The Barbarian Nurseries (31 page)

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.”

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.

A
mong 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 and 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.