Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  A woman opened it. She stood as tall as his elbow, her hair dark and cropped close to her head. Her eyes were brown and bottomless. She squinted up at him, as if he were too bright to view directly. He knew this look. He knew the eyes. These were Iggy’s eyes.

  “Buenos dias,” Rishi said. He needed Helio. But Helio lagged behind, peeking up at the sun through the filter of his fingers.

  “Helio!” he called. “Get over here.” Helio looked over, surprised.

  “Can I help you?”

  Rishi turned. A man stood in the doorway now, nearly as small as the woman, his mustache straight, his skin buttery brown. The smallest smile fluttered across his lips and then vanished.

  “Mister Valdez?” Rishi began. “Señor Valdez? Are you the father of Solimar Castro Valdez?”

  “What happened?” The man took a step forward. “Where is she? What happened to her?” The woman, Soli’s mother, pulled a cross from her pocket and began fingering its beads. Rishi took a step back. He’d had no real idea of what to say.

  “I’m looking for your daughter. For Solimar. Is she here?”

  He smiled, bemused. “Soli? She lives in the States now.” His English was clear and clipped. He looked down at Rishi’s shoes. “Who are you? How do you know her?”

  The true answer was too complicated. Not even Helio, who stood now just behind Rishi, could translate the true answer. Rishi pushed on. “And Ignacio?”

  That’s when the man noticed Helio, and stepped forward to take his hand in both of his. Helio spoke gently to the man, nodding toward Rishi, explaining, it seemed, the how and why of this foreigner’s arrival. The woman broke in, speaking almost inaudibly.

  “I’m looking for Ignacio,” Rishi repeated. He turned to Helio. “Tell him I’m looking for Ignacio. For Solimar’s son.”

  “Soli has no son,” her father said. He laughed, shook his head. “Soli has no son! Who are you?” The father looked past Rishi for an explanation.

  Helio cleared his throat. “Mister Rishi? Do you have the right information? There is no child here.”

  “Your daughter has a son,” Rishi said. Pinpricks of sweat sprang to his forehead and trickled past his hairline. “She has a child named Ignacio. He was our son—”

  Helio spat out a rapid stream of Spanish, and the father answered him. As they spoke, the volume rose. The mother joined in, her voice a whispery undercurrent. The father’s face twisted with anguish. Helio sounded insistent, was repeating the same phrase over and over. Whatever he was saying did not please the father, who stepped forward and shoved Rishi in the chest. He was shouting then, pointing a sharp finger into Rishi’s face, backing him down the drive.

  “Okay!” Helio cried. “Okay! No problem!” He grabbed Rishi’s arm. “Señor, let’s go. No problem!”

  Rishi jerked his arm from Helio’s grip, but the father was yelling now. His voice, his anger, had formed a wall around the house. Rishi would not penetrate it. The father stopped shouting, at last, and capped his tirade by spitting at the ground. Rishi didn’t budge, and watched him as he walked back into his house, slammed the door, and sent up a cloud of dust.

  In the car, the two men sat in silence. Helio revved the engine. “Okay, señor. We’ll go to Teotitlan now. Your wife like rugs?”

  “What happened there?”

  “¿Señor?”

  “Why was he so angry?”

  “Oh. Well.”

  Rishi waited.

  “You said the boy was your son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mister Rishi. You said the boy was your son. You said that Soli was the mother. You understand what you said?”

  It was clear now. He’d said that he and Solimar had had a son. As far as the father knew, Rishi had knocked up his daughter and left her. He sank his head into his hands. Something like a laugh leaked out of him. “Turn the car around, Helio. He got it completely wrong.”

  Helio slowed to a stop, spent a good long while looking at Rishi, and then sighed. He turned the car around. When they reached the house, the father stood at his door, his arms hanging at his sides.

  “Translate for me, Helio. Please.”

  The two men stood before Soli’s father. He glanced down at them, but seemed barely to register their return.

  “Señor,” Rishi began. And Helio translated. “I don’t know your daughter. I have never met your daughter. But I know her child, Ignacio. I am looking for him. Is he here with you? Do you know where he is?”

