Lucky Boy

by Shanthi Sekaran

  “You got drugs in there?” the officer asked again.

  “No,” Silvia said.

  He turned to the car. “Search the baby seat,” he called, pointing to the back window. “The car seat. Whatever it’s called.”

  He turned back to Silvia. “You illegals?”

  “What?”

  “Illegals? Are you illegals? Inmigrantes? Illegales?”

  “No,” Silvia answered. “We have papers.”

  He called to another officer, the third, a woman who’d been keeping watch all this time at the border of the scene. He said, “Get their bags for them.” Turning to Soli: “Let’s see some ID. Tienes ID?”

  “Sí.”

  People paused on sidewalks, slowed their cars, stood and watched with their cell phones held aloft. From the crowd, a woman pushed her shopping cart toward Soli. She was ash-toned and no taller than the mound of her dusty belongings. She was barely a whisper of a woman. She peered at Soli through oversized glasses, looked her up and down, and sneered. “Get the fuck back to Mexico,” she said.

  “Ma’am.” The policeman placed a hand on the woman’s elbow and she yanked her arm away, cursed at the officer, and trundled off. Later, weeks and months later, Soli would wonder if this was not so much an insult as a morsel of sound advice.

  No one asked whose child Ignacio was. It was obvious, maybe, when he cried out and reached for Soli. He watched as his mother was shoved, a heavy hand on her head, into the back of the police car. Silvia was shoved in after her.

  “My son!” Soli said.

  Silvia shushed her. Ignacio was still in their car.

  “My son is in there!”

  “He’ll be fine. He’s going in another car.”

  Soli was handcuffed, and so was Silvia. Soli wept and could not wipe her tears away. They streamed down her neck and onto her chest. Silvia stared at the seat back in front of her and said nothing, not even when Soli asked what was happening. Silvia was elsewhere. No one had remembered to buckle them in and they lurched forward and sideways with every turn of every corner, with every rough and poorly measured stop.

  At the station, their names and photographs were taken. Ignacio was nowhere. “Where is my son?” Soli asked the police officer who was filling in her papers. “He’s on his way” was all she’d say.

  “Where is my son?” she asked another officer, when Ignacio hadn’t surfaced. “Where is my son?” she asked passersby, an hour later, when Ignacio was nowhere to be seen, and she sat, handcuffed to a chair, her chest an aching drum.

  25.

  There was little left to do. Kavya had been held aloft for weeks by a stream of paperwork and state-stipulated tasks. She’d ticked all the boxes. Now she could only wait.

  She’d been waiting for weeks, and each morning she woke to a shiver of possibility. Her waking breaths tickled with the thought that the phone would ring that day and it would be Joyce. But every evening, the clock ticked past five and the sky dimmed and she knew there wouldn’t be a call. She imagined Joyce packing her briefcase and sailing from her office, head up and bosom held high. She went to bed each night a little duller than the night before. But always, hope reawakened in the mornings, a bedraggled servant.

  Kavya had been calling, twice a day sometimes. “Just checking in!” she’d say, trying to sound casual.

  “Nothing today, Kavya,” Joyce would say. “When something happens, I will call you immediately. Okay?”

  “Sure!”

  “No. Kavya? Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “I strongly encourage you not to call me. I’ll call you. I promise.”

  In the evenings, Kavya and Rishi curled into the sofa and watched television. Rishi knew better than to leave her with her thoughts, so his work went untouched, and they binged on drama and comedy and the comforts of fiction.

  It was Tuesday, the end of an endless evening. She could barely speak that day, and Miguel noticed. “You all right?” he asked. “You forget your V-8 today?” What would she say? I want a child so badly it hurts to talk. Have you diced the onions?

  After dinner service, she told Miguel to go home and leave the cleanup to her. He tended to bang pots and zing around the kitchen in a whirlwind of maximal efficiency. That evening, she wanted quiet. She cycled home in a light rain, the drops falling like confetti through the glow of every streetlight. It was only six thirty, but the night had made its wintry entrance. The rain didn’t bother her as she sped down the hills and onto the flats of central Berkeley. Her face gathered no more than a sparse dew.

