Rishi came away from the meeting with a heightened awareness of how children paid the price for adults and their calamitous judgment. He looked at the couples streaming past him, men and women, men and men, women and women. They all looked terribly sure of themselves. They walked like they knew what they had come for, like they could say for certain that their homes were better than the homes from which children were being taken. Such confidence worried Rishi. He doubted himself. How could a warm home and a hybrid car guarantee anything? And good intentions? These scared him the most: People with good intentions tended not to question themselves. And people who didn’t question themselves, in the scientific world and beyond, were the ones to watch out for.
That night, Rishi lay awake. The heat was up too high. He listened to his thoughts course past. Fostering, adoption’s slimmer cousin, lay on the pillow beside him now, blowing in his ear. Kavya had said she was cold and now her body was a campfire next to his. She lay awake beside him. Neither could sleep.
“Should we have sex?” Rishi asked.
“That’s not the solution,” Kavya said.
“Do we need a solution right now?”
The numbers had been running through Rishi’s mind, and they seemed to present a pretty tidy equation. Fostering paid for itself, especially if they fostered to adopt. The meeting had left him with a pit in his gut, but it was the right sort of pit. For the first time in a long while, Rishi sensed that the planning and talking and thinking about a child would result in something real, and possibly something wonderful.
He’d heard about bad foster parents, and he wanted to be one of the good ones. The life he’d envisioned for himself was changing. The future was being reborn. Rishi and Kavya’s conversations stepped up to a new level of complexity, a higher pitch of possibility.
“I think it sounds smart,” Rishi said. “Fostering.”
“I don’t like the sound of it.”
He knew she wouldn’t. He knew she’d bought into the wood paneling and party trays at the private agency.
“It’s not like the kids would be better there,” he said.
“Where?”
“At the private place. It’s not like you’re buying a better kid.”
“And?”
“So why not go with kids who really need us?”
“All these kids need us, Rishi. All of them.”
Yes, all those children. All those children needed them, and there was only one Rishi and one Kavya. The thought of making his own child, when there were already so many others, seemed suddenly obscene.
“I don’t think you’re thinking, though, Kavya. I mean, the price for the private—”
She sprang from her pillow. “The price! You’re thinking about the price!”
He sat up: “Well, someone has to. What do you want, Kavya? Do you want to spend everything? All of it? Do you want to go into serious debt when we don’t have to? Do you want to take away all the money that we might have spent on schools and—”
“I don’t want to lose the child.”
The sentence shot cold and clear through that overheated room.
“What?”
“I don’t want to foster a kid, and get attached to him, and then have to give him up when his mom gets her act together.”
“Oh.”
“That would be too much,” she said.
“But what if we go concurrent, and we end up adopting him?”
“That may not happen.”
Logic was Rishi’s weapon, and Kavya was using it against him.
The discussion continued for days. It skirted around fostering, adopting, the elusive day when they’d finally have a child. It never swelled to an argument, but rumbled with the persistence of an underground train. What resulted was this: a home inspection appointment with a licensing evaluator, an enrollment slip for four weeks of six-hour training sessions, twenty-four hours of training in all.
The social worker drove up in a Chevy Cavalier with government license plates. Her name was Joyce. She was, as Rishi had privately predicted, a rotund woman with a soft brown face and a hard, official edge that could shing like a switchblade. The first thing she asked to see was the child’s room; foster children couldn’t share a room with their foster parents. Kavya took her to the small guest room, still occupied by a double bed and squat bookshelf. Welcoming afternoon light filtered in through the window. Outside grew an old and abundant magnolia tree. She’d envisioned a nursery in here, with walls painted sage green, a white changing table and crib.
“And where would a child sleep?” Joyce asked.
“We’ll get a crib,” Rishi assured her. “One with organic wood, I was thinking. Hardwood, not composite. The composites leach formaldehyde.”
Joyce looked doubtful. “You know you might be getting a child, right? Not a baby?”
