The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

15




Not long after the lynch mob dispersed, Keenan put his thumb in his mouth and wandered to the backyard and slumped down in a lawn chair. Araceli found him there, and realized her charges needed to go to bed. She approached Lucía, who offered her bedroom, saying, “I’m going to be out late.” The boys could sleep on her bed, and Araceli in a sleeping bag on the floor, she said, and soon Brandon and Keenan were dozing off underneath a poster of Frederick Douglass, a photograph of a teenage Spanish matador clipped from a magazine, and the orange and silver tassel from Lucía’s high school graduation cap. Araceli dozed off quickly too, studying the image of the bullfighter in the dim light projected by a streetlamp through the sunflowers on Lucía’s curtains, and wondering what her gordito Felipe would look like in a bullfighter’s tights: comical, most likely. She wondered if he had tried to call in her absence.


“My children are missing. My two sons.” “What is your name?” “Maureen Thompson.”

“And you are their mother?”

“Yes.”

“Are you calling me from your home?”

“Yes.”

Maureen had punched 911 into the kitchen phone, and had reached a female voice that was following the passionless protocol of emergency operators, establishing essential facts in a weirdly detached voice.

“What are their names?”

“Brandon and Keenan. Torres. Torres-Thompson.”

“How old are they?”

“Brandon is eleven. Keenan is eight.”

“And when did you last see them?”

“Yesterday,” Maureen said quickly.

“Yesterday?”

Maureen paused at the operator’s tone of surprise, and in the brief silence she could hear a roomful of voices in the background. “No, no, I mean day before yesterday.”

“Sunday?”

“Yes, Sunday morning.” Maureen could not bring herself to say four days ago. Had she been slightly less panicked she might have felt the need to unburden herself of the full, complicated truth. But it would have taken a very calm, rational frame of mind to untangle for a stranger how a mother and father could abandon their sons for four days, and how it all went back to a dying garden and an argument in their living room. “My husband and I. We went to a spa.” She looked up at Scott, who was shaking his head, but this only strengthened her conviction that taking the time to explain their fight in the living room and the events that followed would only slow the search for their sons. This is not the time to revisit our little episode with the table. And what did it matter anyway? The important thing was to find the boys, to bring them back to the shelter of this home. “We left them with the maid. Sunday. With their nanny.” Two tones sounded, an automated notification that the conversation was being recorded. “We told her we would be back this morning, but we were a little late. And we’ve been waiting all day for her to come back with the kids. We don’t know where she is.”

“We?”

“My husband.”

“He’s there with you?”

“Yes.”

“His name?”

“Scott Torres.”

At the Orange County Emergency Communications Center, the operator considered the choices on her screen, which required her to classify the urgency of the dozens of dramas, mundane and bloody, that were whispered and screamed at her through her headset each day. Satisfied that the two children in this case were in the presence of an approved guardian (the nanny) and that the usual perpetrator in missing children cases (the father) was present, she reached the correct conclusion that this was probably not an abduction in which the children were in imminent danger, but rather some sort of household mis-communication. The caller was clearly lying about the last time she saw her sons: Probably she’s trying to get us to move quicker, the operator thought, probably she saw them just a few hours ago. Emergency Operator II Melinda Nabor was a Mexican-American single mom with two young boys at home who were being looked after by their grandmother while she worked, and it was her experience that parents and “caregivers” got their signals crossed all the time. The “caller location” flashing on her screen was an address in one of the ritziest neighborhoods in the county, and she imagined herself saying, Get a grip, lady. I’m sure your expensive Mexican nanny has everything under control. Sometimes the operators let slip words of wisdom to the confused people on the other line, but Emergency Operator Nabor never did so, she always stuck to the call scripts and protocols, with their comforting sense of logic and professionalism, and their ability to channel events of all kinds into a machinery that translated human folly into codes and correct “unit deployments” from the twenty-eight overlapping law-enforcement jurisdictions in her calling area. In this case, it would be the county sheriff, to a community so rich it collectively preferred to be unincorporated rather than pay for its own city government.

“We’re sending a patrol car out there.”

“Thank you,” Maureen said meekly.

“Orange County sheriffs. They should be out there shortly.”

“Thank you.”


Deputy Ernie Suarez was taken by the incongruity of the setting, a red-eyed mother lost to a mourning lament in her perfectly appointed living room, the father holding the baby girl because the mother was so distraught. “My beautiful boys. I left them and now they’re gone,” the mother cried. “They’re gone!” He had entered the Laguna Rancho Estates only once before, on a domestic violence call that was coincidentally in a home on this very same block, an old sailor beating up on his Vietnamese wife, who didn’t cry or scream about pressing charges, but just looked out the window at the ocean, dazed, most likely thinking about the continent on the other side of that curving blue hemisphere. Otherwise this part of his patrol area was a dead zone. He’d drive his Chevy Caprice past the front gate, wave at the guard, and accept a thumbs-up as the signal to execute an accelerating U-turn back down to the real city and the real work.

“We left them with their nanny. With our housekeeper,” the husband said, repeating the story the mother had told before she started weeping.

“Araceli is her name, right?” the deputy said, looking at his small notepad.

“Yeah.”

“And a last name.”

“Ramirez.”

“Age?”

“Late twenties. I think.”

“Where’s she from?”

“Mexico.”

“Immigration status?” Deputy Suarez knew he really wasn’t supposed to ask that question, but the word “immigration” was out there in the air, in the television news chorus, the talk radio banter: immigration, immigrant, illegal, illegals. You heard “Mexico” and you thought of one of those i-words, and you thought of a crime. And when you heard a Spanish surname that ended with a z, like his, you thought of Mexicans and the various federal codes they violated when they jumped over a steel fence into the United States. Other than that z, Deputy Suarez had no connection to Mexico himself, and saw no contradiction between his growing concern about Mexico and i-words and his Texas Gulf Coast family history.

“I have no idea whether she’s legal or not.”

“But you’re pretty sure she’s from over there? From Mexico.”

“Yes.”

