The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,114
in the dim light projected by a streetlamp through the sunflowers on Lucía’s curtains, and wondering what her gordito Felipe would look like in a bullfighter’s tights: comical, most likely. She wondered if he had tried to call in her absence.
“My children are missing. My two sons.” “What is your name?” “Maureen Thompson.”
“And you are their mother?”
“Yes.”
“Are you calling me from your home?”
“Yes.”
Maureen had punched 911 into the kitchen phone, and had reached a female voice that was following the passionless protocol of emergency operators, establishing essential facts in a weirdly detached voice.
“What are their names?”
“Brandon and Keenan. Torres. Torres-Thompson.”
“How old are they?”
“Brandon is eleven. Keenan is eight.”
“And when did you last see them?”
“Yesterday,” Maureen said quickly.
“Yesterday?”
Maureen paused at the operator’s tone of surprise, and in the brief silence she could hear a roomful of voices in the background. “No, no, I mean day before yesterday.”
“Sunday?”
“Yes, Sunday morning.” Maureen could not bring herself to say four days ago. Had she been slightly less panicked she might have felt the need to unburden herself of the full, complicated truth. But it would have taken a very calm, rational frame of mind to untangle for a stranger how a mother and father could abandon their sons for four days, and how it all went back to a dying garden and an argument in their living room. “My husband and I. We went to a spa.” She looked up at Scott, who was shaking his head, but this only strengthened her conviction that taking the time to explain their fight in the living room and the events that followed would only slow the search for their sons. This is not the time to revisit our little episode with the table. And what did it matter anyway? The important thing was to find the boys, to bring them back to the shelter of this home. “We left them with the maid. Sunday. With their nanny.” Two tones sounded, an automated notification that the conversation was being recorded. “We told her we would be back this morning, but we were a little late. And we’ve been waiting all day for her to come back with the kids. We don’t know where she is.”
“We?”
“My husband.”
“He’s there with you?”
“Yes.”
“His name?”
“Scott Torres.”
At the Orange County Emergency Communications Center, the operator considered the choices on her screen, which required her to classify the urgency of the dozens of dramas, mundane and bloody, that were whispered and screamed at her through her headset each day. Satisfied that the two children in this case were in the presence of an approved guardian (the nanny) and that the usual perpetrator in missing children cases (the father) was present, she reached the correct conclusion that this was probably not an abduction in which the children were in imminent danger, but rather some sort of household mis-communication. The caller was clearly lying about the last time she saw her sons: Probably she’s trying to get us to move quicker, the operator thought, probably she saw them just a few hours ago. Emergency Operator II Melinda Nabor was a Mexican-American single mom with two young boys at home who were being looked after by their grandmother while she worked, and it was her experience that parents and “caregivers” got their signals crossed all the time. The “caller location” flashing on her screen was an address in one of the ritziest neighborhoods in the county, and she imagined herself saying, Get a grip, lady. I’m sure your expensive Mexican nanny has everything under control. Sometimes the operators let slip words of wisdom to the confused people on the other line, but Emergency Operator Nabor never did so, she always stuck to the call scripts and protocols, with their comforting sense of logic and professionalism, and their ability to channel events of all kinds into a machinery that translated human folly into codes and correct “unit deployments” from the twenty-eight overlapping law-enforcement jurisdictions in her calling area. In this case, it would be the county sheriff, to a community so rich it collectively preferred to be unincorporated rather than pay for its own city government.
“We’re sending a patrol car out there.”
“Thank you,” Maureen said meekly.
“Orange County sheriffs. They should be out there shortly.”
“Thank you.”
Deputy Ernie Suarez was taken by the incongruity of the setting, a red-eyed mother lost to a mourning lament in her perfectly appointed living room, the father holding the baby girl because the mother was so distraught. “My beautiful boys. I left them and