The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,138
for coming.” He sensed, in an instant, that his attempt at expressing finality had fallen flat. In the time-swallowing silence that followed, he became aware that he, Maureen, and Samantha were on live television, because he could see their family portrait, animated and mirrorlike in miniature, on five monitors that rested at the feet of the reporters, each with the words LIVE: LAGUNA RANCHO ESTATES in various fonts. “So good night, everyone. And thank you.”
Maureen mouthed the words Thank you silently, with perhaps a bit too much wan affectation. They were just turning to leave when a voice boomed from behind the blinding lights.
“I have a police source that says you, quote, ‘abandoned’ your children. For four days. You just disappeared, apparently. Why?” Scott and Maureen were caught off guard by the questioner’s bluntness. The voice belonged to the veteran KFWB reporter, who had arrived at the scene just a few minutes earlier, after a gear-grinding race from the south county sheriff’s station, where an off-the-record conversation with the chief of detectives before Araceli’s release had tilted his view of the case toward the Mexican woman.
“Why did you leave them alone in this house for four days?” None of his colleagues were surprised by the radio reporter’s directness. His gadfly irritability with interview subjects was legendary, and included a live television dress down of the chief spokesman for the United States Army Central Command in Riyadh during the first Gulf War. “It’s a simple question. Did you abandon your children to this illegal immigrant?”
Maureen could not see the questioner, a stranger who was standing on her property and slandering her before a live television audience. He was yelling from behind the pack of cameras, beyond the white aura of light bursting behind the reporters’ heads. “That’s a lie!” she snapped. She had a moment to think, This is the most desperate thing I’ve done in my entire life, but failed to notice the surprised and mildly disgusted expression on the woman in the first row of reporters, which might have given her a clue to the response of her viewing audience. “How dare you!” After thirty-six hours without sleeping, her eyes were amnesiac droopy, but she could not accept a total stranger saying she was a bad mother. Her hair was flat and stringy, and she was wearing the same dress she had put on the morning she left the desert spa, a spaghetti-strap pullover whose patterned sunflowers now hung forlornly from her shoulders. Her fuming shout only made her look more haggard, poor and harried, as if she’d stepped off some trashy tabloid-reality stage. Later, Maureen would see this moment replayed on television and understand what she had done as an act of self defense, more desperate, even, than being nineteen years old and trying to escape from underneath the sweaty grip of a drunken college friend, the only time in her life she’d actually used her fists and teeth to inflict injury. “I did not neglect my children. That’s a vicious, vicious lie!”
“Yeah, we got it!” the reporter said sarcastically.
“Pete, gather yourself,” one of the other reporters said.
“C’mon. Tell us what happened.”
Maureen squinted and searched the silhouettes of the reporters one last time, and turned and walked away, Scott mumbling a thank-you at the microphones and then scurrying after her.
Araceli thought the cameras outside the sheriff’s station might follow her, but they did not. She walked quickly around the corner, through the station’s parking lot and its fleet of patrol cars, and into the empty center of Aliso Viejo, where the streets were free of pedestrians after four-thirty in the afternoon. The police had returned her money, and in her first moments of freedom she was momentarily fixated on that act of honesty. Transparencia, they called that in Mexico, an idea symbolized by the clear, large plastic bag in which her belongings had been gathered and catalogued. Now, that’s an example of el primer mundo if there ever was one. In Mexico, you paid cash for your freedom, and the police made sure you left custody with nothing but your wrinkled clothes and all the stains you acquired during a night or two in jail: it had happened to a couple of her alcoholic uncles. A bribe and it was all forgotten. If your car was stolen, you paid the police to get it back for you, which had happened to her father, in the comisaría in Nezahualcóyotl. Here at the sheriff’s station, by contrast, Araceli had been