Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  It was wrong. Wrong to put a gas mask on a boy, wrong that children had to know about gas masks and bad air and the violent earth. It was wrong what they’d done to their world. Iggy would build his towers of wood, and Rishi would protect him. He was wrung dry by a desire to wrap the boy in his arms, to swallow him into the warm envelope of his own body.

  38.

  So the guard came for Soli.

  The hope of freedom did flutter past, but vanished as soon as she was handcuffed again. She didn’t know what she’d expected, having grown accustomed to a system in which her expectations meant nothing. She wanted only to know where she was going, and why, and where her lawyer was, and whether he’d know how to find her. “Where’s my lawyer?” she asked a guard, who grinned at her, then took her possessions and handed them to another guard.

  “Hands” was all he said, and cuffed her wrists together. She got on an airplane, her hands shackled to a chain around her waist, that chain chained to the woman before her, and her chain chained to another, a whole chain of chains, dragging down the runway, climbing the steps to the plane, sitting in their seats, metal digging into their behinds, their backs, their wrists.

  As the engines revved from a whine to a full-throated chorus, Soli forgot about the metal. She couldn’t breathe in all the way, couldn’t breathe out. The thrum of the runway sent a thrill up her spine as she watched the ground speed past. She was back on the train, the wind in her eyes. But as the plane’s nose tilted up and away from the earth, she gasped and twisted away from the window. She squeezed her eyes shut, expecting the worst. A plummet. A scree of destruction. But the plane rose, the ground grew light, and Soli, at last, permitted herself to look. Outside her window, the sky was luminous. Below, California shrank away and spread its quilt of soil and field.

  Maybe we’re going back to Berkeley, she thought. Maybe this is working. Two hours later, Soli felt that California was gone. “Where are we going?” she asked the woman next to her.

  “Stop talking,” said a guard from farther down the aisle.

  “Where are we going?” she called back.

  “No talking” was all he said.

  “Are they taking us to Mexico?” she asked.

  “Cho! No way I’m going to Mexico,” said the woman next to her, her skin black against the sun-blinded window.

  They landed in the deepening dusk. She didn’t know where she was, only that she was cold. It was November everywhere, and November here meant that the cold brought sound, a cavernous shudder. It hummed down their spines, gripped their ankles, and froze them to the worn and weary tips of their toes.

  She was put in a cell with two other women who looked at her when she walked in and then looked away and kept talking. She turned to the guard as he pushed her through the cell door.

  “I have a little boy. He needs me. I have a lawyer!”

  “So do I,” said the guard. He smiled and shook his head. “Now get some rest.”

  Outside the prison walls, the world continued its drunken surge, teetering, as ever, on the brink of ruination. Arabs revolted, and Americans. Drones like alien saucers flew overhead, manned with cameras. Americans still raged against Muslims, until they grew tired of raging against Muslims and switched to Mexicans or anyone resembling a Mexican, including Muslims. Hurricanes disappeared entire islands, palm trees bent in the raging winds. Villages vanished under mudslides. On land, grown women were dying their hair purple, and hipsters walked the streets of San Francisco, wearing sleeves of embedded ink up their arms. Iran enriched uranium and pundits worried, and China had more money than God, and the iPhone was making everything better and everything worse, and birds were angry and pigs thieving. Superheroes were back, all over the place, in every theater, because they were needed. The free people outside the prison walls needed supermen and wonder women to wrench them from the ditch they’d dug, arms flailing, bodies sinking into the squelching soil.

  • • •

  BUT INSIDE HER PRISON, all Soli knew were four walls, a cot, a freezing yard. She didn’t know the names of the guards or the other inmates. She didn’t know what color her new uniform was or what species of food was spread across her plate three times a day or how it tasted or whether it made her thirsty or sleepy. She didn’t know if the table where she spent most days was round or rectangular, if the yard had grass, if the men kicked a soccer ball or if the women gathered in clusters.

  She knew this: They’d taken her away. From Ignacio, from Adrian Alvarez, from the last thread that had sewn her to her life. There in prison, in this faceless and nameless prison, the sun neither rose nor set.

  Only the wind blew, a rough and dirty wind, a monstrous and foreign wind. It whistled through the yard and up Soli’s shirt, ran its old-man fingers around her nipples and down her back. She told herself stories of the wind—that it had come from Ignacio, blown from California by his small body in a playground swing, his legs thrust forward, his head back, laughter spouting from his throat.

  Her fourth day there, she managed to call Adrian Alvarez. She’d memorized his number almost instantly from the business card he’d pressed against the window their first day together. She waited for three hours to use the prison’s single phone and got to it that day before free time was over, before lockdown, before head count and dinner. It cost five dollars a minute to call him collect from prison, and the guard manning the phone informed her that no one would take her call, not for that price.

  “Adrian Alvarez,” Adrian Alvarez said. He accepted the call. “Soli? Hello?”

  “Hello.”

  “Where are you?”

