The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

17




Brandon sat with his legs crossed on the floor of the living room, telling the story of the journey he and his brother had taken to a distant land called Los Angeles. For the first time in his young life he had an audience of strangers listening to him with the same expression of urgent concentration that adults put on their faces when they talked and argued among themselves. The grown-ups sat on the edge of the couch and the love seat, and on a chair from the dining room, four adult men and two women in various states of formal dress, and with assorted metal and plastic badges and communication devices attached to their garments, accessories that, in Brandon’s eyes, established their membership in officialdom. None of this made Brandon nervous. Rather, he saw in the presence of people introduced to him as “the officers” and “the social workers” a confirmation of the fact that he had survived an adventure tinged with danger. He had gone to a place far from the warm security and predictability of his home, and had returned to tell the tale.

“And then we got on this train that had two levels, and we left for another place. In Los Angeles,” he said, his younger brother nodding alongside him. “This other place was made of bricks, mostly.”

“And wood,” Keenan added.

“Yeah, and wood, I think. And we went by a river,” Brandon continued. “Or was it a canyon?”

“Yeah, a really big canyon,” Keenan said.

“With bridges over it. And there were these people living there. Refugees from the Fire-Swallowers.”

“The Fire-Swallowers?” Olivia Garza asked.

“Yeah, those are the people who came and destroyed the village of Vardur at the end of Revenge of the Riverwalkers.”

“It’s one of his books that he reads,” Keenan said. Seeing the adults confused, he felt compelled to inject some explanation. “When Mom and Dad left, and Araceli said she would take care of us, she really didn’t take care of us—I mean, she didn’t tell us what to do like Mom does. So Brandon started reading more than he usually does. And when he reads—”

“Yeah, but these people I saw were real people,” Brandon interrupted. “They had scars on their faces, from their battles with the Fire-Swallowers. Then we went to a big train station. And then we got into a bus, and we were looking for Grandpa’s house, because Araceli said we should look for him. But we found this other place instead, where there are houses that are like jails, I guess. And then we found other houses that had half doors and quarter doors, and three-quarter doors, and other things I thought only existed in books. But they were real. And then we found a shack, which was in this place that’s kind of like an oasis in the desert, where people come from all over to meet and sell things. We met this boy, who’s a slave. I have a book about slavery, and he didn’t look like any of the slaves in that book, but he was still a slave. We stayed with him in his shack. And he told us about the warriors who used to live across the street, and the battles they had, which always lasted thirteen seconds. The lady who lived there, she was really mean to this boy, and she made him work.”

“That’s true,” Keenan said. “He really was a slave.”

“Right. He was like my age, but he was a slave. So we slept there one night, until we woke up in the morning and heard some guy screaming outside.”

“I didn’t hear anybody screaming,” Keenan said.

“You were still asleep, but I heard it. It was right after the earthquake.”

“There was an earthquake?” Keenan said.

“Yeah. So this guy, he was like in pain, or something. He was yelling like he was hurting in his guts. And then everybody got up and we went to another place, which is called a park even though there isn’t any park there. We went there because we thought Grandpa lived there, I guess, but he didn’t live there either. At this park place they had a fire burning in the ground, to take a pig and turn him into bones. And the fire was burning hot, even though it was buried, because later we touched the rocks that were under the ground and they were still hot. But before that, everything started exploding around us. A bomb exploded in the street. And Keenan was holding some fire in his hand, and I told him to drop it, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. Don’t lie. I saw you. You were holding fire, it was sparking from your palm, and then the bomb went off in the street. That’s when I wanted to cry. After that a lynch mob came to the front porch, and they started yelling at us, because they were against the guy who lived there, and we started yelling back the name of Ray Forma, who is against them. Ray Forma is like some sort of hero that protects people against lynch mobs. These people yelling at us, they didn’t have torches, but it was a lynch mob, I’m pretty sure, and they were really angry at the guy who lived there, because he’s a president. But then the police came and chased away the lynch mob and we went to sleep and when we woke up the next morning we were on television so I got on the phone and called Dad.”

The assembled audience of adults stared at Brandon with perplexed mouths agape and brows wrinkled, each mystified by the nonsensical details of Brandon’s story and his straightforward and sincere way of recounting them, and the way Keenan sometimes nodded in confirmation of what his brother said. Adults and children had been momentarily transported into a shared state of mystery and innocence, a kind of mental blankness where anything was possible, and the adults allowed themselves to entertain, for the briefest instant of grown-up time, the possibility that these two well-spoken boys had actually returned from a magical land. Even Olivia Garza, who believed she had heard every kind of story a child could tell, did not know precisely what she should make of Brandon’s monologue, so she simply looked at her digital recorder and turned it off.

