz de Loreto. The road had spiraled out of the town, with its tiered seaside villas, nearly two hours ago. Alice was beginning to worry. Lizzie hadn’t mentioned the roughness of the terrain when she had given Alice, Mike and the kids their Christmas surprise. She had gone to the Hotelito with her new husband, George, on their honeymoon last spring and in her enthusiasm had booked the family vacation then; the success of her latest movie had afforded her such extravagances. It was supposed to be a luxury hotel with no electricity, fabulous food and candlelight every evening — a beautiful thought. And indeed, on the Web site, the palafitas with their thatched roofs looked heavenly. But the deeper into rural Mexico they got, the less comfortable Alice felt. The land was blanched dry from the heat. The houses, clustered together, were hovels at best. The occasional roadside restaurants were mostly rusted tin cans of buildings advertising beer and buzzing with flies.
    Mike was sitting up front with their driver, Miguel, and so she couldn’t read his reaction to the obvious isolation of this place. Years ago, when it was just them, the adventure would have thrilled her. But now she wasa mother with five children. What if one of them got sick? Lizzie had said the Hotelito had access to medical care, but Alice saw nothing that indicated these tracts of sparsely populated, arid land were anything but forgotten third-world villages.
    Nell, Peter and Austin, in the van’s third row, seemed to love the bumpy ride. But the toddlers, in the second row with Alice, were looking a little green. Henry was fast asleep in his car seat, but Oscar was getting agitated; he needed a diaper change.
    Alice hated to distract Miguel — she had noticed that every car and truck they passed had a cracked windshield, as did this van — but they were going to have to pull over. She leaned forward so he could hear her above the loud rumble of tires on the rocky dirt road.
    “Excuse me,” she said, knowing Miguel spoke fairly good English — he worked at the Hotelito and had welcomed them graciously at the airport. “We have a dirty diaper situation back here. Any chance we could pull over?”
    Miguel twisted around, saw Oscar’s pout and swerved to an abrupt stop in front of a broken-down shack with a hand-painted sign, CAFÉ. Miguel hopped out of the front passenger’s seat and slid open the van’s side door. The three older children immediately scrambled out. Mike stayed in the van with sleeping Henry, while Alice unlatched Oscar and grabbed the diaper bag.
    Once outside the air-conditioned van, Alice was hit by the richly sweet country air. The humidity here was different than at home, where it settled into your lungs and made you suffocate. Here, it was heavily warm with light breezes that grazed your skin, circulating around you. All of a sudden, in this forgotten place, Alice felt elated to be so far from home.
    Miguel had taken the big kids into the café and bought them orange sodas in glass bottles. They stood ten feet from a trio of Mexican children, the opposing sets eyeing each other until finally a boy reached into his torn redshorts and brought out a stack of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. The gesture instantly broke the distance between them as the two groups nearly fell on each other.
    “You see?” Miguel said, smiling. “Anywhere you go, kids find their way together.”
    “They should work at the UN.” Mike had stepped out of the van and was standing near sleeping Henry.
    Alice set Oscar down on his feet and he clung to her legs. Henry was the explorer of the two; Oscar mostly stayed close. There was a patch of grass at the side of the café that looked like as good a place as any to unfold the changing mat. Oscar laid himself down and lifted his legs; he