Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  The parents around her seemed to take great pride in their work, like artisans of a dying craft. Jogging through parks and waiting in BART stations, Kavya had come across American mothers speaking French to their American children, fathers explaining the physics of underground transport to their preschoolers, property tax law to their eight-year-olds. At the farmers’ market the week before, a little girl had fallen and scraped her knee. As she stood sobbing, inconsolable, her mother knelt down beside her. Here, sweetie, have some kale. The little girl had taken it, chewed on the tough, primordial leaf, and stopped crying. The stakes were high in Berkeley. The toddlers were eating their cruciferous greens.

  There were things she couldn’t know about being a parent without being one—this she sensed from the way men and women with children in tow seemed to have little to say to her. Parenthood was a members-only organization closed to freelancers and temps. Outsiders could visit for lunch, but they tended to leave quickly, overwhelmed by the demands of belonging. But Kavya didn’t want to leave. Kavya wanted in.

  • • •

  FOR RISHI, the brilliant bonus of this new world, this procreative world, was a sudden abundance of sex. They were doing it every day, sometimes twice, like they’d done in the early days. They had sex for lunch, and ate burritos in the car. They had sex in the living room, and toppled the throw pillows from the sofa. They had sex in a restaurant once—in the bathroom—and once in a parking lot. But after two months, then three, these trysts began to feel inappropriate, like their control was slipping. He began to wonder what it was about, all the spontaneity. He supposed Kavya was trying to keep things fun, maybe even for his sake, to combat the impatience that lurked in the shadows.

  For three months, Kavya refused to look at her calendar or take her temperature or do any of the things women did to track their fertility. “It shouldn’t matter,” she said. “It should just happen.” But then it didn’t just happen. After three months of trying and failing, the sex could no longer be casual. She began taking her temperature, tracking her ovulation.

  Rishi had been on board with this. He would think of it as a project, he decided. Project managing was what he did, and driving his management approach was the Weebies principle—the Silicon Valley principle—that nothing was impossible. Impossibility was not an absolute, but as shiftable as a heavy boulder. Trial and error and a little cognitive daring were all it took to make the impossible possible. It had worked for PCs, the Internet, smartphones; it would work for his baby.

  Sex whenever became sex on a schedule. Kavya felt a sense of purpose. Satisfaction, even. She was taking charge. Kavya began demanding sex as Rishi hurried from the house to catch the Weebus. She once actually drove out to the Weebies campus and showed up at his office door. “I’m ovulating right now,” she’d said. “Like now.” Rishi had found them a nap room, disobeying the strict single-occupant limit; they’d emerged flushed and rumpled in full view of his coworkers gathered at the espresso machine. Often, from across the bay, she’d text him in all caps, mid-meeting, mid-presentation, mid-epiphany, to say COME HOME. I NEED YOU NOW. What once would have thrilled Rishi stirred in him a sense of anxiety, futility, ingratitude. He felt less like a man and more like an indentured servant, keeping up his end of a shady bargain. And every time, every month they tried to get her pregnant, Rishi watched Kavya grow more brittle. He thought of himself as a rational person, good at compartmentalizing, good at avoiding flights of fancy. But trying to have a baby defied his powers of reason and strategy and desire. He’d bought into the idea that hard work bred success, but Rishi and Kavya were working hard. They were working unnaturally hard at this most natural of tasks.

  • • •

  SIX MONTHS PASSED, and still nothing. Nine months, and Kavya had found herself at Preeti’s wedding. And now, ten. The gravel in her throat had grown to a stone. Every time she saw a baby or a woman with a luscious globe of a belly, the stone grew harder and larger. But Kavya knew this much: She was a woman. She was an Indian woman. Surely a country with one billion people had produced some capable wombs. She was going to have a baby. She and Rishi just needed to get away from the theater of failure that had become their bedroom. They needed to escape the chilly corners of their bungalow and have the sort of relaxed intercourse from which babies seemed to spring. Her ears buzzed with certainty, and farther inside, her ovaries winced.

