The Barbarian Nurseries (47 page)

“Very general. Yes.”

“What did Brandon tell you about that place?”

“That it was dirty and grimy. That a lot of people came and went there. That he heard a man screaming. That he slept on the floor, next to a child who was a slave, or an orphan, or something like that.”

“On the floor, next to an orphan?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say anything about seeing people with scars on their faces?”

“Yes.”

When the prosecutor had finished, Ruthy Bacalan rose to begin her cross-examination. She was dressed in her own idiosyncratic version of summer courtroom dress: a white jacket with gold-braided epaulets on the shoulders, and wide white pants and white sandals, an outfit that suggested she had come to represent a defendant being brought on trial before the captain of a luxury cruise liner.

“Generally speaking, during the hour or so you spent with Brandon, did he seem frightened to you?” she asked the detective.

“No.”

“Did he appear intimidated by his experience with the defendant?”

“No. Probably the opposite.”

“The opposite?”

“Yeah, he seemed like he was having fun telling his story. It was all sort of, uh, fantastical to him. ‘Magical’ is the word, I guess.”

“And how much of that story were you able to verify?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you make any effort to find out how much of Brandon’s story was true? For example, did you find anyone who looked like they had been through a war, like the, quote, ‘refugees’ Brandon mentioned?”

“You mean, did we find the war refugees Brandon told us about?”

“Yes.”

“No.” For the first time, the detective dropped his guard and grinned. “Didn’t know where to start looking for them.”

“Brandon also mentioned something about time travel. In a train.”

“Yes.”

“Able to verify that?”

“We punted on the time travel, ma’am.”

From her chair, Araceli felt the mood in the courtroom turning light, inconsequential. The judge rolled his eyes—twice!
My Ruthy is winning!
The prosecutor was starting to look ill, he was grabbing the table before him with two hands, as if the building were shifting, very slowly, and the floor of the courtroom were suddenly afloat and tossed about by rough seas. “Brandon said his brother had been, quote, ‘holding fire,’ unquote. Did you find any burns on Keenan Torres-Thompson’s hands?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Did you find any fires burning underneath the surface of the earth?”

“Excuse me.”

“It’s in the statement. Brandon says he saw a fire burning in the ground.”

“There was a pig cooked, apparently. At the home in Huntington Park.”

“And what about the, quote, superhero? Mr. Ray Forma?”

“We were able to ascertain, to a high degree of certainty, that there have been no sightings of any such man.”

On the bench, the judge gave a bemused smirk that matched the one on the face of the detective.

“No further questions, Your Honor.”

Ray Forma sounded like a stage name to Araceli. There was a student she knew in art school who worked as a clown for children’s parties and called himself Re-Gacho. “Really Uncool” was a typical Mexico
City clown who amused and annoyed in equal measures, harassing the moms with double entendres that their kids didn’t understand. Yes, Re-Gacho would fit perfectly in this courtroom, where even the bailiff looked grateful for the brief levity of superheroes and time machines at the end of a day of slogging through the calendar. Cover the oak with red and yellow streamers, bring out the balloons, and put a big top hat on the judge.
Qué divertido.

“The People rest, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said, causing the judge’s face to come alive again with a sparkle of astonishment. The judge was a balding man with a sallow complexion and a fringe of white hair: up until that moment, he had maintained a temperament of studied evenness and congeniality. The judge considered the seated prosecutor for an instant, and then his face collapsed into a mask of disapproval, as if the exit doors had been thrown open inside a darkened theater, interrupting a bad movie and revealing the sticky, trash-strewn aisles.

“That’s it?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Ms. Bacalan. I see you have one witness,” the judge said after a pause. “Is he here, by any chance?”

“No, Your Honor. I didn’t anticipate the prosecutor cutting short his witness list.”

“Right. So, tomorrow at nine a.m.?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Ruthy and the prosecutor said in unison.

