The Barbarian Nurseries (35 page)

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 patting 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?”

T
he 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.

M
aureen 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 say 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?”

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!”