Detective Blake and Assistant District Attorney Goller rose to their feet simultaneously, while a second detective named Harkness patted both Brandon and Keenan on the head and said, “Thanks guys.” Detective Blake called back the parents from their temporary exile in the kitchen and left the boys with them, and the committee retired to the backyard for a tête-à-tête. For a few moments, they stood in a circle and looked at one another with now-what expressions.

“I don’t know what to make of that,” Detective Blake said finally. “That kid’s got quite an imagination.”

“This is what happens when you leave them alone too much, in my opinion,” Olivia Garza said. “Whether it’s TV, or books, or computer games. There are drawbacks. They slip into their own world.”

“God knows what really happened to them,” Assistant District Attorney Goller said. “I’m not a psychologist, but maybe this is some sort of emotional fantasy response to severe trauma.”

The eyes of everyone present turned to the staff psychologist from Child Protective Services, a twenty-nine-year-old recently minted PhD from UCLA named Jennifer Gelfand-Peña. This was Dr. Gelfand-Peña’s first time with the so-called emergency intervention team and she had overdressed for the occasion in her best, virgin-wool business skirt, and now she thought it strange that they were meeting with a representative of the district attorney’s office and two detectives, given the manifest innocuousness of the case.

“What do I think?” she said with a pretty-woman cheerfulness that made everyone else in the group deepen their growing irritation with her. “I think the view up here is spectacular. I’m sort of bummed because I think we’re missing the sunset. I also think this desert garden is really beautiful, but it’s kind of over the top.” Her colleagues shot her stony glances, but she seemed unconcerned. “And in my professional opinion, this kid Brandon is a fascinating case. He’s got the verbal and reading skills of an eighteen-year-old. And the socialization of a seven-year-old, which isn’t surprising, since he’s very sheltered up here, and since he goes to the most expensive, touchy-feely private school in the county. So I think what’s probably going on is that he’s just read too many books.”

“Well, the way I see it, the boy basically confirmed what the maid told our detective here,” Olivia Garza said. “She said she was taking them to the grandfather. Right, Detective? And that’s what the boy said. He said they were alone in the house with the maid and they left to look for the grandfather.”

“But he didn’t know since when,” Detective Blake offered.

“Yeah, kids are terrible with time,” the staff psychologist said.

“No harm, no foul, as far as I’m concerned,” Detective Blake said. “I don’t see what we can hold this Mexican lady on.”

“So we’re going to throw the parents’ statement out the window?” Goller said. “Shouldn’t we be investigating, at least, for child endangerment?”

“Eleven one sixty-five-point-two?” Blake said. “By the parents? Or the maid?”

“No, not the parents, because they left the boys with an adult guardian,” Goller said. “But I wasn’t thinking about that so much as a two-seventy-three-A.”

“Interesting,” said Dr. Gelfand-Peña, which was her ironic way of saying a child abuse charge seemed far-fetched.

“Really?” Olivia Garza said.

“Do we have evidence of either of those crimes?” Detective Blake asked.

“Remember that address our victims appear to have visited first?” Goller said. “I called the LAPD. It’s smack in the middle of the ganginfested garment-factory district of L.A. If taking two Orange County kids to that hellhole isn’t two seventy-three-A, then I don’t know what is.”

“Felony two seventy-three-A?” Detective Blake said. “I don’t see it. Misdemeanor two seventy-three-A? Maybe.”

“Do we go back and question the parents again?” Olivia Garza asked.

“We’ve got their statement,” Goller said.

“Can’t we just drop the whole thing?” Jennifer Gelfand-Peña asked.

There was a collective silence in which the three senior members of the emergency intervention team—Goller, Blake, and Garza—looked at one another and waited like pistoleros in a western for one to blink. The truth was, once you amassed as many resources as they had, it took a bit of courage to simply cry out, Sorry! False Alarm! After all, K-9 units had been assembled to search the hills, Explorer deputies had marched through the meadows, and a suspect had been named, with her alleged crime denounced. They had called an Amber Alert and semi-sealed-off the border for a few hours, all in the name of protecting two Orange County children. Some grown-up had to be held responsible for this mess.