  She let out a single sob, then swallowed the rest down. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. They took me away.”

  “What happened? Did you sign something? I told you not to—”

  “I signed nothing. I signed nothing. They tried to make me but I wouldn’t.”

  “We had things going, Soli. We were getting you a hearing.”

  “The lady said I’d be stuck there for months.”

  “What lady?”

  What lady. It was a good question. A lady in a uniform. A lady with a red mouth and fuzzy face. A lady with the small print written right between her lips.

  A guard slammed his club against the wall.

  “I don’t even know where they’ve—” A beep sounded in her ear.

  “Wait! December twelfth. December twelfth is your hearing. You’ll need to call in, do you understand? I’ll get the number to you.”

  “I don’t have a pen.”

  “You don’t have a pen.” His sigh this time was desperate. “I’ll get the number to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Call me every day, Soli,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen from here. I just don’t know.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Let’s just hope they don’t deport you. I’ll see what I can do from here.”

  “Wait— Where am I?” The line hit a wall of static. “Adrian?” The guard yanked the phone from her and slammed it down.

  Wherever she was, Soli knew Adrian wouldn’t be able to help her. She’d learned the lesson that all women learn, sooner or later: If there was something to be done, she’d have to do it herself.

  • • •

  MAYBE SANTA CLARA was watching all this from her sickbed, a sad movie on her wall. But there were so many sad movies to watch in that place—why Soli’s? Soli had learned from Adrian, weeks earlier, that Silvia was in a detention center in the north of the country. Daniel and Aldo were with their father. Salma had most likely been sent back to Mexico without her children. Her children were with a relative. They would be fine, Adrian said. They’re young enough to forget. Maybe he thought this would make Soli feel better.

  Life in a detention center was an exerc
ise in waiting, and every second she sat on her ass with nothing to do, every moment she spent wandering the yard like a cow put out to pasture, her grip on Ignacio was slipping. Every second was another second for him to forget her, for the world to close up around the mother who’d left him, until all that remained was a pebbled scab of memory. And when the scab fell away, which of course it would, only new skin would remain, pink and soft, a soft pink world without Soli.

  On the day that would change her life again, she was walking through the center of the yard, the sun gazing carelessly, when she noticed a guard notice her. She stopped, planted her feet, and looked back. She thought he would turn away then, but he didn’t. She thought he might be looking past her, surveying the prisoners, doing his job. But no. She looked at him, then lowered her head and looked at him hard, and he looked back with eyes sharp enough to shear her skin away.

  Let’s be clear: This was no romance.

  Two nights later, he opened the door of her cell. “Let’s go,” he said. The two other women in the cell looked at each other and she felt their eyes on her back as she left.

  Did she know where this was going? She had an idea.

  The guard walked fast, his feet striking hard on the green tile. The ceiling lights bounced off his scalp with each step. He headed for the door and she followed. He’s letting you out, she told herelf. He’s sending you away. She whispered the rosary. She had never been outside at night.

  The cold in that place was like a shove in the chest. That night was the coldest she’d ever known, but the guard seemed not to notice. He hadn’t stopped to put on a coat, and she didn’t have one, either.

  “This way,” he said again, and led her along the side of the building, around a corner, to the side of another building. When they reached the back of a stone cube, they stopped. On one side was wall, on the other, a chain-link fence. He was breathing hard now, puffing clouds of hot air that hung in the night.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Take your top off.” He backed her up against the stone wall. His fingers slipped under her shirt and she cried out.

  “Shut up,” he said. “They’ll hear you.”

  39.

  Kavya was on the highway, Ignacio asleep in his car seat. She barely registered the route signs and drove by pure avian instinct toward Sacramento, toward safety.

  The phone had rung that evening as she walked through the door with Ignacio. Immediately she recognized the static of the Department of Social Services, a very specific tick that made it impossible to fully register what was being said. Joyce’s voice rustled through the line.

  “Could you repeat that?”

  “The mother,” Joyce said, “will be pursuing reunification with her son.”

  “The mother,” Kavya said aloud, “will be pursuing reunification with her son.”

  “That is correct.”

  But how? Where is she? she wanted to ask. She didn’t.

  “What does that mean?” she asked instead.

  It didn’t matter what it meant. Kavya knew what it meant. It meant that someone was coming for Iggy. She asked Joyce for an explanation only because she hoped that somewhere inside it she’d find a loophole to thread herself into. It’s just a technicality, Joyce might have said. But she didn’t.

  “The mother has a lawyer,” she heard Joyce say.

  As far as Kavya knew, she was Iggy’s mother. When and how she’d arrived at this state of certainty, she couldn’t say. But there she would stay.

  “I need to go,” she said, and hung up.

  Kavya didn’t get a lawyer. Instead, she got her keys. What she’d meant, what Joyce wouldn’t have guessed, was that she needed to go. Berkeley was suddenly rife with peril. It was a Friday, and Rishi had cycled to the Weebus. Iggy followed her through the house as she gathered diapers and stuffed clothing in a canvas bag. Onesies dripped to the hardwood floor as she went. He trailed behind her and gathered them.

