If you asked the Cassidys, they would tell you she was loved.
The woman came back out with a paper bag that warmed the car. “Egg muffin ’n’ fries and a coffee,” she said.
Soli hadn’t eaten since the day before and she tore at the food before she could question who this woman was and why she was feeding her, or what would become of her now that she was in this car. The woman watched Soli eat. “Wild as a wolf,” she said, and started the engine.
This much she’d learned: Strangers could astonish with their kindness. Strangers could be savage. But no matter what, strangers never disappointed, because she expected nothing from them. It was the people she knew, who liked and even loved her, who could let her down most cruelly. And she could let them down, too.
The woman didn’t ask for Soli’s name or offer hers.
The woman with the windblown face drove down the highway, surrounded by woods, until she came to the concrete edge of a city, with skyscrapers in the distance. She parked before a squat yellow building with a sprawling, fenced-in yard at the back. A chicken scooted across it, bobbing her chin.
“Is this the police?” Soli asked, ready to run.
“Honey. No.”
A man came out who stood almost taller than the doorway. He wore jeans and a green shirt, and over this, a soft gray bathrobe.
“Hang on,” he said, and disappeared into the house. He came back wearing glasses. “Can she pluck a chicken?”
“She sure can,” answered the woman.
He nodded at Soli. “What’s your name?”
“Clara.”
“Clara, go down to the kitchen door and tell them you’re on prep. Tell them I sent you.”
And when he stopped talking, he seemed to focus in a new way. He looked her up and down, he saw what she was wearing. “We’ll get you some better clothes,” he said. “To start you off.” He nodded and closed the door. His footsteps faded away.
• • •
HIS NAME WAS ELMER, and he was good.
Elmer owned the Pick-a-Chicken, the only one in America and possibly the world. It was a place both top secret and wildly popular. The idea was that customers walked into a yard to find the chicken they were going to eat. They didn’t kill it themselves, but they did see their food alive before they ate it.
“It’s honest eating,” Elmer told her. “It’s conscious carnivorism, you know what I mean?”
She nodded, and was only half lying. In Berkeley, there were plenty of people who cared about animals but still ate them. Brett Cassidy would have stood in line for a chicken he could talk to. Still, even if a customer picked up his chicken and stared into its narrow little face and said, Chicken, I’m going to eat you now, the fact didn’t change that an animal was being slaughtered so that someone from Seattle could eat it.
And this place, this Pick-a-Chicken, was never empty. Customers, sometimes famous ones, waited in a line out the door. When a famous one came in, he got seated right away and the waiters started whispering and grinning like idiots. And that’s when they yelled at the workers in back, for taking too long or underseasoning a chicken or leaving a drip of sauce on the rim of a plate. You’d think that no one would want to pick a chicken. You would be wrong.
There were too many people in that kitchen; Elmer just kept taking them in, as long as there was work to do and customers out the door. Iselda was another plucker, and Meera ran the rotisserie. Alejo was a fryer in the kitchen and Alfred a dishwasher. Bobby and Romeo were on slaughter. Mostly they were covered in blood and kept to themselves.
Soli made just enough to buy food and build slowly the stash of money that would take her back to Nacho. She spoke to Mama and Papi the day she arrived. “I’m okay,” she’d said. “They’ve let me out.” There was far too much to say, so she left it at that.
Then she dialed Adrian Alvarez’s number from the rickety pay phone outside the restaurant.
“Where’s my child?”
“He’s with his foster family, Soli. The Reddys.”
“The Readys?”
“The Reddys.”
Adrian spelled for her their full names. They lived in Berkeley.
“How did you get out?”
She told him, and it thrilled and frightened her to speak aloud of what she’d done.
He whispered a string of curses, and then, “Really? You’re telling the truth?”
“Please,” she said. “I need to find him now.”
“Soli, I’d strongly advise you not to contact the Reddys. That could make things very complicated for you, even if you don’t officially exist.”
