by Héctor Tobar
Scott digested this information as he walked down the lawn, Maureen following after him with Samantha over her shoulder, having left the boys inside their room with the assistant district attorney. Like a family condemned to the guillotine, they walked with heads bowed toward the spot where the lawn dropped off and sloped downward. A cluster of microphones attached to two poles stood waiting there, their steel silhouettes glinting against a cloud of white light from the television lamps. Scott felt the heat of the lights on his skin, and a kind of nakedness he had not felt since he was an adolescent. Here we stand before you, my American family and I: have pity on me, their bumbling provider and protector, and on them, because they aren’t to blame. He approached the microphone to speak, though before he could open his mouth someone yelled out, “Is that Torres with an s or with a z?”
“An s,” he said, and smiled, because the question calmed him and brought him to the moment.
“I, we, my wife and I … we just want to say thank you to everybody,” Scott began. “To the sheriff’s department, to the Child Protective Services people, to everyone. And to the media too, for getting the word out. Brandon and Keenan are home safe now. They’re going to be okay.” In ten seconds, he had reached the end of all he could say.
“Were they kidnapped?” a male voice asked in a tone that suggested irony and disbelief. “Was there a note?”
Scott could see the wisdom of Ian Goller’s advice: unwrapping the full and complicated truth for this assembled rabble of news-gatherers would be an act of suicide. “And we’re glad this is over,” he continued, ignoring the question. “Thanks for coming.” He sensed, in an instant, that his attempt at expressing finality had fallen flat. In the time-swallowing silence that followed, he became aware that he, Maureen, and Samantha were on live television, because he could see their family portrait, animated and mirrorlike in miniature, on five monitors that rested at the feet of the reporters, each with the words LIVE: LAGUNA RANCHO ESTATES in various fonts. “So good night, everyone. And thank you.”
Maureen mouthed the words Thank you silently, with perhaps a bit too much wan affectation. They were just turning to leave when a voice boomed from behind the blinding lights.
“I have a police source that says you, quote, ‘abandoned’ your children. For four days. You just disappeared, apparently. Why?” Scott and Maureen were caught off guard by the questioner’s bluntness. The voice belonged to the veteran KFWB reporter, who had arrived at the scene just a few minutes earlier, after a gear-grinding race from the south county sheriff’s station, where an off-the-record conversation with the chief of detectives before Araceli’s release had tilted his view of the case toward the Mexican woman.
“Why did you leave them alone in this house for four days?” None of his colleagues were surprised by the radio reporter’s directness. His gadfly irritability with interview subjects was legendary, and included a live television dress down of the chief spokesman for the United States Army Central Command in Riyadh during the first Gulf War. “It’s a simple question. Did you abandon your children to this illegal immigrant?”
Maureen could not see the questioner, a stranger who was standing on her property and slandering her before a live television audience. He was yelling from behind the pack of cameras, beyond the white aura of light bursting behind the reporters’ heads. “That’s a lie!” she snapped. She had a moment to think, This is the most desperate thing I’ve done in my entire life, but failed to notice the surprised and mildly disgusted expression on the woman in the first row of reporters, which might have given her a clue to the response of her viewing audience. “How dare you!” After thirty-six hours without sleeping, her eyes were amnesiac droopy, but she could not accept a total stranger saying she was a bad mother. Her hair was flat and stringy, and she was wearing the same dress she had put on the morning she left the desert spa, a spaghetti-strap pullover whose patterned sunflowers now hung forlornly from her shoulders. Her fuming shout only made her look more haggard, poor and harried, as if she’d stepped off some trashy tabloid-reality stage. Later, Maureen would see this moment replayed on television and understand what she had done as an act of self defense, more desperate, even, than being nineteen years old and trying to escape from underneath the sweaty grip of a drunken college friend, the only time in her life she’d actually used her fists and teeth to inflict injury. “I did not neglect my children. That’s a vicious, vicious lie!”
“Yeah, we got it!” the reporter said sarcastically.
“Pete, gather yourself,” one of the other reporters said.
