Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  But today, Shattuck Avenue buzzed with life in the sun shower of early evening. Iggy spread his small palms over Rishi’s ears, filtering the street noise. In a window’s reflection, he noticed a leaf in the boy’s hair, from an earlier brush with a birch tree.

  “Papa?” Iggy asked, but said no more.

  Rishi stopped at the corner and let the foot traffic wash over him. People carried bread under their arms, toddlers against their chests, pizza in promising brown boxes. A line had formed outside Green Pizza and trailed halfway down the block. People in Berkeley loved to stand in line for food; it meant they’d found something special, something worth waiting for. It spoke of their unflagging devotion to the best of the culinary best. People smiled at Rishi, at Iggy on the throne of his father’s shoulders. People waved up at him, people pointed and grinned. People said hello. A man with a beard and a T-shirt that read Live in a Yurt gave Iggy a high five. Being a father made him a part of this place, Rishi realized. He was no longer just a scientist, a pizza eater, a line dweller, a street crosser. Ignacio rooted him to the hum of this sidewalk. Ignacio brought him to Earth.

  They stood by the wall of open windows and listened to the dinner band, a jazz ensemble with a female singer. When Rishi looked up, he saw that Iggy was fixed on the double-bass player, who was plucking at the strings of the man-sized instrument, sending out a dignified thump. They stayed until intermission, Rishi swaying and Ignacio tapping a beat on his head.

  When he walked back down Vine, the white Prius was gone.

  He opened the door to a warm fog. He had nothing against Preeti, but he was happy she’d gone. He ducked into the doorway, careful of Iggy’s head. From the kitchen came the scent of boiling pasta, empty and nutty and clean all at once. He heard a knife on a chopping board, Kavya sitting at the countertop, reclaiming her space. On his shoulders, Iggy sighed and wrapped his arms around Rishi’s head. Rishi thought of their first meeting, the foster home, when he’d felt the undecided heartbeat, not in Iggy’s chest, but in the house, in the air around them. The tripping pulse hadn’t come from Rishi’s heart, or Kavya’s; nor was it a shared syncopation. What fed that odd little rhythm were three hearts, Rishi’s and Kavya’s and Iggy’s, beating in quick succession. He’d expected to will himself into fatherhood, and had failed in many ways. But now, in the orderly clamor of their kitchen, the alarm of illness quelled, the night fast approaching, and the boy’s fat legs dangling down his shoulders, Rishi saw them as if for the first time—his wife, his child—and felt, at last, a sense of possibility.

  • • •

  SUNDAY MORNING, Rishi drove Kavya and Iggy to the emergency room. Iggy had been awake all night, barking deep wet coughts, and his fever had stayed stubbornly high. By morning, he could barely keep his eyes open, and his breath came in frantic gusts. The verdict: Kavya had the flu and Iggy had pneumonia. The boy’s diagnosis filled Rishi’s own lungs with nervous exhaust. He shook his head at the doctor. “That can’t be possible,” he said.

  “It’s pneumonia,” the doctor said. He held a sweet rehydration drink to Ignacio’s lips. “It happens. His pulse oxygen is lower than it should be—” He stopped short. “Are you okay? Do you need to sit down?”

  “I’m fine,” Rishi said, but sat down. From the examination table, Iggy reached out for him. The doctor placed the boy on Rishi’s lap, then took Rishi’s temperature.

  Rishi looked down at his hand and saw that it was trembling, tapping side to side like a tabla player’s.

  “You’re fine. Don’t let this worry you, all right? We’ll start him on an antibiotic. He’ll be fine.”

  Rishi nodded. “Modern medicine,” he said, hoping to comfort himself. Ignacio took Rishi by the ears and brought his face close, so close that Rishi could feel the puff of each quick breath from his nostrils. Iggy pressed his forehead to Rishi’s, squeezed Rishi’s cheeks between his palms, leveled his eyes—wider now, more alert—to his father’s, and poured into them a wave of calm.