Sitting in the last row of the gallery with his legs crossed, Assistant District Attorney Ian Goller fixed a dagger stare at Madame Weirdness, the Mexican woman who could make his life easier by making the rational choice and taking the plea bargain. In his desire to avoid defeat he had assembled a squad of attorneys and investigators dedicated to keeping alive the machinery of case AB5387516, in the hope that he would eventually pressure this stubborn woman to accept the inevitable. But as he watched the defendant leaving the courtroom behind her attorney, Ian Goller realized she would not give up. Araceli Ramirez was a Mexican national with nothing going for her but a strong work ethic, apparently, and lived unaware of her powerlessness relative to your average American-born resident of Orange County. She owned no property and had no social security number or credit rating, but walked past him like an exiled empress in denim and sneakers because she inhabited another, Spanish-speaking reality where those things didn’t matter,
a world of people happy with the plebeian pleasures of hurdy-gurdy music and pickup trucks. The assistant district attorney knew, in fact, that there was a pickup with a driver waiting for the defendant in the parking lot. Goller had that information thanks to the investigator he’d assigned to track her movements—an egregious misuse of scarce resources—but the assistant district attorney only now realized how unhealthy his obsession with this case had become. Could it ever be a bad thing to want to win, Goller wondered, when the side you were on was called
the People?
He wanted this woman to make the rational calculation of a defeated American criminal, but of course she would not. His experience with the Mexicans that crossed his path was that they expected the worst and were immovable once they latched on to the idea that the DA’s plea offers were the ploy of English-speaking grifters. Thinking of all of this, Ian Goller slipped into a depression, because Araceli’s surrender was the only path to victory in the case.

Maybe he should just go hit the waves and cuddle with the moving water and its shifting shapes, with its power to lift a man and make him fly.

Assistant District Attorney Goller was in the parking lot, opening the trunk of his car and confirming the presence of his wet suit and mini board in the back when his phone beeped with another text message: his investigator was following the defendant from the parking lot and was wondering whether to continue surveillance.

No,
the assistant district attorney wrote back.

He saw
The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez
more clearly now. It was unusual to be burdened at this relatively late stage with so many bad facts: the parents caught in contradictions, the paper trail of their lies, and the older boy and his elaborate fantasies. In the name of efficiency they usually tossed unwinnables like this one out the door. And yet there was still the march of institutional logic, the overwhelming likelihood the judge would order the defendant to stand trial, adding the passage of time to the equation. It would be four months, at least, until the trial: that kind of time often worked wonders, since it brought into play the predilection of defendants to muck up their lives. The defendant might run afoul of the law while free on bail, allowing her to be arrested on another, unrelated charge. Or they might get their deal. If none of those things happened, there would always be another illegal immigrant to arrest and try in another high-profile case, eventually, inevitably.
The math suggested it would happen again soon, though it was hard to imagine a case as perfect and full of possibility as two handsome boys spirited away by their humorless Mexican nanny.

Ian Goller had closed the trunk of his car and was contemplating the best route to the sea when his phone chattered again with the announcement of another text message.

A
raceli did not notice the assistant district attorney as she left the courtroom and entered a hallway filled with people in sagging, end-of-the-summer day clothes. She walked a step behind Ruthy Bacalan, who was talking into a cell phone, and then into a long corridor where a man and a woman were walking toward them, backs and heels first—after a moment, Araceli saw they were two photographers aiming lenses at a subject, walking backward as the subject walked toward them, as if walking backward were the most natural thing in the world.

The smart-stepping photographers tangoed in reverse past Araceli and Ruthy and suddenly the two women were alone with the subject, a sapphire-eyed man with a light, sun-kissed complexion and a wheat-field of hair that looked as if it had been born on van Gogh’s palette on one of the painter’s sunnier mornings. He was an A-list movie star, internationally recognized and swooned over, and he was in the courthouse to testify at and savor the trial of an annoying paparazzo. The sight of the A-list star caused both Ruthy Bacalan and Araceli to stop in the center of the hallway to admire him. Suddenly he spotted Araceli and stopped his advance down the hallway.

“Hey, I know you,” he said to Araceli. He reached out, shook her hand, and said, “I’ve been following your case.”

“¿De veras?”

“I have.” He smiled, spectacularly, and then added, “And I just want to say, good luck to you, señorita,” in a voice that seemed a conscious imitation of Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant or some other star of a bygone age, and in a moment he was bygone too, headed down the hallway to Department 186B to witness the sentencing of a man who would hound the beautiful people of Laguna Beach, Brentwood, and Bel Air no longer.

“Wow,” Ruthy said, with a hand at her chest.

“Sí,
wow,” Araceli agreed.

He left them in a trance as they followed the hallway to the door
and the concrete plaza outside and its long-shadowed brightness. None of the distracted newspeople standing in the center of the plaza had noticed that Araceli was walking among them. Five of them were gathered in a semicircle, talking to one another and contemplating the black slabs they held in their raised palms, as Hamlet had the skull of his poor friend Yorick, summoning news of a tragedy with their thumbs. A girl’s body was being pulled out of a suitcase in the lake, her stepmother had been arrested, and Ian Goller was speeding toward the scene. The newspeople were all wondering where they would be deployed next, because it was an all-hands-on-deck moment, but Araceli did not know this and assumed that they had simply grown bored with her, and she gave herself a moment to think about how fickle they were, how short their attention spans. None of them had been present to see Ruthy in her white nautical outfit destroy the prosecution in Department 181.

