The Barbarian Nurseries (34 page)

“Sir, a pencil, please, is it possible?” she asked Deputy Castillo when he returned. Unexpectedly, he unlocked the door and held it open.

T
he news-aggregator website kept a flashing police-car light on its home page, along with a series of rapidly rewritten headlines, as the news of Brandon and Keenan’s alleged kidnapping and rescue unfolded, scoring three-point-four million “hits” over the course of the first three hours, with the traffic doubling for the next two hours, when the site linked to footage obtained by an ABC news affiliate: forty-five seconds of Araceli running and being tackled by a police officer, as captured by the film crew in Huntington Park, and sold by the director for one thousand dollars—worth two days of on-location catering, the director would later tell his friends. Soon the footage began circulating on national cable shows, and by midafternoon assignment editors and managing editors across Southern California were dispatching a battalion of wise-ass reporters to stake out the south county sheriff’s station and Paseo Linda Bonita.

At the front gate of the Laguna Rancho Estates, the guards let
through anyone carrying the Day-Glo-green rectangle of a laminated plastic press card issued by the sheriff’s department. Outside the Paseo Linda Bonita home the reporters pestered the sheriff’s department patrolmen and lower-l evel public information officials on the perimeter for details of the boys’ “drama,” and set up tripods and light reflectors on the lawn. A second media cluster laid siege to the Luján family home in Huntington Park, where the councilman had sealed all the doors and windows, leaving the reporters to hound the neighbors for some throw-away speculation about possible kidnappings and flights to the border.

“Police sources say that Councilman Sal Luján is not a suspect in the case,” went the report on KFWB all-news radio, delivered by a baritone-voiced veteran of riots, celebrity trials, and airplane crashes, big and small, a macho reporter-gumshoe who was on a first-name basis with mid- and high-ranking police officials in most of the dozens of jurisdictions in Los Angeles and Orange counties. “Seems he’s just a Good Samaritan who got caught up in the drama of the two boys. But authorities say they’re still trying to figure out what this lady Araceli No-eh-my Ramirez was up to. But, once again, the children she absconded with are said to be safe … Reporting from Huntington Park, this is Pete …”

The case was a “troubling mystery,” said the NBC television affiliate reporter, a portrait of gray-haired youthfulness well known to Southern Californians for the calm urgency of his reporting on the edge of brush fires, mudslides, and assorted gangland crime scenes. “We really don’t know what shape those boys are in or what they went through. We don’t know if this Mexican nanny will be charged with anything. We don’t know what, exactly, her intentions were,” the reporter said, summarizing all he didn’t know when his affiliate patched him into the network’s national cable feed. For several hours the repeated transmissions of Araceli’s blurred backyard photograph were juxtaposed with the footage of the searches and lines at the border, and of Araceli being tackled, and of the gleaming white home in a neighborhood most often described with the adjectives “exclusive,” “hillside,” and “gated.” As interest in the story deepened in the early Eastern Daylight Time evening on national cable news, the class of professional tragedy-pundits chimed in. They were former prosecutors and defense attorneys who specialized in taking small bites of nebulous information and
chewing them until they became opinions and insights based on “what my gut tells me” and “what we know and what we don’t know.” Some opined, why not, on what they believed they knew about Mexican women and the well-off families that could afford to place their children in the care of foreigners. These comments intermingled with those of faceless callers to nationwide toll-free lines, for whom Araceli grew into a figure of menace and dread, while Maureen and Scott became objects of pity splashed with a touch of envy and populist scorn. “There’s a good reason to stay at home and be a mom, and not leave your kids with a Mexican girl, even if you can get one for ten bucks a day,” a caller opined in Gaith-ersburg, Maryland, speaking to the woman of the flaring nostrils, who nodded gravely.

In those American homes where Mexican, Guatemalan, and Peruvian women actually worked, mothers and fathers digested the news, and looked across their freshly dusted living rooms and tautly made beds and gave their hired help a closer look. They asked themselves questions that they usually suppressed, because the answers were, in practice, unknowable.
Where is this woman from, and how much do I really know about her?
Many of them were familiar with the superficial details of their employees’ lives. The most empathetic among them had studied the photographs that arrived in the mail from places south, little faraway images with
KODAK
imprinted anachronistically on the back, of wrinkled parents in village gardens of prickly pear cacti and drought-bleached corn, of children in used American clothing celebrating exotic holidays involving the burning of incense and parades with religious icons. The knowledge of that distant poverty provoked feelings of admiration, guilt, and mild revulsion in varying degrees, and also a sense of confusion.
How can we live in such a big world, where hooded sweatshirts and baby ballerina dresses circulate from north to south, from new to old, from those who pay retail to those who pay for their clothes by the pound?
Now toss into this mystery a villain, and the possibility of hidden peccadilloes and secret motives of revenge, and the result was a slight but noticeable uptick in the volume of phone calls in the greater Southern California region, as mothers in cubicles, mothers leaving yoga sessions, mothers leaving staff meetings, mothers at the Getty and the Huntington, at the Beverly Center and the Sherman Oaks Galleria, looked away from their monitors and turned off their car radios, and picked up office
phones and cell phones and called home, just to check, just to listen to the accented voices of their hired help, to see if they might hear an intonation suggesting deception, the verbal slip of the schemer. “Everything okay?
¿Todo bien? Sí?
Yes? Okay, then.” When they returned home they counted the items in their jewelry boxes and some examined the arms and necks of their children for bruises, and a very few even asked their toddlers, for the first time in weeks, if Lupe and María and Soledad were really “nice” or if they were ever “mean,” to which the most common responses were, “What?” and
“¿Qué,
Mommy?”