“But you know,” she said. “I never officially existed here. Did I?”
“They’re good people, Soli. I know that probably doesn’t help you now, but they’re doing their best for Ignacio. Not all foster families do, you know? The mother speaks Spanish with him—”
“I am the mother.”
“You’re right.” He paused. “Are you safe, Soli? Where are you?”
“I’m Clara now. Not Soli.”
“Clara. Okay. What’s your new last name?”
“That’s a good question, Adrian Alvarez.”
Elmer gave his workers apartments above the restaurant and they lived two or three to a room. There were seven others in Soli’s apartment. It was crowded, but the alternative was to live silent and alone on that forgotten edge of Seattle. They worked until late, but the mornings were theirs, and they could go where they wanted, as long as they were back in the kitchen by noon.
“If there’s a knock on the door,” Iselda told Soli, “never answer it. None of us knock on the door, okay? So if anyone does, it’s La Migra. And you climb out the window. You hide on the roof if you have to.” One evening, as they mopped the kitchen floor, Soli told Iselda about Ignacio, about all she’d lost, about what she’d done to the guard. She’d grown to like Iselda and her quiet ways. As she spoke, Soli felt a few brave petals open within her, the first to feel the sun again. Iselda had leaned her mop against the wall and stared.
“Please,” Soli had said. “Keep it to yourself.”
Iselda shook her head.
“Please, Iselda. Tell no one.”
Iselda walked over to Soli. “We’ve all been through things,” she said. She took Soli’s mop from her. “Go get some rest.”
The next morning, as Soli sat up in bed, still registering the day, Iselda stepped into the room with a cup of coffee. She lay a gentle hand on her shoulder. “New day, m’ija. Sí?”
48.
Ignacio turned two in March. Kavya threw a party for him and invited his daycare friends, children she’d only seen in passing, from the safety gate, and parents she’d never spoken to. A hearing was scheduled for June. They would travel to the same courthouse, this time with Ignacio. A judge—maybe the same one—would ask fewer questions. She would terminate the rights of Ignacio’s birth mother. Rishi and Kavya would start their adoption proceedings. Ignacio would be theirs.
Sometimes Kavya caught herself watching her husband and her son as if they were a film, a fleeting series of rapidly flipping stills that one day would flip into silence and darkness. She tried to catch these moments before they flipped away. Remember this, she’d tell herself, when she and Rishi and Iggy lay in bed together on a weekday morning, all of them a little too warm, a little too lazy to get up and start their day. Remember this, she’d think, when Iggy tasted his first anchovy-stuffed olive, smacking his lips with surprise. Remember this, when Iggy climbed into her lap and held her around the chest, let her bury her nose in his hair. Someday, he would be too old.
There were times when she thought about the greater balance of things, when her karmic calculator reared its meddlesome head. She wondered if she’d suffered enough. She knew there were others, others very close, who had suffered unspeakably so that she could carry on wit
h her happy and healthy days. Sometimes she imagined her world jolting and reeling, toppling down a hillside. She imagined the Big One—if not the Big One, then a Big One—ramming into the gentle percussion of her days, demolishing what was hers. There were times, when she found a cluster of fruit flies on a banana or when a chill wind blew under the door and through the house, that she wondered if things had worked out too well, whether a reckoning was on its way, when it would arrive, and how.
49.
There were days when Soli’s only goal was to pluck each chicken to its naked base and reveal the pure, pimpled flesh beneath. Every bird, stripped of its workaday jacket, was a bird set free. Hers was a small life, but noble in its simplicity. The customers, they came, they ate their chickens, and they went home. They were happy to have eaten, and Soli and the others were glad enough to have worked, to have been able to clean up, lock up, and go home. And if, one day, the rap at the door found them, the flash of a badge, they would scatter to the wind like dandelion seeds, and push their roots down elsewhere. They would start new lives, and new lives again.