They’d signed up for a zero-to-five-year-old, and were hoping to land somewhere closer to the zero. “The crib would fold out!” Rishi said. “I mean, the ones I’ve seen—” He paused, cleared his throat, looked down at his feet. “I work at Weebies, and the ones on our site have sides that slide down and turn into little beds.” Joyce seemed to be watching more than listening. Rishi looked to Kavya. “But we could get something bigger, right?” He turned back to Joyce. “We saw this fire engine bed the other day. It was, like, in the shape of a fire engine, but with a—”
“That’s fine,” Joyce said.
Walking out the front door, she softened. “I think you two will do just fine.” She paused on the threshold. “We need more people like you.”
21.
The center of the universe was situated at the corner of Shattuck and Vine. Solimar spent her afternoons with Saoirse and Nacho, Green Pizza on one side, Chez Panisse on the other. And all around her, children, infants, strollers and carriers, mothers wrapped in layers, fresh cheeks blooming in the shade of tired eyes. And the fathers, men with saintly faces and childish bellies.
Soli might have lost herself in the stream of happy, healthy mothers who made their way down Shattuck Avenue, past the bakery, pausing at the florist, stopping for coffee. She went out each day with Nacho in a folding buggy, a bag slung over her shoulder (stuffed with diapers and wipes and a small stack of folded onesies, should the baby’s bowels grow volcanic) and a new pair of sunglasses (a gift to herself, from herself).
“Look at you,” Silvia said. “You look like one of those ladies. Like a Berkeley mother.”
Soli clicked her tongue. “I’m no Berkeley mother. I’m a mother in Berkeley, but I’m no Berkeley mother.” Fair enough. Her sunglasses came from the drugstore, her sweater fortified with rayon, not mountain-ready down fill. Her skin, flawless, was a product of youth, not of a go-to esthetician. For the most part, the mothers of Berkeley had a good twenty years on her. In Popocalco, they would have been grandmothers. And for the women around her, the afternoon was a time to stare through their sunglasses at the street, managing sippy cups and tamping down the flaring tempers of their toddlers. While they weren’t exactly relaxed, they weren’t exactly at work, either. But Soli was on the job.
At her side walked Saoirse, her strawberry hair in a high ponytail, the sweetness of sunscreen wafting upward, her limbs as fawnlike as her mother’s. There was no mistaking Soli for the mother of this Celtic fairy child. More obviously hers was the sleeping infant, his mouth slightly open and his wide swathe of cheek pressed to her chest.
Nine months had passed. And how do nine months pass? With sidewalks blue with rain. With an Easter, a birthday. Soli turned twenty, and her parents acquired a phone line. They called to tell her that she had given them more than they could have hoped for. Talking to them brought a swell of hot tears.
As she spoke, Ignacio reached for the phone, his wet lips churning, wanting not to talk, but to cram the thing in his mouth and suck. Soli twisted away from his reach, fearing that he’d cry i
f she put him down, revealing himself at last.
She had not found the courage to tell her parents that she was pregnant—the cojones, so to speak, and her ovarios were still catching their breath. And after she’d given birth and discovered the torrent of her own love for her child, and realized that the father was exactly who she’d hoped he would be, she cowered at the thought of explaining to them the grandson they might never see.
Popocalco, Papi, Mama, home—these receded even farther into the past, and Soli found herself living a life that was, more than ever, her very own. Returning to work at the Cassidys’ meant finding a newly negotiated rhythm. Her days pre-Ignacio had been quiet and calm. Cleaning every day meant not having to clean much, and she could stretch her mornings over a sparse list of things to do: after-breakfast dishes, wiping down surfaces, sweeping the floors or mopping them, checking the windows for spots, the toilets for spots, the mirrors for spots. She’d once had hours at her disposal to pick up the señora’s Delft figurines, to examine the passage of light through her finely buffed windowpanes, to rub a washcloth over faucet handles, just to see them shine.
But now, but now. Who knew this about children? They take up all your time. Even when they’re not doing a thing. What was Ignacio but a fleshy bulb of human growth? What could he possibly ask of Soli?
Only for her everything. Only for her every drop of time, of milk, of sight. To look away from Ignacio was to abandon him. To put him in a bouncy seat, catastrophic. To leave a room that he was in, unthinkable.
