The Barbarian Nurseries (17 page)

M
aureen’s room at the High Desert Radiance Spa was a two-room suite in which both rooms opened to a strand of Joshua trees, their twisted limbs arranged on a gently sloping hillside in the poses of a modern dance troupe. Just after sunrise, she stepped outside and sat in a plastic chair on the small cement patio, while Samantha slept inside the room, curled up under her favorite blanket in a fold-up crib that housekeeping put away every afternoon. The evening chill would be baked away soon, but for the moment wisps of freezer air whispered to the Joshua trees and nudged the tumbleweeds forward. Yesterday morning she and Samantha had walked the spa’s hiking trail (“difficulty: low”), following it to the opening of a scrub canyon, where Samantha climbed up a small sandstone rock shaped like the belly of a very pregnant woman.
Oh, to have brought a camera to capture my little mountaineer!
The hours here passed with few thoughts of shouting men or broken tables. A mother and daughter on their own had a mellow symmetry, and since arriving at this oasis Samantha had not had a single tantrum: obviously this girl needed more time alone with her mother; she relished not having to compete for attention with two older boys. Maureen herself felt replenished. There was an essence of herself that she had neglected, a part of her soul that was attached to this dry, austere, and harsh place. A California equivalent to the Missouri grasslands, to the places where her homesteader ancestors stood on the blank slate of the
land.
I am a woman of open spaces.
The only male presence in her getaway was the kneading hands of a man named Philip, who applied oils scented with sage and chamomile to her skin, and who left only the few, forbidden centers of her body untouched.
Now I know all the things I haven’t allowed myself to feel for years.

The plan had been to return home Monday morning, to face Scott again and perhaps to forgive him. Perhaps. But then the good people at the front desk had mentioned their Monday discount. She would have just enough of the emergency cash left to stay one more night and take one more session on that table.

O
n Saturday night, Araceli put the boys to bed with none of the drama and screaming of the night before. They had spent the afternoon in various illicit pursuits, chief among them an hour-l ong gun battle with plastic pistols that fired foam bullets, the boys laughing as the projectiles bounced harmlessly off the furniture and their bodies. Araceli had forced the boys to clean up the house, and they had simply acquiesced when she declared,
“Ya es tarde,
time for sleep.” Once they were in bed, she pulled back the blankets to cover them, in imitation of the mothers she had seen in movies, because she couldn’t remember her own mother doing such a thing. These boys seemed to appreciate and need the gesture, and Araceli even touched Brandon on the forehead when she noticed the tears welling in his eyes.

“Do you think Mom and Dad will ever come back, Araceli?” he asked.

“No te preocupes.
Your mommy will be back soon. And Araceli is taking care of you now.” Araceli spoke these words more soothingly than any she had ever addressed to these boys, or to any other children, and she felt a sudden and unexpected welling of altruism coursing through her veins, a drug that straightened your back and made you feel taller.
What else can you tell two lost boys but that you will take care of them?
“Araceli will take care of you,” she repeated. “I will sleep here, on the floor, again.
¿Está bien?
A little later. After I wash the dishes.”

A
raceli pulled herself from the hallway floor just outside the door of the Room of a Thousand Wonders the next morning with the
boys still sleeping. They were sweating inside their brightly colored pajamas, shirts and pants with superheroes imprinted on them, men of rippling muscles in various flying poses whose courage offered protection against such evil threats as temporary parental abandonment. Their wet hair was matted against their foreheads, strands clinging to beads of perspiration. Keenan was curled up in a fetal position, clutching a pillow and a stuffed lion between his arms.
If I am still taking care of them tonight, I will tell them to go to bed in shorts.

She wandered through the house again, quickly peeking into the garage to see if Maureen’s or Scott’s car was there, and then to the living room and the gallery of faces inside teak and cherrywood on the bookshelves. These pictures, Araceli realized, were the only clues that could untangle this family mess. The portraits of the grandfather,
el viejo
Torres, called out to her most loudly, smiling wryly from the final decades of black-and-white photography, a teenager standing before a Los Angeles bungalow, his swarthy skin rendered in tones of gray and darker gray, hands on his hips and an irresistible twinkle in his eye. This relic had been here since Araceli had started working for the Torres-Thompsons, when the old man was still coming to the house regularly, before he uttered the words that caused his banishment.
What did you say,
viejo?
And where might I find you?
Araceli remembered the looks of exasperation on the faces of Maureen and Scott when they discussed
el viejo
Torres in the kitchen one Saturday afternoon, and snippets of conversation: “What a jerk.” “What a dinosaur.”

