Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  He stepped over the threshold into a bedroom. And in a bed, sleeping on its side, its face turned to the wall, a small body.

  “Iggy?” he whispered.

  From where he stood, the boy looked comically small, no longer than half the length of the mattress. He snored softly, then shuddered at something in a dream. Rishi took one step and another. He would take the boy in the night. He would win him as he’d lost him.

  “Iggy,” he said, bending over the boy. “It’s me.” He nudged his hand under an arm, his fingers sinking into the flesh of a soft shoulder.

  He heard a snuffle, a murmur. The body in his hands stiffened and turned to face Rishi.

  Rishi reared back. This was not Ignacio. This was an old woman. A small woman. This was Solimar’s mother. The woman stared out from her sleep, as if trying to decide if Rishi were more than a vaporous dream. He watched, unable to move, as she pushed through to the waking world.

  He should have run.

  She screamed. The shock of sound sent Rishi reeling, backpedaling for the door. She screamed again, squeezed her eyes shut, clasped her palms together, and sobbed. From another room came a bang, heavy footsteps. “Majo,” a man shouted. “Majo! Querida!” And in the doorway stood Soli’s father. He held a sickle in one hand, dark with age, freckled with rust. Rishi couldn’t take his eyes off it. He’d never seen an actual sickle before.

  For a few long moments, the man stood in the doorway, waiting for Rishi’s next move. And then, all at once, Rishi was falling to the hard stone floor. The old man was astonishingly strong, and had pinned Rishi’s arms to his back. He leaned over him, his face just inches from Rishi’s.

  Rishi struggled, kicked out, and brought the old man crashing down. The mother shrieked and tumbled off the bed, ran to her husband and crouched down beside him. The man lay panting, his breath rasping from his throat. He cradled his knee, rocked back and forth, his face twisted with pain.

  Rishi cursed quietly. From where he lay, he tried to speak, but couldn’t. The room now was beginning to fill with light, and when he turned to the doorway, he noticed another man, and behind him, more heads, more people drawn by the commotion. The sitting room filled as man after man filed in. The old lady rocked beside her husband, speaking quietly. When Rishi got up, she whimpered and scooted away. He watched her cross herself once, and again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to her. “I didn’t mean this.” At some point that night—or was it days before, months before?—he’d crossed a border between right and wrong. Six men stood around him now, and more waited beyond the doorway. The father teetered to his feet and limped to join them.

  From the porch came the shuffle of feet, an angry shout. The old man hissed, and the house fell quiet. Rishi watched closely the rise and fall of the man’s narrow chest, the gleam of sunlight on his forehead. He noticed that his own arms had risen and hovered now around his head. Some part of him had surrendered.

  The father took two steps toward Rishi. He raised his sickle and spoke clearly, slowly, in English. “What do you want from us?”

  Rishi looked around at the waiting faces. He cleared his throat. “I want my boy.”

  The old man’s mustache twitched. He lowered the sickle and shook his head. “We have no boy for you,” he said. “We have nothing for you here.”

  Rishi waited.

  “Go home,” the old man said, as if he understood what home was to Rishi, the depth and swell of what awaited him there.

  It was clear that he had lost. The faces in the room waited for him to go, or to speak, but he had no final words. He thought only of Kavya’s message: I need you. Come home.

  The onlookers parted as Rishi passed through them. When he reached the door and looked up again, he met a collective unwavering gaze. He’d never meant to anger these people. They were old, most of them, as craggy and solid as the hills that had borne them. He had come for his boy, and that was all. He hadn’t wanted to hurt them. He hadn’t meant them any harm.

  59.

  Kavya couldn’t say what day or date it was. She lived now in a twilight of sedatives and sleep. One nameless, numberless morning, she woke to a sudden dip in her mattress. She saw first a waist, a belt, familiar brown slacks.

  “Kavya? Wake up, please?” A gentle hand on her shoulder.

  “Dad?” She looked around. “Where’s Rishi?”