Those first days, Soli had wanted out. She had felt fearful and wild, an animal that ruptured its chains, a mother rabid for her child. But as she settled into the routines of freedom and work, she realized that getting back to Ignacio wouldn’t be easy. She couldn’t show up penniless and planless. The Pick-a-Chicken would be a place to recuperate and make money, to remember the human ways.
Elmer used to watch her when he thought she couldn’t see. He had money, yes. One day, he asked her if she’d like to go to another restaurant with him. To eat with him, not to work. He said it just like that, gruff and nervous. To eat. Not to work.
She told him no. And thank you. She watched the rapid flutter of his lashes, and she wanted to change her mind to save him from this embarrassment. “Watch out,” Iselda said when Soli told her. “Men don’t like the word no. If he asks you again, say yes. Or he’ll find a way to make life hard for you.”
Elmer never asked Soli again, and her life stayed more or less the same.
She showed up in Elmer’s office one afternoon. The money from a few weeks’ work had roused in her the first peeps of confidence. He offered her a seat.
“I need to find a telephone number,” she said. “Can you help me?”
He scooted his chair into his desk. “Sure thing.” She showed him the names she’d etched into her palm. And within seconds, a few clicks, an answer. He wrote it down and slid it her way.
“Thank you.”
He gave her a thumbs-up.
As she stepped out the door, he said, “Clara.”
“Yes?”
“Stay out of trouble.”
It took her three days to find the courage to dial the numbers. The area code was comforting. Soli could see the woman before she heard her voice: ski jacket and jeans, flat shoes, fresh skin, and bright eyes. Her phone rang three times.
“Hello.”
Her throat collapsed and the words slipped away.
“Hello-o,” the woman repeated. “Hello?”
Soli hung up, then dialed again. When the woman answered, she disconnected again. She didn’t have her words. Not in English.
“Hello? Who is this?”
And she forced out the sentence. “This is the mother of Ignacio Castro Valdez,” she said, descending immediately into tears.
The phone clicked, and the woman was gone.
“You can’t hang up on me,” she said. The dial tone hummed in response. “You can’t hang up on me!” She said it again and again, hoping the repetition would make it so, until she was shouting it. She felt the foghorn of her voice rise from her throat. And when the dial tone clicked into silence, she was hardly there to hear it.
Soli was a spider dangling from its own weak thread. She was crying now through bared teeth, kicking uselessly at the walls of the phone booth. Two arms pulled her from the booth and held her until she stopped shaking. When she realized where she was, she saw that her palms were wrapped around her elbows, held in place by two large hands. Elmer had found Soli, her web torn. His shirt sleeves were soaked. They stood, unmoving, for many minutes, until the rise and fall of his chest brought her back again.
“I need to get back.”
“I know.”
• • •
LATER, IN ELMER’S OFFICE.
“I need the money, señor. To get back to my son.”
He sighed, scratched at something on the surface of his desk. “Clara, you all need money. All of you. If I gave you money? Then what? How’ll I say no to the others? What makes you different from them?”
She stared into her lap. He was right. She’d had the chance to set herself apart from the others, and she hadn’t taken it.
“And how do you figure to get back to California?”
“I’ll fly. I’ll drive. I’ll walk.”
He smiled. “And? You arrive. And what do you do?”
“I take my son back.”
“How? Will they give him back? Will you kidnap him?”
“When he sees me, he will know me.”
“Will he?”
She let this question take its place in the room.
“And if he does? Where’ll you live, Clara? What’ll you do?”
For this, she definitely had no answer.
A new thought came to her. “Can I see them?”
“See them. Their picture?”
She nodded.
“Easy,” Elmer said. He clicked and tapped. And there they were, the people who were keeping him, their cheeks pressed close, two wineglasses held between them, their sky awash in gold.
“But they’re not even American.”
Soli and Elmer sat in silence.
