Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  That morning, Joyce had arrived and carried him into the living room. He was subdued and observant. His hair had grown since they’d last seen him, and a few curls fell over his forehead and grazed his brow. He wore a yellow T-shirt and red pants that stretched across the bulk of his diaper. This was the boy he remembered, and to see him again—his mop of dark hair, his dimpled knuckles—stirred in Rishi an unexpected longing.

  “Hi there,” Rishi said to Ignacio.

  From Joyce’s arms, Ignacio leveled his gaze on Rishi, and neither cried nor smiled. He seemed to be developing an image of his new father through the filter of his lashes. Rishi took the boy’s hand and ran the pads of his fingers over Ignacio’s miniature nails. Rishi wasn’t sure what a sixteen-month-old would want to hear. This one still looked babylike, with pillowy cheeks and skin so soft it vanished at his touch.

  “Would you like to hold him?” Joyce asked.

  Rishi turned to Kavya, who was bringing a warm bottle in from the kitchen. She stopped. She smiled. “Hold him,” she said.

  “Maybe I could—um—” Rishi pointed to the floor.

  “Let’s sit down,” Joyce said.

  So they sat on the floor together, the four of them, like they were at a picnic. Ignacio turned to the mound of toys that waited in the corner, reached for a wooden hammer and cobbler’s bench, and began taking drunken swipes at its blue and yellow pegs.

  “He’s not walking yet,” Joyce said. “He’s a little late, nothing to worry about. But he crawls like a champ.”

  “He’s doing well,” Kavya murmured as Ignacio whacked away. The women nodded gravely at each other.

  “Hi, Ignacio.” Kavya leaned in. “Hola, Ignacio,” she cooed. Ignacio looked up and a flutter of recognition passed over him. He stuck his lips together and made a sound, a nonsense sound, and handed her the hammer. Kavya laughed, her eyes glistened. They played quietly with Ignacio while Joyce, in her practiced way, retreated from the scene a few inches at a time. Finally, she rose to her feet.

  “Ignacio,” Joyce said. “I’m going to say bye-bye now, okay, sweet boy?” Ignacio looked up. He blinked, not comprehending. He reached an arm up for Joyce. “Okay, now. Okay, now, you be good, now. Bye-bye, Ignacio.” She backed out of the room and vanished into the front entryway. Ignacio watched her, craned his neck to find her again. They listened, the three of them, as the door opened and clicked shut.

  Rishi had read about crying in an article Joyce had given them. There was the angry cry. There was the attention-seeking cry. There was the tired cry. And there was the sad cry. The article was called “The Grieving Child.” At first, he hadn’t understood why grief would have anything to do with the boy’s arrival. There was nothing grievous about the situation, as far as Rishi could tell.

  As it settled upon Ignacio that Joyce was gone, he looked at Kavya, then Rishi. His lip trembled, and with a deep inhale, he let loose a blaring wail. It tightened to a scream, a steady siren. Then the cry halted, his mouth hung wide open and silent. His eyes bulged.

  “Oh my god,” Kavya said. “Ignacio?” He sucked in a breath and set off on a new howl, this one longer and angrier than the first. When Kavya reached over to pick him up, he shrieked and clawed her away. His uncut nails left a long scratch down her cheek.

  “Hey,” Rishi said. “Hey, you okay?” Kavya touched a hand to her face, blinking. Rishi reached out to grasp Ignacio beneath the arms. Ignacio kicked out with broad-footed, astonishing force, and Rishi leapt back.

  Kavya knelt beside him. They sat and watched the child for several minutes.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with him. Maybe he’s sad,” she said. “How would I know.”

  She tried again to pick Ignacio up, but he twisted himself away. “Hold on,” she said, brightening. She jogged to the kitchen and returned with a cup of water. Kneeling before the boy, she stuck her tongue in the water, flicked it back and forth. “Perro!” she said. “Ignacio, perro! Woof woof!” She lapped at the water, wagged her tongue. Ignacio stopped crying, took the cup, and dumped it on the ground, wailing again, louder than before. Kavya rose to her feet, her hand over her mouth, and walked to the kitchen. Through the open doorway, Rishi watched her stand alone, one hand on the refrigerator door, motionless.

