the call went directly to voice mail. Next he moved to the guesthouse, and gave the door to Araceli’s room three blows of his closed fist. “Araceli,” he shouted again, and then listened for movement in her room, but heard only the very distant whir of a leaf blower, and the taps of a hammer coming from another corner of the undulating hillside subdivision. “Araceli!” The absence of the Mexican employee in the middle of the week was more disturbing than all the other absences; it was a dramatic break in the routine that signaled, in Scott’s mind, that a kind of crisis, a deliberate flight, had played itself out here, as if word had come of an impending tsunami, a landslide, a fire. He stepped in a slow daze back through the interior of the house, wondering if he might discover a clue to his family’s whereabouts. In the bathroom he found a soap dragon on the mirror, pouncing. That’s weird. It suggested boredom, like the scratching a castaway might leave in his cave while waiting to be rescued. In the boys’ room the beds were made, there were no toys on the floor, and this orderliness also felt unnatural. He opened the closet doors and noticed a conspicuously empty space on the top shelf, and after a few moments remembered that the boys’ suitcases were usually stored there.
They’ve gone.
They’ve run away.
He felt his wife’s anger at work in the empty stillness. After twelve years, could this be the long-feared final break, the end of their family project? This is what happens when you strike and injure your wife. She leaves, of course. What else did I expect? A bland, numb, and lonely future loomed, the silence and emptiness of this child- and wife-free moment stretched out into a future of carpeted and sparsely furnished bachelor apartments. What is a father without his family? A lonely object of scorn or pity. He would be transported back to the directionless, passionless days of his adolescence and young adulthood, when algorithms were his only progeny. Daydreaming about his children, about the daily routines that would no longer be his pleasure to share, he unconsciously followed the same path his sons and Araceli had taken some hours earlier: out the door, into the cul-de-sac, and downhill toward the front gate, accompanied by the same canine protest. He drew the stares of the Mexican landscaping crew that had failed to take notice of Araceli nine lawns and gardens earlier, his distant eyes suggesting to them the sorrow of a wealthy man. You see: even a big house in a flawless neighborhood like this one cannot guarantee happiness. At the front gate, the pregnant attendant watched him approach and asked, “Sir, is there something I can help you …?” but he was soon past her, headed toward the bus stop and then into the meadow behind it, following a ghost trail through the grass that led down toward the Pacific.
We Californians drift to the sea. I will fall asleep on the beach and the rising tides will pick me up and carry me westward, like those Mexican fishermen who left their village chasing sharks, only to find themselves with cracked lips and sunburns weeks later on an island in the South Pacific.
After they had finished their meal, the four boys and Isabel’s daughter sat on the front stairs of the bungalow, with Araceli and Isabel behind them in the living room, Araceli making sure she didn’t allow more than thirty seconds or so to go by without glancing at Brandon and Keenan as she listened to Isabel recount in great detail her romance, pregnancies, and eventual falling-out with Wandering-Eye Man. Isabel had opened the inner door to catch an evening breeze after a day in which the sun had beat down on her little structure, and the children had gravitated to the steel security door, and had been drawn outside by the air molecules that squeezed through the pinholes. In between pauses in Isabel’s monologue, Araceli heard the occasional passing car on Broadway, a whistling firecracker exploding several blocks away, and a merengue from the building next door that was going on about lips and kisses, and more kisses, in a chorus of Bésame, bésame, bésame.
On the porch just past the open door, Tomás was telling the newly arrived visitors the story of the neighborhood he, Héctor, and María Antonieta lived in, as Tomás understood it from two years of observations made from the