sound of the roaring surf nearby, negotiating with Don Corleone in his study, forging blades of steel in a medieval foundry, and carrying his new weapons into battle against hordes of bearded Vikings on a Scandinavian beach.
They’ll probably put them in the Foster Care. Until they can find their parents. What else are they going to do?” That was Marisela’s considered opinion, rendered by phone, and it matched Araceli’s own assessment of what would happen if she called the police. “And of course they’ll start asking you questions. The police have to ask you questions.”
“That’s not good.”
“No, not for you.”
“And the boys?” Araceli asked.
“They’ll probably put them in the police car, take them to the station, and then to Foster Care.”
“What else could they do?”
Children who spent their nights under blankets decorated with moons and stars in the Room of a Thousand Wonders should not have to spend a single night in the Foster Care. Araceli imagined communal sleeping arrangements, bullying twelve-year-old proto-psychopaths, and cold macaroni and cheese without salt. Children raised in the recirculated air and steady temperatures of the Paseo Linda Bonita would not last long in the drafty warehouses of Foster Care. She imagined the boys cuddling under unlaundered blankets, and suffering the cruel admonitions of caretakers who did not realize how special and smart they were, how they read books about history, how they had learned to identify Orion and Gemini, quartzite and silica, from the library in the Room of a Thousand Wonders. Children with the sensitive intelligence of these boys—qualities their mother did not sufficiently appreciate, because she saw only their boisterous and disorderly masculinity—should not and could not be exposed to the caprices of Foster Care.
Araceli did not want to be responsible for that loss of innocence. There was a finite amount of innocence in the world and it should be preserved: like Arctic wilderness and elephant tusks, it was a precious creation of nature. And what would the police say or do to her? Probably they would report her to the immigration agents in the blue Wind-breakers, the ICE people—it was difficult to imagine that a Mexican woman without a green card could call the police and present them with two unaccompanied and guardianless American children without herself being drawn into a web that would eventually lead to her deportation.
Perhaps she was getting ahead of herself. If by Monday morning neither Scott nor Maureen had returned, she would call Scott’s office and demand that her boss return home immediately.
Araceli was in a deep sleep on the floor in the Room of a Thousand Wonders, dreaming that she was walking through the corridors of her art school in Mexico City, which did not resemble her art school at all, but rather a factory in a desolate corner of an American city, when she was awakened by a series of screams.
“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”
She sat up, startled, and in the yellow glow of the night-l ight saw Keenan yelling at the wall next to his bed.
“Keenan, qué te pasa?”
“Mommy!”
“Keenan. ¡Despiértate! You’re having a night mirror!”
“Mommy!”
“It’s just a night mirror!” Araceli insisted, and with that Keenan stopped, turned, and searched for his Mexican caretaker. To his young eyes his room had become a small submarine in a deep ocean of darkness, a bubble of light and security in a frightening world without his mother and father. The captain of this craft was the Mexican woman with the wide face now looking up at him from the door to the hallway with startled and irritated eyes.
“What?” Keenan asked in a high, perplexed voice suddenly stripped of his fear.
“You said he’s having a what?” Brandon said from the perch of his bunk above Keenan.
“A night mirror.”
“What?”
“A night mirror,” Araceli repeated. “You know, when you see ugly things when you’re sleeping.”
After a pause to digest her faulty pronunciation, Brandon said in a scholarly voice, “No, in English we say nightmare.”
“Pues, una pesadilla entonces,” Araceli said angrily. “Nightmare,” like many other expressions with Old English origins, was a word she would never be able to wrap her tongue around, especially since it bore no resemblance to the Spanish equivalent.
“Yeah, a pesadilla is what you say in Spanish,” Brandon said diplomatically. With that he and his brother put their heads back on their pillows, and both boys thought that “night mirror” was in many ways a more apt description than “nightmare”: Keenan looked at the wall and thought of it as a reflection of his motherless room and a window into