A Star Called Lucky

by Bapsy Jain

  “Nothing, I just can’t get it to open right. It sometimes keeps defaulting to Hulu.”

  Collette sniffed it again then eyed it curiously.

  Funny, Lucky thought, her feet barely reach the floor when she sits in that high chair, but here she is, about to fix my computer.

  “Kind of a virus-y thing, huh?”

  “No, it just keeps coming up to Hulu.”

  “But you keep resetting it and it keeps doing something you don’t want?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Uh huh.” She took a long swig of Kool Aid and looked at the clock on the wall over in the breakfast nook. “Sounds like you got a virus.”

  “I don’t know how, the computer’s brand new.”

  Collette yawned. “Who knows? You got antivirus?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, that’s good. But it still might have picked something up before you installed it.”

  Lucky sighed.

  “I got this friend in Bulgaria, Yazma, but he doesn’t get up until midnight—his time. That’d be about…” she looked at the clock on the wall, “now. We’re seven hours different, I think. He has something that scans hard drives for buried code. But it takes time. I’ll ping him and see if he’s around. When did you say you need this?”

  “Well I,” Lucky began. She hadn’t intended to leave it, just to get the settings fixed. “Are you sure you can’t just…” Then she stopped. Coleman would have a computer for her in Washington—so it wasn’t a big deal. “I’ll be out of town for a few days,” she said, “so there’s no hurry. And by the way, do you think you might have some free time to look after Sean? I mean, Maria may need some help around the house.”

  “I got tons of time,” Collette said. “All the time in the world.”

  Lucky got up to go but turned at the door and looked at Collette. “Are you okay, sweetie?”

  Collette followed Lucky to the door. “Never been better. I hacked into the school computer yesterday and posted my grades for the year. I’m not going back.”

  Lucky blanched, and Collette smirked a bit at the expression.

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t give myself the kind of grades that anybody’ll notice. B’s and C’s, mainly. And nobody there’ll miss me, anyway.”

  Lucky reached out and stroked Collette’s hair. “You’re such a sweet girl,” she said. “Promise me you’ll at least read and do your math every day?”

  “Math’s easy,” Collette said. “Do graphic novels count?”

  “Graphic? Oh, you mean, with pictures. No. Real novels. Why don’t you try something like Anna Karenina?”

  Collette rolled her eyes. “What’s that about?”

  “It’s a story about a family in Russia a long time ago. A love triangle, sort of. Mostly about two sisters, Kitty and Anna. Levin loves Kitty, but Vronsky, an army officer, wins her. Then Vronsky dumps her and runs off with Anna Karenina. Anna is married but her husband won’t give her a divorce. Kitty eventually realizes that she made a mistake and agrees to marry Levin. Their life turns out happy. But Anna, doubting her lover and trapped in a loveless marriage, throws herself under a train.”

  “But what does it all mean?” Collette asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘What does it mean?’”

  “What’s the point?”

  “It’s about love,” Lucky said. “What is true love? And how does one find it? I guess you could say it’s about not judging by appearances.”

  “Love,” Collette said, “is the biggest crock of shit ever pulled over a girl’s eyes.”

  So that’s the problem, Lucky thought, as she walked home. Collette’s boyfriend dumped her. She made a mental note to call Analise and to drop a hint to the school counselor.

  Perhaps it was Alec’s and Susan’s, her godparents, palatial colonial home with the carefully manicured grounds (grounds that Lucky sometimes referred to as the 389th National Park) that inspired Lucky to purchase a tiny house clinging to the edge of a ravine on a piece of wild land that nobody else wanted and nothing could be done with—literally at the end of the road. But she liked the quiet and privacy. The inside of the house was civilized enough, reminding Lucky of the quaint cottage behind Alec’s and Susan’s and all the happy weekends she had spent there conversing with Susan and watching Alec teach Sean to read Dr. Seuss, build Lego castles, and fold origami cranes.

