Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  14.

  As far as Soli could gather, the señor worked for a government office that worked with the university, and that’s why the Cassidys lived in Berkeley. He called her Solimar, never Soli, and he offered to make her tea if he happened to be in the kitchen and making a pot for himself. Soli always said no. The stuff he drank smelled like sour tree bark, and Silvia had warned her not to eat or drink with the Cassidys, and even though she’d already wildly disobeyed, with the tree bark, she could stick to the rule.

  If Soli had been someone else, or perhaps just a different version of herself, she might have fallen for Mr. Cassidy. He looked her straight in the eye when he spoke. There was no way Soli could meet the straight shot of his gaze, and so she spent a good deal of time scanning the other segments of his face—his nose, his cheeks, the full bow of his lips. Even if she liked what she saw there, Soli knew the señor would take no physical interest in his seven-months pregnant and boarishly hungry housecleaner, no matter how much attention he paid her.

  He asked for her story, he wanted to know how she’d arrived on his shores, and what had happened to her on the journey. Soli, without papers and pregnant, and hanging by a thread to this happy, healthy place, considered telling the truth. With a sharp slap to her inner chismosa, she slowed down and shut her mouth.

  At first she gave him shreds of detail, sparse and scattered enough to keep him from linking them into a whole. She told him about the trains and the changing scenery, about arriving in the Mission and thinking she was back in Mexico, which made him laugh. But she told him nothing of the border, the trucks, the weeks she spent making herself small.

  Because he seemed less invested in her answers, she found him easier to speak to than the señora. And soon she found herself telling him how it was back home, where everyone knew she was an Indio, a hill girl with brown skin whose family had wound their way down to the valley and started up a farm. Her Indio papi knew everything about every type of corn that grew in every mountain cranny in the whole of Oaxaca. He liked this detail, she could tell. She told him about living surrounded by adobe, crumbling at its corners, in a house that sheltered as many birds as people. The palomas would perch in the eyelet nooks that peeked below their roof, where the corrugated tin didn’t quite meet up with the hand-flattened ridges of clay. She told him about their nests, round as baseballs, arrayed along the town’s power lines, and about the time she found a baby bird fallen to the ground, too young still to fly, its legs no thicker than dandelion stems, its head the size of an almond.

  She told all this to Mr. Cassidy, because when you find success, even the most modest success, it gets easier to talk about thinner times. The poor times feel as far away as an abandoned train. You don’t know poverty until it’s you who has to feed and clothe your children, her papi used to say. Poverty is a pit that rumbles in your gut. You squash it down and pack it over with family and drink and music, but still it rumbles, threatening any day to erupt and send you and everything you know careening down a hillside. These details, Soli kept to herself.

  One day, the señor called her into his study. “Solimar? Could you come in here a minute?”

  “Señor?”

  “Call me Brett.” He smiled and motioned for her to sit. He sat back in his office chair. She liked to stroke this chair when she cleaned the room, its tight, smooth hills of leather punctuated by round buttons. It was the richest thing she’d felt in her life. It felt to her like salvation stretched and sewn, and she wondered how creatures like the moody old cows she’d known in Popocalco could have produced such leather. Maybe, she thought, the cows that made this weren’t like the cows in Popocalco. Maybe they were happy cows, and healthy.

  She sat.

  “Solimar?” He smiled even wider. “You strike me as brave.”

  She’d grown weary of people telling her what she was. She said nothing.

  “Solimar, here’s the thing. I’m a consultant. Most of my work is for the government. You know that, don’t you?”

  Say the word government to an immigrant with no papers and all you get is a system-wide shutdown: silence, and the faint hum of fear. Her throat went hot and dry. All she could see was Mr. Cassidy and his wide, wide smile.

  “Right, so. Here’s the thing. When we hired you, your sister-in-law—is that right? Is she your sister-in-law?”

  “My cousin.” She remembered then that even happy, healthy cows ended up at the slaughterhouse door.