  “Time to rise, Kavya-ma. I have brought you some tea.” A china cup steamed primly on her bedside table.

  She tried to piece together memory and information, but nothing clicked. “What are you doing here?”

  Her father didn’t answer, only drew the cup and saucer from the table. “Sit up. Drink this.”

  She obeyed, more out of surprise than desire. They sat together for a long and silent minute.

  “It is very bad, Kavya,” her father said. “This thing that has happened to you. To our family.” He shook his head, as if only just realizing. “A very bad thing, indeed.”

  It felt good to hear this simple acknowledgment of what was true, free of questions or indictments or speculation. “I know,” she said, and the tears trailed fresh. Her father reached out and wiped them with his fingers.

  “How did you get here, Dad?”

  “We have a new-fangled contraption, kanna-ma. An automobile, it’s called.”

  She felt a smile inside. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Tuesday ladies’ yoga.”

  “You drove here alone?”

  Her father raised an eyebrow and cleared his throat. “I am a simple man, Kavya. But I can drive a car.”

  They sat together for a while longer, until Kavya’s father took her by the arms and helped her stand. She stumbled into the shower, and when she emerged, she found him at the sink, gingerly holding a plate and patting it with a sponge. She settled onto a chair and watched him. Wet sponges and dirty plates were foreign to her father, but he swiped at each smudge of food with a determination to obliterate it.

  Ten minutes later, he’d collected a stack of four clean plates and deposited them in a cupboard, ignoring the dishwasher altogether.

  “Kavya-ma. Sometimes the things that happen can be changed. Sometimes they cannot. Which time is this?”

  There it was, the question she’d been hiding from. Could what happen be changed? Should it? Did Kavya’s pain delineate the rules of right and wrong? It was too much to answer. Kavya shook her head and stared at the counter. Then her father stood beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. He was clumsy, thin, calm. When she leaned into his chest, something inside her snapped, the same ligament of control that had snapped many times over the preceding days, releasing each time a flood of rage. It didn’t scare her father. He stayed still even as she screamed, even against the monster wails that overtook her. He didn’t try to stop her, but waited for her to let out what was left, her last throaty cries.

  Kavya emptied herself. Her father made her tea and two pieces of toast. She watched him learn to use a butter knife. “Well,” he said an hour later, “your Amma will be wondering.” He gathered his keys and jacket and made his way to the door. Kavya walked him to the porch, where the early afternoon was fresh. He laid a hand on the crown of her head. “Bless you, Kavya,” he said. “Life will get better.”

  • • •

  KAVYA WOKE FROM A NAP that had woven the afternoon to the evening. She was sure she’d heard the doorbell. Reporters, she thought, though Preeti had dropped by the day before with a roasted chicken from a nearby deli. She’d sat next to Kavya in bed, bereft of words. They spent the afternoon not speaking, but staring at their knees, once the scuffed and bony knees of children, now strong and round.

  The doorbell rang again. Kavya shuffled out of bed. “Who is it?” she called weakly, not expecting an answer. She opened the door. Rishi stood breathless on the porch. He was unshaven, older than when he’d left. The dusk e
rased his outline. He was a smudge of himself. He dropped his bag and nearly fell into her, wrapped his arms around her and clung to her.

  They stood this way for a long time. “Come inside,” she said. She pulled him into the house, picked up his bag, and followed him into the bedroom. Together, they gazed at the bed where she’d sought refuge for so many days. All those days, she hadn’t been hiding from her troubles. She’d been accepting loss. She watched him stare at the bed as he slowly realized this. Kavya hadn’t been waiting. Kavya had been grieving.

  Over the past two weeks, a kind of surface tension had held Rishi together. It had kept him whole through the press conferences, the police interviews, the op-eds, the local news coverage, the phone calls from his parents and Kavya’s, the e-mails from old friends and cousins, his trip to Popocalco, even his run through the cornfields. Nobody could have known how feebly he was held together. Only Kavya knew. Only Rishi. He sank to the bed, not from fatigue, but from an emotion he couldn’t name, except to call it a gravity of the soul, the same that had pulled Kavya to this bed and held her there for days. As his head sank into his pillow, his surface broke, at last. He spilled over. He spread shapeless. This was sorrow, the deepest he’d ever known.

