The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

6




The park consisted of a rubber mat and the requisite slides and swings, resting at the bottom of a slope of irrigated fescue overlooking the beach and the ocean. Midmorning dew covered the grass and the park was deserted, a fact that Araceli found disappointing somehow. She expected crowds, children running, the smoke of barbecues drifting skyward, but here the only movement was from the empty swings being tapped forward by the invisible hand of the ocean breeze, their plastic seats garnished with mist. In the distance, the roar of the surf, and sometimes the whine or purr of a car gliding down the street that curved around the park. The overcast was a whitish gray roof, as it was most summer mornings before the sun came to burn off everything to blue. The tableau was quiet, oceanic, meditation-inducing, but for the sound of Maureen berating her two sons inside their idling car.

Thirty minutes earlier, alerted by a series of screams and shouts, Maureen had discovered her two sons gripped in a pretzel headlock on the living room floor underneath the bookcases with their picture frames and two glass vases from Andalusia that rattled when, in their wrestling, Keenan had managed to push his brother backward into the furniture. “You’re going to break something!” Maureen had shouted, referring simultaneously to their bodies and the objects in her bookcase. They grunted and yelped and Maureen had struggled to separate them as Keenan tried to dig his teeth into his older brother’s wrist, while Brandon screamed “Get off me” and tried to free himself with a kick. I order them off the television an hour ago, and without the pacifying power of that screen, they are trying to draw blood. There was no play in this, they were like two drunks on the sawdust-covered floor of a bar. Once or twice a week this happened, a testosterone brawl born suddenly from a moment of peaceful brotherly play. Maureen believed a mother had to eradicate the disease of Y-chromosome violence during childhood, lest her family one day be consumed by the gunplay horrors broadcast on the television news. She had decided to whisk them out of the house, into the punishment of open space and an afternoon spent with Araceli as their caretaker.

Inside the car, with Keenan still in tears and Brandon glaring defiantly out the window, Maureen launched into a familiar monologue of threats that revolved around the loss of “privileges.” “Boys!” she said by way of conclusion. “Sometimes I wish I could just leave you with your father and take Samantha and just go. Go someplace far away.” Then, turning to face the boys directly, she said, “I wish I could just leave you with your father!” It was an unforgivably mean thing to say and Maureen would regret it later, after she had driven off with Samantha and seen the defiant expression of proto-adolescent withdrawal on Brandon’s face, a narrowing of the eyes that suggested a future rebellion with sweaty and disheveled male textures. But in her frustration Maureen told herself she didn’t care, because there was only so much boy craziness a woman could put up with.

“Listen to Araceli,” Maureen told her sons after opening the door and lining them up on the sidewalk next to their housekeeper. “She’s in charge. And if I hear from her that you didn’t behave, you’re going to lose your Game Boy privileges for the rest of the summer.” Turning to Araceli, she announced, “I’ll be back about one.” Araceli was standing with her arms folded across her chest, dressed from head to toe in a pink filipina, looking back at her jefa with bemused irritation. Maureen thought briefly that perhaps this was not such a good idea, suddenly leaving her boys at a park with this ill-tempered Mexican woman of un-proven child-rearing skills. Araceli was allergic to her boys; she would just as well limit her contact with them to making their meals and picking up their scattered toys, but in Araceli’s severe disposition there was an air of ample responsibility, the sense that she wouldn’t panic in an emergency. Maureen looked around the park and saw a pay phone: she gave her maid a handful of quarters. “You should really get a cell phone,” she said, provoking no response from Araceli. “I’ll be at home with Samantha. Call me if there’s a problem. I can be here in fifteen minutes.”

Araceli tugged at her uniform, wishing she’d had a chance to change. She had been plucked by Maureen from the laundry room as she folded a stack of el señor Scott’s boxer shorts and in the chaotic evacuation of the boys from the home she had carried that underwear into the dining room and left it on the table, and it annoyed her to think it would still be there when she got back.

When the car turned a corner and disappeared, the boys and Araceli shared a few moments of contemplative silence. She’s really gone, Brandon thought, our mother left us here on the sidewalk. Even though it had been announced with that angry speech, his mother’s absence felt stark and sudden, and for a moment he imagined that he had been dumped into the plot of a melodramatic novel, like the parentless hero of a multivolume series of books he recently finished reading, the adventures of an adolescent boy unwittingly thrust into an adult world of crime and magic. He was alone out here in public, without even Guadalupe to take care of him. Araceli did not yet register in Brandon’s mind as a protective force, and he quickly scanned the park like a young warrior about to enter a dark and threatening forest. He imagined a “strike force” suddenly descending on the park, a hooded army of armed underworld types, the machine-gun-toting villains in one of the books he was reading.

