The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

14




Their bus headed eastward, deeper into the modern industrial heart of the metropolis, over the north-south thoroughfares and railroad tracks that carried cargo and commerce, into districts of barbed wire and sidewalks blooming with fist-sized weeds, past stainless-steel saltwater tanks excreting briny crystals, past industrial parking lots with shrubbery baked amber by drought and neglect, past storage lots filled with stacked PVC pipes, past stunted tree saplings and buildings marked CHOY’S IMPORT and VERNON GRAPHIC SERVICES and COMAK TRADING, and through one intersection where a single tractor-trailer loomed and groaned and waited. The setting triggered no new reveries in Brandon’s overactive imagination, because he was too sleepy to think, having stayed up late into the night thinking about Tomás and his stories about the crossroads on Thirty-ninth Street, and then being forced to get up early by Araceli for the departure to their next destination. They were headed for a park where it was said his grandfather might live.

“I don’t know where,” Araceli said. “But I know who to ask.” She told them about her friend Marisela, and the uncle of hers by marriage who lived in Huntington Park, su tío político, a man said to occupy an orderly American suburban house in a neighborhood that was also the one el abuelo had moved to, according to Mr. Washington back on Thirty-ninth Street.

“This uncle of my friend can help us,” she said.

“You have a friend?” Keenan asked, and wasn’t surprised when Araceli didn’t answer.

Already, it seemed to Araceli, things were going more smoothly than she expected, the bus was advancing quickly through streets with little resistance from the usual weekday morning traffic. For a moment Araceli was struck by the emptiness, and the sense that she might be missing a key piece of information that explained this strangely quiet Tuesday.

They switched lines on California Street and headed southward, now inside a bus in which they were the only passengers, alone with the driver’s unauthorized personal radio. “That was a four-point-eight, centered in Barstow,” the radio declared. “L.A. County Fire Chief Bill Abrams asks that we all use fireworks safely … There’s a red-flag warning in the canyons of Los Angeles and Orange counties, which means acute fire danger … It’s clear sailing on the freeways for all you holiday travelers …” The bus entered a neighborhood of cream-colored mini Mission cottages with arched doorways, and unadorned apartment buildings that resembled Monopoly hotels, the skyline behind them dominated by the steel monsters of twin power trunk lines, and a half-dozen parallel strings that drew the boys’ gazes upward to watch their arcs descend and rise from one tower to the next.

“We’re following the electricity,” Keenan said.

“Yeah,” Brandon said. “We’re like electrons or something.”

They reached their final stop and moved to the door at the front of the bus, Araceli taking a moment to ask the mustachioed driver, who looked Mexican, “¿Qué se hizo toda la gente?”

“Es el Fourth of July. ¿No sabías?” the driver said, the English coming out as harsh as a native’s, the Spanish flat and unused. “Wake up, girl. Haven’t you been listening? It’s a holiday!”


Maureen rolled her car out of the spa at the early but sane hour of eight-fifteen in the morning. She arrived at Paseo Linda Bonita without stopping three hours and twenty-six minutes later, according to the onboard computer in her automobile. By then, the sun was noon-high and July-strong, and for some reason her husband’s automobile was baking in the driveway instead of the garage, an incongruity that nevertheless lifted the anxiety that had overtaken Maureen the night before. Scott is here. She opened the garage door, parked her car, and took pleasure in the feeling of having returned to take charge of the home she had built. With her daughter on her arm, Maureen walked purposefully to the door that led from the garage to the kitchen, stepping inside with a shout of “I’m home!” Her eyes settled on the familiar and spotless kitchen, each square of clean tile, each gleaming plane of marble a musical note of order. “I’m home!” Maureen shouted again, putting a little rasp into it this time. The sound echoed through the home without an answer, and for a second or two Maureen concluded this must be a silence of resentment, and that her sons and husband would soon emerge from one of the rooms glowering at her because she had left them for four days.


They debarked from the bus onto a wide avenue that seemed very new to Brandon and very old at the same time. A line of storefronts rose over the street, each edifice a bold, rectangular robot emblazoned with the names of commercial concerns: SOMBREROS EL CHARRO, KID’S LOVE, SPRINT MOBILE. The multitudes that filled this shopping district on most days were absent, and in the soft light of that holiday morning there was only an eight-foot-tall teenage girl with braces and a billowing white dress to greet Araceli and her charges. She was frozen giddily in two dimensions behind a curtain of black steel bars, and when Brandon peeked into her darkened storefront prison at the merchandise that surrounded her, he saw glittering, child-sized crowns and pictures of chariot limousines. This was a place, he concluded, where girls came to be transformed, by dollar and by ritual, into princesses. But Brandon didn’t like princess stories and his attention quickly returned to the street and to his brother and Araceli, who were both turning their heads north and south and back again.

“Which way do we go?” Keenan said.

“Tengo que preguntar,” Araceli said, but there was no one around to ask, and they began to walk down the sidewalk, past parking meters and empty diagonal parking spaces, underneath the fluted tower of a shuttered Deco movie palace, Keenan craning his head to admire the melting green skin of a nonfunctioning bronze clock affixed to the top. After half a block, they found one store with an open door and lights on behind the display windows.

“Not open,” said the Korean woman inside. She was kneeling on the floor with a clipboard, surrounded by boxes and racks of rayon blouses. “Cerrado.”

“I am not looking for clothes,” Araceli said. “I am looking for a street.” She showed the woman a slip of paper with the address Marisela had given her.

Myung Lee rose to her feet, took the address, and then sized up the child-accompanied woman who had given it to her. In the four months since opening her business, every day seemed to bring another oddity, another riddle, like this Mexican woman and her handsome children. Myung Lee was a native of Seoul, single, thirty-eight years old, and fluent in the language of local fashions: rayon with tropical flowers and leopard prints and bold décolletages, free-flowing polyesters to drape over bodies of any shape or size. “Maybe I know this street,” she said. Geography was easy: what she didn’t understand was the stealthy methodology of the shoplifters, or the pricing logic of the wholesalers in the garment-factory district, or why her uncle would lend her $40,000 to open a business, while expecting her to fail. This Fourth of July morning brought more lonely hours of inventory, and more obsessive daydreaming about her uncle and his haughty California millionaire confidence and his thin teenage daughter with her size-two dresses and their mansion in that Asian Beverly Hills called Bradbury. The longer Myung remembered her debt to her skeptical samchon, the more she hated rayon and tropical flowers and leopard patterns. Oddly, however, she still liked being in the presence of American women, or Mexican women, or whatever most of her clients were, and as she moved to the door to show Araceli which way to go, she felt the irritation on her face slipping into the pleasantness that was always good retail practice.

“This is over there,” Myung Lee said, pointing to the east. “Not far. Two blocks.” She placed a hand on Keenan’s shoulder and said, “Your boys are very nice,” leaving Araceli too stunned to offer any clarification. Their father must be very fair, Myung Lee thought, and she imagined this missing white partner as the strangers walked away down Pacific Boulevard. I am a single woman, yes, but I haven’t allowed a man to leave me with two boys to feed and clothe. No.

“She thought you were our mother,” Keenan said. “That was weird.”

“Estaba muy confundida,” Araceli said, and they headed away from empty Pacific Boulevard into a neighborhood of houses with sandpaper skins painted blue-violet and carnation-pink, with little patches of stiff crabgrass enclosed behind painted brick pillars and iron bars welded in feather and fan patterns. A canopy of intersecting utility wires drew Brandon’s eye upward again, while Keenan looked across the street and saw a man leaning against a fence with his hips thrust out in the style of Latin American campesinos, a pose that reminded Keenan of the handful of childhood photographs he’d seen of his grandfather. “Maybe this is where Grandpa John lives,” Keenan said.

“I guess,” Brandon said. “It’s not as poor as Los Angeles.”

