Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  At Gamma Gamma Pi, the specter of the coming day threw the kitchen into shadow. Kavya kept her coat on for most of the morning. Even the steam from the pasta pot was cold.

  “I’ll be there with you,” Eva Cabral had said. “We’ll be a presence in that room, and they’ll consider your position because they won’t be able to ignore it, with us sitting there.”

  “Will the mother be there?”

  “The birth mother? No. Probably not. But, Kavya, you’ll need to keep in mind what your position is.”

  “I know my position.”

  She knew she didn’t have one.

  A fault line. A landslide. A pit. She’d built her love on a deep dark pit, a void in the earth, an abscess of unsanctioned need. The state of California stood by, shovels in hand, waiting to fill it in. But with what? With everything she’d ever wanted? With a lifetime of Ignacio? On Wednesday, that pit would fill with promise, or with the debris of what might have been.

  “Hey,” she heard. “Hey.”

  She looked over.

  “Pot’s boiling over.”

  She grabbed the lid of the vast pasta pot and shrieked at the scalding metal.

  Miguel rushed over and lifted the lid with an oven mitt. “Cheap-ass pots, man.”

  She watched his fingers wrap a wet cloth around her hand.

  “What’s the matter with you today?”

  “Everything.” She sighed and said nothing more.

  Miguel set to work chopping carrots for his salad. The thud of a blade on wood filled the room. She strained the pasta and shook it into a chafing dish.

  And then: “It’s my boy. His mother wants him back.”

  Miguel’s knife fell silent. “I know. I heard about it.”

  “She’s being deported. To Mexico.”

  “And she wants her son back.”

  “Yes.”

  When Miguel said it in six blunt words, it sounded simple. The mother wanted her son back. The mother. Her son. Mother, son. Of course she wanted him back.

  “So what’s happening?”

  “There’s a hearing tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh. So. Well.”

  “What?”

  “So if it’s her kid, and she’s being deported, he goes with her, right?” He put his knife down and turned to face her.

  “If you don’t think about the fact that he was born here. That he has a right to stay here, as an American citizen.”

  “A right to stay with you, you mean.”

  “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “What about his mother?” He crossed and recrossed his arms. “I mean, it seems simple to me. She wants her kid back, she gets her kid back.”

  “Yes, Miguel,” she snapped. “It’s very simple. It’s really very simple when you don’t think about how this affects me.” She looked up at him. “Or Ignacio. Ignacio knows me now. He calls me Mama. This is about what Ignacio wants, too.”

  “What does Ignacio want?”

  Miguel stared at her. From above, she heard the footsteps of descending sisters, summoned to the dining room by the twelve o’clock chimes. Kavya started to answer, but couldn’t. She felt what Ignacio wanted; she understood his need fully and precisely, but she couldn’t strap words to it. She had no answer for Miguel. She put on her oven gloves, picked up the serving dish, and headed for the kitchen door.

  That afternoon, she rushed through dinner prep. As the evening fog began to roll across the kitchen window, she decided she’d had enough. “Cover me,” she said to Miguel, untying her apron.

  “Cover you?”

  “Please, Miguel. Please.” She stood before him, apron in hand, and watched him consider. “I’ll pay you extra. Twenty. For every hour tonight.”

  “I don’t want your money,” he said. He nodded at the door. “Go ahead.” She left without another word. At the daycare, she stepped over the safety gate and wrapped Ignacio in her arms. He dug his nose into the curve of her neck and stayed there, as if he knew. And then he wriggled from her grasp and ran back to the train table.

  She packed him into the car and drove him to a shopping center in Emeryville. She needed shoes for the hearing the next day; all she had were sneakers, clogs, and stilettos.

  “No one’ll be looking at your feet,” Rishi had said.

  “I’ll be looking at my feet.”

  On the way to the shoe store, Kavya paused outside a children’s store. In the window display, the faceless plasticine models wore sweaters appliquéd with polar bears and penguins, ice-skating, sledding, striped scarves around their necks.