Soli couldn’t buff the windowsills. She couldn’t hold a ceramic figurine in the palm of her hand without Ignacio, clinging chimpishly to her chest, grabbing for it. So she carried him from chore to chore and grew used to him screaming. She tried to do the two-handed chores—the dishes, the mopping—when the Cassidys were out, so the shrieking wouldn’t disturb them. In a matter of months, the baby would need real food, more clothes, more shots. Getting fired was not an option. So Soli held Nacho over the toilet while she scrubbed it, she pressed him to her chest as she sprayed and scrubbed the stove, the oven, the cupboards. He fed at her breast as she ran a Brillo pad over the seams of the kitchen sink.
The señora came home early one afternoon. She stopped at the bathroom door and found Ignacio screaming on the tiled floor, Soli scrubbing furiously at the shower drain, leaking tears of her own.
“Soli!” the señora cried, her eyes perfect platelets of alarm.
And that’s when things began to change.
First: The señora bought a baby-carrying contraption. An Ergo.
Ergo, Soli began to work with her boy strapped to her chest. This solved the problem of the screaming, the one-armed scrubbing, and made things easier, in some ways.
Soli had seen other women, the Berkeley mothers, carry their babies in these things. She’d seen a woman carrying what must have been a three-year-old in one of these things. With Nacho strapped to her chest, and then her back, she returned to work. Still, she wondered, was this all that lay in store for her? Mornings and workdays and exhausted nights?
Soli was not tortured. Soli was not abused. So no, Soli didn’t have it so bad. She wasn’t cheated of pay, overworked, or starved. She was never actually threatened with deportation; never from the Cassidys’ tea-warmed lips did she hear the word ICE. She didn’t have to clean with materials that corroded her nasal passages or coated her intestines with toxic sludge. And for this she should have been happy. But the uncertainty of Soli’s happiness remained, a permanent raised eyebrow on the face of the great green woman she’d equated with America, the supposed mother of exiles. Soli had arrived tired, poor, a huddled mass indeed, and had been given a bed to sleep in and a place to work, money in hand, the outlines of a life. But Soli longed for more—and wasn’t this the American way? She could hear Checo laugh at her. More! Give me more! She couldn’t put a name to her hunger, and America made no promises. It was she, and the others like her, the fools with stars and stripes in their eyes, who imagined such rewards.
For a time, her working life became systematic. She cleaned in the mornings, made a snack for Saoirse and took it to preschool pickup. She washed dishes and sprayed countertops and folded toilet paper ends into sweet rosettes. Ignacio was fond of open windows, liked to grasp and turn the crank, liked to place his palm against the screen and feel the air pass against it. When she was alone, she’d pull her breast from her shirt and let him feed while she worked. Against the warm cushion of her breasts, Ignacio spent most of each day snoozing. His breath rattled when he slept. It was the sound of the wind within him, Soli told herself, the ebb and flow of his life source.
And one evening, Silvia had news. “The men came today,” she said. Soli had no idea what she meant, but it was never a good thing when men came. She clarified: “The men for the money. The coyote’s men.”
Soli slumped into a chair. The apartment around her hadn’t been touched. Silvia was calm. Nothing had been moved, nothing harmed. “And you had the money?”
“I did,” Silvia said. “Of course I did.” She brought out the notebook where Soli’s expenses had been tallied. “And now,” she said, “we begin the accounts.” Soli sat down with her cousin to decide how she’d pay back the three thousand dollars. There was no ideal plan; every option seemed to take too long or ask for too much. Choosing how to pay Silvia was like choosing which of her fingers to slice off. But eventually they settled on one, and Soli settled into the reality of having less to send home and to spend on her boy, of watching the colors of this dream fade, for a time, from brilliance.
• • •
A SEASON PASSED, and before Soli could pause to count the teeth on his gums, Ignacio turned one year old. She planned an evening with Silvia and the boys. The days were getting longer, so they’d spend an hour or two at a playground, and then take the boys to ice cream. Real ice cream, Soli promised them, with many scoops and chocolate sauce and fake cherries. It was a Thursday.
