The Barbarian Nurseries (36 page)

“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.

A
raceli 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.”

I
n her home on Calmada Avenue in South Whittier, Janet Bryson was angry too, though for entirely different reasons. She watched
television 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 insinuations 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.

I
n 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.

“And that’s how we got into this mess,” Maureen said, and as she looked up through her swollen eyes at her old friend the phone rang once more. Peter Goldman picked it up after the second ring in the dining room, where he was drinking wine with Scott.

“The reporters,” Maureen said. “We’re living this media plague. They’ve made us into a story.”

“It was big on the morning shows,” said Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast, who had black hair cut man-short for the summer. She was a lean woman of forty with the no-nonsense air and taste for embroidered blouses of her Wyoming forebears.

“They called here last night, before we took the phone off the hook so we could sleep. The
Today
show. Scott talked to them and told them to leave us alone.”

“And then there’s the stuff in the papers. And in the blogs.”

“The blogs? I can only imagine.”

Stephanie removed three printed pages of blog posts from her purse, and held them so that Maureen could see them, a sampling of the 316 postings on the
L.A. Times
website as of late morning. She did this simply so Maureen would know, because that was the job of friends, to be both loyal and alert, and to bring knowledge that might be uncomfortable and unwanted but also necessary. Almost exactly half the postings expressed sympathy with Scott and Maureen: of those, half cited the clip of Maureen shouting back at the reporter in expressing their own outrage at the “liberal” and “immigrant-loving” media for refusing to believe that Brandon and Keenan had been kidnapped. These posters and their paranoid rhetoric held Maureen’s attention only momentarily. The other half, however, made various snide observations about the Torres-Thompsons and the Laguna Rancho Estates, about Maureen’s “rant” and how “spoiled” she and her husband were, and the obvious “heroism” of the Mexican woman who’d been briefly jailed for “the crime” of trying to save two children who’d been abandoned by their parents.

“Don’t take that stuff too seriously,” Stephanie said. “I just thought you should know. Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you.”

“No. I need to see this.”

“There was this one guy on the radio. KABC. Some guy from an immigrant association, talking about how Mexican women are the ‘salt of the earth,’ how they raise our children and do heroic things every day, and how Araceli is, what’s the word, ‘emblematic’ of this big ‘font of mothering’ these Latina nannies provide. I tried calling in to defend you, to say something, but—”

“A font of mothering? Araceli?”

“Yeah. It was some really overwrought expression like that.”

“Unbelievable.” Maureen scanned a few of the English postings, then stopped and returned them to her friend. “Araceli is the real mother, I guess,” she said with sarcastic resignation. “I’m just the rich parasite.”

“Ignore them. You know who you are. You’re a great mom. To three kids. And now with Guadalupe gone? All by yourself you’re raising them. None of those people know how hard you work. And who cares, frankly?”

Above all, Maureen was offended simply by the idea that distant strangers would offer their glib and automatic opinions about her home and family. They peered into her household and made a wicked sport of her, Scott, and their children, extrapolating conclusions based on a few photographs released to the public, their own prejudices about people “like her,” and the recorded moment when she chose to defend herself before the intrusive white light of the television cameras gathered on her front lawn. These faceless strangers could type insults and collectively craft the big falsehood of Araceli’s lionization, without knowing that the Mexican woman disliked Maureen’s children and frowned at them as she served them dinner, and that she had once had the gall to tell Maureen, “These boys have too many toys to keep in order. They are not organized in their brains to have this many toys.”
Araceli questioned my sons’ intelligence, she sat for hours in her room playing artist with our trash, she recoiled at the sight of my baby girl’s spit-up. But now she is a Mexican Joan of Arc.

“It’s true that I left, that we left her alone in the house,” she told Stephanie finally. “But that doesn’t give her the right to take our children on some bizarre journey to the city, for God knows what purpose.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Maureen thought of the daily vigilance necessary to keep domestic order and to stay true to her values and raise children who would be good citizens and thinkers. It was all a private, selfless act, and now she was being mocked as precisely the opposite. Araceli was responsible for this chorus of snarky and misspelled voices against her.