Probably Maureen had not yet gotten around to removing
el dinosaurio
from this family gallery because he was on the bottom shelf, in a lesser spot in relation to the recent school pictures of the boys with eager smiles and moussed hair, and of Maureen herself holding the newborn and slippery Samantha while sitting up with exhausted ecstasy on a hospital bed. Maureen in the delivery room was on the shelf next to a recent shot of Samantha with a red bow in her thin hair and to the bronze-toned image of a woman with pinned-up hair and a giant curtain of a dress staring back from the Victorian era, the folds in the corners of her eyes suggesting she was Maureen’s grandmother or great-grandmother. Next there was a recent shot of Maureen’s mother, taken in a pine forest, a gray-haired woman in khaki shorts and hiking books, with a faint and uncharacteristic smile.
This is the woman’s shelf: there are four generations of girls from Maureen’s family here.
Araceli considered
too, on the second shelf from the top, the wedding pictures of Scott and Maureen, including a shot of the couple laughing and bending their bodies in an expression of the kind of uncontainable hilarity that hadn’t been seen in the Torres-Thompson household for quite some time.

Of all these people, Araceli concluded, old man Torres was the only adult still alive and likely to live in a place reachable from Paseo Linda Bonita. They hadn’t yet purged the old man from the family, not completely—he was a resilient
mexicano,
apparently.
If their parents don’t come back, I’ll take them to this old man’s house.
Araceli would have to prepare herself for the worst contingency. She had been used to thinking this way once, her naturally pessimistic outlook had served her well in her single-woman bus journey to the border, and then through the sprint, hike, and crawl into California, and in the first few harrowing and lonely weeks in the United States. Those were days of important lessons, though the subsequent four years in this household on Paseo Linda Bonita had led her to the false belief that the world might still have sanctuaries where prosperity and predictability reigned. Standing here now in front of pictures of the absent and departed members of the Torres and Thompson clans, she realized she might soon have to start thinking like an immigrant, like a desperate woman on the highway uncertain where the asphalt and the invisible trails of carbon monoxide might take her.

S
cott awoke on Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki’s couch, following a forty-eight-hour bacchanalia of popcorn, nachos, pizza, diet soft drinks, and power beverages consumed in front of Charlotte’s flat-screen TV and game console, fighting Persian armies and completing post routes to sinewy wide receivers. Charlotte listened to his complaints about his wife, she fed him munchies he consumed compulsively and without joy, and she nestled into a spot on her vinyl couch next to him, her leg and sometimes her shoulder touching his. She tried rubbing his neck: “You have to watch out for the carpal tunnel with these game controllers.” But she wasn’t able to stir those passions that begin below a man’s waist and reach, through circuits of nerve and muscle and irrationality, to moist lips and tongue. Instead, she had set free an inner boy.

To steal a few minutes of play here and there was one thing, Scott
thought: to fully indulge your inner gamer was another. These games were meant to be played by the hour, the better to appreciate their narrative mazes, the overwrought art of their virtual stages. Now, in his second morning here, Scott continued his playing tour of Charlotte’s impressive and diverse collection, chipping onto the green at Pebble Beach to the sound of the roaring surf nearby, negotiating with Don Corleone in his study, forging blades of steel in a medieval foundry, and carrying his new weapons into battle against hordes of bearded Vikings on a Scandinavian beach.

T
hey’ll probably put them in the Foster Care. Until they can find their parents. What else are they going to do?” That was Marisela’s considered opinion, rendered by phone, and it matched Araceli’s own assessment of what would happen if she called the police. “And of course they’ll start asking you questions. The police have to ask you questions.”

“That’s not good.”

“No, not for you.”

“And the boys?” Araceli asked.

“They’ll probably put them in the police car, take them to the station, and then to Foster Care.”

“What else could they do?”

Children who spent their nights under blankets decorated with moons and stars in the Room of a Thousand Wonders should not have to spend a single night in the Foster Care. Araceli imagined communal sleeping arrangements, bullying twelve-year-old proto-psychopaths, and cold macaroni and cheese without salt. Children raised in the recirculated air and steady temperatures of the Paseo Linda Bonita would not last long in the drafty warehouses of Foster Care. She imagined the boys cuddling under unlaundered blankets, and suffering the cruel admonitions of caretakers who did not realize how special and smart they were, how they read books about history, how they had learned to identify Orion and Gemini, quartzite and silica, from the library in the Room of a Thousand Wonders. Children with the sensitive intelligence of these boys—qualities their mother did not sufficiently appreciate, because she saw only their boisterous and disorderly masculinity—should not and could not be exposed to the caprices of Foster Care.

