Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  Just weeks before, this trip had felt impossible, but now she saw that impossibility was only ignorance shrouded by poverty. Over ten hours, a somersault of day and night, she would travel down the haunch of this country, back to California, Berkeley, Ignacio. Still, seated on the Greyhound bus, a firm clasp on her ticket, she expected something to happen. The yank of the leash. The brusque American Hey! It could have come from anyone. The bus driver? Or one of the passengers—surely one of these people would sense that she was a false woman, a runner, a stabber, a chicken stripper.

  Her incredulity shrank with every passing hour. She cataloged all she’d been through—prison and escape and the weeks and weeks of dollars stashed away—to make it seem real. She thought back to the day she’d given birth, the victory of it. Her ribs ached with desire. At the twelfth hour, she saw in the distance the glassy bay, the graceful swoop of the Golden Gate, and she knew she was home. The road rumbled beneath her, forward propulsion that grounded her to her mission. She would arrive.

  At sunset, Soli was back in Berkeley. The city that day was covered in clouds, but nothing about it had changed. The first thing she did was find the house. Elmer had tracked down the address. It stood three streets from the Cassidys’. All this time, these people had been three streets away, waiting.

  She had arrived, yes, but wouldn’t truly be home until she glimpsed her son, if even for just a moment. That first night, she lingered on the corner of their street, breathless with the thought of seeing him again. He never came out. He would have been sleeping by that evening hour, her well-kept boy, trained to a healthy routine. She left her suitcase against the outer wall of the old familiar bakery, just around the corner. She found a bin of buns and pastries—almost new, a little stale.

  Make no mistake. She had a plan. Every step of it balanced on a crumbling precipice of good fortune, but she decided that she’d had enough bad fortune. Her good luck must have gathered like the dollars in her Band-Aid box. But then, she thought, gazing at the house door and willing it to open, perhaps she’d been lucky all along—to escape the prison, to find Elmer, to save her money and spend it, to find herself back here, just feet from her boy, in a neighborhood that was practically hers.

  “I think a shelter must have closed,” Rishi said, drawing the blinds. “I’ve been seeing more homeless people around. New ones.”

  “Huh. Hopefully it’s a shelter and not a mental hospital.”

  “I’ll talk to the police when I get a chance. They shouldn’t be on our street. They’re supposed to stay on Shattuck, right?”

  Kavya shrugged. “Is that the rule?”

  Rishi parted the blinds again with his fingers, but the woman who’d been lingering on the corner, young, with long hair, clean-looking, maybe newly homeless, was gone.

  • • •

  SOLI WAITED for the night to deepen, for the hour when the main street was quiet and the windows dark. An occasional car passed. In the distance, a siren rose and wound itself back down. Living her quiet non-life in Washington, plucking chickens and waiting, she’d been doing more than she realized. She’d spent those days remembering how to climb a moving train, gathering her propensity for action over wisdom.

  A small part of her, the well-mannered girl her parents had raised, was horrified. But the rest of Soli wanted only to see her son and was willing to violate the most basic rules of human dignity to do so. She approached the house on cat feet. The day’s warmth had gathered in the adobe walls and radiated now to her touch. The kitchen faced the street, as did the living room with its large window. Around the side of the house, she saw a gate. Prayers sprang to her lips, steadied the pound of her heart. One window looked in on a bathroom, another on a large bedroom. Through the dark, she could make out the topography of the bed, two long bodies stretched beneath covers. She followed the wall until she came to the next window. White-and-red draperies hung half open. A light cast a bluish glow.

  And there he lay, in a very small bed against the opposite wall. Ignacio in the moonlight. Her knees faltered, her vision swam, and she had to kneel. She might have fallen there, defeated at last by the sight of her son. They might have found her vanquished in a tangle of ivy. But she held herself up by the forearms and rested her head against the window. His eyes were closed. His eyebrows arched and sank, arched and sank. His lips made suckling motions, his cheeks working rhythmically.

  “Nacho.” The word tumbled from her lips, the only offering she had.