“Save your money, Clara.” He tapped on his keyboard, and turned the screen to her. “See that? Seattle to San Francisco. Bus fare. This is all you need.”
Soli sat up straight. One hundred and forty-five dollars. “I can make that,” she said. She had one hundred and seven rolled into a Band-Aid box in her room.
“And then you’ll need some more to live—to eat.” He smiled. “You’ll have a little mouth to feed.”
• • •
SHE DIDN’T CALL HER PARENTS OFTEN, but when she did, she’d say, “Times are hard, Mama.”
And they’d say, “What’s happening?”
She’d been through an opera of small hells and made it out the other side, but all she said was “I’m fine. Everything’s fine. I’m working in a new place now, and I’ll send something soon.” They knew only that Soli had been locked up, then let out, and that now Silvia was in a bona fide American jail. It was the new family shame, and no one discussed it.
“Don’t worry about us,” they’d say. And she yearned for them when they said that. “You’ve done so much for us. Think about coming home.” What she couldn’t tell them was that she couldn’t come home without her child.
• • •
ONE MORNING twelve weeks after she’d arrived, she entered Elmer’s office. “I have the money,” she said. “I’m going.”
Elmer sat back. “Well,” he said, and nothing more. He let his eyes rest on her face, her hair.
“I see you cross yourself every morning.” He opened a drawer in his desk and from it drew a string of beads. “I don’t use these anymore, but I’ve held on to them. Can’t very well throw out a rosary, can you?” He held up the polished spheres of honey-colored wood, anchored by a cross.
“It’s yours.” He poured the beads into a small heap on the table.
“Thank you,” she said, and wrapped them around her palm.
“Your name means ‘clear and bright,’ Clara.”
She nodded.
“It’s the name of a saint,” she added. “She watches over my town. She is the saint of television.”
A grin, a gap between his front teeth. And then he stopped smiling, leaned forward, and said, “Who’s going to watch over you, Clara?”
She fingered the beads, rubbed smooth now by someone else’s circular prayers. “Thank you for this.” And she broke out into the day, clear and bright. The winter was weakening and the sun sparked through the branches of the trees, stoked by the fuzz of nascent leaves. A solemn wind blew the hair off her shoulders. It was a wind that didn’t chill, that simply made its way north. It was a Popocalco wind.
Already, the buds of sanguinaria were emerging. Their tight ivory petals still cowered from the cold, waiting for a warmer day to open. In America, they called it blood root. This sounded to her like raw birth, the crimson shreds that followed in the wake of new life. To her, this had nothing to do with the actual flower, simple and white with a yellow stamen, as unmarked as a new soul. Soon, the spring would ram its hard little head into the world. And she’d be back where she started.
Inside, Ignacio’s old cells pattered through her. They ran and leapt. They played escondido. They were hers to keep, his gift.
50.
Washington mornings were the stillest she’d known. She woke most days to a thick gel of silence, no trains or early joggers. But on her final morning: a sudden crunch of leaves. A hiss at the window: Alejo. “It’s time.” Iselda rose from her bed and ran a towel under the tap in their room. She swiped it across Soli’s forehead, over her cheeks and chin, dabbed softly at her eyes, a gentle communion. In Iselda’s eyes, dark specks marred the white, one shaped like a bird, another as brown and square as a piece of toast. Soli would remember these. Iselda knelt with Soli as she closed the suitcase she’d bought from the local Goodwill, and helped her yank the zipper around a stubborn corner. When she started to rise, Iselda grabbed her by the forearms.
“Not yet,” she said. “We should pray.” They took out their rosaries and said the Padre Nuestro one time, and once again. Another hiss from the window, Alejo growing impatient. “It really is time,” Iselda said. She kissed Soli’s cross and folded the rosary into her hand. She held her close and whispered a final blessing, then pushed her out the door. In the minutes before dawn, the sky was bitter blue, the leaves shivered black on their branches. Alejo waited with his engine running.
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