The Barbarian Nurseries (46 page)

“What are you reading now?” she asked Brandon. He showed her the cover of the paperback and then handed it to her in the same way a teenager surrenders a pack of cigarettes to a school principal. “Wow, a classic. This is an advanced book for your age.”

“I’m a pretty good reader.”

“But do you understand everything that’s in it?”

“About eighty percent. No, ninety. When I get to a part I don’t get, I just pretend the words don’t exist.”

“Interesting.”

“That way I keep going.”

“I should learn to do that.”

“It’s like the best book I’ve ever read. It’s really real. Next to that, everything else I’ve read sounds kind of phony.”

Olivia was holding the book and leafing through it when Maureen appeared at the doorway, holding Samantha and trying too hard to project an air of motherly nonchalance.

“Is everything okay?” she said with a smile.

“Yes, yes. We were just talking about the book Brandon was reading. What page did you say you were on, Brandon?”

“Ninety-three.”

“Do you mind if I borrow this for a second? I’ll give it right back, I promise.”

Olivia Garza said goodbye to the boys and left the Room of a Thousand Wonders with Maureen.

“Is everything okay?” Maureen repeated when they reached the living room, because she sensed they were not.

The social worker held open the book to page ninety-three and gave it to her. “I’m not sure he’s quite old enough for this. And especially passages like this one.”

Maureen took the copy of
The Catcher in the Rye,
a book she had never read, though she knew the name of its protagonist. The social worker’s thick index finger had been resting on a page where Holden Caulfield was using the cool slang of the middle of the last century, smoking cigarettes and preparing to talk to a prostitute: “She was sort of a blonde, but you could tell she dyed her hair. She wasn’t any old bag, though.” Just a few pages later the protagonist was talking to her pimp, arguing with the man, the narrator’s voice suggesting the casualness and loose morality of an ancient American era.

“Oh, my God. Why is he even reading this? Where did he get this?”

Maureen held the book and looked at the representative of Child Protective Services, and felt the weight of a judgment that was at once holy and official. Her shame deepened when she realized that the social worker had discovered this transgression after just fifteen minutes of conversation with her son.
COUNTY OF ORANGE,
said the official seal on the social worker’s plastic badge: three pieces of the eponymous fruit rested in a green field that itself was nestled inside the center of a sun ablaze with a corona of dancing yellow arms, and for an instant that seal was as disturbing as those dusty old icons of Saint Patrick in her Missouri home, the ones with the snakes at his feet and flames around his head. Her eleven-year-old was consorting with pimps and prostitutes, having been transported to a seamy corner of Manhattan via the art of fiction, and he was doing so in Maureen’s very house, in her very presence.
Because I am not really looking at him. I am not here in the room with him.
Now the saints that looked after the Irish and the County of Orange both knew this secret.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” Maureen said, directing her words not just to the social worker but to everyone she knew. “I thought I was in control of everything. I thought I had it all under control.”

Underneath all the order and beauty around me, things are not as they should be. I’ve glossed it all over so it doesn’t look like Pike County, but underneath everything is just as frayed as that old couch in our living room, as those unpolished and splintering floors.
She felt foolish for expending so much effort uselessly, and when she thought of herself puttering around this living room amid its leather, oak, and wool, she felt an empty sorrow, as if she were standing at the beginning of a dirt path that led back to the places she had run away from. “I’m so sorry.” She plopped herself down on the sofa, still carrying Samantha on her hip. She wanted to cry, but could not. Instead she sat there, defeated, and thought about how Brandon had betrayed her, and that she shouldn’t be surprised, because he was a man, after all: and then she stopped herself from thinking that, because he was eleven years old and that was absurd.
This is why women go crazy. We live with men who act like boys and boys who want to be men, and we’re trapped between what we know is right and what little we can do, between what we can see and what’s invisible to us. It’s all impossible.
She shook her head and mumbled the word out loud. “Impossible.”

“It’s not really that big of a deal,” Olivia Garza said, reaching into her purse and handing Maureen a tissue from the large supply she carried.

