The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,194

the skull of his poor friend Yorick, summoning news of a tragedy with their thumbs. A girl’s body was being pulled out of a suitcase in the lake, her stepmother had been arrested, and Ian Goller was speeding toward the scene. The newspeople were all wondering where they would be deployed next, because it was an all-hands-on-deck moment, but Araceli did not know this and assumed that they had simply grown bored with her, and she gave herself a moment to think about how fickle they were, how short their attention spans. None of them had been present to see Ruthy in her white nautical outfit destroy the prosecution in Department 181.

Araceli parted company with Ruthy and made her way to the parking lot, where Felipe was waiting for her. He’d been there for four hours, waiting, sitting in the cab of his truck with a pad of paper and a pencil, drawing, and he tossed the pad into the back of the cab as soon as she approached. They drove back to Santa Ana, and she told him about how Ruthy had taken apart the prosecution, and when they reached the Covarrubias home he walked her to the front door and said goodbye in a very chaste way, as if he were holding back other, deeper things he wanted to express but was too afraid to say. There was something that was supposed to happen next between them, and Araceli wondered if he would allow that thing to be.

“¿Mañana? At the same hour?” he asked.

“Yes. But only if you want to.”

“I do. I really do. I don’t have any work now—things are slowing down. But even if I did have to work, I would be here, porque es importante.”

“Hasta mañana entonces.”

“Hasta mañana.”

This is a formal, too-polite parting, filled with unspoken yearnings, like in the villages back home, Araceli thought, and she reached out for his hand. Their fingers lingered together long enough for her to inhale and exhale once, very slowly, and in that moment Araceli felt infinitely more electricity pass through her skin than when the A-list movie star had touched the same hand.

26

On the morning of Araceli’s second day in court the large crowds of protesters had disappeared from the front steps of the courthouse. In their place there was Janet Bryson, alone, scanning the street and the parking lot for the friends she had made yesterday, at first perplexed by their absence and then, finally, disappointed by their lack of resolve. “They said they would be here,” she said to herself aloud, and when the defendant in The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez appeared at the bottom of the steps with another Mexican, Janet Bryson barely noticed, because she was so upset with the unpunctuality and flakiness of her fellow Californians. What are they doing that’s so important that they can’t be here? What’s on their televisions that’s so captivating; what excuses about traffic will they concoct? Araceli walked up the steps with Felipe and didn’t see Janet Bryson. The shouting woman of the day before had dissolved into the background for Araceli, because at the bottom of the stairs Felipe had reached over to take her hand.

Felipe had wrapped his fingers around Araceli’s suddenly, instinctively, because he was swept up by the emotion of leading his new friend into a courthouse, which he thought of as a place where people went to disappear and never come back. They could take Araceli away and send her to one of those prisons in the desert, in faraway valleys where people trekked to visit incarcerated fathers and brothers on pathetic road trips where an ice cream for the kids at Burger King on the way back was supposed to make it all better. Felipe had suffered such trips to see his older brother—who was still in that prison, thirteen years later—and when he reached over to take Araceli’s hand, it was to comfort himself as much as her. He knew she was someone special and brilliant whose freedom and future were under threat. They walked up the stairs with palms joined for twenty-four steps and thirty-eight paces to the door with the metal detector, until he let go and allowed her to enter the court building alone, and said, “Te espero en el parking lot, just like yesterday.”

Inside the paneled courthouse, the proceedings resumed with Ruthy Bacalan rising to her feet and announcing, “We call Salomón Luján, Your Honor.” The Huntington Park city councilman entered the courtroom, in