  That night, Kavya rolled herself in the duvet and slept diagonally across the bed, and it was Rishi who slept on the floor by Iggy’s crib. If Ignacio knew about past lives, in the way young children sometimes did, he didn’t let on. The blanket across his chest, the hiss of breath through his nostrils, seemed to be all Iggy knew. His dreams, the picture shows that coursed behind his flickering lids—these would constitute the depth and width of living, until his eyes opened and the show leaked away and he returned to this world, to this father who watched him sleep. He slipped a finger through the crib rail, and instinctively, Iggy wrapped his own fist around it. Rishi measured his own breath to Iggy’s, and listened to the rattle in his chest. He lay awake, anticipating the boy’s next cry. He worried that they’d broken him.

  Most parents worry. Most parents worry from day one that their child will stop breathing, that their child will fall out of bed, be crushed in the night by a falling light fixture or sat on by a cat. Most parents experience the worry and push their way through it, so that by the time they’re parents of two-year-olds or three-year-olds, individuals who really are capable of destroying themselves, they’ve learned not to worry. Even when they should. Rishi, however, was a newly born parent, and fearful. Maybe this was a good thing. Maybe it was fear that turned him, that early August morning, into a father.

  36.

  And one day, Iggy began to walk. He was eighteen months old. It happened in the evening, when both Kavya and Rishi were home. He’d been pulling himself around the dining table, as usual, while Kavya chopped an apple-jicama-cabbage slaw. She picked up an apple wedge and bit into it. At the sound of the wet crunch, Iggy swung around and took a step away from the chairs, and another, until he found himself with nothing to hold on to, teetering forward, backward, in midair. Kavya stopped chewing, and watched. Iggy looked up at her, but didn’t thump down on his behind, like most children did. Instead, he tottered in place until he’d struck a balance. And then, very carefully, as if a miscalibrated angle would bring him crashing down, he raised his arm and pointed to the apple, crimson and cream, in Kavya’s hand.

  She knelt down and coaxed him forward, holding out the apple slice. “Apple?” she said. “Apple?” She felt like she was spying on the universe’s inner mechanics—the crack of a bird’s egg, a vulture feasting on carrion, a squirrel-chase through the branches of an oak. Iggy’s first steps were part of a greater unstoppable force, more animal than human. He took one more courageous step and fell forward at last, smacking his palms to the floor. “Bravo!” Kavya whispered. “Bravo!” And how human it was, after all, this feat, the swell of pride when it happened. How human, to stand for an apple, to step strong for its cardinal promise.

  In the weeks that followed, Iggy got used to falling. In the weeks that followed those, he began to run. Rishi started getting up with him in the mornings to play chasing games in the living room. Ignacio nearly stopped walking altogether, and ran from room to room, stopping only to get down on his knees for the three steps between the kitchen and the living room.

  Kavya was aware, of course, that there was a mother out there who had missed these first steps. But the thought of this woman, angel or devil, whoever she was, sent a chill through her. She grew hollow and painfully cold at the thought of another woman wanting what she’d come to think of as hers. And, she reminded herself, this woman, this mother-woman, had been there for Ignacio’s first months. Kavya found herself mourning Ignacio’s infancy. She found herself staring at the almost-two-year-old, thinking about the aching fragility of a newborn, the absolute dependence that could carve both terror and bottomless wells of awe into new mothers. Kavya had known none of this. She could close her eyes and imagine Iggy’s infant legs, bowed around the girth of a diaper, folds of fat around his knees. She wondered how thick the pads of his feet were then, if they were as soft and pillowy as his palms still were. Then she reminded herself that she had Iggy now. He was hers.

  Now
and then, Kavya caught a feature she hadn’t noticed before, the square spread of his feet, the astonishing musculature of his calves. He leapt and landed like a leopard. He moved with a physical grace that had no match in Kavya’s family or Rishi’s. Another man and another woman had created this boy, and he was flowering in foreign soil. As Iggy learned to walk, then run, then leap, the butter of infancy melted off. He gained the stridency of a child—elbows, shoulder blades, teeth like moonlit pebbles. And words. Apple. Hot. Woof. Papa. Hi. From his mealy mutterings, actual sentences emerged. And from these sentences sprang meaning, intention, and a beastly will.

  • • •

  HER MOTHER was on the other end, asking about Ignacio. The very fact of this buoyed Kavya to such heights that she hardly cared that Uma called him Yignacio. Maybe now, Kavya told herself, her mother would call her every two days, as she’d always done. Kavya would share stories with her about the things Ignacio had said, questions about low-grade fevers and opinions on doctors and schoolteachers. Her mother would give advice that wasn’t asked for; her mother would lament the state of modern-day parenting. Her mother would be her mother again. As the pace of their talk slowed and the phone call wound down to its natural end, as Kavya opened her mouth to say Okay . . . well, her mother said, “One more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Preeti is having a baby. Preeti is pregnant.”