“C’mon. Tell us what happened.”
Maureen squinted and searched the silhouettes of the reporters one last time, and turned and walked away, Scott mumbling a thank-you at the microphones and then scurrying after her.
Araceli thought the cameras outside the sheriff’s station might follow her, but they did not. She walked quickly around the corner, through the station’s parking lot and its fleet of patrol cars, and into the empty center of Aliso Viejo, where the streets were free of pedestrians after four-thirty in the afternoon. The police had returned her money, and in her first moments of freedom she was momentarily fixated on that act of honesty. Transparencia, they called that in Mexico, an idea symbolized by the clear, large plastic bag in which her belongings had been gathered and catalogued. Now, that’s an example of el primer mundo if there ever was one. In Mexico, you paid cash for your freedom, and the police made sure you left custody with nothing but your wrinkled clothes and all the stains you acquired during a night or two in jail: it had happened to a couple of her alcoholic uncles. A bribe and it was all forgotten. If your car was stolen, you paid the police to get it back for you, which had happened to her father, in the comisaría in Nezahualcóyotl. Here at the sheriff’s station, by contrast, Araceli had been set free not by monetary payment, but rather with truth and laughter, and this realization made her chuckle again, all by herself on the street corner, and reminded her of that folk saying: La que sola ríe, en sus maldades piensa. She who laughs alone is remembering her sins. “That’s dumb: I haven’t committed any maldades. I’m just a poor mexicana trying to find her way.” The detective had asked her, simply, for a phone number at which she might be reached—“in case we need some help with the investigation”—and had then handed her the plastic bag. She advanced one block down the street before she realized she didn’t know where to go next. Returning to the home of the Torres-Thompsons was out of the question. No los quiero ver. She did have the money in the plastic bag, and briefly considered buying a bus ticket to the border: she had enough for a ticket to Tijuana, and for a torta and taco once she got there, but not enough to go any farther. And getting her money out of the bank was impossible without returning to Paseo Linda Bonita. So she called Marisela, with a quarter dropped into the last pay phone left in the center of Aliso Viejo, and asked her friend for posada for a night.
“You were on TV,” Marisela said. “You’re still on TV.”
“Estoy cansada. I think I’ll sleep for two days.”
“Did they hurt you? When I saw them grabbing you on the news, when you were running, I told Mr. Covarrubias, ‘Oh, my God. They’re going to break her arm!’ And then we saw you walk out and you looked fine.”
“They were polite. Once they realized I am not a secuestradora … So can I stay with you?”
“Let me ask my Mr. Covarrubias and see what he says.” Araceli heard the sounds of dishes being moved about the kitchen, and the formless chatter from the television, and then the very clear jingle of a beer commercial, followed by an exchange of voices.
“He says he’s going to drive out there to pick you up,” Marisela said with a cheer. “He’s really angry about what he saw on the TV. He says we have to help you. He’s running out the door right now. Expect him there in about twenty-five minutes.”
In her home on Calmada Avenue in South Whittier, Janet Bryson was angry too, though for entirely different reasons. She watched tele
vision dumbfounded as Araceli Ramirez walked to freedom, perched on the edge of her old but homey and recently reupholstered couch, in a big house with a faulty air conditioner. The heat and the events on the television put her in a foul mood. She’d begun to follow the drama of Brandon and Keenan before dawn, in the final hours of her hospital swing shift, catching the first images of the boys on the television in the empty reception area. Later, at home, she searched for details on the Internet and then sat down in her living room to watch the final, insulting denouement of the day’s events live on Channel 9.
“They’re letting her go? What is this?”