  She texted Rishi: Napa Valley this weekend! Spa, B&B. I’m booking it. The exclamation mark: so hopeful. She began to delete it, then decided to let it be.

  6.

  It had been five days since Soli had last seen Checo, and thoughts of him and what might have happened to him jangled inside her like shards of tin.

  Soli and two other women sat on the bed of a yellow onion truck, with crates stacked high to shield them. Every now and then, a thin whistle of air made it through the slats of the truck and past the crates, and for those swift seconds, she sensed the sweet nearness of the end. With the air, the morning light, the company of calm women among whom she could—at last!—close her eyes, Soli felt that she would hold together, cohered by a single strip of hope, just long enough to arrive at Silvia’s door. They stopped twice that day to piss on the side of the road and stretch their legs. Soli slept. For how long, she did not know. She did not dream of what had happened to her. She did not dream of Checo, or of the brutish men who came later. The cave between her legs was numb, but her thighs were sticky and began to blister in the day’s heat. When she awoke, the air was still. The woman beside her was called Fatima, and Soli wondered if she’d drugged herself, because after saying “My name is Fatima,” she fell asleep and didn’t wake for six hours.

  A woman named Luz squinted at her across the mound of onions. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Berkeley,” Soli answered.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Close to San Francisco.”

  “You know someone there?”

  “Yes, my cousin.”

  “Your cousin have money?”

  “I think so. I think she has money.”

  Luz shook her head like she didn’t see good things for Soli.

  A few hours after dark, the driver stopped the truck and stuck his head out his window. “Get flat,” he called.

  “What’s he talking about?” Soli asked.

  Luz rolled herself into a ball. The truck slowed to a halt. The engine stopped. “Get down,” she hissed, and pulled sleeping Fatima from the bench to the floor. Fatima grunted awake, blinked dumbly, and then burrowed behind them into an empty space, hemmed in by towers of onion crates.

  “Are we here?” Soli asked.

  “Quiet! Make yourself small.”

  Through the crates and the slats, Soli saw the flicker of a dark green uniform. The flicker spoke in English. He spoke in English!

  “We’re here,” Soli whispered.

  “Shut up.” Luz was kneeling beside her, and she took Soli’s hands in hers. She slipped her fingers along Soli’s knuckles like they were rosary beads, and Soli prayed silently, thinking of her own lost rosary. Though his words were muffled by onions, she knew the uniformed man was questioning their driver. Shuffling paper, more questions. And before she could move, a stick shot through the slats. She gasped. It grazed her skull. Again and again, it rammed through the slats, a guard’s iron wand, trawling for migrant flesh, hoping to hit something live enough to cry out and prove the truck carried more than onions. She held her hands to her head and prayed. She knew she was shaking, but luckily for her, fear made no sound. Moments later, she heard footsteps crunch away and vanish. The engine started up again and they rolled forward.

  Luz released a tremulous breath. “Lucky,” she said. “A lazy one.” She looked up at Soli, grinned, and pushed her tongue through the gap in her teeth. “We’re here.”

  “In the North?”

  “America, m’ija. That’s what th
ey call it here. We’re in California now.”

  Soli looked up to the sky. Same blue as the Mexican sky. She looked through the truck’s slats. This was California. The United States of America. She had arrived.

  And here’s what she discovered. This place, this America? This new place, this streets-of-gold place? Looked a hell of a lot like the old place.

  America streaked by her, stripped and tender with heat. She watched it all rush past through the slats of the old truck: the tin roofs, seas of broken glass, glinting and breathless like a fever dream. America was the dust in her hair, the wind in her throat, the sun that shouted against her eyelids. Between the slats of this truck, America was nothing but a high-tech, high-speed dream of trees and houses and fences, a sliver of interrupted light.