They advanced two blocks more and the street name still did not materialize on any of the signs, and Araceli stopped again, and the rolling wheels of the suitcases ceased their noise, and for a moment she and her charges stood in an unexpectedly deep silence. The thoroughfares and the freeways that surrounded the neighborhood were empty in those first hours of a holiday morning, no trucks or forklifts were at work in the nearby industrial districts, and in the absence of the usual noise there was a natural stillness that seemed somehow unnatural. Every Huntington Park resident who was up and about that morning noticed the quiet too; it hit them first through the windows left open on a summer night, and later when they stepped outside. They heard the calls of the birds for the first time in months, the keek-keek of highflying, black-necked stilts heading for the nearby Los Angeles River, the three-note carols of American robins, and the Morse-code tapping of woodpeckers hunting for acorns stored inside the utility poles. As their ears adjusted to the quiet, they heard fainter sounds still: the whistling of air through the wings of the mourning doves, and the creak and rustle of tree branches moved by the weak flow of the July wind. They were small-t own sounds, country sounds, and they had the effect of making those who heard them more aware of the charms of their time and place, and of all that was comforting and homey in the cluttered workingman’s paradise that Huntington Park wanted to be.

The quiet caused Victorino Alamillo, the only man awake and outdoors on his block, to pause in the unfurling of his American flag, contemplating for a moment his 1972 Chevy truck and camper shell in repose in the driveway, until his eye was drawn skyward by the sight of a crow bullet-gliding one hundred feet in the air. After climbing to the top of his ladder, he stopped again, flag in hand, because from that perch the spread of the quiet across the neighborhood was all the more apparent. He could scan the roofs of his neighbors’ houses, see their satellite dishes and kitchen vents and the nearby district of salvage shops, and hear a few distant but sharp sounds: the fee-bee? fee-bee? question posed by a black phoebe, and then, most improbably, the braying of an invisible goat. ¿Un chivo?

Suddenly, the spell was broken by a clack-clack coming from the sidewalk.

“Excuse me,” Araceli said. “Excuse! Me!”

Araceli and her charges had stopped at their first encounter with a person who seemed capable of helping them—a man whose flag seemed to imbue him with authority. They had been watching him for several seconds, beginning with his climb up the ladder, flag in hand, looking to Brandon and Keenan like a man claiming a piece of real estate for his country at the end of a battle.

Victorino Alamillo looked down at Araceli, and hearing her marked accent answered, “Espérate allí un momentito.” Seeing this lost trio, obviously in flight from some familial mash-up, brought him fully back to the real Huntington Park, reminding him of the transient, unsettled place this really was. Suddenly, the flag and the hammer he was holding both fell from his hand.

“I think the star means he has a kid who’s in the war,” Brandon said, pointing to a rectangle with a single blue star that was affixed mysteriously to the inside of the home’s living room window.

“Correct,” Victorino said, as he descended to retrieve the flag. “My son in is Kandahar. En Afghani stan. He is a medic.” He pronounced this last word in a way that conveyed pacifist fatherly pride.

“That’s cool,” Keenan said.

“Estamos buscando esta calle,” Araceli said. “La calle Rugby.”

“Está del otro lado de Pacific,” Victorino said, pointing westward. “Regrésate por allá”

“¿Está seguro?” Araceli asked, rather impertinently. “Porque una coreana nos dijo que era por aquí.”

“Sí, señorita,” Victorino said. Switching to the authoritative sound of English, he added, “I’ve lived here fifteen years. It’s that way.”

Araceli grave a curt “Gracias” and without further ceremony headed west, with Brandon and Keenan trailing after. They had entered a landscape of very old American dreams. Huntington Park was a collection of truck farms subdivided a century ago into a grid of homes, and inhabited ever since by men and women lured in by affordable mortgages, by a shared belief in the value of square footage in a U.S. city, the nearby factories, warehouses, and freight trains be damned. For the first third of its history Huntington Park had been homesteaded by English-speakers with Oklahoma and Iowa and other flat American places in their pasts, and for the next third of its history those proud but paranoid people had fought to keep various dark-skinned others out, until finally evacuating in favor of those who dominated Huntington Park in the most recent third of its history: transplants from South Texas, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and East Los Angeles, and other places filled with Spanish-surnamed people. All these home owners, in all these epochs, came and found comfort in the perpendicular streets, in the surveyor’s patient construction of uniformity and efficient use of space, in the stop signals, and in the city workers who cleaned the parks. A red-and-white-striped flag and its blue field with white stars had long been a symbol of that nurturing and protective order, and it remained so for many in Huntington Park, even those who still preferred the colors of other flags and the other kinds of order those banners represented.

With the clack-clack of Keenan’s suitcase resuming behind him, Victorino Alamillo took his Stars and Stripes and began to hammer, unaware that the sounds were rousing his neighbor Jack Salazar from his bed, causing him to pull back a curtain. Alamillo is putting up his flag. Finally! He waits until the actual Fourth! Jack Salazar also had a blue star in the window, and a son in Ramadi, Iraq, and two American flags that hung from the eaves 365 days a year. He noted that with the addition of Alamillo’s flag there were now three houses on the block that were bold enough to show their patriotism on Independence Day—a whole three!—though one of those belonged to a Pakistani family, and they almost didn’t count in Salazar’s right-leaning, fourth-generation Mexican-American opinion. The Pakistani family’s flag was plastic, and Salazar sensed they’d put it up so he would stop looking at them suspiciously, or so that he would come over and chat with them as if they were normal Americans, though the truth was that the Pakistani family put up that flag because their daughter Nadia had purchased it during an immigration-rights march in downtown Los Angeles. Nadia Bashir, a twenty-year-old UCLA biochemistry undergrad, had decided that hanging it over the front door would make for a personal and somewhat ironic statement about her family’s ongoing state of cultural evolution. On the day she put up the flag, she remembered her uncle Faisal and his tales of his first, carefree travels through middle Canada and middle America in a Volkswagen Beetle in the 1980s, selling bongs from the trunk. The U.S., he liked to say, was still the feel-good country he had known then.

“There are no clans here,” he’d say. “That is why the Americans prosper. They don’t have these silly, inbred resentments like we do. We are too clannish. It’s always held us back.”

To which Nadia very often answered, in the sassy and slightly nasal tones of a Los Angeles accent that sounded charmingly provincial to her Pakistani-born, London-educated uncle, “No clans? Gimme a break! Even in this tiny city, all we have is clans!” In Huntington Park there was a large Spanish-speaking Mexican clan, and the shrinking but still influential Mexican-American clan that never spoke Spanish, and a small clan of people who still called themselves white, and the scattered and reserved Koreans and Chinese, and now a very quickly growing Muslim clan, which was the newest in this part of the metropolis and thus the most feared and misunderstood by all the others. Add to this the warring clans of the street gangs with their baroque entanglements, and the caustic comedy delivered by the two political clans viciously facing off every other Tuesday at the meetings of the City Council, and it all looked as messy as anything on the subcontinent. There was an undercurrent of psychic violence to Huntington Park, Nadia thought, alive underneath a façade of coexistence that was as fragile as the quiet that had miraculously enveloped the neighborhood this morning, interrupted only by the clack-clack of three outsiders walking past her bedroom window.

“Maybe we should show someone the picture of our grandpa, to see if he lives around here,” Keenan said.

The same idea had occurred to Araceli, until she remembered how ancient the photograph was—she would only make a fool of herself. This neighborhood they were in now, Araceli noted, was clearly newer than the one that housed the shack where el abuelo Torres had lived a half century ago, and most of the people she could see stirring behind screen doors and windows were much younger than he was. They seemed unabashedly Mexican to her, despite the occasional U.S. flag. Araceli sensed they were, like her, relatively recent beneficiaries of the American cash boom, that they were housekeepers and laborers just a decade or so ahead of her in filling their dollar-bill piggy banks. No, they would not know John, Johnny, or Juan Torres, so she wouldn’t waste any energy asking. Instead, she would find Marisela’s uncle and ask him to tap into those rivers of American information that were still a bit of a mystery to Araceli, the lists of names and numbers that smart fingers could make appear on computer screens, and he would make a phone call, and liberate her from her charges and this journey.

