by Héctor Tobar
But very quickly the passing time and the empty home and all its objects and boyless silence became an excruciating judgment on their own actions, a slow ticking punishment. “Where could they be?” Maureen asked as she wandered into the boys’ bedroom and studied the modular plastic boxes that contained their toys. “Where did she take them?” Maureen repeated the questions out loud several times as she moved from the boys’ room to the media room and the kitchen, carrying Samantha through the house on her shoulder, trying to get her baby girl to take the noon nap that was now two hours overdue. The time is all wrong for her to go to sleep now. She will be awake late into the evening. She can sense something is wrong; she can sense her parents are panicked.
Maureen ran through her mind what she knew about Araceli, wondering if she could summon a fact or name that might provide an answer or clue to the question of where she had taken the boys. The mother who had given Maureen Araceli’s name was in South America as of three years ago, having become an expatriate for a U.S. company in São Paolo, Brazil, and Maureen had no number for her. Araceli was from Mexico City, if Maureen remembered correctly. It took some effort of memory to produce Araceli’s last name: Ramirez, a name confirmed moments later when Scott found, in Araceli’s bedroom, a stack of postcards addressed to her and also the bank book for the savings account Scott had set up for her four years ago. The savings book revealed the last name Ramirez too, but the address was their own. “We have a full name, but that’s it. What else do we know?” Maureen had no idea what Araceli’s parents’ names might be. How many people lived in Mexico City? Ten million? Twenty? And how many Ramirezes might there be in such a metropolis? Such a common last name offered these Mexican people a kind of anonymity. They’re all Ramirez, or Garcia, or Sanchez.
“Where does she go on the weekend?” Maureen asked Scott.
“I think she said to Santa Ana. I’m pretty sure I heard her say that once.”
Scott decided he would go through the old phone bills and check for any unfamiliar numbers. He returned from the office with a stack of paper, began scanning, and soon realized he would find nothing. “I think I’ve seen her use a card or something when she calls Mexico,” he said. “And Santa Ana is a local call.” The toll-free access numbers for the long-distance services left no trace on the bill, which was precisely what Araceli had intended—she didn’t want to owe the Torres-Thompsons any money for the phone bill, and felt the details of her Mexican life were hers alone to possess: they were not for others to see, or study, or to be amused by. Araceli was “very private,” as Maureen put it to her friends, and until this moment Maureen didn’t mind, because she equated Araceli’s reserve with an efficient and serious approach to her job. For a year before Araceli joined them the Torres-Thompsons had a Guatemalan housekeeper, Lourdes, who kept a continual lament about the daughter she had left behind in a place called Totonicapán, often weeping as she did so. After one tearful soliloquy set off by the sight of children her daughter’s age celebrating Brandon’s seventh birthday in the Torres-Thompson backyard, Maureen had decided to let Lourdes go. Madame Weirdness, the childless woman from Mexico City, came to take her place. I have allowed this person to live in my home for four years without once having a substantial conversation about where she is from, about her brothers and sisters, or about how she got here. I have allowed this foreign mystery to float from one room of my home to the next, leaning into the vacuum cleaner, flexing forearms as she mops with that look that often goes far away. I have allowed this state of affairs to persist, and may have placed my sons in danger, in exchange for her chicken mole, for the light and tart seasoning of her black beans, and for the passion we share for the sanitizing power of chlorine.
Maureen’s ignorance about Araceli’s life beyond Paseo Linda Bonita meant she had no information on which to base even an educated guess about where the Mexican woman might have taken Brandon and Keenan. “Where did she go? What is she doing with them?” If Scott was right and they hadn’t been in this house in two days, at least, then the situation became even more inexplicable: Why would a woman who had shown so little interest in her sons suddenly take an overnight excursion with them? As the light shining through the windows lost its white sheen and aged into a faint yellow, and the shadows in the succulent garden turned longer, and the memory and guilt over her own absence from the home grew fainter, Maureen’s thoughts took on a darker and increasingly suspicious hue, leading her to declare, just a few minutes before sunset:
“I think we’re going to have to call the police.”
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 fucking 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, fuck.”
“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.”
