Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  “What happens now?”

  “Well,” Rishi said, “we get a lawyer. We fight our case.” He paused. “We do have a case, you know.”

  “We do.”

  He heard himself say the words that a few months ago would have felt untenable. “Iggy’s best interests lie with us. Being with us would be the best thing for him.” Now he believed it.

  “Really?”

  “Do you not think so? We could give him back. If that’s what you want—” Saying the words sent a trill of fear through him. “If that’s what you want, Kavya, that’s what we could do.”

  “No. I’m not going to give him back.”

  “Good,” Rishi said.

  “But what about the real mother?”

  “The real mother.” Rishi ran his fingers over hers, smoothing out the wrinkles around each knuckle. “You taught him to walk. You stayed up with him all those nights. You’re a real mother, too.”

  “I know.”

  “What we have to do now, Kavya, is we have to engage. If we’re going to fight for Ignacio, we’ve got to run for this bus. Do you get that? We’ve got to stop thinking about their side, and fight ours. Run for the bus.”

  Kavya thought about this. “Run for the bus,” she said. “We owe him this.”

  Rishi tensed, nodded. It sounded right coming from her. When she said it, his doubt evaporated. “Yes.”

  That night, they both lay awake for hours. On her bed with the canopy of yellow flowers, a Boris Becker poster staring down at them, they lay awake and listened to the mutters and chirps that Ignacio made in his sleep. We may never hear them again, Kavya said to herself. This may be one of the last times. Don’t be so dramatic. It was Rishi’s voice in her head.

  Why did people love children who were born to other people? For the same reason they lived in Berkeley, knowing the Big One was coming: because it was a beautiful place to be, and because there was no way to fathom the length or quality of life left to anyone, and because there was no point running from earthquakes into tornadoes, blizzards, terrorist attacks. Because destruction waited around every corner, and turning one corner would only lead to another. So it made sense to stay put, if put was a place like Berkeley, with its throb of lifeblood, of sun and breeze and heart and anger and misplaced enthusiasm. She’d built her love on a fault line, and the first tremors had begun.

  The next morning, she woke to the glare of the sun. Rishi was already awake, staring up at the ceiling. He turned to Kavya.

  “We’ll be fine,” he said.

  “I believe you.”

  Kavya had never had a problem speaking up for herself—she’d been an impetuous child, according to her mother, and by college her fighting voice had fully ripened and become her own. Its volume her own. Its California monotone her own. This fight felt right but scared her still.

  “There’ll be a hearing,” Rishi said. “I’m pretty sure we won’t be a part of it. It’ll be a county thing.”

  Scarier than the fight was the idea that she wouldn’t be allowed to fight. She would be a bystander to her fate. She knew little of what to expect in the coming weeks. She knew only that she couldn’t think of losing Iggy. The thought of losing him was blinding. But in her blindness she found certainty, if not clarity.

  They set off for Berkeley the next morning. Rishi drove. The outlet malls fell away and they drove past fields and signs for farm-fresh produce. Kavya sat up and pointed at a large, block-printed panel at the side of a field. Harjeet Bhupinder Orchards.

  “You don’t see that every day,” Rishi said. “We should take Iggy there one day.”

  Open weekends, the sign read. Apple picking, pumpkin patch, Christmas trees. Not much surprised Kavya after twenty years in Berkeley, but the name on that sign caught her eye. Not that Indians didn’t own land; Indians had a hand in most industries, farming included. It’s just that they rarely announced it on a sign. Immigrants were supposed to own things quietly. Proclaiming themselves invited the wrong kind of attention, from the evil eye to more immediate retribution. The surest sign of an immigrant business was an American flag on the door. But perhaps this Harjeet Bhupinder felt secure enough not to worry about that. Maybe with this announced identity came the belief—the very American belief—that success and happiness weren’t always temptations of fate.

  • • •

  WHEN SHE GOT TO the sorority Monday afternoon, she found Martina McAfee waiting for her at the kitchen door.

  “You’re here.”