Araceli parted company with Ruthy and made her way to the parking lot, where Felipe was waiting for her. He’d been there for four hours, waiting, sitting in the cab of his truck with a pad of paper and a pencil, drawing, and he tossed the pad into the back of the cab as soon as she approached. They drove back to Santa Ana, and she told him about how Ruthy had taken apart the prosecution, and when they reached the Covarrubias home he walked her to the front door and said goodbye in a very chaste way, as if he were holding back other, deeper things he wanted to express but was too afraid to say. There was something that was supposed to happen next between them, and Araceli wondered if he would allow that thing to be.

“¿Mañana?
At the same hour?” he asked.

“Yes. But only if you want to.”

“I do. I really do. I don’t have any work now—things are slowing down. But even if I did have to work, I would be here,
porque es importante.”

“Hasta mañana entonces.”

“Hasta mañana.”

This is a formal, too-polite parting, filled with unspoken yearnings, like in the villages back home,
Araceli thought, and she reached out for his hand. Their fingers lingered together long enough for her to inhale and exhale once, very slowly, and in that moment Araceli felt infinitely more electricity pass through her skin than when the A-list movie star had touched the same hand.

O
n the morning of Araceli’s second day in court the large crowds of protesters had disappeared from the front steps of the courthouse. In their place there was Janet Bryson, alone, scanning the street and the parking lot for the friends she had made yesterday, at first perplexed by their absence and then, finally, disappointed by their lack of resolve. “They said they would be here,” she said to herself aloud, and when the defendant in
The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez
appeared at the bottom of the steps with another Mexican, Janet Bryson barely noticed, because she was so upset with the unpunctuality and flakiness of her fellow Californians.
What are they doing that’s so important that they can’t be here? What’s on their televisions that’s so captivating; what excuses about traffic will they concoct?
Araceli walked up the steps with Felipe and didn’t see Janet Bryson. The shouting woman of the day before had dissolved into the background for Araceli, because at the bottom of the stairs Felipe had reached over to take her hand.

Felipe had wrapped his fingers around Araceli’s suddenly, instinctively, because he was swept up by the emotion of leading his new friend into a courthouse, which he thought of as a place where people went to disappear and never come back. They could take Araceli away and send her to one of those prisons in the desert, in faraway valleys
where people trekked to visit incarcerated fathers and brothers on pathetic road trips where an ice cream for the kids at Burger King on the way back was supposed to make it all better. Felipe had suffered such trips to see his older brother—who was still in that prison, thirteen years later—and when he reached over to take Araceli’s hand, it was to comfort himself as much as her. He knew she was someone special and brilliant whose freedom and future were under threat. They walked up the stairs with palms joined for twenty-four steps and thirty-eight paces to the door with the metal detector, until he let go and allowed her to enter the court building alone, and said,
“Te espero en el
parking lot, just like yesterday.”

I
nside the paneled courthouse, the proceedings resumed with Ruthy Bacalan rising to her feet and announcing, “We call Salomón Luján, Your Honor.” The Huntington Park city councilman entered the courtroom, in black denim jeans and a thick leather belt whose bronze buckle bore the initials
SL.
His nod to the formality of the courtroom was a freshly ironed plaid shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, and boots polished so that they resembled the skin of the oak table on Paseo Linda Bonita. Once on the stand he recounted the phone call that brought Araceli Ramirez to his home, and the arrival of the defendant and her two charges at her front door. “She told me she was looking for their grandfather,” he said in moderately accented English, “because the mother and father had abandoned her in the house, alone, with two
gringuitos,”
he said.

“With two what?” the judge interrupted.

“Sorry. I mean with two little American children.”

“And did these children you saw,” Ruthy asked quickly, “did they seem to be well taken care of?”

“Yes. They look a little tired. But this lady, Araceli, she was in charge. Their hair was long, but she made them comb it. She was taking care of them, yes.” After asking Luján to recount how Brandon, Keenan, and Araceli had all slept in his daughter’s room—“She’s the one going to Princeton, correct?”—and having Luján confirm that he was a member of the Huntington Park City Council, Ruthy moved to the moment at which Araceli fled his home, alone.