  “These are cute, Iggy. Don’t you think?”

  Ignacio sat curled over his stroller, sucking voraciously on its nylon-covered T-bar.

  “Let’s try some on. Come on.”

  Kavya hadn’t been a mother long enough to realize that most mothers didn’t take their kids shopping for kids’ clothes. Ignacio fussed in the store, wriggled and wheezed, allergic to the very air. When she held a sweater to his chest, he grabbed it and threw it to the ground. He strained against his safety belt. When she released him, he climbed out and slipped under display racks to hide, ducking from rack to rack in a game of cat-and-mouse that left Kavya stranded at the front of the store, childless and calling his name. She finally treaded slowly around the store, quietly enough to escape his ears, and found two brown shoes poking out from under a rack.

  “Iggy!” she cried, and fell upon the shoes, wrestling his small body to the ground and tickling him until he screamed with laughter. She didn’t care that she was sprawled across the shop floor. She didn’t care that other mothers and the store clerks were staring.

  She bought Ignacio four sweaters that weren’t on sale. They were more expensive than anything she’d bought herself that year.

  Leaving the store, she thought about the summer. Summer was six months away and she had nothing for him to wear. She drove him to a large children’s store at the edge of town. There, she filled her cart with clothes for that year, the year after that, and the year after that. She cleared the clearance rack. She emptied the shoe rack. She bought Ignacio a pair of sneakers that squeaked when he walked, and another that lit up. She bought him shoes for every year that she might not be with him. She bought him rain boots in three sizes and raincoats in four. She bought him one umbrella, child-sized.

  She stockpiled diapers and training diapers, underwear and socks. Footed pajamas and summer pajamas, undershirts and T-shirts and swimming trunks and floaties and an inflatable pool toy shaped like a snail. Diaper rash cream, baby lotion, bath gel. Bath salts that would turn the water every color of the rainbow. A pack of race cars, a box set of Winnie-the-Pooh books, a Spider-Man backpack. A teddy bear, a plush duck, a set of bendable action figures from a movie she’d seen advertised. She bought him a tricycle and cases of crayons, of washable markers, of watercolor paint. A pencil case, binder paper, pencils, and a sharpener. She bought him pads of paper bigger than he was, and coloring books. These she put back, remembering that coloring books stifled creativity. She bought a parenting book on fostering a child’s creativity, and a kitchen set complete with a miniature rolling pin and colander. She filled three shopping carts, rolled one to the checkout and ran back for the other two. Two clerks helped her wheel her carts out to the Prius.

  They arrived home long after dark, Ignacio wailing with hunger. Rishi raised his eyebrows at her.

  “What?” she said. “We were shopping. There’s stuff in the car.”

  He sighed, went out the car, and from the kitchen, shredding cheese for Iggy’s quesadilla, she heard her husband’s roaring obscenities.

  “We needed that stuff,” she said, stepping away from him when he stalked into the kitchen. “Iggy needs that stuff.”

  “Iggy needs this stuff? He’ll need some of it when he’s twelve! What’s gott
en into you?”

  She shrugged. Her world, after the shopping frenzy, had grown very still.

  “Did you get your shoes?”

  “I’ll wear my clogs.”

  44.

  The morning of the hearing arrived with the shriek of a guard’s whistle. Her wake-up call. Soli was at the door before the whistle stopped blowing. She leapt for the corridor.

  “Not so fast, Conchita.” The guard grabbed the back of her sweatshirt. “You stand here and wait to be counted,” he said.

  She stood. She waited She was counted. She ran for the phone. Running was prohibited. Let them shoot me, she thought. I won’t be walking when they do. She reached the corridor where the phone was kept. No one was waiting!

  Only a guard.

  “Shut down,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Shut. Down,” she said.

  “No. No, I need the phone. It’s not possible.”

  “NO PHONE. Compren-day?”

  But there was a phone. Soli could see the phone. The phone existed.

