The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,118
the table, laughing.
“I saw you guys,” Lucía said. “I swear.”
“You’re crazy,” Araceli said. “You’re just like this boy here. Imagining things.”
“They said they were lost,” Griselda said in English. “Perdidos.”
“There we are!”
“Cool!”
Brandon and Keenan were suddenly grinning broadly on the televis ion screen, the imperfections in their front teeth frozen in the high-definition transmission for several seconds, causing Brandon to subconsciously raise his hand to his mouth and then close it shut and to think, My mom is right, I am going to need braces soon. Maureen had retrieved this image from her digital camera some eight hours earlier, as the first of many detectives stood in her living room. It was a cropped close-up from a picture taken at Keenan’s eighth birthday party, a late afternoon image that showed the boys standing over the cake in the gathering’s final, exhausted hour, because in all the others from earlier in the day they were wearing papier-mâché helmets.
“Police are asking for your help this morning in finding these two young boys, little Brandon and Keenan Torres-Thompson, of the Laguna Rancho Estates,” a male voice was saying gravely. “They’ve been missing two days, Nancy, and their parents are frantic to see them.”
“Oh, my God, they’re so cute!” The screen cut back momentarily to the news studio, where Nancy, the female co-anchor, had brought her hand to her mouth and twisted her eyebrows into a face that was too theatrically mawkish given the subject matter, and the screen quickly moved to another still image.
“They are believed to be in the custody of their housekeeper, a Mexican immigrant. Araceli Ramirez is her name.” Maureen had searched frantically for thirty-five minutes through her boxes of family pictures before finding a photograph in which Araceli appeared. It was a fleeting image, also taken in the dim light of a late afternoon, but at another birthday party a year ago, Brandon’s tenth. Araceli stood fuzzily in the background of a larger photograph that had been cropped out, save for the ear of the main subject—Maureen, who was posing in the missing portion with a newborn Samantha in a chest-hugging sling. Out of the range of the flash, Araceli appeared in a blurred gray profile, walking quickly in her filipina across the backyard lawn, passing behind her boss with a stack of dirty dishes, following the quail-bangs that popped from her forehead. It was not an image that flattered. Removed of its context, its fuzzy quality suggested something furtive about its subject, as if she were already in flight when it was taken. “The boys’ parents apparently left the boys in the care of the housekeeper, and the housekeeper disappeared—with the boys.”
“She disappeared with them?”
“That’s what the police say.”
“God, let’s just pray that they’re safe.”
“Their mom and dad are obviously anxious to see them.”
The report ended, leaving Araceli and the boys in the living room with the unsettling sensation that they occupied bodies and faces that had just been transmitted, via airwaves, cables, and satellite dishes, into many more living rooms besides this one across the metropolis. Araceli was confused over the meaning of the phrase “disappeared with the boys,” and wondered if “disappear” carried exactly the same mysterious and nefarious definitions as desaparecer: and then Lucía spoke the English word out loud and Araceli realized, from her tone of surprise and restrained disgust, that there was no difference at all.
“They say you disappeared with them. That you took them. Didn’t you have permission?”
“¿Permiso?” Araceli spat back. “Me dejaron sola con dos niños. Me abandonaron.”
“But now they’re looking for them.”
“Yes, I know,” Araceli said, switching languages because Lucía didn’t seem to fully comprehend. “But they left four days ago and never told me anything. I was all alone.”
Griselda retook the remote and waded anew into the selection of channels, until she reached a shot taken from a helicopter, a plugged-up flow of automobiles on one side of a freeway. The words at the bottom of the screen had caused her to stop—MISSING CHILDREN—and now Griselda raised the volume to better hear the repartee between another studio anchor and a man who seemed to be speaking from inside a blender.
“We’ve got Captain Joe McDonnell in Sky Five over San Ysidro, over the U.S.-Mexico border … And whoa, look at that line.”
“That’s right, Patrick. We’ve got a two-mile backup, and from what I can see now … it stretches far beyond the last San Ysidro off-ramp. And it’s all due to the case of those two missing children. They’re eleven