The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,64

Harris-Hayasaki’s apartment building—that he failed to notice the subtle verbal clue that perhaps not everything was right in his home.

“I’m taking a little break from being home.”

“A vacation?” Keenan asked.

“Yeah, like a vacation.”

Keenan was less interested in this conversation than the one he had just had with his mother. Hearing their two voices within minutes of each other had returned to him a sense of normality, and he wanted to get back to his game, and also start eating the spaghetti and meatballs on the counter.

“How’s Mommy doing?”

“She says she’s really angry at you.”

His wife had spent the day filling his sons’ ears with soliloquies about what a horrible man he was, the completely predictable sequel to the pratfalls and crashes of the night before.

“I know she’s angry at me,” Scott said, the words coming out with a sad sense of finality. In an instant, his mood changed. How dare she try to turn the children against me. “I’m angry at her too,” he said. He imagined his wife hovering nearby, and that she might take the phone away from Keenan and start to harass him about where he was, so he said his goodbyes quickly, telling his son to listen to what his mother told him to do.

“Okay, Dad,” Keenan said, even though his mother wasn’t there, because like his father, he was in a hurry to get off the phone too.

11

I’m scared. Araceli, can you sleep with us?”

Keenan asked this with the comforter pulled up to his chin, in bed after forty-five minutes of crying and confusion Araceli would not soon forget. It seemed to Araceli that getting the boys into their room with their teeth brushed and under the covers, in her best approximation of what their mother would have done, was a Herculean task in itself, and that asking her to throw herself on the floor next to them was asking one thing too many. She needed a moment alone, to step back and think what to do next. The boys had begun to panic an hour or so after dusk, when the windows turned into black planes broadcasting images of parentless rooms. “Where’s Mommy?” “Where’s Dad?” They had peppered her with these questions and had grown increasingly insistent on receiving some answer other than “I don’t know,” “Soon,” or the Spanish “Ya mero.” Araceli told them they had to go to bed, and this had set off a round of silent tears from Brandon, and a strange, high-pitched grunt-growl from Keenan. They were going to bed with neither their mother nor their father in the home, with only the surly Mexican maid in the house, and suddenly they felt as lost as two boys separated from their parents on a busy city street. Brushing their teeth and changing into pajamas had calmed them to the point that they could wipe the tears from their faces; the nightly routines their mother had inculcated in them became, for a moment, a soothing substitute for her presence.

“Will you sleep with us, please?” Keenan repeated.

Araceli desperately wanted to return to her room, but of course that wasn’t possible: if she retired to her casita in the back she would be leaving the children alone in the house.

You shouldn’t just give in to children. You shouldn’t just give them anything they ask for.

In Araceli’s family home in Nezahualcóyotl children were obedient, quiet, and nondemanding: girls, especially, were expected to occupy quiet, scrubbed spaces that adults were free to ignore. Her own childhood equivalent to the bedtime routine in the Room of a Thousand Wonders took place in the spare room of tile floors she shared with her sister, floors both sisters had been required to mop from the age of ten onward. At bedtime the only good night was a quick look-in from their mother, a check of their obedience. They feared their mother’s disapproval and the idea that they might delay her from that final reward of her workday: the climb to the roof, where pennants of denim and polyester caught the breeze and, in their cool evening stiffness, announced, En esta casa, yo mando: In this house, I am love, a river of order and sustenance that flows steady in all seasons.

“I won’t sleep here next to you, no,” Araceli said. “But I will sleep close. Over here, in the hallway. Okay?”

“In the hallway?”

“Yes. Aquí.”

She opened the door to their room and in a few moments she had taken two comforters from one of Maureen’s closets and tossed