Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  Checo’s shout died down at night.

  They lay side by side and away from the others, their shelter a humid cloud bank, their blanket the dark. The stars had hidden themselves. Even with the faraway restaurant lights, she could barely see her own hand. Checo laid his jacket on the ground for her. From somewhere else, he brought a sweater. It was shapeless and smelled male. It was big enough to cover her. Checo slept facing Soli, one hand on her shoulder. Through the thick weave, she could feel every inch of his palm, his solid knuckles, each finger a separate promise.

  “Are you warm enough?”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t believe she could sleep with Checo lying so close, but she hadn’t slept for two days. She thought of how he’d called her his wife, how he’d held her in the store and trusted her to know what to do, how they ran holding hands. And in the middle of all the thinking, she drifted off. Her brain shut down, even as her body buzzed with the nearness of a man.

  When you sleep outside, it feels all right to wake at dawn, no matter how tired you were the night before. She woke to Checo’s open eyes.

  “La Bestia,” he whispered.

  “It’s here?” She sat up and looked around.

  “Lie down, it isn’t ready yet.” He grinned. “Are you warm?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, though the clouds had scattered and made way for the morning’s violet chill.

  Checo propped his head on his palm. “Everyone’s asleep.” He reached for her cross, poked the pads of his fingers into its corners. “You take this everywhere?” he asked.

  “Everywhere.”

  His gaze settled on her. She flooded with joy and terror and wanted to vanish. She couldn’t look up. He was too bright. He would blind her. He lifted her chin and kissed her. They both tasted bitterly of wine and sleep. He kissed her again. His hands, ice-cold, found their way to her waist. Her skin leapt to his touch. His fingers rode the seam of her jeans and she let out a small cry. If anyone had woken and watched, if Pepe had spied on them from his distant perch, he would have seen a peculiar double person, its arms wrapped around itself, its two heads meeting and parting, meeting and parting, a beast in the half-light, quietly surging.

  After sunrise, La Bestia, the death train, growled to life. It was larger than the last train, or any train she’d ever seen. People had fallen from it and died. People had lost limbs. La Bestia was nothing to be excited about.

  • • •

  THE TRAIN CRAWLED TIRELESSLY up the country, stopping occasionally, sometimes all night, to refuel and take on cargo. From the soles of her feet, through her knees and the base of her spine she could feel the churning of its wheels, the steel blades that would eat her for dinner. When her fear spiked, she fingered the rosary that still hung from her neck. She hadn’t taken it off, even though only the Virgin wore the rosary and to wear it herself was improper and vain, even if she’d been a virgin of the everyday order. It was uppercase blasphemy, but Checo had put the beads there. The cross sat cradled between her breasts, and there it would stay.

  On that train, she didn’t watch the horizon. She focused on Checo. She stared at him. Even with his hair whipping in the wind, he was the most stable thing there.

  “Stop staring like that,” he said.

  She couldn’t. When it was warm enough, he took off his shirt and lay down on it. Only Checo could lie down on La Bestia. Soli didn’t dare.

  “Checo,” she said. “I’m lucky I ran into you.”

  He shushed her, his eyes still closed, and said nothing, seemed only to care for the sunlight that slathered itself across his lids. Just when Soli grew jealous of the sun, he reached for her hand and held it.

  Checo was something between a man and a boy. She didn’t know what to call him. With his friends, he acted like a boy, told dirty jokes and wrestled and laughed at nothing. With Soli at night, in the trackside nests they built of coats and backpacks, he was a man, rough-skinned, sure with his hands, redolent of fuel and bark.

  Eventually, Soli told Checo about Manuel and the tunnel to America. Checo shook his head. “It’s good you got away from him, Soli.”

