The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

BOOK TWO

Fourth of July




“You know, Bigger, I’ve long wanted to go into these houses … and just see how your people live.”





—Richard Wright, Native Son





10




Waaaaaaaaaa!

The alarm startled Araceli awake at the lazy hour of 7:30 a.m., the summer sun already blasting through the curtains. On most mornings she would have been long awake, but the memory of the powerful matriarch of the mansion momentarily helpless on the floor had kept her from sleeping well. During the summer the Torres-Thompson household got a later start to the day and Araceli could often spend some time in the morning with the hosts of the Univision morning show as she got dressed, half listening to their interviews with diet experts, the celebrity gossip, the reports on the latest drug murders in Guerrero and Nuevo Laredo, the videos of the dead being pulled from overturned buses, and the like. Now she had witnessed a kind of news event in this home, too close and too raw to be entertainment. The crash and scream had invaded her dreams, causing her to sleep right up to the deadline announced by her digital clock. By now, el señor Scott would have made himself some toast and be out the door—on this morning, perhaps more than any other, he would have wanted to avoid contact with his servant. Araceli took her time getting dressed and put on her white filipina, dreading the stony mood that awaited as soon as she entered the main home; a day of silences from Maureen, followed by the tense sharing of the domestic space in the evening when Scott returned from work. When a man tosses his wife to the ground, there can be no easy forgiveness.

With some trepidation Araceli opened the door to the kitchen, and then the door from the kitchen to the living room. No one, nothing, all quiet, as orderly as she had left it the night before, when she swept up the glass and steel ruins of the coffee table and collected them in two boxes she placed next to the plastic trash barrels outside. Only the conspicuously empty space in the living room hinted at what had happened the night before. Perhaps she should examine the floor for any traces of glass, lest the baby Samantha pick one up and place it in her mouth. Leaning down, Araceli examined the ocher surface of the Saltillo tile floors and found two slivers, each smaller than a child’s fingernail. She held them in her palm to examine them, meditating not so much on the shards as on the unexpected violence that had produced them. This house will not return to normal so quickly. Suddenly Araceli the artist, the Araceli who didn’t care, longed for the ordinary. She was the strange one, the mexicana they couldn’t comprehend, but it would fall to her to bring the Torres-Thompson household back to a calm center by restoring the broken routines: the comfort of served breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, the tonic of a sparkling kitchen and smartly made beds at the end of the day. She tossed the shards into the trash and started breakfast, following the rotation la señora had established on a refrigerator calendar. Friday: Cream of Wheat.

Brandon wandered into the kitchen first, at 8:36, followed by his brother a few minutes later. They sat at the kitchen table, eating silently, their spoons hitting the bottom of their bowls with a comforting clank-clank, Brandon reading a thick book with a dragon on the cover as he ate. Araceli wondered how much they knew about their parents’ altercation the night before. Probably they heard everything, she thought, and this was almost true: they had retreated to the television room and the comfort of cartoon warfare just as the shouting had reached a peak, but before their father had shoved their mother backward into the coffee table. Brandon had guided his softly weeping younger brother away with a “Hey, Keenan, let’s go watch a movie,” and the crash and their mother’s short scream had been lost behind a closed door of sound-swallowing Mexican pine, and in the swirling orchestral theme music that accompanied a boy on his animated martial-arts adventures through a world inhabited by dueling tribes of warriors. When Maureen had shown up sometime later to tell them to get ready for bed, they had assumed everything was normal because they were too young to pick up the muted exhaustion in her voice, too unknowing of the cruelties that adults could inflict upon one another to recognize the meaning in the puffy droop in their mother’s eyes.


