The Barbarian Nurseries

by Héctor Tobar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Really?” Olivia Garza said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’ll go out there and talk to them.”

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

  “Why?”

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

  “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Right,” Scott said quickly.

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

  “Fuck,” Scott said, which earned him a pointed look from his wife.

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

  “Jesus,” Scott said.

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

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

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

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

  “Us?” Maureen said.

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

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

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