  The old folks back home, those who’d been here and back, told Soli she would do well here, that she had the spirit. They told her to keep her head down and work hard and for God’s sake keep her mouth shut.

  After four more hours with sleepy Fatima and gap-toothed Luz, Soli was ready to jump. The man up front drove hard and fast, like he had someplace to go, like he wasn’t hiding three people in a mound of onions in the back of his truck. This dream smelled horribly of onions.

  They were entering a city, where the buildings rose like missiles from the ground, too tall to be seen completely. Minutes later, the buildings shrank down and grew dingy; the sidewalks streamed with walking life. The driver pulled over and stopped. He called through the slats: “This is your stop. Get off here.”

  “You.” He nodded at Soli. “This is where you get off.”

  She stepped off into a flurry of bodies, crossing paths and jostling, moving in all directions at once. It was cloudy here, and surprisingly cold. From where she stood that day, California was a gray road that lived for miles, sloping down, then up, dying into a sunstruck horizon. The horizon was where the earth turned, where it decided it had had enough of the same, and dove into something new. She wondered if the earth found what it was looking for, if it was happy with its new life.

  She looked up: The signs were in Spanish. She looked around: The people looked like her. She opened her ears: All around her, Spanish. And her heart dropped. This wasn’t America. She’d been cheated again. They’d somehow crossed back into Mexico. The truck was gone.

  She turned a corner and walked. Her knees ached, her vision floated, and the taste of her own mouth was nauseating. She didn’t think she could go much farther—she’d find a way back to Popocalco or she’d sit down where she was and never move again. She was still a fool, unschooled by the hardship of her journey. She looked up and saw a wide marquis: Amnesia. Under the marquis, young people gathered and smoked.

  But they were white young people. And Chinese young people. And then—she rocketed with hope when she saw them—there were black people. She kept walking and saw more of every color, street signs in English, and on the side of the road, a line of cars with license plates. California, they said. A sunburst on each plate: This was California.

  The sun above was cool, the ground littered with shriveled cigarettes. Soli kneeled before San Francisco and gave thanks. Because she didn’t have her cross, she kissed her thumb. She kissed it again.

  She wasn’t a city girl. She walked and walked, but didn’t know where the streets were leading. The houses here looked like frosted cakes, painted pink and blue and purple, rising and falling with the curve of the city’s hills. So full was she with the thought of being in America that she had to remind herself that she had someplace to get to. She came to a crossroads. There were five corners, six, and people all around. People held mobile phones high, at arm’s length, smiling to the sky. This was no place for a woman who’d entered the country beneath a pile of onions. People were all around, and mostly they looked up at the sky. She looked up, too—spires, wide gray bricks, cornices and turrets, more windows than she had ever seen, clouds the color of turmoil.

  • • •

  HER SHIRT WAS ON INSIDE OUT and backward. The tag stuck out from under her chin. Her backpack was gone, her water, her money. She could smell herself. She cursed herself for losing the five dollars, that bill of weathered hope that Papi had pressed into her palm. What she did have was Silvia’s address, packed into her memory, recited and reviewed so many times that it had grown limp with handling: 2020 Channing, Berkeley, California. It sounded high-tech and glamorous, an address like a disco ball. After where she’d been and what she’d done in the three weeks of her journey, finding her way from San Francisco to Berkeley didn’t scare her. She’d ask questions, point, and ask for help. She would say the word Berkeley many times, piecing together links of kindness, holding fast to the chain until it led her to Silvia. She came to a subway station, something she’d heard of but never seen. She asked a woman playing guitar what to do. The woman pointed at a sign on the wall with an arrow. “Go,” she said. “There.”

  When the man in a booth turned his back, Soli hoisted herself over the turnstile and ran. He didn’t chase her. It seemed that a disappearing Mexican wasn’t worth his trouble.

