The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

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

  “Yep.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yeah, me too.”

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

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

  “What?”

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

  “We’re missing?”

  “That’s what they said.”

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

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

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

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

  “¿Qué?”

  “On the news.”

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

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

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

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

  “There we are!”

  “Cool!”

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

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

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

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

  “She disappeared with them?”

  “That’s what the police say.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “But now they’re looking for them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Good idea,” Lucía said.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Pero eres gringa,” Araceli said.

  “No I’m not. I’m mexicana.”

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

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

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

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

  “¿Qué?”

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

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

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

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