and nationality, he saw the math of the multitudes that would one day drive him out of the profession altogether, because naïve Latin American immigrants like her were filling up his courtrooms. This was a painful realization for the son of an old-line Democratic family to make, and one he’d arrived at after years of observation, and despite his steadfastly liberal outlook on most other issues, from abortion rights to preserving the local wetlands. Ian Goller’s meta-knowledge of how foreign nationals clogged his superior court flowcharts, matrices, and spreadsheets, along with the victim-centered culture at the DA’s office, with its victim’s rights manifestos and procedures, tilted his view of the case decisively in favor of Maureen—despite her nervous and not-entirely-consistent recounting of events.
Ian Goller thought of this woman’s children, and about other children he had not been able to rescue, and he bowed his head in silent, private prayer.
Seeing the prosecutor lower his head and clasp his hands suddenly and without explanation only filled Maureen with more dread. She did not understand the source of the prosecutor’s intense stares, nor of the obvious irritation of the big woman who represented Child Protective Services. These are the people who take children away from parents. The arrival of the obese Mexican-American woman, especially, with her large nose and ruddy skin with a strange Indian-ebony mixing, and the plastic ID badge with the county seal, was nearly as frightening to her as the idea that Brandon and Keenan were wandering the city somewhere. Maureen entertained the prospect that the police might find her children, listen to Araceli’s true and entirely plausible story, and then decide to take her children away. Maybe I should tell them now what really happened: that it’s been four days, not two, and that Araceli had no idea we were leaving. How much trouble had she gotten her family into with that small lie? Maureen decided she would reveal the complexity of the situation, how she and Scott had played a part in its unfolding, and perhaps this small truth would bring her children to her quicker, and loosen the surly mask of the representative from Child Protective Services, the only other woman in the room besides Maureen, and the only one of the strangers who seemed to sense the hidden and juvenile chain of events that had brought them all here.
Maureen was about to launch into her confession when the phone rang.
Araceli walked through the neighborhood at a leisurely pace, past aging front-yard cacti and blooming rosebushes, and the unpainted gray skins of newly built cement homes with gabled roofs and dangling wires for light fixtures. She walked past pickup trucks with gold wings painted on their sides, three-t oned pickups with mismatching doors and hoods, and pickups with the color schemes of Mexican soccer teams, and then squeezed between two more pickups after jaywalking across California Street. Despite her deliberately unhurried pace, she decided it might be better not to walk in a straight line, but rather to make large zigzags through the grid of streets, especially now that a helicopter had appeared overhead.
The aircraft was chop-chopping like a lawn mower in the airspace above the Luján home, and it did not take much imagination to conclude that the police were at that moment engaged in the “rescue” of Brandon and Keenan. Araceli marveled at the fact that in this country police could emerge from the empty sky in the time it took to walk five blocks. The police would now return Brandon and Keenan to the Room of a Thousand Wonders and the two-dimensional superheroes of their bedsheets. The helicopter was loud enough to bring a scattering of people to their front doors, to look up and wonder who or what the machine was looking for.
Now the helicopter began to move, making circles concentric to the point where it had started, banking and turning in ever larger circles until its spinning blades and green body dipped over Araceli’s head, a giant mechanical dragonfly whose beating squeal announced crisis and urgency. Araceli began to walk faster as more people came out of their homes and stood on their lawns, craning their necks upward. An accelerating automobile drew their eyes back to the ground, a Huntington Park police patrol car zooming past with exaggerated masculine purpose. Araceli halted her sidewalk march and watched the flashing lights of the patrol car reach the end of the block, cross the intersection, and then accelerate into the next block with another