“Vikram.”
Sen could hide it no longer. “Rishi-bhai!” he guffawed. “What a wonderful TED Talk you would give!”
“Okay.”
His laugh was a braying, throaty shout. It was the sort of laugh that Rishi, under other circumstances, would have found infectious.
“Okay, Vikram.”
Sen choked on a final spew of mirth, and finally calmed. “It’s just that they look for names, Rishi. When they can get them. Big names get clicks. Right?”
“Right.” Rishi fixed on the tomato seeds stuck to the Weebus window. He picked at one, knowing full well that it was on the wrong side of the glass.
“You’ve been absolutely invaluable to this project, yaar. I couldn’t have got this together without you.”
“I know.”
“So I’ll need a PowerPoint. Just basic ideas. Preliminary. EOD tomorrow. I can have Sally working with it by Monday. Twelve slides, right?”
“Sure.”
“You’re right about the memorizing, yaar. Won’t be easy.”
“Okay. No problem, Vikram.” He hung up, sank into his seat, and pulled his earbuds out with limp arms. Nothing’s changed, he told himself. You just misunderstood. Poor consolation for a Friday evening. The air in the Weebus was thick with the body odor of thirty people who needed to sleep, to eat, to shower. It buzzed with the radiation of their laptops and plugged Rishi’s nostrils with lingering dismay. They were hypocrites, all of them, for breathing this shitty air. Hypocrites for tap-tapping on their laptops when they could have been out on a Friday evening, watching a sunset, feeling the spank of wind on their skin. He’d play in the yard with Iggy when he got home. He’d feel better after that.
• • •
WHEN HE GOT OFF THE WEEBUS in Berkeley, he hoped the cycle home would awaken him. He was going to a safe place, he told himself. In the bungalow on Vine, he knew that Kavya would greet him in the kitchen, that Iggy would be posted in his high chair, that Rishi would sit beside him and help him spear his pasta shapes. Rishi would help Iggy brush his nine teeth, and Kavya would bathe him. Then Rishi would kiss the boy good night, and he’d vanish into the bedroom for his nightly story.
When he did arrive, Kavya was banging pots in the kitchen. A mishap at the fish shop—Iggy grabbing at clams, Iggy screaming—had left her razor-tense. A salmon fillet sat burning and sticking on an overheated pan. Rishi grabbed it, shook the fish free, and slid it, dry now, ruined, onto a plate. Kavya stood before the open fridge. She was staring at the milk.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re going out.”
“Out where?”
“Out of the house—out to a bar or something. Out for the night.”
Kavya sighed. “It’s a little late for a sitter.”
“Forget the sitter. Call up one of your girlfriends and leave me with Iggy. Seriously.”
Kavya closed the fridge, considered him for a few moments. “You think you could do it? Dinner and bath and bed?”
Rishi had no idea if he could do it, since he never had. He was fairly sure he’d manage to feed their son to some capacity, and most likely put him to bed with some semblance of a cleaning beforehand. It couldn’t be harder than living out the evening with this version of his wife.
“We’ll be fine. Call someone.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
The truth was, she had no girlfriends. Rishi was girlfriend and boyfriend to her. As if he knew this, he said, “Try Preeti. She could probably use a night out.”
“Preeti has a two-month-old,” Kavya said. “She’s probably exhausted. Going out is probably not what she needs right now.”
• • •
“YES!” PREETI SAID. “Yes, yes, yes. I’ll come out to you. Should I come out to Berkeley? Could we try that Mexican place with the beer garden? Comal? Oh, wait. No, it’s fine, I can pump. I’ll pump. The nanny’s staying in tonight, anyway.”
So Kavya planned a girls’ night out. She would meet Preeti downtown for drinks, and they’d follow their whims from there.
53.
“You! New girl! What’s your name again?”
“Clara,” she answered. “How many times do you plan to ask?”
The man at the burrito counter grinned. “Looking good, Claracita. Looking good!”