Maureen awoke atop a cushion of comforters on the floor of the nursery, next to her daughter’s crib. With its lavender walls, Samantha’s incipient doll collection, and the stuffed purple pony in the corner, the nursery was a safe room, its femininity a shield against the masculine harshness outside. He didn’t follow her there; he didn’t hit her or yell at her with her baby girl by her side. Having failed to injure Maureen with his words, Scott had infected the household with fear and unpredictability and the silencing power of his muscle. He unleashed a monster, to ravage her body and violate unspoken codes, to inflict the injuries his words could not. At first the argument about Maureen’s spending on the desert garden had played out as the mirror image of the argument about Scott’s neglect of la petite rain forest. In this case it was Scott who was the aggrieved party, having been humiliated before his employees, but somehow Maureen had wrested the upper hand, shifting the discussion to Scott’s failings as husband and parent, and their roots in his emotional distance. She had taken the argument back to South Whittier, to that sad little two-story home of thin drywall and crabgrass lawns, with the box rooms that had mirrors along the walls to create the illusion of space. It had been her misfortune to visit this property as their courtship reached its climax, to see the Torres family home in all its faded, lower-middle-class glory, and last night she had allowed herself to blurt out certain truths he refused to see, long-held but never-spoken observations that focused on that brittle woman whose admonitions were the font of her husband’s ambition and also much of his self-doubt. It occurred to Maureen now, in the morning, that bringing her late mother-in-law to the conversation was not a good idea: the rage she provoked by doing so was entirely predictable, but not what happened next. He had taken two purposeful and irrational steps toward her, and attacked her with the muscles of his forearms and hands, sending her sprawling backward across the room and into the table. There was the moment of stunned helplessness as she lost her balance and the table collapsed and shattered underneath her, followed, seconds later, by a moment of clarity, the sudden understanding of a long-suppressed fear.

I always expected him to do this.

Maybe from the first time they dated she sensed that the nervous, faded-cotton exterior of Scott Torres concealed a roiling core. That was the attraction to him in the first place, wasn’t it? Before she had seen the home in South Whittier, before she had lived with the man, she saw the anguished exertions of an artist searching for perfection, though he possessed only some of the language and social gifts that oozed from painters, actors, and writers. He suffered to bring his creations into the world, and when they did not come he could turn sullen and angry in a disturbingly adolescent kind of way. His daydreams and his projects were his best friends and companions, and often they caused his face to brighten with a mischievous sparkle. There was something charming, she decided, about a man whose brilliance lay in solving problems that could not be easily explained in words. I will make you my project, Scott Torres. She had taken this shy man and, like a wizardess, had given him at least some charm, and a surplus of family riches. And now he had rewarded her with the same common violence that sent women to shelters. Hours later she could still feel his assault just below her collarbone, and see the two bruises that seemed to float on the surface of her skin like jellyfish.

Fatherhood did this to men. They weren’t prepared for it. After the boys were born there were days when Scott glared at the clutter of baby paraphernalia in their home, the spit-up stains scattered on the rugs and their clothing, with the resentful eyes of a prison convict. What? Did you expect it to be easy? This sagging you feel around your eyes, the ache in your arms, that is called parenthood, and it is no longer the exclusive province of women. Then came the scattered moments of aggression when his toddlers committed minor sins, when Brandon was a two-year-old just learning the power of felt-tip pens to deface freshly painted walls, or when Keenan tossed a wine glass on the floor, and Scott blared a too-loud “No!” When she was halfway into carrying Samantha, he punched the wall, leaving a crater for a week before fixing it, never bothering to explain what had set him off. It’s true what my mother said. You can think you know someone as intimately as they can be known, you can commune happily with their odors and their idiosyncrasies for years, but then they show you something distasteful, something frightening precisely at the moment when you’re too far in to get out. Maureen’s father was old Missouri Irish and the hurtful memory of his living room explosions had led her to adopt her mother’s maiden name when she was eight een. Now the neighbors had likely heard Scott too, they knew that his wife and children were inside cowering. They all knew.

