Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  “Get out.” She could still hear his voice, cavernous and dim. It was the driver. She’d ridden alone for a day, the truck bed echoing with worries for Checo and Nutsack and the others. And then, like a warehouse, it had been restocked with more people, women and men and children she’d never seen before. Now the others struggled off the truck bed, their legs bowed at angles, their shoulders and spines warped. Even the children walked with crooked backs after days of hunching down in the truck.

  She toppled off and one of the women helped her up. The driver pointed to another truck, this one open to the air, boarded by wooden slats. “That’s yours,” the driver said. “California.”

  Before she climbed aboard, a man grabbed her elbow. This one wore a cowboy hat. “Not so fast, señorita. This is going to cost you. You know that, don’t you? We’ll be expecting payment.” Soli had neither peso nor penny.

  “Not now,” the man said. “When you get there, you’ll be paying us three thousand.”

  Papi had given all he had to Manuel. There was no way she would get three thousand pesos.

  The man squeezed her arm: “Three thousand dollars. Okay?”

  She’d never heard a number like this. She couldn’t imagine three thousand dollars.

  “If we don’t get it from you, we’ll get it from your family, Solimar Castro Valdez of Santa Clara Popocalco.” He grinned. “Got it?”

  She nodded once at the man, then pushed past him, irritated. She didn’t have time for his scare tactics. She needed to piss.

  The man broke off from the group and walked behind her. Soli heard his footsteps but thought nothing of it, until two others began to follow. Any other day, she would have pissed her pants and run. But today, Soli was too bandy-minded to think, and cradled in daylight, she felt she had nothing to fear.

  One man. Three men. They shoved her down, the ground a hard shock. They pinned her arms to her chest and pulled every thread of clothing off her, there on the stony earth. The first man ordered her to take her piss. He pulled a pistol from his pocket and ordered her to do it. She might have run, but the gun emanated its own heat, a promise to follow and find her. She had nowhere to go, so she stayed where she was. One knee, then the other, on the ground, where rocks and sand ground into her skin.

  “Go ahead,” the man said. His voice was calm and deep. “Take a piss. That’s why you came out here, right?” The tears wouldn’t come, but she heaved nonetheless, propping herself onto her feet and squatting. Her thighs were bare, splayed wide. Her thighs shamed her, their fleshy flanks the most naked things she’d known, and the dark gutter between them. It gaped at the ground, grinning and open to the wind. She was too frightened to piss, and the wave of relief stayed bottled up inside. She shook her head, and was pushed down.

  The evening was nearly silent, the desert sands swallowing sound. First, second, third. One by one, they rammed into her and did their animal thing. She placed an arm over her breasts and they laughed and shoved it away. Her throat was dry and she tried to scream, but the sound only wheezed out of her. She saw then the barrel of a gun, pointing down at her like a camera lens. When the last one finished, he got to his feet and zipped his pants, tugged his shirt cuffs over his wrists. Through the tremble of her own legs, she watched him diminish in the thickening dark. When he was out of sight, a gush of urine drenched her thighs and buttocks.

  Soli found her clothes strewn around the base of the tree. She returned, dressed, parched and shaking, to the group that had gathered around the second truck. The men who’d done it to her gathered around, sucked on cigarettes, gazed up to the darkening sky. They chatted quietly, like they were waiting for a bus. All three wore cowboy hats. Some vaqueros they were. When the truck bed opened, they herded the passengers on. Soli sat on something hard and even, crossed her arms over her stomach, and rested her head on her knees. Her thighs smelled sour.

  When the door clanked shut, she let loose a wail. Her shoulders shook with a force she couldn’t control, as if her grief had turned against her, as if the horrors within were taking charge and shutting her down, having decided she would die. She made sounds she’d never heard, and they droned for hours, maybe days, born from some canyon of loss. They churned up her throat and vibrated through her teeth. She did not know these sounds.

