Rishi lay in bed, his eyes open. She thrust the laptop at him.
“What the . . .” he said. She watched his eyes slip across the lines of text, as befuddled as she was.
“How’d they even know about us?”
“Her lawyer.” His eyes flipped to Kavya’s. “Or ours. I’ll call her now.”
Still on his back, he reached for the telephone and dialed. Kavya had a sudden overwhelming urge to absent herself from the phone call that was about to happen, and returned to the living room to find Ignacio waiting patiently, quietly. He smiled at her, and let a single quarter drop from his mouth.
“Jesus Christ,” was all she could say. From the bedroom, she heard Rishi’s voice rise and drop, and then cease altogether. The biological mother’s lawyer had leaked the news.
Later: Uma Mahendra.
“What is the meaning of this, Kavya? Why you put this in the paper?” Apparently, Uma Mahendra kept abreast of her daughter’s life by subscribing to her daughter’s local paper.
“I didn’t, Mom. I didn’t.”
“Who, then? That Rishi? Put him on the phone.”
“It wasn’t Rishi. It was the other mother’s lawyer.”
Uma made a spitting sound. “Lawyers,” she said. Kavya could only agree. That evening, when the article’s existence had settled into her, she looked at it again. It was too short to be either damning or sympathetic. A Berkeley couple is hoping to be granted custody of their foster son. The toddler is the son of an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, who is currently incarcerated in a detention facility and awaiting deportation. The child is a U.S. citizen. It went on briefly.
“It’s neutral in tone, at least. We should be thankful for that,” Eva said over the phone the next day. It was a Sunday, but she’d answered her cell when Kavya called.
For a few days, the story grew quiet and seemed to have vanished. In an election year, in a world at war, her saga was a mere crumb of circumstance. She and Rishi assured each other of this, lying in bed at night and watching the dark together, locking gazes over the breakfast table as Ignacio banged his spoon and fork, staring at each other in the bathroom mirror as toothpaste frothed from their lips. But the calm that settled over their lives was not to last. It seems the big things—war, famine, the economy—get left to work themselves out. It’s the crumbs that are picked up and examined, that delineate the path of a struggle.
• • •
EVA CALLED WEDNESDAY MORNING. “Kavya,” she said, “stay away from campus if you can. And tell Rishi, too. It’s nothing to worry about, but there’s a student group that got wind of Saturday’s article. They contacted me yesterday to let me know what they’d be doing today. Just a demonstration. A peaceful one.”
“And what exactly will they be protesting, Eva?” Kavya knew the answer already.
Eva sighed. “There are people out there, Kavya, who think that a birth mother’s rights take precedence over all other circumstances. No matter what.”
And of course, Kavya went to campus. Thoughts of Martina followed her there, but going to work was not an option. Protests started at noon on Sproul Plaza, she remembered from her student days. As the clock tower played its twelve o’clock carillon, students began to gather. She only counted three at first, and then a fourth. They stood uncertainly around the Free Speech plaque embedded in the plaza floor, and it both pained and pleased Kavya to see that she’d stirred so little rage. And then she heard a distant chant. She turned. From Telegraph Avenue, a crowd advanced, headed by a television cameraman, stumbling backward to stay ahead of the group. At its head was a girl no older than twenty, short and slight. But her voice was big. She didn’t need the megaphone she held. When she called out, the mass behind her responded. But like most real protests, this was a scattered affair. They weren’t on a film set, so the group moved in weak clusters, not as a cohesive mass. And though they chanted back at the leader, their shouts bounced off trees and faded in the rumble of traffic. But as they neared, two lines, tossed out and sent back, emerged strident and clear above the surrounding noise.
“Blood!”
“Blood!”
“Is thicker than money!”
And as they drew closer, the gaps filled and the crowd grew, body by body, until it was a solid entity with a united voice. Kavya lost her breath to their physical mass. There must have been fifty, sixty of them. She struggled to inhale as they drew in close, barely taking notice of her. Nobody recognized Kavya. She resolved to stand her ground as they pooled around her, and for five seconds—six—she did. And then, to her private dismay, she turned and scampered behind a tree. From behind its trunk, she watched.
The girl in charge began speaking. The megaphone hung at her side, her voice loud enough to carry across the plaza. “Solimar Castro Valdez,” she shouted, “is a mother who loves her child. She’s also undocumented, so they locked her up in immigrant jail.”
The crowd fell silent.
“The Reddys are a couple in Berkeley. They decide they want to adopt. They decide they want Ignacio. Solimar’s child. The child of a woman who is alive and wants her son back. Guess what?”
“What?” someone answered.
“You don’t need a green card to love your child. Only some folks think a Mastercard can get them whatever they want!”
Shouts from the crowd.
She raised her index finger to punch out each word. “You can’t go around taking what you want just because you’ve got money and a nice house! Am I right?”
The crowd roared yes.
“Am I right? ¿Sí o no?”
“¡SÍ!”