“From what I can tell,” Goller said finally, “and from what I can see of this family, and from having questioned this woman, I think it’s pretty obvious Ms. Ramirez didn’t like her employers. So she conspired to dump their kids someplace. Just leave ‘em somewhere god-awful. If she ‘willfully’ placed those boys in a situation where they might be endangered, then that’s two seventy-three-A. That’s the law.”

Detective Blake was unconvinced. He sensed familiar political-theatric motives at work, the usual DA baloney. “Well, you go ahead and make your phone call, Mr. Goller. And I’ll make mine.”

“You know Goller, sometimes things really are what they seem to be,” Olivia Garza said. “It’s pretty obvious we should just call it a ten-forty and go home.”

“No, I don’t think that I’ll be able to do that,” the assistant district attorney said, raising his chin and directing the group to look up at the sky and its spreading wash of ultramarine ink. The beating engines of two television hel icopters had slipped into the airspace above them as they were debating the case. “They pulled those choppers away from the fire to cover this,” Goller said. “That’s huge. My guess is that we’re live on national cable right now.” The assistant district attorney allowed the members of the emergency intervention team to ponder the meaning of the hovering crafts, and the small globes attached to their undercarriages. “Unfortunately, we’re in America’s living room now,” he said. “Therefore, we must proceed with an abundance of caution.”

They were smack in the middle of that great spectacle Goller had foreseen in his condo during the first hours of the morning, when Brandon’s and Keenan’s faces first flashed on his television. And already he sensed where its pressures might take them.

“So go ahead and release your suspect if you have to, Detective,” Goller said. “But in a few days you might have to pick her up again.”


After a first kiss of his daughter’s forehead, after looking at his two sons, embracing them, and confirming, with a scan of his eyes and a few minutes in their untroubled presence, that they had suffered no harm, Scott found himself stepping back and away. “We missed you, Dad,” Keenan said, and the simple statement brought a rush of water to his eyes. He turned to his wife, seeking a glance, a shared moment of understanding and forgiveness, but she was aggressively not looking at him, so he drifted off into a state of shocked silence, in which he listened to his wife repeat, again and again, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” Then, after the police and the social workers and the psychologist had finished their “talk” alone with Brandon and Keenan, and after he and Maureen had a second reunion with their sons that was a shorter and less emotional version of the first, he drifted away from the room entirely, leaving his wife to assuage her guilt by reading to the boys and Samantha from a large picture book, in a kind of forced imitation of domestic bliss that, Scott guessed, was intended for the police and social services officials still huddled in their yard. Scott looked at Brandon rolling his eyes because Ladybug Girl was not exactly his idea of compelling literature. My son is eleven, but he’s already a book snob. Eventually Scott drifted to the television room, to the high-tech masculinity of objects plugged into the wall, and reached for the television’s power switch with a Pavlovian purposelessness, flipping through the cable channels. He stopped when he reached an aerial news shot of a structure on a dead-end circle that looked familiar. When he saw the graphic that read MISSING CHILDREN FOUND he knew it was his home, and he considered the size of the crescent-shaped backyard, and how much of it was filled by the desert garden. From the air, and in the fading illumination of dusk, the garden looked liked a herd of small spiked animals escorted by tall cacti shepherds. He thought that it all made for an aesthetically pleasing composition of circles and lines when you saw it from the sky, before the little commentator in his head finally woke up and he realized, Holy shit, there’s a helicopter floating above my house.

Before he could rise to his feet to go to the window to look for the helicopter, the television switched to a video clip shot from the ground, footage that showed Scott himself talking with a sheriff’s deputy at his door several hours earlier, a few minutes after Scott had received that phone call from Brandon. The deputy was smiling and patting him on the back, and Scott guessed that this image was supposed to convey the idea that the drama had been resolved happily, and sure enough seconds later there was a shot of his two sons walking up the driveway, escorted very quickly by a deputy to the front door. The television cut to a studio shot, of a woman with flaring nostrils and stiff blond hair that sprayed forth, fountainlike, from her head, and a band of gold coins around her neck, and she was speaking to a camera with a kind of vehemence that Scott found unappealing, until she stopped suddenly and just stared at the camera for several seconds and began nodding. This caused Scott to reach for the volume and turn it up. The woman on the television was listening to a caller with an accent that Scott recognized as upper New England.

“… and I just look at those two precious little boys, Nancy, and I wonder, what did that Mexican lady want with them? What was she thinking she was gonna do with them? I just wonder.”