Maureen felt the curtains of an ancient, unerasable shame being drawn across the windows of this bright home. I have to flee. Again. When she was eleven Maureen walked out and no one heard the slap of the screen door because her older sister and her mother were in full-throated battle with her father. On that day she ran out in her spring sundress and sandals, jumping down the steps, running to the corner, and then walking when she looked over her shoulder and saw no one was following, past other small houses like hers in that Missouri river town, underneath the impossible pinks of the flowering dogwoods, past the lonely Baptist church and the venerable, abandoned gas station and its gravel bays. Past the fields at the edge of town, with pebbles in her sandals, she walked slowly toward the unfettered horizon that loomed over the stubs of early corn, feeling comfort in the promise of other fields fallow and freshly plowed, and then to the hills where tractors cut plow lines that flowed around the undulating contours of the landscape, until she finally stood alone at the entrance to a solitary farm. Two silos stood guard there, each looking like a man with steel-pipe arms and a tin-roof hat, and she thought how much better it would be to have a father who was as tall and stately and silent. She thought these things until tires rolled on the dirt path behind her, and she turned and saw the police car that would take her home.

Now Maureen would leave and stay gone for a few days, and her absence would teach Scott a lesson. She would leave and decide later whether, and under what conditions, she would come back. But how would she cope on the road with three children, driving on the interstate?

How long could she even control her boys in a claustrophobic hotel room? She envisioned herself with her three children at a nearby hotel suite, the boys pushing each other backward into the fold-out couch, the minibar, in subconscious imitation of their father. Did she really want to be around that boy energy, their unpredictable physicality? A woman alone with two boys and a baby girl would not work. Her mother was in St. Louis, and if Scott was right about the credit cards Maureen wouldn’t be able to buy plane tickets to get there. Maureen went over her options during a mostly sleepless night and in the last hour before dawn she knew exactly what she would do: she would raid the emergency cash that the ever-cautious Scott kept in a washroom drawer next to the earthquake kit. And then she would leave with Samantha for a few days, allowing Scott to contemplate her absence and take care of the boys. Araceli would be there to keep the household from falling apart and the boys from going hungry. It was what she had always wanted to do anyway, to take off with Samantha for a few days, for a “girls’ vacation.”

As she carried a half-asleep Samantha through the house and to the car, she thought, It’s going to be another hot day. For the moment, however, there would be the chill of early morning, and she tossed a blanket over her daughter. She wanted to be out the door before Scott woke up, to avoid any further, unpleasant confrontations and present him with a fait accompli, but when she entered the garage at 7:45 a.m. she discovered his car was already gone; he was off to work about an hour earlier than usual. This did not surprise her, though it did cause her to pause in her escape plan: if she left now, her two boys would be alone in the house, because Araceli was still in the guesthouse, and not yet at work, separated from Brandon and Keenan by two walls and the five paces or so it took to walk to the kitchen’s back door. Damn it! To leave now would violate a taboo of motherhood: she would have to carry Samantha back into the house and start her escape all over again. If I go back in, I might not leave at all, I might lose my nerve. She opened the garage door to confirm his car was also absent from the driveway, then stepped outside into the morning air. Now the light came on in the kitchen, and from the driveway Maureen could see, through the window, the sleepy rebellion on the face of her Mexican employee as she began the breakfast routine. Araceli was in the house, and the sight of her was enough to set Maureen on her journey again, to surrender to the momentum and sense of emancipatory purpose that had brought her to the driveway in the first place. She opened the car door and gave a faint sigh as she freed herself of her sleeping daughter’s weight and strapped her into the car seat. She had a vague idea of where she was headed: to that spa in the high desert mountains above Joshua Tree she had read about in the arts section of the newspaper, the one said to be relatively cool even in the heat of summer, the one with the babysitters who took care of your child while they pampered you in steam and lavender.

Maureen was outside the gates of the Estates, turning onto the road that skirted through the meadows, when she realized she had forgotten her cell phone. It was too late to go back home, if she did so she might cancel her expedition altogether, so she directed her car to the first gas station and a public phone and called directory assistance, and reached a half-awake clerk at the spa-hotel and made a reservation. Minutes later, mother and daughter were on the unencumbered, early morning highway, heading out of the city, sprinting eastward in the face of an incoming bumper-to-bumper, heading toward the dry foothills at the edge of the metropolis.