They don’t know how nice my house is, Kavya thought. They don’t know if I have money. But there was no one to listen to Kavya. No one on the plaza would be taking her side, and who could expect them to? She was on a side of her own, cowering behind the wide trunk of a redwood, thankfully invisible. She scanned the faces—beautiful and young, strong with the certainty of their beliefs. She’d been one of them once, cushioned at student demonstrations by friends and the ferocity of their beliefs. But those friends had trailed off to other coasts and other lives, their collective steel softened. Now she was the enemy.
If she could have stayed objective, she would have found this funny, astonishing, maybe a tad flattering. They were taking time out of their day to protest her. They were young. They were children. And they seemed unshakably sure of themselves. They didn’t have to see the gray, these children. They could rest comfortably in the black and white.
Her phone rang.
“Where are you?” Rishi asked.
“At work. Why?”
“Liar.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at the back of the crowd.”
“What?”
“Just look.”
She peered into the line of bodies, and one of them stepped away from the group, waved, shrugged. Rishi. He motioned for her to join him, to which she shook her head, vigorously, no.
“Come on,” he mouthed. She wouldn’t.
“Come on!” he shouted. Several people turned to look. Most of them turned away again, but a few continued to stare. Kavya considered running. If she sprinted from her redwood to the grove of oaks nearby, she could vanish onto Telegraph Avenue and reach her car without anyone seeing her.
But this possibility ended a second later, when Rishi, her husband, her chosen partner and target of the afternoon’s gathered rage, jogged from the back of the crowd to the front of it, waving down the speaker.
“Rishi!” she shouted. “Get back here!” Her maternal instincts must have kicked in then, because she bounded toward the crowd and found herself, panting, at Rishi’s side. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” she said to him. “These are angry people.” She pulled but couldn’t move him.
“It’s them!” she heard someone say. M
urmurs grew to shouts and the next Kavya knew, a wall of young, strong, beautiful faces stood shouting, spitting their anger, at her.
“Hold up!” the girl in charge yelled. She raised her megaphone. “Shut up! Silencio!”
The girl took two large, exaggerated steps, and stood hip to hip with Rishi. She looked him up and down, once and then twice, to hoots and laughter from the crowd.
“Now this guy,” she shouted, “has some fucking huevos!” From the bubbling din, a thin wave of laughter, a few more shouts.
“To show up here? To show up here?”
She ripped through a Spanish scree that Kavya couldn’t understand. Whatever she’d said got the crowd going, and soon the students had joined voices to shout, in perfect unison, “Baby stealers, go home! Baby stealers, go home!”
Kavya grabbed Rishi’s hand, pulled him away from the crowd. Rishi resisted. “We’re going,” she growled.
“Go back to your pretty little house, baby stealers!” the girl shouted, her face contorted now with the snarl of a small and vicious bulldog. Her voice rang clear across the plaza, and chased them out the campus gate, onto Telegraph, and back to Kavya’s car.
“That’s right, Mama, you’d better run for the hills! Get in your beemer and drive your asses home!”
42.
His skin was as dark as Soli’s. His eyes were two black tunnels. His name tag said D’Cruz. Something was missing from those eyes, a flame extinguished. She wanted to ask him what he’d lost. She wanted to know what cold syrup slid through his veins. He began coming for her at night, when the others had gone to sleep, and soon she found herself waiting for him. Not because she looked forward to it.
The pain of it, the stench and chill and barbed rip of it—these followed her from the cold nights to the sleepy days. She asked herself why she’d locked eyes with the guard. It was a bold and stupid thing to do. She’d done it, she finally decided, because it had seemed, for a mere second, that D’Cruz saw the person in her. And even if she hated and feared him now, she’d grown so accustomed to being nothing, that to be something, even a slave, felt like a key to a secret room. Sometimes she imagined telling Señora Cassidy about this, about what this man was doing to her. “But, Soli!” she would have said, “Soli, honey, you’re being raped.” She would have whispered the last word, circled her long fingers around Soli’s arm, looked into her with tea-saucer eyes.
Soli was building up her defenses, getting used to the hands of men traveling where they would. Any man would descend to this, given the right set of circumstances. This place, this country, was no different than back home. Opportunity here was a multi-willed creature. Its tentacles spread in all directions. Some days, she would spot D’Cruz across the yard, watching her. When she looked back at him, he’d turn away.
And then it was December. Outside, the cold could have flung her to the ground. The air was sandpaper against her cheeks, and still, they were forced to roam the yard each day, for thirty minutes after breakfast, after lunch, after dinner. One morning, they were given sweatshirts to wear. And when she zipped hers up, she could hear the winter laughing.
The hearing was approaching. It was ten days away, then seven. The air crackled with cold, waiting for snow. Soli had managed another call. “Call the cell,” Adrian said. “It’s more reliable than calling the court. We’ll figure out a speaker connection.”
One night, she was out with the guard. He lay on top of her, the bare tops of his thighs still weighing her down. Her head was on the ground, where the frozen concrete had numbed away the pain. Usually, he got up right away, zipped himself, and walked her back to her cell. That night he didn’t move. In the well of her neck, a puddle grew. It was too cold for sweat. Tears or blood. They weren’t hers. She twisted her head to look.
