“You’re letting me go,” she said. “You’re letting me go?” She hugged Nacho close. He wound his fingers through her hair and tugged.
The officer raised his eyebrows and said nothing. From around the corner, footsteps.
A woman turned the corner wearing neither a uniform nor a jumpsuit. Her skin was dark, Cuban brown, and she wore chunky abuela shoes and a light blue sweater. From her glasses hung a chain.
“I’m Joyce Jones from the Department of Social Services,” she said. She held out her arms, nodded for Ignacio.
Soli held him tighter. “What do you want?”
“Give me the child, please. He’ll be just fine.”
“No.”
The officer stepped forward.
“Miss Valdez,” he said, “we’ll need to take your child. Just for now. Okay? Just for now.”
“No!” She kicked him in the knee. He doubled over, cursed, then straightened. He reached for his belt and lunged. Fire jolted through Soli’s arm, and she tumbled to the floor. Ignacio held her by the neck, fell with her, and began to scream.
When she tried to scramble away, she couldn’t. The muscles in her arms went dead as cardboard, and Ignacio was lifted away. In the brown woman’s arms, he vanished around a corner, still screaming. She wailed for him. Her arms came to life and she tore at the air.
She was hoisted by one elbow, then the other, and dragged down the hallway, legs out, head down, like a sack of flour. A door opened, and she was thrown into a small room, hardly bigger than a closet, with concrete walls and a hard floor. A single window let in light from the hallway, but no sound. She lifted herself to her feet, pressed her hand to the window, and wept. “Please,” she cried. “Bring him back to me!” But no one heard her. No one passed. And if anyone did, they would probably not have noticed the hand against the window, the fleshy palm pressed flat and featureless against the pane.
There is a beast in all of us. Only the worst things can bring it ripping through the human veneer. On that cold linoleum afternoon, Soli’s screams vibrated through her abdomen and up her chest, relentless and pure, and broke from her lips in a swarm.
Hours later, she awoke. She’d fallen into a stupor and now that she was conscious, her body ached with thirst. She sat up, shaking. The front of her blouse was drenched with milk. Feebly, she knocked on the door. It was too much to stand and bang on the windowpane and if she had, no one would have heard. “Help,” she called. But her voice was too hoarse to even penetrate the room around her.
Hunger wended its way through Soli. She grew weak. She waited, but no one came. Hours passed, and she lay forgotten. “I am brought to this,” she whispered. Her vision turned gray, then cleared, then clouded over again. “I am brought to this.”
From a high corner of the room, a CCTV lens trained its red eye on her. If he’d bothered to watch, the guard in the control room would have seen this: a woman, gray and grainy, her pupils aglow in the darkened room, hunched against the door, lifting her shirt, curling into herself, and drinking from her own breast. They might have gasped and pointed, they might have shaken their heads and called others to watch. And if Soli knew about the cold red eye trained on her from above, she was past caring. What mattered was the moisture on her lips. What mattered were the droplets of milk, warm and sweet, inching down her throat.
• • •
SHE WAS MARCHED down a corridor, out into the blinding sun, where an old blue bus sat idling.
“Spread your feet!” she heard. “ARMS OUT. SPREAD YOUR FEET.”
And what she wouldn’t do herself was done for her, her arms yanked akimbo, her feet pulled in two directions. The handcuffs clamped on. The wind stung her sodden cheeks.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Quiet.”
And then, around her ankles, rings of iron, sharp and crude. Shackles. The officer was shackling her feet. Soli gaped. Only slaves had their feet shackled, and the worst criminals. She dug her heels in and turned to the guard.
“What about my boy?”
“He’s in care,” she said. “He’ll be fine.” She shoved Soli up the stairs. Later, Soli would realize the miracle in the guard’s words. That she was willing to answer a question would feel, months later, like profound kindness.
Many times that year, Silvia had said to Soli: “You can make it here, Soli. All you have to do is work hard and keep quiet. And if you do, you’ll make it.”