  At the front door, Rishi stood, cell phone in hand. “Call Joyce now. She’ll be there until seven,” he said. “She left me a message.”

  “She did? She called you? She called you?”

  “Call her now.”

  Kavya grabbed the phone and sat down on the front porch. The rain smattered the knees of her jeans. Rishi sat beside her, his arm around her shoulders. She shivered as she dialed.

  “Joyce?”

  “Kavya? I’m glad you caught me. I called four times—”

  “Do you have any news?”

  Silence, hushes and clicks on the phone line, and then, “Yeeeesssss. Hold on, just getting . . . Okay. Kavya, we have an infant, a little girl. We’ll call her Baby A for now. Would you like to meet her?”

  “Baby A?”

  “She’s in a foster home currently, but we’re looking to place her elsewhere. Are you free Saturday?”

  “This Saturday?” She looked to Rishi. “Yes? Yes! Yes.”

  Times were arranged. Kavya and Rishi would meet Joyce at the foster home. “Thank you, Joyce.” She said it too many times, so many times that Joyce had to raise her voice.

  “See you then, Kavya. Okay? Kavya?”

  “Yes, Joyce.”

  “Kavya? This is for temporary placement. You got that?”

  Kavya nodded into the phone. She felt good. Temporary or not, this felt right. She hung up and rammed her face into Rishi’s chest. She squealed when he squeezed her tight. That night, they ignored the television and stayed up long into the night, drinking tea at the table, Kavya’s hands folded into Rishi’s, laying out the details of how they’d get to Joyce’s office, what they would need for the baby’s room. Kavya ignored the worried cleave in Rishi’s brow. He was being cautious, she knew. Nevermind, she told herself. Let him be the cautious one.

  26.

  Soli and Silvia spent their first night in a small jail in Berkeley. Ignacio had come to her, at last, after four hours and thirty-seven minutes. She’d heard the familiar rattle of his breath before she saw him. He appeared around the corner, head up and back straight, in the arms of a white woman in uniform. The woman was short and thin-armed, with wide gray eyes. She whispered to Ignacio as she approached the cell. He listened, his chin alert and aloft. And when the officer handed him over, he fell limply into Soli’s arms, as if exhausted. She held him, opened her shirt to feed him, whispered in his ear.

  “He’s been searched,” the officer said. “You can keep him for the night.”

  A few hours later, the female cop sat Soli down and asked questions, many questions, sometimes the same question twice: “Where were you born? Do you have papers? When did you arrive in the U.S.? Was your child born here? What is his date of birth? How old is he? He was born here? Do you have a visa?”

  Soli lied exactly three times, all in response to the same question. She did not have a visa. She didn’t even have a passport in which to put a visa. By the end of the interview, she’d convinced herself that she at least had a state ID, that this had to count for something. She knew that most people got their papers in offices, in big white buildings like the one she was sitting in now. She knew not everyone bought their papers from a man named Marta in the back of a Chino grocery. But as far as she could tell, what she had were papers. She wasn�
�t sure why she lied about having a visa; it was something she was meant to have, of course. Before she could stop it, the lie fell out of her, and it sat between her and the female officer, a wobbling egg fallen from its nest.

  “You have a visa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this visa at home? With your passport?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have a Mexican passport?”

  “Yes.”

  The lies hatched and cheeped and demanded feeding. But the lies seemed to be working. The officer was writing things down, nodding. And then she rose, picked up her papers.

  “Follow me,” she said, and led her back to the cell.

  Soli was breastfeeding Nacho when Silvia returned. Silvia’s eyes rested on the back of his head. “The boys went to their dad,” she said quietly.

  “Are they letting us out?”

  “No.”