Maureen realized now that there were tears in her eyes. She wiped her face and began to speak, in a voice that was eerily steady. “We are going to change.”

“Excuse me?” Olivia Garza said.

“We’re moving. To a smaller house.”

“Maureen,” Scott said. He wanted to stop his wife before she went too far, because she always took things too far.

“We’re going to put our kids in public school. In another city.” It was a necessary sacrifice, Maureen thought. A surrender. A defeat. They would leave their Eden, and that would be a fair punishment. “If they go to public school, if we live in a smaller house, how much will we save? Twenty, thirty thousand a year? No, more. Right?”

“Yes,” Scott said. He felt defeated seeing his wife like this—fighting off tears one moment, and then telling a stranger about a new beginning the next.
I am responsible for this.
In a few weeks or months, when they were living at another house, she would come to the same conclusion, regret all the things she had said, and find a way to blame him for it.

“Well, that sounds all very positive to me,” Olivia Garza said. “But don’t worry. We don’t take away kids because their parents let them read Salinger.” She allowed herself a hearty, big woman’s laugh. “I really just thought you should know what he’s reading. I think it’s just the tone—that’s what he likes about it. He told me he just skips over the parts he doesn’t understand. The rebellious tone. Get ready. Puberty hits earlier these days.”

Scott led her to the door, and after what he hoped was a final handshake, the social worker pulled him close and spoke in a low, furtive voice.

“You have nothing to worry about,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m not supposed to say this, but I will: my office won’t bother you anymore. And no one else can or will. Not the sheriff or the DA. No one.”

“Really?”

She took a moment to size up Scott with her large eyes, wondering if he could be trusted with the information. “Go about your lives. But I never said it. You didn’t hear it from me.”

“We’re free and clear? Why are you are telling me?”

“You’re a smart guy, Torres,” she said, rolling the
r
in his surname suggestively. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

It was another mystery, like how to cut a lawn cleanly, or the rules of the stock market, and Scott wondered if he’d ever understand. For the moment, he decided he’d keep it a secret, even from Maureen.

The following morning Child Protective Services issued a two-sentence press release concerning “the events surrounding two children at a home on Paseo Linda Bonita in the Laguna Rancho Estates.” “CPS has investigated this matter,” the release said, “and has closed the case without further action.” The memo was transmitted to news agencies via the press office at the Board of Supervisors, falling into the reporters’ mail slots along with releases from other agencies announcing the
unemployment figures, the number of county residents receiving public assistance, and the upcoming celebration of Orange County Weights and Measures Day. By then only a few dedicated scribes noticed or cared, and just one penned a news brief that appeared alongside the summaries of traffic accidents and robberies in the Orange County daily newspaper. The minds and eyes of the reporters on the county beat had been spirited away by another drama, playing out on four channels of the county press room’s cable television hookup. This new story involved a single missing child and had begun to unfold the previous afternoon in Stanton at about the same time Olivia Garza was leaving the Torres-Thompson home and Araceli Noemi Ramírez Hinojosa was sitting before a judge inside the Laguna Niguel satellite courthouse. The protagonists were a missing eight-year-old girl in a Hello Kitty blouse and her stepmother, an elementary school teacher, and the supporting cast included crews of divers searching the bottom of a lake. It was a case whose cruelty and gruesomeness would invite no ambiguity, uniting a city in a sense of tragedy and revulsion once the child’s body was found.

The dead girl had four siblings whose custody would soon become Olivia Garza’s concern, along with the fate of the level one caseworker who had visited the trailer park where the girl lived twice the year before to investigate several anonymous complaints. Olivia Garza fired the caseworker herself, and visited the siblings in their Foster Care homes several times. Many weeks later, after her role in that horrific case had ended, Olivia Garza remembered her pleasant visit with the Torres-Thompson boys on Paseo Linda Bonita and how she had reencountered
The Catcher in the Rye
again, after twenty years. She read the book on her first Saturday afternoon off and decided, belatedly, that it was probably okay for a bright eleven-year-old to read.