“Do you think the Russian mafia would ever come to Orange County?” he asked his brother.

“What?”

Keenan believed that his big brother read entirely too much and knew him to be an incessant confabulator, prone to confusing and scaring his younger brother with fantastic thoughts. At their very expensive private school, Brandon’s big imagination caused him to run afoul of the otherwise laid-back teachers there, primarily because he had freaked out many of the girls with new and ever more elaborate versions of the Bloody Mary myth, causing them to avoid the girls’ bathroom, with a handful of peeing-in-the-hallway incidents the result.

“You know,” Brandon insisted. “Like in Artemis Fowl.”

“Nah,” Keenan said. “It’s too sunny here for the Russian mafia.”

Brandon was still only eleven years old, and the morbid and fantastic imagery from his middle-reader novels did not linger in his mind’s eye for long; in less than a minute he was running down the grass with his brother chasing after him, the reasons for their living room fight forgotten. Araceli followed them down the slope of the park toward the rubber play mat and swings and took a seat on a bench facing the ocean. Brandon watched her as she looked off in the distance at a lone surfer tossing himself into the waves, the charcoal skin of his wet suit swallowed up by water the color of the backwash in her mop bucket. Araceli was a major planet in Brandon’s universe, and he studied her often as she shuffled around the Paseo Linda Bonita house. Sometimes he wondered if she was angry at him, if he had done something to upset her, because why else would someone be so quiet in his presence for so long? But after careful consideration of his actions—he was, in his own estimation, despite a few flaws, a “good boy”—Brandon arrived at the conclusion that Araceli was just lonely. And when he thought about her loneliness, he concluded that she should read more, because anyone who read was never alone. In books there were limitless worlds, there was truth, sometimes brutal and ugly, and sometimes happy and soothing.

Brandon considered giving her the book he had managed to bring with him, but then he thought better of this, and instead left it on a bench and joined his little brother on the plastic body of the play structure and its short hanging bridge, and began to playact with battle sounds formed by trilling tongues and popping cheeks. Araceli listened to them and slunk down on the bench, looking up at the gray sky and wondering why it was that here along the beach the sun seemed to come out less during the summer than it did during any other season. The blankness of the sky reminded her, for some reason, of Scott’s underwear left on the table, and of other things left undone at the house up on the hill, where Maureen was probably just now arriving to the quiet of a house without boys. Araceli would give anything to be back in Mexico City on one of those summer days when balls of white drift across the blue canvas of the sky and you can follow them on their march across the valley of the city, and know that they will soon drop a cooling rain shower on your face. She wanted to feel something cold or warm, because in this uniform, in the amphitheater of this park, she felt like a stiff pink box and not like a human being. Looking down at the beach, she saw the surfer climbing out of the water, a brown-haired teenager in a black wet suit, and in an instant she imagined he was Pepe the gardener, dripping water from his bare chest. She imagined herself sitting on the beach on a towel, Pepe walking toward her with beads of water clinging erotically to his pecs, climbing up the sand to reach her, leaning over her, dripping salt water over her dry and lonely skin.


Ten miles away from the Laguna Rancho Estates, on the third floor of an office building in a business park on a wide and sparsely traveled boulevard, in a corner of the city of Irvine, itself sparsely populated by various medium-sized corporations with generic and quickly forgettable names, Scott Torres toiled at work, sitting before a flat-panel computer screen displaying five different images of the perimeter fence at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky National Airport. He waited with a dulled sense of anticipation for the knee-high grass at the base of the fence to be whipped back and forth by a gust of wind or the back-draft of a passing airplane, a confirmation that the image was, in fact, “live.” Over the course of the morning, Scott had opened windows on his screen that revealed various locales in the United States, noting that it was raining at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, and watching the long, Arctic-summer shadows stretch underneath the Alaska Pipeline. The pipeline to the Bering Sea was a favorite summer place to spend time at the Elysian Systems office because there was a chance you might see an elk or deer scurrying across the tundra. All day long the computers on the third floor of the Elysian corporate headquarters were open to windows showing lonely stretches of fencing that seemed static and frozen in time, like the peopleless backdrops to a deep and disturbing dream, with only the effects of the weather and the moving of the shadows to prove they were objects in a real, living world.