  “What about bail? Don’t they let us out with bail?” This too she’d learned from television.

  “Not me. Probably not you.” For the first time that Soli could remember, Silvia looked helpless. And on Silvia’s broad and soft face, helplessness looked a lot like stupidity. Blinking bovine ignorance.

  “So now what?” Soli asked.

  “I’m going to court, I guess. I’m staying here. I’m a criminal now.”

  “You’re going to jail?”

  Silvia shrugged. “I get a lawyer.”

  “Do I get a lawyer?”

  She stared at Soli. “How should I know?” She sat back and closed her eyes. “And then I go to jail, or something, and then they deport me.”

  “What do you mean they deport you?” It seemed a sort of over-punishment. “But you have papers. Why’re they punishing you so bad?”

  “I was driving without a license.” Silvia sat up and counted the offenses on her fingers, as if laying them plain for the first time. “Driving without a license. Not stopping for the police. Crashing into some maldito street barriers. And not having papers.”

  One beat, two, three.

  “You don’t have papers!” Soli whispered. She whisper-yelled, the way schoolchildren do, the way people in big stupid trouble do. Silvia only shrugged.

  “You told me you had papers. You told everyone you had papers! In Popocalco, they said, Silvia Morales? She’s got papers. That’s what they said!”

  “They were wrong,” Silvia said.

  “You were wrong. You lied to me.”

  Silvia glared. “I never said a thing about papers.”

  But Soli had made up her mind. Silvia, who’d always been right, was wrong this time, in the biggest and most terrible way. Silvia, who’d always been a landmark for Soli, was now a pile of bricks. Soli felt the ground slip from beneath her. She felt that she could have turned to vapor and floated away and not even known it.

  Only Ignacio was keeping her solid, his head heavy against her shoulder. In his sleep, he pressed his nose and mouth against the curve of her neck, forming a well of sweat and heat. He smacked his tongue, dreaming of feeding. She closed her eyes against his damp temple. Only that morning, things had been fine. She sensed the weight of night around the windowless room. It was nine o’clock. She should have been bathing Nacho now, rubbing his limbs with baby oil, squeezing with her thumb and forefinger the strong flesh, the nascent muscle.

  They spent the night in the holding cell. The next morning they were given breakfast, and it seemed to Soli that a morning with breakfast could only bring good things. She felt the sun through the walls. Ignacio was in good spirits, laughing when she bumped her forehead against his, tracing with his fingers the ridges of her nose. When the female officer approached, Soli waited for some happy news. A release, an error, the buzz of an alarm clock, an end to this bizarre waking dream.

  “Van’s here,” the woman said. She was the one with the gray eyes, the soft voice. She held her hands out, nodded at Ignacio.

  “What do you want?” Soli’s mouth went dry.

  “I’ll take him.” Behind her, a male officer approached, two pairs of handcuffs dangling from his fingers.

  “Where are you taking him?” Silvia asked.

  “He’s going with you, don’t worry,” the woman said in her kitten voice. “You can’t hold him with your cuffs on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Come on, now,” the woman urged. “Hand him over, now.”

  Soli would reconsider this moment many times in the future, thinking she should have run while she could. Should have yanked the officer’s gun from her belt and bolted from the station, firing. She might have escaped, might have hidden herself and Ignacio under a bridge somewhere, or by a creek in the hills. She might have become a homeless woman, pushing a shopping cart full of clothing and cans, camouflaging herself against the sidewalk, against the burnished silver of the morning sky, where she and Nacho could be invisible. The officer settled her gray gaze on Soli. She had rosy lips and a soft nose. She didn’t have the face of a cop. And because she knew nothing of the future, and because the officer had small, fair hands, Soli gave up her child. He screamed for her.

  “We’ll meet you at the van,” the officer said, and headed down the hallway.

  Handcuffs clamped down.

  “Nacho!” Soli called.