Deputy Suarez bit his lip with concern. A few weeks back he had traveled down to the Border Patrol station in San Ysidro, to have lunch with an old sheriff’s deputy pal and to get a closer look at a potential career move into federal law enforcement. As a result of this conversation Deputy Suarez’s vision of Mexico had undergone a rapid devolution. Up to then, he’d thought of the Border Patrol gig as a chasing-chickens kind of job, a human roundup in the desert, and Mexico as a colorful haven of booze and cheap handicrafts. But to hear his old pal tell it, there was a terrorist army growing on the other side of that fence, flush with cash from cocaine and crystal meth. These lawbreakers lorded over Baja with their automatic weapons and their fleet of luxury SUVs stolen from law-abiding Californians, and they had weird nicknames like “Mister Three Letters” and “The Crutches.” They controlled the smuggling rings that brought people through the desert and sometimes right through the checkpoints because there were customs agents on the take: “You can smell it,” his friend said. It disturbed Deputy Suarez to think that there were places where the waters of corruption ran so deep and wide that even the well-paid agents of the U.S. government could be swept in. The drug gangs ran kidnapping rings that snared doctors and schoolteachers and the children of the Tijuana rich, and they tortured their enemies and tossed their bodies onto highways with notes attached and severed fingers stuffed into their mouths. “There’s some scary f*cking shit going on down here, bro.” Deputy Suarez had gone to TJ as a child, and he remembered holding his mother’s hand as she weaved between the teeming market stalls, worrying that he might get lost. Now there were these new, real-life demons set loose in that city behind the fence.

“You think she might have taken them to Mexico?” the deputy asked Scott.

“No. No. I mean, no, I don’t think so. But I’m not sure. What? Do you think she might have taken them to Mexico? Does that happen?”

“Hey, it’s what doesn’t happen that surprises me.”

Scott led him to Araceli’s room, thinking the deputy’s professional eyes might see something there he could not. “This is some weird stuff,” the deputy said out loud. His eye was drawn to one of the cutout magazine pages stuck to the wall with tape: it showed an oil painting of a woman prone on a bed, her face shrouded by a white sheet, legs spread open. A baby with the face of an adult woman bearing a single eyebrow emerged from the woman’s vagina. Deputy Suarez said, “Jeez, that’s really sick,” and took a subconscious step backward. He had managed to complete four years of high school and two years at Rio Hondo College without studying a single work of modern art, and he was also in the minority of people of Latino descent in Southern California who had never heard of Frida Kahlo. This is what they call “pathology.” I remember that from my criminology class. He next looked at Araceli’s cubist self-portrait and mistook it for a drawing of one of the two missing boys. What is the word for this? “Dismembered.” The face is dismembered. He started to wonder if perhaps the children were being harmed by this person in some hidden place.

Having seen enough, the deputy left the room and asked the father for photographs of the two boys and the nanny, and the man and his wife disappeared into other rooms deeper in the house to search for them. Once he was alone, the deputy called his station. There were two or three kidnap-to-Mexico cases every year in the county, though they always involved immigrant families and domestic disputes. A cross-border kidnap case in the Estates involving a nonrelative screamed urgency. At any rate, it was the usual procedure in cases of suspected child abuse and missing children to speak directly with the watch commander.

“Hey, Sarge, I’m up in the Estates and I think this is pretty serious. I’ve got two missing children. Possible kidnapping situation.”

“Huh?”

“I said I got a child kidnapping situation. Possible. Up here in the Estates.”

“In the Estates?”

“Yeah.”

“Aw, f*ck.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. I got two missing kids from the Estates. Looks like the nanny took ‘em. Mexico, maybe.”

“She took ‘em to Mexico?”

“Maybe. Don’t know. Looks like a line of investigation.”

“You got a ransom note?”

“No. But she didn’t have permission to take them anywhere either.”

“How long they been missing?”

“Since Sunday,” the deputy said, but then checked his notes and saw the parents had told him two different times. “Or yesterday, I guess.”

“Yesterday? Are you sure they’re not just late coming back from Knott’s Berry Farm or something?”

“Negative.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone, and Deputy Suarez understood why: among other things, when a peace officer declared a child missing, a county child-abuse file was opened, and an elaborate system of reports and notifications was triggered. The case entered a federal database, and county social workers were notified. It was a big bureaucratic to-do, and if the nanny suddenly walked up to the door in half an hour, it would all be just jerking off.

“So that’s your call, on scene there? Two missing kids in the Estates?”

“Yes.”

“How old?”

“Eight. Eleven.”

“Possible two-oh-seven kidnap to Mexico?”

“Yep.”

“F*ck.”

“Yeah, exactly.”


Over the course of the next several hours, the story of the Mexican housekeeper and the two missing boys from one of the richest neighborhoods in Orange County gathered mass and momentum in the digital flows of the news stream, pushed along with a flotsam of facts and half facts and speculations. It began with a stilted, bare-bones Sheriff’s Department press release: “missing since Sunday … ages 11 and 8 … in care of Mexican national … Border Patrol advised …” This information was delivered to various news organizations by the hopelessly archaic method of fax, and first landed in the hands of a reporter at the Sunset Boulevard headquarters of the news-tip agency City News Service. Working without any supervisor present at the cash-strapped company, a twenty-three-year-old scribe at the agency called the South County sheriff’s station at 1:45 a.m., eliciting from the half-alert deputy manning the phone that the case might be a kidnapping. “The deputy who rolled out on the first call says it’s a possible two-oh-seven to Mexico.” The CNS reporter then tagged the item for the agency’s 2:00 a.m. news roundup with the keywords “Child Kidnapping—Illegal Immigrant,” an act of journalistic carelessness that would take up an entire chapter in a PhD dissertation in the Communications Department at the University of Southern California two years later. “I boiled it down to the most exciting part,” said the former reporter, who was by then in law school. The City News Service bulletin appeared on a list of “breaking stories” dispatched by old-fashioned wire transmission to morning assignment editors at every newspaper and television and radio station in Southern California, and by six in the morning Pacific Daylight Time the story was on the websites of the CBS affiliates in Los Angeles and San Diego, the latter reporting the “enhanced surveillance” at the border. That San Diego television report, accompanied by the first officially issued photographs of Brandon and Keenan, caught the attention of the midday editor at a Miami Beach-based news aggregation website, who made the story his lead item, with a headline in the usual all-caps, tabloid-inspired, thirty-six point font. CLOSE THE BORDER! CALIFORNIA BOYS IN ALIEN KIDNAP DRAMA. Perusing this website’s unique blend of celebrity gossip, political news, and weird animal and weather stories was a guilty pleasure in office cubicles and on laptops and smart phones across the country, and its fans included millions of American mothers whose children were in the care of women named María, Lupe, and Soledad.