  Perhaps it was La Bestia’s death roar, or maybe the promise of the North coming ever closer, and with it, the knowledge that they would all be going their separate ways: Soli wanted to tell Checo something memorable. But instead she acted like herself and spouted nonsense and couldn’t stop, even when the wind swallowed her words, even when Checo frowned and pressed an arm over his eyes. She told him where she’d come from, what she thought the North would be like, what she dreamed and feared. She told him about Mama and Papi and the old corn ways. She wanted to tell him everything that she would have told him if their time together hadn’t been ticking down with each passing field. And so she did. It’s a wonder, after four days together, that she still had things to talk about, and it’s a wonder he didn’t push her off the train, and only sat up, looked her in the eye, and said, “Soli, talking time is over.”

  He lay back down and closed his eyes.

  But she wanted to say one more thing. Just one more meaningful and memorable thing, something he could carry with him, should this journey throw her off its back.

  “Checo,” she said. “You are so high-tech.”

  He opened one eye. “I like that,” he said. Soli tucked her hand in his, and lost herself to the dizzying rush.

  5.

  Kavya cycled to work every day, one of the perks of living in Berkeley. She knew the streets like the hush of her own breath. She could navigate them blindfolded, could tell where she was just by the smell of roses or baking bread or Thai food or urine. She knew where earthquakes and tree roots had split the sidewalks, which hills were best for biking in the morning sun, and which cafés caught the evening light. Her otherwise terrible sense of direction was centered here and framed by the hills to the east and the ocean to the west.

  On a cool August morning, with only the whistle of wind through her helmet to keep her company, Kavya pushed up the north campus hill. She took the long way around, turning from Cedar onto Oxford, ducking under low-hanging oaks, skimming the short concrete wall that bordered the street. She’d started taking this route, ostensibly to avoid the steep slope of Euclid, but really, she could admit now, to avoid the playground. Looking at children drove a jagged blade through her, left her riven and weak. She’d stopped speaking with friends who were pregnant, had stopped attending showers. She vaguely and irrationally worried that the infant supply would be tapped out by other lucky women—that in the great heavenly handout, no babies would be left for her. One month since Preeti’s wedding, and the urgency of her desire was expanding daily. If she were ready to tell the truth about herself, she’d admit to a fear that Preeti would get pregnant before she did. It was childish, petty, and true.

  She and Rishi used to bike together in the mornings, heading south along Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley’s main thoroughfare, until they split off downtown—Kavya heading uphill to the sorority and Rishi to the BART station, where he would be yelled at and pelted with fruit for riding the Weebus, working in the Valley, and driving up housing prices in the once affordable boroughs of the East Bay. “I’m not going to bike to the bus anymore,” he had announced one morning five months earlier. It wasn’t the fruit or the abuse that was making him stop. It was his conviction that his bike seat was killing his sperm. The doctors hadn’t found anything wrong with either of them. Rishi’s sperm count was healthy. Kavya’s ovaries were diligent and her uterus hospitable.

  “There’s no way a bike seat could kill your sperm,” Kavya had said.

  “You don’t know that. Why do you think Europe has a declining birth rate?”

  “Because their women are educated and contraception’s free.”

  Rishi had started wearing sweatpants, even to work. “It’s all very sensitive down there,” he’d concluded. Having renounced his bike, h
e drove his Prius to the Weebus instead, which riled up the protesters even more. Without having to ask, Kavya knew that this filled her husband with contentious, barely hidden glee.

  • • •

  KAVYA PUMPED HER WAY to the top of the hill and stopped on the corner to catch her breath. Here, she dismounted, took off her helmet, wiped the sweat from her hairline. Before her rose a broad flight of stairs, crowned by the white columns of Gamma Gamma Pi. As she drew near, she heard her assistant, Miguel, grinding rice for fresh horchata.

  She’d been working at the sorority for nearly a year. Financially, it was a step up from her head chef position at Green Pizza, but she was still getting used to the idea of it. For four years, she’d allowed her position at Green to define large segments of who she was: her political beliefs, her esthetic tendencies, her respect for the Earth and the food that sprang from it. They all wove nicely into her role at Green. In her world, being head chef at a trendy pizza restaurant was the sort of informational tidbit that dropped harmoniously into conversation.

  Oh! people used to say. I love that place! Wait—you’re head chef?

