Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  “So you’re Saoirse’s nanny?”

  “Yes,” Soli had said, and smiled.

  The woman smiled sweetly, nodding. “Wonderful.”

  Soli smiled again.

  The woman smiled back. She was a nanny to Saoirse, and sometimes it seemed among this crowd, a nanny to Ignacio, as well.

  A moment later, another nanny arrived, this one clearly Salvadoran, followed by a Venezuelan and another, whom Soli immediately pegged as Mexican. The nannies clustered together, spoke in rapid Spanish, darker and shorter shadows of the parents. There was one nanny who spoke no Spanish; she was Asian, with long black hair and a clear smile. She smiled at them. They smiled at her, before turning back to their conversations. Soli took a few steps over, until she hovered at the outer edge of the Spanish nanny circle. She listened more than she spoke, happy just to have a place to stand.

  When Soli complained that the preschool parents never spoke to her, Silvia shook her head. “There’s a name for that,” she said. “It’s called a First World Problem.”

  “Okay, so it’s not such a big deal.” But it was, in the way that very small things could be a big deal within the very small orbits on which they spun.

  24.

  A morning in June. The day started with a bowel movement from Nacho that exploded from his diaper and shot up his back, browning the sheets of his crib. Later that morning, the broken showerhead plummeted off its bracket and clocked Soli on the head. It landed with a heavy thud on the shower floor. “What was that?” Silvia shouted.

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing!” Soli reconnected the head, but not without soaking the floor of the bathroom. In the kitchen, she dropped a glass that broke around her toes. And after breakfast, when she opened the cupboard to put back a cereal box, she discovered a bottle of syrup, overturned and missing its cap. Syrup oozed from the head of the lady-shaped bottle and pooled on the shelf. Worse than this, it swarmed with ants. The smarter ants stayed at its edges, and a single file of emissaries marched off to gather more troops. The stupid and greedy ants trudged to its center, got stuck, struggled vainly in the dense golden pool. They gorged themselves, the idiots in the middle. They would eat themselves to death. At this point, Soli should have given up and gone back to bed.

  She should have stayed out of the way of this day. She should have let this day pass, like an overcrowded bus, and waited for the next one. But instead, she hopped on. The Cassidys expected her, and Silvia was honking from the car downstairs.

  The rest of the morning passed without incident. Nothing broke, nothing burned, Nacho’s stomach seemed to settle, and so did Soli. It appeared that the day’s tilt-a-whirl of minor disaster had slowed to a rest. That afternoon, Saoirse came bounding from the schoolhouse door and informed Soli that they’d be playing with Paloma that afternoon. The children, one by one, were turning five and taking it upon themselves to arrange their own social plans. Parents laughed about this at the school gates, trading stories of their hilarious and intelligent children, lobbing anecdotes about each other’s offspring, to add a sheen of munificence to their boasting. For Soli, these charming little social planners presented a dilemma. For four- and five-year-olds, playdates almost always included parents. It was assumed, therefore, that the parents would get along and want to spend time together. It was assumed, also, that parents were parents, and not nannies. It was rare for a parent to socialize with a nanny, particularly one whose English was only passable. Soli knew the mother of this Paloma. The woman dressed in scarves and swept a severe fringe of gray hair across her forehead. She spoke incessantly at the school gates, with a sort of focus that permitted no interruption. She addressed herself to whomever would listen, but ignored Soli and the few other nannies. Soli couldn’t stomach the idea of spending an hour with this woman, and she was pretty sure the woman wouldn’t want to spend any length of time with her.

  The little girl, Paloma, sprinted from the door herself, swinging a large metal lunch box. “We’re going to the park with Saoirse!”

  The mother gazed up at Soli, and Soli waited for her to say something, anything, to get them out of the arrangement. Surely, this woman who couldn’t stop talking would be able to come up with an excuse to keep the date from happening. But the woman’s lips parted, and no sound came out. She seemed to be waiting for Soli to act. And so, Soli said, “I can take the girls. To the park. I can take them both.” Ignacio yelped in protest.

