The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,121
of her Mexican citizenship. They would arrest her and sort out the truth later. But I don’t want to be a prisoner, not even for a few hours. Araceli had digested, over the years, a regular diet of stories from across the U.S., fed to her by Spanish-language radio and television, all offering ample evidence that those who arrived on this side of the border without permission were returned home via a series of humiliating punishments. Meat packers, garment workers, mothers with babies in swaddling clothes: Araceli had seen them on the television, rounded up in vans, into buses with steel mesh over the windows, gathered up in camps behind fences, onto airplanes that landed on the tropical runways of San Salvador and Tegucigalpa and other places, far away from those other places they had learned to call home—Iowa, Chicago, Massachusetts. Pobrecitos. When this saga was on television you could dismiss it as the bad luck of others. She was too busy to worry, and too much at peace with the risky life choices she had taken. But now that her name and her face had been fed into that tragic stream of the wanted, the apprehended, and the deported, she felt the need to resist. My words and my true story will not buy me my freedom, not right away. Araceli would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English: it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.
“Me voy,” Araceli announced happily. “Good luck, boys. I’m glad you didn’t go into Faster Care. Lucía and her father will take care of you until the police come.”
After returning to Lucía’s bedroom to retrieve the backpack she had been carrying, Araceli passed through to the living room one last time, patted Keenan on the head, and placed a hand on Brandon’s shoulder.
“I leave them with you,” she said to Lucía, and to Mr. Luján, who had just entered the living room. “Cuídenlos, porfis.”
Araceli took a moment longer to consider the surroundings, the grown-up man and his daughter, giving them the kind of cursory, self-assuring once-over a hurried mother might before leaving her children in a familiar day-care center. Then, remembering the police were on their way, she stepped toward the front door. “Adiós, niños,” she said, adding an unnecessary “Stay here,” as she stepped into the furnace of July daylight and down the Luján family steps, across the lawn and the patch of street where the lynch mob had gathered the night before, following a path that would lead her back to the bus stop, where she would begin a journey to some new place unknown to her.
Among the tribe of sheriff’s deputies, detectives, social workers, and assorted county officials gathered in the Torres-Thompson living room, it was the presence of the representative of Orange County Child Protective Services that Maureen found most threatening. Olivia Garza was 220 pounds of Mexican-American woman on a five-foot ten-inch frame whose labored breathing and loud exhales of exasperation filled the silences in the room. This rotund stranger had spent quite a lot of time inspecting the pictures on the bookshelf, and Maureen sensed that she was looking for clues in the faces she saw there, in the body language of her wedding pictures, the grooming of her boys in their school portraits.
Alone among the assembled members of the Endangered Child Emergency Intervention Team, Olivia Garza did not feel the need to hide her skepticism. She had a unique gift for untangling family dysfunction and had worked her way up from Case Worker I in the Santa Ana office with the files of 127 children whose parents and guardians were raccoon-eyed heroin addicts, pugilistic plumbers, wannabe street-corner kingpins, and shoplifting Chicana versions of Scarlett O’Hara waiting in Fullerton subdivisions for their tattooed heroes to slam the door in their faces. She was especially adept at spotting the custody-fight manipulations, the Halloween-scary fictions mothers and fathers made up about their exes, but had also rescued babies dying from malnutrition, plucking them from their cribs and from the sticky kitchen floors of Santa Ana apartments. She had cornered the thirteen-year-old sons of Newport Beach glitterati in Anaheim crack houses too: de todo un poco.
Olivia Garza did not believe a Mexican nanny would take off with her two charges in a kidnapping adventure with two boys the ages of the Torres-Thompson children. Or, rather, she had not yet been presented with any facts that would allow