  But soon came the onset of what people were calling this economy. The lines that once trailed out the door and around the corner grew shorter with the passing months, until there came a time when customers could actually arrive and be seated. Prospects were darkening. Kavya began to look for something new. She found Gamma Gamma Pi, with its nine-thousand-dollar salary bump. It wasn’t her dream job, but as far as she knew, sororities were economy-proof. She would be starting a family soon. She took the job.

  The conversations had changed, of course.

  I’m head chef at a sorority, she’d say.

  Oh.

  And then the questions: Are you in the sorority?

  Were you in a sorority?

  What’s it like?

  Did they initiate you?

  Are they total bitches?

  “Total bitch,” Miguel muttered. The kitchen door swung closed. Miguel was Kavya’s assistant chef and designated wok-reacher. He was six feet tall. In Peru, he’d once told her, I’m a Godzilla! The total bitch in question was Gamma Gamma Pi’s house mother, Martina McAfee. Kavya didn’t see her as a bitch so much as an authority figure uncomfortable with her authority. She’d never formally introduced herself to the two kitchen employees, but appeared on Kavya’s first day, in blond bob and nautical stripes, and began reciting the weekend menu. Given that this was Berkeley, she could really have been anyone—a Realtor off her lithium, a truant professor, a well-preserved homeless woman. It was only later that Kavya noticed her picture on the WELCOME!!!! board at the sorority’s entrance. When Martina McAfee spoke to Kavya, it was to relay instructions, ask questions about ingredients, and check off weekly menus. She didn’t seem able or willing to say hello, to ask Kavya about her weekend or take up the threads of chitchat Kavya proferred. Kavya hadn’t been used to being a mere employee. She was used to being an integral cog of a professional family, the creator and preserver of her culinary universe. But for the extra nine thousand, she could live with being staff.

  In the end, Green Pizza survived. The economy returned, and so did the clusters of pizza eaters that sat on the grassy traffic median. Often, Kavya wondered if she should have given up on Green, if the family she’d left it for would ever come into being.

  It was the third Monday of the month, Roast Day, so Kavya was rubbing a trio of chickens with lemon and rosemary when Martina entered. She stood in the corner of the kitchen, silent, until Kavya sensed a glint of yellow hair and turned.

  “The girls are complaining about the garlic,” Martina said, crossing her arms over her chest, arranging long fingers over her elbows.

  Kavya put down the lemon wedge and wiped her hands on her apron. “Is there a problem with the garlic?”

  “There was too much of it in the arrabiata sauce. It wasn’t good.”

  Kavya happened to know that her arrabiata was, without fail, good.

  “Thanks, Martina. I’ll take that on board.”

  It was a phrase Kavya resorted to when she sensed an outsider fingering the confines of her kitchen. It was a phrase that allowed her to reclaim some authority in her professional space. When orders were flung at her, Kavya took them on board. She became their captain. And the complaints and demands little more than compliant stowaways.

  Martina McAfee breathed deeply, turned on her heel, and left.

  “I’ll take her on board,” Miguel muttered.

  Kavya couldn’t help smiling. She had recoiled from her workplace at first, despite the oak-paneled peace of the house, its crystal chandeliers, its lush rugs and fainting couches. The sorority was just— It was just so. She couldn’t think of a single word to encapsulate how she felt about the Gamma Pis, mincing around their lavish home, caked in makeup at breakfast, singing their mortifying predinner song, fawning over the campus a cappella groups and crew teams who visited for dinner. But in the end, what really mattered was that the Gamma Pis smiled and thanked her when she carried out chafing dishes piled high with rice or vegetables or meat. When she brought out something they liked especially—like moussaka or macaroni and cheese—they clapped their hands and squealed in that very girly way. For the most part, sorority girls were just girls. She might one day have her own sorority girl, as unlikely as it was starting to seem—a daughter like one of these, born with her own free will and a closet full of cocktail dresses.