  The mother brightened and said, “Fantastic!” It was the first word she’d spoken to Soli, and for a moment, it felt like conversation.

  And so Soli took the two girls to the park. It was a big one, with three separate playgounds, and a wide, steeply sloped hill that led off the sports courts of a local middle school. The mother walked her daughter over to the park, just half a block from the school. “See you in an hour? Okay?” She bade the little girl goodbye and winked at Soli.

  Saoirse took one hand, and Paloma, without hesitating, took the other. Soli was glad for the simple weights and measures of a child’s judgment. At the park, she settled onto a bench, Ignacio snoozing in his carrier, and watched a hummingbird hover over a wall of freesia, making its promise to every blossom. Paloma planted herself in the shade of the slide, while Saoirse leapt from slide to ladder to swing, unfettered by height or gravity or the scrape of sand on skin. Soli clucked and called out to her to stop. She feared for this child with no lashes, with skin so pale she could see the indigo streams beneath.

  At last, Saoirse came to a rest beside Paloma, and the two busied themselves with the quiet intricacies of being girls. Girls are not like boys, everyone said. They don’t have kick-fights on the playground or step on one another’s necks. They don’t delight in yelling or throwing, in discovering new avenues of destruction. Girls swing from monkey bars. They talk and plot and plan and play. They are quieter. They hold hands. They sit. They make dolls from twigs and rocks. They make cradles from bark and grass. They are quiet. They are sometimes a little too quiet.

  Soli looked up from her sun-struck daze. She’d fallen asleep on the playground bench. On her phone, twenty minutes had passed. It was a warm day for the season, and after days of rain, the playground was crowded, the children frenetic. Ignacio nestled into her chest. Around her, children swarmed anonymously, building a wall of noise. She looked for Saoirse. She didn’t see her. No Paloma, either.

  The last time she’d seen them, the two girls had been tucked beneath a wooden drawbridge, sticking sandy twigs between the slats. She turned one way, then the other. She turned a full circle. She searched under the bridge, around the bridge, on the other side of it. The girls were nowhere. She called their names, and then she shouted them. Children stopped playing. Parents turned to stare. The girls were nowhere to be found.

  Kind strangers offered to help. Soli felt the questions before she heard them—How old? What do they look like? What are their names? She couldn’t find the words to answer. Around the playground, she saw blond and brown and black heads. No pale amber. No Saoirse. She tried to remember what Paloma was wearing; she didn’t know the girl well enough to be able to spot her from afar. Any of them could have been Paloma. All of them were. And none of them.

  To lose a child, even for a few moments, sends a panicked ring from ear to ear. To lose a child for several minutes—to lose two children—can cancel the air altogether. Soli crossed the playground, her throat sucking and closing, her vision going gray. She found herself in the parking lot, weaving between cars and peering in their windows. She ran to an open soccer field. Ignacio laughed as she ran, and held on to her cheeks. She crossed the soccer field to search in the bordering bushes. She found a discarded tricycle and a single dirty white shoe.

  “Nacho,” she pleaded. “Nacho, where are they?” Nacho swung his head around, searching wildly for the source of his mother’s distress. She rummaged for her cell phone to call Silvia,
forgetting the numbers at first, then whispering them aloud to stoke her memory.

  “Bueno,” Silvia answered.

  “Silvia!”

  “What happened?”

  “I can’t find them. Las pequeñas. They’re lost!”

  “Where are you?”

  Soli told her. “We’re at the park,” she said, “the one by the school.”

  Silvia cursed. “Soli,” she said.

  “I can’t find them! Help me, Silvia, please!”

  “Soli.”

  Soli began to shriek into her phone, panicked now, beyond words.

  “Soli! Calmate! Stay there. Don’t move. Where’s Nacho?”

  “Here, with me.”

  “Stay there. I’ll bring the car.”