“That’s what we’re all thinking,” the blond host said, which led Scott to change the channel, inadvertently causing Araceli to appear on the screen. She was being escorted to the police car, earlier in the day, with her wrists clasped together with plastic strings. Oh, my God, Scott thought. What have we done to this poor Mexican woman? The screen cut to another shot tagged LIVE: ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, which showed his $250-per-week housemaid emerging from a police station, winding her way through concrete obstacles meant to fend off terrorist attacks. “Araceli Noemi Ramirez, kidnapping suspect, has now been set free, with investigators saying …” Araceli was walking away from the cameras, studying the news-gatherers filming her from a distance with the same quizzical and annoyed look she gave Scott when he asked for catsup to apply to her turkey sandwiches. Now she stopped, to listen to a shouted question, apparently, and the camera zoomed and shook, with his large domestic employee bouncing at the center of the frame as she turned and walked away with long and loping strides, an image that reminded Scott of that footage of Bigfoot supposedly walking through a clearing in a California forest, a video moment halfway between the real and the simulated, like those shots of turban man and binocular lady Elysian Systems sold to the government.

Scott was changing the channel again when Maureen appeared at the door behind him.

“Scott. The police say the reporters outside won’t leave,” she said, and there was something startling in hearing her address him. “They say they’re going to wait until we make a statement.” She had not slept in two days and she was fading quickly, her voice dreamy and faraway.

“I’ll go out there and talk to them.”

“No, I have to go with you. You can’t be out there alone.”

“Why?”

“Because they need to see both of us. We both need to be there. To defend ourselves.”

“What?”

“People are talking about our family. All over the city. Didn’t you know? Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast just called. They were driving in from the airport and heard people talking about us on the radio. About the boys and Araceli and me and you. For an entire hour. People are saying we’re bad parents. We have to show ourselves. Because people are saying things about us. Didn’t you know?”


The news of the “kidnapping” had circulated in Spanish too, in a flow of words only slightly less robust than in English, beginning in the morning, when a popular FM radio talk/variety jock interrupted his usual series of bawdy jokes and barnyard animal noises to reflect on el caso, lowering his voice an octave into what he called, off the air, his “citizen voice.” “Friends,” he said in Spanish, “this is a case that might impact each and every one of us. I don’t know what this lady is doing with these boys, but if you’re listening to me, señora, or señorita, take them home. Let’s remember that our relationship with these people is built on trust. Because I know there’s thousands of nuestra gente out there taking care of these little mocosos with blond hair and blue eyes. And if just one of us messes up like they say this lady is, a big load of you know what is going to fall on top of all our heads.” In kitchens where meals were being prepared by women named Lupe and María and Soledad, the anxiety level rose significantly after listening to this lecture, and rose further after Lupe and María and Soledad saw the reports on the city’s three Spanish-language television stations, and the footage of Araceli in flight. So by the end of that fifth of July, the floors gleamed brighter, the food was prepared with extra care and fewer spices, until, in the evening when Lupe and María and Soledad arrived home to the cluttered hominess of their apartments in South-Central and Compton, or when they settled into their cramped servant quarters in Beverly Hills homes, and they turned on their televisions and their radios to hear the happy news that Araceli Noemi Ramírez had been set free and that she had been exonerada of all charges.

On Spanish-language television, the images of Araceli walking free were broadcast with commentary that took on a thinly veiled tone of the celebratory, the rising voices of a soccer victory, or the birth of a celebrity baby. “Salió una mujer libre, con la cabeza alta, y digna.” It had all been a misunderstanding, they reported in voices a half breath short of a sigh. The charges against Araceli, now dropped, were a false wrinkle in the freshly starched blanket of responsibility for which latinoamericana nannies were famous. Una mala comunicación. On the telephone, “la soltaron” became the refrain: They let her go, they let her slip away. It was an observation dropped into conversations that soon swung back to the mundane quotidian chatter and melodramatic gossip about school meetings and comadres who were pregnant again and jobs opening up in “casas buenas,” and the irritating behavior of employers in “casas malas.” They let Araceli go and everything was back to normal until the next morning, when the workday began in the early morning darkness, and Lupe and María and Soledad entered kitchens and bedrooms and looked for the faces of the women who paid them, their jefas, and saw the upturned corners of pert lips, the flaxen caterpillar eyebrows that rose in recognition and comfort: Yes, I know you, you are my Lupe, my María, my Soledad. You are here again, on time, and you will wave your chestnut hands and return these sheets and comforters to order, and you will erase the grease from the kitchen surfaces and keep the ants away, and you will change my baby boy’s diaper, and I will leave you here alone in my nest, alone with my child and my possessions, because of that moment of faith and calculus when I close my eyes and feel that thing called trust.