No tears, no blood. An icicle had formed on the guard’s nose, and was dripping onto her shoulder.
He looked her in the eyes. He wasn’t about to move.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Behind the kitchen,” he said.
“But where are we?”
His gaze sharpened. “Washington. Outside Seattle.” He got up, she got up. They went inside.
• • •
THE NEXT NIGHT: “Is it near California? This place?”
“Is Washington near California?” He frowned. “Some would say yes.”
“How can I get back to California?”
“You won’t.”
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, there was no line for the phone.
“Shut down,” a woman told her. “The phone’s shut down.”
She turned to a guard. “I need the telephone.”
“Shut down,” he said. “No telephone today.”
December the twelfth was three days away.
The phone line was down the next day, too. Nobody said why.
• • •
THE NEXT NIGHT: “I need to get in touch with my lawyer.”
D’Cruz sighed. His eyes hardened. She feared she’d said the wrong thing. If she began to bother him, if she pestered him and transformed this arrangement of theirs into something that didn’t suit him, he would end it. Her tie to the inside would be gone.
December the twelfth was two days away.
• • •
THE NEXT NIGHT: “I need to use the phone,” she said to him, and slid her hand up his thigh. “I need to use the phone,” she said.
His voice shivered with desire. “I’ll see what I can do. Not now.” And he said no more.
The next day she did something she’d never dared, and walked up to him in the yard.
“I need something. Remember?”
He dropped a sideways gaze and said nothing.
“I need to contact my lawyer,” she said louder, Nacho’s small arms around her shoulders urging her on. “I have a hearing tomorrow, remember? My son?”
“Shut up,” he said. “Stop talking to me.”
She walked across the yard to the other guard, her own voice echoing in her head. Since the day of the buggy soup, she’d barely heard her own voice; it had withered to a faltering flame, but the thought of Nacho stoked it back to life. A large white man with no hair watched her approach. It seemed that the entire yard had grown silent and turned to watch.
“I need to use the phone,” she said.
“Get in line.”
“The line has thirty-seven people. I counted.”
He smiled down at her. “So you’ll be thirty-eight.”
The noise of the yard rose and hid her shame. “I have a hearing tomorrow and I need the telephone,” she said. “I need to call or I’ll lose my son.”
This made him smile. He chucked his chin at D’Cruz. “Why don’t you ask your buddy over there?”
She turned to look at D’Cruz, and even from that distance she could see his jaw clench.
Turning back to the second guard, she said, “I need your help.”
The man leaned down until his breath stung her eyes. “Mexicans,” he said. “Always on the lookout for a fuckin’ handout.” Soli went hard inside. What she saw in that moment—what she would remember always—was the gray, uneven stubble on his poorly shaven chin.
In one corner of the yard, a group of men were juggling with their feet, sending a single rock leaping from their knees to their ankles. In another corner, a row of women sat and talked, rolling pebbles between their fingers. The lunch hour was running down, and then lockdown would begin. She left to wait in line.
One phone, thirty-eight people. The line barely moved, and before long they were sent back to their pods for lockdown. She sat and stared at her two cellmates and they stared back at her. Two hours later, a stampede passed her room. Free time had begun. She waited twenty minutes for someone to unlock her door. And when she was out, the line was bigger than it had been before.
She didn’t get on the phone that day.
That night, D’Cruz didn’t come for her. She lay awake and waited—not for him, but for a sign that something would happen, that the next day would not come and go in silence, that she wouldn’t lose her child to a telephone line.
43.
The bedroom door shuddered open, catching itself on the hardwood floor. It was December, and every morning started with a blast of heat through the floor vents that caused the house to bloat and rise against itself. The floor was too high for the door, the door too wide for its frame. Running feet stopped at her bedside, and as she swam up from her dream, she sensed a cloud of heat just inches from her face.
Kavya opened her eyes. Ignacio, his face level with hers. He touched his sleep-warmed forehead to hers. “Iggy,” she said, “you’re out of bed.”
She jolted upright. “How did you get out of your crib? Ignacio?”
Rishi lay beside her, eyes closed.
“How’d you get out, Iggy?”
“He jumped,” Rishi mumbled.
“What?”
“He jumped out of his crib. He’s been doing it for weeks.”
It was Tuesday, the day before the hearing. Kavya had wanted to take the day off, but after she’d missed lunch service on the day of the protest, Martina McAfee warned her another absence would get her fired. She’d asked for Wednesday off, and had explained why. Martina McAfee had asked no questions about the reason for her court date, had only crossed her arms and waited for several seconds. “Okay. But it comes off your paycheck.”
She dropped Iggy off at daycare and lingered at the safety gate. Inside the playroom, he sat with a pile of blocks, his back to her, slim and sturdy, his hair flicking the tops of his shoulders. This might have been their last day together. “Iggy!” she called. But Ignacio didn’t hear. Already, he’d abandoned his blocks and stood at a train table, pushing a single black locomotive over a wooden hill, past some wooden trees and across a bright red drawbridge.
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