  Kavya stopped and placed her bag on the ground. She’d missed work that morning, claiming she had a doctor’s appointment. Really, they’d been to a lawyer.

  Kavya crossed her arms. “Do you want to discuss something?”

  “I do, Kavya. I do need to discuss something. But we don’t have the time right now. You’ve missed two and a half days of work in the last two weeks. Plus your three weeks of family leave. Think about that.”

  Martina McAfee was wearing a patriotic sweater and red starfish earrings. Her lips cut a thin line across her face.

  Kavya nodded. “I’ll take that on board.”

  “Miguel is waiting.”

  “Thanks.” And she pushed past Martina, into the humid well of her kitchen.

  “She kick your butt?” Miguel asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “You all right?” Miguel watched her as he chopped a bunch of parsley.

  “Eyes on the knife,” Kavya said.

  They worked in silence until dinner prep was done.

  That morning, Rishi and Kavya had walked three blocks, with Ignacio in his stroller, to the office of Eva Cabral. “Here we go,” Kavya said. They climbed a set of wooden stairs and knocked on a door.

  “Come in,” they heard.

  At the far end of the room had stood a woman leaning over a desk, rifling through a stack of papers. She wore a red kaftan that swung down to her knees. She’d blinked at them, as if they were no more than three ghosts known to wander the Gourmet Ghetto.

  “Is this Eva Cabral’s office?”

  “I’m Eva Cabral. Yes.” She didn’t welcome them in. “Are you in the right place?”

  “I think so,” Kavya said. “We’re the Reddys. We called—”

  “Oh, God,” the woman said, and smacked her forehead. “Yes. I’m so sorry. Of course. Come in. I was sure we’d planned to meet tomorrow. My assistant’s away. Right? Wasn’t it tomorrow? Well come in, anyway, have a seat. Let’s go back to my office, actually.”

  Rishi turned to stare at Kavya. She ignored him.

  “It may have been tomorrow,” she’d said. “I was pretty sure it was today, though.”

  Rishi took her by the hand and led her through the room.

  “So,” Eva Cabral said, landing heavily in her armchair. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “We’re foster parents,” Rishi began. “We have a little boy? He’s almost two?” He’d said this as if Eva Cabral might have heard of this particular little boy, the almost-two-year-old who lived in North Berkeley.

  “You’re a foster parent?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  She smiled, at last. “I find that so admirable. You’ve come to the right place.” She frowned. “On the wrong day.” She grinned. “Just kidding.”

  “The thing is, we’ve run into a problem,” Kavya piped in.

  “Can you smell that apple pie?” Eva Cabral stood and cranked open her window. “They drive me crazy with that apple pie!” She had the spangle-toothed smile of a PTA president. She beamed at Ignacio, then walked over and took him from Kavya, hitching him onto her hip. Ignacio grunted and wriggled to the floor.

  She pulled out a play table and scattered some blocks across it.

  “Have a seat,” she called to Ignacio loudly, as if speaking to a foreigner. “Toys for you! See the toys?” She sat d
own herself, set her elbows on the desk and interlaced her fingers.

  “So what’s up?”

  Rishi sighed. Kavya feared he would get up and leave. She had, for some reason, a good feeling about Eva Cabral, so she clutched Rishi’s arm and laid out their story, the facts of the hearing and the danger of losing Ignacio for good.

  After sitting still and listening, Eva Cabral had agreed that, yes, what they had going for them was the best-interests angle.

  She rapped on her desk with long, buffed fingernails. “You’re the best parents for him. No question. Not in my mind.”

  Rishi began to nod.

  “But.” Eva held up her hand. “But. You two are not actually actors in this decision. I’d be happy to represent you, but we’ll be witnesses to that hearing on the twelfth. We’ll be spectators. The people talking? They’ll be the state, the mother’s lawyer, the case worker. We can’t sue anyone or file any motions ourselves.”

  When Kavya looked over, Rishi was still nodding.