  And then she saw it: her first chance. A gap between the base of the window and the white stucco wall. A gap she could push her fingers into. When she planted her feet and bore down with all her strength and pulled, the window didn’t budge. When she crammed her palms against the upper edge of the window and pushed, the frame stayed stuck. It was splintered and old, this window, but it was locked.

  When she looked back in the room, the small body sat upright in its bed. A blanket swirled around his knees. He blinked in the dim light, rubbed at his eyes. And then she watched his vision focus, his lids pop wide. He saw her. To be seen, by Ignacio, at last, was almost too much. “Nacho,” she whispered. “Nacho, it’s me! It’s me! Open the window, m’ijo. Open it, Nacho!” Blinded by tears, she couldn’t see him anymore. He faded into the moonlit blur of the room. She sank to the ground, pressed her head to the spiny stucco wall, and wept.

  She looked up again to meet a face. He hovered above her, nose smudged against the glass, hair spilling into his eyes, blinking down. He raised his hand and pressed his palm to the window.

  “Nacho,” she cried, this time louder than she should have. “Nacho!”

  He called through the glass. “Mama. Mama!”

  From deep within the house, a light switched on. A voice. Thudding footsteps. The door swung open and she saw a head and wild hair, shoulders and the curve of breasts. His room flooded with light.

  Soli was gone. She crept on her belly to the nearest bush, hid beneath its foliage, and made her way back through the gate, down the sidewalk, running now through the dense night, down Shattuck, turning one corner, and another, until she was sure she had vanished.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, she woke chilled to the bone. The sun hadn’t risen, but the garbage trucks rumbled nearby. Voices and pans clattered behind the bakery door. She had slept an hour, maybe, but she could stand. Her legs would hold her.

  Would she present herself to the Cassidys? She couldn’t bring herself to. The prospect of them looking at her in that way, or of not looking at her at all, of turning her away, of turning her in, made street life preferable. You are homeless, Soli, she told herself. You’re like the woman with the milk crate, but you don’t have a milk crate, only this suitcase, heavy and filled with possessions that grow more useless with each passing hour.

  Her night on the street had left its mark. Mud streaked her shirt and the seams of her underwear dug into her groin, moist and bladed with sweat. In her suitcase, clean clothes waited. She made her way to the Cassidys’ house. She wouldn’t ring their bell, but had an idea of when they’d be home, and when they wouldn’t. She needed to get warm. They kept a key by their kitchen door, tucked under a wormy rock, behind a hydrangea bush.

  The door opened. “Hello?” she called, just in case. It was midmorning, the house empty. No one was home, not even a housekeeper. But the place was clean. Clearly, they’d found another Soli, someone to polish their ceramics and hold at bay the incessant tide of their belongings. She went first to their bathroom, where at one time she’d been afraid to take a shit. She was still afraid, the prospect of someone coming in from a morning jog nearly paralyzing, but her body ached with cold. Just a trickle of water, she thought, some hot water on my feet and my face. She ran the faucet in the tub. She let the sumptuous heat of it run through her fingers, then took her sock off and stuck her foot in. A moment later, her clothes were off, and before she could stop herself, she
stood in the shower, the water turned up to scalding, and let it pelt against her breasts until her abdomen tightened with breathless pleasure. She picked up a bar of soap that smelled of roses and swept it between her breasts, under her arms, along the shaft of each thigh. She dried herself with a towel that hung on the door, the panic swelling again, and dressed as quickly as she could, checking twice, then three times, that she’d left nothing behind.

  The door to the señor’s office was open, the lamp on. She bit her lip, peered into the room. It was empty, and something—the habit of turning off the lights in this house—carried her to the desk. On it sat a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. She picked them up and before she could stop it, her thumb smudged the lens. There it was, her fingerprint, clear and small. She rubbed it off with her shirt, dropped the glasses to the table, and got out of there. Outside their back door was Saoirse’s old stroller, gathering cobwebs. Soli took it.