Huntington Park more fully awakened in the half hour it took Araceli and the boys to return to Pacific Avenue and cross to the other side, into a neighborhood where they were greeted by the creaking springs of two sets of garage doors opening. Freshly showered patriarchs began to retrieve oil-barrel grills, lawn chairs, and other Fourth of July accoutrements, while behind kitchen curtains stoves sizzled with cholesterol-spiking breakfasts. Brandon felt an order in these sounds and their growing volume, the power of routines repeated behind fences and inside homes, while Keenan grew more convinced they were closer to his grandfather, because these were noises he made with his clumsy, old-man hands. As the day progressed further the neighborhood noises would grow louder and more varied: they would become electric and gas-powered, amplified and transmitted far beyond property lines, with pirated MP3 melodies and power-tool percussion jams ruining the quiet inside next-door living rooms where old men were trying to read, goddamnit, to bedrooms a block away where adolescents were trying to sleep past noon. The growing holiday din reminded every resident of the existence of their many neighbors and all their irritating habits, of their penchant to shout for Mom and their poorly maintained toilets, their excessive hair-drying, and how they badgered their sons and daughters and disrespected their parents. With each hour the noise grew, and it grated, serving as further proof, if any were needed, of the central, inescapable fact that subtracted from Huntington Park’s pleasantness: the existence of too many people, too close to one another, in too little space.

The residents of Huntington Park were going to try to forget these many irritations during a Fourth of July they planned to fill with hamburgers and carne preparada with cilantro, and mesquite charcoal and the not-necessarily-patriotic acts of crabgrass-lounging and beer-can-lifting. It was a time of down-market plenty in Huntington Park, thanks to second mortgages and their illusory windfalls, and the extra cash on hand from copious overtime working at ports and railyards and warehouses unloading goods from an Industrial Revolution taking place on the other side of the Pacific. Les va bien, Araceli observed, because the Americans still have plenty of money to spend on the things that people like me and these people can do for them. Araceli did not know, however, that the flow of containers marked with Asian logograms had begun to slow, imperceptibly, and that the burden of mortgages here had begun to grow, as it had elsewhere, leaving the working people of Huntington Park worried about all the purchased pleasures of second cars and debt incurred when garages were converted to playrooms, and thus a bit relieved, relaxed, and decompressed by the prospect of enjoying a free pleasure this evening. For the Fourth of July there would be no tickets to buy, no parking to pay for, no lines to form, but simply the joy of resting and having the show brought to them when the inky curtain of the post-sunset sky fell over the horizon. At that hour they would turn their lawn chairs and their necks toward Salt Lake Park and the municipal fireworks show, and all the neighborhoods across the city grid would be joined together by the light and the explosions of Chinese powder, louder than any other noise on that noisy day. They were sounds of simulated battle meant to unite the respectfully quiet families of Huntington Park and their dysfunctionally loud neighbors in place and purpose, reminding them all of the name of the sovereign land upon which they were standing: Los Estados Unidos de América, the USA. It was a land held together by paychecks with tax deductions and standardized forms available in just about any language, and police cruisers that sometimes stopped late at night at the homes of the most serious violators of aural tranquillity, to tell them to keep it down, if you would, please. And it was home to a suburb where two boys wandered with their caretaker, scanning the doors and windows for a grandfather who had never lived there.


The rest of the home was as perfect as the kitchen. Maureen found no truant dishes wandering about the house, no bowls filled with cereal and curdling milk in the living room. No dirty clothes marred the hallways, none of the small Danish building blocks were tossed about, the windows were free of smudges. In Araceli’s orderliness Maureen sensed an explanation for the emptiness. They’ve gone off to do something, it seems, and Scott has taken Araceli with him, which would be the sensible thing to do, and Araceli cleaned before they left, because Araceli is like me and cannot step away from a disorderly home. But what about Scott’s car? Had they left on foot, on an expedition to the park, almost a mile away? Or a picnic in the meadows?

Maureen decided she would wait for them to return, and made lunch for her daughter, leaving the pan and dirty dishes in the sink for Araceli to clean. When they had finished, she said: “Come on, Sam, let’s go find your brothers … and your father.” They were probably walking back from the park. “Let’s go rescue them, because that’s a long walk uphill. Wonder if poor Araceli can make it.”

Five minutes later Maureen and Samantha had pulled up to the same park where she had deposited Araceli and the boys in a fit of pique two weeks earlier, but it was empty, all the maids who usually gathered there absent because it was the Fourth of July. She accelerated away quickly, drove back toward the Estates, and stopped at the bus stop, and from the front seat of the car she looked into the knee-high grass of the meadow, which had been bleached golden-green by the sun, remembering that she actually picnicked there with Scott and the boys a few years back, to take in the unobstructed view of the ocean. They would have returned, but for the cow chips that littered the field and ruined the taste of her sandwiches and of the Pinot Noir. Now she searched the shifting surface of the windblown grass for her husband, or her children, or the tall, thick shape of her Mexican employee.

“Where are they, Samantha?”

Wherever they are, they have to pass by here. On foot, or in a car, they have to enter through this gate. She had turned off the engine, wondering how long she would have to wait, when she saw a figure emerge on the horizon, a man walking where the meadow dropped steeply, struggling to keep his footing, as if working against an unseen tide.


Araceli unlatched the front gate, followed a straight path through a crabgrass lawn, climbed up to a porch, and rang the doorbell. Her long journey to reach this address was rewarded, delightfully, by the sudden appearance at the door of a ruggedly handsome man in his forties who greeted her with a chivalrous “Buenos días” and the same pencil-thin mustache and jaunty smile that had broken hearts when he left Mexico City two decades earlier. Salomón Luján was expecting Araceli and her charges, because an hour earlier he had half listened to his niece’s explanation of the Torres-Thompson family saga, while simultaneously watching two work crews install a canopy tent and trampoline in his backyard for the big Luján family Fourth of July fiesta.

Now Mr. Luján stood at his door and heard Araceli tell the story of the absent parents herself. “Estás haciendo lo que debes hacer, y tus jefes te lo van a agradecer,” he said. Once a common laborer, Salomón Luján believed that being loyal to your gringo employers was the secret to mexicano success on this side of the border, his barrel-chested exertions on behalf of various warehouse owners and construction contractors having lifted him through many layers of North American achievement, including the purchase of this home, his triumphant entry into the water-heater business, and his oath-taking as an American citizen and his recent election to the Huntington Park City Council. He sized up Araceli and decided she too was destined for something better, and, judging from the free-flowing hair styles and leather-sandaled feet of her charges, she was the one who kept order in the hippie household where she worked.

“Stay with us today and tonight if you like, and tomorrow I will find the grandfather,” he said, switching to English for the benefit of the two boys. “Today is impossible, because it’s the Fourth of July and all the city offices are closed. But first thing in the morning I’ll call the city clerk and check voter registration and we’ll find him. For the moment, come to the backyard. Our party is just getting started.”

He led Araceli and the boys through his living room, which was decorated in a style Salomon’s smart-aleck Ivy League daughter called “Zacatecas Soap Opera Chic,” with an oil painting of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on one wall. The Knight-Errant of La Mancha stood for the idea that the Lujáns were descended from a place of nobility and history, where men stood tall on horses and looked proudly over the dry, yellow hills of their patrimony. Don Quixote shared the living room with assorted horseshoes, mounted vintage revolvers, and a sofa-bench and love seat with fragile, wood-carved legs and cream velvet cushions embroidered with gold swirls, both pieces shipped in from “the best kitschy furniture maker in Durango,” as his daughter put it. Scattered among these symbols of his romantic outlook were family pictures, including one portrait of the aforementioned daughter in cap and gown, and another of the family patriarch raising a clasped hand on election night with the mayor of Huntington Park. Brandon and Keenan looked at that picture a second or two without knowing what its precise meaning might be, though Brandon surmised from both the image and the air of steadiness and authority of Mr. Luján that he had recently been named president of Huntington Park.