Maureen led Scott back to the living room, where Assistant District Attorney Goller was standing alone by the front door with the attentive look of a best man awaiting the bride and groom at a wedding. When Maureen reached the door, he gave her a comforting smile, put his arm around her shoulder, and lowered his chin to speak sotto voce, even though no one else but Scott was listening.

“There’s about a dozen reporters out there. Don’t let that scare you.” He guided Maureen gently to the picture window and pulled back a corner of the drapes, revealing the spectacle of lights and telescoping microwave antennas outside; they felt to Maureen like an alien force, gathered on her lawn with nefarious cinematic intent, fed by the electricity generated by their humming vans. “The sheriff department’s PIO was just out there fifteen minutes ago. The public information officer, I mean. And he gave a statement, saying they were releasing your employee, and not charging her with anything. He said this was all a, quote, ‘misunderstanding.’ “

“Right,” Scott said quickly.

“But when they pressed him for details, he got off his script,” Goller continued. “He started saying some things that weren’t on the release. He said some things that our friend Detective Blake told him, apparently. He said your employee was trying to, quote, ‘rescue’ your children because you had, quote, ‘abandoned’ them.”

“F*ck,” Scott said, which earned him a pointed look from his wife.

“That’s what he said. ‘Rescue.’ Which, of course, implies that you two placed your children in danger.”

“Jesus,” Scott said.

“Why would he say that?” Maureen asked. “Why would anyone care? We got our boys back.”

“He said that because he needed to explain how it was that a sheriff, an American sheriff, could simply release an illegal immigrant onto the streets, especially one that was just a suspect in a child abduction case.”

“Child abduction?” Scott said. “But is that really—”

“The PIO had to give them something,” Goller continued. “So he gave them you, in so many words.”

“Us?” Maureen said.

“And as soon as he made that suggestion, well, it got the reporters excited. They started throwing around phrases like ‘irresponsible’ and ‘negligence’ and asking if we’re going to ‘press charges.’ Being reporters, they don’t really understand what those words mean. But when they start asking those kinds of questions, Child Protective Services will eventually get their noses in the case.” Goller quickly explained the competing bureaucratic imperatives that would soon envelope Maureen, Scott, and their children, and how it was that two good parents could easily end up before a skeptical judge in family court. It shouldn’t be that a mother and father who called the police in search of their boys ended up under the scrutiny of Child Protective Services, that crude, cheaply staffed machinery, as Goller saw it, where parents were studied under a lens of maximum disbelief. But it happened all the time.

“So what do we do?” Maureen asked finally.

“Number one, you go out there and speak very calmly and show these people who you are,” Goller said. “You’re the very picture of a happy California family. Just you standing up there will do a lot to calm the waters, so to speak. You don’t answer any questions. But you do say that you’re thankful to the sheriff’s department and the Huntington Park police and the media—it’s important that you remember the media—that you’re thankful to all of them for helping to find your two sons. If they shout any questions, you don’t answer. You just say thanks and walk away. Okay?”

Scott digested this information as he walked down the lawn, Maureen following after him with Samantha over her shoulder, having left the boys inside their room with the assistant district attorney. Like a family condemned to the guillotine, they walked with heads bowed toward the spot where the lawn dropped off and sloped downward. A cluster of microphones attached to two poles stood waiting there, their steel silhouettes glinting against a cloud of white light from the television lamps. Scott felt the heat of the lights on his skin, and a kind of nakedness he had not felt since he was an adolescent. Here we stand before you, my American family and I: have pity on me, their bumbling provider and protector, and on them, because they aren’t to blame. He approached the microphone to speak, though before he could open his mouth someone yelled out, “Is that Torres with an s or with a z?”

“An s,” he said, and smiled, because the question calmed him and brought him to the moment.

“I, we, my wife and I … we just want to say thank you to everybody,” Scott began. “To the sheriff’s department, to the Child Protective Services people, to everyone. And to the media too, for getting the word out. Brandon and Keenan are home safe now. They’re going to be okay.” In ten seconds, he had reached the end of all he could say.

“Were they kidnapped?” a male voice asked in a tone that suggested irony and disbelief. “Was there a note?”