Making it was a concept of which Soli had never required a definition. She assumed that she would discover one day that it had happened, when she had money for food, a place to live, maybe even a man to love. She would know making it when she saw it, and until it revealed itself, she would work and wait. But she knew this much: Calling her employer from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, the skin on her wrists still sore, was no signal of success.
Mrs. Cassidy would be home because Soli wasn’t. She’d be irate. Soli listened to the ring and waited for the tremor of poorly contained indignation.
“Hello? Hello?”
“Hello—”
“Hello?”
“Señora? It’s me!”
A pause. “Soli? Is that you? What happened?” Her voice was clipped and strained.
“I am in prison,” she said. Silvia had taught her this sentence, just for the call. “I am in prison.”
“You’re what?”
“I need help,” she said. “Please, the señor?”
“Hold on.”
Señor Cassidy’s voice crackled through the line, but even through the static it was deep and calm. “¿Qué pasa, Solimar?”
With her Spanish came a release of tears. “Please, señor, I’m in a prison somewhere. I’ve been here since yesterday. They took Ignacio from me. They took him!”
“But why? They arrested you? Why?”
“I did nothing!” And she explained about the car chase, the police, the crash.
“But why’d they arrest you? What did you do?”
She clamped her feet to the floor and gathered her courage. “I lied,” she said. “I don’t have papers. I don’t have a visa.”
From the señor, silence.
“Señor?”
“Solimar.”
“I need someone to take care of my Ignacio. I need help.”
“Solimar.” He sighed deeply. “I need to think about this.”
For Soli, the answer was clear: These noble people, people who understood her and her struggle, these people would save her in the end.
“I can’t do it,” the señor said. “We can’t, Solimar.”
She waited in silence for him to correct himself.
“You understand, don’t you?”
“No.”
“It’s my job. It’s very tied up with the government. And if they knew—if they knew I’d been dealing with a—”
Soli heard no more. The room rushed around her ears until all she heard was static, cracked and lonely, like wind over a barren field.
PART II
kavya
28.
Rishi ducked into the Prius and shut the door.
In the driver’s seat, Kavya looked fresh and ready.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
For a moment, they looked at each other and were silent, more silent than their silent car, and Rishi remembered what he’d almost forgotten—that this was the day they were going to see about a child. This was a small and brilliant beginning.
The house had four windows, two up, two down, and a pointed roof, a house from a kindergarten drawing. From the outside it looked only slightly larger than their own bungalow, with a patch of blanched grass at the front.
“Six kids?” Kavya asked. She and Rishi followed Joyce up the short walkway.
“Six kids,” Joyce said. She cleared her thro
at and rang the bell.
Footsteps thundered above, the steps of twelve feet, the steps of a hundred, it was impossible to tell. Voices called out, a voice called back, and then came silence. Silence greeted them and silence made them wait, until Rishi cleared his throat.
Joyce smiled. “Six kids.”
They stood on the porch for another three minutes, until Joyce rang the bell again. Rishi lunged forward and knocked hard. “Rishi,” Kavya hissed.
Again a thunderstorm of footsteps, and this time, a woman’s voice. “Just— Just a minute!”
The door opened. Rishi had expected a harried mother, overwrought and milk-stained, haggard, becardiganed. But the woman who stood before them was clean and crisply dressed. She smiled, she wore makeup. She showed no sign of the ruckus that had preceded her.
“Sorry about the wait,” she cooed. “Come on in.”
Toys littered the living room carpet, but the house was clean, filled with light, and smelled of lemons. Rishi worried how their own house compared. The foster mom was giving up the foster baby, Joyce explained, because a grown bio-son had graduated from college and was moving back home. “Majored in French,” she muttered.
Rishi didn’t comment on the grown son with the impractical major. He was too busy noticing the heartbeat, the tripping arrhythmia, that filled that house. It was his own heart, or possibly Kavya’s, or more likely both their hearts beating in nervous asynchrony as they were led to the family room, where a gathering of children waited. The foster mom stayed in the kitchen, running water in the sink. One, two, three, four, five. Rishi counted them. And in the center, sitting on the lap of a teenaged girl, was Baby A.
