Today what she found was a strip of white paper—familiar to her, but from another time. It sat curled and wrinkled, as if it had once been scrunched in a ball. The paper had been smoothed out, but still flailed upward at the ends, like a bird attempting flight. She knew this slip of paper. And when she picked it up, she knew the nine numbers written on it. She knew the writing, because it was hers.
But the señor had thrown them away, her nine numbers, her seguro. Who had resurrected them? She imagined him fingering them, frowning into the telephone as he recited the digits and found out, once and for all, that she was a fraud.
Her vision went gray. The room jolted. Never throw out a piece of paper, she remembered. She wasted no time, picked up the paper and tore it to shreds. She flung them in the trash can and pulled out the plastic bag, nearly empty. From the front door, she could hear the trash collectors on their rumbling rounds. The Cassidys’ garbage bins waited on the curb, and Soli dropped into them the trash bag, the numbers, her security. She hurried back in the house and slammed the door shut, listening to the quiet buzz of the refrigerator as she waited to catch her breath.
The rest of the day passed as normal. The señor and señora came home, set their bags down, and released her for the day. By evening, thoughts of the number had receded to the uncharted caves of her memory, only to resurface later that night, in a series of muddled dreams.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY, SOLI STOPPED outside the Cassidys’ door. For the first time, she could hear voices from the sidewalk. The Cassidys were shouting at each other. No. They were speaking very loud and very fast. She couldn’t understand them, but she did hear this: Soli. Soli. Soli. Three times, her name popped from the froth of sound.
A woman next door stepped out of her house, spotted Soli, and stared. It was time to go in. As usual, she went to the kitchen door. The voices churned. She turned the doorknob—the voices stopped. She stepped inside.
There stood the señora, the señor, facing her now, their cheeks a high Irish pink, their eyes bright with conviction. They did not smile at first, but as they stopped to catch their breath and register who she was, their smiles began. First with their mouths, moving slowly up their faces but never finding, not quite, the light switch to the eyes. “Hello, Soli,” the señora said. They stepped away from each other, and Mr. Cassidy left the room. The señora’s eyes followed him.
It was only then that Soli noticed Saoirse, perched on the arm of the sofa, swiping at a cell phone screen. The señora swooped past her and snatched the phone from her grasp. “Enough!” she called above the girl’s wails. “Soli,” she said. “Mr. Cassidy would like to speak with you. In his office.” She dropped her teaspoon and cursed. The woman was shaken. The room was shaken.
In his study, Mr. Cassidy sat at his desk, his fingertips resting on the very spot where her number had sat. She couldn’t pull her eyes away from the desk. For a few moments, they stayed silent together, gazing at the empty patch of wood.
“Solimar.”
“Yes.” She looked at the floor now, the tips of her shoes just visible beneath her belly. She barely breathed, but her child moved inside her, sliding one way and then the other, like a great fish.
“Solimar, I think you might know what this is about.”
“Yes, señor.”
“I had a number? On this desk? Your Social Security Number?”
“Yes, señor.”
“Do you know what happened to it?”
“No, señor.”
He waited.
Soli looked up at him, and gave in. “Yes. I’m sorry. I thought it was garbage.”
He smiled sadly. “It wasn’t garbage, Solimar. I think you knew that.”
She waited for him to stand up and tell her to leave, to take her things and go home and not bother them again with her store-bought number and her teetering half-truths. She waited with both dread and impatience, like waiting for a slap.
“Okay,” he said.
“Señor?”
He sighed. “Okay. You can go now. You can get back to work.”
She watched him tug at the cuffs of his shirtsleeves. His eyes seemed to shrink beneath their lids, and then shifted away. Rising on shaky knees, she left the study, shutting the door behind her. The hallway was dark and quiet, the kitchen covered in breakfast crumbs, tea-stained and empty. And so she began her day by filling the sink with soapy water, the run of the tap drowning out the whine in her head, the feeble alarm.
• • •
“IT WAS THE WIFE,” Silvia said later that night. “She wanted to check up on you. I can tell.”
“You hardly know her.”
“You hardly know her. I’ve worked for enough of these women to know, Soli. They treat you like their prize pony, until you do something that could get them in trouble.” She turned from the stove and crossed her arms. “What have you been doing over there?”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you been behaving yourself?”
Soli only stared back at her.
“That señor isn’t so rough on the eyes, is he?”
Soli stood. “I didn’t do a thing,” she said, and sat back down.
“She’s watching you, Soli. I’ll bet my soul on it. Just watch where you step, okay?”
“Okay. Even though I don’t know what you’re talking about. And he’s old.”
Silvia snorted at this. Soli might have pretended, even to herself, that she felt no attraction to Mr. Cassidy, that the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind. But a seed planted begins its life underground, Papi used to say. By the time we see it, its roots are down, its buds are calling to the world.
The evening passed and the boys went to bed. Silvia poured herself a glass of diet soda, and handed Soli what was left in the can.
They sat sipping, listening to the hiss and pop.