They moved to the backyard, where six rented white tables had been arranged under the mustard-colored light that seeped through the tarpaulin skin of the tent. Salomón led Araceli and the boys past a cluster of half-awake young people gathered at the tables, to the edge of the backyard, where two men with shovels were standing and conversing around a mound of beige dirt that seemed to have bubbled up from the lawn.

“We’re having carnitas, the way they do it in the ranchos,” Salomón told the boys. “There’s a pig buried in there.”

“Underground?” Brandon asked.

“Yeah, we got hot rocks down there. And the pig, wrapped in foil, cooking. We let it cook for some hours. When it finish, you have very juicy meat. Sabrosísima.”

Brandon gave the mound a look of innocent puzzlement, causing Mr. Luján and the two sweaty, stubbly-faced men with the shovels to grin: he was, in fact, deeply troubled by the idea that combustion was taking place in the unseen hollows beneath his feet. “I thought fire needed oxygen to burn,” he said, but Mr. Luján had turned his attention elsewhere and did not answer, and his two cousins with the shovels didn’t speak English well enough to explain the simple physics of their carnitas barbecue. After thinking about it for a few seconds, Brandon came to the disturbing conclusion that he was standing over a pit of buried flames, as in the underworlds often depicted in the books he read: souls trapped in subterranean passages, evildoers building infernal machines in caves. He considered, for a moment, running away, until Mr. Luján returned and put his arm on his shoulder.

“Let me introduce you to the people here,” he said to the boys. And then he turned to Araceli and said in collegial Spanish, “Y tú también.”

For the moment, the only guests were the four young adults sitting half asleep at the table, seemingly hypnotized by the piano resonating from two transistor-radio-sized speakers. A single piano note repeated inside the swirl of a flute, and then a tenor began to sing, pushing into falsetto, and Araceli found it odd that these people with their obvious Mesoamerican features were listening to a rather effete voice singing words in English.

History involved itself,

mysterious shade that took its form.

Or what it was, incarnation,

three stars,

delivering signs and dusting from their eyes.





“¡Buenos días!” Councilman Luján said, causing his daughter, Lucía, to startle and sit up straight, and her three friends to emit wake-up groans and coughs.

“This is Araceli,” he said to Lucía. “She’s a friend of your cousin Marisela. And she’s visiting us for Fourth of July with the two boys she takes care of. ¿Cómo se llaman?”

“Brandon.”

“Keenan.”

“Look, they just finished with the trampoline,” Councilman Luján said. “Vayan a jugar. Go play.”

The boys ran off, while Araceli joined the four young adults. Lucía Luján was nineteen, and Araceli recognized her immediately as the girl in the cap and gown in the living room, even though the thick braids into which she had woven her hair for summer had the curious effect of making her look younger than in the photograph. Her friends wore jewels and studs in the crooks of their noses, and loops inside their earlobes, and presented Araceli with the realization that she was losing touch with urban fashions. Probably they were already wearing these things in Mexico City, or would soon be, Araceli thought. “Hola, ¿qué tal?” Lucía said, after rubbing the sleepiness out of her eyes. “I think my cousin told me about you once.”

Lucía was wearing the same clothes she had put on the night before, but even in this wrinkled and weary state, she presented a picture of hip and fashionable mexicana femininity. She wore a vintage pin-tucked blouse of caramel silk, its shimmering skin playing an odd lightgame with the copper tone of her skin and the half dozen friendship bracelets on her wrist. That blouse looked one hundred years old to Araceli and brand-new at the same time. Lucía was two weeks back from Princeton and still suffering from the cruel cultural whiplash caused by her return to Huntington Park: she had lived nine months among assorted geniuses and trust-fund children from across the United States, none of whom understood the contradictions of being a young expatriate from her own, wire-crossed corner of mexicano California. A week before finals she had split up with a young man who hailed from a moneyed Long Island suburb, in part because he had talked about coming to Huntington Park this summer, and the thought of him entering her home in his Tommy Hilfiger summer-wear was too much to bear. She imagined him reciting to her friends those Lorca poems he had memorized—¡verde que te quiero verde!—and thought, No, that won’t go over well in HP. She was still trying to figure out where she stood after a nine-month waking dream of calcified eastern tradition and unadorned American ambition. I am not the same Lucía. She was trying to figure out too how to tell her father that she had already dropped the premed classes in favor of Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, and James Baldwin. Lucía the Ivy Leaguer did not smile or laugh as easily as before, and sometimes she laughed harder and louder and with a kind of cynical meanness her friends did not recognize. Both Lucía’s father and her friends had been giving her strange looks as if to say, Is it possible you think you are better than us now? It was, therefore, a pleasure for Lucía to fall into conversation with an educated Latina from outside her Huntington Park and Princeton orbits. After just a few minutes of casual conversation, she had learned a lot about Araceli, the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, and what it was like to clean houses in Orange County.

Araceli said she wasn’t sure if she’d ever go back to school, but that she wasn’t going to be doing “esto” much longer, gesturing rather coldly in the direction of Brandon and Keenan on the trampoline. She had a little money saved up, and the “aventura” with the boys would be her last.

Lucía understood everything Araceli said, although her own castellano came out slowly and with the simple vocabulary of a much younger person—she had studied French in high school and never been formally educated in Spanish—and she often fell back to English.

“Go with what your heart tells you,” Lucía said, and then repeated the phrase in Spanish, “Haz lo que te diga tu corazón.” She gave a sidelong glance to her friends, who had drifted into semi-sleep again, their heads resting on the table. “I’m studying history and American literature. I don’t know why. Just because I like stories, I guess. My dad’s got a good story. Maybe I’ll write it someday.”


Scott had stayed up late into the night on the beach, watching the march of the constellations along the ecliptic, his dark-adjusted eyes making out the oval smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy. He had watched the flight of low-flying birds along the purple-blue twilight waters, the black featureless forms of two hel icopt ers headed southward to Mexico, and the silent, slow drift of lighted ships, and then he had fallen asleep sometime deep into the night, his head resting near the top of the sloping sand that rose from the water. He had been awakened after dawn by the simultaneous assault of the first rays of morning sun on his face and the first wave splashing the balls of his feet. He stretched out, then took a long, slow walk along the beach, listening to screaming seagulls. When he reached a tide pool he’d once visited with the boys, he held back tears at the not entirely rational thought that he might never enjoy such a life-affirming paternal moment again, until finally his rumbling stomach cured him of such melodrama and he decided to begin the long climb back to his house. He would launch a search for his wife and children, who had likely left for Missouri to spend a week, or perhaps a month or two in recreation and exile from their abusive paterfamilias, and perhaps he would go there to plead his case.

He was surprised to spot, halfway through his quarter-mile trek through the meadow, the familiar high silhouette of his wife’s car. For a moment he felt a sense of relief and reprieve—they had not left him after all—and then once again a sense of foreboding when he realized he would have to add an explanation for this night out on the beach to his apology for the fiasco in the living room and his absence over the past four days. She’ll think I’ve gone totally nuts. He got closer to the car and imagined his unhappy sons inside, and the daughter who would wrap her arms around him no matter what. When he reached the car, smiling despite himself, the electric-driven window lowered theatrically, revealing Maureen’s sunglasses, which she quickly lowered to study him and his surroundings with unshaded eyes.

“Where are the boys?” she asked quickly.

“What?”

Maureen had seen Scott appear on the horizon, and she too felt her apprehensions lifting, a motherly reunion just moments away. She too imagined an embrace, or several, dropping to her knees as one did when children were smaller. But no, Scott was alone.

“Where are the boys?” she insisted.

“You don’t have them?”