  “BUT. That doesn’t mean we can’t be there,” Eva Cabral said. “We’ll be in that courtroom, the three of us, guns loaded—figuratively speaking, of course—and we’ll be present.

  “This is what we focus on,” she continued. She reached out and covered Kavya’s hand and Rishi’s with each of her own. “Being there. We’ll give this our best shot,” she said. “And it’s a good one.”

  Rishi leaned in. He and Eva nodded at each other. It may have been a play of the room’s fluorescent lights or the fast passage of a wind-blown cloud, but Kavya could feel, from the very heat of his arm, that Rishi had a goal in sight.

  • • •

  IGGY HAD SPENT THE WALK HOME leaning out of his stroller, twisting around to watch Kavya.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “Where is what, Iggy?”

  “Where is it?”

  “What? Where is what?”

  “Where is it, Mama?” he squealed, his face crumpling with frustration.

  Kavya shook her head. “I don’t know, Iggy. I don’t know where it is. It’s all right. Okay?” She turned to Rishi. “He knows something’s wrong.”

  They walked in silence.

  “You heard her, didn’t you? You heard her say we wouldn’t have a say in this.”

  “But we’ll be there, Kavya.”

  Kavya said nothing.

  Home again, Iggy pointed to the window. She let him crank the lever to open it. He pointed to the sky. “Sky,” he said.

  “Sky!” Kavya repeated. He’d never said the word before. “Sky! ¡Cielo!” She said it once in Spanish, then stopped herself. “Sky,” she repeated. “Blue sky.”

  He pointed to the eucalyptus tree that hung from above and yelped with pleasure. “Tree,” Kavya said. “Eucalyptus. It smells good, Iggy. It smells like lemons.”

  Now Miguel leaned against the worktable. “You’ve been stirring that batter for fifteen minutes.” Kavya came to. She’d been watching the mixer spin and lost herself in the airy dance of blades around the bowl. If only she could move so lightly.

  “So this is where the handsome sous-chef gives his boss a good talking to,” he said. “What’s the matter with you, woman?”

  “I haven’t slept,” Kavya said. “For days. Two days. Can I ask you something?”

  “Ask me anything.” He moved the mixing bowl over a giant cake pan, letting the batter cascade in smooth, even sheets.

  “Are you legal?”

  He said nothing for a good while, holding the bowl over the pan, staring as the batter ran down to a few desultory glops. He let the bowl drop to the counter, walked back to his work station, put on his gloves, and started hacking a chicken to pieces.

  “Oh,” Kavya said.

  “Not a good thing to ask. Okay?” He hacked away at the chicken. “Am I legal,” he muttered. “Are you legal? Do I have the legal right to exist? Yes I do.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean. And I’m telling you. That’s just not something you ask.”

  “Oh.”

  They worked in silence for a long time, until Miguel said, “It just so happens that I am documented.”

  She turned to him. “Thanks. Thanks for telling me.” She paused. “Do you have a green card?”

  “I came over when I was nine,” he said. “They gave us asylum.”

  “Well, good. For you.”

  He snorted, shook his head.

  “Asylum from what?”

  “From some fucked-up shit back home, is what.” He slammed his knife into a joint, and a chicken leg leapt across the counter. “Why’d you want to know?”

  She didn’t answer. She’d overstepped another boundary, asking him to justify himself that way.

  “I answered your question,” he said. “Now answer mine.”

  “Just wondering,” she lied. “I was reading about it. About immigration.”

  This seemed to satisfy, and they worked side by side as the afternoon wore on, through dinner prep and service, until the kitchen had been cleaned and put to rest, and they parted with a quiet goodbye.

  40.

  Rishi was supposed to be building an air-flow model of the retrofitted programming center. He’d told himself that working from home that morning would allow him to focus. Instead, he found himself drafting a letter. The letter constituted his show of support for his wife, he told himself. He was drafting a letter to the birth mother of Ignacio Castro Valdez, stating their desire to adopt her child. It was a humanizing letter, and Eva Cabral had told him to write it. It would show the birth mother that Kavya and Rishi weren’t monsters, that they had Iggy’s best interests in mind, that they would give the boy a mother and father’s love. “And I’ll check it over when you’re done,” Eva had said.