She pinched at the rice kernels her washcloth had missed. She straightened the chairs, then got on her hands and knees to pick a fork up off the floor. A whistle flew from the burrito counter and Soli ignored it. She’d been working there as a nonemployee for the past two days—it was how she stayed off the streets.
And guess what? Give a Mexican woman a dish towel in a Mexican restaurant, and everyone assumes she belongs there. Including the kitchen staff, including the burrito rollers behind the long counters and the customers who filed from the order line to the cash register. This was how Soli ate for two days, camouflaging herself among the tables that spread twenty deep, wiping away rice and bean detritus and wadding up tinfoil. She tried, at first, to balance plates on her forearms, until she noticed a bus boy who carried everything in a brown plastic tub. She found her own tub, and focused instead on her belonging-face, her don’t-question-me face. For two days, she joked with the burrito men, smiled when she felt their eyes on her. She learned to grab order tags for hot dishes from the kitchen and search out table numbers.
If the restaurant had an owner, he never showed up. If it had a manager, she managed to stay off his radar. It was a big enough place that she could vanish out the door a few times a day with a foil-wrapped burrito, and no one questioned her.
In the evenings, she watched Ignacio’s house, never daring to sit down. Homeless people sat. Housekeepers and nannies stood and waited for their rides, their buses, their legitimizing companions.
It had been Saoirse who’d spotted her at the playground that day, Saoirse who’d cried out the old name. An initial tug had pulled Soli to this crackle in the atmosphere—she’d nearly let herself turn to see the little girl, to measure the growth of her face, her curls, her sprouting height. Instead, she fled. She flew through the gate with her empty stroller. But when she ran, she felt heads turn and eyes follow this sudden leap in the evening’s pace, and so she slowed. She was breathless. Her vision blurred until she couldn’t see and had to sit on the nearest bench, her head in her hands, ignoring the bus that stopped and opened its doors for her.
In the morning, she would go to the barbershop she’d passed a thousand times before. Hacking away at her own hair would leave it tufted and lunatic. This place charged fourteen dollars for a haircut. She had the money. She would spend it. She would cut her hair short and even. She would look respectable.
Earlier that evening, returning from the restaurant, she’d had to sit down, her shins aching from the day’s work and the nights of bad sleep. She found a nook across from Ignacio’s house, between a rhododendron bush and a giant agave, where the ground was soft with red-brown mulch. The air here was righteous with the smell of wood chips. Her belly was full of shrimp burrito, her head heavy with the weight of it. She would wait for dusk as she always did.
She must have dozed off. The slam of a door had brought her back. The sun had fallen but its light remained. Ignacio’s woman emerged from the house. Her hair was down now and sprang over her shoulders, framing the brown face, the storybook eyes. She got into the red car and pulled off the curb, ticking quietly down the street, around the corner, away. A single sideways glance, and she would have spotted Soli, still tucked between rhododendrons and agave.
The taste of digested shrimp sat thick and acrid on Soli’s tongue. She thought about toothpaste and wondered where her next real shower would come from, if she’d ever have one again. She wouldn’t return to the Cassidys’. She’d been too bold.
And then the house’s door had opened. The man ambled out, as brown as the wo
man, the man from the picture with the wineglasses. He stretched his hands to the sky, rose to the tips of his toes, and swung his arms in wide circles. He called to someone in the house. Ignacio emerged and jumped into the man’s arms, then clambered onto his shoulders. They picked up a ball from the porch and headed to the side of the house, disappearing to the back. Soli squatted and watched. She could hear the flare and dip of their voices. The squeal of a baby laugh, a clench in her throat. She stood.
The evening was cooling. Clouds canopied the town and summoned the wind. Leaves rustled at her feet and whipped around her ankles. She watched the leaves leap and swoop and fall again. She watched the wind gather, billowing the hem of her skirt, climbing her legs, gathering velocity. The wind doubled over itself, tripled and gathered speed, gathered voice. Wishhhhh, it said. The wind rose and filled her lungs, filled her heart. It took hold of the trees above and sent branches flapping. And with a sudden gale the wind blew south and drove itself into the house. A click, and the front door opened. She peered across the street. Yes, the door was open.