  • • •

  KAVYA HAD MOVED TO BERKELEY eighteen years earlier for college. She had graduated, traveled, become a chef, and married Rishi, in that order. They found a bungalow with Craftsman moldings and light fixtures. It sat wood-shingled at the end of a short drive just off Shattuck Avenue, within wafting distance of bakeries and storied restaurants. After they bought their house—a small miracle, possible with their parents’ help—they’d walked hand in hand through a horticultural nursery to pick out plants, wandering among aisles of miniature fruit trees and exotic blooms. On Sunday mornings, they lay naked in bed. They often slept clothed against the cool Berkeley nights, then stripped down for the pleasure of a lazy morning. They spent hours individually wrapped, Rishi in the bedsheet and Kavya in the quilt, dozing and staring at each other and checking their e-mail, until the prospect of skin on skin and plunging one into the other grew too electric to resist. When they remembered to, they went for head massages at the Sunday farmers’ market. With Rishi, Kavya took bike rides through the low hills. She walked to the movie theater. She walked to the shops. She walked and walked. She cycled. She flipped off cars that got too close to her on narrow and overparked roads. She glared at SUVs. She grew calf muscles that no longer fit her jeans. Kavya rose to the helm of her own storied restaurant. For a while, it was all she needed: the comforting method of pizza-making, the smell of baking bread, her sous-chefs tossing and catching their great spinning discs of dough, graceful and sure as dancers. After closing every night, Rishi would meet her at the kitchen door and walk her home, Kavya smelling of warm yeast, the two of them holding hands on the quiet sidewalk, watching other restaurants tuck themselves in for the night.

  All this time, she’d been living for the stolid delicacies of work and marriage, her tidy home, cocktail evenings and yawning holidays. Her grown-up life was fat with pleasure, but after three years, then four and five, the pleasure grew thin. She’d come to Berkeley to find herself, but found that her self was not enough. She wanted a self of her self. She wanted a child.

  She’d been thirty-four when she came to this discovery. Her own mother had always seemed more irritated than fulfilled by motherhood, and for a long time, Kavya couldn’t imagine how it might feel, this compulsion that seemed to possess so many. But one morning, she woke up, and like gravel in her voice, it was there.

  She began to really look at children for the first time. Babies. Her chest ached at the sight of them. Her hands grew r
estless, like a smoker’s. She wanted to press one to the beat of her heart, feel the sweet, warm weight of a baby in her arms. She saw herds of children running, playing, frantic with joy, and wanted to run with them, to run like her life depended on it, her legs burning, her throat raw from shouting.

  To love profoundly, and be loved. To shape her own blood and body into sparkling new life. She could be home to someone, a safe and soft place in a world of ragged edges. She could teach a little boy, a little girl, how to make their way.

  It seemed simple at the start. Having a child, as she understood it, required a good deal of unprotected sex. Plenty of others had managed it. The goal was to have fun and not to worry. The path to motherhood would be wide and grassy, an open valley of possibility.

  It had begun in their living room. They’d had a quiet meal that night—baked eggs and polenta, breakfast for dinner. She’d led Rishi to the living room, sat him down, and grew suddenly, unexpectedly nervous. So rarely did they say anything that meant this much. Her pulse ricocheted and her mouth went dry.

  “I want to try for a baby.”

  Rishi had stared at her for a few long moments and then nodded, slowly.

  She studied his face. “You want one, right? You want a baby?”

  He squeezed her hand. “Sure. Of course I do.” He assumed he did. Children had seemed like a project planted permanently in the future. A certainty about which he never thought he’d be asked. Had anyone asked his own father if he’d wanted a baby?

  • • •

  DESPITE THE CLARITY of her desire, Kavya had no real idea of what sort of mother she’d be. She’d decided this much: She would take her child to the ocean whenever she could, and she would teach him about trees. They would go to Muir Woods and she would guide her child’s eye from the base of a tree—as big around as a bungalow—to the trunk that climbed and lost itself in green, tented pine. She would tell her child that the tree was taller and older than he could imagine, that the tree was taller than the Golden Gate Bridge, and the child would look right into her, his face just inches from her own, and tell her she was lying.