Inside the game room, beneath the flat-screen and the game console, Scott Torres awoke on the floor at 5:35 a.m. after a night of surprisingly uninterrupted sleep, six hours in which the memory of what had happened in the living room disappeared in the inky cube of a lightless room and he lived in blissful nothingness. Within three seconds of opening his eyes, the series of events of the night before replayed themselves in his memory with the stark simplicity of those PowerPoint presentations the executives concocted on the fourth floor at Elysian Systems. He remembered the staccato dialogue of exchanged insults, each slightly more crude than the next, and then his attempt to get away while Maureen followed him around the room, yelling at the back of his shoulders. That’s what happens when you call a woman that word you should never use: they either sulk away or come at you with newfound ferocity. She had counterattacked with a spiteful commentary about Scott’s being unable to see a horizon beyond “the stupid stucco coffin” in which his mother, separated from his father, had lived her final days alone; it was a remark so stunningly cold that it had caused the argument to stop while Scott took in the realization that he had married a woman who could insult the dead. His thoughts had turned to the many ways he might impose his will with his hands at precisely the moment Maureen took a step toward him to renew the argument: he pushed her away with the full, furious strength a man in his early forties could muster, a half-defensive shove that had sent her sprawling backward into the coffee table.

For an instant before she lost her balance he felt a strange and childlike gratification. At last! When she hit the table—such a fragile construction, that piece of Mexican craftwork—and Araceli entered the room, it all disappeared. Now a hollow numbness occupied the space between his eyes. Maureen had violated a trust by spending that money, she had damaged their family, but of course he had lost the moral high ground when he pushed her. Would she ever forgive him for her fall, see the full picture of events, and apologize for what she had done and said? There is a less than fifty percent probability. Or would she believe that her fall and the broken table had absolved her of any need to acknowledge how vicious she had been? The much more likely outcome. If she’d managed to get a full night’s sleep she might feel something other than the outraged sense of victimhood of the night before, when he feared, for a moment, that she would call the police. By the feminist calculus that followed these events, he was an abuser, a male inflictor of bodily harm, and therefore would be permanently expelled from the garden of family love, into the purgatory inhabited by the alcoholics, the goons, and the serial adulterers. Perhaps, after the erasures a few hours of sleep could bring, Maureen would see the crash and fall for what they really were: an accident, an act of mutual stupidity and clumsiness, like a pratfall in a comedy skit. This is what happens, he would tell her, when two middle-aged people push their sleep-deprived bodies to raise small children, a task we should leave for twentysomething decath-letes, ballerinas, and other spry and limber people.

Scott would tell her these things in due time, but after just a few minutes awake, he had decided that for the moment a full retreat was in order, an escape from his wife’s sense of entitlement, from her new fascination with rare desert fauna, which appeared to have replaced earlier fascinations with rustic Italian furniture and abstract California art. Let her figure it out on her own: or rather, with Araceli, who did the bulk of the work, who kept the house livable and the children fed and gave Maureen time to dream up schemes that would empty their bank accounts—now, as many times before, he thought of Araceli as a kind of subtraction from his wife. In Maine’s “Down East,” where his mother was from, and in the unknown Mexican places his father had lived, they understood about respect and responsibility. He was still the son of scrappers and survivors.

I have to get the hell out of here. It was what he told himself those last days at MindWare, when he longed to work with adults again. Living with Maureen was looking like the final act at his roller-coaster start-up, when the Big Man spent an extravagance on five-star hotels, dinners at restaurants on the Strip, and a thousand dollars in golf lessons in a quixotic campaign to seduce the venture capitalists, raise cash, and fend off the board. At some point you had to say, Stop, it’s over. Suddenly, those old sayings of his Mexican father didn’t sound so silly and quaint: Live cheap and smell sweet. Never hang your hat where you can’t reach it. After grabbing a few clothes, he was out the door and in his car, gliding down toward the ocean with only the red eye of Scorpio watching him.