If there was a baby out there who looked less like him and Kavya, Rishi hadn’t met it. Baby A—“This is Agatha,” Joyce announced—had flaming orange hair and blue eyes with stony blue pupils, a mouth that lost itself in imperious pillows of cheek.
“Wow” was all he could say.
Agatha was eight months old—old enough to sit up, young enough to be sucking on an entire fist, but alert enough to look alarmed when Kavya leaned over her.
The teenager thrust the baby into Kavya’s arms, and Kavya took her. She rounded her shoulders, held her gingerly. He sensed a quiver in her arms. From behind, Rishi placed his hands on her elbows. When Kavya turned to look at him, he didn’t see what he’d expected—and what had he expected? Joy? Relief? Terror?—but an opacity that told him nothing. Kavya’s eyes had gone solid brown and the face that Rishi could read so easily was inscrutable to him now.
“Sit down,” Joyce said, as if she knew.
Kavya sat down with the baby, who whined and clawed at the air. She began to howl.
“Does she want me to stand?” Kavya asked Joyce. Kavya turned to the teenager. “Should I stand up?”
“She’s fine,” said Joyce.
Tiny tears streamed down the baby’s face. Rishi looked around for the foster mother, but she’d kept to the kitchen. Agatha’s wail rose to a full-blown screech and Kavya jiggled the bundle in her arms, shushing it, clicking her tongue, wincing with every cry.
The teenager stepped forward and scooped the bundle from Kavya’s arms. She held it to her shoulder and the crying stopped.
With a gasping sort of laugh, Kavya crossed her arms and legs. And when she looked at Rishi, he saw it: sadness, like a frog breaking through the surface of a pond.
“Well, that went well,” Rishi said. He couldn’t stop himself. Kavya glared.
“Can I bring anyone a glass of water?” the foster mom called from the kitchen. Nobody answered. The room fell into silence.
“Perro.” Rishi looked around. The chirp came from the corner of the room. “Perro. Perro.” Like a heartbeat externalized. A bigger baby, a year old, maybe two, stalked on his hands and knees to Kavya’s side. He was dressed only in a diaper and blue socks, one of which had slipped halfway down his foot to reveal a silken heel.
The boy grabbed her shin.
“Who’s this?” Kavya asked.
The foster mom came in with two water glasses. “That one’s Ignacio,” she said. “He thinks he’s a dog.” She handed the glasses to Rishi and Kavya, and sat down on a corner settee. “He’s been with us for a week now.”
Ignacio pulled on Kavya’s pant leg and lifted himself to his feet. Rishi watched her lower her water glass. Ignacio leaned in. He lapped at the water with one, two, three flicks of his slim pink tongue. When he looked up at her, a rogue drip trickled from his chin to the plain of his bare chest.
“I think he’s cold,” she said. She scooped Ignacio into her lap. Rishi turned from adult to adult, from adult to teenager, looking for disapproval, for someone to tell his errant wife that she couldn’t swoop into a foster home and pick up any child she wanted, that this wasn’t a yard sale or a petting zoo, but no one seemed to mind her picking up the boy. Maybe, Rishi thought, no one else knew her well enough to know what was happening. She didn’t bother looking at Rishi, but from a distance, he could see this much: The fog in her eyes had cleared. He could see quite plainly, because he’d seen it before, that Kavya was falling in love. Ignacio lay in her arms now, his cheek pressed to her chest. She’d wrapped the ends of her sweater around him, to guard against the chill.
From somewhere in the house a breeze was born—a heavy sigh, a closing door. It passed through the living room and raised a sheet of goose bumps on Ignacio’s back. This was what she noticed first about the boy: the wakeful, tender flesh. She heard the faintest rattle in his breath. It angered her that he’d been left to grow cold, that the foster mother, now settled on the sofa, could fail to see that the sun had set and evening was approaching, that the bay winds had begun to whistle through her single-paned windows.