The morning after the Fourth of July, Brandon and Keenan wandered over to the backyard of the Luján home alone and listened to the roof of the tent pop as it caught the occasional breeze. They had left Araceli behind in Lucia’s room, snoring as she slept off four consecutive restless nights, next to a nightstand and a bubbling lava lamp that Brandon had turned on in the morning to read. They had moved quietly around their temporary guardian and through the silent house, past the bedroom door that vibrated with an older man’s tectonic snore, through the living room, where a pair of empty plastic cups with cigarette butts sat on the coffee table, and finally to the empty backyard. At the pit they used splintering pieces of discarded and weathered lumber they had found nearby to poke at the stones inside, wondering if they might get in trouble for doing so. They discovered scattered pieces of foil and bits of charcoal, and a few scattered bones that had been chewed and tossed inside and basted with ashes and dirt, but failed to discover flames, or melting rocks, or any other sources of combustion.

“It’s only rocks,” Keenan said, and looked at his older brother, aware of his disappointment.

“Maybe, maybe not. Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

They wandered around the backyard, kicking at the paper cylinders that once held firecrackers and picking up the sticks of bottle rockets. Brandon gathered some scattered beer cans and stacked them into pyramids and arranged them into small forts that he bombarded with the spent firecracker casings, and they collapsed with a realistic clank. Once they finished, they plopped themselves down on the rented picnic benches, resting their elbows and their heads on the tables like students struggling to stay awake in an afternoon class.

“I wanna go to Grandpa’s,” Keenan said.

“Yeah, me too.”

Keenan wondered if crying would help, even if it was not the spontaneous bawling that came from scraping your elbow or being called a nasty name by your brother, but rather the self-conscious, manipulative weeping he sometimes heard from his younger sister, Samantha, who cried for any reason, and who always seemed to get her way. He told himself he would employ this strategy with the next adult that came into view, and then he heard a screen door being pushed open and slamming shut, and saw Lucía Luján run toward him and his brother. Griselda Pulido trailed after her, both women wearing stylish evening clothes that suggested they had been up all night, their faces wide awake with strange expressions that merged surprise, delight, and concern.

“We just saw you guys on TV,” Lucía said. “You’re missing.”

“What?”

“The TV says you’re missing children. On the news.”

“We’re missing?”

“That’s what they said.”

“But I’m right here,” Brandon said. “How can I be missing?”

The boys followed Lucia and Griselda to the Luján family living room and the glowing television screen. They were disappointed to see images of a brush fire racing up a hillside. “Hey, you were on just a second ago,” Lucía said, and she picked up the remote control and began switching channels.

“¿Qué pasó?” Araceli said behind them, having been awakened by the sound of doors opening and slamming shut.

“We saw the boys on TV,” Griselda said.

“¿Qué?”

“On the news.”

Several images and voices cycled through the screen: a blond starlet on a red carpet, waving to a crowd; the green-clad members of Mexico’s national soccer team tackling and embracing a goal-scorer during a game from the night before; a supermarket with empty shelves and a floor covered with boxes and cans, the words BARSTOW EARTHQUAKE underneath; two Spanish news anchors in a studio, engaged in a chatty, light back-and-forth with the pregnant weather woman, who rubbed her belly and stuck out her tongue cartoonishly, causing the two anchors to slap the table, laughing.

“I saw you guys,” Lucía said. “I swear.”

“You’re crazy,” Araceli said. “You’re just like this boy here. Imagining things.”

“They said they were lost,” Griselda said in English. “Perdidos.”

“There we are!”

“Cool!”

Brandon and Keenan were suddenly grinning broadly on the televis ion screen, the imperfections in their front teeth frozen in the high-definition transmission for several seconds, causing Brandon to subconsciously raise his hand to his mouth and then close it shut and to think, My mom is right, I am going to need braces soon. Maureen had retrieved this image from her digital camera some eight hours earlier, as the first of many detectives stood in her living room. It was a cropped close-up from a picture taken at Keenan’s eighth birthday party, a late afternoon image that showed the boys standing over the cake in the gathering’s final, exhausted hour, because in all the others from earlier in the day they were wearing papier-mâché helmets.

“Police are asking for your help this morning in finding these two young boys, little Brandon and Keenan Torres-Thompson, of the Laguna Rancho Estates,” a male voice was saying gravely. “They’ve been missing two days, Nancy, and their parents are frantic to see them.”

“Oh, my God, they’re so cute!” The screen cut back momentarily to the news studio, where Nancy, the female co-anchor, had brought her hand to her mouth and twisted her eyebrows into a face that was too theatrically mawkish given the subject matter, and the screen quickly moved to another still image.

“They are believed to be in the custody of their housekeeper, a Mexican immigrant. Araceli Ramirez is her name.” Maureen had searched frantically for thirty-five minutes through her boxes of family pictures before finding a photograph in which Araceli appeared. It was a fleeting image, also taken in the dim light of a late afternoon, but at another birthday party a year ago, Brandon’s tenth. Araceli stood fuzzily in the background of a larger photograph that had been cropped out, save for the ear of the main subject—Maureen, who was posing in the missing portion with a newborn Samantha in a chest-hugging sling. Out of the range of the flash, Araceli appeared in a blurred gray profile, walking quickly in her filipina across the backyard lawn, passing behind her boss with a stack of dirty dishes, following the quail-bangs that popped from her forehead. It was not an image that flattered. Removed of its context, its fuzzy quality suggested something furtive about its subject, as if she were already in flight when it was taken. “The boys’ parents apparently left the boys in the care of the housekeeper, and the housekeeper disappeared—with the boys.”

“She disappeared with them?”

“That’s what the police say.”

“God, let’s just pray that they’re safe.”

“Their mom and dad are obviously anxious to see them.”