  The father spoke past Rishi, to the hills behind him. “You have the wrong house, whoever you are. My daughter has no son. No child. No husband.”

  His eyes rested on Rishi now. “If you know of a son, you know more than I do. All I know is that she’s in America now. And if she will be back, and when she will be back, only the valley knows.”

  “You got it now, señor?” Helio asked. “She isn’t here.” And with that, he turned and headed for the car, leaving Rishi and the father standing face-to-face with nothing left to say. When he started the engine, Rishi considered letting him go. But he would need Helio.

  Back in the car, Helio patted him on the shoulder: “Let’s get lunch.” In Dolores’s kitchen, Rishi ate voraciously, filling the void of his morning with rice and beans and freshly made tortillas. He crammed entire tortillas into his mouth, spooned beans down his throat without chewing them. He ate without speaking. He ate too much, too quickly. An hour later, the tortillas and beans and rice formed a thick coating in his stomach, his throat, made his legs heavy and his mind dull. He longed for a salad, for the crunch of watery leaves on his tongue. He longed for a bracing wind. He longed to run.

  “Where you going?” Helio asked as Rishi passed him on the patio.

  “Running.”

  “Running?” Helio crossed his arms. “Running from who?”

  “I need to get my blood moving.”

  “No, no. Bad idea, señor. No es posible.”

  But it was possible. The wet heat of the valley seeped into his joints and loosened them. The sun ran its hands over his neck and his ears. He ran past a new brick house, surrounded by construction vehicles. Perfect round nests balanced on the power lines above. He ran past cacti flattened by the roadside, probably obliterated by a passing dump truck, a builder’s Jeep. His feet slushed over the sandy road, roughening the silence.

  He had one full day left, one day in which to accept defeat or find a new path of investigation. He would go to the nearest city. If the woman were looking for work and a way to support her son—his son—she would surely end up in a city. He would ask Helio about this. The next day, he would search the city.

  For several minutes, Rishi made his way through fields of old corn. They reached out with dry hands, combing over the stranger in their midst. He ran faster, ducked away from the meddlesome stalks, but still they found him. He spent several minutes running in one direction, until all he could see was corn. It felt like he’d run a mile, but it was hard to tell in the unfamiliar weight of this air. When he turned back around, the sparse scatter of buildings was gone. He was lost. He ran on, until the back of his head throbbed and his throat ached. Swallowing didn’t help. Hot cramps shot up his legs and yanked him to a halt. He moved one foot, then the other. He fell to the ground.

  Above, the sky spun. A tickle at his knee brought him to attention. Looking down, he saw a squad of fat red ants coursing up his legs, navigating the forest of his leg hair. He jumped to his feet and smacked at his shins. He shook his leg in the air like a frenzied dog. “Shit!” he shouted. “Shit!” He slapped at his legs and pinched the ants from his skin, but he couldn’t get all of them. Some had gone up his shorts and disappeared. The thought of them making their home in the crevices of his body made him writhe and curse, scratch at his skin until it bled, until tears of frustration and disgust took him over. He squatted in the sea of dead corn. It had be
en so long since he’d last shed tears that it took him a few moments to realize what was happening. He was crying. He lay on his back, half numbed by the sun, and let it overtake him.

  In the thirteen days since Ignacio disappeared, Rishi had been holding down his panic as one held down a wave of nausea. But like nausea, it forever threatened to rise up his throat, against his weakened tongue. Traveling to Popocalco had slowed its climb. The journey had given him a concrete mission and kept him from sinking, as Kavya had. For a few days, he’d had a plan. It was essential to have a plan, simple though his was.