  Soli tried a different tack. “Señora, they are taking my son away from me. I need to call the court. I will lose him. The phone in the office? The office phone?”

  Her jaw clenched. “Get back to your cell.”

  “I need the phone.”

  Silence.

  “I need the phone.”

  “I’m calling backup.” She looked slightly frightened.

  “I need the phone!” Soli growled. She shoved the guard to the side and ran for the phone, but the guard was faster and stronger. She tackled Soli to the ground, caught Soli’s flying fist, and pinned her arm to her back. She clawed at the guard’s face. The woman rolled Soli onto her front, and another guard cuffed her wrists. All she could do was yowl and curse, a cat in a one-sided fight.

  “I need the phone,” she wept, her body heaving and shuddering.

  Arms like a rogue current dragged her down the hall. It took two men to take Soli away, kicking at the walls, her heels scraping along the corridor. One set of hands she recognized. One set of hands had been places on her body she’d never seen with her own eyes. She knew where she was going. She screamed and spat at them. She cursed their mothers and their babies. She pleaded.

  “Don’t put me there. Please. Don’t put me there. Please.”

  A door opened to a cushioned, sunlit closet. The hands threw her in, and she bounced off a wall and landed hard on the padding.

  The door shut.

  From a skylight, the sun glared down.

  • • •

  HOURS CAME AND HOURS WENT. Somewhere in Berkeley, people were walking into a room, saying things about Soli and her son. A decision would be made. She didn’t move from the floor, but curled into herself, her knees to her belly, her breath steaming down her breasts. The sky above was gray like the cushioned walls. Darker gray, and then black. The night passed. She didn’t move.

  The only place she could be was no place. The only safe place for her was this soundless void.

  December twelfth came and went. Soli stayed in the room for two cycles of white sky and black night. Many hours in, when the hunger in her stomach had spiked and finally numbed, Soli had a vision, flickering on her wall, the hearing in the Berkeley courtroom. Nacho! She could see him in a wooden chair, his fat legs hovering a good foot above the ground. She saw Adrian Alvarez, stalking about the courtroom, speaking in crisp and authoritative English. She could see the judge with kind eyes. The judge would ask for her and see that she was absent. The judge would take stock of this and write it down. Words would stream through that courtroom, weaving and circling and then floating to rest. The judge would finish it all with a decision, a judgment. And this would end it.

  She prayed to Santa Clara, she said her rosary, parsing out invisible beads, and she fell asleep, at last. When she awoke, it was daytime. The sun through the skylight had filled her with warmth and she knew—she knew, all at once, that Ignacio would return to her. A boy belonged with his mother. It was a biological imperative that every human understood. Adrian Alvarez would have to say nothing. Soli wouldn’t have to call. It was a law of all kingdoms—human, animal, heavenly. Children stayed with their mothers.

  For two days, she lay on her back and watched the sky change. When the weight of it threatened to crush her, she huddled in the corner and watched food come and go. Her body was a solid block of will—no room for food, none for doubt.

  And then they let her out, walked her back to her pod.

  “I need the phone,” she said to the guard. He shut the door and left.

  45.

  The morning of the hearing, Kavya woke up, showered, dressed, and vomited. It happened so suddenly that she had no time to lunge for a trash can. One second, she was fastening her top button and the next, she found herself covered in a yellow sheet of bile. The white fabric of her blouse clung to her breasts, and she took it off, all of it, her pants, even her underwear, to start again.

  When she got to the kitchen, her mother was waiting. She’d asked her to babysit that day, had explained to her the reason for the hearing, the possible outcomes. She could have taken him to daycare, of course, but something in her wanted her mother there, in case things went very badly, in case she needed to come home, quit her job, and crawl into bed for days.

  “He had his Cheerios,” Uma said, by way of greeting. “This is what you’re wearing?”

  Rishi looked up from his laptop. “That’s what you’re wearing?”

  She’d found a long black skirt and a black turtleneck sweater to replace what she’d vomited on. Everything else she had was too casual or too flirty or too something. Her ultimate goal was to clothe herself, to make it to the courthouse and through the hearing.