The report ended, leaving Araceli and the boys in the living room with the unsettling sensation that they occupied bodies and faces that had just been transmitted, via airwaves, cables, and satellite dishes, into many more living rooms besides this one across the metropolis. Araceli was confused over the meaning of the phrase “disappeared with the boys,” and wondered if “disappear” carried exactly the same mysterious and nefarious definitions as desaparecer: and then Lucía spoke the English word out loud and Araceli realized, from her tone of surprise and restrained disgust, that there was no difference at all.

“They say you disappeared with them. That you took them. Didn’t you have permission?”

“¿Permiso?” Araceli spat back. “Me dejaron sola con dos niños. Me abandonaron.”

“But now they’re looking for them.”

“Yes, I know,” Araceli said, switching languages because Lucía didn’t seem to fully comprehend. “But they left four days ago and never told me anything. I was all alone.”

Griselda retook the remote and waded anew into the selection of channels, until she reached a shot taken from a helicopter, a plugged-up flow of automobiles on one side of a freeway. The words at the bottom of the screen had caused her to stop—MISSING CHILDREN—and now Griselda raised the volume to better hear the repartee between another studio anchor and a man who seemed to be speaking from inside a blender.

“We’ve got Captain Joe McDonnell in Sky Five over San Ysidro, over the U.S.-Mexico border … And whoa, look at that line.”

“That’s right, Patrick. We’ve got a two-mile backup, and from what I can see now … it stretches far beyond the last San Ysidro off-ramp. And it’s all due to the case of those two missing children. They’re eleven and eight years old, and they may have been abducted by their Mexican nanny. Apparently the detectives in this case have reason to believe she may be taking them to Mexico.”

“That’s right, Joe. Brandon and Keenan Thompson of Orange County. Here they are. And here’s their nanny, Araceli Ramirez. She is from there, apparently, allegedly, so they’re checking all the cars crossing the border. We understand. They haven’t closed the border completely, now, have they, Captain?”

“No, Patrick. As you can see, if we zoom in here … there is some traffic going past the checkpoint, but it’s at a real snail’s pace. A snail’s pace, because in a case like this, in this kind of Amber Alert involving a suspect, a possible Mexican national as the suspect, they don’t want to take any chances.”

The camera’s eye zoomed back, briefly taking in the U.S. and Mexican flags at opposite ends of a twenty-lane stretch of concrete, and the inspection booths, and then the long, curving, interlocking-puzzle pieces of cars on the southbound roadway in the United States, simmering and stationary between shoulder and center divider, the boxes of tractor-trailers, pickup trucks, and taxis, and a car hauling a boat. The camera then turned back on itself and showed how the parallel lines of vehicles climbed and banked northward, toward the San Diego downtown skyline, a hazy Oz many miles distant. Finally the broadcast switched to a taped shot, taken on the ground, of a U.S. customs agent holding a piece of paper printed with Brandon and Keenan’s picture as he peered into a van.

Araceli grabbed the remote from Lucía’s hand and turned off the television, hoping to stop the delusional machine’s madness, which would spread if she allowed it to keep flashing its images and its lies. In the news I am a fuzzy criminal. Officers are looking, agents are checking. They were searching for the boys, to rescue them, and they were looking for Araceli, so that they could arrest her. Maureen did this. Because she came home and found no boys, because she wants to punish me for acting like their mother, even though I never asked to be their mother. I never wanted that. Her instinct to keep away from her jefes’ children had been right after all. She had crossed a boundary by thinking she was their guardian. And they would arrest her, because she dared to save those parentless children from Foster Care.

Now she caught Griselda and Lucía staring at her. Could it be true? they seemed to be asking themselves. Do we have a child abductor among us?

“Están locos,” Araceli said dismissively in Spanish, referring to the newsmen and newswomen, Maureen and Scott, and the two young women in the living room with their doubts all at once. She turned and repeated this in English to the boys, who knew the truth, hoping they might say something in Araceli’s defense. “They are crazy. They say I took you.”

“I wanna go home,” Keenan said. The television news had unsettled him further, because seeing a television report that said you were missing seemed to be a step closer to actually being missing. He didn’t want to be “disappeared,” a state which he imagined to be something like sitting in a white room in another dimension while you waited to return to the world of the known and definite. “I don’t want to be missing. I want to be home.”

Brandon was worried about being missing too, but at the sound of Keenan’s pleading whine, the older brother in him kicked in. “We should call home and tell them where we are,” he said, his voice rising with the discovery of a simple and quick solution to their dilemma. “Then they’ll pick us up!”

“Good idea,” Lucía said.

“Then I should go,” Griselda interjected quickly. “Before the police get here.” She gave Lucia a knowing look that turned pained when she realized her friend didn’t get her meaning right away. “Because they’ll start asking everyone questions.”

Lucia’s eyes shifted in confusion, then fixed on her friend until she understood. “Oh, yeah, right. Of course. You should go.”

“What?” Araceli demanded, suddenly irritated by the mysterious dialogue between friends. “The police are looking for you too?”

Griselda Pulido shook her head and said bluntly, in English, “I don’t have papers.”

It seemed impossible. Here was a young woman who spoke about music and boyfriends in English, who was obviously educated in the freewheeling, free-girl-thinking of U.S. schools, a privilege imparted to the country’s brightest daughters, announcing solemnly that she was an indocumentada. This predicament didn’t match, somehow, with the thin silver bracelets on her wrist, her slender and confident bearing, her gentle, even voice of the academically inclined. Nor did it match with her puckish party outfit, a billowing spinach-green dress with forest-green leggings and elfin slippers, all of which suggested an actress fresh off the set of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Pero eres gringa,” Araceli said.

“No I’m not. I’m mexicana.”

“¿De veras?” Araceli insisted. “Pero ni hablas bien el español.”

“I could speak Spanish a little better, yes,” Griselda said calmly, and suddenly she radiated a youthful, black-haired confidence and inescapable meekness all at once. “But I’ve never really lived in Mexico, so it’s understandable.” After a pause to consider the paradox of her status, Griselda lowered her voice and said, “I came when I was two. And I’ve never been back, because I can’t go back. Brown was going to let me in anyway, but they couldn’t give me any financial aid.”