  Ignacio was waiting, as promised, in his car seat. As the van coursed through Berkeley, Soli pointed out the window to the playground, the corner store, and their very own street. Their apartment lay empty. The remains of breakfast had been left out the day before, and would still be on the table, crusting over. But she’d be back soon enough to clean it all up. Soli felt sure of this.

  Sunlight shot through the window and warmed her cheeks, and she was able, for a few moments, with Ignacio’s hand on her shackled wrist, to feel the pleasure of this. A guard sat in the back of the van, his club at his side.

  The ride was short. Once again, Nacho was pulled from her arms. “You’ll get him back,” the guard said. They were yanked from the van, walked across a yard, hissed and yelled at by other women in yellow jumpsuits, and before they could process or protest, Soli and Silvia stood in yellow jumpsuits themselves, stripped of their possessions.

  “What are we doing here?” Soli asked. “What are they doing to us?”

  Heavy footsteps, a guard approached.

  Silvia’s breath grew heavy and urgent. “Soli,” she hissed. “Don’t sign anything. Don’t sign anything they give you!”

  The guard gripped Silvia by the elbow and pointed her to a room, prodding her in the back with his club.

  A few minutes later, a guard came for Soli. She was led, once again, to an airless interview room. A fluorescent beam lit the space and warmed it. A man knocked on the door and entered.

  He threw a folder down on the table, pulled his chair back with a screech, and sat.

  “You Thelma or Louise?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  ‘Your name is Solimar Castro Valdez, is that correct?” He spaced his words out now, so that Soli could understand.

  “Correct.”

  “Would you like me to speak in Spanish?” he asked. “Español?”

  “Sí. Por favor.”

  He proceeded to ask the same questions she’d heard the day before.

  “How long have you been here? Do you have a visa? Where were you born? Where was your child born?”

  And then he put his pen down, leaned forward, tented his fingers.

  “Who is Preston Chiu?”

  “What?”

  “Who is Preston Chiu?”

  “What?”

  “Who is Preston Chiu?”

  27.

  Preston Chiu was an American, it turned out. Preston Chiu was an American with a Social Security Number, a driver’s license, and a driving record. Preston Chiu was the rightful owner of S
oli’s Social Security Number. Soli was not Preston Chiu. Soli was in trouble.

  She believed that a female officer might have sympathized. A woman would be easier to speak with, but Soli had no choice. With the discovery of Preston Chiu, she felt herself unmooring from the reality of her home, her life, her crusting dishes, her Ignacio, all of it shrinking rapidly away. She clasped her palms together and said, “Please, señor, I have a boy. And my cousin. We both have small boys. I take care of a child. We made a mistake on the road because we were going to her.”

  “It wasn’t running the red light that got you in here,” the man said. “It wasn’t even that sad little chase you led the police on.” He crossed his arms. “Your cousin was driving without a license. And that’s why we brought her in. We did a little research, and we found out you are both here on false docs. Your Social Security Numbers didn’t check out.”

  Soli felt she might blow away at last, even in that airless room.

  “And what will happen to us?”

  “You’re about to find out. We’re deciding that.”

  “And what will happen to my child?”

  He sighed so heavily it turned into a cough. “We’ll have to see about that.” He crossed his arms and gazed at her for several long moments. “You’re an illegal,” he said in English. “Is that correct?”

  And in English, she replied, “That is correct.”

  • • •

  SOLI DIDN’T SEE SILVIA AGAIN. She was led to a cell where four women stared at her. When Ignacio was brought to her, she buried her face in his soft burgeon of hair.

  “What is happening, Nacho?” she whispered in his ear. “Where do we go from here?”

  It was a question that would vibrate in his ears for weeks, just as it echoed, never fading, in hers.

  An officer arrived again, slid open the grated door, and said, “Good news.”

  They weren’t pressing charges against Soli. She had technically committed no traffic offense. She wouldn’t be a criminal. She wouldn’t be on trial. For a moment, she was overjoyed. For a moment, she saw the world as a righteous place.