  And what of this plan? He’d based it mostly on the expectation of finding Soli here, in her parents’ home. And now he envisioned himself in Oaxaca City, scanning faces. Knocking on doors. Holding up a photo of Iggy, a mug shot of Soli. To whom? Store owners? Housewives? Not even her parents knew where she was. His plan was wearing thin, and it was getting harder to push down the panic that threatened to climb from his mouth and cascade into despair. The difference between panic and despair was hope. Despair saturated the afternoon heat, infused every drop of sweat with the reeling loss of Ignacio. Despair swarmed. He rolled onto his side and cried. He had lost all control, was ugly now, crying though bared teeth. He was shamed and helpless. He had unraveled, had been unraveling for days, and now he was finished, stretched across the valley floor, his limbs sifting through the sandy soil. Who would gather him up, wind him back around himself, and carry him home?

  He lay in the well of the dry and surrendered basin, until the sun grew dim, diffused, and dipped low. He’d finished crying a while earlier, his ducts tapped dry. He needed water, badly. If only it would rain, he thought. If only he could sit up, look around, find the village, mercy in a glass of water. He found relief, at least, in the shadow of a cactus. It was a grandfather cactus, older perhaps than the redwood. It was a stereotype of a cactus. It looked like a spiny green man waving hello; it might have appeared, wearing a sombrero, in an ad for a Mexican restaurant.

  He tried to get up, but rolled onto his back instead. He couldn’t stop himself from staring into the sun, and amid the globules of blinding light, he saw this: Kavya in a red dress, her eyes two deadened chips of wood. Ignacio, squatting in the garden, stacking wood chips into patient towers. Ignacio, leaping from the porch steps and into Rishi’s arms. Ignacio ascending, saddled in a baby swing, his head thrown back and gulping against his own laughter. Ignacio, perched on his shoulders, the backs of his knees, two perfect wells for Rishi’s thumbs.

  His vision had gone ragged, but slowly now, his eyes began to focus. They homed in on a single needle. He blinked, squinted, rubbed at his eyes. From the needle, miraculously, hung a single drop of water. He reached up, coaxed it onto his finger, and dabbed the moisture to his lip. Where had it come from?

  If this cactus could create water from dry land and arid sky, substance from absence, then surely there was no such thing as nothing. Zero, much as Vikram Sen would hate to hear it, was a myth. He could quarter something, halve it, grind it to invisibility, but it would never be gone.

  He struggled to his feet. His head throbbed. The ants had either left his body or found some numbed and hidden grotto of it, for Rishi saw no sign of them. He headed back the way he’d come, first at a slow walk, and then working up to a jog. His body rallied against chains of thirst as he gained speed, ploughing into the heat and the headache. In the burnt-out caverns of his lungs, he’d found air. In his overboiled muscles, strength. There was no nothing. There was always water, always time, always hope. Even in the soundless void of his Berkeley bungalow, there was hope. There was Kavya. There was home.

  They spent the evening going door-to-door around Popocalco. It required Helio’s complete cooperation, and at first, Helio was not being cooperative. Rishi had the cash to convince him. They went to every inhabited building in the village, even those technically without doors. It cost Rishi 1,500 pesos, but it was a thing to do. It was a thing someone in America would do, if they were looking for a child. The faces at these doors flickered with recognition at the mention of Soli, but no one knew where she was. No one had heard of Ignacio. It was almost a comfort to return to Dolores’s house, its walls stained and bare, the dirt drive immaculately swept. It lacked the adornments—agaves, colored tiles, bells on the door—that he’d seen on the other houses. It was plain and still, a house that had lost its son.

  The next morning, Rishi’s final full day in Mexico, they stopped at a cash machine in the center of Oaxaca and he took out another three thousand pesos. He gave a thousand to Helio, and saved the rest for the consulate. He imagined a meeting with an official behind a large wooden desk, a passage of currency from one palm to another, a promise made, a problem solved.

  What Rishi found was a long line, a take-a-number system, and a bored woman behind a double-layered wall of glass.

  What he came away with, four hours later, was a promise. The consulate had met with him personally and laid out a plan—a surprisingly lucid one—of dispersing information to regional police departments and the Mexican press. He would contact the American embassy, and Rishi would be hearing from the FBI. Rishi wasn’t sure what to make of these promises. If they were real, if they happened, they would surely lead somewhere. But something—prejudice, perhaps, or fatigue, or just plain despair, told him that these steps would never be taken. They were shadow-promises—bold in the light of day, but soon enough forgotten.