“How could she not believe we were coming back? That doesn’t make sense to me. She doesn’t even leave a note. That woman was always off. And why take them into Los Angeles, of all places?”

“She was wrong to do that.”

“She placed them in danger.”

Stephanie Goldman-Arbegast kept silent and gave her friend a weak nod of solidarity. She sensed that Maureen would eventually add her voice to those seeking to punish Araceli, and she did not approve.
I will not hold this against my friend.
Here before her was a good woman in an impossible situation. She lived for her children. Her children were her art. And now the city belittled her as a bad mother.
Would I act any different? If my jaw tightens in anger when my New York in-laws criticize my parenting, how would I act if an entire city were sitting in judgment?
Stephanie watched as her friend bit her lip and turned to look at her sleeping baby girl.

“This rocker is too small for Samantha, isn’t it?” Maureen said finally, as if she had stepped out of a fog and found her daughter, unexpectedly. “I can’t put her in this thing anymore. She’s all squeezed into it. What was I thinking?”

I
n the space Araceli knew as the Room of a Thousand Wonders, Brandon and Keenan huddled with their friends, Max and Riley Goldman-Arbegast. For once they had not drifted immediately to the pleasures of interlocking plastic blocks arranged as imaginary parapets, forts, and bunkers, or the distractions of handheld electronic games. Instead, they talked about their recent adventures: the Goldman-Arbegasts’ trip to Europe, and the train journey that Brandon and Keenan had taken out of their home and into another world in the center of Los Angeles.

“We saw the Parthenon in Athens,” Max said.

“Is that where Zeus lived?” Keenan asked.

“No, that’s Mount Olympus,” Brandon corrected. Both he and Max, the older of the Goldman-Arbegast brothers, were great fans of Greek mythology.

“And then later we went to London and saw the marbles the English took from the Greeks.”

“The Greeks played with marbles?” Keenan asked.

“No. They’re these big flat pictures carved out of marble,” Max said. “And we saw the Rosetta Stone.”

“When we went to L.A., everybody spoke in Spanish, mostly,” Keenan said. “We saw
el cuatro de julio.”

“I learned how to say ‘thanks’ in Italian,” Riley countered. “It’s
‘grazie.’
“

“And we saw you and Keenan on television,” Max said.

“Yeah,” Brandon said flatly. “We were on lots of TV stations.”

“Lots and lots. Like every one, I think,” Riley said.

“Were you scared when that lady kidnapped you?” Max asked, rushing in the question, as if he had been waiting to ask.

“Nah, I don’t think she kidnapped us,” Brandon said. “We were looking for our grandfather. But we got all mixed up. We saw some cool things, though.”

“We saw the Colosseum,” Riley said.

“Were there gladiators?” Keenan asked.

“Nah,” Max said. “It’s all ruins now.”

“Parts of L.A. are ruins too,” Brandon said. He began to share a few more details of his journey to Los Angeles, and his encounters with war refugees and lynch mobs, though this time with less gusto than before. He had already tried telling the story to his parents, only to be interrupted by so many of his mother’s questions that the story didn’t sound like his anymore.
Why is it,
he wondered later,
that stories begin to turn old the first time you tell them? Why won’t a story allow itself to be told over and over?

“I think L.A. sounds cooler than Europe,” Max pronounced once Brandon had finished.

“I guess,” Brandon said. “I really wanna go to Greece, though. And Rome too.”

The four slumping boys remained sitting in a circle; the older boys felt their bodies slip into an unease, a too-bigness that hinted at their
coming adolescence. Finally, Brandon noticed a book sticking out of Max’s back pocket.

“Whatcha reading?”

“It’s an old book I found on my grandpa’s bookshelf when we stopped to visit him in New York,” Max said. “He said I probably should be older to read it. Because there’s stuff in it I shouldn’t read ‘cause I’m only twelve. But then he gave it to me anyway when my mom wasn’t looking. It’s got some bad parts. Some parts that are really bad, actually.”

“What? Like murders and stuff?”

“Nah. I can’t describe it. There’s no dragons or warriors or elves like in all the other books I read before. But it’s really, really cool. And bad. There’s kids smoking in it.”

