The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Is there anything else here I should see?”

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

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

  “Interesting,” Olivia Garza said.

  “Art,” Detective Harkness said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What do you think, Garza?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “How much do you pay this woman?”

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

  “Under the table. Right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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