Such was the domestic discipline in the home on Paseo Linda Bonita that several hours passed before either Araceli or the two boys noticed that Maureen and Scott were gone. Having been conditioned by a half summer’s worth of their mother’s anti-television, anti-computer exhortations, Brandon and Keenan began their day with appropriately mind-nurturing and solitary activities. It was a quiet, sisterless morning, and through the open summer windows and the screens the house filled with the squeaky chee-deep chee-deep of the tree swallows that were acquainting themselves with the ocotillo in the backyard. Saman-tha’s usual prespeech utterances and screams were not there to ring in the ears of her brothers, though the boys were not yet conscious of her absence. The boys did not know that their sister was already halfway to the Sonoran Desert with their mother just as they were finishing their Cream of Wheat with Araceli. Keenan drifted over to the Room of a Thousand Wonders and began assembling a three-level spacecraft with Danish plastic mini-bricks, while Brandon climbed onto the couch in the living room and lost himself in the fourth volume of a detective-fantasy thriller for “middle readers” that involved teams of elves capable of time-bending magic. So gripping was the escape of the boy-detective protagonist from yet another band of machine-gun-toting criminals, that Brandon failed to notice that the coffee table was missing.

After the usual and easy post-breakfast cleanup in the kitchen, Araceli wandered about the house picking up dirty laundry, starting with the pajamas in the boys’ room, and then moving to the nursery. She was preoccupied, once again, with Felipe, because after putting away the saucepan she had used to prepare the Cream of Wheat, she had a sudden premonition that he would call her today—perhaps it was some sort of psychic displacement produced by having witnessed the fight between Scott and Maureen the night before. In the presence of violent disagreement, a germ of happiness might take root. Hoy el gordito me va a llamar. Araceli was daydream-dancing with her “little fat man” when she entered the nursery and noticed the comforter on the floor and quickly surmised that Maureen had slept there. A few minutes later the conclusion was confirmed when Araceli entered the master bedroom and found the bed exactly as she had left it yesterday afternoon. Clearly, el señor Scott had not slept here either; he had probably bedded down with the big television set, and indeed, on her final stop on the laundry search Araceli found a sleeping bag and pillow tossed on the floor there. Well, of course they didn’t make up before going to bed, that was no surprise. Araceli made her way to the laundry room, got the first load of Maureen’s clothes into the washer after checking for and failing to see any blood: It appears they did not kill themselves. Finally, she circled back to the kitchen, unsurprised that in her wanderings through the house her path did not cross with that of la señora Maureen. It was a big house and on many days Maureen wandered in and out, unannounced, quite often.

At 12:15 p.m. the boys came back to the kitchen table for lunch, and it was only after they had devoured the last of the chicken tenders Araceli had prepared that Keenan, who was always slightly more attuned to any change in his surroundings than his older brother, finally asked Araceli casually, “Where’s my mom?”

Araceli turned from the sink, where she had a saucepan soaking in lightly soaped water, and faced Keenan.

“¿No está en la casa?”

“No, she’s not here.”

“That is strange,” Araceli said. It occurred to Araceli, for a second, that she should utter something to disimular, one of those verbal misdirections that Mexicans are especially good at, a fiction such as, Oh, now I remember, she went to the market, that would lift the look of mild concern that had suddenly affixed itself to Keenan’s hazel eyes. Instead she said nothing and thought how on any other day Maureen exiting the house unannounced without the two boys for an hour or two or three wouldn’t cause her any concern, but after the events of the night before …? Given the swirling cloud of disorder and emotional collapse gathering around this household, anything was possible. One day a crew of men hacking the garden with machetes, the next her patrones wrestling in the living room. What next? Maybe my crazy jefa left the baby with me too and didn’t tell me. In the time it took to scrub the saucepan the idea morphed from preposterous to credible. The baby is wandering somewhere alone in the house! I have to find the baby! Araceli bolted from the kitchen, her hands dripping with dishwater, leaving Keenan’s unanswered “What’s wrong?” in her wake as she moved in big, loping strides to the living room, and to the nursery and through the hallways, into the walk-in closet, calling out, “Samanta! Samanta!” eating the “th” in much the same way the baby herself would in six months’ time when she tried, for the first time, to pronounce her own name. Finally, Araceli sprinted out of the house and into the backyard, across the lawn, and toward the cool, still blue plane of the swimming pool. No, please, no, not here, aquí no, in the name of Nuestra Señora Purísima, no. The baby was not in the pool, nor in the desert garden, nor anywhere else within the confines of 107 Paseo Linda Bonita, because Maureen had taken the baby with her, of course. Araceli could see that the baby was with la señora Maureen. There was no need to panic.