Scott and his programmers at Elysian Systems were drawn to the images for their clandestine, remote allure and for the rare pleasure of officially sanctioned voyeurism. They had been given access to this government system to develop software, a contract that happened to be the only source of positive cash flow in the Elysian Systems corporate spreadsheet. When Scott thought about his responsibility to enforce this contract by telling his seven programmers never to discuss their project “with any individual outside our direct work group,” or when he was forced to ask them to sign numerous promises of confidentiality and loyalty to the United States of America, he could not help but feel silly, because such admonitions ran counter to the iconoclastic programming ethic of his youth, and even the essential élan of his initial foray into entrepreneurship. This was the central contradiction of Scott’s professional life, to be the enforcer and organizer of a project that did not fire his imagination, and to be the oddball in a moneymaking culture that as of yet generated little money. He was a relic, an aging survivor from that clan of “robust” programmers who came of age in the interregnum between the slide-rule epoch and the Ethernet era. There were moments during the workday when he felt this characterization growing among his underlings and Elysian’s executives; it was a fleeting sensation, a truth just beyond his grasp, like knowing the meaning of a word but not remembering the word itself, the syllables that described the idea unwilling to gather on your tongue. No one here admires me, no one looks up to me, Scott thought, except maybe Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki, a young and as yet unsuccessful game designer who was as misplaced at Elysian Systems as Scott was, and who often stole glances at him through the glass of his office.

The executives running Elysian Systems were serious, middle-aged, and worked on a separate floor, the fourth, as if to immunize themselves from the eccentricities of the programmers: the executives wore suits and ties, and decorated their walls with plaques earned during their days as mid-grade managers at detergent and soft-drink companies. They had charged this government contract to Scott, the “vice president of programming,” even though any first-year graduate student in computer science could have managed to write the essential code. The contract was for the “accountability software” of the “Citizen Anti-Terrorist Sentry System,” CATSS, by which the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and other agencies farmed out guard duty at airports, nuclear power plants, and military bases to thousands of Americans sitting at home staring at their computer screens.

Scott’s programming mission was to find ways to make sure the “citizen sentries” were actually monitoring the 12,538 cameras in the system, instead of using their computers to play solitaire or shop for shoes. His programs gave these people, like rats in a laboratory experiment, meaningless tasks to do while watching the camera images on their computers, then rated them on those tasks and produced a waterfall of statistics that was especially pleasing to Washington. Scott clicked through fence images from a half dozen more places, including a perimeter fence in a piñon forest in Los Alamos, New Mexico, then went back to the work he was supposed to be doing: analyzing his programmers’ progress on a project to design animated fake “intruders” who would “walk” and “dig” and perform other suspicious acts alongside the fences and gates, frightening the citizen sentries into pushing the alert! button on their computer screens and causing an Elysian Systems server to register another entry in the vigilant column. He tried out “turban man,” an image of a swarthy fellow with a towel wrapped around his head running and ducking: the actor was his lead programmer, Jeremy Zaragoza, and the clip had been filmed at a rented studio along with others of “binocular lady” and “shovel man,” all played by various programmers in this office. Scott made turban man run along various fences: the challenge was to create animations in correct proportions to the various barriers on the screen as they ran and shoveled alongside them, which was proving to be trickier than anyone had anticipated. After watching turban man pass improbably back and forth through the steel mesh fence at the San Onofre power plant, like some superhero possessed of special powers, Scott absentmindedly clicked open the latest numbers from NASDAQ, which had been especially bad all morning.