  A faded diaper bag, mostly empty, sat in the undercarriage of the stroller. It gave her an idea. She brushed it off and hung it on the handlebars. Inside it was a blanket, which she draped over the hood of the stroller, keeping her imaginary child out of the sun.

  This much she knew: The so-called American mother had put her Nacho in a car that morning. She couldn’t follow her fast enough, and lost her a few blocks down Shattuck, when she turned east and up into the hills. Soli would have to wait. So she waited, making her way through the Gourmet Ghetto, moving often enough to not raise suspicion. She wasn’t hungry, either—her system, it seemed, had purged itself of physical need. Intention, distilled, was her fuel. With the stroller and clean clothes, her clean hair, she was just another nanny.

  51.

  “Iggy,” Kavya began, watching him lift Cheerios to his mouth on a wavering spoon. She tried to lighten her voice. She practically sang the question: “Why did you go to the window last night? Did you have a dream?”

  Iggy crossed his eyes over the spoon. “I see,” he said.

  Kavya met Rishi’s eyes. “What’s that, Iggy? You see?”

  “I see this!” With one small finger he pointed to something, to nothing, to a patch of ceiling.

  “He saw something.”

  “I’m calling the police,” Rishi said. “We can’t have homeless people creeping around our house at night.”

  The homeless, Kavya thought. Of course.

  Leaving Iggy’s daycare after pickup that afternoon, she shared the story with another woman, a friendly mother named Alison. “It could be night terrors,” Alison said. “This is the age when their dreams get vivid. I took Milton to craniosacral therapy when his began. He said he was seeing ghosts. I’d say it helped. The ghosts went away, at least.”

  Skulking itinerants. Nightmares. Ghosts. The explanations were plentiful, but neither Rishi nor Alison had mentioned what sprang first to Kavya’s mind: the mother.

  • • •

  APRIL WAS BERKELEY’S WARMEST MONTH, the secret subseason before the summer fog descended, when the East Bay opened to a bath of light and sky. Soli sat at a café table. She’d spent a dollar on a day-old muffin. When she spotted Nacho’s red car turning onto his street, she got to her feet and followed, careful to maintain a distance. She’d returned to their house that afternoon, and tried more windows. It had taken her far longer than it should have, as every slam of a car door sent her skittering into hiding, her ears hammering with fear. The windows had been locked, every one of them. Soli was no thief. She knew nothing of breaking glass or loosening locks. From half a block away, she watched Ignacio’s woman take him from his car seat. Instead of heading straight into the house, she picked Nacho up and plopped him in a stroller. They turned back to Shattuck and headed down that busy street. Soli knew exactly where they were going.

  • • •

  THIS CLOSE TO THE DINNER HOUR, the playground still buzzed with nannies and parents, a rampage of children tearing through their after-nap energy spikes. The woman released Ignacio from his belt and he was off, stumbling across the sandpit to the low slide. Soli gasped at the sight of these, his first steps. The first she’d seen in daylight. He was a boy.

  She pushed her empty stroller to the spot on the playground farthest from the woman, and sat on a bench. On the outside, she looked like a nanny. She knew this playground well. She scanned the periphery for anyone who might recognize her—park regulars or sitters from Saoirse’s preschool. Nobody.

  Turning back to her boy, she couldn’t stop watching his strong little legs, train-jumping legs, Checo built into every step.

  Ignacio climbed up a small ladder, turned, and called to the woman. How different she looked, without the plastered smile from the computer screen. This unsmiling version squinted across the swing set, settled on Soli, and focused. Soli’s breath caught. The woman’s eyes settled on the covered stroller, and then she looked back at Soli and stretched her lips into a noncommittal smile, the smile parents gave to nannies. Ignacio had begun scrambling up the wide slide and careening down it. How many sunset adventures had she missed with her boy? How many days of watching him sail on swings, kicking his legs, raising his arms to the sky? Soli permitted herself a lingering look at the woman, her brown skin, her nest of wavy black hair. In her gaze, even from this distance, Soli could see a mist of love. She couldn’t deny this, and it shrank her inside, the love. It shamed her, and made her feel for a moment that she was a creeping specter, come to haunt this tranquil play. How sure the woman seemed that she belonged there, that she belonged to Ignacio. The setting sun raised a glow on her cheek.