  Iggy sat in his booster chair, his chest and shoulders rising higher over the tabletop than she remembered. “You grew!” Kavya said, unstrapping and lifting him from the chair. He pointed to the living room window. “Should we go see? What’s out there?”

  She walked him to the window, and like a good parent, she narrated what she saw. She narrated the passersby, the students with backpacks, the homeless woman with her crate, heading to her corner for the day, the comers and goers carrying bags with baguettes shooting from their depths. All the while, she watched Iggy’s reflection. She memorized his smell, the firm clutch of his arm around her shoulders. She tried to imagine how it would feel to have him torn from her grasp, to see him recede to nothing, a shadow, and then a memory. The thought made her nauseated. Tears sprang forth and she couldn’t stop them. She cried without wiping away her tears. Ignacio was watching her now, searching her eyes, thrusting out his own lower lip and huffing. He swept his palm over one of her cheeks, then the other.

  “Kavya,” Rishi said. He took the boy from her and she let him. “Let’s go. Hey.” He paused. “Hey, he’ll be fine. Okay? I’ve got some toast for you.”

  He handed Iggy to Uma. Uma cooed and sang to him, picked up her bag to search for whatever indulgence she’d smuggled into the home. And before Kavya could say goodbye to Iggy, Rishi pulled her out the door.

  Eva Cabral met them outside the courthouse and walked them, hand in hand in hand, to the hearing.

  “Familiar faces,” Rishi mumbled, and pointed to a group outside the courthouse—the RAZA kids, twenty or so of them, the bulldog leading the charge.

  “Buena suerte, Mama-Papa Mastercard!” she yelled. Rishi cleared his throat, wrapped an arm around Kavya’s shoulders, and led her into the building.

  The courtroom was the size of a small classroom, with a slightly raised desk at the front, where the judge sat. She was a young Asian woman, surprisingly young, with short hair dyed blond, and glasses that cut straight across her face. Joyce Jones was there, and two lawyers—one for the child welfare department, one for the birth mother. “No birth mother,” Rishi said. Five p
eople Kavya had never seen before sat in the benches behind them.

  “They’re here for other hearings,” Eva explained. “After ours.” It hadn’t occurred to Kavya that their hearing was just one in a series. They sat down in the front row to watch.

  Later that day, that night, the next day and night, lying in bed, eating cereal, soaping her arms in the shower, Kavya would try to piece that hearing together, to reassemble its parts, believing that an hour so crucial couldn’t simply slip from her memory, a wasted by-product of the legal system.

  First, the birth mother’s lawyer spoke. She could remember the sharkskin gray of his suit, the curly brown hair that reminded her of Ignacio’s, but she couldn’t remember his name. She did remember the way he twirled his pen over his fingers like a propeller, sitting at his table, waiting to speak. “Soli Valdez has proven herself a proficient and loving mother, Your Honor. Her only legal trespass has been to cross the border without immigration documents. Her right to her child cannot be morally questioned, and should not be terminated by the faceless mechanics of the state.” He said the things that Miguel had said, and more, packaged with oratorial sheen.

  “And where is your client today, Mr. Alvarez?”

  “She’s being held at the Belle Plain detention facility in Washington State, Your Honor. She was scheduled to phone in, but is most likely being prevented from doing so.”

  “By whom?”

  The lawyer cleared his throat and looked down. “I don’t know” was all he could say.

  She remembered how surprising it was that the judge spoke during the trial, and asked questions, counterposed arguments, participated in the scrimmage of reason and rhetoric. The judges on television were stern onlookers that barked at interruptions and threatened to find people in contempt. She remembered this judge asking the question she dreaded: “And why shouldn’t Ignacio Valdez go back to Mexico if that’s where his mother ends up?”

  “Your Honor,” the county lawyer said, “Ignacio Valdez is a dependent of the state of California now. It’s our job to make some tough decisions on his behalf.” Kavya had never seen this lawyer before.