Back in the living room, Araceli tried to regain her breath and her sense of composure. She stood at the empty section of tiled floor where the coffee table had once stood and tried to sort out what exactly was happening in this household.


After the last of the lunch dishes had been put away, at about the time Araceli had removed the ground turkey from the freezer to begin to defrost for dinner, she began contemplating calling Maureen on her cell phone. This presented a small problem of etiquette. For all her feistiness and independence of spirit, Araceli was still a slave to certain customs and habits, and her undeniably inferior social standing prevented Araceli from immediately picking up the phone and demanding of her jefa: Where are you and when are you coming back? That wasn’t Araceli’s place; she had to come up with a pretext for calling, something related to her professional duties, such as they were. The better part of an hour passed, with Araceli distractedly wiping off counters and tabletops and sweeping floors that were already as spotless and shimmering as they were ever going to be, before she thought of something plausible to say: she would simply ask Maureen if the children would eat Spanish rice for dinner. This would be an exceedingly thin and probably somewhat transparent reason for calling, although la señora had mentioned before the onset of summer something about forcing the boys to broaden their palates and working a few vegetables into their diet of processed meats and cheeses. Araceli would now suggest that Latin American staple, asking if she should throw in some peas and carrots. She moved to the refrigerator and the list of “emergency phone numbers” located there, a typed list Maureen had prepared on Scott’s computer more than a year earlier, in one of her last acts of domesticity before she went into labor with Samantha. The list had been made for Araceli and for Guadalupe, neither of whom found the need to consult it, and it had not been updated since.

Maureen, cell was at the top of the list and Araceli quickly punched the numbers into the kitchen phone, anticipating her boss’s voice on the other end and the calming effect it would have not just on Araceli, but also on the children once Araceli could provide information about their mother’s whereabouts and expected hour of return. It was 2:29 p.m., according to the oven clock, and the boys were now ensconced in front of the television set, aware that they had done so without permission for the simple reason that their mother wasn’t around to be asked. Araceli listened with her ear on the receiver and began to worry after the fourth ring, surprised and a bit angry at the sixth and seventh rings. The ringing stopped and the voice mail message began. “Hi, you’ve reached Maureen Thompson …”

Araceli found herself answering, “Señora,” until she realized it was a recorded voice. She tried again with the same result. Something strange is going on, Araceli decided, looking at the clock again. 2:34 p.m. For the first time, Araceli wondered if Maureen would be home by the time el señor Scott arrived home from work at 5:45, and Araceli pessimistically concluded that the answer was no. She leaves me with her two boys all day without telling me. ¡Qué barbaridad! Up to now, her boss had been the epitome of responsibility and what Mexicans call empeño, the putting of effort and thought into one’s actions. Maureen was precisely the kind of person hundreds of thousands of Mexicans came to the United States hoping to work for, a smart and civilized employer who never needed to be reminded it was payday, and who with her daily conduct taught you some of the small secrets of North American success, such as the monthly calendar of events posted on the refrigerator and in the boys’ bedroom. June 2: School is out. June 22: Keenan’s day! August 17: Ob-gyn. August 24: Brandon’s day! September 5: School begins! © Planning, organization, compartmentalization. Respect and awareness for the advance of the clock, the ritual and efficient squeezing of events and chores into each day and hour. These were the hallmarks of daily life with Maureen Thompson.