This was a shock to Araceli. Griselda had been an indocumentada when she was still in diapers; it seemed a country would have to be excessively cruel and cold to place such a label on a baby girl, and keep it on her even as she grew into an English-speaking woman.

Lucía placed a hand on Griselda’s shoulder. “You should leave, then. When the boy calls, leave right away.” She turned to Araceli, and spoke with a sternness that she would later regret. “And maybe you should go too.”

“¿Qué?”

“¿Tienes documentos?” Griselda asked, and quickly discerned the answer in Araceli’s sudden silence and discomfort. Griselda knew that wordlessness too; it came from carrying a secret so long you forgot you were carrying it, until someone or something reminded you of its existence and you felt the pressure of the words against your skin, and you realized the words were always there.

“Hi, Dad,” Brandon said into the phone. “We’re here.” He paused to listen to his father’s voice. “Yeah, we just saw ourselves on TV. But I’m not missing. I’m right here.” Now an excited shouting could be heard, miniature adults celebrating inside the earpiece, clapping, screaming in joy. “We ate tacos last night,” Brandon continued. “They cooked a pig. With a fire in the ground. But I don’t think it’s burning anymore … What? The address?”

“It’s 2626 Rugby Street,” Lucía said, and looked at Griselda. “In Huntington Park.”

Brandon repeated the address to his father. “Yeah, Araceli is here with us. She’s been taking care of us. We rode on a train, and on some buses too. We saw a river, but it didn’t have water in it.” Suddenly he narrowed his eyes to a look of irritation. “And where did you go? Is Mommy there?” He listened to the answer, and turned to Keenan. “He says Mommy can’t talk right now, but she’s okay.”

Keenan took the phone and announced flatly to his father that he was okay too. “I love you too,” he said, and immediately hung up, because he thought of a phone I-love-you as meaning more or less the same as goodbye.

The clatter of the phone on the receiver was the cue for Griselda to reach over and give Lucía a kiss on the cheek. Without any more drama Griselda moved calmly to the front door, turned, and smiled and waved to the boys and to Araceli, mouthing the Spanish word for luck as she did so. Suerte. The screen door closed behind Griselda with a slap and Araceli watched through the living room window as she walked across the lawn, onto the sidewalk, gliding in her slippers and wide dress past parked cars and other lawns, a green fairy indocumentada walking without worry, her unhurried air causing her to melt into the surroundings, another Mexican-American, another mexicana on these streets with so many other people with stories and faces like hers. That’s how you did it. You acted as if the city belonged to you. You walked with the pace of a limber woman taking her daily stroll. I can do that too, and slip back across the city, and maybe back to Mexico, with a little stop at the bank to get my money. Araceli liked the idea of thumbing her nose at the police and the immigration authorities with the simple fact of her absence, her unwillingness to answer questions or offer explanations, even though she had no reason to run away, no reason to hide from anything, except for the inconvenient matter of her Mexican citizenship. They would arrest her and sort out the truth later. But I don’t want to be a prisoner, not even for a few hours. Araceli had digested, over the years, a regular diet of stories from across the U.S., fed to her by Spanish-language radio and television, all offering ample evidence that those who arrived on this side of the border without permission were returned home via a series of humiliating punishments. Meat packers, garment workers, mothers with babies in swaddling clothes: Araceli had seen them on the television, rounded up in vans, into buses with steel mesh over the windows, gathered up in camps behind fences, onto airplanes that landed on the tropical runways of San Salvador and Tegucigalpa and other places, far away from those other places they had learned to call home—Iowa, Chicago, Massachusetts. Pobrecitos. When this saga was on television you could dismiss it as the bad luck of others. She was too busy to worry, and too much at peace with the risky life choices she had taken. But now that her name and her face had been fed into that tragic stream of the wanted, the apprehended, and the deported, she felt the need to resist. My words and my true story will not buy me my freedom, not right away. Araceli would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English: it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.

“Me voy,” Araceli announced happily. “Good luck, boys. I’m glad you didn’t go into Faster Care. Lucía and her father will take care of you until the police come.”

After returning to Lucía’s bedroom to retrieve the backpack she had been carrying, Araceli passed through to the living room one last time, patted Keenan on the head, and placed a hand on Brandon’s shoulder.

“I leave them with you,” she said to Lucía, and to Mr. Luján, who had just entered the living room. “Cuídenlos, porfis.”

Araceli took a moment longer to consider the surroundings, the grown-up man and his daughter, giving them the kind of cursory, self-assuring once-over a hurried mother might before leaving her children in a familiar day-care center. Then, remembering the police were on their way, she stepped toward the front door. “Adiós, niños,” she said, adding an unnecessary “Stay here,” as she stepped into the furnace of July daylight and down the Luján family steps, across the lawn and the patch of street where the lynch mob had gathered the night before, following a path that would lead her back to the bus stop, where she would begin a journey to some new place unknown to her.


Among the tribe of sheriff’s deputies, detectives, social workers, and assorted county officials gathered in the Torres-Thompson living room, it was the presence of the representative of Orange County Child Protective Services that Maureen found most threatening. Olivia Garza was 220 pounds of Mexican-American woman on a five-foot ten-inch frame whose labored breathing and loud exhales of exasperation filled the silences in the room. This rotund stranger had spent quite a lot of time inspecting the pictures on the bookshelf, and Maureen sensed that she was looking for clues in the faces she saw there, in the body language of her wedding pictures, the grooming of her boys in their school portraits.

Alone among the assembled members of the Endangered Child Emergency Intervention Team, Olivia Garza did not feel the need to hide her skepticism. She had a unique gift for untangling family dysfunction and had worked her way up from Case Worker I in the Santa Ana office with the files of 127 children whose parents and guardians were raccoon-eyed heroin addicts, pugilistic plumbers, wannabe street-corner kingpins, and shoplifting Chicana versions of Scarlett O’Hara waiting in Fullerton subdivisions for their tattooed heroes to slam the door in their faces. She was especially adept at spotting the custody-fight manipulations, the Halloween-scary fictions mothers and fathers made up about their exes, but had also rescued babies dying from malnutrition, plucking them from their cribs and from the sticky kitchen floors of Santa Ana apartments. She had cornered the thirteen-year-old sons of Newport Beach glitterati in Anaheim crack houses too: de todo un poco.