  “Right. Your cousin told us that you were in the country legally—and of course we trust you both completely.” He tapped his palm on the table. “Now. I’m going to ask you something, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

  That was when Soli began to panic. Why the big toe of her right foot was the first to sniff out the trouble, she would never know, but it began to hop around like a lightning bug right there inside her shoe. Its tremor passed like a current up her leg, to her knee, and her bouncing knee got her hands riled up, and the quake surged up her torso, through her shoulders, and right up to the tangle between her ears. Soon she was shaking all over, and in response, for the first time in a very long time, she began to weep.

  “Please, Señor Cassidy. Please don’t send me away!”

  “Solimar!” He rolled his chair over to hers, and took her hands in his. “Just hold your horses. Don’t get upset, all right? I’m just going to need your Social Security number. Okay?”

  He looked her straight in the eye. “You have a Social Security number, don’t you?”

  She stopped shaking and sat very still. Her hands grew hot, hot enough, surely, to make him pull away. But he looked at her steadily—what was it about that look?—and she knew that one way or another, she’d be getting that number.

  • • •

  THAT EVENING, Soli left the Cassidy home on feeble ankles. She didn’t know whether to feel scared or stupid. Stupid, for thinking that she could dream and live with no one noticing. And scared to think that she might be caught. That the simple, functional life that she’d been blessed with might be yanked away. Already, she wondered how she’d give birth in jail.

  And yet, looking around her, she saw it: proof that the life she sought was possible. On the bus, walking down the crowded sidewalk, carrying backpacks, pushing strollers. She saw women who were dark like her and foreign, living their American lives, pushing ahead without fear, none of them doubting for a second that they belonged. Did they have numbers? Did they have papers? Had they ridden to the border on a freight train? Some of the women around her were as old as Popocalco grandmothers. They could have been the women who ran alongside the tracks when the train slowed down for stretches, slow enough for bystanders to hand off water bottles and parcels of tortilla. Now, Soli ached for these women. She still could see their worried squints, the awkward thrust of their elbows as they ran. She could see Checo taking the bottles and waving, like a president on a motorcade, his smile coaxing theirs to the surface.

  “They look like they need the water more than we do,” Soli had said. “Why take from them when we have enough to drink?”

  “They give these to us because they have people out there, and they can only hope that someone else is handing bottles to their kids and their husbands.” He’d steadied his gaze on her. “Don’t ever assume you have enough. Okay?”

  She’d taken Checo’s word as the infallible truth, as did they all, Soli and the boys, as they laid and relaid their plans. Plans were very important and everyone had one. “We’re going to be mojados!” Flaco threw his fist in the air, as if farm labor were a great adventure. Pepe, who was only eight, was looking for his mother. She worked in a factory somewhere in Arizona. If he didn’t find her, he’d decided to be adopted. If any of them could be adopted, it was him. His eyes were dark puddles. He seemed to imagine an American fairy-woman who would take him in and love him and feed him all he could eat. “I’m going to get fat like an Am
erican,” he said. “I’m going to get so fat they’ll have to wheel me in a wagon. The next time you see me, you won’t even know it’s me.” Nutsack taught the other boys the words they’d need to know. Un jornal was daily wage. Un camion was truck. Una pala was shovel, and la tierra was mud. The boys practiced the sounds, stretching their lips around daily wage, laughing at the word mud. “Tierra,” Nutsack said. “Mud.” The boys slapped their knees and laughed at the sound of it. Mud. Mud. So oafish on the roofs of their mouths, so dead.

  • • •

  WHEN SILVIA GOT HOME with Daniel and Aldo, Soli was slicing onions at the dinner table, glad at least to disguise the tears that streamed down her cheeks. On the chopping board, a hillock had grown, and it toppled over itself every time her knife hit wood, sending onion shards snowing to the ground, a few each time, to gather in drifts around her toes.

  “Why the tears, muchacha? Not so happy to see me?”

  Soli told Silvia that Mr. Cassidy had asked for her seguro.

  Silvia sighed. “This was going to happen eventually, I guess.” From a kitchen drawer she pulled a book, small, its cover printed with unicorns and stars, the sort of book Soli kept as a little girl, to write stories and list her dreams.