“I have Samantha! I left with Samantha and left you with Brandon and Keenan.”

“No, you didn’t. I wasn’t home.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t have any of the kids. I left. I thought they were all with you.”

“I left on Friday with Samantha.”

“You didn’t take the boys?”

“Obviously not!”

“Where are they?”


By dusk the Lujáns’ ample backyard was filled with a hundred people chewing pork whose succulent juices pooled at the bottoms of paper plates, and triggered memories of summer barbecues in provincial Mexican cities with gazebos and stone churches. Araceli noted that they were significantly better dressed than the summer partygoers at the Torres-Thompson residence. They were all immigrants linked to Mr. Luján by blood, marriage, and business ties, and several were compadres of Mr. Luján and his wife. Not having lost the sense of formality attached to family gatherings in their native country, the men were dressed in freshly ironed shirts tucked into jeans and polished snake-skin boots, and the women wore big jewelry and ran wet combs through their sons’ hair, and teased and pulled their daughters’ hair into buns, braids, ponytails, and little black fountains held in place with barrettes that bore butterflies and flowers. The men showed off new brass belt buckles with Mexican flags and the names of towns in Jalisco and Durango, and the women moved about in newly purchased jeans or stiff dresses whose wide linen cones resembled the style worn in U.S. movies during the Eisenhower era.

Alongside this older, largely Mexican-born and Spanish-speaking group, there was a younger circle of partygoers, speakers of English and Spanglish, teenagers and sedate twentysomethings who equated good taste with understated flair and the ironic embrace of fashions past. They wore porkpie hats and baseball caps, jeans with narrow legs, canvas tennis shoes and mauve T-shirts of high-quality cotton, and campy links of faux-gold chains. A couple were dressed in baseball jerseys as wide as capes, and the shorts and knee-high white socks that a goofy midwestern suburban dad might wear, their cottoned feet stuffed into guarache sandals, a style Lucía liked to call “retro summer gangster casual.” They were all people of understated ambitions too, most having graduated to new jobs at hardware stores and composition-writing classes at community colleges, or to long drives across the metropolis to the waiting lists and crowded parking lots of underfunded state universities.

Both groups of guests, young and old, looked at Mr. Luján and his daughter, Lucía, with varying degrees of respect and envy, because in their own way father and daughter were the most successful people they knew. The compadres entered Mr. Luján’s home and found its knight-errant furnishings tasteful and elegant, and they saw in Lucía and the famous university attached to her name a shiny specialness that made them sick to their stomachs with worry about their own progeny and how studious and dedicated those children might or might not be. Among her friends too, Lucía was the subject of awe, esteem, and suspicion, because she had gone farther away from Huntington Park than anyone else they knew, and because she had come back from this distant and wealthy place to stand underneath the power wires and sip beer as if she were an ordinary HP girl, even though she knew she would never be an ordinary HP girl again.

Among all these people, young and old, Mexican-born and California-born, the presence at the party of two Orange County boys went largely unnoticed, with Brandon and Keenan slipping easily into the mostly English-speaking orbit of the children, and only a few parents noticing their long bohemian locks, or the ease with which they glided across the backyard in their bare feet and untrimmed toenails. But after just a few minutes no one failed to notice the paisana with Germanic height and bronze freckles, dressed like some explorer in a canvas hat, presenting them all with the mystery of her person. She was too old and not casually stylish enough to be one of Lucía’s friends, but too young and not formal enough to be one of the compadres.

“¿A quién llevas en la camisa?” Araceli asked one of Lucía Luján’s friends, switching to English when he didn’t seem to understand her right away. “On your shirt. Ese hombre. He looks like Jesus, but he is smoking. Y tengo entendido que Jesucristo Nuestro Señor no fumaba. Jesus does not smoke.”

Griselda Pulido, Lucía Luján’s best-friend-forever, heard Araceli’s chilanga accent, and began to pepper her with questions about Mexico City. Griselda had long thought of Mexico’s capital as a kind of Paris, a destination she would visit one day in solemn pilgrimage, a place where a woman with Mexican roots might escape her fraught American existence and find her true self. She wanted to know where the chilangos went out at night, what rock bands they listened to, and at which nightclubs they danced. “What is the Palacio de Bellas Artes like?” Griselda Pulido asked. Switching to Spanglish, she asked, “Tienen las pinturas de Frida allí, or do you have to go to her house in Coyoacán?”

To Araceli, this woman Griselda seemed as intelligent and curious as Lucía, but with a tragic air that was only heightened by the velvet eye shadow she wore, and cross-combed hair that ran down her forehead and crashed upon the eyebrows. “I got into Brown, which is in Rhode Island, and I thought I’d hang out over there on the East Coast with Lucía, but I couldn’t go,” Griselda said, and Araceli looked her straight in the eye to say, I understand completely. Going to school for as long as they wanted was one of those things latinoamericana girls couldn’t do, and hadn’t been able to do for centuries, the same inequity having kept at least one of Araceli’s grandmothers illiterate her entire life. Our feminine emancipation is incomplete: maybe our daughters, if we ever have any, will be free. Araceli tried to answer Griselda’s questions about Mexico’s capital city as best she could, even though she was a bit thrown by the way Griselda weaved English and Spanish together, so freely and without care.

“Lucía and I are going to go there,” Griselda said. “Un día. Tal vez.”

Araceli wanted to suggest some museums Griselda might not have heard of, but before she could the small man with the smoking Jesus asked her if she’d been to Huntington Park before.

“No,” Araceli said. She twisted her mouth into English so Smoking-Jesus Boy would understand her. “But this is a place you can forget easily. So maybe I was here before and I just don’t remember.” Hearing this, the two homeboys among Lucía’s friends stuck their hands deeper in their pockets and squinted approvingly at Araceli through dilated pupils and gave weak and wicked cannabis grins and wondered briefly if this lady had ever been in The Life, over there in Mexico, because she looked like a girl who could handle herself in a fight. A moment later they forgot about her, and looked up at the sickle moon and the first stars of dusk and listened intently to the pulsating bass of the music and how deeply it inhabited infinite space, and then they smelled the fat-laden air coming from the barbecue pit and their stomachs suddenly ached with hollowness, and they decided it was time to get something to eat again.

Araceli was the deepest mystery to all the parents and older relatives present, some of whom were a bit put off when she entered their circle—they were all standing by the tables and their pyramids of pork and side dishes. She was about to plunge her fork into a serving of carnitas when she noticed she had inadvertently brought the conversation between the compadres to a sudden halt. “Buenas tardes,” she said, eliciting a round of not-especially-friendly “Buenas tardes” in return. These mothers and fathers were put off too by Araceli’s failure to pay much attention to the boys she was apparently assigned to look after, even when the older of the two approached and said with a stricken plea, “I think someone should tell all these kids to stop playing with firecrackers because it’s so dangerous.”

“¿Qué quieres que haga?” Araceli asked rhetorically, because there was nothing she could do, and the boy snuck away, leaving all those who observed the exchange to wonder what exactly was going on here with this child-unfriendly woman and those American boys.

“It’s true what el niño says,” one of the moms said in Spanish. “Those things are too dangerous. Someone is going to get burned.”

“They see more dangerous things at school, believe me,” said another mom dismissively, and with this all the mothers and fathers in the circle nodded. “The other day, I go to pick up my son and the entire school is surrounded by police cars and police officers, and there is what they call a ‘lockdown.’ My son is in the sixth grade, believe it or not, and one of the kids is running down the hallway with a knife. I think he stabbed a teacher in the leg with it.”

“Qué barbaridad.”

“The things that go on in those schools.”

“My son is in sixth grade too, and he doesn’t know his times tables past three,” one of the fathers said. “ ‘What’s six times eight?’ I ask him, and he looks at me all confused. So I tell him, ‘What are they teaching you there?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know.’ In my pueblo, they taught us that in the second year.”

“What are we supposed to do?” one of the mothers said.