  Of course Preeti was pregnant. Of course, of course, of course. Six months earlier this news would have sunk Kavya. But now, she said goodbye, picked up the phone again, and dialed.

  “Congratulations!” She tried to lean lightly on the exclamation point, but her voice felt shrill.

  “Thanks,” Preeti said.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Not bad.”

  Kavya waited. “Vikram’s?”

  A long pause. “I saw Huntley once. Just once.” She started to speak, but stopped herself. “It’s so over. I’m sure it’s Vik’s. I can feel it, you know?”

  Kavya didn’t know what to say to this.

  “I didn’t plan this. I so didn’t plan this.”

  “Yeah, well. You are married.”

  “Yeah. And everything else.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess my body wanted to get pregnant, you know? I went off the pill when Vikram took me back, but I didn’t think it would happen this soon.”

  “Uh-huh.” How easy for Preeti, of course. How easy.

  “I thought it would take a year or so for things to kick in. Or longer. I’m no spring chicken.”

  “But you seem to work.”

  “Yes, I seem to work. I seem to have a cervix with a tourist information center.” A pause. “How’s Iggy?”

  “Good.”

  “I can tell. I can hear you smiling.”

  “I think you’re going to be a great mom,” Kavya managed. “No matter what happens.”

  • • •

  HER LIFE WAS A BERKELEY BUNGALOW: small and sturdy, plain on the outside, but surrounded by expensive plants. What warmed this stucco block was Ignacio. And Kavya was learning to be a mother. Not an eat-sleep-poop mother, but a singing, storytelling inventor of a universe. The sort of mother she’d fantasized about being. She found that she could make Ignacio laugh just by blowing air onto his cheek, and doing it again. And again. She found that he laughed every time she did it, no matter how many times, each burst of pleasure its own singular surprise. She found that she could tell stories. Old fairy tales that she half knew, she could give new endings. New stories, she could spin from nothing, welding new facts to old tropes to come out with tidy tales of vengeance, salvation, discovery. As Iggy learned new words she became a mix master of storytelling. Car! Dinosaur! Buzz Lightyear! He’d call the words and she’d come out with a story about Buzz Lightyear and his car, his dinosaur, his redemption.

  Ignacio was speaking, his English crisp and clamoring with momentum. He learned at a supernatural rate. And when he said something new and astonishing, she picked him up, swung him through the air—and yes, she’d read the manuals about not overpraising, about conditioning excellence—she swung him through the air and kissed his face, the skin fragrant with spit and dewy heat. She took every opportunity to press her lips to the sweet plum of his skin, and before long, it would not have occurred to her that his skin was not her skin, that she had not borne him from some humid cave of her own desire.

  She rushed from work each evening with the urgency of a nursing mother. Her breasts lay slack and empty, but her chest swelled with need, and with the belief that he was waiting for her. When she arrived at his daycare, unlatched the safety gate in the foyer, he ran to her, strong arms around her neck. His faith was effortless, his need steadfast.

  37.

  The gas mask arrived. A day earlier, another hearing had been held in Ignacio’s name. This one determined that the foster parents of Ignacio Castro Valdez were doing an adequate job. Joyce Jones had phoned that morning to inform Rishi that he and Kavya were proving adequate. Rishi was glad that he’d answered and not his wife, who would have taken this stamp of adequacy as an outright accusation.

  “Come on, Iggy,” Rishi said. “Come with me. Let’s test this thing out.” He helped Ignacio down the steps to the garden, over to the earthquake kit.

  “This is our emergency earthquake kit,” Rishi said. He unlatched the plastic crate and took from it his own gas mask. “See this, Iggy? This is my gas mask. This is if the air gets bad. It’ll help me breathe.”

  He put the gas mask on and Ignacio’s eyes grew wide, his face flushed crimson. He opened his mouth and screamed. He screamed again, called, “Mama, Ma, Ma!” He called, “Papa!” He turned from Rishi and curled into a protective ball. Rishi whipped the mask off.