Scott could see the wisdom of Ian Goller’s advice: unwrapping the full and complicated truth for this assembled rabble of news-gatherers would be an act of suicide. “And we’re glad this is over,” he continued, ignoring the question. “Thanks for coming.” He sensed, in an instant, that his attempt at expressing finality had fallen flat. In the time-swallowing silence that followed, he became aware that he, Maureen, and Samantha were on live television, because he could see their family portrait, animated and mirrorlike in miniature, on five monitors that rested at the feet of the reporters, each with the words LIVE: LAGUNA RANCHO ESTATES in various fonts. “So good night, everyone. And thank you.”

Maureen mouthed the words Thank you silently, with perhaps a bit too much wan affectation. They were just turning to leave when a voice boomed from behind the blinding lights.

“I have a police source that says you, quote, ‘abandoned’ your children. For four days. You just disappeared, apparently. Why?” Scott and Maureen were caught off guard by the questioner’s bluntness. The voice belonged to the veteran KFWB reporter, who had arrived at the scene just a few minutes earlier, after a gear-grinding race from the south county sheriff’s station, where an off-the-record conversation with the chief of detectives before Araceli’s release had tilted his view of the case toward the Mexican woman.

“Why did you leave them alone in this house for four days?” None of his colleagues were surprised by the radio reporter’s directness. His gadfly irritability with interview subjects was legendary, and included a live television dress down of the chief spokesman for the United States Army Central Command in Riyadh during the first Gulf War. “It’s a simple question. Did you abandon your children to this illegal immigrant?”

Maureen could not see the questioner, a stranger who was standing on her property and slandering her before a live television audience. He was yelling from behind the pack of cameras, beyond the white aura of light bursting behind the reporters’ heads. “That’s a lie!” she snapped. She had a moment to think, This is the most desperate thing I’ve done in my entire life, but failed to notice the surprised and mildly disgusted expression on the woman in the first row of reporters, which might have given her a clue to the response of her viewing audience. “How dare you!” After thirty-six hours without sleeping, her eyes were amnesiac droopy, but she could not accept a total stranger saying she was a bad mother. Her hair was flat and stringy, and she was wearing the same dress she had put on the morning she left the desert spa, a spaghetti-strap pullover whose patterned sunflowers now hung forlornly from her shoulders. Her fuming shout only made her look more haggard, poor and harried, as if she’d stepped off some trashy tabloid-reality stage. Later, Maureen would see this moment replayed on television and understand what she had done as an act of self defense, more desperate, even, than being nineteen years old and trying to escape from underneath the sweaty grip of a drunken college friend, the only time in her life she’d actually used her fists and teeth to inflict injury. “I did not neglect my children. That’s a vicious, vicious lie!”

“Yeah, we got it!” the reporter said sarcastically.

“Pete, gather yourself,” one of the other reporters said.

“C’mon. Tell us what happened.”

Maureen squinted and searched the silhouettes of the reporters one last time, and turned and walked away, Scott mumbling a thank-you at the microphones and then scurrying after her.


Araceli thought the cameras outside the sheriff’s station might follow her, but they did not. She walked quickly around the corner, through the station’s parking lot and its fleet of patrol cars, and into the empty center of Aliso Viejo, where the streets were free of pedestrians after four-thirty in the afternoon. The police had returned her money, and in her first moments of freedom she was momentarily fixated on that act of honesty. Transparencia, they called that in Mexico, an idea symbolized by the clear, large plastic bag in which her belongings had been gathered and catalogued. Now, that’s an example of el primer mundo if there ever was one. In Mexico, you paid cash for your freedom, and the police made sure you left custody with nothing but your wrinkled clothes and all the stains you acquired during a night or two in jail: it had happened to a couple of her alcoholic uncles. A bribe and it was all forgotten. If your car was stolen, you paid the police to get it back for you, which had happened to her father, in the comisaría in Nezahualcóyotl. Here at the sheriff’s station, by contrast, Araceli had been set free not by monetary payment, but rather with truth and laughter, and this realization made her chuckle again, all by herself on the street corner, and reminded her of that folk saying: La que sola ríe, en sus maldades piensa. She who laughs alone is remembering her sins. “That’s dumb: I haven’t committed any maldades. I’m just a poor mexicana trying to find her way.” The detective had asked her, simply, for a phone number at which she might be reached—“in case we need some help with the investigation”—and had then handed her the plastic bag. She advanced one block down the street before she realized she didn’t know where to go next. Returning to the home of the Torres-Thompsons was out of the question. No los quiero ver. She did have the money in the plastic bag, and briefly considered buying a bus ticket to the border: she had enough for a ticket to Tijuana, and for a torta and taco once she got there, but not enough to go any farther. And getting her money out of the bank was impossible without returning to Paseo Linda Bonita. So she called Marisela, with a quarter dropped into the last pay phone left in the center of Aliso Viejo, and asked her friend for posada for a night.