“You’re supposed to go to the teacher and complain,” Lucía Luján interjected in English, having just entered the circle on the hunt for her own plate of food. “You’re supposed to get in the face of that teacher and say, ‘What’s up with the times tables?’ “

“¿Podemos hacer eso?”

“Of course you can. That’s how this country works. Get a classroom full of white kids, and that’s what their parents do all the time. They treat every teacher like a worker.”

“Tiene razón,” Araceli said. “La señora Maureen, mi jefa, siempre está peleando con los maestros.”

“But if we go, they don’t take us seriously,” one of the mothers said, speaking directly to Lucía. “You go to the office and they tell us, ‘What are you doing here? Go away. We’re busy.’ “

They all paused, middle-aged and young, Mexican-born and U.S.-born, and considered the betrayal of the schools, and the steel mesh that covered every window, the security cameras in the hallways, the posted warnings aimed at student and adult alike, and a few of them very self-consciously allowed their eyes to drift over to those young girls and boys who were their blood and their responsibility, running and bouncing in the backyard, each child gleaming and full of promise, and each poor and stripped of it. Boy and girl screams filled the silence that followed, which was heavy with hurt and powerlessness and a certain unfocused sense of workingman’s defiance that found no words in which it could be expressed.

Araceli broke the wordlessness suddenly, to say that the kids she cared for seemed to be getting an excellent education.

“Where are they from?”

“Los Laguna Rancho Estates. Por la playa. En los cerros.”

“The public schools are good down there, I bet,” Lucía Luján said.

“No van a la escuela pública,” Araceli said. “Private school. Todo pagado. Y muy caro. Very expensive. I see the bills.”

“How much?” Lucía Luján asked quickly.

Araceli spoke the figure in slow and deliberate Spanish, allowing its mathematical obscenity, its thousands and thousands, to hover over the assembled hardworking, cash-strapped, taxpaying adults and scholarship-funded college students like a blinding glow of fake sunshine. There were one or two gasps, though Lucía Luján’s eyebrows rose with only moderate surprise—the tuition for those two boys, together, was a bit more than her tuition at Princeton, before all the financial aid kicked in.

“Imposible,” one of the parents said.

“Estás loca,” said another.

“No sea chismosa. Por favor.”

It was preposterous, and suddenly everyone in the circle except Lucía was angry at Araceli for revealing a figure that, were they to accept it as truth, would temporarily strip them of some of their own moderately elevated sense of accomplishment, by revealing just how small their achievements were relative to true American success and affluence. The compadres with kids in parochial school imagined they were paying top dollar, but in fact it was a small fraction of the sum Araceli had just divulged, even though those gringo boys didn’t look so much different than theirs, not especially special, and certainly not that rich.

“Es lo que cuesta,” Araceli insisted. She explained that she knew this startling fact not because she’d made any effort to find out, but rather because her employers were exceedingly casual with their paperwork and left letters and bills lying around. And with a dollar figure that big screaming from the kitchen countertop, even a normally circumspect housekeeper like Araceli had to take a look.

“You’re pretty sure about that number?” Lucía asked.

“Claro que sí,” Araceli said.

“No,” one of the compadres insisted. “Estás confundida.”

I might be just a housekeeper and a chilanga, Araceli wanted to say, but I know basic English and math and the meaning of commas and decimal points and dollar signs. But instead she gave a long glance at her disbelieving audience, then shook her head with a dismissive chuckle that was instantly recognizable to Lucía for its thick layering of intellectual condescension. With that all the compadres and Lucía drifted away, leaving Araceli amused and finally able to take a first real bite of the carnitas, which were quite juicy. She searched for the boys and spotted them, and then decided she could forget about them again, because here in this big backyard they would be safe.

Brandon and Keenan were running about the backyard with the children of the extended Luján clan. Having watched the men with the shovels remove their dirt and then the foil-wrapped meat, and a few hot rocks, Brandon had persuaded himself that he was no longer in danger from the fires in the earth, though now there were various firecrackers and flames and explosions going off in the air around him. Salomón’s brother Pedro had brought three large boxes’ worth of assorted handheld pyrotechnics from Tijuana, and the children were playing with them, the most popular being small silver balls that burst into sparks when the children flung them against the patio’s concrete floor.

“I got you! I got you!” a girl yelled as one of her “fire rocks” exploded at Keenan’s feet, and Keenan replied by throwing one back at her, and laughing as she squealed.

“Be careful!” Brandon shouted at his brother and anyone else in earshot, though no one listened. A boy was lighting firecrackers and throwing them into the now-empty pig pit and there were no adults stopping him. Gunpowder tickled Brandon’s nose, and bits of paper and cardboard from the firecrackers were littering the patio floor and the lawn, and there were other kids igniting sticks that spit fire and whistled, holding them too close to their eyes, and they wouldn’t stop even when Brandon shouted out “¡Cuidado!“ in Spanish. He looked for Araceli, but she had drifted away into the crowd of people tearing at meat from the buried pig with their teeth, and for the first time since leaving his home on Paseo Linda Bonita, Brandon felt truly alone and afraid. The firecracker explosions pinched his eardrums and the neighborhood dogs were suffering too, filling the air with their wailing and barking on this block and all the others surrounding it, begging the humans to cease fire. It was one thing to play war when all the sounds came from your mouth or your imagination, and quite another to be standing in a cloud of gunpowder. Now he heard a powerful explosion, felt the thumping vibration in his chest, and then the echo of the boom. “An M-80!” a boy shouted, and Brandon wondered why no one in the backyard was ducking for cover when there were bombs exploding out on the street.

A flash of light on the horizon caught his eye, and he turned to see three fire bursts growing in the shape of dandelions against the dark gray sky, followed by the muffled sound a few seconds later of distant cannons.

“¡Son los fireworks de la ciudad!” someone shouted, just as more burning dandelions emerged, their light shining on the distant transmission lines and the towers. “The city fireworks show!” someone else said, and now everyone was turning and watching as more bursts followed, some in the shape of flying saucers, in green and crimson and yellow, some drooping like jellyfish, others slithering through the sky like serpents, and finally one forming a large orb that loomed over the towers and the neighborhood like a small planet, causing many oohs and ahhs from the people gathered in the Luján backyard.

The planet fell from the sky and the explosions stopped, suddenly. For ten, twenty, thirty seconds the adults and children looked up at the blank sky and waited for the next burst of light. They saw only a large cloud of smoke, drifting slowly eastward like a white Rorschach test across the dark sky. From beginning to end the sixty-third annual Huntington Park Fireworks Extravaganza was the shortest in city history, having lasted just four minutes and thirty-five seconds, the city having failed to take note of the nationwide fireworks shortage caused by a warehouse explosion in China’s Guangdong Province some months earlier.

“That’s it?” someone said in English.

“¿Se acabó?”

“What a rip-off!”

Standing by the table where the carnitas were being carved, City Councilman Salomón Luján stood with a large serving fork, took in the empty horizon, and uttered a useful English exclamation that had been one of the first to drift into his vocabulary:

“Oh, shit.”


After a harried exchange of shouted questions and answers during their five-minute drive up the hill to Paseo Linda Bonita, Maureen and Scott realized that Brandon and Keenan had been alone with Araceli since Friday morning, and that neither had talked to the boys since calling home on Friday evening. The length of their absence stretched out to unseemly numbers: four days, more than ninety-six hours of blank and unknown chapters in their sons’ lives, ninety-six hours in which they had abdicated their parental responsibilities. When they are small, you are vigilant at the playground, you never allow your eye to stray from them for more than a few seconds, Maureen thought. And if you lose sight of them, for twenty seconds, for a minute, you are transported suddenly into an abyss of guilt and panic, and you scan the surroundings against the idea that your loss will endure forever, until you spot them and your heart returns to that calm place where parents most seek to live. Maureen drove past the guard shack without bothering to acknowledge the pregnant woman on duty, and violated the 25 MPH speed limit signs, flying over speed bumps and making several squealing turns up the sinuous streets of the Laguna Rancho Estates. She pulled into the garage and ran into the house, leaving Samantha still strapped in the car with her father.