  This house had borne little resemblance to the cottage when Lucky purchased it. Then, it had been an old 1940s concrete-block house with a tilting foundation and a leaking roof. Over time, and with much love, she had transformed it into something special, once spending a whole week sleeping in a tent in the backyard while the old roof was torn off and replaced right down to the joists and rafters. And she had the walls insulated and energy-efficient windows installed. She laid the natural flagstone tiles herself, everywhere but in the kitchen, where she used hand-painted ceramic tiles. To keep the floors warm, she laid Kashmiri rugs, three mostly red and one mostly blue, housewarming presents from Alec and Susan. The rugs, Lucky knew, were collectors’ items. They probably cost as much as the house.

  But there was another reason Lucky wanted the property. There were eleven acres that wound along the inside of the steep-sloped ravine. The ground here was too soft for heavy construction. The creek—designated a wild bird preserve—could not be dammed or piped or diverted. The ravine trapped cold air in winter, which was bad, but it was also shady and cool in the summer, which was very good. It had at least a trickle of water most of the year; only in late August, in the driest of summers, did the spring fade to a wet, moldy smudge on the rocks from which it sprang. Along the banks of the creek were a number of old silver maples and cottonwoods, and among them grew a profusion of ostrich ferns and stinging nettles and grasses and weeds and wildflowers. Cattails grew in the deeper pools in the creek, and in the spring, the thin, new leaves filtered the sunlight into a bright, fresh green. In the summer, the thickened leaves canopied the ravine into a dusky and sedate shade of dark gray where Dragonflies whizzed by in the evening, and tree swallows and butterflies flitted in the mornings. Lucky had once seen a deer in the ravine, a doe, alone. And on another occasion, a red-eared slider turtle had bobbed up in the pond. There were occasional herons, too, and at least one raccoon had taken up residence somewhere in the area. Sean had spotted it and taken to leaving treats for it on the back patio.

  “In other words,” Lucky had said, as she showed off the remodeled house to Alec and Susan before the housewarming party, “it’s perfect.”

  “Except if you have an emergency,” Susan replied.

  “You are sooooooooo dramatic,” Lucky had retorted.

  Now Lucky peered through the open window across the living room and into the kitchen, where Maria worked over something floury on the counter. As she watched, Maria pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen into her eyes. She wore her favorite apron—sky blue and white—the colors of the Guatemalan flag. She had made chili rellenos (although not Guatemalan, they were still Sean’s favorite—he called them “ray-nos”) with rice and beans and strips of steak with onions and green chili on the side. Lucky wanted to slip in through the door unnoticed and sneak up on Sean from behind, playfully spooking him in the kitchen, but before she was halfway across the living room, Maria called out, “Hi, Luck-eeeee,” and the plan was ruined.

  Maria was short and broad and mahogany-skinned, her face long, wide at the eyes, narrow at the chin, with pronounced cheekbones and a wide, triangular, hawkish nose. In some ways, she looked almost Indian—South Indian, anyway, or Tamil. Her hair was thick and black and very long and shiny. It was Maria’s eyes that made Lucky hire her—they were so dark, yet full of life. Like water sparkling in a cave, Lucky thought at the time. Although Maria had lived a hard life, there was not a hint of anger or bitterness in her eyes. They were, Lucky thought, like deep pools of love. Maria was not the kind of woman one sees once and forgets.

  The bad part was that while a few of Maria
’s relations were documented aliens, the rest were refugees. Where did they all come from? Mexico? Guatemala? El Salvador? Really, other than Maria’s word, Lucky had nothing to go on. It was no use tracking them. There were no databases in Mexico, not like here in the good old U S of A.

  And when the night was finished and Maria had gone home, Lucky realized she hadn’t told her about the trip to Washington. Tomorrow, she thought, and sighed. Or maybe she’d just send Sean to stay with Amay. She decided to call Amay and arrange it.

  “Hey, sweetie,” he said, sounding sleepy.

  “I got your text,” Lucky said, “but I was busy. It was a strange day. I was mega-busy.”

  “I figured you were.”

  “Look, I have to go to Washington for a few days and I was wondering if you could look after Sean. I’m sure he’d love to see Murzban and Ava.”

  “Washington? Why? What’s down there?”

  “I’m going to work on a little project at the Food and Drug Administration. Just for a few days, a week or two at the most. But who knows? It might turn into something permanent.”