No one in Elysian Systems bothered to hide the fact that they were using their computers throughout the workday to watch their stocks and mutual funds and 401(k) accounts, not even the executives up on the fourth floor. Before, we played Nerf football in the hallways, and practiced tango dancing in the cafeteria. Now we watch our retirement shrink in multicolored graphs. Football and tango were better for the soul. This morning, as on most mornings in recent months, Scott squinted at his screen in frustration at the dynamic displays, updated at five-minute intervals, that confirmed his poor financial judgment, his bad bets. For several years the market had risen dependably, and people started to think of it as a machine that made money, but that wasn’t its true nature. The market did not behave according to any pattern Scott had been able to discern. Turning the market into the graphs and charts of the type filling Scott’s flat-panel display created the illusion that it was a mathematical equation, that it obeyed rules like those hidden inside the core of computer games, where players spent hours exploring and prodding to uncover the underlying logic, the key that opened the jewelry box. The equations that ran the market were, in fact, too vast for any computer to decipher: they were the sum of the desires and fears of millions of people, divided and multiplied by the ostensibly rational but really quite subjective calculations of “analysts.” The math was twisted further by the fiscal legerdemain of accountants who could be as creatively fuzzy as impressionist painters. The numbers their spreadsheets spit out, Scott now knew, were inflated by narrative inventions like those Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian used to confabulate at meetings with venture capitalists. Scott had learned these lessons while watching the Big Man run their company, but unfortunately he had no way to apply them to his own investment decisions, and he had spent several frustrating years moving the “go-away” money from MindWare around the market and into various “instruments.” Five years ago the charts and graphs pointed, unmistakably, toward exotic new fields being tested in Research Triangle laboratories, and if they had continued to follow that logic Scott would not be working at Elysian Systems today, he would not have a mortgage to worry about, and Pepe the gardener would still be cutting the lawn and tending to the backyard garden and Scott would be liberated of his wife’s complaining to him about it.


As was their custom, the regulars at Laguna Municipal Park South began arriving around noon. They brought packed lunches, strollers stuffed with extra diapers and moist towelets, and carried pay-as-you-go cell phones to talk to the barrio relatives who were watching over their own children as they earned dollars caring for their patrones’ boys and girls. The weekday routine of the park was broken this morning by the appearance of a new woman, a fellow latinoamericana who occupied the bench by the play structure, and who instantly reminded the regulars of locales deep to the south, and not because of her broad face and caramel skin, or the way she slumped on the bench and sneered at the play structures. No, it was the uniform that reminded them of their home countries, the excessive professional formality of matching pink pants and the wide, pocketed blouse that was known back home as a filipina. It was the uniform of the high-society domestic back home, though hardly anyone wore one in California, where most employers preferred their domestics in the sporty and practical attire of jeans and tennis shoes, complemented with the odd gift garment from the boss: a quality hoodie from Old Navy, or a sturdy cotton blouse from Target. The new woman in the park was sitting with her arms folded defiantly across her chest, as if she were a prisoner taking some fresh air in the recreation yard, watching over two boys who themselves were very familiar because they used to come here with Guadalupe, a favorite of the group.

“¡Buenas tardes!” announced a perky older woman in sweatpants and a loose-fitting blouse as she took a seat next to Araceli. “Those are Guadalupe’s kids.”

“Así es,” Araceli said.

The woman introduced herself as María Isabel and pointed out that she had brought a girl to the park who was about Keenan’s age. Araceli watched as the girl and Keenan stood on opposite sides of the elaborate play structure, as if contemplating the gender divide and the walkways of plastic and compressed rubber that stood between them, until Keenan made another mouth explosion and returned to the game with his older brother.

“I heard that Guadalupe might quit,” María Isabel announced. “So, you took her place?”

Before Araceli could answer, María Isabel rose to her feet to push the girl, who had run over to the swing, and then turned toward Araceli in anticipation of an answer.

“No, we used to work together.”

“That Guadalupe was a funny girl. Always telling jokes. Did she ever tell you the story about the little boy getting lost in the women’s section in the mall?”

“Yes.”

María Isabel gave the girl another push, the wide fan of her charge’s blond hair catching the air and billowing in the moist morning air, her pendulum movement and the creaking of the apparatus keeping a kind of harried time. “Push me higher, María,” the girl yelled, and María Isabel obeyed and gave another heave. María Isabel was a woman of oak-bark hue with freshly dyed and aerosol-sprayed short hair, and she was wearing smart matching accessories of gold earrings and a thin gold chain on her wrist that were mismatched with the bleach-burned T-shirt draped over her short frame. This woman arrives at work dressed as if she were a secretary, and then strips down into janitor clothes. “You tell a few good stories and the time just flashes by,” María Isabel continued. “A lot of us come here every day. Later on we’ll probably see Juana. And Modesta and Carmelita. Carmelita is from Peru and the nicest woman you’ll ever meet. Maybe we’ll see Fanny, though I hope not. Fanny is a mess.”