  But she didn’t die. She felt a hand on her back. It belonged to the woman beside her. Soli grew silent, until the hand on her back brought her back to the truck, back to the hum of the bench on which she sat. The hand, solid and still, brought her, in its quiet way, back to the world. When she felt down her shirt for her rosary, it was gone. She sat up, looked down her collar and saw nothing but brown skin, her breasts. No beads, no cross. That’s when the door to the truck slammed shut and the engine coughed to a start. She hunched back down, her head between her knees, and stayed this way, never looking up, as the truck lurched forward. The earth rumbled low and surged from under her. She knew she was on her way.

  • • •

  AND HERE SHE WAS NOW—it was almost beyond belief—in her warm bed, the Berkeley morning a cool white blush. After haunted dreams, the sun had brought silence. She moved through that morning a few inches from the ground. She had built a castle of light, with walls that dissolved as she passed. This place was not hers. These homes—Silvia’s apartment, the Cassidy bungalow—were refuges lent by a gentle fate, but she held no claim to them. The life she knew could slip from beneath her with hardly a moment’s notice.

  Soli had told no one about those men, and would have wiped her memory clean if she could. But she couldn’t. Three men. Three cowboy hats, all white, like they’d bought them together. They’d used her like a latrine, taking turns, each moving methodically like a dog fucking a dog. By the time the third had jammed himself inside her, she could stare into the sun’s glare and think of herself as a dog, and them as dogs, and nothing more. When all of them were animals, the spikes of pain deadened and she felt nothing. She’d felt nothing when they ground her shoulders into the dirt. She’d felt nothing when the third man held a knife to her throat, smiled, and pulled the blade away. Three more paternal possibilities for Soli’s child, three more gambles in this land of infinite chance.

  A hardness had taken root in her that evening, out among the desert rocks. And now, as she listened to kitchen clatters and the rush of the shower, a sense of disgust welled up inside her, radiating through the room. She began to sweat through her clothes, hot now with rage. She crammed her eyes shut and forced herself to remember again the sickly, spastic thrust of their bodies, the sight of a rigid penis, the veinous alien. She reminded herself of these things so that she could live with them. They had killed a piece of her, those men. Now that she could be still, safe in the light, she sensed something heavy and dead within. She would use it one day, that heavy dead thing. She would care for it like a baby. She would relish its violence. And one day, it would serve her well.

  • • •

  SILVIA HAD BREAKFAST WAITING. Normally, she was out the door before Soli woke up, but that morning she lingered, setting a plate of hot tortillas and eggs before her and smoothing down Soli’s hair. Perhaps she knew, Soli thought, about the visions that had stalked her through the night.

  Silvia set down a cup of dark coffee. “Your mama called early this morning.”

  Her stomach clenched.

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “Papi?”

  “Fine.” Silvia paused. “Have you told them yet?”

  “About?” But Soli knew what about, and no, she hadn’t. And in an unfamiliar fit of authority, she set down her cup and said, “You don’t tell them either, Silvia. Do you hear me?”

  Silvia shrugged.

  “Please. Silvia. Please.”

  Silvia arched an eyebrow over her coffee cup, smacked her lips, and before Soli could drop to her knees as one would before a village saint, Silvia said, “Okay. I won’t tell.”


  “I’ll tell them myself. I promise. I just need to do it at the right time.”

  “You have to, Soli. How can they not know?”

  “They’ll know.”

  “Okay.”

  And when would they know? Before the birth or after? Would Soli return to Popocalco one day twelve years in the future, with a tall and gangly stranger, a flamingo-legged boy she called her son? Or would she call her parents immediately and say Mama-Papi, I’m having a baby. Whose, I can’t be sure. It could be a wonderful young man who is either dead or mowing lawns, or one of three rapists with flamboyant taste in hats. Oh, yes, and by the way, I was raped three times but also made some very nice love by a railroad track. And so it happened that Soli did not get around to dropping this news bomb on her parents, though she did speak to them every few weeks, for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time, nuzzling into the warmth of their improving humors (sending money home, it seems, does wonders for parental moods). Mostly she let her mother talk. She told Soli about Doña Alberta, her brand-new home built right in front of the old one, with tile floors, an air conditioner, an indoor toilet.

