“When my back acts up, Kavya walks on it.”
“Of course.” He exhaled, turned to Rishi. “Are you ready for Tuesday?” In four days, Rishi would be presenting his plans for the Stratosphere to the Weebies management team, most of whom he’d seen only in magazines.
“Sure. I’ll just have to know everything I’m going to say. And then say it. Right?” He was shooting for zero, halving his distance from his goal with the implementation of each new technological gadget. But halving distances would never get him to the coveted number; he was still maddeningly far away.
• • •
TUESDAY CAME QUICKLY. At two in the afternoon, Rishi stood before the Weebies management team: Vikram Sen, Topher Timmons, Mike Li, and William Reynolds, CFO, CEO, COO, and marketing director, respectively. Valley start-ups waited months—years—for meetings with these men. Rishi tried to still the tremble in his hand by repeating the mantra I work here. I already work here. He was simply a colleague with a PowerPoint presentation, he reminded himself. These were his coworkers. They were his age. His hand calmed. Watercooler guys. Guys at the company Christmas party, photocopying their asses. But the truth was, these guys had their own party, to which Rishi, if deemed worthy, might one day be invited.
He took a deep breath and began. “WeBreathe. Weebies’ first exclusive consumer product. For homes, schools, businesses. For healthy babies, healthy workplaces, healthy families.” Topher Timmons grinned. “And smart kids.” Timmons’s grin grew. Rishi went on to summarize the Wall Street Journal article that had birthed the idea. He explained his software simulations, showed the group the on-screen modeled version of the Stratosphere, and what happened to the air inside it when he manipulated, through the magic of simulation software, the strategically placed air filters, the air vents, the organic paint and furniture. As he proceeded, he tried not to look at Vikram Sen, whose left eyebrow quivered with excitement. He focused instead on the faces of the other three men, who, after ten minutes, began to look limpid, pudgy, serene. Anything but intimidating. He was good at this, he remembered.
When he finished, Rishi felt so good that he forgot that his presentation had comprised, if one stopped to think, twenty-seven minutes of bullshit. The ideas he’d come up with were predictable, rudimentary, the stuff of science fairs. He needed more. Timmons, Sen, and Reynolds showed no understanding of his failure. Li had looked a little suspicious, but said nothing.
He wasn’t daunted. Air quality data was clear and quantifiable. It could be summoned and charted. Children and wives could not. Acceptance couldn’t be graphed. Nor could love.
Kavya wore love like a wool cloak, wrapped it around herself, around Ignacio, until the two were securely bound. How her love could be so immediate and complete, Rishi didn’t understand. Ignacio was another woman’s son. Loving him couldn’t be simple. His own child, he would have loved without question. But Ignacio—the boy asked with every movement, every syllabic babble, to be embraced, but there had to be limits. Didn’t there?
With love lurking, he would sink deeper into the Weebies project, and leave the other one to Kavya. He would give in to the Stratosphere. An idea would drop, splat, like a dollop of bird shit. He would wait for it, and work tirelessly.
33.
She would take him back to Popocalco. Soli and Nacho, they’d live with Mama and Papi in the house that Soli had saved, with its phone line and new sturdy door and wall-to-wall roofing. She could see him, a fully fledged boy, a child without worries. He’d spend his afternoons playing escondido, sprinting down dirt roads and around adobe corners with other children (for in her imagining, the village had children again). On festival days, they’d stay up past midnight to watch the fireworks. Nacho would go to the school that his mother had gone to, with the same ancient teachers. He’d blend in among the locals with their proud faces, their noses straight and sharp, and skin like the buttered bark of a cinnamon tree. He’d know Torta, the madman in the village square; with the other children, he’d see Torta as a certain sort of hero, the only adult who behaved worse than a child. Nacho would grow to be a man, a Popocalteco who drank mezcal and argued about corn strains. He would stand broad, he would have children. The children would have wild hair that blew in the valley wind.