Olivia Garza did not believe a Mexican nanny would take off with her two charges in a kidnapping adventure with two boys the ages of the Torres-Thompson children. Or, rather, she had not yet been presented with any facts that would allow her to believe such an unlikely scenario. What is she going to do? Sell them in Tijuana? Make them her own children, teach them Spanish, and raise them in a tiny village in the mountains? None of this had she expressed to the other members of the intervention team. She didn’t need to, because the two sheriff’s detectives sent out to the scene had reached the same conclusion, more or less, though they were trying hard to be deferential to the weeping mother and the worried father.

After hearing the basic outline of the story from the father, Olivia Garza had wandered about the house. Too clean, she observed, too perfect. She looked into the Room of a Thousand Wonders and was unimpressed. If you saw too many toys, it implied distance, parents who substituted objects for intimacy, though the presence of so many books, and the variety of their sizes and subjects, was reassuring. Olivia Garza picked up a handful and examined the dog-eared pages of a novel, and then the worn cover of a picture book on medieval armor and decided, These kids are going to turn up by the end of the day. The members of Olivia Garza’s elite team had been precipitously assembled here simply because the family lived in the zip code with the highest per capita income in their district, and because the photogenic boys had attracted the news crews gathered outside. Some things are so obvious you just want to force them out like a wad of spit.

She encountered the two detectives back in the living room, off by the windows that looked out to the succulent garden.

“Is there anything else here I should see?”

“Have you seen the nanny’s room? It’s a little house in the back.”

They entered the guesthouse, which wasn’t much smaller, truth be told, than the condominium in Laguna Beach where the childless Olivia Garza lived with her two cats. One of the detectives reached up and tapped at the mobile, watching it spin and bounce.

“Interesting,” Olivia Garza said.

“Art,” Detective Harkness said.

“Yeah, that’s what they call it,” Detective Blake said.

“This is what got our responding deputy all worked up,” Detective Harkness said, waving his hand at the drawings, the collages, and the mobile, which didn’t bother him at all.

The intervention team had been called up just before dawn, roused from their beds, and in the full light of midmorning there was an everyday clarity to the situation that had eluded the first responders the night before.

“My theory: the nanny took them to Disneyland or something and got lost or delayed on the way back,” Detective Blake said.

“Yeah, they’re probably sleeping in a hotel someplace, dreaming about the apple pie they had for dinner last night,” Detective Harkness said.

“I predict, after the all-points,” Detective Blake said, “that they turn up around lunchtime.”

“Nah, earlier,” Detective Harkness said. “Ten, ten forty-five at the latest.”

“What do you think, Garza?”

She looked about the room, shuffled the papers and envelopes on Araceli’s table-desk, and finally said, “These parents have lied to me. And I don’t like it when people lie to me.”

“And how many years have you been in Child Protective Services?” Detective Harkness said.

“That’s what we do, Garza,” Detective Blake said. “We go places, and people lie to us. And then we catch them in their big lies, and we make them feel bad, and then they cry and tell us smaller lies.”

“I don’t like it when people lie and force me out of bed early,” Olivia Garza said. “And I don’t like it when they make me walk past the TV crews without having had a chance to put my makeup on.”

“You mean you can look even more beautiful than you do already?” Both detectives chuckled. “You’re funny, Garza.”

Olivia Garza brought her bad temper back to the living room, refusing to sit on the couch or at the table in the dining room, and decided to continue her self-consciously insolent pacing instead, as if daring the other members of the team to put up with her. After listening to Scott again recite, without much conviction, the story Maureen had first told the 911 operator, she addressed the parents for the first time.

“How much do you pay this woman?”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars a week,” Scott said.

“Under the table. Right?”

There was no answer, but Olivia Garza pressed ahead. “Do you leave your kids alone with her often?”

“No,” Maureen said, breaking a long silence. “We never have. Before. We had another person …”

“You’ve never left her alone with them and then you go away for two days and leave two boys with her?”

“That’s what they’ve been telling us,” interrupted the representative of the district attorney’s office, who was sitting on the sofa seat at a right angle from Maureen.

Olivia allowed the silence to stand there and make her point. The two detectives had been doing the same thing, off and on, for an hour, walking up the story to the parts that were not quite believable, and then stepping back because the representative of the DA’s office had placed himself next to Scott and Maureen and was, with his repeated words of support for the alleged victims, preventing the detectives from probing any further. Olivia Garza and the detectives both wondered the same thing: What are these people hiding? Something small and insignificant, Olivia Garza concluded, a fact not completely essential to the recovery of their children: some family embarrassment, or petty crime. Probably she and the detectives could pry the truth from this couple, but for the presence of the representative of the district attorney’s office, who was leaning forward in his seat, over the space where the coffee table used to stand. He was conspicuously overdressed in glossy Brooks Brothers sharkskin, and looked intently at Maureen and Scott, his clothes and demeanor suggesting a corporate-minded Catholic priest.

Ian Goller was the third-ranking member of the district attorney’s office and his official title was Senior Assistant District Attorney for Operations, but unofficially he was the district attorney’s fixer and protégé. Goller had mobilized the Endangered Child Emergency Intervention Team at 5:25 a.m., after sitting down to his morning news and coffee ritual, and seeing the faces of the boys flashing next to the words ORANGE COUNTY MISSING CHILDREN. Ian Goller was thirty-eight years old and, like Olivia Garza, he lived alone, though in a much more spacious condominium with a view of the harbor in Newport Beach. He had turned up the volume and heard the outline of the story, and in two deep breaths and two heartbeats he felt the great swell of popul ar indignation it might provoke. A nanny who was, more than likely, an illegal immigrant: absconding with two Orange County children with All-American looks. It would make the good people and voters of Orange County angrier than a dozen Mexican gangbanger murders, or twenty homicidal drunk drivers with Spanish surnames and no driver’s licenses, and, as such, it was precisely the sort of high-profile case for which the emergency-response team had been created.