  “And a shower, m’ija! And above the shower, there’s a square in the ceiling with a window in it, just in case she wants to look up at the sky!” Mama said.

  “Have you been to visit?”

  “No, no. She’s taking no visitors,” her mother said and sniffed. “Not us, anyway.”

  When her parents asked Soli about her life in America, she told them everything she could think of about the Cassidys and Berkeley and how well she was being treated. But when it came to such key pieces of information as their impending grandchild, she told herself that she had enough to deal with. She had, for instance, the señora to deal with.

  The day after the birth video, she walked into the Cassidy house at 8 a.m. exactly. Mr. Cassidy sat alone at the table, sipping his tea. He smiled, said good morning, and asked her to sit down.

  “Señor?”

  “Call me Brett.”

  The truth was, Soli couldn’t say the name Brett, not the way he said it, and the way it sounded on her lips shamed her. “Can I call you Mr. Cassidy, please?”

  His eyebrows jumped. “Sure.”

  Soli took off her coat, hung it on the laundry room rack, and returned to the kitchen to begin the dishes. Over the past two weeks, dishwashing had grown nearly impossible. Reaching the sink was no problem, but levering heavy pans against the weight of her belly produced a new kind of strain in her neck. She picked up a frying pan and held it high to scrub it.

  “Soli,” said Mr. Cassidy. “Soli, sit down!” He sounded upset. “Don’t do that now. Look how pregnant you are! Have a seat, please.”

  She couldn’t so easily slide a chair out and relax.

  “Sit.”

  When Soli did sit, she feared another question about the Zapatistas. Or that he was angry she’d walked out the day before. Or perhaps this was about the food. They might have noticed their Tupperware growing lighter, the bread loaves shrinking, the missing containers of yogurt, the sandwich meat, the milk. As if reminded, her stomach sang out with a throaty, three-beat gurgle.

  Mr. Cassidy smiled. “Stay there.” He got up and went to the fridge and came back with a stack of creamy pastry on a plate. “Have you had a Napoleon before?”

  No, she had not. Soli didn’t know where to begin with the concoction. She knew from what drifted to her nostrils that it was sweet and rich. It rose before her, a castle of pastry layers topped with a solid pane of sugar, a candied cherry. The fragrance of cream sent a willowy ache up her jaw.

  She looked at the man sitting before her. There was a smudge on his glasses that she wanted to wipe. “Is the señora home?”

  “She’s in bed today, Soli. You won’t need to clean the bedroom.”

  “Is she sick, señor?”

  “No, no. She feels awful about yesterday, though. She was worried you’d never be back.”

  “I’m back.”

  He smiled. “Soli, you’ll be a mother soon.” He cocked his head, searched her face. “Are you ready?”

  “I have to be ready?”

  He laughed at this. “I suppose not. Do you know yet? Boy or girl?”

  “No. But I feel that he’s a boy.”

  The truth was, Soli hadn’t been to a doctor. Silvia hadn’t wanted to spend the money. You’re so young, she’d said. You’re getting so big, the baby must be growing, right? You think our mothers went running to the doctors like the gabachas do?

  Silvia was right, of course. Soli felt the life that kicked inside her, and that was all she needed. In Popocalco, she would have seen a comadrona, and she would have had her mother. Here, she had Silvia.

  “Who’s going to help you, Soli?” he asked, as if he’d read her thoughts. “Do you have a lot of family?”

  She shook her head. “Only my cousin.”

  “Uh-huh. And have you thought about the time you’re going to take off?”

  She shook her head. She’d assumed Silvia would pull out the baby, towel her off, and send her back to work.

  The señor rapped his fingers on the table, pinkie to thumb, making a sound like rainfall. He looked at Soli, and Soli, who should have felt uncomfortable, who should have risen from her chair or stared at her feet, simply looked back. She sat frozen in his gaze.

  “Well, listen,” he said. “We’re prepared to give you a month off, to rest and heal and what have you. But then we’ll need you back. All right?”

  A month seemed like a long time to go without pay.

  “You’ll be paid,” he said, a step ahead again.