Araceli said nothing and for a moment they watched Brandon chase Keenan over a bridge of plastic slats, until Brandon lost his footing and fell over the edge, headfirst onto the black mat below. Keenan laughed as his brother climbed up and rubbed his head, unhurt.

“Niños traviesos,” María Isabel said with a tone of mild exasperation that she intended as a gesture of sympathy with Araceli. “But I’d rather take care of children. If you’ve got a girl, it isn’t any work at all. A boy is a little more work, but I’ll take even three boys over an old lady. That was my last job, taking care of a viejita on her deathbed.”

“Really?” Araceli said, unable to mask her complete lack of interest.

María Isabel lauched into a story about la señora Bloom “wrestling with death” and “trying to keep him from taking my old lady away.” Araceli was going to speak up and say, I really don’t want to hear this story, but at that instant María Isabel shifted her gaze to an object or person behind Araceli and began to wave.

“Juana! ¡Aquí estoy! Over here.”

Within a few minutes Araceli was sitting in a circle of Spanish chatter, with three more women greeting Araceli with smiles and holas and polite kisses on the cheek.

“You’re taking care of Guadalupe’s kids,” said Carmelita, a stubby-legged woman from Peru. “Those are good boys. She loved them.”

“This is one of the nicer parks around here,” said Juana, who had oily, uneven bangs, and the coffee-colored skin of her ancestors in the mountains of Veracruz. “They clean it every night. And the police patrol past here, so you hardly ever see any vagrants.”

As the women gathered in the play area, Araceli had a fleeting sense of nostalgia for the company of colleagues, the banter of coworkers, the space that Guadalupe and Pepe had filled in her life. The women told her about their families and the American homes they worked and lived in, while simultaneously keeping an eye on their charges, who were swarming over the play structure and filling the air around it with the squeals their parents called “outside voices.” Carmelita sat on the mat a few feet from Araceli and allowed the boy in her care to stand in his leather shoes and overalls, walk toward her, and then fall into her embrace. Modesta, a freckled and green-eyed mexicana, raised a finger at a girl climbing the roof of the structure’s plastic cube, and the girl immediately clambered down to safety. They were all parents themselves (and María Isabel a grandparent), and their motherly self-assurance fell over and calmed the children around them like a rain of warm milk. Once they’d finished greeting Araceli, their conversation drifted, as it often did, to the practical problems of child-rearing.

“This is a good place to practice walking. If he falls, he can’t hurt himself.”

“If you don’t let them fall, they don’t learn to walk.”

“I remember when Kylie was that age. Es una edad de peligros: they fall as much as they talk. She still has that scar on her forehead, underneath her hair.”

“I finally got Jackson to eat the squash, after I tried that recipe with the food machine. Un milagro. But it didn’t work with his sister.”

“Each one is different. God makes them that way.”

Araceli watched and listened, saw the children on the play structure casting glances at their paid caregivers, and the caregivers looking back as if to say, You are okay, I am here. They knew that each child was his or her own shifting landscape because the estrogen that ran through their veins, and their own histories as mothers, allowed them to see these things: Araceli sensed that North American employers and Latin American relatives alike revered them for this power. They all seem to possess it—and to know that I do not.

After a while their attention returned to Araceli, the quiet, awkward woman in their midst, and the small mystery and break in the park routine she represented. What, they now asked directly, had happened to Guadalupe?

“I guess they didn’t have enough money to pay her what she wanted,” Araceli told them. “Or to keep her.”

“Or she didn’t want to stay,” María Isabel said knowingly.

“No sé.”

“Yes, I remember her saying something about the money,” María Isabel said. “First they asked her to work for less. Then her patrón said they were going to need just one person to cook and clean and take care of the kids too. To do everything. Guadalupe said she thought it was too much work for one person. And that she wouldn’t do it, even if they asked her … So I guess they hired you.”

Araceli said nothing.

“Do you know where she went?” Carmelita asked.

“No.”