She lay on her cot and spoke to the ceiling: I’ll take you to the fireworks, my Nacho. En la Noche del Maíz. Los castillos de luces, great towers with sparking crosses, with spinning wheels of flame, and Christ himself popping and banging. The happiest Christ on a cross you ever will see. The fire will talk in tongues and the crown of thorns will spin so fast you’ll think it might spin right off and fly to heaven. And just when you think that the blazing and banging, the sparks in your hair, your eyes, your teeth, can’t get any closer—just when you think the whole glorious high-rise contraption might topple flaming to the ground and send you running home, the square will calm. Silence. And then, an explosion. Blossoms of fire will fly and fall and fly and fall, until the sky gets dark and the crowd thins. And you’ll go home, back to your kitchen, a glass of milk, and bed. And the night will be still again, except for smoke that trails through the village, except for the sprinkle of remembered light that spills down your eyelids as you drift away, to sleep.
A guard opened Soli’s door. “Let’s go,” he said. The thin one slid off her bed. “Not you. The fat-ass Mexican. Get your fat ass out here, Mexicana,” he said.
So she got her fat ass out of that cell and never looked back. She had a feeling she’d never see them again, but she didn’t wave goodbye. The guard who’d covered Salma in stew handed Soli her old clothes and her purse in a clear plastic bag. Everything was inside, except for her forged ID card. “Good luck,” he said, as if he’d never pushed her to the ground.
34.
After three weeks with Iggy, Kavya returned to work. On her first day back, she dropped him off at a home-based daycare, sat in the Prius for ten minutes, cried, then started her engine and drove to work. She’d never driven to work before—she couldn’t risk a bike wreck with Iggy on the back—and it took longer than usual to get there, now that she had to obey the one-way street signs and road barriers that guarded the streets of Berkeley. When she got to the sorority, it was as if she’d never left. The house was still dark and hoary, the kitchen equipment still comically oversized. Miguel offered a fist bump, and she accepted. Martina McAfee stood in the kitchen doorway with the lunch numbers and instructions about gluten-free pasta, and didn’t say a thing about Kavya’s family leave, didn’t ask her if she’d gone anywhere or had a good time or taken in a child. No one seemed to know that she’d revolutionized her place in the world, that she was now, of all things, a mother.
When Martina left the kitchen, Kavya turned to Miguel. “I have a kid now,” she said. He’d just opened the dishwasher, and he stood swallowed in a cloud of steam. He didn’t move. She saw only his feet, planted firmly, toes pointing out.
“You what?”
“I have a kid now. We’re fostering a little boy, and we might get to adopt him. I hope.”
“For real?”
“Yup.”
“Really? Had you planned this?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, it was totally spur of the moment. We were having brunch and it sounded like a good idea.”
“Hey, hey! You’re a mama now, girl! Come here!” Miguel wrapped her in a hug, binding her own arms to her sides. In his warm arms, the sun angling through the window, the kitchen steeped in butternut steam, Kavya was freshly convinced that what she’d done was an okay thing, perhaps a very good thing, and maybe even the right thing.
• • •
EVERY FEW MONTHS, their weekends fell victim to emergency preparedness. It was easy, in Berkeley, to forget about earthquakes. No one seemed overly worried about them. It was generally understood that one day soon, the two plates that flanked the Hayward Fault would give in to pressure so intense that the cities of the ba
y would come crashing down. Destruction would march through their beautiful lives, bringing down their walls and trees and telephone polls. The quake would be an eight or a nine, maybe even a ten. The Big One, they called it. The Big One was coming.
About once a month, Rishi found himself unable to sleep, hyper-alert to the catastrophe that could strike any moment. Now, for example.
Or now.
Rishi’s earthquake kit, a coffin-sized Tupperware—weatherproof, verminproof, raccoonproof—sat waiting outside the back door. In it were first-aid supplies, water tablets, granola bars, a tent, a wrench, a shovel, toilet paper, extra clothes, matches, a fire extinguisher, a crowbar, a flare, a knife, and two adult-sized gas masks.