  Hammering faintly, the thought returned that they were being cavalier, assuming their right to Ignacio when his birth mother was very much alive. This was not something that politically sensitive, culturally attuned Berkeleyites did. But in the previous months, Rishi’s feelings about Iggy had ballooned in a way that had thrilled and frightened him. He couldn’t let go. The thought of losing his boy stirred nausea and terror he hadn’t felt since his days volunteering in a hospital. It was making him physically sick.

  “You should take the lead, Rishi,” Kavya had said. “I can’t do this alone.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You should be leading the fight here. You were almost a lawyer.”

  “We have Eva.”

  “Eva’s not us. No one cares about this more than us.”

  Her conviction fed his. It kept him upright in this fight. And yet, there were times when Kavya withdrew from the moment, the house, the world, staring at her hands, blinking rapidly, as if she’d forgotten who and where she was. At times like this, her doubt floated through the room like odorless gas. It filled his head, but he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t smell or taste or touch it, and therefore couldn’t stop it from slipping its fingers beneath him, and tilting his moral ground until Rishi went sliding, dizzy and bracing for a fall. His conscience wagged a finger in those moments, insisting that Rishi had no right to this battle.

  He sat staring at his computer screen, unable to conjure a word, even the wrong word. The cursor, a silent metronome, counted down the wasted morning. Some part of him wondered exactly who his wife was, whether she was becoming a person he’d be less likely to love.

  And that was it—he couldn’t write because he couldn’t decide who he was, who his wife was. The Kavya he knew wouldn’t take another mother’s child. Even if that mother left the child shirtless and cold, barking for attention. But the Kavya he knew couldn’t live without Ignacio, either. Losing Iggy would mean losing Kavya, and that was not something he could tolerate. She hadn’t been sleeping. She’d barely been eating or speaking
. Kavya felt something for the boy that he couldn’t see and she couldn’t voice.

  This much was clear: no matter the contradictions, Rishi would fight through the moral fog. Kavya was blinded. He was not. It would fall to him to parse the darkness. And from this thought, he drew strength.

  He tapped one key and then another.

  I am writing on behalf of myself and my wife.

  The house fell into silence. Footsteps on the sidewalk drifted off. Through the slats of the kitchen window, the sun edged behind a cloud and the room darkened. Even his breathing grew dim.

  We are the foster parents of Ignacio Castro Valdez.

  41.

  The phone rang. Mahendra, Uma. Kavya ignored it. No good could come of her mother at 6:45 on a Saturday morning. Ignacio was awake already, and lay with his knees bent, as long now as the changing table. Kavya slung a wipe between his butt cheeks, folded it expertly, and took another swipe. In the bathroom, washing her hands, her eyes were bruised with exhaustion. The dark circles were badges from a thousand small battles.

  At 8 a.m., as she slipped Ignacio into a jacket for a morning walk, the phone rang again. Patel, Preeti. The timing brought with it a sense of urgency.

  “Hello?”

  “Were you sleeping?”

  “I have a toddler. What is it? Are you okay?”

  “Have you looked at the newspaper?”

  “We don’t get one.”

  “Oh. So your mom called me.”

  “Sorry,” she said, but was beginning to understand that something was wrong.

  “It’s in the papers. You’re in the papers.”

  “What?”

  Preeti paused. “The adoption,” she said. “You.”

  Kavya was in the news. She opened her laptop and found the article online. Kavya and Rishi were on the Local page of the San Francisco Chronicle, a picture of them from their Mexico trip, the sleek white plains of a boat behind them, wineglasses in hand, toothy and sun-splashed. It was a Facebook photo. Berkeley couple seeks custody of undocumented immigrant’s child.

  The article was hardly a paragraph long. When she tried to read it, the lines slid from her grasp. She hung up the phone.