Although Maureen had been in the house thirty minutes earlier, and recognized the improbability that her sons might have returned in that short time, she called out their names again: “Brandon! Keenan! Mommy and Daddy are home! Brandon! Keenan!” This maternal reflex became more of a plea and lament with each repetition, until Scott said, “They’re not here,” which caused Maureen to turn and snap at him, “I can see that!”

Scott began looking for a note from Araceli, and for clues about her departure and destination. There was nothing in the kitchen, the place where one might have expected her to leave a message. In the living room he was distracted by the great open space where the shattered coffee table had once been, and thus failed to notice that one of the picture frames on the bookshelves was empty. He moved back to the kitchen, where he informed Maureen of the undeniable conclusion that their children had not been home for a while. “If you look closely you can tell the bathrooms haven’t been used for at least twenty-four hours, if not longer,” he said. “And no one used the kitchen until you got here and made that meal for Samantha. Right?” Before Maureen could answer, Scott headed toward the door that led from the kitchen to the backyard and the guesthouse, and stepped across the open space to Araceli’s door again, and tried turning the handle.

“Do we have a key for this door?”

For the next ten minutes, Maureen and Scott searched their home for a spare guesthouse key, until they found a plastic sandwich bag filled with keys in a drawer in the laundry room. They rushed back to Araceli’s room: neither had set foot in this locked corner of their property for the four years Araceli been their employee, respecting the Mexican woman’s privacy and trusting her to keep it clean. They opened the door and entered a space of unexpected clutter and mystery. Their eyes were drawn immediately upward, to an object hanging from the ceiling of the small living room. It hovered over a small drafting table and many drawings taped to the walls, along with pictures cut from magazines, a floating sculpture that drifted very slowly in the faint, hot breeze that seeped through the room’s lone, partially opened window.

Maureen stepped back to the doorway so that she could focus on the object in its entirety. It was a bird of prey, assembled from one hundred or more blue, white, red, orange, and yellow disposable forks, knives, and spoons that Maureen had purchased for the last few birthday parties. The utensils had been fused together into a bird about three feet long, its clawed feet made from broken fork prongs, while many serrated knives were layered together to form the teeth, and two layers or more of utensils formed the body and wings, the smooth plastic covered, haphazardly, with ripped-up strips of discarded clothing and dishrags, the various textures creating an especially meaty-looking representation of flesh and feather. The sculpture had the crude quality of an object formed by a series of haphazard and violent collisions, and in a letter to one of her friends Araceli had called it El Fénix de la Basura, the Garbage Phoenix. Araceli liked it both for its disturbing, otherworldly quality and as a commentary on her situation in the United States: she dusted it once a month, but had recently considered taking it down, because in the one-woman artistic circle that followed her work, the Garbage Phoenix was becoming passé. Maureen studied this creation and then examined the drawings on the walls. There was a eight-by-eleven-inch self-portrait in which Araceli had enlarged the size of her own nostrils, and rendered the rest of her face in a Picasso-inspired abstract geometry, but without the master’s sense of balance and composition. There were several pencil and charcoal sketches of shoes and sandals ascending and descending the steps in the Tacubaya Metro station, their rotting laces and heels melting into concrete steps covered with swampy moss and dripping water. And there was a collage of hands, assembled from magazines that were stacked on the floor: My magazines, the ones I threw in the recycling bin. Maureen studied the hanging sculpture and the drawings, and felt she was looking into the mind of a woman upon whom various psyche-smashing torments had been inflicted. Is this the same woman who has lived in my house for four years and fed my children and cleaned my clothes? No. This is a stranger. She sulks while she cooks for us, and then she sits here in her free time and creates monstrosities with the broken fragments and discarded objects of our home. The grim aesthetic of the utensil bird, the cavernous nostrils, and the melting shoes suggested, to Maureen, self-hatred and a suppressed desire toward destruction. Understood in the light of her art, Araceli’s surly everyday nature took on new meanings, and this sudden, unexpected insight was all the more unsettling in the light of Scott’s announcement that “I looked and there’s nothing here, no note, no clue.” Araceli had taken the two boys someplace without giving word of where she might be.

Still holding Samantha, who had reached up to try to touch the mobile, Maureen returned to the kitchen and wondered what they should do next.


Forty minutes after the fiasco of the fireworks, Brandon and Keenan stood on the front porch of the Luján home on Rugby Avenue, having been drawn there, along with much of the Luján family and their guests, by the shouting and chanting coming from the street. With Araceli at their side, the Torres-Thompson boys cast a disoriented squint at a crowd of about one hundred people, all of Latin American descent, gathered in the middle of the roadway, under the flickering light of a streetlamp. Some carried beer bottles in foam sleeves, and others held folded lawn chairs, but all shared the disheveled, sunburned, and offended look of Fourth of July recreation interrupted and unfulfilled. They had come from the park, and they had come from their lawns, confused by the empty sky, the missing explosions, and the very ordinary, very unpleasant sounds of car alarms and car stereos and crying children left in the truncated show’s wake. The vacuum caused by the sudden lack of explosive noise was filled by their own voices telling them to be angry, telling them to remember where they lived. It was a holiday insult added to all the usual, daily HP insults—the dirty tap water, the aggressive parking cops, and the annual surprise of supplemental property-tax fees. “Those f*cking council incompetents! Again!” “¡Pinche ciudad de la chingada!” And when a certain, very metiche woman at the park suggested Luján was to blame, they began to head off in a group to his home, gathering more people on the way.

Councilman Luján appeared on the porch, hanging both thumbs on his belt, and even the children in the crowd seemed enraged, their high-pitched voices adding a feminine squeal to the crowd’s collective chant.

“¡Afuera los Tres! ¡Afuera los Tres! ¡Afuera los Tres!”

“Out with the three?” Brandon asked no one in particular. “What’s that about?”

“They mean my dad and Councilwoman María and Councilman Vicente,” said Lucía, who was standing behind him. Sensing the boy was smart enough to understand, she quickly explained the political dispute that pitted her father and two allies against a corrupt mayor. “So whenever anything goes wrong, the mayor blames my dad. And his Special Friend, that lady in the back over there, she gets her rabble from el movimiento to come out and harass us because we want to reform things.” With that, Lucía stepped to the front of the porch and down the steps to the concrete path that ran through the front lawn, and leaned forward into a screaming shout: “Go home, losers!”

“¡Rateros!“ someone in the crowd shouted back, starting a new chant with the Mexican Spanish idiom meaning “bandit” or “crook.” “¡Ra-te-ros! ¡Ra-te-ros!”

“You stole the money for the fireworks!”

“Get out here and defend yourself like a man, Salomón. We see how you spent the money for the fireworks on your own party. ¡Ratero! “

Having heard Lucía’s explanations, Araceli scanned the back of the crowd and spotted the mayor’s Special Friend, a woman with a black head of hair-sprayed raccoon quills, her temples sporting identical white wings. She was light-skinned and small inside her wide summer paisley dress, and she held at her side a cell phone, which Araceli understood to be the instrument by which the Special Friend rounded up crowds and exerted her will. The Special Friend spotted Mr. Luján on the porch and gave him a long, self-satisfied stare, like a half-deranged chess master sizing up the effect of a game-changing move on her opponent. Finally she raised her eyebrows quickly, as if to summon a reply from her rival—but Mr. Luján seemed unfazed. “No hay que hacerles caso,” he said to his daughter and anyone else who would listen. Mr. Luján said this with calm conviction, a deepness of thought that hinted at reserves of belief and self-awareness. Now the Special Friend was back on the phone, summoning additional troops. Araceli could see the Special Friend and Mr. Luján were locked in a familiar struggle, the same one played out in village councils and big-city demonstrations in their native country, at inquests and in courtrooms, between those who understood that wielding power meant being a paternalistic shepherd to the stupid flock and those who dreamed of an Empire of Reason and a literate citizenry. Araceli could see the Special Friend and Councilman Luján were standing on opposite sides of Mexican history, even as they stood in the United States.