“Unless you take things the other way,” Silvia said. It took Soli a moment to catch her cousin’s meaning.
“With the señora?”
“With the señor. You could make him your ally. When you spend so much time with one family, Soli, you need your allies.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Silvia glared at her now. “I think you know.”
Feigning ignorance, she was realizing, was not her strongest move. Yes, there were many things a woman, even a pregnant woman, could do to make her life more complicated. There were plenty of games she could play. But the trouble with games was that games could be lost. And losing, in her case, would be a painful burden to bear.
She returned to work the next day with a newly hatched conviction to be the señora’s ally, not her husband’s. She became, in Silvia’s words, the señora’s prize pony. Indispensable, loyal, an entity that moved through the house like an ancestral ghost, giving everything and taking nothing. And rather than feel the burden of this, she found comfort. She sank into a purity of purpose that she hadn’t known before. If she’d known the phrase model employee, she would have called herself this, without a shadow of irony. She managed to avoid the señor most days, cleaning his office with blunted eyes that didn’t see, treating his possessions as motley forms of the same generic matter. She worked quietly and left quietly, letting the señora hold her hands at the end of each day for as long as she wished, returning her gaze only when she said her heartfelt Gracias. In this way, the winter passed and the year neared its end. Soli let loose the memory of those nine numbers, the shredded paper, and they floated away, like ashes from a campfire. Three days before Christmas, the Cassidys gave her an extra week’s pay and sent her home for the holidays. It was more money than Soli had ever held at one time. She thought back to Papi’s five dollars. How rare it had seemed, that single pale bill.
• • •
THAT EVENING, SILVIA CAME HOME with a three-foot tree, and broug
ht down from a closet a small box of ornaments and a string of tiny bulbs. The boys hung them carefully, and the family—for they felt that night like a family—sat on the sofa and watched the glass orbs catch the light.
On Christmas Eve, Silvia refused to go to church. “I haven’t been to a church in years,” she said, “and I won’t be starting now.” In Popocalco, the Templo de Santa Clara would be abuzz with services. Soli told Daniel and Aldo about the Three Wise Men and the boy with the poinsettias, who made his way to the manger with nothing but some branches to give the son of God. Silvia picked up tamales and an apple pie and a liter of fancy-looking soda from the expensive supermarket, the one they never went to. The corn casings of the tamales were fresh and warm, but the chicken inside was dry. Even amid their bounty of food, the gratifying hunger of the boys, the sparkle of the tree and the presents beneath it, Soli couldn’t help but think of home: Mama patiently grinding and mixing her mole, the wafting scent of romeritos, the rich and potent bacalao, the syrupy rosca cakes that lined the shelves of Señora Garza’s tortilleria.
On Christmas Day, they opened presents. Soli bought race cars for the boys and Silvia bought them basketballs and books. Soli bought Silvia a box of soaps shaped like hearts, and Silvia bought Soli a pack of cloth squares. “Burp cloths,” Silvia said, “for when the baby throws up down your back.”
“Thank you.”
The day passed slowly, with little to do. Soon enough, it was dark, and they went to bed. Christmas was over.
17.
Kavya was home alone on a Sunday afternoon. She’d been imagining a child. A dangerous game, she knew, but once invented, the child refused to leave. She imagined him—for he was a he, in this game—an infant tucked into the crook of her arm, his face hidden from view. She imagined him, slightly older, sprawled on the floor with a pile of blocks. She imagined him, school-age now, standing in the doorway, a briefcase in hand. Why a briefcase, she couldn’t say, except that the child in this game had become a sort of Alex P. Keaton, earnest and precocious and prim. The doorbell rang and she gasped. She sat and stared at the door. She had conjured something, surely. But could she have? On unsteady feet, she made her way to the front window.
Preeti Patel. Kavya breathed again, and reached for the door but stopped herself, searching for some reason not to answer. She had none. She hadn’t thought Preeti even knew where she lived. They’d said exactly ten words to each other at the wedding. Ten words in ten years had felt sufficient. She looked around her living room. Rishi had left a stack of papers strewn across the coffee table. She hadn’t vacuumed in possibly weeks.
“Kavya?” Preeti called. “Is that you?”
The curtains hung an inch open and Preeti peeked through them. Kavya cursed herself and opened the door.
“Hi.” Preeti stood fresh and tidy on the porch. Her ski jacket—San Franciscans seemed always on the verge of heading for the mountains—was a flattering fuchsia, its collar upturned. She was smaller than Kavya remembered her.
“What are you doing here?”
“Hi,” Preeti said again. She stood with her hands on her hips, her eyes wide.
“Hi.” Kavya paused. “How are you?”
“Can I come in?”
If Kavya had done the calculations, she would have realized that she and Preeti Patel had not been alone in a room together for eighteen years. Now Preeti found Kavya’s sofa and fell to it like she was desperate to stop moving.
“How’s it going?” Kavya began. “How’s married life?”
Preeti groaned and dropped her head to her knees.