Kavya had objected to the masks at first, thinking they were too apocalyptic, that they would never need them, that Rishi was being an alarmist. These weren’t the masks that surgeons and gardeners and people in Beijing wore. These were netherworld devices, heavy goggles with vinyl snouts and hollow air chambers. Rishi had tried his on first for Kavya. You look like a Tusken Raider, she’d said. It had impressed him that she knew what a Tusken Raider was.
They didn’t have a mask for Ignacio. On an afternoon four weeks after Ignacio had come to live with them, Rishi set off for the camping stores scattered through Berkeley’s west side. “Going out!” he called to Kavya, and left. He was gone for four hours and was driving home with three cardboard boxes full of survival gear (but no child-sized gas mask), when he realized it was 6:30 and time for dinner. He called home to see if dinner was waiting. The phone rang and rang. He cursed quietly her habit of ignoring the phone when she was busy. He felt like burritos.
He stopped for burritos. He would get one for Kavya. After standing in line for twenty minutes and ordering two burritos, he remembered Ignacio. He stood in line again and ordered a child’s quesadilla. He got home to the sounds of Ignacio’s bath.
“I got him food,” he called from the kitchen.
No reply. And then, “He already ate.”
“Oh. You all right in there?” It was the wrong thing to ask. She didn’t answer.
A steam of discontent rose from the bathroom and trailed to the kitchen, drawing Rishi from his chair, from his plate, from his still unopened foil-wrapped burrito.
In the bathroom, Kavya, a vision of motherhood: She kneeled on the bathroom floor, the front of her shirt soaked with water, her hair in limp strands around her face. Ignacio walloped the surface of his bath, sending high arcs of water raining down. Ignacio himself: a slippery little beast, shiny as a seal, his hair foaming with soap, a trail of suds running down his back. Bubbles gathered at his elbows. He was a strong boy, wide-chested, with shoulders that could be described only as manly. But the manliness was nascent, bubble-wrapped in fat, in sweet soapy-slick skin.
“Yes?” Kavya turned a cold eye on Rishi. “Do you need something?”
“Uh. No. I was just seeing when you wanted to eat.” He paused before leaving. “I’ve never seen him in the bath before.”
She turned, unfurled a small, tight smile, and said nothing.
“I get now why some species eat their young,” he said, and grinned.
“Excuse me?” She scowled, shook her head. He’d meant it as a compliment. In any case, it was the wrong thing to say.
Back in the kitchen, he wiped down the counters, swept the floor, and let the burritos sit on their plates, wrapped in foil, waiting. From the far corner of the house he heard the bathwater draining away, Kavya passing from bathroom to bedroom, chattering high and bright to Ignacio. He could hear her narrating what she was doing, singing songs with only a hint of melody. He heard the side of the crib slide down, Ignacio’s squawks of protest, and Kavya’s soothing reply. He heard her sing to the boy. And then he heard her wait. She’d be standing by the crib, waiting for him to drift off.
Anyone who knew burritos knew they had to be eaten immediately. The longer they waited, the greater the likelihood of a soggy tortilla, pasty beans. Within a twenty-minute window, a burrito could turn from a parcel of life-giving heat to a mealy and humid corpse. Everyone in Berkeley knew this. Anyone who cared the tiniest bit about food would know better than to let a burrito sit.
Forty minutes passed. Rishi swept the floor again. He sat, began to unwrap the foil, then remembered Kavya’s scowl. He would wait. He wanted her to walk into a clean kitchen, an attentive husband, a table with two plates and two whole, gleaming bundles of satisfaction. Being caught mid-burrito would deepen the cast of his failings, whatever she found those to be.
By the time she walked in, the kitchen was spotless. Rishi sat down and picked up his burrito, thinking now about eating, about the first, best bite of the burrito, the way the steam funneled up his nostrils and the top morsels of rice and beans broke away from their base, landing lightly on the tongue. He was thinking about this and nothing else when he looked up to find Kavya, seated but staring past him.
“Hungry?” he asked, and took, at last, his first bite. It was cold, yes, but still a benediction of texture and flavor. He looked up. He finally looked at Kavya, and the food turned to mulch in his mouth.
“Hey,” he said. “What happened?”
She shook her head. “I’m hungry,” she said. “I’m tired.”