  “Wow,” Amay said. There was a long silence.

  Lucky listened. There was a sound like rustling in the sheets. “Are you in bed?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I was tired. I went to bed early. Washington, eh? I was not expecting that.”

  “Me neither. It came out of the blue.”

  “I suppose that means it might not turn into something?”

  Lucky frowned. “I guess so. But it sounds interesting. Wouldn’t you want to be doing something good?”

  “I’m just being selfish,” Amay said. “I don’t want you to go. But of course I’ll look after Sean. You want to drop him off or should I pick him up?”

  “Can you pick him up? Maria will be here in the morning, but I’ll give her a week off while I’m gone.”

  “You leave tomorrow?”

  “Yes, tomorrow. I told you this came out of the blue.”

  “I guess so,” Amay said. “What will you be doing?”

  Lucky bit her tongue. “I really can’t say right now,” she said. “But I’ll tell you about it after I get back.”

  Chapter 6

  That night, Lucky dreamed she was at the controls of a bulldozer. How could this happen? She’d never even seen inside the cab of a bulldozer, much less operated one. She woke at dawn drenched in sweat. She’d been grinding her teeth and her jaw hurt. She struggled to remember. There was a protest—PETA activists with signs—but they were all tall blonde men in maroon robes, a river of them washing down the road toward her. The vehicle was out of control and she tried to warn them, to push them back, but she did not know how to handle the joysticks that guided the machine, or the accelerator, or the brakes, and she toggled this way and that and stamped on the pedals, but the machine was crushing the protesters underneath the treads with a sound like dry leaves underfoot in the fall. “I’m sorry!” she shouted over and over again. “I can’t stop! Nobody showed me how!”

  She climbed out of bed and dressed quietly, stripped off the sheets and threw them in the washing machine. In the kitchen, she lit a stick of incense and sat for a few minutes in lotus pose then made coffee for herself and oatmeal and toast with butter for Sean and mixed a pitcher of orange juice. Sean came into the kitchen rubbing his eyes and dragging Falstaff, his slowly disintegrating stuffed bear, behind him. He wore his Superman pajamas and crawled up into Lucky’s lap and hugged her, sucking his thumb. He had stopped sucking his thumb for a while a few months ago, and this was the second time in a week that Lucky had noticed him doing it again.

  “Did you sleep okay?” Lucky asked.

  Sean shook his head. “Falstaff had bad dreams,” he said.

  “Oh. That seems to be making the rounds this week. And what did Falstaff dream?”

  “’Bout lolygaters.”

  That was Sean’s word for alligators. Ever since he’d watched a show on the Discovery Channel about alligators, and how they lurked in ponds to eat whatever came down to drink, Sean had developed a phobia for water. The tub, the toilet, and Alec’s and Susan’s duck pond. Everything these days came down to ‘lollygaters. Lucky spoon-fed Sean his oatmeal and sewed up a little tear in Falstaff’s neck. Maria came—on time, thank goodness.

  Lucky packed, threw the laundry into the dryer, and said goodbye to Sean, feeling a sudden pang of regret as she kissed him and promised to be home soon. She quickly informed Maria of the situation, telling her Amay would be there soon, then hurried out of the door. But Lucky paused at the rose garden on the way to the subway station. How many times, she wondered, did people say goodbye to their loved ones, walk out the door, and never see them again? She shook it off. Bad omen, thinking things like that.

  She caught a train to downtown then hurried along down quiet streets, stopping only at Café Vision for a mocha and a cinnamon roll. On impulse, she went around the corner to see Grant. He was sitting at his place at the counter reading. “That Sun Tzu,” Lucky said, “do you still have it?”

  He did. Lucky bought it before she could change her mind then headed for work.

  She was surprised to find Barkley in her office, sitting at the chair behind Lucky’s desk. “I didn’t expect to find you here so early.”

  “I had an idea you’d flit in and out.” He tossed Lucky a Fed-Ex envelope and Lucky did not have to open it to know that it contained a plane ticket.

  “Well,” Lucky said, sitting down in the chair opposite Barkley, “We’ll see how it goes.” She rested her chin in her hands.

  “Where’s my bright-eyed girl?” Barkley asked.