“Did she tell you why she was leaving?”

“Yes. Because of the immigration.”

“She was afraid because she felt she might be detained for her immigration status?”

“Yes.”

“And when she left, did she leave the children in your care?”

“Yes. She could see, on the television, that their mother and father were back home. So she didn’t need to take care of them anymore.”

“And you had them until the police arrived?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing further, Your Honor.”

Arnold Chang said he didn’t have any questions for the councilman—the prosecutor seemed as eager as Araceli to be out of the courtroom.

“The defense rests, Your Honor,” Ruthy said.

“Any affirmative defense or motions?” the judge asked.

“Motion to dismiss based on insufficiency of the evidence,” Ruthy said. “I would like to be heard, Your Honor.”

“Go ahead.”

Araceli watched and listened as Ruthy rose to her feet again and launched into a spirited monologue directed at the judge and, with the occasional sidelong glance, at the prosecutor. “It strikes us as a misuse of prosecutorial power to file charges against the only adult in the household who acted responsibly,” Ruthy said. She sometimes held her belly in her palm as she spoke, and she leaned on the lectern once or twice as she described Araceli’s attempts to find a safe place for the children first with their grandfather, and then in a “traditional home with a respectable family” in Huntington Park. “Clearly,” she concluded, “these are the actions of an adult who’s taken the responsibility of caring for two children seriously.” When she finished she plopped back down into her chair, and all the men in the courtroom seemed relieved that she did, because it seemed she might go into labor if she kept on talking.

“And the People?” the judge asked.

Now Arnold Chang stood up and began using the same legalisms Ruthy had pronounced, but with a dismissive tone, as if firing tennis balls back across the net. “The facts in evidence establish the vulnerability that is at the essence of the endangerment statute,” he said, and
Araceli wrinkled her brow at him because despite his at times abstract and difficult English, the meaning of what he was saying was clear in his flustered, strained brow, and the way he stretched out his arm in Araceli’s direction to make a point. “The vulnerability need not be an actual physical threat, but may also include a looming emotional threat over the psyche of the victims. The People argue that the disturbing nature of the journey undertaken by the defendant with the two minor children, into an area of persistent physical dangers, all thanks to the poor decisions of the defendant, falls within the definitions of the statute.”

After the prosecutor had stopped and returned to his seat, the judge leaned back into the cushions of his swivel chair and said, “Well, then.” Araceli understood that it was now his turn to decide the next stop on her journey through these buildings and their rooms of concrete and wood paneling. He rubbed his bald head vigorously with both hands, in what felt like some odd judicial ritual, then looked at a clock on the wall. He allowed the second hand to advance in its circular motion and kept on looking as it reached the six at the bottom and swung back and began climbing again toward the twelve, leading Araceli to wonder if he was peering into the clock’s face and studying it for a message only he could discern. Finally, he turned to the lawyers.

“I’m going to grant your motion, Ms. Bacalan.”

This short statement was followed by a long silence whose contours Araceli did not fully appreciate, because she did not know what “motion” meant, precisely, in this context.
Motion.
Moción.
Something is moving. The judge will allow something to move. Me? Do I move? But to where?
The prosecutor sat up straight, as if preparing to launch into new arguments, while Ruthy leaned back in her chair and gave her pen a jaunty twirl between her fingers.

Addressing the prosecutor, the judge said, “You’re not even anywhere near a preponderance of evidence.”

“I respectfully disagree, Your Honor.”

“Well, you can make a trip to the Court of Appeals if you like, counselor. If you feel it’s worth it. This court has rendered its decision.”

“Your Honor, before you adjourn,” Arnold Chang interjected, “there’s also the matter of the defendant’s immigration status.”

“Excuse me?” the judge snapped. He leaned forward and glared at the prosecutor.

“Objection,” Ruthy said, almost spitting the word out as she rose quickly to her feet.

The judge motioned for her to sit down, then leaned back in his tall padded chair and brought his hands together before his face as if in prayer. “Counselor, there’s a couple of things,” he began. “First, I’ve got a pretty full docket here. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of an hour, or even fifteen minutes discussing facts not related to the charges before this court. And second, and most germane, is that big bronze seal that’s floating over and behind my head. See that?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“It’s got the San Francisco Bay and a lady with a spear, and it says ‘State of California.’ Is there an immigration law in the California code that you’d like me to enforce, counselor?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Case dismissed,” the judge said. “Ms. Ramirez, you’re free to go.” He pounded the gavel, which sounded with an odd clack-clack, and rose to his feet and retired to his chambers, carrying an empty coffee cup he intended to fill before returning to the bench for the next case.