  The boy had crawled to the corner, and now lay flat on his back. He screeched rhythmically, his legs pounding out a steady beat against the wall. Then, on a wave of fresh indignation, he began to yell. He yelled. He yelled. He yelled.

  “Ignacio,” Rishi said as gently as he could. “Ignacio.” He tried it loud and firm, as he’d seen dog trainers do. “IGNACIO.”

  The boy paused, turned to Rishi, and his yells juddered to whimpers. His arms went slack, his tears spilled quietly to the rug. Keep a grieving child warm, the article had said. Sadness precipitates feelings of cold. Rishi picked a blanket off a neat stack in the corner and draped it over the boy.

  They met in the kitchen.

  “What are we doing?” she asked. Her forehead rested on the refrigerator door. It’s what Rishi had wanted to say, but he knew very well that he couldn’t have said it.

  “He’s okay,” Rishi said. “He’s in there, he’s just—” The word escaped him.

  “Catatonic?”

  “Sure. Yeah. He’s fine. He’s just catatonic.”

  Kavya didn’t smile. “Should we call Joyce?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s give it some time.”

  “You don’t want her to think we’re already screwing up, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  They stood in the kitchen together for a long while, until Kavya opened the fridge.

  “I’m hungry,” Rishi said.

  She pulled out a loaf of bread. “This is for Ignacio.”

  “Can he eat bread?”

  She looked down at the loaf. “He has teeth.”

  From the cupboard she pulled a tin of formula—expensive formula, organic, sustainably farmed, snowy pure. “He doesn’t need that,” Joyce had pointed out. “Plain old milk is fine after a year.” But Kavya had researched this formula, with its promises of DHA and iron; she felt reassured by its label, a hand-drawn child, diaper-clad, tromping through a wood.

  When Rishi and Kavya approached the boy, he lay coiled into his blanket, a cotton-swaddled nautilus.

  “He’s asleep,” Kavya said.

  Indeed, Rishi heard the elongated snuffles, caught the rise and fall of his back.

  Ignacio woke up twenty minutes later, and Kavya fed him formula. He accepted a bite of buttered bread and two spoons of mashed banana before turning away.

  “You should ask Joyce what he’s been eating,” Rishi said.

  “Why?” Kavya scowled.

  “Comfort food. Eating what he ate at his old house could be comforting.” He’d read this, and was surprised that Kavya hadn’t.

  That night, Kavya slept next to Ignacio’s crib, rolled in a duvet, her index finger clasped in his fist through the bars of the crib.

  “It was good,” she said to Rishi the next morning. “He held my hand all night. He wouldn’t let go.”

  Rishi nodded, sipped his coffee. “He’s attaching.”

  But Ignacio returned that day to his corner. He sat in a heap for much of the morning, gazing wet-eyed at the door. Now and then he picked up a toy, turned it over in his hands, and put it back down. His gaze flitted constantly to the door.

  Rishi was packing his satchel for work. Rishi would come and go as he always had. His schedule wouldn’t change, and Kavya wondered if he understood how spectacularly their lives had. When Kavya sat next to Ignacio and picked up the cobbler’s bench he’d so enjoyed the day before and said, “Here, Ignacio, mira, Ignacio,” he snatched it from her and flung it against the wall.

  “It’s magical thin
king,” Rishi said.

  Kavya threw him a look.

  “He thinks that hammer thing is what made Joyce leave.”

  Kavya squinted at him. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Uh, no. It’s not. It’s how they think.”

  Kavya had the maternal instincts she needed. She had the love, she had the faith and the food and the granite force of her will. But she’d ignored almost all the reading material Joyce had given them. It’s so pessimistic, she’d said, and handed the articles to Rishi.

  “But why Joyce?” Kavya asked.

  “Well, okay, maybe the first foster mother. Or his real mom. But Joyce was the final link to them. Or something.”

  “Or something. We’re not part of the chain. At all.”

  Rishi went on. “Ignacio thinks it’s something he did that made Joyce leave. He equates that toy with Joyce leaving him here. So he won’t play with it. He thinks if he doesn’t play with it, she’ll come back. And take him away from here.”

  “Really.”