When he rested his head against her, she found herself consumed. The essence of Ignacio grabbed her by the ears. She lowered her nose to his skull and breathed him in, the hair there soft and brown and slightly unwashed. When she pulled him closer, the cavity that she’d been carrying around for so many months—for so many years, she realized now—opened itself and was filled.
Kavya and Ignacio weren’t born in that room on that evening. An outline of her desire had been building for years now; it was clearly delineated and multidimensional and lacked the one thing, the real thing, the child at its center. Ignacio climbed quietly into that outline, and Kavya knew she was his.
Rishi had to end it. She knew he would. When he cleared his throat and suggested they go, it took her several minutes to give Ignacio back. The room waited in respectful silence, as if Ignacio were already hers, and hers to give up. Joyce waited. The other children played quietly. Agatha had fallen asleep. Even Rishi kept his trap shut.
And when she found them prying the boy gently from her lap, ushering her into the moonless dark, she twisted to peer at the closing door, into the winking sliver of light, thinking, perhaps, that Ignacio would follow.
Rishi put his seat belt on, but didn’t start the engine. “Wow,” he said.
“I know.”
“What was that?”
“He was amazing, wasn’t he?”
“What?”
“What?” she asked.
“You couldn’t see what you were doing?”
“You didn’t get to hold him, did you? I was just so caught up, I didn’t think to hand him over to you—”
He stared at his wife for a long minute. “No. Listen. We were brought there to meet a baby. We’d asked for a baby and they gave us one. And then you—you—like—dissed the baby for this other kid.”
Kavya stared back. “Excuse me?”
When Rishi swiveled his head to look at her, she saw something familiar and distasteful there. It was the lawyer look. An argument was roiling inside him, and he was gathering his militia, readying for the attack.
She breathed deeply. “Can we talk about this at home, please?”
“Yes. Sure.”
And they drove through Berkeley in silence.
At home, Kavya stripped down to her underwear and pulled her husband into bed. With her legs wrapped around him, she knew she had the upper hand. She wasn’t using sex as a weapon, or even as a coaxing mechanism. Sex, it turned out, wouldn’t factor into that night. She was operating on the belief, recently discovered, that naked skin begged for understanding. She had never wanted one person as immediately as she wanted Ignacio, and the fact of this wanting made her wholly vulnerable to the fickle step of circumstance. When she wrapped herself around Rishi and slid her hand beneath his T-shirt, she felt him soften. The brace of his abdomen slackened, and he sighed.
“So what are you saying?” he asked.
“I want to be a mother to Ignacio.”
“Ignacio.”
“Yes. If you could just hold him like I did—”
“Would you listen to me, please? For two seconds?”
“Yes.”
He inhaled deeply. She could feel from the punctuated drop of his belly that he was measuring his words. “You can’t. Just. Do that.”
“Yes I can.”
“What was wrong with the baby? Why were you holding it like that?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t— I felt something for Ignacio.”
“You can’t just choose him because you feel like it. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Yes it does. I’m choosing. I’m calling Joyce in the morning.”
Kavya shut off the lamp and lay in the dark. She hadn’t showered or brushed her teeth. The lights in the house were still on. But she was done for the day, and though she didn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time that night, she wanted nothing but to meet the morning.
• • •
SHE WOKE UP SHIVERING in the gray light, still in her underwear and nothing else. She’d pulled her comforter tight around her chest in the night, and now her knuckles ached from the strain. It was Sunday morning. Joyce wasn’t answering her cell. Kavya would have to wait. And think. She knew that Rishi would view this weekend as the cooling-off period, the delay before she changed their lives forever, but Kavya didn’t want to cool off. She’d spent most of the night hyperalert, a pot of water mad with heat and longing to boil. To her, the situation was simple. She couldn’t have a child. And then she met a child she wanted. The child, quite possibly, needed a better home. This was easy, she decided. So much easier than the waiting and the loss she’d known already.
Lucky Boy Page 22