These thoughts occupied Araceli as she stood in the living room before the picture window, absentmindedly staring at the lawn, which was returning, again, to a state of unevenness and unkemptness, when she heard a faint electronic tone. After much circular wandering through the house, she traced the sound to the backyard and the ocotillo: at the very top of the tallest arm of the desert plant, a mockingbird was imitating the tone emitted by Maureen’s cell phone, a series of four marimba notes. A few seconds later Araceli heard the sound repeated, this time clearly coming from the master bedroom, and she rushed back inside. In the half darkness of the late afternoon a light glowed near one of the lamps on the nightstand. Araceli moved to pick up the device, something she never would have imagined herself doing just that morning, because there were certain personal objects in the home she never touched—wallets, jewelry, and loose bills left lying about.

On this day, however, the unexplained absence of her boss caused such objects to begin to lose their radioactivity, and Araceli picked up the phone with the tips of her fingers, like the detectives in those American television dramas, and read the message on the display: 7 MISSED CALLS.

Araceli had left Mexico City just as the cell phone craze had taken off, and had never owned such a device. She did not know that pressing two or three buttons would reveal the identity of the callers, in this case herself (HOME) and SCOTT, who had just phoned five times in the past hour from his office in an attempt to talk to his wife directly.

Scott usually arrived, punctually, at 5:45 p.m., an hour that Araceli knew well because it marked the beginning of the winding-down phase of her workday: el señor Scott would come in through the door that led to the garage, and his sons would bother him about playing in the backyard or starting a game of chess, and Samantha might teeter-run to him with her arms raised. This was the signal for Araceli to leave dinner in a handful of covered Pyrex dishes ready to be served, ask Maureen if she needed anything more, and then retire to her room with her own dinner, to return later for the final cleanup. Such were the work routines carved into Araceli’s day during four years of service. Rarely were these rhythms broken: the light and weather in the outside world shifted, with dinner served in darkness in the winter, with white sunshine outside in the summer, and once with a rain of ash visible through the windows. Awaiting the arrival of this hour now became Araceli’s quiet obsession. She watched the clock on the oven advance past five, and then walked into the living room to check on the Scandinavian timepiece on the dresser to see if it had the same time. The boys were taking care of themselves. After a motherless lunch, they could feel their mother’s authority in the home waning further, and they had switched on their handheld video games.

Her putative hour of emancipation came and went without Scott coming through the door. The pasta and albóndigas were ready. She’d finished her work for the day. Where is this man? At 6:45 p.m. Araceli impulsively walked out the front door, down the path that led through the lawn, to the sidewalk of Paseo Linda Bonita and its silent and peopleless cul-de-sac. She stood with her arms folded and looked down the street, hoping to see el señor Scott’s car coming around the corner, but the vista never changed from the blank-page sweep of wide roadway. He’s not coming home either. No lo puedo creer. They’ve abandoned me. The sun was just beginning its rush toward the daily ocean splashdown and Brandon and Keenan were in the house without a parent in sight. She could hear the air-conditioning turn off suddenly in the home next door, and then in another, leaving a disconcerting silence that soon took on an idiotic, satirical quality, as if she were standing not in a real neighborhood, but rather on a stage set crafted to represent vacant American suburbia. Why is it that you almost never see anyone out here? What goes on in these luxurious boxes that keeps people inside? There was no human witness on Paseo Linda Bonita to see Araceli in her moment of distress, no nosy neighbor to take note of the anomaly of a servant in her filipina waiting impatiently for her bosses to arrive, gritting her teeth at the darkening street. Araceli began to contemplate various scenarios that might explain this new and strangest turn of events. Perhaps the violent encounter in the living room had been followed by others, with Maureen finally deciding to leave her husband for good. Or maybe she was in the hospital, while Scott had taken flight lest he be arrested. Or he might have killed her and buried her in the backyard. One saw these news reports about American couples bringing the narrative of their relationships to a demented end with kitchen knives and shovels: Araceli had expanded her knowledge of U.S. geography from the maps in Univision stories that showed the places where North American men murdered their pregnant wives and fiancées, places with names like Nebraska, Utah, and New Hampshire.