T
hey walked up a wide staircase of weathered granite into the open house, a family of five, Maureen holding Samantha’s hand as the little girl raised her legs high to navigate each step, Brandon and Keenan and their father following after. Maureen stopped in her climb to look longingly at the Prairie style, Frank Lloyd Wright—inspired windows, each an eye-pleasing geometry of nine glass rectangles separated by thin strips of wood. The windows were authentically old and American, as were the pillars of river stones that held up the rafters of the front porch, and the polished floors in the living room whose brown mirror greeted the Torres-Thompson family as they walked through the front door.

“This is nice,” Scott said.

Of all the Craftsman homes they had seen in South Pasadena, this was the purest gem. It wasn’t as big as some of the others, but it was the best preserved, and it seduced Maureen with the triangles of its eaves, the sturdiness of its exposed rafters, the long beams that loomed over the living room and jutted out over the porch outside. It was a squat
story and a half, perched halfway up a gentle rise above the concrete wash of the Arroyo Seco.

The boys ran through the living room to the stairs and climbed up to the two rooms of a second story that was tucked underneath the sloping ceilings of a pitched roof. The floors creaked and moaned with each of their steps. “It’s like an eagle’s nest up here,” Brandon said, and he lay on his stomach and looked out a window frame that was only six inches off the floor. He scanned the neighborhood, the billowing canopies of the sycamores and oaks, the spotted green fruit of a black walnut tree, and the shadows and shafts of light that cut through leaves and branches to dapple the sidewalk below, and he remembered the tiny talking forest creatures of a novel he’d read a long time ago.

Down in the living room, Maureen paced the echoing floors and thought about how she liked the simplicity and directness of the Craftsman design, with its embrace of early twentieth century American values of openness and restraint. Sunlight and breezes raced through its spaces, which seemed familiar and somehow midwestern. This house embodied the new person she wanted to become, and she felt it was a good sign that at this property, unlike all the others, the Realtor had not done a double-take when he saw the notorious Orange County family from the television news walk up to the door.

“It’s from 1919,” Scott said, reading the brochure as he climbed the stairs behind them. “The plumbing is probably not great.”

“Who cares about the plumbing?” Maureen said. We’re looking for a new beginning, she thought, and some old pipes aren’t going to stop us.

She returned to the porch and admired the street, with its wide oaks and denuded jacarandas, each standing in a pool of purple flowers. It was a version of an America that was, a Main Street USA, a
Music Man.
She thought,
Only the streetcars are missing. This is the kind of street where the boys can ride their bikes.
There were no walls separating this neighborhood from the rest of the city, and yet there were no bars on the windows either, no suggestion that the residents lived in fear.
This is as it should be.
Yes, the air was still and dirty here; she would miss the sea breezes living inland. She was losing the California home of her dreams—she had been chased away from it, really, but perhaps it was for the best.
I paid for my ocean view with that horrendous isolation, up on that hill, in that gated and insular place.

“It’s just nineteen hundred square feet,” Scott said. “Can we squeeze in?”

“That’s the point,” Maureen said. “To make do with less.”

Scott examined the asking price, a nose more than seven figures, and more than he had paid for the house on Paseo Linda Bonita five years earlier.
Now I might be paying more for less house and no ocean view.
It made sense only for the supposedly excellent local public schools, and for having a home small enough to take care of without a Mexican living with them.

“What if we offer a little less than that?” Scott said to the Realtor, a man with slippery hair and ruddy skin who was just reaching the top of the stairs.

“They may take it. You’re lucky; it’s a good time to buy. The prices have sort of stabilized the last month or so.”

“Do you think the prices will start to drop?”

“No. Not a chance.”

Up on the second floor Brandon was still on his stomach, still looking out the window, a bit disappointed by the failure of this new landscape to trigger any vision or hint of adventure. And then a girl of twelve or thirteen appeared below. From his perch he watched her pass before the house, hands folded over her chest holding a book, a long black braid bouncing on the back of her neck, advancing with a slow, feminine glide over the sidewalk squares. The sight of her brought forth an unfamiliar sensation deep in his stomach.
That’s a pretty girl.
He quickly forgot about forest creatures and everything else on the street until the girl disappeared from his field of vision, and for the next hour he didn’t think about any of the books he was reading, about Holden Caulfield or the dragon in Eragon, and instead he secretly wished they would move to this house so that he might see that girl again and maybe even talk to her.