At a loss, Kavya turned to convention. “You want some tea?” She switched the kettle on and found a place on the sofa a few feet from where Preeti sat, head in hands. “Are you okay?”
Preeti looked at Kavya like she was surprised to find her there. “Oh my god,” she said. “You’re probably like, What the hell is she doing here?”
This was precisely right.
“I’ve totally fucked up,” Preeti said.
“Okay.”
“So, I mean, you’ve fucked up a few times before, right?”
“I guess I’m the local authority.”
“Sorry. There aren’t many people I can talk to about this.”
“About what?” Kavya got up when the kettle whistled. Preeti followed close behind, tailgating her to the kitchen.
Preeti Patel had been having an affair. Preeti Patel was not in love with her own handsome and rich and very new husband. Preeti Patel was in love with a married man. The depravity of it sunk Kavya into a pool of such warm redemption that she barely remembered to swallow her smile. His name was Huntley Macaulay, and he was a professor of epidemiology. Kavya had questions, of course, but couldn’t get past the name.
Preeti went on: “So he calls me the night before my wedding and tells me he can’t live without me. And I tell him to fuck off, of course. I mean, I’d given him like five years of my life, I wasn’t about to call off my wedding for him.”
“Uh-huh. And Vikram?”
“And Vik knew nothing about him. And he wouldn’t have ever known anything about him, except that this morning, Huntley shows up on our doorstep. Drunk. And tells me he’s left his wife for me. I mean, what the fuck, Kavya?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” What else could she say?
“So then Vik knows everything, or figures out enough, you know, to know. And he leaves. Vikram left and I don’t know where he is!”
“Wow.” And Kavya meant it.
Preeti burst into tears, right there in Kavya’s kitchen. She leaned against Kavya’s fridge and spilled wet and snotty tears onto a paella recipe that Kavya had stuck up with a magnet.
“Hey,” Kavya said. “Um, okay.” A hug seemed to be in order, and Kavya circled her arms around her friend. Preeti gripped Kavya’s shoulders and cried into her neck, and Kavya stood with her for as long as she needed to, wondering what Rishi would do if he walked through the door right then.
“God,” Preeti croaked, pulling away after soaking the collar of Kavya’s shirt. “I’m so sorry. I completely just barged in here and unloaded on you—”
“No,” Kavya said. “It’s okay.” She waited for silence to settle on the room. “So what are you going to do?”
Preeti shrugged.
“You must have other friends. I mean, other friends who’d know where Vikram is.” She’d imagined the couple spent their time with a coterie of tech magnates.
Preeti nodded quickly. “Sure. Sure.” But looking at her now, Kavya had her doubts.
“Do you still love—Huntley?”
She shrugged again. “I don’t know. It’s been so long. You sort of get into this—routine—when you’re in love with a married person, like you’re always ready for disappointment. And the disappointment becomes so normal that you forget what happiness feels like. I mean, I should be happy, right?”
“But what about Vikram? Do you love Vikram?”
“I do. I think I do. He’s kind of my only hope, you know?”
“And Huntley?”
She shook her head. “Anyone named Huntley can pretty much suck my balls.”
Kavya laughed, and even Preeti was moved to a sort of weepy chuckle.
“So it’s Vikram, then.”
She shrugged. “If I ever find him.”
“Well, go find him.”
She looked up at Kavya and seemed to reconsider her. “You’re right.”
Between the two friends hung an understanding that things were not so simple, that love wasn’t always about free will. Kavya walked to the sofa to pick up Preeti’s jacket. The strange detour from her strange afternoon was over. “Do you want to call me?”
“Yes. Yes, I’ll call you.” She took the jacket from Kavya and held it to her chest.
Kavya knew how ancient friendship worked, and was very aware that
Preeti might never call at all. When Rishi got home less than an hour later, he walked in, stopped short, and gazed at Kavya.
“Are you smiling?” he asked.
She shrugged. She smiled.
“What’re you smiling about?”
“I don’t know.” And she didn’t. “Preeti Patel came by today.”
“Excuse me?”
“Preeti Patel. Stopped by.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she lied, silenced, surprisingly, by an ancient sense of loyalty.
“Was it—nice?”
“She’s got a filthy mouth.” Kavya placed a hand on Rishi’s neck, and felt there the clinging sun. “Let’s celebrate,” she said.
It didn’t matter what they were celebrating, only that they felt celebratory at all, only that the evening celebrated with them. The imaginary child, she left at home. They stepped out onto Shattuck, and thoughts of Preeti drifted away. The air popped with ocean salt. A salsa band played outside Green Pizza and a couple danced on the sidewalk. At the streetside florist, peonies caught the sun and blazed orange, and sweet peas rose from their metal pails with a purity that verged on joy.
18.
On an evening in March, as Soli walked through the dark from her bus stop, a new kind of pain sliced through her. It gripped the lower band of her abdomen, wrung her out and didn’t let go. She doubled over right there on the sidewalk until it ended. She made it home, and it grabbed her again. Silvia found her leaning against a table, straining against her own breath.
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