  In the distance, Soli spotted the park office. She would find help there. But if they called the police? If the girls were missing, they would call the police. And Soli couldn’t risk the police. She had to think of herself, her boy. So she walked to the window and looked in. A woman at the counter looked back out at her. The rest of the room was empty. She had a better idea: the nannies. She scanned the playground for brown skin. The nannies would help her look and they’d know well enough not to call the police. She ran for the slides and the swings.

  “Soli!” At the head of the parking lot stood Silvia. “Get in the car. We’ll drive around the area.”

  Together, they drove slowly around the park, coursing along ever-widening circles, Soli calling “M’ija! Paloma!” from her window. Silvia joined in, her hands on the steering wheel, her face out the window, yelling to the street, the occasional pedestrian, the rows and rows of closed doors. They circled onto Shattuck, its wide avenues a wilderness of cars and buses.

  And then Soli’s cell phone rang. It was a number she’d never seen.

  “Is this So-lee?”

  “This is Soli.”

  “Soli!” She heard the little girl’s voice in the background. “Soli, where are you?”

  “We have two girls here who say you’re they’re caretaker?”

  “Where are they? Who is this?”

  It was the woman in the park office. Soli laughed with relief and marveled at the resourceful little girl she was raising, a little girl who remembered the number Soli had taught her, sung to the tune of “Pajarito.” When she saw Saoirse again, she would twirl her through the air.

  “I’ve got ’em here in the office,” the woman said. And then her voice sank doubtfully. “You are coming, aren’t you? To pick them up?”

  “I’m coming. Yes, I’m coming.”

  “I’ll just give her mom a call, too. Just in case.”

  “No, no! I’m coming.”

  “It’s no trouble,” the woman said, and hung up.

  Silvia was already driving back to the park. “So?”

  “They’re calling the señora.”

  “Ai, mierda.” She leaned in, and the car jumped forward, speeding down Shattuck now, through one yellow light, then another.

  Soli slammed her fist against the door and cursed. Silvia breathed a high whistle and chuckled.

  “I didn’t ask to be their nanny!” Soli nearly shouted at Silvia. She’d never shouted at Silvia before.

  Silvia smiled at the windshield. “Soli Poppins, Soli Poppins,” she said, and shook her meaty head. Soli wanted to bop it with her fist.

  “You’re supposed to be my friend,” Soli said. “Aren’t you?”

  Silvia shrugged.

  “Aren’t you?”

  Silvia let out a yelp that startled Nacho and sent him wailing. “You want me to hold your hand and tell you they were wrong, Soli? You lost their babies at the playground! What were you doing? The little girl calls her mama crying? From a stranger’s phone? And you want me to tell you they were wrong? You’ll be lucky if they don’t fire you.”

  Soli sat back, closed her eyes. “I know that.”

  Silvia calmed. “So don’t tell me I didn’t support you.”

  “I know.”

  “A lot of people have it worse than you,” she said. “You’re lucky you work for people who look at you like you’re a real human. Most of us get treated like dogs in this country. Worse than dogs.”

  Soli had seen how dogs were treated in this country, and she knew that Silvia was right. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. She sank into her seat, helpless under the weight of two lost girls.

  “Don’t tell me I’m not your friend,” Silvia muttered, her eyes on the road. “Pulled you out of that mierda-de-burro village.”

  “Yes,” Soli said. “Thank you.”

  Silvia turned, frowned, and took her hand off the steering wheel to wrap it around Soli’s.

  And that’s when Sylvia ran the red light. She zoomed through the intersection of Shattuck and University with hardly a thought.

  Horns blared around her. “Why’re they honking?”

  Soli turned around. A cyclist launched an empty plastic water bottle at their back window.

  “Culero,” Silvia muttered.

  “Silvia. The light was red!”

  “What? No. Psh. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Silvia, turn here. I see police. Please.”