“Smoking?”

“Yeah. Cigarettes. It’s, like, the best book I’ve ever read.”

Max gave a conspiratorial scan, and then took the old paperback from his pocket and handed it to Brandon, who examined its timeworn cover, and a title whose meaning he could not immediately decipher.

“You can keep it,” Max said. “I finished it in the car.”

Brandon opened the first page and began to read. When the narrator promised to describe “what my lousy childhood was like,” Brandon was hooked.

“Y
ou know, eventually, they’re going to prosecute that poor woman because of me.” It was one of the few comments Scott had allowed himself to make about the situation, and Peter Goldman decided he would try and ignore it. “It’s either her or me. Or us, I mean. I guess we deserve to be punished more.” They were near the bottom of the bottle and had been talking baseball and football, for the most part. Having bared his guilt for a moment, Scott caught himself, took another gulp of wine, and looked up at his old friend, who seemed more amused than outraged by Scott’s situation.
Here’s one person,
Scott thought,
who won’t sit in judgment.
Scott was trying to think of something witty to say to chase away the unwanted pathos of the moment, when the phone on the dining room table before them rang again and Peter Goldman picked it up.

“No, he’s not interested,” Peter Goldman said. “That’s right. Thank you. Bye-bye, now … bye.”

“Thanks for doing that, buddy,” Scott said. “I really owe you.”

“Every good quarterback needs a good offensive line. Especially when the pass rush is as murderous as the one surrounding this household, let me tell you.” They had a camaraderie forged during five years of school meetings, birthdays, and excursions to amusement parks, a brotherhood born of their marriages to women who dragged them all over the city and erased many hours of potential sports viewing, all in the name of family obligation.

There was a knock on the door. Three evenly spaced and polite taps, followed by a pause, and three more evenly spaced but louder taps. Peter Goldman rose to his feet and said, “I’m on it.” A moment later Scott felt a shaft of warm light enter his home through the half-open door and heard the mumble of a voice from outside. After a quick back-and-forth, Peter came walking back to the table.

“It’s a guy from the district attorney’s office.”

“Not again. Fuck.”

“Should I tell him to go?”

“No. I have to talk to him.”

Scott stood up and walked to the front door and swung it open.

“Mr. Torres, we haven’t been able to get through on the phone,” said Ian Goller. He wore a light-swallowing charcoal suit and a thin red tie over a starched white shirt, and to Peter Goldman, who had never met him before, he radiated the unrealness of an actor who’d wandered off the soundstage of a Technicolor spy flick. Goller had been shot back to Pasco Linda Bonita, quickly, by the dizzying spin of the news cycle, and the clamor of a vociferous segment of the voting public inside Orange County, and an influential segment of watchers and commentators beyond the county’s borders. These voices were demanding, via various forms of digital and analog media, that Ian Goller and his colleagues in the district attorney’s office apply the “rule of law” in the case of Araceli Ramirez, alleged childnapper.

Goller had arrived at the district attorney’s office, off the beach and with his hair still wet (figuratively speaking and maybe literally too), with certain idealistic notions firmly rooted in his brain—specifically, the belief that criminal law was a scientific pursuit in which American and European traditions of jurisprudence were applied to the dispassionate weighing of facts and the protection of the public. During his ascent to the upper layers of the agency, and with his eventual
admission to the walnut-paneled sanctuary of the district attorney himself, this idealism had aged and matured into a more realistic understanding of the job and its responsibilities. Above all, he had come to learn it simply wasn’t possible for a public servant to ignore public opinion—completely—when defining right and wrong. The perceptions of the people counted, their collective fears and wants, what outraged them and what did not. In this case, the law-abiding sensibilities of many an Orange County resident had been offended by the suspect’s unauthorized arrival in the United States of America. It made them skeptical and suspicious of her actions with the boys, and eager for punishment. In nonlegal terms: they would not cut her any slack. So he couldn’t either. Goller found himself more or less obliged, therefore, to dive into the unpredictable waters of a politically necessary but potentially tricky prosecution.