Soli looked left down the street, then right. She looked behind her and took one step onto the sidewalk. This was her chance—for what, exactly? She couldn’t know yet. But the street was silent and empty. The mother was gone. The father. No. She was mother and father. She bolted across the street and through the open door. The television rattled from another room and a clock ticked noisily from somewhere in the kitchen. She was a wolf again, searching for shelter, ears piqued for predatory footfalls. A cartoon on the television played to an empty room. What am I doing here? she asked herself. She searched for a keyhole of opportunity, for a way to wrap herself around this blessing, this break in the family fortress.
54.
When Kavya arrived at the restaurant, she spotted Preeti next to a heat lamp, her shoulders bared to the last dregs of evening sun. She sat with her eyes closed, her back arched, as if she were completely alone. Her middle sagged as it never had before, and she looked, frankly, exhausted. But when she saw Kavya, she leapt from her seat and threw her arms around her friend. They ordered cocktails laced with mezcal, and chips with guacamole. Preeti grew giddy with her first drink and hot rosettes bloomed on her cheeks. Heat radiated off her arms and Kavya began to perspire just from sitting beside her, but it was the heat of joy, not drunkenness, and it was infectious. Preeti was overjoyed to be out, to be sitting in the night air, to be among adults and the sour bouquet of alcohol and food, beneath an umbrella of dark descending.
She dug an elbow into Kavya’s ribs. “Don’t look! That bartender’s checking you out.”
Kavya, unpracticed, turned around immediately to see Miguel behind the bar, frozen mid-pour, staring at her. They’d seen each other only a few hours earlier, but in this new context, she felt she hadn’t seen him in months. Since the custody hearing, they’d barely spoken, daunted by the task of addressing the obvious. Ignacio was all Kavya could think about in those early days; she’d find herself smiling for no reason during lunch and dinner prep. Miguel, she knew, didn’t approve of her form of motherhood. And if she asked him to, he wouldn’t hesitate to say so. From behind the bar, he nodded, waved, and she waved back. He returned to pouring.
“I work with him,” Kavya explained. “He’s my assistant chef.”
“He’s beautiful,” Preeti said, her eyes lingering, then clouding. “Does it ever bother you?”
“What, Miguel?”
“No, no. Just this idea that you’re a mom now, and getting older. We’re almost forty, and we’re someone’s mom. Though maybe it was different for you. You had to really struggle for this. So maybe it’s different . . .”
Kavya listened to the words trail away.
“But remember?” Preeti went on. “When we’d go to bars and see guys there, and there would be this sense of—of possibility? And they would see us, you know? Like really notice us.”
This rang a bell, though Preeti figured nowhere in Kavya’s memories. “I remember that. But this is what we wanted, right? To be married? To have kids? That’s why we went to those bars.”
Preeti looked doubtful. “But even before that. Like in high school. Remember climbing out of windows to meet boys, and—”
“Excuse me?”
Preeti licked chili salt from the rim of her glass. “Remember that feeling, though? Like you’d do anything just to see some boy you liked?”
“You climbed out of windows? You? Climbed out of windows?”
Preeti shrugged. “Maybe I used the door. You get my point. Didn’t you ever sneak out?”
“You were a very bad girl, Preeti Patel.”
“Like you weren’t.”
“But you were such a Goody Two-shoes!”
“Goody Two-shoes,” she said, shaking her head. “Who says that?”
Kavya set her drink down, genuinely flummoxed. “How did you do it all? With the grades and the colleges? And the spelling bee?”
Preeti rolled her eyes. “The fucking spelling bee. I was a trained monkey.”
“Well, well,” Kavya said. “Sex and drugs and rock and roll. Did your parents know?”
“Well, they caught me once, going out the front door when I thought they’d gone to sleep. I drove them nuts. I think I genuinely made them crazy for a while. No drugs, though.”
“And there I was, thinking you were such a good girl.”
“The comparisons to you were endless.”
