The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,26
toys, but in Araceli’s severe disposition there was an air of ample responsibility, the sense that she wouldn’t panic in an emergency. Maureen looked around the park and saw a pay phone: she gave her maid a handful of quarters. “You should really get a cell phone,” she said, provoking no response from Araceli. “I’ll be at home with Samantha. Call me if there’s a problem. I can be here in fifteen minutes.”
Araceli tugged at her uniform, wishing she’d had a chance to change. She had been plucked by Maureen from the laundry room as she folded a stack of el señor Scott’s boxer shorts and in the chaotic evacuation of the boys from the home she had carried that underwear into the dining room and left it on the table, and it annoyed her to think it would still be there when she got back.
When the car turned a corner and disappeared, the boys and Araceli shared a few moments of contemplative silence. She’s really gone, Brandon thought, our mother left us here on the sidewalk. Even though it had been announced with that angry speech, his mother’s absence felt stark and sudden, and for a moment he imagined that he had been dumped into the plot of a melodramatic novel, like the parentless hero of a multivolume series of books he recently finished reading, the adventures of an adolescent boy unwittingly thrust into an adult world of crime and magic. He was alone out here in public, without even Guadalupe to take care of him. Araceli did not yet register in Brandon’s mind as a protective force, and he quickly scanned the park like a young warrior about to enter a dark and threatening forest. He imagined a “strike force” suddenly descending on the park, a hooded army of armed underworld types, the machine-gun-toting villains in one of the books he was reading.
“Do you think the Russian mafia would ever come to Orange County?” he asked his brother.
“What?”
Keenan believed that his big brother read entirely too much and knew him to be an incessant confabulator, prone to confusing and scaring his younger brother with fantastic thoughts. At their very expensive private school, Brandon’s big imagination caused him to run afoul of the otherwise laid-back teachers there, primarily because he had freaked out many of the girls with new and ever more elaborate versions of the Bloody Mary myth, causing them to avoid the girls’ bathroom, with a handful of peeing-in-the-hallway incidents the result.
“You know,” Brandon insisted. “Like in Artemis Fowl.”
“Nah,” Keenan said. “It’s too sunny here for the Russian mafia.”
Brandon was still only eleven years old, and the morbid and fantastic imagery from his middle-reader novels did not linger in his mind’s eye for long; in less than a minute he was running down the grass with his brother chasing after him, the reasons for their living room fight forgotten. Araceli followed them down the slope of the park toward the rubber play mat and swings and took a seat on a bench facing the ocean. Brandon watched her as she looked off in the distance at a lone surfer tossing himself into the waves, the charcoal skin of his wet suit swallowed up by water the color of the backwash in her mop bucket. Araceli was a major planet in Brandon’s universe, and he studied her often as she shuffled around the Paseo Linda Bonita house. Sometimes he wondered if she was angry at him, if he had done something to upset her, because why else would someone be so quiet in his presence for so long? But after careful consideration of his actions—he was, in his own estimation, despite a few flaws, a “good boy”—Brandon arrived at the conclusion that Araceli was just lonely. And when he thought about her loneliness, he concluded that she should read more, because anyone who read was never alone. In books there were limitless worlds, there was truth, sometimes brutal and ugly, and sometimes happy and soothing.
Brandon considered giving her the book he had managed to bring with him, but then he thought better of this, and instead left it on a bench and joined his little brother on the plastic body of the play structure and its short hanging bridge, and began to playact with battle sounds formed by trilling tongues and popping cheeks. Araceli listened to them and slunk down on the bench, looking up at the gray sky and wondering why it was that here along the