  “It’s called magical thinking.”

  “Oh.”

  Ignacio looked from Kavya to Rishi, from Rishi to Kavya. Rishi picked up his backpack, opened the door that had swallowed Joyce, and left. On the patio, he listened for a moment for Ignacio’s cries, but heard nothing.

  • • •

  KAVYA WATCHED RISHI mount his bicycle, straighten his backpack, and ride off, shrinking with distance, until he looked more like a schoolboy than a father. She’d taken three weeks off, with a cut to her pay, to adjust to life with Ignacio. She had found a daycare center for him. And yes, she’d wondered why she was bringing a child into her life, only to leave him in daycare. But the thought passed quickly: This is just the way things are, she told herself. Mothers have to work.

  She called Joyce. The shake in her own voice surprised her.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Joyce said. “He’s letting go of his old home, and the crying shows he’s able to attach. I’d be more worried if he wasn’t upset. Just be with him, and he’ll come around. Okay?”

  She hung up and turned to Ignacio. He sucked on his lower lip and watched her.

  “Stories,” Kavya said. “Libros.”

  Books worked. Ignacio didn’t throw books. And the way he watched her lips move made her feel that he was listening. His attention grew sharp, wide-eyed, when she was in the midst of a story, and she felt, for extended periods that morning, that she was doing something for him—that she was filling a need rather than signifying an absence.

  Still, the easy, affectionate clasp with which he’d held her at the foster home was gone. Or it was hiding, waiting to see that the coast was clear. While she read, she stole glances at his eyes. From black pupils sprang amber coronas, riotous with light, fenced in by solemn mahogany. She read Goodnight Moon, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Jamberry, and Each Peach Pear Plum. She started Stellaluna, the story of a bat adopted by birds, but closed it when it became clear that a bat was not meant to be with birds.

  When they finished with the books, the house grew quiet again.

  One day, she would look back with longing at these first endless mornings. She’d see this as a period of tranquility that she should have savored. That first day was a valley abandoned, murmuring and dry, punctuated only by mealtimes and diaper changes, Kavya’s stories and one merciful nap. Kavya read to Ignacio until her voice turned to rust.

  The next morning, when the door clicked shut and Rishi was gone, Ignacio picked up a book and handed it to Kavya. The morning after, he crawled to her lap as she read, and rested a sturdy elbow on her thigh. On the fourth day, Kavya picked up a book as soon as Rishi left. She began reading, when Ignacio broke the quiet with a scream. He pointed to the door, tears streaming. There seemed to be words in his cries. It seemed he was genuinely trying to tell her something.

  “Come here,” Kavya said, and picked him up. This time, he let her. She cradled him in her lap. This time, he burrowed his face into her chest and seemed to find solace in the warm valley between her breasts. She picked up a stack of books and began to read. The rhythms of the prose calmed her, and seemed to calm Ignacio as well. The longer she read, the more solidly he sank into the curve of her body, until his head rubbed up beneath her chin and she could smell the wheaty warmth of his scalp. And when the phone rang and she tried to put him down, he struggled against her, and she stayed put, letting the line ring itself into silence.

  That night, as Kavya dozed off by Ignacio’s crib, she felt a yank at her hair. She turned to find two copper pennies, wide awake. She sat up. “Iggy,” she whispered. “Ignacio.” And then, as babies do—as babies must do—Ignacio sat up and reached up with both arms, asking to be held.

  Kavya had read the parenting books on sleep and food and discipline. She’d read them all and promptly forgot them. Those first raw days and nights played out on a separate plain, where discipline and sleep patterns didn’t factor, where all that mattered was the sealing of a crack, the winning of Ignacio’s acceptance. For this, Kavya didn’t need rules. She got by on sheer desire.

  She spent every night that week hunched in a duvet next to Iggy’s crib. When she sat up, he sat up, and vice versa. He was a nervous sleeper. If she tried to leave, he cried out for her. If she had to pee, she did it with Ignacio sitting on her lap. In the space of those few days, he’d gone from not wanting her to not wanting to let her go. Only when he slept did he release her from his sight.