Ian Goller was a native of the Orange County suburb of Fullerton who liked to tell people that his otherwise plain and unassuming hometown had once been home to the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. “You know, Blade Runner?” Fullerton had produced no other greatness, as far as he knew, other than a perennially excellent college baseball team, and Goller himself was a graduate of San Diego State University and the middle-of-the-pack Chapman University School of Law. At the DA’s office he put in long hours, unlike many of his colleagues, and quickly worked his way up from traffic court and DUIs, his rise aided by a few idiosyncrasies that identified him as an Orange County local, and thus made him a favorite of the OC-born DA. Goller still allowed his blond hair to reach his collar, wore a braided leather Hawaiian surf bracelet over the French cuffs of his dress shirts, and in his youth had flirted with a career as a professional surfer—which had led to a recent profile in California Lawyer as “the surfing prosecutor.”

Now, sitting with these two parents in their well-appointed living room in the Laguna Rancho Estates, he could see that he was in the presence of an Orange County mother who cared. He could feel it in the dust-free air, the good and life-giving scent of the nearby ocean, in the baby dictionaries and well-worn swing set, and see it in the way she stroked her baby girl’s back, as if to comfort the child when she was really comforting herself. As he contemplated the fate of the boys this OC mom had left in the care of a Mexican nanny, Goller saw everything that was at once satisfying and frustrating about being a prosecutor.

Protecting children and prosecuting abuse was the purest thing a lawyer could do: the victims were sinless, and the defendants were invariably transparent scumbags, convicted by juries with great speed and relish. And in the suspect’s copper-tinged face and nationality, he saw the math of the multitudes that would one day drive him out of the profession altogether, because naïve Latin American immigrants like her were filling up his courtrooms. This was a painful realization for the son of an old-line Democratic family to make, and one he’d arrived at after years of observation, and despite his steadfastly liberal outlook on most other issues, from abortion rights to preserving the local wetlands. Ian Goller’s meta-knowledge of how foreign nationals clogged his superior court flowcharts, matrices, and spreadsheets, along with the victim-centered culture at the DA’s office, with its victim’s rights manifestos and procedures, tilted his view of the case decisively in favor of Maureen—despite her nervous and not-entirely-consistent recounting of events.

Ian Goller thought of this woman’s children, and about other children he had not been able to rescue, and he bowed his head in silent, private prayer.

Seeing the prosecutor lower his head and clasp his hands suddenly and without explanation only filled Maureen with more dread. She did not understand the source of the prosecutor’s intense stares, nor of the obvious irritation of the big woman who represented Child Protective Services. These are the people who take children away from parents. The arrival of the obese Mexican-American woman, especially, with her large nose and ruddy skin with a strange Indian-ebony mixing, and the plastic ID badge with the county seal, was nearly as frightening to her as the idea that Brandon and Keenan were wandering the city somewhere. Maureen entertained the prospect that the police might find her children, listen to Araceli’s true and entirely plausible story, and then decide to take her children away. Maybe I should tell them now what really happened: that it’s been four days, not two, and that Araceli had no idea we were leaving. How much trouble had she gotten her family into with that small lie? Maureen decided she would reveal the complexity of the situation, how she and Scott had played a part in its unfolding, and perhaps this small truth would bring her children to her quicker, and loosen the surly mask of the representative from Child Protective Services, the only other woman in the room besides Maureen, and the only one of the strangers who seemed to sense the hidden and juvenile chain of events that had brought them all here.

Maureen was about to launch into her confession when the phone rang.


Araceli walked through the neighborhood at a leisurely pace, past aging front-yard cacti and blooming rosebushes, and the unpainted gray skins of newly built cement homes with gabled roofs and dangling wires for light fixtures. She walked past pickup trucks with gold wings painted on their sides, three-t oned pickups with mismatching doors and hoods, and pickups with the color schemes of Mexican soccer teams, and then squeezed between two more pickups after jaywalking across California Street. Despite her deliberately unhurried pace, she decided it might be better not to walk in a straight line, but rather to make large zigzags through the grid of streets, especially now that a helicopter had appeared overhead.

The aircraft was chop-chopping like a lawn mower in the airspace above the Luján home, and it did not take much imagination to conclude that the police were at that moment engaged in the “rescue” of Brandon and Keenan. Araceli marveled at the fact that in this country police could emerge from the empty sky in the time it took to walk five blocks. The police would now return Brandon and Keenan to the Room of a Thousand Wonders and the two-dimensional superheroes of their bedsheets. The helicopter was loud enough to bring a scattering of people to their front doors, to look up and wonder who or what the machine was looking for.

Now the helicopter began to move, making circles concentric to the point where it had started, banking and turning in ever larger circles until its spinning blades and green body dipped over Araceli’s head, a giant mechanical dragonfly whose beating squeal announced crisis and urgency. Araceli began to walk faster as more people came out of their homes and stood on their lawns, craning their necks upward. An accelerating automobile drew their eyes back to the ground, a Huntington Park police patrol car zooming past with exaggerated masculine purpose. Araceli halted her sidewalk march and watched the flashing lights of the patrol car reach the end of the block, cross the intersection, and then accelerate into the next block with another throttle burst and thought, They’re trying to scare me out into the open. They think that if they zoom through here I will begin to run, and give myself away.

She began walking again, but was aware that by stopping and starting with the passing of the patrol car she had drawn attention to herself.

“Hey, that’s her!” shouted the voice of an adolescent boy standing behind her on the sidewalk. She continued walking without looking back. “That’s the lady! From the TV!”

Araceli took a few more steps until a second voice shouted from one of the doorways, “¡La secuestradora!“ She turned and saw a woman with dimpled cheeks pointing at her from a cement porch, with the glee of a person who has scratched the skin of a lottery card and discovered a twenty-dollar prize. Araceli stumbled away, walking faster, frightened as much by the voyeurism of the people around her as by the idea that they might hand her over to the police. “¡Es ella! La vi en el canal 52. ¿A dónde vas?“ She began a light jog, thinking that she might be safe as soon as she turned the corner and escaped this block and its Greek chorus of television watchers, people who believed she was the secuestradora in the news montages, a villainous taker of children.

“¡Córrele!” a man shouted with a gusto usually reserved for horse races and cattle roundups.