Araceli did not want to be responsible for that loss of innocence. There was a finite amount of innocence in the world and it should be preserved: like Arctic wilderness and elephant tusks, it was a precious creation of nature. And what would the police say or do to her? Probably they would report her to the immigration agents in the blue Wind-breakers, the ICE people—it was difficult to imagine that a Mexican woman without a green card could call the police and present them with two unaccompanied and guardianless American children without herself being drawn into a web that would eventually lead to her deportation.

Perhaps she was getting ahead of herself. If by Monday morning neither Scott nor Maureen had returned, she would call Scott’s office and demand that her boss return home immediately.

A
raceli was in a deep sleep on the floor in the Room of a Thousand Wonders, dreaming that she was walking through the corridors of her art school in Mexico City, which did not resemble her art school at all, but rather a factory in a desolate corner of an American city, when she was awakened by a series of screams.

“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

She sat up, startled, and in the yellow glow of the night-l ight saw Keenan yelling at the wall next to his bed.

“Keenan, qué te pasa?”

“Mommy!”

“Keenan.
¡Despiértate!
You’re having a night mirror!”

“Mommy!”

“It’s just a night mirror!” Araceli insisted, and with that Keenan stopped, turned, and searched for his Mexican caretaker. To his young eyes his room had become a small submarine in a deep ocean of darkness, a bubble of light and security in a frightening world without his mother and father. The captain of this craft was the Mexican woman with the wide face now looking up at him from the door to the hallway with startled and irritated eyes.

“What?” Keenan asked in a high, perplexed voice suddenly stripped of his fear.

“You said he’s having a what?” Brandon said from the perch of his bunk above Keenan.

“A night mirror.”

“What?”

“A night mirror,” Araceli repeated. “You know, when you see ugly things when you’re sleeping.”

After a pause to digest her faulty pronunciation, Brandon said in a scholarly voice, “No, in English we say
nightmare.”

“Pues, una pesadilla entonces,”
Araceli said angrily. “Nightmare,” like many other expressions with Old English origins, was a word she would never be able to wrap her tongue around, especially since it bore no resemblance to the Spanish equivalent.

“Yeah, a
pesadilla
is what you say in Spanish,” Brandon said diplomatically. With that he and his brother put their heads back on their pillows, and both boys thought that “night mirror” was in many ways a more apt description than “nightmare”: Keenan looked at the wall and thought of it as a reflection of his motherless room and a window into a parallel world, and within a few minutes he was asleep again, as was his brother.

Araceli listened to their boy-sized puffs become rhythmic, the quiet song of children at rest. This is the third night I am spending alone with these boys. I should be the one crying out in my sleep. I should be the one screaming for my mother. ¡Mamá, ayúdame!

Unable to fall back asleep, she decided to get up and make herself tea. She took her steaming cup of
manzanilla
to the silent living room, lit one of the lavender-scented candles there, and sat on the couch. Maureen never brought a match to these candles—why buy something and never use it? Araceli sipped her tea and watched the yellow flame flicker and cast long shadows throughout the room, the soft, dancing light falling upon the pictures in the Torres-Thompson gallery, coloring the faces with nostalgia and loss.
Here are people related by blood, but distant from one another.
Pobrecitos. The photograph of the younger version of
el abuelo
Torres was the one most closely related to her own experience: the urban setting was familiar, along with the mestizo smile. Had he run across the desert to reach the United States as Araceli had? Araceli had a photograph like this of her mother in Mexico City, a snapshot taken by one of those men with the big Polaroids in the Zócalo, when her mother was a young woman recently arrived from provincial Hidalgo.
My mother still felt like a tourist in Mexico City then, and so
does the young man in this picture—he is a young man in the first days of his Los Angeles adventure.
In this picture too there was a just-arrived feeling, the brow raised in something between astonishment and self-assurance. Now something behind the young man caught her eye. Three numbers could be seen floating above his slicked-back hair, attached to a wall behind him: 232. A street address. She remembered how her mother carefully wrote dates and other information on the back of family photographs. On a hunch, she picked up the frame, turned it around, and moved the tabs that held the photograph in place and pulled it out. She found words and numbers written on the back in the elegant, masculine script of another era, the florid penmanship of a teenager educated according to the standardized rules of Mexican public education, the looping letters teachers of the Secretaría de Educación Pública had tried to force upon Araceli too, until she rebelled.