  Kavya wrapped herself around him. His whole body was coated in a cold sweat, and he shivered. “I need you with me, Rishi.”

  They had wanted to love. They had gone too far. They had taken a woman’s child. She could see that now, though the truth didn’t fill their empty bungalow or bring back the light and sound of Iggy, the warm and lustrous body they’d come to consider theirs. She stayed in bed with Rishi, rubbing his back, at once essential and useless. Grief was a solitary practice, though they would cling to each other that day and in the days to come.

  That evening, Kavya got out of bed to make Rishi a cup of tea and a tuna sandwich. A week later, she would return to the kitchen of Gamma Gamma Pi, pulling her livelihood from the brink of extinction. She would cook up vats of chili and risotto and chicken soup with dumplings, the scale of production a comfort. Now and then, the memory of Iggy would pull her from the busy present and leave her engulfed in tears, Miguel standing by with a strong hand on her shoulder, a dish towel at the ready.

  Eventually, Rishi would break away from Weebies and take his first brave steps onto the market. He’d develop his own product, the purest air possible for American homes. For homes around the world. For office buildings, schools, gyms, hospitals. He, Rishi Reddy, would make the world a better place. It had come upon him that day, as he lay beneath the cactus: the realization that everyone around him was taking risks. Vikram Sen had done it and won big. Preeti Patel was still doing it, risking the facade of perfection she’d so assiduously constructed; she might end up winning, whatever that meant for her. Kavya risked her heart and was fighting her way out of a tar pit of loss. Solimar Castro Valdez, whoever the woman was, had risked country, life, and limb. Rishi, for once, would be the one to take a risk, even if it meant failure, foreclosure, moving himself to a smaller life before emerging anew. Kavya would stand by him. He would belong to himself. Rishi Reddy. Rishi Ready.

  But until then: What was there to do but carry on? Slowly, they would gather themselves up again. Every evening, he and Kavya would come home to each other. Dinner, tea, books, sofa. That’s all they would muster, until the hurt, day by day, slackened its grip. It would always hurt. They both knew this. They would seek refuge in a quiet understanding.

  60.

  In the beginning, there were seven days. On the first, she stole him from his bed.

  On the second, they left their new home for Mexico. It was easy getting back in. No questions.

  On the third day, Nacho refused to look at Soli. They were making their way south through Mazatlán, on a bus full of strangers, and she was his only friend. Still, he wouldn’t turn his face to hers—not when she asked him questions or told him stories or sang him songs. He jutted his chin to the open window and stayed like that. He stuck his nose into the wind of the new country, sniffed at it, like it smelled familiar, squinted into it, like he was cataloging its contents.

  On the fourth day, he refused to eat. He refused even when Soli told him a story of a little mouse who’d found a talking piece of cheese. They reached Mexico City that night, Dey-Effe. And even through the smog of his silence, Soli could tell he was ill. She found a motel run by a tall Chinese man, and she found some food. Ignacio refused it. She cried to him then, for the first time. She begged him to eat, but he wouldn’t. That night, he had an accident in the hotel bed. With a thunderous eruption that woke her from her sleep, he wet his pants and left a frothy stream of shit on the sheets. She peeled the covers from the bed, ran them under water in the tub. And when they left that morning, she said to the man, “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.” He blinked at her and said nothing, because at the time, he didn’t know.

  On the fifth day, they found a place to live. Nacho ate three crackers and drank some water that Soli had boiled. His bowels held together.

  And on the sixth, she found work in a restaurant, washing dishes in an outdoor kitchen. For six days, she was Ignacio’s enemy.

  On the seventh day, she woke to the sun’s glare. He lay next to her, his eyes wide open.