  “It’s me, Iggy. See? It’s me.”

  Iggy calmed down, pulled his lips back together, huffed through his nose, a thread of snot flaring and receding from his nostril.

  “Hey, come here,” said Rishi. He sat cross-legged on the ground.

  Ignacio climbed into his lap and examined his face. It was a relief to be in a child’s world, where kindness was the standard operating mode, where clarity was the order of the day, and adult posturing kept its distance.

  Hearings had been happening, quietly, for months. Rishi and Kavya had little say in what went on, and Joyce had told them to stay home. “It’s a checkup we do,” she said. “We think about next steps, and we don’t need to hear from you. Do you understand?”

  Rishi picked up Iggy’s mask. “This,” he said, “I got for you. And when you get bigger, you’ll get a bigger one.” He hesitated, and then, “Do you want to try it on?”

  Iggy picked up the mask and dropped it. Rishi helped him lift it. He pointed out the eye screens, the filter that looked like an alien snout. “This is what keeps the air clean, see?”

  Face-to-face with the mask, Iggy pressed his nose to the metallic snout, his eyes against the eye screens. He made a sound.

  “On? Should we put it on?”

  Ignacio nodded. Slowly, waiting for the boy to squirm away or run, Rishi lowered it over his head.

  “Can you breathe?” Rishi asked, and pantomimed puffing and whooshing breaths.

  Ignacio whipped his head around, looking for something. He was hearing his own breath, Rishi knew, isolated in the mask and amplified.

  “I wished I had a gas mask when I was a kid. I wanted to be a soldier. Did you know that? I was gangly, way too skinny, and my mom told me I was too skinny to be a soldier, which I now think was her way of getting me to eat.”

  Ignacio’s face was pointed straight at Rishi’s. He couldn’t see the boy’s eyes, but there was no peripheral vision in a gas mask. Iggy could only be looking at him.

  “And then I thought I’d be a doctor, and I went to this science camp when I was eleven.”

  Iggy pulled at th
e snout.

  “Can you breathe?” Rishi went to remove the mask, but Iggy pulled away. “You’re all right in there, I guess. Maybe you’ll go to science camp when you’re bigger. Right? Would you like that?”

  Iggy blocked a hand over one eye screen, then the other.

  Rishi had told Kavya about an earlier hearing. She’d reacted so badly that he’d kept the second a secret. The matter was out of their hands, and this enraged his wife.

  “I don’t know why I thought of being a soldier,” Rishi said. “It seemed like the next best thing to being a superhero. Maybe I thought I could save people, you know? Maybe that’s what I wanted to do. I guess I’m doing that now. Sort of. Saving them from bad air.” He took Iggy’s elbow between two fingers and gave it a gentle shake.

  A plane buzzed overhead. An outdoor band was playing somewhere in town, and the rhythmic snare and bass trailed into the yard. Still wearing his mask, Iggy dropped to his knees and began building a pile of wood chips. He had to point his snout straight at the ground to see. Rishi watched him build one stack, then another, until he’d made a small campus of wood-chip towers. Soon the distant music stopped and Iggy’s breath, whooshing through the mask, was the loudest sound in the yard.

  “A gas mask,” Rishi said. Iggy looked up. “A gas mask for the Stratosphere. If we could wrap a gas mask around the entire programming center, Iggy—we could line the walls in filters!” Rishi peered in the hollows of his eyeholes. He thought of the highways that snaked around their little town, the refinery by the water. Maybe it was bad air that had made Iggy sick. Even a place like Berkeley could fill a small pair of lungs with generations of industrial sin. If he could purify the universe for this boy, his boy, he would. That’s what WeBreathe would do. WeBreathe wasn’t for other babies. WeBreathe was for Iggy.

  Iggy stared quietly at Rishi, nodded, and resumed his building. He squatted over his project, picking up and placing each chip with astonishing care. Any other kid, Rishi guessed, would have pulled the mask off by then, or would have fought it off in the first place. Ignacio trusted. Rishi ran a finger over the little arm, the skin so soft that Rishi grew vertiginous, as if fingering the edge of a towering cliff. Ignacio had put the mask on because Rishi had asked him to. He trusted Rishi to make the right choices. “Ignacio,” he whispered, and the boy turned to him.