The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,119
and eight years old, and they may have been abducted by their Mexican nanny. Apparently the detectives in this case have reason to believe she may be taking them to Mexico.”
“That’s right, Joe. Brandon and Keenan Thompson of Orange County. Here they are. And here’s their nanny, Araceli Ramirez. She is from there, apparently, allegedly, so they’re checking all the cars crossing the border. We understand. They haven’t closed the border completely, now, have they, Captain?”
“No, Patrick. As you can see, if we zoom in here … there is some traffic going past the checkpoint, but it’s at a real snail’s pace. A snail’s pace, because in a case like this, in this kind of Amber Alert involving a suspect, a possible Mexican national as the suspect, they don’t want to take any chances.”
The camera’s eye zoomed back, briefly taking in the U.S. and Mexican flags at opposite ends of a twenty-lane stretch of concrete, and the inspection booths, and then the long, curving, interlocking-puzzle pieces of cars on the southbound roadway in the United States, simmering and stationary between shoulder and center divider, the boxes of tractor-trailers, pickup trucks, and taxis, and a car hauling a boat. The camera then turned back on itself and showed how the parallel lines of vehicles climbed and banked northward, toward the San Diego downtown skyline, a hazy Oz many miles distant. Finally the broadcast switched to a taped shot, taken on the ground, of a U.S. customs agent holding a piece of paper printed with Brandon and Keenan’s picture as he peered into a van.
Araceli grabbed the remote from Lucía’s hand and turned off the television, hoping to stop the delusional machine’s madness, which would spread if she allowed it to keep flashing its images and its lies. In the news I am a fuzzy criminal. Officers are looking, agents are checking. They were searching for the boys, to rescue them, and they were looking for Araceli, so that they could arrest her. Maureen did this. Because she came home and found no boys, because she wants to punish me for acting like their mother, even though I never asked to be their mother. I never wanted that. Her instinct to keep away from her jefes’ children had been right after all. She had crossed a boundary by thinking she was their guardian. And they would arrest her, because she dared to save those parentless children from Foster Care.
Now she caught Griselda and Lucía staring at her. Could it be true? they seemed to be asking themselves. Do we have a child abductor among us?
“Están locos,” Araceli said dismissively in Spanish, referring to the newsmen and newswomen, Maureen and Scott, and the two young women in the living room with their doubts all at once. She turned and repeated this in English to the boys, who knew the truth, hoping they might say something in Araceli’s defense. “They are crazy. They say I took you.”
“I wanna go home,” Keenan said. The television news had unsettled him further, because seeing a television report that said you were missing seemed to be a step closer to actually being missing. He didn’t want to be “disappeared,” a state which he imagined to be something like sitting in a white room in another dimension while you waited to return to the world of the known and definite. “I don’t want to be missing. I want to be home.”
Brandon was worried about being missing too, but at the sound of Keenan’s pleading whine, the older brother in him kicked in. “We should call home and tell them where we are,” he said, his voice rising with the discovery of a simple and quick solution to their dilemma. “Then they’ll pick us up!”
“Good idea,” Lucía said.
“Then I should go,” Griselda interjected quickly. “Before the police get here.” She gave Lucia a knowing look that turned pained when she realized her friend didn’t get her meaning right away. “Because they’ll start asking everyone questions.”
Lucia’s eyes shifted in confusion, then fixed on her friend until she understood. “Oh, yeah, right. Of course. You should go.”
“What?” Araceli demanded, suddenly irritated by the mysterious dialogue between friends. “The police are looking for you too?”
Griselda Pulido shook her head and said bluntly, in English, “I don’t have papers.”
It seemed impossible. Here was a young woman who spoke about music and boyfriends in English, who was obviously educated in the freewheeling, free-girl-thinking of U.S. schools, a privilege imparted to the country’s brightest daughters, announcing