He waited. “Is that all? That’s all that’s wrong?”
She’d picked up her burrito, but stopped to glare at him. And she slammed the burrito down. He cringed. Burritos were delicate.
“Okay,” he said. “I just thought there was more to it.”
“No more to it. I’m hungry and tired and that’s all. That’s all there is to it. Just me. Just me doing everything.”
He breathed in, exhaled loudly.
“Oh, shut up.”
He took another bite, and another.
“I know you think I’m being dramatic, but you know what?”
“What?”
“Fuck you.”
“Jesus.”
“You haven’t done a single thing for Iggy this weekend. All weekend. Or ever! I’m back at work now and I’m still doing everything. Where were you all day today?” Her voice was getting higher and shriller than he’d ever heard it.
“At camping stores. I told you.”
“At camping stores. Earthquake preparedness.”
“Well, someone’s got to think about it.” He was getting angry now, his volume rising. “I’ve never seen you take an interest in our earthquake kit.”
Kavya guffawed and dropped the burrito to her plate. Rishi ate in silence. Before Ignacio, they’d sometimes disappear from each other for hours on the weekends. Rishi had liked the fact that marriage hadn’t shackled them together. He had four cold beers waiting in the fridge. He rose to get one, and brought one to the table for Kavya. She didn’t open hers. She began to eat again. The tortilla and beans would be plastering the roof of her mouth by now, but he didn’t open her beer for her. He didn’t get her a glass of water. He’d hoped faintly for sex that night, but now even the small possibility of it had sunk to a negative value. When Kavya finished eating and rolled her foil in a ball, her hands were still shaking.
“Hey,” he said. He got up and brought her a glass of water.
Twenty minutes later, the kitchen sat in a gel of silence. Rishi had tried to tell Kavya about his day, to ask a few safe questions about what she and Iggy had been up to. She snapped at him the first time, her mouth twisted and sour. Then she ignored him and stared at the table. He gave up, loaded their plates into the dishwasher, and opened his laptop. On Weebies.com he typed child gas mask. Child. Gas mask. The uncanny pairing of terms almost made him close his laptop. But if the world was ending, Iggy would need to breathe. Please choose a size, Weebies prompted. He’d have to measure Iggy’s head. He thought of ordering something for Kavya. A parenting book, maybe. But he had no idea what sort of advice he could shop for that wouldn’t c
ause even deeper offense. He used to have a number of wife-pleasing maneuvers to choose from, but after Ignacio arrived, her pleasure receptors seemed to have shifted. He didn’t know, these days, where he stood on the newly calibrated spectrum of her approval.
In the nursery, Rishi slipped a tape measure around the boy’s skull. He slept deeply. Even when the metallic end of the tape pulled at his hair, he swatted absently and then settled. Rishi watched him sleep. They’d brought a child into their home. The thought ran in circles and he watched it go, run into the distance and close in again, rounding the corners of his mind. They’d taken in a child to treat as their own. He’d said all this before, but what did it mean?
Ignacio began to cough cavernous, wet barks. They went on for so long that Rishi wondered how the boy was breathing. He’d picked up the bug from the other foster home, they thought, but it had worsened, each cough rocking his small body.
“What’re you doing?” Kavya asked from the doorway. Rishi turned. She looked smaller now than she had in the kitchen, her shoulders stooped. Her body had exhaled its anger and now stood tired, perhaps contrite, ready not to fight.
“Measuring his head,” he whispered. “For a gas mask.”
“You and those gas masks.”
“You’ll thank me.”
“Hopefully, I’ll never have to.” She walked to him and placed a tentative hand on his back. He pulled her in, and her head dropped to his chest.
“I’m sorry you were so tired,” he said. “I’ll try to be around more on the weekends.”
She shrugged.
“You really do a lot. More than anyone I know.”
“Well,” she said. “I feel better now.” She straightened up and they locked eyes. She kissed him lightly, once and again. Taking him by the hand, she led him out the door, stepping nimbly over the room’s one creaky patch of wood, and Rishi did the same.
Lucky Boy Page 27