  “Ignacio?” she said. “¿Estás bien, amor?”

  He climbed into her arms. He dug his face into the curve of her neck, and soon she felt the tickle of warm tears.

  “Nachito,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Scary.”

  It was the first thing he’d said in seven days.

  She thinks about that morning still, and wonders what brought the change. She wonders if a final slat of knowledge clicked into place on that seventh day, bringing to Nacho’s short memory the memory of her. Perhaps he remembered Soli, truly and completely, the mother, the body, the milk, and the smell of her. Or maybe he’d simply given in to what had happened.

  Eventually, he would forget it all: the house in Berkeley, his child-sized bed, the early-morning escape, the bus, the predawn harbor. He would grow, become a man, and know her as his mother. She wouldn’t be the woman at his window. She would be Mama.

  61.

  In the days that become their new life, Nacho begins to speak to her, asking the questions you’d expect from a child, about the world around him, the whys and hows of daily living, questions at once minute and profound. Not once does he mention his old home, his bed, his playground, the others who loved him. Soli learns to give him space, to wait for him to come to her, to take her hand or burrow into her arms. She is like a shamed and grateful lover.

  When Soli works, a lady named Rosa picks Nacho up from preschool. She has a lazy foot. Soli doesn’t know what else to call it; her right foot drags behind her when she walks. She lives a floor above them, and at night they hear the slush-slush of her foot as it slides across their ceiling. This frightens Nacho at first, but he soon stops noticing.

  One day, she calls Mama and Papi. “I live in D.F., Mama. I have a son.”

  Her announcement is met with heavy silence, and then, “What have you done, Solimar?”

  “I’ll tell you when we come. Don’t worry.” She will take him home to Popocalco, where it all began. Mama will know him, and Papi. He’ll see the dollar houses, the bleached facades and adobe walls. She’ll show him the new television in his mamita’s house, the roof Soli paid for, the tiled floor. But for now, she’s building them their own life and filling it with the things a boy needs: school and friends and space to run.

  • • •

  IT’S A SATURDAY in late October. They go to the Colonia Jamaica, and Nacho pulls her to the flower market. The first of November is a few days away, and the market is jammed with shoppers, ladies placing their orders for the big day, filling their sacks with daisies and carnations to prepare for the holiday. In the flower market, the air is heavy, the smell of calendula thick enough to feel mild
ly toxic. Soli and Nacho walk down aisles of gladiolas and sunflowers, pure-white lilies and birds-of-paradise with sharp and flawless petals. The marigold stand, the busiest of all, is presided over by the fattest man Soli has seen outside the States. He sits on his stool and frowns down on his customers, like they’re so many bees buzzing around his otherwise restful day. When Nacho grabs her hand to pull her down the swarming aisle, she lets him lead her. Together, they braid themselves into the crowd, and they’re gone.

  Nacho stops moving when they see the fruit man. Soli buys him a bowl of mango slices, doused in lime and chili. She indulges him more than she should. Often, she thinks of his other parents, and it frightens her to imagine that someone might come for him. The police, the government, the man and woman themselves. But this is a big city, an ocean of buildings and roads and surging tides. Nacho and Soli are two small drops in it, undetectable, unlikely to be seen, unlikely to be missed.

  But that Saturday, in the scrum of the fruit market, someone does recognize her, impossibly, inevitably.

  “Soli!” She walks through the marketplace and hears her old name. It gets lost at first in the bustle of the crowd, but she hears it again. “Soli!”

  She stops and turns and what she sees sucks the breath from her. Nutsack. An apparition, her train-top English tutor, older now and somehow taller. She half expects him to dissolve into the crowd. She can’t remember his real name, so when he reaches her, at last, she says, “Nutsack. How did you find me?”

  “What are you doing here?” Nutsack asks, out of breath himself. “I thought you would make it over.”

  “I did.”

  “You made it? To California?” His smile expands and vanishes. “Why did you leave?”