  Surely, his real mother lived in his memory. What did he think had happened to her? Sometimes sitting on the living room floor, he looked up at Kavya, questions hovering like bumblebees at his lips. “She’s all right,” Kavya answered. “She just can’t be with you now.” Kavya knew little more than this—only that Ignacio’s mother was alive and well and in a detention center. “And that’s all,” she said aloud. “We’re taking care of you now. This is your home. Your good home.” She spoke the words that she was willing to hear, and didn’t venture further. The truth was a fragile thing.

  And early one morning, before the first flush of day, she sat on the floor by Ignacio’s crib, half asleep. The boy lay cradled on her lap. She felt the riffle of his hand on her belly. As she looked down, he pulled up her shirt, exposing her belly, its one narrow roll, to the twilight chill. She tried to pull the shirt back down, but Ignacio was adamant. In a flash, his hand pushed the fabric up to her shoulder. Her breast hung forth, a soft and bronzed cupola. It took her a moment, in the fog of sleep, to realize what he was doing.

  “Ignacio,” she said, and pushed him away. Ignacio whined and clawed at her chest. She picked him up and set him on his rump. He sank into himself then, and lay on the floor, his face buried in an elbow, his shoulders shaking. Kavya had finally done some reading on adopting toddlers. This was the sad cry, and it ripped into her more deeply than the shrieking or clawing had. She watched her boy weep, defeated. She would give him what he wanted. She would have to try.

  For the sake of comfort, she took off her shirt. Sitting cross-legged, she picked Ignacio up again, and placed him in the well of her lap. He stopped crying and wrapped himself around her middle, his head by one breast, his knees by the other. He took her nipple between his lips, latched on, and began to suck. Kavya gasped at the force of it. Ignacio’s jaws worked at her breast. Kavya hunched over and bit her lip against the pain of cutting teeth, wondering all the while if maybe—anything was possible, where his desire met her hope, his mouth her glands. But eventually, he stopped sucking and unlatched. He frowned at the nipple, glistening now with his saliva. He rolled to the floor, then crawled to the bedroom door. That was it. He’d given up on her empty breast, and would never bother with it again.

  • • •

  RISHI WATCHED THE BOY grab one Cheerio at a time from the small bowl before him: breakfast. Ignacio picked up a chunk of banana and pressed it between his fingers until the yellow flesh caved
and squelched between his knuckles. There were times when Rishi found himself staring at the boy with a sensation he had trouble naming. It was something close to surprise, but closer to incomprehension—of who and how this small child was, sitting opposite him in a high chair, cramming banana in his mouth. There were times when he looked at Ignacio the way one might look at a sculpture: for the fine curve of his nose or the sweetly turned petal of his bottom lip or the warm opalescence of his skin. And then, of course, there were times when Ignacio turned all too human, shrieking and banging, caught in a tempest. These moments, thankfully, fell under Kavya’s jurisdiction.

  I love you, Ignacio, he imagined saying. But Ignacio was another parent’s child. He hadn’t realized this until the day the boy arrived. Ignacio hadn’t signed on to Rishi’s love, not even to Kavya’s, who seemed already to have fallen, irretrievably. Rishi didn’t know when or if he’d be allowed to love the boy. He did know this much: He wanted good things for Ignacio—food and kindness and a clean, safe home. He wanted to be a haven for the downy head, the proud, elfin shoulders. He didn’t want to let him down.

  It was for this reason, Rishi told himself, that he was spending ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day at Weebies, pricing supplies for the Stratosphere, calculating, anticipating, building theory into reality in a manner, he hoped, that was authoritative enough to convince Vikram Sen that Rishi was more than a ventilation engineer—that Rishi was both capable and destined to be someone important.

  He began stopping by Vik’s office nearly every day. Sally knew how many sugars he took in his chai, and he had a throw pillow on Sen’s sofa—one with an elephant embroidered on it—that he liked to wrap his arms around when thinking or talking. During these visits, a piece of his old self returned to him.

  It was a Thursday afternoon now, their usual meeting time, and Rishi stepped into the office, shoes off. Vik was lying on the ground, his head on Rishi’s special pillow.

  “Should I come back?” he asked.

  “Rishi-bhai.” Sen tossed him the pillow. “I have a bad back. The floor helps.”