Araceli would like to leave too, but she could not, thanks to the chain that ran back to the house and those two boys anchoring her to this piece of California real estate. She could not run away, or stray too far, because there were children in the home and to leave them alone would be an abdication of responsibility, even if they had been left in Araceli’s care against her will. ¿Qué diría mi querida madre? Subconsciously, Araceli began to pace the sidewalk, reaching the boundaries of the next property and turning back, because anything might happen to those boys, unsupervised: they might even start a fire. She could not therefore simply continue walking down the hill, and this realization caused her to stamp her foot into the concrete like a child forced back inside for supper.

Araceli was still outside, about twenty-five yards beyond the closed front door, when the phone rang inside the Torres-Thompson home. She did not hear it. Anticipating that the person calling was his mother, Keenan interrupted his game play at the second ring and ran from the living room to the kitchen, stood on his tiptoes, and grabbed the dangling cord of the receiver from its perch five feet off the ground on the kitchen wall on the fourth ring.

“Hello? Mommy?”

“Hi, sweetie.”

“Mommy, where are you?”

“I’m just taking a little break.”

“A break?”

“Yes, honey. A little vacation.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m angry with your father.” “Oh.”

The pause that followed lasted long enough for even young Keenan to feel the need to fill it, though he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Mommy loves you,” Maureen said finally. She was in a hotel room with musty old Navajo rugs and sage burning on an incense tray, watching her baby girl devour a banana. The squeaky tones of her younger son’s voice evoked images of domestic routine: Araceli must have the situation in hand, Maureen thought; she is helping Scott, and Maureen felt her concerns about the boys and home she had left behind lift quickly. “Mommy’s just a little angry with your father.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Soon, honey. Soon.”

These words comforted Keenan sufficiently that he started thinking about getting back to his game. It had been ages since he’d played it as long as he had today.

“What have you been doing today?”

“We’re playing on our Game Boys,” he said. “I got to the top of Cookie Mountain. Brandon showed me how to do it. It was really cool.”

Maureen winced. Scott gets home and the first thing he does is let them play those mindless games.

“Did you eat?”

Keenan looked across the kitchen and noticed the dishes Araceli had left on the counter. “We’re having spaghetti and meatballs,” he said. Maureen heard the “we” and assumed it included Scott. Satisfied that her boys were being taken care of by Araceli, and that Scott was hovering nearby, she said goodbye to her son and hung up the phone quickly, the better to avoid any awkward conversations with her husband.

Years of being married and raising children had brought Scott’s and Maureen’s parental clocks into sync. Thus, a minute or so after Keenan had replaced the phone in its cradle, the phone rang again. Keenan had returned to the living room and turned his Game Boy back on, and now he circled back to the kitchen, picking up the phone on the eighth ring.

“Hello?”

“Hi! Keenan?”

“Dad?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Where are you?” Keenan said. Scott was sufficiently distracted by his surroundings and the circumstances under which he was making the call—he was standing in the patch of grass by the street outside Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s apartment building—that he failed to notice the subtle verbal clue that perhaps not everything was right in his home.

“I’m taking a little break from being home.”

“A vacation?” Keenan asked.

“Yeah, like a vacation.”

Keenan was less interested in this conversation than the one he had just had with his mother. Hearing their two voices within minutes of each other had returned to him a sense of normality, and he wanted to get back to his game, and also start eating the spaghetti and meatballs on the counter.

“How’s Mommy doing?”

“She says she’s really angry at you.”

His wife had spent the day filling his sons’ ears with soliloquies about what a horrible man he was, the completely predictable sequel to the pratfalls and crashes of the night before.

“I know she’s angry at me,” Scott said, the words coming out with a sad sense of finality. In an instant, his mood changed. How dare she try to turn the children against me. “I’m angry at her too,” he said. He imagined his wife hovering nearby, and that she might take the phone away from Keenan and start to harass him about where he was, so he said his goodbyes quickly, telling his son to listen to what his mother told him to do.

“Okay, Dad,” Keenan said, even though his mother wasn’t there, because like his father, he was in a hurry to get off the phone too.