B
randon sat with his legs crossed on the floor of the living room, telling the story of the journey he and his brother had taken to a distant land called Los Angeles. For the first time in his young life he had an audience of strangers listening to him with the same expression of urgent concentration that adults put on their faces when they talked and argued among themselves. The grown-ups sat on the edge of the couch and the love seat, and on a chair from the dining room, four adult men and two women in various states of formal dress, and with assorted metal and plastic badges and communication devices attached to their garments, accessories that, in Brandon’s eyes, established their membership in officialdom. None of this made Brandon nervous. Rather, he saw in the presence of people introduced to him as “the officers” and “the social workers” a confirmation of the fact that he had survived an adventure tinged with danger. He had gone to a place far from the warm security and predictability of his home, and had returned to tell the tale.

“And then we got on this train that had two levels, and we left for another place. In Los Angeles,” he said, his younger brother nodding alongside him. “This other place was made of bricks, mostly.”

“And wood,” Keenan added.

“Yeah, and wood, I think. And we went by a river,” Brandon continued. “Or was it a canyon?”

“Yeah, a really big canyon,” Keenan said.

“With bridges over it. And there were these people living there. Refugees from the Fire-Swallowers.”

“The Fire-Swallowers?” Olivia Garza asked.

“Yeah, those are the people who came and destroyed the village of Vardur at the end of
Revenge of the Riverwalkers.”

“It’s one of his books that he reads,” Keenan said. Seeing the adults confused, he felt compelled to inject some explanation. “When Mom and Dad left, and Araceli said she would take care of us, she really didn’t take care of us—I mean, she didn’t tell us what to do like Mom does. So Brandon started reading more than he usually does. And when he reads—”

“Yeah, but these people I saw were real people,” Brandon interrupted. “They had scars on their faces, from their battles with the Fire-Swallowers. Then we went to a big train station. And then we got into a bus, and we were looking for Grandpa’s house, because Araceli said we should look for him. But we found this other place instead, where there are houses that are like jails, I guess. And then we found other houses that had half doors and quarter doors, and three-quarter doors, and other things I thought only existed in books. But they were real. And then we found a shack, which was in this place that’s kind of like an oasis in the desert, where people come from all over to meet and sell things. We met this boy, who’s a slave. I have a book about slavery, and he didn’t look like any of the slaves in that book, but he was still a slave. We stayed with him in his shack. And he told us about the warriors who used to live across the street, and the battles they had, which always lasted thirteen seconds. The lady who lived there, she was really mean to this boy, and she made him work.”

“That’s true,” Keenan said. “He really was a slave.”

“Right. He was like my age, but he was a slave. So we slept there one night, until we woke up in the morning and heard some guy screaming outside.”

“I didn’t hear anybody screaming,” Keenan said.

“You were still asleep, but I heard it. It was right after the earthquake.”

“There was an earthquake?” Keenan said.

“Yeah. So this guy, he was like in pain, or something. He was yelling like he was hurting in his guts. And then everybody got up and we went to another place, which is called a park even though there isn’t any park there. We went there because we thought Grandpa lived there, I guess, but he didn’t live there either. At this park place they had a fire burning in the ground, to take a pig and turn him into bones. And the fire was burning hot, even though it was buried, because later we touched the rocks that were under the ground and they were still hot. But before that, everything started exploding around us. A bomb exploded in the street. And Keenan was holding some fire in his hand, and I told him to drop it, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. Don’t lie. I saw you. You were holding fire, it was sparking from your palm, and then the bomb went off in the street. That’s when I wanted to cry. After that a lynch mob came to the front porch, and they started yelling at us, because they were against the guy who lived there, and we started yelling back the name of Ray Forma, who is against them. Ray Forma is like some sort of hero that protects people against lynch mobs. These people yelling at us, they didn’t have torches, but it was a lynch mob, I’m pretty sure, and they were really angry at the guy who lived there, because he’s a president. But then the police came and chased away the lynch mob and we went to sleep and when we woke up the next morning we were on television so I got on the phone and called Dad.”

The assembled audience of adults stared at Brandon with perplexed mouths agape and brows wrinkled, each mystified by the nonsensical details of Brandon’s story and his straightforward and sincere way of recounting them, and the way Keenan sometimes nodded in confirmation of what his brother said. Adults and children had been momentarily transported into a shared state of mystery and innocence, a kind of mental blankness where anything was possible, and the adults allowed themselves to entertain, for the briefest instant of grown-up time, the possibility that these two well-spoken boys had actually returned from a magical land. Even Olivia Garza, who believed she had heard every kind of story a child could tell, did not know precisely what she should make of Brandon’s monologue, so she simply looked at her digital recorder and turned it off.

Detective Blake and Assistant District Attorney Goller rose to their feet simultaneously, while a second detective named Harkness patted both Brandon and Keenan on the head and said, “Thanks guys.” Detective Blake called back the parents from their temporary exile in the kitchen and left the boys with them, and the committee retired to the backyard for a tête-à-tête. For a few moments, they stood in a circle and looked at one another with now-what expressions.

“I don’t know what to make of that,” Detective Blake said finally. “That kid’s got quite an imagination.”

“This is what happens when you leave them alone too much, in my opinion,” Olivia Garza said. “Whether it’s TV, or books, or computer games. There are drawbacks. They slip into their own world.”

“God knows what really happened to them,” Assistant District Attorney Goller said. “I’m not a psychologist, but maybe this is some sort of emotional fantasy response to severe trauma.”

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.”

A
fter 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.