  Here’s what Soli planned to do. She would go to her cousin Silvia, who had moved to the States nine years earlier. Silvia was high-tech. She was doing well. She had an apartment and two boys. She had her own business, and she had papers. She could get Soli papers. She would work for Silvia’s cleaning business. The people in these neighborhoods, Silvia wrote, they pay a lot of money to not have to clean their own houses. They give you cash gifts at Christmas. They are good people, a lot of them, and they know how to treat their servants.

  “Servitude lives in the heart.” Papi had said. “Soli, you will never be a servant because you know your heart.”

  “Bravo, bravo, Trovador. Do you want your daughter to scrub floors all her life?” Mama had asked.

  People called Papi Trovador because the things he said were beautiful.

  “Soli, do you want to scrub floors?”

  She said to Papi, “I want to go. Servitude lives in the heart, Papi.”

  “Not in yours.”

  “Not in mine.”

  The matter had been settled that day.

  • • •

  ARRIVING IN BERKELEY, she exited the station and stood on the corner of a wide and teeming avenue. This could have been any corner, anywhere. Behind a café counter, she found a Mexican man. This one looked at her kindly. She told him the address she’d memorized. It turned out it was not so far from that café. She walked down a cracked sidewalk. Garbage cans overflowed, and the place smelled of rot. In the thick and stormy air, there was nowhere for the stench to go. This is America, she thought.

  As she approached, she could see that Silvia’s building leaned slightly at an angle. Scaffolding rose up its side, and on it sat dark women, darker than Soli, in flowing silks, scrubbing windows. They watched her get closer to the building. She had seen plenty of smiling people in America, but these were the first to smile at her.

  A label with a tiny doorbell: Morales. Soli rang it.

  She heard the thump of heavy footsteps. The door opened. “Solimar.”

  “Silvia.”

  Silvia stood tall as a statue, so clean, so American. Soli stepped over the threshold and into Silvia’s arms. She held her so long that Soli stopped feeling both her cousin’s body and her own. Her legs gave out, and she began to cry. Not from sorrow or anger, but from wild exhaustion, the only thing she still owned.

  “You smell like shit,” Silvia said. “Where’ve you been?”

  “I’ve been getting here.”

  “Come upstairs, girl. What did you do to your hair? Your papi’s been calling. Every day. You’ve made him crazy. Why haven’t you called him?”

  Upstairs, two boys waited, Silvia’s sons, five and seven. Before she could kneel down and smile, or take them in her arms, or ask them what they liked to eat, Silvia shoved a towel in he
r face and pointed to the bathroom.

  “Shower,” she ordered.

  This was Soli’s first shower. In Popocalco, they’d had baths and only baths. She would come to miss baths, of course, but that morning, the shower was what she needed. The steam kept her warm and the past sped down the drain. She was an earthworm in the warm spring rain.

  Now that she had arrived, her happiness had time to establish its landscape. And it was not pure. Her happiness was terrain pitted with melancholy. The end of her journey brought with it the realization that Santa Clara Popocalco was behind her, perhaps forever, and that she would never again be the Soli she’d once known so intimately.

  Silvia walked in while she was drying off. “That’s better. Now I can see you.” She picked up the Soccer Players Do It for 90 Minutes shirt and scowled. “I’ll burn this,” she said.

  “No. I want to keep it.” Soli snatched it from her. The shirt hung heavy with filth, and she let it drop to the floor again. She would wash away the stink and sweat and fear. It would be clean again, like Soli.

  Silvia found Soli a skirt and a T-shirt. The shirt was fine, but the skirt slid to the floor as soon as it was on.

  “You’re too skinny,” Silvia said. “You’ll do good here, all right. Skinny here means you’re smart and hard-working. And rich.”

  They laughed together.

  Silvia found her a cotton dress with no sleeves.

  “This’ll do,” she said. “I used to wear this before the boys were born. If this falls off you, we’re both in trouble.”

  Soli took off her shirt and reached for the dress, but Silvia held it. Soli’s hair dripped down her back and she winced. Silvia let her stand there, naked as a worm, and stared.