  “I left her at home.”

  “Still not sure about the job?”

  “Somebody once told me if something sounds too good to be true…”

  “It’s an opportunity some people would kill for,” Barkley said.

  “Well,” she said, looking up, “I’ll try my best.”

  “Of course you will, dear girl. Really got swept up in the drama yesterday, didn’t we? Hate to lose someone like you. I mean that. You realize that, technically speaking, you’re being promoted to a higher level than me. Hard to accept, but not hard to believe. Obviously talented. Not like I’m currying favor or anything, but I do hope you remember me when you crack the top.”

  “I’m not leaving for good, for God sake!” Lucky said. “I don’t think…”

  “What I mean to say,” Barkley said, “is that you’ll be missed, when you eventually move on to Coleman’s team.” He pushed a small parcel across the desk to Lucky.

  “What’s this?”

  “A remembrance.”

  “I wasn’t expecting anything. Besides, I’ll be back here in New York in a few days.”

  “Of course not, no one never expects anything. But you never know, do you? What fun would there be in that? It’s the sheer unexpectedness of things that makes them good, isn’t it? Go on, open it.”

  Lucky opened the package to find an ornate, gold-plated frame bearing an old, hand-colored photograph of a Rajput king. The image was impressive: A tall, white mustachioed man in a short blue jacket with baggy pink pants, a pink turban, and a sweeping white cape. His left hand was extended in a gesture, which could be interpreted as either a welcome, or a gesture of finality. His right hand clutched the silver haft of a short, wide, curved sword, the scabbard of which was thrust into his belt. “This is really old,” Lucky said, lightly touching the glass overlaying the photo. “Where on earth did you find this?”

  “I found it at an antique shop on my way home yesterday. Knew you had a thing for Indian stuff, so I wrangled it for you.”

  “Thank you,” Lucky said. She rose and extended her hand.

  Barkley stood up and shook it. At the door he paused. “Mind yourself, Lucky Boyce,” he said. “Be careful in Washington. That crowd would boil and eat their children for a promotion.”

  Lucky nodded. For some reason, one of Shanti’s old sayings came to mind. She used to say, “When the
hand is empty, there is nothing to grasp.” Lucky thought about this and said, “I mean, what have I got that anyone would want?”

  Barkley arched his eyebrows. “That kind of thing sounds good on paper, Boyce. But I wouldn’t trust them. Not for a while, at least. Magicians always show you an empty hand, but then they pull a coin out of your ear. It might not be so much what you have as who you are, or where you are. Be at the wrong place at the wrong time and you might get run over by a truck. It’s not personal, it’s just timing. There are some people who think they only look good when they tear somebody else down for comparison, you know?”

  When Barkley was gone, Lucky opened the Fed-Ex envelope. A first-class ticket on the 1:00 PM flight. There was a letter, too, with the address of her new office. It confirmed her wages and benefit package (which was eye-popping) and that Lucky had hotel reservations at the Marriott Residence Hotel. He moves fast, she thought. And while she was re-reading the letter, her phone rang. It was Collette. “Call me back from a pay phone,” she said.

  So dramatic. “I thought you were supposed to be—” The line disconnected.

  Pay phones? Do they even have those anymore? She checked her watch. Almost 10:00. Plenty of time, she thought, as she left her office for JFK.

  She stopped by Emil’s desk, said her goodbyes, then walked out of the building, noticing a crowd on the sidewalk. The PETA protesters are back again. As she walked down a step further, a flash of maroon caught her eye. In the distance, she saw four monks—three short, one tall. She looked again. Three dark, one very pale. It can’t be, she thought. But then again, how many tall, pale, handsome Buddhist monks were in New York City? She hesitated, then walked closer—yes, it was definitely Usko. She stopped in front of him and met his gaze.

  “Hello,” Usko said. “Have we met?”

  “Not exactly,” Lucky said. “I mean, we haven’t been properly introduced. But we have met. Sort of.”

  “Ahh,” he said, nodding. “And how do people meet—sort of?”

  “You were here yesterday—at the demonstration. I walked by and asked what the fuss was about and when I turned to go you said I could help.”