T
he ants marched in from their hidden nests in the soil outside and every day they conquered new territories of tile, particleboard, and porcelain. They gathered in pulsating masses around pieces of chicken underneath the dining room table, over the toilet paper in the bathroom trash cans, and inside the kitchen sink, carrying away whatever it was that settled at the bottom of the garbage disposal. As the number of days without Araceli in their home grew, Maureen came upon more fresh swarms each morning, when Scott was still snoring in the last few minutes of post-dawn coolness, with Samantha awake and in her mother’s arms, drinking her first bottle of the day. At first Maureen assaulted the insects with water and soap, simply smothering them with wet sponges and paper towels, reclaiming the kitchen and other spaces a square foot at a time, washing both their corpses and their still-slithering bodies down the drain. Within a day the effectiveness of this fight back diminished and the swarms returned in their original ferocity. The ants appeared next in the bedrooms and garage, and in the kitchen there were always two or three ant scouts on the counter where she prepared meals, probing in every direction in an odd shuffle, until she killed them with a squeeze of her fingers.
How did Araceli keep the ants away?

The ants triggered memories of the time before Araceli worked for them, in that first year in the Paseo Linda Bonita home, when the trails the insects forged into the kitchen during a summer-long siege led Maureen to briefly consider moving out. It was her helplessness before the ants that had finally convinced Maureen she should hire a housekeeper, and she had gone through various women who struggled with the insects as much as Maureen did, until she found Araceli. Now Maureen suspected that Araceli had secretly applied some potent and probably illegal Third World insecticide to defeat the ants, deciding on her own to disobey Maureen’s admonition not to use chemical poisons. For a day or two Maureen searched cabinets and shelves in the kitchen, laundry room, and garage for the bottle or can that contained this magic potion, but she could not find it. Araceli had defeated the ants, Maureen finally concluded, merely by being extremely vigilant, by never flagging in the disciplined daily upkeep of all the ant-prone surfaces of the home, by never allowing garbage to accumulate, or spills to linger. Maureen did not have the energy to imitate this behavior, nor did her new domestic helper, her father-in-law. The old man cooked, he looked after the children—sort of—and made the beds, but he would not clean the floors, no matter how many hints Maureen dropped.
Probably he thinks mopping a floor is women’s work.

Maureen finally mopped the kitchen, bathroom, and living room floors herself one night, with Samantha asleep and Scott reading stories to the boys in their bedroom, and for a moment she felt renewed by the fake-lemon scent of disinfectant and the wet gleam of clean tile. As she leaned into the mop Maureen noted the presence of fading chalk lines along the base of several walls and wondered if Araceli had placed them there for some reason, and what those lines could mean. They were like crop circles, an apparition with mysterious and alien meanings, and another example of Araceli’s many minor imprints on the household landscape, like her decision to save instant-coffee powder in the refrigerator, or to leave basil leaves in a bowl of water by the kitchen window.
Basil? Is that some sort of cure? But for what?
Maureen wiped out the chalk lines with the same desperate insistence that a student uses in erasing an incorrect math equation on a chalkboard.

When Maureen awoke the morning after her first assault with the mop, it was with the anticipation of ant-free surfaces. Instead she found a new trail entering the kitchen through one of the light fixtures and splitting into two branches, one crossing the room to the pantry, where
the ants were devouring a loaf of stale French bread. Yet another trail entered from the backyard underneath one of the sliding glass doors, across the former path of one of Araceli’s chalk lines, and Maureen followed it to the remains of a dead grasshopper that had somehow been trapped behind one of the bookcases.
This is more than I can take.
She could not look at the sickening nodes of their dirt-colored bodies a moment longer. Several times a day, she felt one or two crawling on her legs and arms, racing for her neck and breasts, and she fantasized about finding their colony’s nest, and bringing some cataclysmic destruction upon it that would end ant culture and ant history on this hillside. Finally, that afternoon, she stood in a supermarket aisle she always tried to avoid, and purchased two different cans of poison. When she got home she was so desperate to see the chemicals work that she didn’t bother to get the children out of the house before she began spraying.