Janet Bryson did not personally know any of the protagonists, of course, although her home happened to be eight blocks from Scott Torres’s old home on Safari Drive. She was a nurse technician, and a divorced single mom raising a teenage boy in a two-story ranchette with a layout identical to the former Torres residence, a home plopped like his on the flat surface of forgotten cow pastures, alongside a concrete drainage channel called Coyote Creek. A small thread of brackish liquid ran in Coyote Creek during the summer, fed mostly by the runoff from storm drains that collected the water wasted by neighbors who babied their lawns, rose gardens, and low riders with twice and thrice-weekly deluges. That thread of brackish water attracted crows and cats and, occasionally, a flock of feral parrots with emerald and saffron plumage, and now, as Janet slumped back into the newly stiff cushions of her couch to fully absorb the release of yet another illegal alien criminal suspect into American freedom, one of the parrots gave a loud, humanoid squawk just beyond her backyard fence.
“Oh, shut up, you stupid bird!”
Janet Bryson felt roughly the same about Araceli Ramirez, the nanny kidnapper, and all the other Mexicans invading her space, as she did about the untamed parrots. Like the Spanish-speaking families in her subdivision, the parrots were intruders from the south. They were the descendants of escaped pets and, in a landscape that was the natural home of gray-brown house sparrows and black crows, they were disturbing for the ostentatious display of their exotic colors. Five years earlier she had written to the SPCA, the Sierra Club, and the Audubon Club about how disturbing it was, what a violation of natural rhythms and habitats, to have these tropical birds gathering on the telephone wires and bathing in the creek. Only the Audubon people had written back, with a polite and oft-circulated letter decrying the “invasive species” but lamenting the expense and impracticality of rounding up all the birds, which were in fact six different species of the genus Amazona.
The Mexicans came after the parrots. There had always been a few, but they were English-speaking and generally decent folk back in the day when Janet Bryson was a newlywed and lived in this same home with her former husband. She could talk to those Mexicans because they were Americans, and she could even see a bit of herself in the family comings and goings she witnessed on their driveways and in their garages, the household routines shaped around automobiles, football, and the holidays. Their cousins and grandparents concentrated for Thanksgiving and their lights went up every Christmas. But then came the slow drip of Spanish speakers, the inexorable filling of her block with actual nationals of that other country. She’d knocked on the door of one of the first of these Spanish-speaking families when they moved in next door, offering a plate of brownies because it was the neighborly thing to do. A man of about thirty with a head of black Brillo-pad hair had greeted her, seemingly perplexed by the gesture and also delighted by the appearance of a still-hot white woman on his doorstep. Moments later, this man’s wife had joined him at the door and had given Janet Bryson a reluctant “thank you”—or, rather, “tank you”—and then a dismissive up-and-down, as if to say, No, my husband won’t go after this one. And they still hadn’t returned her plate several years later! Janet Bryson didn’t forget a slight, which was why she hadn’t spoken to her ex-husband for several years, not since an incident at a Super Bowl party involving one of his girlfriends. She remembered the missing plate as more Mexicans arrived, with one family on her block raising a Mexican flag on an actual flagpole they planted on their front lawn, in violation of a building code no one bothered to enforce.
The parrots squawked and waddled in the wash, and thrived and multiplied on a diet of oranges and lemons, and their sudden bursts of noise, their early morning squawk-chorus, often startled Mrs. Bryson awake, as did the Mexicans who revved up their old cars at six or seven to get them going. The parrots flew in groups of about twenty, in large, diamond-shaped formations, and the Mexicans moved in clusters, pairs of men standing over engines, groups of women and girls carrying pots. The Mexicans always seemed to be plotting, with the men putting arms around one another, speaking in lowered voices. Most ominously, she heard, several times a week, one of them make a seven-tone whistle. It was a kind of signal, a summoning, the last note trailing off in plaintive demand. What was the meaning?
Janet Bryson had begun to study the Mexicans in the same way she had studied the parrots, by plugging keywords into Internet search engines, and then by writing letters and emails in which her sense of dislocation found voice. She had come to see herself as part of an under-the-radar network of concerned citizens, isolated voices scattered about suburbs like El Monte and Lancaster, fighting the evils of bilingual education and the bad habits of these people, such as using their front lawns to park their cars and dry their laundry. From her Internet friends, she learned about the conspiracies hatched at the highest levels of government and finance to join together the United States, Canada, and Mexico into a single country, with a single currency called the Amero. She had seen schematic drawings that were said to represent the superhighway that would link the interior of Mexico to Kansas City, and thus accelerate the country’s plunge into foreignness. Watching the Mexicans on Calmada Avenue plot, and reading about the much larger scheme to transform her country, was like living in a dream: the events were strange, menacing, and out of her control.