  As she drove, she thought about lawyers. If the other mother had one, she would need one. After an hour, she’d reached the brown-and-green plateau that spread before Sacramento, and beyond this, the spray of high-rises that made up its skyline. At its center, a single tower, covered in windows, caught a last gasp of light from the setting sun.

  From the end of the driveway, Kavya could see the astonished outline of her mother’s head, cocked at the kitchen window and pulsing with attention. She cut the engine as Uma half ran down the drive. She ignored Kavya and headed straight for the backseat, where Iggy sat sleeping.

  “Is he all right? What happened? Why you are here?”

  Kavya could only stand at her door, shivering, staring across the car at her mother.

  She opened her mouth to speak and a cloud of vapor puffed from her lips and startled her into silence. She tried again.

  “The mother,” she said. “She wants Iggy back.”

  Beyond the drive, the neighborhood was caught in a soundless winter haze. Christmas lights twinkled on a house across the street, but everything else was still.

  “Come inside. It’s getting cold.”

  Uma’s kitchen was a laboratory of bubbling pots. A vat of dal spat steam from its lid. She was boiling tea in a saucepan with sugar and milk and cardamom.

  “It’s not a good idea, Kavya-ma, taking him out on these cold days. At this age, you don’t want him to get sick. It’s not necessary.” Uma carried on as if the news of Iggy’s birth mother had stayed on the driveway and bore no relevance to her indoor world. “You know, Kavya, that I am allergic to the cold? It makes me cough like anything, just being in the cold. Definitely it’s some kind of allergy.”

  Kavya hadn’t mentioned the pneumonia to her mother, and now she never would. “You can’t be allergic to the cold, Amma. That doesn’t exist.”

  “I see. Now you’re an expert on existence, is it?”

  The two women watched Ignacio run to the far corner and pull from Kavya’s bag a plastic shape-sorter. He sat with it, pushing square blocks through square holes, round blocks through round holes.

  “This one,” Uma said, nodding at Ignacio. “See how he’s putting the correct shape in the hole? With you, it was always the triangle in the round hole, the square in the triangle hole. Always making things impossible.”

  Kavya, for a few moments, was letting the thought of the birth mother walk through the room and out the door. What she wanted, there and then, was a cup of tea. Uma stirred the saucepan, her eyes on Ignacio, who’d opened a cupboard and started pulling out Tupperware.

  “Kavya, I’m going to say something. Don’t get mad.”

  “Here we go.”

  “In India, we have a saying.” And Uma launched into a series of sentences that Kavya half understood.

  Uma translated: “When you make dal for another woman’s child, keep it a little bit raw.”

  And she fell into silence and stirred the tea, coaxing upward its plumes of steam.

  “And?”

  “Anyway,” Uma said. “That’s what they say.”

  Neither spoke for several seconds. Uma was waiting this out, Kavya knew. This was her cue to ask for an explanation. Kavya would not indulge her.

  From the stove came a hiss as a fountain of milky tea bubbled over the edge of the saucepan and spilled down its sides, pooling across the stove and sending through the kitchen the smell of lost milk, burnt sugar.

  Rishi called at dinnertime. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Hi.”

  “Are you okay?” A heavy pause. “Are you leaving me?”

  She had to smile. “I’m not leaving you.”

  “Are you sure? What happened to the house?”

  Kavya had left a rumpus of half-opened drawers and scattered clothes.

  “Rishi?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Joyce called
. The mother wants him back.”

  “What do you mean? You mean the birth mother?”

  Kavya didn’t answer.

  “Can she do that?”

  “She’s being deported. She wants to take him back with her.”

  “She can’t just decide to do that,” he said. “No. No, we’ll look into this. I’m sure there’s something.”

  Kavya wanted to believe him. Here was the hope she’d been waiting for. But when Rishi offered it, she couldn’t latch on.

  “Listen, babe. Where are you?”

  “Sacramento.”

  “Sacramento?”

  “It was the only place.”

  “You packed up with him and went to Sacramento? I don’t think you can do that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If they find out you picked up Ignacio and ran off with him—”

  “Are you going to tell them?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I’m not on parole. I can take him where I want.”

  “Are you coming home?”

  “I’m staying here for now,” she said. “I just need to. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  • • •

  RISHI ARRIVED BY TRAIN that night, after Ignacio had gone to bed in a Pack’N Play lined with blankets. They sat at the kitchen counter, Kavya spooning leftover rice and fish onto Rishi’s plate. Her parents were in the family room and Tamil soap operas blared from the television.

  “You didn’t have to come.”

  “I wouldn’t have slept tonight.”

  “And now you’ll sleep?”

  “No.” He reached across the counter for her hand. “I probably won’t.”

  From the family room came the overamplified slapping sounds of a fight scene. A trumpet flare.