In the evening Maureen had rearmed herself with the spray can, determined to find any ant scouts or trails that had escaped her initial offensive, and was wandering the various rooms of the house when the phone rang.

Scott answered in the kitchen. “Hello, Mr. Goller,” he said, and Maureen listened, watching as he spoke in profile, either unaware or unconcerned that she was eavesdropping.

“No. We’re not going to do that … We really don’t want to be there. No. We’ve made our statements … You go ahead and do that, and we’ll be there if you force us to. And you know what: we’re pretty clear on exactly what happened … Meaning that we left separately and didn’t … If you’d just let me finish … Well, I guess you could say that, but I’m past being embarrassed now … No, neither will my wife … Right … Child Protective Services was already here … It was a very nice visit … Well, I got the distinct impression we don’t have anything to worry about … I’m sorry, Mr. Goller … I think that would be an injustice, Mr. Goller. Supremely unfair, for reasons that should be clear without me having to say why … I understand what the laws are, yes … I have to go, Mr. Goller … Kids, you know, and dinner … Goodbye, Mr. Goller … Goodbye.”

For the first time since that night he’d pushed her, Maureen allowed her eyes to settle and linger upon her husband. He was as exhausted as she was, but also completely in the present, his eyes pale brown embers giving off the same serene and low-burning glow of a
woman in the days after childbirth.
Men don’t often look like that.
Scott had somehow understood, from one moment to the next, that they were no longer at the mercy of the melodramatic machinery of the media and the criminal justice system. It had hit him, Maureen sensed, with a eureka suddenness and intensity, like the solution to a programming conundrum.
These prosecutors and bureaucrats have no power over us. None. Because we haven’t done anything wrong. We’re just as innocent as Araceli. Aren’t we?
Every so often her husband did something brilliant like this, shifting his thinking as easily as he might shift his posture or his feet, finding a solution suddenly falling into his arms, simply because he’d stepped out of the box of a problem and examined it in an entirely different light.
That’s something he can do that I cannot.

Looking at him, she began to see the possibility that the original, simple, and indefinable feelings that drew her to him might return.

“Is it over now?” she asked.

“I think it is.”

“Really?”

“I don’t think he’ll be calling us again.”

“Thank God.”

She was still holding the yellow can whose steel skin was emblazoned with drawings of bugs and a thousand words of warning in minuscule fonts.

A
fter several visits to courtrooms, police stations, and jail-houses, Araceli now understood that Americans associated justice with two dominant architectural styles: the austere cement cubes where walls, floors, ceilings, and passageways blended into a single smooth surface; or the woody hominess of dark paneling that suggested shadowy forests of mystery. This new Laguna Niguel satellite courthouse had a bit of both, and the mood was as somber as those other places, despite the presence of large Latino families with children sitting on some of the benches in the hallways and playing with toy cars and dolls. The look on the faces of the mothers and wives said,
This is where I come to say goodbye to my
viejo. Adiós, pendejo,
and yeah, I’ll look after the kids, because what the fuck else can I do?
This was a place, Araceli understood, where the damned were released temporarily from their dungeons to intermingle with the undamned. The presence of the
inmate fathers and brothers in their shackles and jumpsuits sent everyone around them into a funk. The gloom was there to see in the faces of the mothers and the daughters, the judges and the lawyers, including Deputy District Attorney Arnold Chang and Ruthy Bacalan, who had lost the sheen of pregnancy on her cheeks and looked older somehow as she took a seat with Araceli at a table before the judge. There was sadness too in the look of pained exertion on the face of the first witness of Araceli’s preliminary hearing, a police officer she had never met before.

Deputy Ernie Suarez was not dressed in police clothing as he sat in the witness box, but rather in jeans and a collared short-sleeve cotton shirt that revealed his rather excessive musculature. He wore a small loop earring that was meant to convey masculinity, but whose effect, Araceli decided, was completely the opposite. Only the badge on his belt identified him as a member of the tribe of law enforcement.