“Soli,” the señora said that morning. “We have a reception to get to this afternoon. Any chance you could watch Saoirse an extra hour or so? Till six or so? It’s just on campus. Just a show-your-face kind of thing.”
Soli liked that expression. A show-your-face kind of thing. She would use it herself one day.
The señora left at three in a current of perfume, a silk scarf trailing behind her. Saoirse, sitting on the living room rug with Ignacio, looked up when the door closed. “Where’s she going?”
“To a party, m’ija.”
The girl’s face crumpled.
“Not a fun party. Don’t worry.”
Soli’s thoughts turned to her own party, due to start in three hours. She’d meet Silvia at a park near their apartment. Silvia would bring a Tupperware of food, and they’d spread themselves over a picnic table beneath the last rays of the afternoon sun. Soli had seen other Mexican families celebrating in parks, with throngs of cousins and uncles and aunts. Paper lanterns hung from the trees, and piñatas. Music blared from radios. Someday I’ll have that, too, Soli told herself. Thoughts of an ideal future bobbed to the surface now and then. But because she didn’t know how this would come about, she tamped down her hopes of a sprawling and joyous throng. And when such thoughts popped back up, she let them float by, until they’d traveled out of sight again.
She made Saoirse a grilled cheese sandwich with the Gruyère her mother had set out. She chopped some carrots and poured a glass of soy milk. She would wait to feed Ignacio in the park, his birthday dinner, followed by his first taste of ice cream. At 5:30, Soli cleared away the dishes and fed Ignacio a snack, just a small one, just two crackers. Silvia was making tlayudas with fresh salsa. At 5:45, she changed Ignacio’s diaper and buttoned his sweater. At 6:00, bags packed, Ignacio in the Ergo, she waited by the door. The Cassidys owned a car that made hardly any noise, but Soli would recognize the tick-tick-tick of its approach.
At 6:10, she sat bac
k down, bag in hand, and waited. Saoirse was watching television. She thought about turning off the television then, to let Saoirse get her whining out before her parents returned. Six fifteen. Soli turned off the television to Saoirse’s wails. Six twenty. Soli scanned the sky. The sun was losing its verve. Her phone rang and she grabbed for it. Silvia.
“We’re on our way,” Silvia said. “Are you there already?”
“We’re leaving any minute. Any minute now.”
Six thirty came and went. Six forty-five. Seven.
Saoirse yawned. “It’s time for bed,” Soli told her, not at all sure of what time the girl went to sleep.
“I need to have my bath.”
“No bath tonight. Get in bed.” Soli helped her into pink pajamas, watched her scrape a toothbrush over her faded pebbles. Into the sink she spat a thin bubbly stream, then turned her teeth to Soli for inspection.
“Muy bien.”
In the darkened bedroom, she held Saoirse’s hand and willed her eyelids to close. The weight of Ignacio pulled at her shoulders, so she unsnapped the Ergo and lay him down next to Saoirse. He sat up and examined the fair-haired girl who lay before him. When he grabbed for her face, Soli whisked his hand away. She thought of leaving the girl, of letting the Cassidys find her asleep and safe, without her nanny. Soli never did bedtimes.
Seven fifteen passed and the sky went gray. The sun would retire for the evening, and within minutes, the day would be dark, the parks deserted. From the other room, she could hear her cell phone ring. It would be Silvia, asking where she was.
By 8:00 Ignacio lay asleep against her chest, unaware that he’d been alive a whole year.
Silvia, on the phone: “We’ll do it another day.”
“This weekend,” Soli whispered.
“This weekend.”
It was 9:00, and Soli sat staring into the living room, Ignacio asleep on the sofa, when she finally heard a key in the door.
“We’re home!” the señora called out, too loudly. She clicked into the kitchen on high-heeled boots, teetering in the half-dark. “Did you miss us? Is Saoirse in bed?” She was still speaking too loudly. Mr. Cassidy followed her in, handsome in a suit and tie, his hair swept gallantly off his forehead.
Lucky Boy Page 18