  And then, Ignacio: “Mama!” He was looking straight at Soli. “Mama, look!” He turned then to the woman, and called again, “Mama, look!” He slid down the slide on his stomach, stopping himself with his palms and inchworming off. He fell to a squat in the sand.

  “Great job, Iggy!” The woman clapped her hands. “Do it again!”

  “Bravo, mi amor,” Soli whispered. Iggy. His American name.

  • • •

  THE SUN WANED, and children and parents trickled away. Soli felt her chances slipping, though she couldn’t specify what those chances were. Her only hope for that day had been to see Ignacio, to be near him again. Across the playground, the woman looked at her watch and rose from her seat. Soli began to tremble. She watched the woman walk to Ignacio, pick him up by the waist, and swing him in a circle. She kissed him on one plump cheek, then the other. Soli nearly cried out then. But instead, she rose and pushed her stroller to the exit. And then: “Soli!” A voice shot across the playground. A flash of auburn hair, longer and lighter now, flying from a swing. “Soli!”

  52.

  The Weebus pulled up and Rishi got on, heading home. Like the other riders, he popped his earbuds in as soon as he sat down and would spend the ride leaning into his laptop, wholly oblivious to time or traffic or the shimmering marvel of sunset on the bay. He was modeling the programming center, and was eager to show it to Iggy—he’d inspired it, after all. Iggy would understand none of it, but would still, Rishi knew, listen with rapt attention, his eyes following the bounce of his father’s lips. After an hour, the slap of a tomato on his window brought him back to the world. Protesters gathered on their usual patch of the Oakland stop. The bus moved on to Berkeley, and his cell rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Rishi-bhai. How’s it going?”

  He was in the process of designing his room-sized gas mask. That morning, he’d taken a swatch of an activated carbon bed filtration system to Weebies HQ. Vik had fingered the rubber fibers, whistled appreciatively. Rishi had explained how the fibers could be installed throughout a room to filter out pollutants. He’d felt, at last, the coagulation of disparate plans. The stomach-curdling anxiety that had gripped him all these weeks was slowly dissipating.

  That week, they’d be finalizing the details of the WeBreathe package, Rishi and Vikram Sen. Really, this meant that Rishi did the legwork, gathered
and prepared the data, and presented it in digestible condition to Vik, who then asked CFO-like questions, most of which sent Rishi back to the drawing board, often for good reason. Vikram Sen was a smart man with an uncanny ability to make others feel good about working very hard on his behalf.

  Rishi had yet to achieve a zero-VOC reading. He was getting close—closer with every new indoor filter, with every air-flow recalibration, and now with his gas mask idea, he’d be closer than ever. But still, the Stratosphere was less than pure.

  “How’s it going on your end?” Rishi asked.

  “Listen, Rishi-bhai. After last week’s meeting? I had a talk with TED.”

  “Who’s Ted?”

  “TED. As in TED Talks. You know about TED Talks?”

  “Everyone knows about TED Talks.”

  “They liked the WeBreathe idea. No. They loved the WeBreathe idea.”

  Rishi’s heart began to trot. TED Talks were watched online by millions of people, all over the world. In all his pre-career fantasy play, he’d never imagined himself giving a TED Talk. This step would take him, his career, his prospects, to an entirely new level.

  “July,” Sen said.

  “July. That’s in a little over two months, Vik. I don’t know if I could prepare a TED Talk by July.” By July, they’d know if Iggy would be theirs.

  “Sure you could!”

  “But I’d have to rehearse it. Memorize it!”

  Rishi heard nothing. “Hello?” He wiggled the wire on his headset. “Vik?”

  “Yes,” Vikram said, still barely audible. It sounded at first like Sen was whispering, then whimpering. And then, creeping like bile from his gut, settling and sloshing between his ears, was the understanding that Vikram Sen was laughing.