“You were on TV,” Marisela said. “You’re still on TV.”

“Estoy cansada. I think I’ll sleep for two days.”

“Did they hurt you? When I saw them grabbing you on the news, when you were running, I told Mr. Covarrubias, ‘Oh, my God. They’re going to break her arm!’ And then we saw you walk out and you looked fine.”

“They were polite. Once they realized I am not a secuestradora … So can I stay with you?”

“Let me ask my Mr. Covarrubias and see what he says.” Araceli heard the sounds of dishes being moved about the kitchen, and the formless chatter from the television, and then the very clear jingle of a beer commercial, followed by an exchange of voices.

“He says he’s going to drive out there to pick you up,” Marisela said with a cheer. “He’s really angry about what he saw on the TV. He says we have to help you. He’s running out the door right now. Expect him there in about twenty-five minutes.”


In her home on Calmada Avenue in South Whittier, Janet Bryson was angry too, though for entirely different reasons. She watched television dumbfounded as Araceli Ramirez walked to freedom, perched on the edge of her old but homey and recently reupholstered couch, in a big house with a faulty air conditioner. The heat and the events on the television put her in a foul mood. She’d begun to follow the drama of Brandon and Keenan before dawn, in the final hours of her hospital swing shift, catching the first images of the boys on the television in the empty reception area. Later, at home, she searched for details on the Internet and then sat down in her living room to watch the final, insulting denouement of the day’s events live on Channel 9.

“They’re letting her go? What is this?”

Janet Bryson did not personally know any of the protagonists, of course, although her home happened to be eight blocks from Scott Torres’s old home on Safari Drive. She was a nurse technician, and a divorced single mom raising a teenage boy in a two-story ranchette with a layout identical to the former Torres residence, a home plopped like his on the flat surface of forgotten cow pastures, alongside a concrete drainage channel called Coyote Creek. A small thread of brackish liquid ran in Coyote Creek during the summer, fed mostly by the runoff from storm drains that collected the water wasted by neighbors who babied their lawns, rose gardens, and low riders with twice and thrice-weekly deluges. That thread of brackish water attracted crows and cats and, occasionally, a flock of feral parrots with emerald and saffron plumage, and now, as Janet slumped back into the newly stiff cushions of her couch to fully absorb the release of yet another illegal alien criminal suspect into American freedom, one of the parrots gave a loud, humanoid squawk just beyond her backyard fence.

“Oh, shut up, you stupid bird!”

Janet Bryson felt roughly the same about Araceli Ramirez, the nanny kidnapper, and all the other Mexicans invading her space, as she did about the untamed parrots. Like the Spanish-speaking families in her subdivision, the parrots were intruders from the south. They were the descendants of escaped pets and, in a landscape that was the natural home of gray-brown house sparrows and black crows, they were disturbing for the ostentatious display of their exotic colors. Five years earlier she had written to the SPCA, the Sierra Club, and the Audubon Club about how disturbing it was, what a violation of natural rhythms and habitats, to have these tropical birds gathering on the telephone wires and bathing in the creek. Only the Audubon people had written back, with a polite and oft-circulated letter decrying the “invasive species” but lamenting the expense and impracticality of rounding up all the birds, which were in fact six different species of the genus Amazona.

The Mexicans came after the parrots. There had always been a few, but they were English-speaking and generally decent folk back in the day when Janet Bryson was a newlywed and lived in this same home with her former husband. She could talk to those Mexicans because they were Americans, and she could even see a bit of herself in the family comings and goings she witnessed on their driveways and in their garages, the household routines shaped around automobiles, football, and the holidays. Their cousins and grandparents concentrated for Thanksgiving and their lights went up every Christmas. But then came the slow drip of Spanish speakers, the inexorable filling of her block with actual nationals of that other country. She’d knocked on the door of one of the first of these Spanish-speaking families when they moved in next door, offering a plate of brownies because it was the neighborly thing to do. A man of about thirty with a head of black Brillo-pad hair had greeted her, seemingly perplexed by the gesture and also delighted by the appearance of a still-hot white woman on his doorstep. Moments later, this man’s wife had joined him at the door and had given Janet Bryson a reluctant “thank you”—or, rather, “tank you”—and then a dismissive up-and-down, as if to say, No, my husband won’t go after this one. And they still hadn’t returned her plate several years later! Janet Bryson didn’t forget a slight, which was why she hadn’t spoken to her ex-husband for several years, not since an incident at a Super Bowl party involving one of his girlfriends. She remembered the missing plate as more Mexicans arrived, with one family on her block raising a Mexican flag on an actual flagpole they planted on their front lawn, in violation of a building code no one bothered to enforce.