  Carefully, Silvia copied some numbers onto a blank page.

  “Is this the seguro?”

  “No, tonta. That’s called a phone number. But to tell you the truth, it probably won’t work. You’ll have to go there.”

  “Go where?”

  Silvia didn’t answer. Below the phone number was what looked like an address.

  Marta, the slip of paper read. “Who’s Marta?”

  Silvia shrugged.

  “Who’s Marta? Will Marta get me a number?”

  “I don’t know any Marta,” Silvia said. She picked up the chopping board and carried it to the kitchen, moving swiftly, without spilling a single onion.

  The next day was Saturday. Since Silvia wouldn’t talk to her about it, Soli had to find her own way to the city. The address, on Mission and 14th, was obvious enough. She took the BART train to the city, paying this time for a ticket.

  She remembered her first day here, how convinced she was that she’d never left Mexico. Now she could see between the brown, familiar faces, to the others that teemed down the street, young Americans, tall and thin in big glasses, girls with tattoos and piercings in their eyebrows and chins (how her mother would have beaten her!) and boys with beards, storkish legs encased in jeans, holding hands. Girls and girls, boys and boys, girls and boys and boys and girls. This was no Popocalco.

  She found the address and looked down at her paper to check the number. This was a vegetable market. She didn’t know what she was expecting, but she didn’t think they sold seguros with cabbages. She went in, and almost immediately walked out. The people inside were not Mexicans, not even Sudamericanos. They were one hundred percent unfiltered Chinese. Or maybe Japanese? Soli couldn’t tell the difference. She was finding there were as many types of Chino as there were Mexican. In any case, the woman scanning her from the counter looked nothing like a person who supplied seguros.

  “What do you want?” she called to Soli.

  “I am looking for Marta.” Soli approached the counter. “Are you Marta?”

  The woman pointed to the vegetables. “Buy something.”

  Soli was about to protest, and then she understood. She picked up a banana and brought it to the counter. The woman muttered something. She dropped her coins on the counter, and the woman gestured down the aisle again. “Through that door,” she said. “La puerta!”

  La puerta. It opened into a short hallway that ended in a doorway hung with heavy black flaps. Soli pushed through these. She heard a deep voice call from the dark.

  “I see the belly first, and then I see the woman! Ave Maria purísima!”

  She stepped carefully through the dim room; it was dark enough that she could not see the floor, and she didn’t entirely trust her feet to take her where she needed to go. Where she needed to go was to the very back, where a man sat at a small table. A lamp shot a pool of light onto his desk.

  “¡Pasale! ¡Pasale! ¡Pasale!”

  The room smelled of onions, and she could make out a shadowy mound of them rising from a stack of crates. “I’m looking for Marta,” she said.

  “And Marta is me.”

  “What kind of name is Marta for a man?” Soli heard the words before she realized she’d spoken them.

  Luckily, he was too fixated on her middle to notice. He walked over to her, his arms reaching for her belly, and Soli backed away.

  “¡Tranquilo!” He stopped where he stood, his arms still reaching for her.

  If she’d had Manuel’s knife that day, she might have used it. But it turned out that Marta had little interest in anything but the circumference of her belly. He charged back to his desk, pulled a measuring tape from the drawer, and to Soli’s amazement, he began to measure the width and length of her abdomen.

  He returned to his desk, jotted a few numbers, whipped out a fresh sheet of paper, and began.

  “Name?”

  “Solimar Castro Valdez.”

  “Is that your real name?”

  She nodded.

  “Date of birth?”

  She answered.

  “You got a picture?”

  Soli would have a state ID and her Social Security number. Nine numbers, nine dainty steps to the dream. Wadded into her bag was a roll of bills that would have gone to her parents. Four hundred seventy-five dollars. Now, she counted the limp and clammy things into Marta’s hands. The bills stank of bus exhaust. He printed something out, then disappeared into another room. A few minutes later, he emerged with something that looked like a credit card—her California ID—and a piece of paper of roughly the same size, this one a somber blue and gray. On it were nine digits, separated by dashes. Where they came from, she didn’t know and didn’t want to know. They proved, however humbly, that she belonged.