Janet Bryson worked, sacrificed, and kept an eye on the Mexicans for her only son, an ungrateful sixteen-year-old who was beginning to talk English like a Mexican: she could hear it in the way he stretched out the vowels into a long whine in words like “really” and “guy,” and the gangster intonations with which he pronounced phrases like “so what.” “Why are you talking that way?” she would demand, but he would just shoot back that annoyed sneer that had taken over his face since he turned thirteen. Before he met Mexicans, Carter was a boy who understood they were a mother and son against the world. She had recently given him the keys to his first car and he had rewarded her by working on it in the driveway with one of the Mexicans, and then disappearing every afternoon and most evenings in that old Toyota Celica, leaving her alone in the house to think about her Mexican neighbors and to watch television, where the news was filled with Mexicans. If you looked closely, you saw them everywhere: on the edges of fires, at basketball games, in mug shots. And now in the face of that running woman, the stealer of children who, for mysterious reasons, was now walking free.
On the day that Araceli Ramírez became a national celebrity, Janet Bryson stood on the front porch of her home and called out to her son, “Carter! Where are you going?” He waved but didn’t answer. She had been planted in front of her television set for most of the day, and her obsession with the story had caused her to consume, all on her own, a family-size bag of cheese curls. It’s not good to eat that way. But what else could she do? Those boys looked like her boy, in the old grade school picture with the brown fixer stains in the hallway, Carter before hormones swelled his arms and thickened his neck. Two American boys spirited away southward into Mexico. Unprotected. She found herself actually weeping when word of their rescue had flashed on Headline News. “Thank God!” She slipped into the kitchen and made herself a late lunch, and allowed the television to fill the house with noise as she waited for whatever epilogue the news might bring. And then she had heard the announcement of the Mexican woman’s release, and the scurrilous insinua
tions against the American parents.
When Maureen shouted, “That’s a lie,” Janet Bryson shared her sense of motherly indignation, and felt herself instantly freed from the state of vibrating meaninglessness that seemed to settle over her mind and home during those long hours when her son was away. We should all shout like that. Janet Bryson wanted to shout at the next-door neighbor with the string of Christmas lights circling a backyard shrine, whose nighttime glow filled her bedroom 365 days a year, to shout at the unseen young Mexicans who had taught her son to whine at the end of his words. She had to do something; she had to join her shout to the shout of that American mother who had been wronged. She had to rally the troops. She returned to her computer and started writing.
18
In thirty minutes, Maureen told Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast the entire story, beginning with the fiasco of the birthday party and the drunken ramblings of Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian and the planting of the desert garden. They were sitting in the kitchen, with Samantha’s somewhat plump, pre-toddler body squeezed into a now-stationary hand-crank rocker. Samantha was about three months and fifteen pounds past the appropriate age and size for this contraption, Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast observed, and it disturbed her, mildly, to see her old friend subject her baby to this uncharacteristic and extended moment of inattention. Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast was used to seeing Maureen in elegant control of just about any situation that presented itself, moving slowly and deliberately and in good cheer in the face of poolside scrapes and wine-glass mishaps. Stephanie admired and in many ways sought to emulate her old playgroup friend, even though, in a few, select encounters over the past few months, she’d noticed how the old, even-tempered Maureen was being slowly ground down by the demands of two growing boys and a baby girl. But never had Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast seen Maureen in the sleep-deprived and disoriented state in which she found her today, circling aimlessly about the kitchen as she spoke, and finally wiping the tears from her face as she brought the strange and accidental tale forward to the argument that ended with the broken living room coffee table, and her journey with Samantha into the desert, and her return to the spotless and empty rooms of this home.