“Please.”
Preeti donned a thick accent. “Look at this Kavya, such a sweet girl, so respectful to her mother, see how she likes to cook, Preeti, every night she helps to make the dinner, why you cannot be like that? Such a loving child!”
“No. I don’t believe a word of it. You’re a compulsive liar.”
“I was for a while, actually.”
Across the table, the two friends grinned. Kavya felt a cloud lift. The courtyard around them had grown boisterous with groups gathered around the fire pit, clustered around picnic tables, swarming around the bar.
“Let’s not be like that,” Kavya said. “With our kids. Let’s not compare them to each other. Let’s not make them feel like they’ll never be good enough.”
Preeti sat back and sipped on her drink. “Good idea.”
• • •
KAVYA WALKED HOME AFTER MIDNIGHT and went straight to Iggy’s room. He lay in a shaft of moonlight. She sank to the ground beside his bed and rested her cheek on his pillow. He was two years old and changing with astonishing speed. His nose was growing longer, sharper, the angles of his face more pronounced. But his cheek still smashed and spread against his pillow, as a baby’s would. His lips, open and pink, were still petal-smooth. She blew drunkenly at his face, fluttering the fringe of his lashes. She smiled at herself and closed her eyes and felt mildly ridiculous, a foolish, fawning mother.
As sleep began to weigh her down, she went to her own room, plucked the contacts from her eyes, and fell straight into bed. In his sleep, Rishi took her hand, grounded her to the bed as the room spun. She was glad for him, glad for the deep oblivion of sleep. She sank into it, watching the spirals of imagined light that swirled behind her eyelids. In the morning, she predicted, she would regret this.
The next morning, she woke to a cool room. When she sat up, expecting a thunderclap of a headache, none came. High-quality mezcal. From the clarity of a full night’s sleep sprang the discovery that she’d had an excellent time. Turning to her left, she let herself watch Rishi, his profile taut and handsome, even in unguarded sleep. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d woken up on their own like this.
Rishi’s eyes opened. He gazed at her, then squinted at the window. “What time is it?”
55.
What Rishi noticed first was the billowing curtain. The drapes in their bedroom had never moved this way before, filling with air and flattening, not even on warm days when they
slept with their windows open. That morning, the white fabric rippled with an unfamiliar wind.
The next thing he noticed was the time. “Nine forty-three.”
“Where’s Iggy?”
Ignacio should have come in long before this, wedging between them with his cold feet. They should have been up on this Saturday morning, eating breakfast, heading for the park, the café, the grocery store. Rishi began to understand why he felt so awake.
“Ignacio?” Kavya called, her voice hoarse. No answer came.
“Ignacio!” he bellowed. His voice carried better than hers. “Iggy!”
He waited for the thrum of Iggy’s footsteps, always at a run. He tried again. No answer came and no little boy appeared in their doorway or jumped on their bed, knocking into them with hard head and elbows.
“Maybe he’s sick,” Kavya said.
“I’ll go see.”
The hallway was cold. “Iggy,” he whispered. A tunnel of cold air rushed through the house, sucking shut their bedroom door. Rishi rubbed at his arms to warm them. Even in the hallway, he sensed a shift. “Ignacio?” But the name stuck in his throat, and when he reached Iggy’s door, he knew why. The bedroom window was open. The sheets were pulled back. Ignacio was gone.
He marched through the house. “Ignacio! Iggy!” From room to room. The kitchen was empty, the television dark. His toys lay stacked in the corner of the living room. Outside the window, the leaves of a Japanese maple shuddered. All else was still.
Back in the hallway, he nearly crashed into Kavya.
“Where is he?” she asked. “Where is he? Iggy!” He heard her scurry to the bathroom. “Iggy?” She followed him to Iggy’s bedroom. Rishi leaned out the window, looking for something—he didn’t know what.
“Iggy?” he called out the window, as if the boy might have appeared from behind a bush. Kavya tried calling his name. She opened the closet. She pulled the bed covers clear off and threw them to the floor.
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