Suddenly the newcomer looked perplexed and agitated. Araceli could see now that all the scenery at Paseo Linda Bonita had been shifting around her, even before Guadalupe left: calculations were being made, consultations undertaken. Araceli worked harder than Guadalupe, she was infinitely more reliable, but she didn’t chat with her bosses, or make friendly with them, and so they had revealed their crisis to Guadalupe, the flighty and talkative one. But they hadn’t even bothered asking Araceli what she thought, and had instead simply foisted more work upon her. Araceli saw her standing in the world with a new and startling clarity. She lived with English-speaking strangers, high on a hill alone with the huge windows and the smell of solvents, and lacked the will to escape what she had become. She quietly accepted the Torres-Thompsons’ money and the room they gave her, and they felt free to make her do anything they asked, expecting her to adapt to their habits and idiosyncrasies, holding babies, supervising boys at the park, and probably more things that she could not yet imagine.

“Sometimes, you just have to pack your things and go to the next job,” María Isabel said. “That’s how it was when la señora Bloom died …”

“Again with la viejita,” Carmelita said. Juana and Modesta rolled their eyes.

“I was telling the story to Araceli when you all got here. And I never finished.”

“The Day of the Dead isn’t until November,” Carmelita said with a wry smile. Already Juana and Modesta were starting to drift away, walking closer toward their charges. “Why don’t you wait until nighttime to start telling your scary stories?”

“There’s nothing scary about it. It’s a story about a human being. About two human beings. Me and la señora Bloom.”

“Araceli doesn’t want to hear that story,” Carmelita said.

“No, no, it’s not a problem,” Araceli said. Already, this woman’s rambling had revealed one unexpected truth, and if she allowed her to go on, she might reveal another.

“Like I was saying, la señora Bloom lived by herself, with only me to keep her company. None of her kids even lived nearby. The one daughter who called to check in every week, she lived in New York. So one day, finally, la señora Bloom gave up and let go. I was talking to her, just like I’m talking to you right now, about my ungrateful children in Nicaragua. Then I looked at the bed and I saw her with her eyes open. I waited for them to close, but they never did. So I crossed myself about twenty times, and called the ambulance. Two very nice young men came, and they said, ‘She’s dead.’ And I said, ‘I know that.’ And then they said, ‘There’s nothing we can do.’ They said I had to wait for the coroner. And they left her with me. So here I am all alone with a body in the house! I call the daughter in New York and there’s no answer. Just the machine. I keep trying, all day long, and I’m thinking, I can’t say that into the machine, Your mother is dead. So finally I tell the machine, ‘Please call your mother’s house.’ But she never did. I was all alone with that body for fifteen hours, until the brown van came and they took my viejita away.”

María Isabel stopped and saw Araceli looking off at the ocean, but plowed on. “The house smelled like death to me: so I cleaned all night long, until all the disinfectant was gone. Finally the coroner called: they wanted to know what to do with the body. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t reach the family.’ So they tell me, ‘If we don’t hear from someone in forty-eight hours, we’re going to cremate her.’ Así de frío. So I started yelling at them, saying, ‘Don’t you have a mother? Would you burn your own mother?’ “

“Increíble,” Araceli said flatly.

“By the time I finally heard from the daughter, my viejita was just a box of ashes. After I got the box, then they all show up at the house. The daughter, the son-in-law, the other daughter, the long-lost brother, who I had never met before. Todos. And they start asking me questions as if it were all my fault. One of them wanted to search my things when I moved out, but when I started crying they let me go.”

“I’ve never taken care of an old lady,” Araceli said distractedly. “And I’ve never taken care of children until now.”

Araceli stood up, gave a perfunctory “Con permiso” to María Isabel, then walked over to the play structure, where Keenan was now running across the bridge with the girl María Isabel had brought. At the other end of the play structure, Brandon was sitting on a step, reading a book. Where did he get a book? Is he always carrying one, the way other boys hold toy trucks or security blankets?

“What are you reading?” Araceli asked him. In four years of living with the Torres-Thompsons, it was the first time she had ever asked this boy that question: it felt like a correct, motherly thing to do.

“El revolución,” Brandon answered, holding up the book to show her the title, American Revolution.

“La revolución,” Araceli corrected.

She sat next to him, another thing she had not done before, and looked at the pages as he read them. The book contained short snippets of text and pictures of long muskets, reproductions of old paintings of battles, studio shots of museum artifacts like rusting buttons and uniforms. There was something sad about a young boy sitting in a park reading about men in white wigs who were dead. She wanted to tell him that he should put down his book and play, but of course that wasn’t her business, to talk to him like his mother.

“What happened to Guadalupe?” Brandon asked suddenly.

“Yeah,” Keenan chimed in from the play structure. “Where’s Lupita?”