  • • •

  ON THE DRIVE BACK to Popocalco, he realized he’d forgotten to bribe the consulate. The pesos lay in a fat rolled stack in the pocket of his jeans. He kept his eyes fixed firmly out his window.

  “It’s a terrible story,” Helio said. “Your story. The boy. It’s terrible.”

  “Yes.”

  “This boy was yours?”

  “We were adopting him. He was almost ours.” Rishi paused. “He was ours.”

  As they turned off the highway and entered Popocalco, a text message buzzed. Kavya: Anything today?

  Rishi: I spoke to the consulate. Plan in place.

  Kavya: So you didn’t find him?

  Rishi wanted to laugh at her. He wanted her to hear him laughing at this, the simplicity of her hope.

  He texted: Nothing.

  He added: Yet.

  Kavya: Come home, Rishi.

  Tomorrow.

  I need you here. Come home.

  I need you. Come home. She was summoning him, as she had in the old days, at the start of all this. Kavya, at home, her grief and her deadened will forming a gutter in their mattress. Rishi would find her and pull her out.

  • • •

  LATER, RISHI PACKED HIS SUITCASE and prepared for a sleepless and sweaty night. He’d come here, he realized, expecting to find the woman, to find his boy, to take him home. He’d come looking for answers, and what he found was an answer of sorts. The hills had an answer. Go home, they told him. We have nothing for you.

  A light tap at the door. Helio. He held up a flask. “Cactus,” he said. “Made here.” Rishi followed him onto the front porch, where Helio took the first swig. The flask held homemade mezcal, Rishi managed to learn, extracted and fermented in a copper tub. “For a long time, he’s been making it,” Helio said. “Memo Romero. Donkey man. Same tub. Never washes it. This is the secret.” They drank until Rishi couldn’t sit upright anymore. He lay back on the porch. The moon blurred. Even the dark blurred.

  “You’ll be all right in the morning,” Helio said, and helped him up. “See you then.” He shook Rishi’s hand.

  When Rishi closed his eyes again, what he saw was the father of Soli—the small smile that had flit across his lips. Rishi fell asleep out there, for how long he didn’t know. He sat up. In his drunken exhaustion, he could see that smile more clearly than ever. There was something to it. The man had been hiding something. He’d been mocking Rishi with that smile, his show of indignance. What occurred
to Rishi then, what punched him with its obvious truth, was that he’d never been inside the house. That old couple had kept him on their porch. And for what? To keep him out. To keep him from seeing what there was to see: Solimar, and with her, Solimar’s child. Rishi’s child.

  He stood up and ran to the end of the drive. He knew where the village center was, and began walking toward it. His phone told him it was four in the morning, a few hours before dawn. The boy would be asleep now, and so would the mother. The forces of inevitability were closing around Rishi, propelling him forward. The events of the past three days were lining up like obedient boxcars, linking together a train of logic, there on the valley floor.

  He had one more step to take.

  Guided by a vague memory of the village layout, Rishi found a familiar strip of houses. A few windows were lit, but there were no streetlamps and the path ahead was solidly black. He’d never made his way through such dense darkness. Halfway down the main road, he came to a low wall he recognized. This was the house. He slipped through the gate.

  At the door, he raised a fist, instinctively, to knock. He stopped himself. A light push, and the door opened. He found himself in a sitting room with a low sofa, a straw cot pushed against the wall, and a television. The ceiling hung just inches above his head. A cloud of moonlight passed through the window. The air here was almost too thick to breathe. Beyond this room, he found a kitchen, and branching off of it, a third room. A bedroom.

  They would be in the bedroom, asleep. Rishi listened for the tick-tick of Iggy’s sleep-suckling. Instead, he heard crickets, a faraway bark. He stood alone in the sitting room and listened to the whistle of breath through his own nostrils. If Ignacio was here, what would Rishi do? What would happen if he stepped into the bedroom to find his boy asleep on a bed? If Ignacio was here—he couldn’t finish the sentence. The room grew lighter. Somewhere, the sun was rising.