  Any other day, Silvia would have been right. But on this day of days, she could only be wrong. If she’d believed Soli and turned a corner, then maybe the cop on the motorcycle would have lost interest. Maybe the pedestrian who pointed out their car would have given up and shrugged them off. But their blue Honda ambled stupidly down Shattuck. It seemed not to know that pedestrians were pointing, that cyclists were grinning, that the cops had caught their scent. If this had been a television show, the streets of Berkeley would have opened up and let them zoom through, lady-rebel style, leaving the cop on his motorcycle buzzing and lost like an injured bee. But this wasn’t television. This was Berkeley, and Berkeley on this day, as on every other, was full of people. People and bikes and cars and babies and students and dogs and even an alpaca standing, inexplicably, at a crosswalk. There was no room for a high-speed chase or even a low-speed chase, and the blue Honda was running out of options.

  Silvia glanced up at her rearview mirror. “Mierda.”

  A police car joined the motorcycle. The red lights of the cop car swept left-right-left. It bleeped three times. They sped through another red light, missed an oncoming car by inches.

  “They’re giving up!” Silvia cried. But the cop car was right behind them. And then there were two. With barely a glance at oncoming traffic, she swung left at the next intersection, zoomed down the street, past houses, past a stop sign, swinging right and right and left.

  Soli shrieked and hid her head in her arms. “Stop it, Silvia. Stop! Just stop!”

  “They can’t get us,” Silvia said. Silvia ripped down the narrow avenues, but the police car roared right behind. A loudspeaker was telling them to pull over, but Silvia kept on going. Soli thought only of Ignacio, strapped in and helpless in the back of the careening vehicle. She craned back to find him staring wide-eyed out the rear windshield, his two teeth bared. Back on Shattuck now, they burned down the main strip.

  “Stop it, Silvia! Stop the car!”

  Silvia swerved to miss a cyclist. She swung back into her lane. She chipped the curb. The tire screeched, the hood leapt skyward, the car spun one revolution, two. They crunched, at last, into the side of a tall concrete barrier. Through the window, the hood of Silvia’s car had bent in half, and smoke began to seep out its side.

  Cyclists. In the weeks to follow, Soli would think most bitterly of the cyclists, smug in their helmets and slick shorts. From her side mirror, Soli saw a cyclist slow to a stop, pull out his water bottle and suck from it, watching, cold as a shark. Three police cars crept in close. Walkers gathered, students with backpacks, a man with a stroller.

  Ignacio set off a shriek
ing cry.

  From behind, a robotic loudspeaker: “Step out of the car.”

  “Don’t move,” Silvia said. “Callate, Nacho.”

  “STEP OUT OF THE CAR. WITH YOUR HANDS UP.”

  Silvia leaned into the steering wheel and stared straight out the windshield at her smoking, mangled hood.

  “Silvia.”

  Behind her, the doors of the two police cars opened, all four of them at once, as if they’d driven into a television show.

  Soli sucked in her breath and opened her door. She stepped out, slowly. She raised her arms above her shoulders, as she’d seen on cop shows. This was something she never thought she’d do. The lights of a siren whirled round and round behind them.

  The policeman closest to her had been reaching for his holster, but let go of it when he saw Soli. Her hands trembled by her ears. From the corner of her eye, through the filter of her fingers, she watched the dance of red lights on a white wall. She watched this dance as if there were nothing else to see, as if officers were not approaching, extracting handcuffs from their belts, pulling Silvia, limp and sullen, from the driver’s seat, and stooping, peering through the backseat window, at the little boy, at her Nacho, who waited and watched, shouting syllables, one small palm pressed against the window.

  “They’ve got a baby!” an officer barked. Ignacio, startled, began to howl.

  Silvia stood by Soli, heads held high, wrists behind their backs.

  “Nacho!” Soli called. “Estoy aqui!” Silvia hissed her quiet.

  “He’s all right,” the cop said, chewing his gum and crossing his arms. “You got guns in there?”

  “No.”

  “No guns? You got drugs? Drogas?”

  There was no reason for him to ask. Already the large blond officer sat on the passenger seat, opening the glove compartment, spilling the contents onto the floor, poking his fingers in and baring his teeth with the effort. “You can’t do that,” Silvia spat. Soli cowered. “You can’t search our car like that.” He would find nothing but a map of San Francisco, a Lila Downs cassette tape, a ChapStick, and a maxi-pad.