“¿Y los niños?” a woman’s voice pleaded as she turned the corner, and Araceli was tempted to turn and say, I don’t have them, I never took them. She reached a block where narrow bungalows were lined like railroad boxcars in parallel rows, their square lawns transformed by drought into flat and featureless dust squares. Plastic curls of Christmas lights hung from the eaves, and all the residents were inside, glued to their televisions, she guessed, looking at Araceli’s fuzzy picture on their screens. A block later she found herself standing underneath the enormous zinc torso of a power transmission tower, eight lines attached to four arms that stretched out like a woman having herself measured for a dress. The lines loomed above a corridor of vacant land that ran several straight miles through residential neighborhoods, one tower following another until they gradually disappeared into the midday ozone bake of dirty-blue haze and nothingness. Araceli took a second or two to contemplate the hugeness of the tower above her, and the oddity of the notch that had been cut into the grid of homes. She jumped over the short fence that proclaimed NO TRESPASSING and began to walk under the trunk lines, thinking there would be no nosy television watchers to bother her as she walked here, and that she might be able to follow the lines northward to the peopleless heart of the metropolis, and the safety of factory buildings and warehouses. Her legs labored against the uneven, weed-covered ground, because she was entering a kind of urban wilderness, a nursery of odd flora sprouting up through the mustard grass. A cypress tree, its canopy shaped like a large wing. Sickly rosebushes without buds. Strawberry plants clinging to a patch of loam. Bamboo grasses and a stunted palm with thin leaves that sprouted, fountainlike, from its trunk, and the wide, tall bouquet of a nopal cactus. She had stumbled into the back closet of California gardens, the place where seedlings of plants discarded and abandoned came to scratch their roots into the dry native soil. If she hadn’t been on the run, she might have stopped to admire this freakish landscape, and she might have noticed too the cluster of cameras and lights in the distance.

Instead, the film crew saw her first, when, about eight hundred yards to the north, an Estonian cinematographer peered into the viewfinder of his camera. Araceli was under the second tower in the distance, a woman stumbling forward in the dancing waves of rising heat, lifting her legs over the weedy land like a woman wading through snowdrifts. “Someone is in my shot,” the cinematographer said, his neck bent and face attached to the eyepiece. “They are coming into the shot.”

“Again?” the director called out. “Where?”

A dozen or so members of the small film crew began squinting at the horizon. They were shooting the coda of an indie feature with a modest $3.1 million budget, and they had already been bedeviled by the appearance of the helicopters, which were driving the sound guy loopy. At the director’s behest the cinematographer had filmed the circling craft for two minutes and forty-five seconds, capturing their lead actor looking up at the machines circling over the wires, the expression of foreboding and curiosity on his tanned face completely in line with the themes of the screenplay. Electrical towers appeared at the end of each of the film’s three acts, and the cinematographer had shot other towers and wires in the San Bernardino Mountains, and in the plain of tumbleweeds outside Henderson, Nevada, and the Cimarron Grasslands of southwestern Kansas. The Huntington Park shoot was intended for the epilogue, the towers and the barren channel of weeds at the actor’s feet symbols of the protagonist’s failed search for self in Las Vegas casinos and a Kansas beef-processing town.

“I told you these Eastside locations were a bitch,” the key grip said. “I told you.” Most of the local residents had behaved themselves: they were used to being put out by film crews drawn to the grim and epic backdrop, and only the appearance of an A-list actor or Mexican television star really got them very excited. Every few minutes, however, there was the straggling homeless person, or a gangbanger on his bicycle, people who hadn’t read the letter: Sorry for the inconvenience: We’re bringing a little bit of Hollywood to your neighborhood!

“Now I see him,” the director said.

“Her. It’s a she.”

At that instant a helicopter swooped in close to the trunk line and a police car emerged with a squeaky skid on one of the streets that cut through the corridor. Two officers jumped out of the car and the figure of the woman began to run toward the crew.

“Whoa, they’re chasing her.”

“They’ve got their sticks out.”

“Is this real?”

“Batons. You call them batons, not sticks.”

“Are you getting this?” the director yelled to the cinematographer. He called out the name of the lead actor, a bright young prospect whose presence in the film had assured its funding—he was a twenty-four-year-old Australian with a sparse chestnut beard that matched his eyes, and a Gary Cooper everyman quality that screamed out he was destined for big-budget greatness. “In character,” the director said. “Stay in character.” The actor took a breath and a moment to remember his drama-school improvisation training and stretched his arms down at his sides. He relaxed his facial muscles into a look of genuine puzzlement and muted pleading captured in profile as he watched the foot chase that was now headed in his direction, a Mexican woman towing a cloud of dust and two running men in black, a spectacle now about one hundred yards distant.

“They’re going to beat her,” a crew member said breathlessly. “They’re going to beat her to a pulp.”

“Take a step toward them. Just one step.”

The actor moved hesitatingly toward the running woman, as if he wanted to help her but was not sure he could.

“Good. Now one more. Just one. Are we still getting this?”

“Yes, I’m on a tiny f-stop,” the cinematographer said. “The depth of field is magnificent.”

“Beautiful.”

Weeks later in the editing room, the director and his editor would incorporate about seventy-five seconds of this footage into the final version of the film. Araceli never saw the camera, or the actor, or the film crew. She was focused on the men trailing behind her and the idea that she might elude them. They had come to grab her and bind her hands in plastic strings, but she still found herself suppressing a laugh as she ran, even with brambles scratching at her ankles, because there was the quality of a schoolyard game to being chased around like this. There are other, easier ways of returning to Mexico. They will grab me and drag me across the dirt like a calf in the rodeo, and then cage me. We must endure these rituals of humiliation: this is our Mexican glory, to be pursued and apprehended in public places for bystanders to see.

If you let me go, señores, I will merely walk to the bus station and buy a ticket back to my country. No les molesto más. They were far behind her, at first, and for a moment she entertained the thought that if she could reach the next street, or slip into an alleyway or a backyard, she might elude them and find her own route home. But she was not a good runner. The first police officer quickly closed the gap, sprinting with a determined, middle-aged ferocity that surprised and frightened her, his face turning crimson and sweat bursting from his face and chest. When he reached her he was still running much too fast, and stumbled on top of her while trying to apprehend her, his body crushing hers as they both fell to the soil, their mouths filled with dirt and sticky weeds.