The parrots squawked and waddled in the wash, and thrived and multiplied on a diet of oranges and lemons, and their sudden bursts of noise, their early morning squawk-chorus, often startled Mrs. Bryson awake, as did the Mexicans who revved up their old cars at six or seven to get them going. The parrots flew in groups of about twenty, in large, diamond-shaped formations, and the Mexicans moved in clusters, pairs of men standing over engines, groups of women and girls carrying pots. The Mexicans always seemed to be plotting, with the men putting arms around one another, speaking in lowered voices. Most ominously, she heard, several times a week, one of them make a seven-tone whistle. It was a kind of signal, a summoning, the last note trailing off in plaintive demand. What was the meaning?

Janet Bryson had begun to study the Mexicans in the same way she had studied the parrots, by plugging keywords into Internet search engines, and then by writing letters and emails in which her sense of dislocation found voice. She had come to see herself as part of an under-the-radar network of concerned citizens, isolated voices scattered about suburbs like El Monte and Lancaster, fighting the evils of bilingual education and the bad habits of these people, such as using their front lawns to park their cars and dry their laundry. From her Internet friends, she learned about the conspiracies hatched at the highest levels of government and finance to join together the United States, Canada, and Mexico into a single country, with a single currency called the Amero. She had seen schematic drawings that were said to represent the superhighway that would link the interior of Mexico to Kansas City, and thus accelerate the country’s plunge into foreignness. Watching the Mexicans on Calmada Avenue plot, and reading about the much larger scheme to transform her country, was like living in a dream: the events were strange, menacing, and out of her control.

Janet Bryson worked, sacrificed, and kept an eye on the Mexicans for her only son, an ungrateful sixteen-year-old who was beginning to talk English like a Mexican: she could hear it in the way he stretched out the vowels into a long whine in words like “really” and “guy,” and the gangster intonations with which he pronounced phrases like “so what.” “Why are you talking that way?” she would demand, but he would just shoot back that annoyed sneer that had taken over his face since he turned thirteen. Before he met Mexicans, Carter was a boy who understood they were a mother and son against the world. She had recently given him the keys to his first car and he had rewarded her by working on it in the driveway with one of the Mexicans, and then disappearing every afternoon and most evenings in that old Toyota Celica, leaving her alone in the house to think about her Mexican neighbors and to watch television, where the news was filled with Mexicans. If you looked closely, you saw them everywhere: on the edges of fires, at basketball games, in mug shots. And now in the face of that running woman, the stealer of children who, for mysterious reasons, was now walking free.

On the day that Araceli Ramírez became a national celebrity, Janet Bryson stood on the front porch of her home and called out to her son, “Carter! Where are you going?” He waved but didn’t answer. She had been planted in front of her television set for most of the day, and her obsession with the story had caused her to consume, all on her own, a family-size bag of cheese curls. It’s not good to eat that way. But what else could she do? Those boys looked like her boy, in the old grade school picture with the brown fixer stains in the hallway, Carter before hormones swelled his arms and thickened his neck. Two American boys spirited away southward into Mexico. Unprotected. She found herself actually weeping when word of their rescue had flashed on Headline News. “Thank God!” She slipped into the kitchen and made herself a late lunch, and allowed the television to fill the house with noise as she waited for whatever epilogue the news might bring. And then she had heard the announcement of the Mexican woman’s release, and the scurrilous insinuations against the American parents.

When Maureen shouted, “That’s a lie,” Janet Bryson shared her sense of motherly indignation, and felt herself instantly freed from the state of vibrating meaninglessness that seemed to settle over her mind and home during those long hours when her son was away. We should all shout like that. Janet Bryson wanted to shout at the next-door neighbor with the string of Christmas lights circling a backyard shrine, whose nighttime glow filled her bedroom 365 days a year, to shout at the unseen young Mexicans who had taught her son to whine at the end of his words. She had to do something; she had to join her shout to the shout of that American mother who had been wronged. She had to rally the troops. She returned to her computer and started writing.