Araceli was momentarily taken aback. Guadalupe had taken care of these boys for five years, she was like a big sister to them, and no one had explained her absence.

“¿Tu mamá no te dijo nada?”

“No. Nothing.”

“I don’t know why, but she is gone,” Araceli said, hoping to forestall any further questions.

“She’s gone? You mean she’s not coming back?”

“Is she working somewhere else?” Brandon asked in a distracted voice that suggested he already had an inkling that Guadalupe had quit. “Is she mad at Mommy? Is she getting married?” Brandon was continuously peppering the adults around him, including Araceli, with questions, and these queries about Guadalupe seemed more like the casually curious questions he posed to Araceli from time to time: “Why can’t we have turkey dogs two days in a row? … Why do you say ‘buenos días’ in Spanish but not ‘buenos tardes? …” In the Torres-Thompson family, doing your best to answer Brandon’s questions was a house rule. La señora Maureen was proud of her inquisitive oldest boy and liked to brag about the very first “brilliant” question he had asked when he was four years old: “Why do moths always fly around the lightbulbs?” Neither of his parents knew the answer and they scrambled to reference books and the Internet before giving their incipient genius the information his young brain demanded: moths use the moon to navigate at night, and the lights confuse them, so that “they think they’re circling the moon.”

When a boy got answers as satisfying as that one, they only fed his desire to ask more questions. “An atomic bomb? Why? How does that work? How do bald eagles see fish in the water from way up in the sky? Who is Malcolm X, and why is his last name X?” The boy was destined to be either a brilliant scientist or an irritating attorney.

“Did Lupita go back to Mexico?” Brandon asked his temporary caregiver. “What part of Mexico is she from? Is it the same time there as it is here? Can we call her?”

“No sé,” Araceli said, giving an annoyed looked to make it clear that this answer applied to all of Brandon’s questions. “No sé nada.”

Araceli felt a sudden warmness on her face: looking up, she saw a shimmering white disk of phosphorus eating through the clouds. The sun will come out, Araceli hoped, and then she said it out loud and Brandon looked up and nodded and returned to his book, lingering over a picture of two armies gathered at opposite sides of a bridge, engaged in a standoff of martial posturing. As he read the accompanying text, running his fingers over it, Araceli gave out a loud sigh.


The nursery manager paid a quick visit to Paseo Linda Bonita and left Maureen three pieces of paper. First there was a schematic drawing on a sheet from her sketchpad in which small symbols represented the various succulents the consult ant proposed planting in the Torres-Thompson backyard. Second, there was a form in which the price of creating this desert garden was laid out, with separate quotes for “labor,” “flora,” and “base material,” and the alarmingly high figure of the sum total. The third and final piece of paper was a drawing that depicted the succulent garden as it would look from the perspective of the sliding glass doors of her home. The cylinders of a miniature organ pipe cactus would rise to the right, creating an anchor to the composition that would draw the eye leftward, toward the cluster of barrel cacti, mesquite shrubs, and large yuccas with arms blooming like human-sized flowers. When Maureen looked at the numbers on the smallest piece of paper she winced, and felt the dream of the drawing slipping away, becoming so many grains of pencil graphite dissolving into the white blankness of the paper. Then she remembered the argument that she would present to her husband, the logic that would make the garden real, the words the nursery manager had said in a matter-of-fact tone, because the truth of it was so self-evident: “I know it looks a little high. But in the final analysis you’re gonna save a good chunk of money each year off your water bill, and even more off your gardening bill. Because this is the sort of garden you just put in and forget about. Maybe two or three times a year you go in and weed the thing, but otherwise you just stand there and watch it look pretty.”

The drawing of the garden looked like a desert diorama, and Maureen imagined the dreamlike effect you got at an old-fashioned natural history museum, the sense of standing in a darkened room before a window that looks into another, brightly lit world. The succulent garden would create the illusion that their house was a portal into the unspoiled landscape of old California. Only Scott and his calculator stood between Maureen and the diorama coming to life. Against this obstacle, there was the accelerating decay of the current garden: in time, it would resemble a dried-out mulch heap, or one of those corners of Brazil ravaged by cattle ranchers. She could make this argument to her husband, or she could simply take control of the situation—as she did with every other problem in this home—and present him with a rather costly fait accompli. He’d be angry, but he’d pay the bill, because he always had before.