  “Señor?”

  “We will pay you, okay? For that month, you’ll get money.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “But then we’ll need you back. You can bring your baby, and start a few hours later if you need to. You’ll watch Saoirse after school, and you’ll clean while you’re here. You’ll be our nanny, like we said before.”

  What could she say? She almost refused. The people here were too kind; she felt that she didn’t deserve them. No one got treated like this, did they? To be paid for doing nothing? For a whole month?

  Mr. Cassidy got up and opened a drawer. “I forgot to give you a fork,” he said, and, handing it to her, sat down to sip his tea.

  Cutting into the thing was not easy. Every press of the fork caused a layer to slide off. She felt Mr. Cassidy’s eyes on her, and feared she was doing it wrong. The harder she sliced, the more the pastry slipped across the custard. When she did cut through the Napoleon, it collapsed into a thousand flakes. She had to scrape them up and mix them in with the cream, until she gathered on her fork a mouthful of something that looked nothing like the original. When she placed it in her mouth, the custard was cool, and the layers broke coyly on her tongue. She had trouble swallowing, for the lump that had formed in her throat. It was a beautiful gift, more than she could have asked for, and impossible not to destroy.

  13.

  Most likely, it was finding Kavya crying in the car outside her house that made her mother suspect something was wrong. And because Kavya had no other answer—what else could be wrong?—she told the truth. She told Uma half the truth anyway, the truth as it had been eleven weeks earlier, when all they were doing was trying for a baby, and trying and trying. Perhaps she hoped to erase the baby who’d died inside her by keeping it out of the minds of others, forgetting by ignoring, starving it of attention until it shrank to a limp skin of memory. So she cried and told her mother that she wanted a baby. Uma stooped at Kavya’s open car door and held her around the shoulders. Kavya, still in her seat belt, sobbed into her mother’s chest as she hadn’t since she was small.

  And then, because it poured out of her without stopping, she went ahead and told Uma. She revealed the pregnancy, the failure, the removal. Uma held her at a distance, surveyed her daughter fr
om eyes to ears to chin, and drew her back into an awkward embrace.

  “Be patient,” Uma said. “Don’t rush yourself.” Kavya didn’t blame her for not being helpful. The thing about patience was that it couldn’t exist without impatience. Impatience, desire, the irksome passage of time—these were what kept her from sleeping. Patience was the act of holding impatience at bay, of keeping it, like an impudent lover, from wearing her down.

  • • •

  WORK WAS A REFUGE with its high ceilings, its instruments comically large. The colander measured two feet across, the salad tongs were as long as her arms, the rice cooker was the stuff of her mother’s dreams, the wok an ominous dome hung high on the wall, which only Miguel could reach. It was a giant’s wok in a giant’s kitchen. When Kavya entered each day, her troubles shrank away and left her with her habits and her hands. She tore, mashed, rubbed, and sliced, and her materials moved to her will. Within these walls, she could rely on the rules of cause and effect.

  The doctor had said to wait six months to try again, though there was no harm, he added, in trying naturally. After six weeks, her body regained its monthly cycle. She didn’t tell Rishi.

  • • •

  A WEEK AFTER HER MISCARRIAGE, the clinic had e-mailed her a list of couples therapists. She’d tucked it into her junk-mail folder, and said nothing to Rishi. They didn’t need therapy. They needed a baby.

  She felt utterly dulled, leaden at the prospect of more clinic visits, more shots, more nerve-addling drugs, more scheduled, wordless sex, a prolonged fight for what should have been her unquestioned, naturally granted right. All of it would end again—again and again—with brutal failure. And when would they stop? And what would stopping mean?

  Now, lying alone in bed, she thought of Rishi. She tried, overcome now and then by gratitude, to be kind and rational with him, even when—especially when—she was screeching inside. The effort, most of the time, was monumental. Together, they had braved the cycles of hope and despair, the hope growing more tenous and perilous with each passing month. Together, they had maintained a deliberate show of calm, held aloft by an undercurrent of torrential desire. They’d be in for months of this, probably years, with more IUIs and IVF.