A man in the crowd wearing a backward baseball cap and an incipient beard stepped forward to stand on the edge of the lawn and send a glob of spit toward Lucía, causing Councilman Luján to remonstrate with the spitter and then to pull back his daughter to the safety of the porch.

Keenan, who had never seen an adult use his saliva as a weapon, grabbed Brandon’s hand for security. “What is this?” he asked his brother.

“I think it’s a lynch mob,” Brandon said with the amused detachment of an anthropologist describing some primitive rite. He took a weird comfort in the idea that he had stumbled upon another case where life clearly and obviously imitated literature. He had believed lynch mobs were creations of novelists and filmmakers, but here was one before him, with real people showing their canine teeth and twisting their faces into other expressions that suggested incipient revenge. “I’ve read about them in books. In this lynch mob, no one is carrying torches. But I guess torches are not, like, required for it to be a lynch mob.”

“What are they going to do?” Keenan asked. “Are they going to hurt us?”

“Well, I don’t see them carryi ng any rocks, so I guess they can’t stone us. I predict they’ll start throwing those bottles and cans. Unless the police get here first. In a situation like this, it helps if the police show up. They call that ‘restoring order.’ “

A minute later two police cruisers slowly wheeled up to the block, each painted white with slanted steel-blue letters proclaiming POLICE, and progressively smaller letters declaring HUNTINGTON PARK, and the department’s wordy motto: DEDICATED TO SERVICE THROUGH EXCELLENCE IN PERFORMANCE. Police Chief Mike Mueller emerged from one of the vehicles, standing tall and thick and midwestern in navy wool, and strode into the space between the contending parties, raising his hands like an announcer in a boxing ring. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to remind all of you, once again, that we have a whole new city ordinance related to so-called political gatherings on residential streets.”

He kept his arms raised and turned his beef-fed torso 360 degrees, his preferred method for ending these “Mexican standoffs.” “Okay, all right, everyone go home now.” The crowd in the street obeyed, as did the members of the Luján family on the porch, until Lucía stood alone on the front steps and started a chant directed at the retreating lynch mob.

“¡Re-for-ma! ¡Re-for-ma! ¡Re-for-ma!”

Brandon soon joined the chant too, his voice squeaking as he tried to match Lucía’s. “Ray-for-mah! Ray-for-mah!”

Keenan stood on tiptoe and joined them too, trying to mimic the Spanish sounds, as his brother was. When the last of the lynch mob was gone and the chanting had stopped, Keenan turned to his big brother and asked, “Who’s Ray Forma?”

“No sé,” the boy answered.


Maureen and Scott stood in the kitchen looking at each other, studying the main work area of their servant, the unwashed plastic tumbler and bowl in the sink the only objects out of place: the leopard skin of the marble countertops gleamed, spotless, even the windows suggested they might squeak if you put a cloth to them. The perfect kitchen and the disturbing art were both the work of the same Mexican woman, and Maureen felt blind and ignorant in the face of this newly revealed proof of human complexity: I took her for granted, allowed her to seep into the white noise around me. It was not immediately obvious what Maureen and Scott should do next, and they wandered about the house, hoping that the ring of the phone or chime of the front door would liberate them from waiting for something to happen. For the moment, it seemed likely, or at least probable, that their two sons and their employee might appear at the door at any moment. It was Maureen and Scott’s experience as parents that all crises eventually ended and their home returned to its placid normality. Fevers dropped, cuts were stitched up, X-rays were taken, and doctors pronounced the children resilient and fated to healthy lives, and when it was all over the home’s routine comforts—the hum of television sets, the salty smell of cheese and prepared meats cooking in the kitchen—confirmed their faith that good parenting values and vigilance would protect them.

But very quickly the passing time and the empty home and all its objects and boyless silence became an excruciating judgment on their own actions, a slow ticking punishment. “Where could they be?” Maureen asked as she wandered into the boys’ bedroom and studied the modular plastic boxes that contained their toys. “Where did she take them?” Maureen repeated the questions out loud several times as she moved from the boys’ room to the media room and the kitchen, carrying Samantha through the house on her shoulder, trying to get her baby girl to take the noon nap that was now two hours overdue. The time is all wrong for her to go to sleep now. She will be awake late into the evening. She can sense something is wrong; she can sense her parents are panicked.

Maureen ran through her mind what she knew about Araceli, wondering if she could summon a fact or name that might provide an answer or clue to the question of where she had taken the boys. The mother who had given Maureen Araceli’s name was in South America as of three years ago, having become an expatriate for a U.S. company in São Paolo, Brazil, and Maureen had no number for her. Araceli was from Mexico City, if Maureen remembered correctly. It took some effort of memory to produce Araceli’s last name: Ramirez, a name confirmed moments later when Scott found, in Araceli’s bedroom, a stack of postcards addressed to her and also the bank book for the savings account Scott had set up for her four years ago. The savings book revealed the last name Ramirez too, but the address was their own. “We have a full name, but that’s it. What else do we know?” Maureen had no idea what Araceli’s parents’ names might be. How many people lived in Mexico City? Ten million? Twenty? And how many Ramirezes might there be in such a metropolis? Such a common last name offered these Mexican people a kind of anonymity. They’re all Ramirez, or Garcia, or Sanchez.

“Where does she go on the weekend?” Maureen asked Scott.

“I think she said to Santa Ana. I’m pretty sure I heard her say that once.”

Scott decided he would go through the old phone bills and check for any unfamiliar numbers. He returned from the office with a stack of paper, began scanning, and soon realized he would find nothing. “I think I’ve seen her use a card or something when she calls Mexico,” he said. “And Santa Ana is a local call.” The toll-free access numbers for the long-distance services left no trace on the bill, which was precisely what Araceli had intended—she didn’t want to owe the Torres-Thompsons any money for the phone bill, and felt the details of her Mexican life were hers alone to possess: they were not for others to see, or study, or to be amused by. Araceli was “very private,” as Maureen put it to her friends, and until this moment Maureen didn’t mind, because she equated Araceli’s reserve with an efficient and serious approach to her job. For a year before Araceli joined them the Torres-Thompsons had a Guatemalan housekeeper, Lourdes, who kept a continual lament about the daughter she had left behind in a place called Totonicapán, often weeping as she did so. After one tearful soliloquy set off by the sight of children her daughter’s age celebrating Brandon’s seventh birthday in the Torres-Thompson backyard, Maureen had decided to let Lourdes go. Madame Weirdness, the childless woman from Mexico City, came to take her place. I have allowed this person to live in my home for four years without once having a substantial conversation about where she is from, about her brothers and sisters, or about how she got here. I have allowed this foreign mystery to float from one room of my home to the next, leaning into the vacuum cleaner, flexing forearms as she mops with that look that often goes far away. I have allowed this state of affairs to persist, and may have placed my sons in danger, in exchange for her chicken mole, for the light and tart seasoning of her black beans, and for the passion we share for the sanitizing power of chlorine.

Maureen’s ignorance about Araceli’s life beyond Paseo Linda Bonita meant she had no information on which to base even an educated guess about where the Mexican woman might have taken Brandon and Keenan. “Where did she go? What is she doing with them?” If Scott was right and they hadn’t been in this house in two days, at least, then the situation became even more inexplicable: Why would a woman who had shown so little interest in her sons suddenly take an overnight excursion with them? As the light shining through the windows lost its white sheen and aged into a faint yellow, and the shadows in the succulent garden turned longer, and the memory and guilt over her own absence from the home grew fainter, Maureen’s thoughts took on a darker and increasingly suspicious hue, leading her to declare, just a few minutes before sunset:

“I think we’re going to have to call the police.”