The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,150

boys here, and then, well, to find them missing.” She was aware that her voice had begun to tremble, that she sounded tenuous and frail, and as soon as she became aware of this, she realized that this was not necessarily a bad thing. “And then to find out they were all the way on the other side of the city.”

“And they’re okay?”

“Yes, yes. They’ve got a story to tell, a wild story, but it appears nothing happened to them.”

“A wild story?”

“Yes. It seems our employee, Araceli, took them on a train ride. For what purpose, God knows. They were among the homeless at some point, or so it seems.”

“The homeless?”

“Yes. Which is very disturbing, of course.”

“But they’re okay?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us a little about yourself.”

“My husband, he’s a programmer. I teach art at my sons’ school. I’m an art teacher there. Well, a volunteer art teacher, I should say, because they don’t pay me anything, but I do get to be close to the boys and their school.” Her voice had lost its quaver suddenly. “And we’ve lived in this beautiful house for five years now.”

“Now, explain to us exactly how it was that you found your children missing,” the newsman said, and then looked her directly in the eye and added in a markedly more friendly voice, as if he were an actor speaking an aside to the groundlings, “And please, feel relaxed. We can do this more than once if we need to.”

“We left on a little trip, my husband and I,” Maureen began, and she resisted the temptation to say separately, which would have kept her closer to the truth. “You know, when you have three kids, you need a break.” No, I shouldn’t have said that. I sound spoiled. “And our boys are bigger now, and they’re easier to take care of, so we thought we could leave them overnight with their nanny and just take Samantha with us. Because Samantha is so little, we thought we should take her with us.” She paused, and inhaled fully, because she was stepping closer to blatant untruth than she wanted to go, and she made the mistake of looking down at her floor and away from the camera. Quickly she recovered herself, and felt strangely aware and alert. “Then we came home. And it was so quiet. So incredibly and unnaturally quiet here.” Now that she had returned to a full, solid truth she could see its power and how it made the newsman’s eyes sharpen their focus with anticipation. “Something didn’t seem right. And we went from room to room and didn’t see the boys. And I thought, This is so strange. How can Araceli not be here in the house with the boys? I mean, she doesn’t have a car, or permission to take the boys anywhere. At first I thought, Oh, maybe she got bored and took them walking to the park or something. It sort of didn’t make sense, because she doesn’t have a car. But you know how it is: you have in your mind this little voice that tells you not to think the worst. And then it started to sink in that they were gone. And this house started to feel so empty. So horribly empty. And I started to think about where they might be, and what they might be suffering, and how I wasn’t there to protect them. And I just couldn’t stand it.” Yes, this was true: she loved her boys and had lost them for an afternoon, a night, and then a morning, and had spent that time living with the deepest fears a mother can know, an ache she felt in those parts of her body where her boys had once lived and kicked and slithered into the world.

Maureen was burying her subtle falsehoods in a larger truth unknown, until now, to the millions who had followed the story. Their Internet commentary would soon be peppered with sympathetic descriptions: “the screamer” was, in fact, a woman who sounded “quite reasonable.” She was an “educated and articulate” mother who “obviously loved her children,” had suffered “every parent’s nightmare,” and who was “clearly telling the truth” about discovering her sons missing.

“Did you ever authorize this woman, your employee, to take your children to East Los Angeles?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“So they were kidnapped?” the interviewer said, making it sound as much suggestion as question.

“Well, they were taken on … t his bizarre journey. They set off for L.A. And the hills