  • • •

  THAT MONDAY SHE FOUND Mr. Cassidy in his study. He sat holding a pair of glasses to his face, squinting his eyes and relaxing them, squinting and relaxing. She would do as he said and call him Brett, his first name, though to her it sounded like a belch. “Señor Brett?” she began, standing in his office door.

  He looked up and smiled. “Come in, Solimar. Have a seat.”

  “Señor Cassidy, I have the number for you, the Security Number.”

  “Good girl! Let’s have a look.”

  He took the folded paper and held it at arm’s length, squinting again, and wrote the numbers on a form. Then he rolled the paper into a ball and flicked it into the trash can.

  He picked up the glasses again and wiped them with the end of his sweater.

  “Would you like me to clean those for you?”

  “These? Nah, don’t bother.” And he tossed them to the desk.

  She sucked in her breath. “Please be careful.”

  He grinned. “You know value when you see it. You want to hold them?” He placed the glasses in her hands. “Real glass. Feel how heavy those are,” he said. They were, indeed, heavier than she expected. The lenses were perfectly round and framed in gold wire. “Now, these belonged to my great-great-great-grandfather.” The lamplight winked through them.

  “Go ahead. Put them on,” he said. She did.

  “Killian Cassidy of County Cork. Ireland. That’s how the man himself saw the world.”

  To Soli, Killian Cassidy’s world was a dense and painful blur. She blinked and squinted.

  “He arrived in New York harbor in 1880. Back in the days when the Irish weren’t wanted here. We found him in the arrival records last summer.”

  “So he had a Security Number, too,” Soli said.

  “I suppose he did.” He smiled.

  “You shou
ld put them on,” she said.

  He smiled sadly, took off his own glasses, and put on the round gold frames. He cleared his throat. “How’s that?” His eyes had turned as big and round as an owl’s.

  “Beautiful,” she said.

  He smiled wide, crossed his arms. Soli didn’t get up then. Maybe she should have. Instead, she stayed put, and looked at Señor Cassidy. And Señor Cassidy looked at her. And it felt good to feel at ease. And so she stayed in her chair, in the dark heart of this house, with its owner and his poetic possessions. She knew that she was part of the poetry, part of its maintenance, at least. It had been a long, long time since she’d been a part of anything.

  He smiled. “You’ve come a long way, Solimar. I’m proud. You should be proud.”

  “Thank you” was all she could say. How could she tell him that his words were stronger documentation than the nine-digit number now etched in her memory? She looked up, and he seemed to be waiting, had grown very serious.

  They heard a step at the study door. Señor Cassidy whipped the glasses off. In the doorway stood the señora, her arms folded across her chest.

  “Everything all right, you two?” she asked.

  Soli sprang to her feet with a sudden, acute awareness that she’d been sitting in a comfortable seat. Mr. Cassidy’s smile stretched wide across his face. “Yes, señora,” he said. “Thank you.”

  In the doorway, the señora stood, arms still folded. She didn’t step aside until Soli whispered, “Excuse me.” And “Thank you.”

  The señora’s smile deepened, but only her lips moved. Soli couldn’t see the woman’s eyes in the dark hallway. In the living room again, she picked up the vacuum and switched it on and ran it over the carpet once, twice. She watched the avenues of awakened fiber bloom and dull, until the hammer in her chest subsided.

  15.

  Rishi was rehashing his proposal. He’d sent it off to Vikram Sen ten days before, as promised, only to have it returned a week later with a two-word reply. Rehash, please. What exactly needed to be rehashed, Rishi couldn’t say, but rehash he would. He was creating a software model of the programming center; then he’d add windows, air vents, sticking on and plucking off the variables like parts of a Mr. Potato Head. His laptop pinged. As if he’d sensed Rishi’s uncertainty, Sen sent another one-liner: Healthiest fucking babies in the world, yaar. It was meant to be inspirational, and for the moment it was. Vikram Sen was good at his job. He was very, very wealthy for a reason.