“You are, at the moment, working?” the prosecutor asked by way of explanation.

“Yes.”

“Are you working as what they call an ‘undercover’ officer at the moment?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is this, ‘undercover’?” Araceli whispered to Ruthy. It didn’t sound good.

“I’ll tell you later.”

“At the time of the incident involving the Torres-Thompson children, you were a patrol officer assigned to the Laguna Rancho area, correct?”

“Yes.”

Guided by the prosecutor’s questions, Deputy Suarez proceeded to tell the story of his arrival at Paseo Linda Bonita, of the “distraught” state in which he found Maureen and Scott, and his search of their home for clues of the boys’ whereabouts, and how Maureen paced and held the baby.

“Had the defendant left any communication of any kind with the parents?”

“We didn’t find any note or message of any kind, sir, no.”

“So the parents had no idea where their children were?”

“That’s correct, sir. And they were pretty shaken up about it.”

Listening to the deputy, Araceli saw the events inside the home on Paseo Linda Bonita that day through the eyes of Maureen and Scott for
the first time. Her employers were adrift and afraid in that orderly house Araceli had left behind for them.
I cleaned the sinks before I left, but I didn’t think of the most obvious thing: to leave behind a note. I made a mess of things as much as they did.

As the court session moved on, Araceli could see the prosecutor was building a tale of foreboding around her acts of naïveté and stupidity. The deputy district attorney was a short man in boxy, scuffed black shoes, and a tie that was knotted too loosely. Now he began to fiddle with a computer and a projector, and raised a screen inside the empty jury box. An image appeared on the screen, a video from a Union Station surveillance camera that showed Araceli, Brandon, and Keenan, seen from an eye high above the waiting area, the shiny floors reflecting the atrium daylight into an odd glare, so that Araceli and the boys stood in a menacing glow. The prosecutor had a sheriff’s detective state the video’s provenance and act as narrator. “The defendant enters the frame at one forty-five p.m…. You can see the victims walked in after her …”

“Were you able to determine if the two boys have any relatives in the vicinity of that station?”

“To the best of our knowledge, they have no relative within thirty miles of the station.”

The video representation of Araceli turned her head in several directions, mulling which direction to take as the boys studied the high ceilings above them. Video Araceli walked away and out of the range of the camera without saying anything to them and they followed after her. Araceli looked at that footage and saw what everyone else did: an impatient woman who never wanted to take care of children, who rushed out of the home without leaving a note because she was too anxious to be rid of them. The video doomed her.
Am I really that selfish and mean?
But how had she allowed herself to be placed in such a predicament in the first place?
You are going the wrong way, woman! Go back to the house and wait!
Why was she always at the mercy of other people? Seeing this stupid woman projected on the screen, Araceli felt an impotent rage that made her want to stand up and shout in Spanglish,
I am a
pendeja!
Looking for the grandfather?
¡Pendeja! But she said nothing, and slumped back in her chair suddenly and folded her arms, and shook her head with silent violence. “What’s wrong?” Ruthy Bacalan asked.
They are going to put that woman in the video back in jail and then send
her home with plastic ties around her wrists because she is a callous simpleton.
Araceli fought to hold back the water welling behind her eyes; she couldn’t let these people see her cry.
Now I understand why there are all these boxes of tissues in the courtroom.
There was one box on the table before her, another perched on the railing where the witnesses stood, two more in the empty seats of the jury box.
People come to cry here. To see their follies projected on a screen, and then to weep.

The prosecutor turned off the video, the deputy left the courtroom, and the next witness entered the courtroom.

Detective Blake marched down the gallery aisle like a middle-aged man in a hurry, rose to the stand, said “Yeah, I do” in response to the oath, and plopped down into the witness chair. He was soon asked to relate Brandon’s tale of his journey with Araceli.

“The neighborhood this boy described to you,” the prosecutor began. “Would you say it bore a general resemblance to the neighborhood near the intersection of Thirty-ninth and South Broadway?”