She streaked past Rishi in the hallway. “The mother,” she gasped.
Rishi grabbed her by the arm. “Kavya—”
“It was the mother!” she shrieked, and yanked herself away, pushing past him and running down the hall. He heard the front door open. He heard his wife’s voice, broken now and frantic. She called out to the street, to the bakery-goers and dog-walkers on a Saturday morning. “Ignacio!” she cried. “Ignacio!”
56.
It was three in the morning. The last house light had long been extinguished and the streets were silent. Earlier that evening, she’d snuck into the house and unlatched the bedroom window before slipping out again. Returning at the darkest hour, she crammed her hands into the gap and pulled. The window had gasped open. She stuck her head in and heard the bedroom door judder, the breeze from the window shaking it in its frame. When hard work fails, luck, the lesser brother, steps in.
Her first foot knocked a toy over, and Ignacio stirred. The second she placed more carefully. And then she was in his room. He lay in a bed that was just the right size for him, with wooden rails that ran along the wall. She ran her fingers through her newly short hair, fingered the tips, suddenly self-conscious. In his bed, Nacho clutched a soft toy and sucked at the night. This small, dark world of his, it was made just for him, a loving nest. Soli’s American boy. Could she have left him there?
At his bedside, she knelt down and whispered their old song. “Nacho, Nacho-o-o.” She lifted him—how sturdy he had grown! His legs were solid, his arms sure. He wrapped himself around her and tucked his head into her neck, as he always had, and she was nearly knocked down by the smell of him, the scent of her boy. She’d never known it existed so specifically, or that she’d been living without it. She could have stood in that room all night, breathing him in. They would have caught her in the morning, her nose buried in his hair. “Time to go, Ignacio,” she sang. He chirped like a bird in his sleep.
They climbed back through the window, landing softly in the ground cover. She lowered him into the stroller and crouched beside him. “It’s you and me, amorcito.” He didn’t wake. She buckled him in and set off.
The night was blushing away. Soli felt safe still, in the purple half-light, and the hour between night and day was so cold it sent her flying over sidewalks and through alleyways. She crossed the streets without waiting for the lights to turn. She listened for the ghost-whistle of the BART train, and heard it soon enough.
She had questions for Ignacio. One day, she would ask them. Was I making a mistake? She’d never have her own little Gourmet bungalow or a car that clicked its way through town like a stealthy beetle. Would these things have made a better life for him?
The tunneled din of the BART station must have woken him. He opened his eyes and saw Soli—clearly this time, with a flint of recognition. She was certain she saw it. Days later, she would cling to that spark. He’d known her once. And again?
Did you know me that morning when you came to, Ignacio, blinking against those green-gray lights?
He woke up to see Soli, then swiveled to look behind, and saw nothing but a lonely ticket booth. He shrieked. He shook his head so hard she feared he would damage himself, and so she squeezed her palms to his face to stop him. “Mama,” he cried. “Mama! Where is it?”
She knelt and took him by the elbows. “Nacho. I’m here. This is Mama.” She wrapped her arms around him, though he was almost too small to hug, but he walloped her with the side of his head and her vision went swimming.
And those people. Would they have loved you more than I did? Will you wish someday that I had left you with them? She had many hours to think that day, and a lifetime to revisit her deed, and here’s what she would discover: This story, this fight for a boy—it wasn’t about the boy. It was about his mothers. It was about a law that grew from the deepest roots of their being.
A bus pulled up in front of the station, and it was full, even at four on a Saturday morning. The people boarding were neither shoppers nor tourists, no one heading to work in a sky-high office. Around her sat fluorescent vests and beige uniforms, heading to the city to clean floors and raise buildings. Soli and Nacho would take the bus as far as the port, and then they’d be gone, heading down and down, to the farthest edge of Nacho’s country. They’d find a school for him, a job for her. They’d find a life. And there they would stay. And if one day, they were forced over a border, they would go, the two of them, to where the sky meets the land and the earth turns a corner. They’d step into whatever awaited them, in his country or hers.
• • •
NACHO SPENT THE BUS JOURNEY with eyes glued to the window, to the telephone lines in the distance. Soli feared there was something wrong with him. She feared that they had broken him.
They arrived in San Diego around lunchtime and went straight to a restaurant in a busy shopping district, where she had a contact, Iselda’s niece. The girl met Soli at the back door, leaned against the door frame, long and slim in black jeans.
“Do you have service experience?” she asked in English. “Front of house or back?”
“Front, back. I’ve been all over the house.”
This made her laugh, and she let Soli in the kitchen.
That first evening, she took Nacho to the seaside, a small harbor with a boardwalk. Around them, people milled in familial clusters, held hands, and walked out onto the short docks to watch the bobbing boats and the horizon beyond. Soli hoped the boats and the fresh salt air might inspire Nacho to forgive her. He’d been on a bus with her for eight hours, and then in the dark of a dirty motel. She thought the sun and wind and seagull cries would help him feel at home again. It was dinnertime when they reached the harbor, and the air was dense with the smell of fried fish. The sun was angry that day. Even as it dimmed and sank, it burned orange at the ocean’s edge. The fire in the sky threw the rest of the world into shadow. They were ghosts in its wake.
“Nachito,” she said. “How about something sweet?” Around them were pretzel stands, an ice-cream shop, a man in a pink cowboy hat selling pink wispy clouds of sugar. Ignacio didn’t answer, but his gaze lingered on the man.
“Okay, then.” She stepped over to the stand and paid the man. He offered her three spools for the price of two, and she spent a good twenty, thirty seconds convincing him that she did not want three spools of the fluffy pink stuff.
When she turned back, Ignacio was gone. The stroller stood in place, its chest buckle still fastened. He’d slipped out and lost himself in the crowd. He was nowhere. “Nacho!” she cried. “Ignacio! Come back!” People turned. A few stopped.
“You lose your kid, lady?” a man asked.
“Nacho! Where are you? Stop this now!” She raised a cotton candy wand, held it like a torch to summon him back. “Nacho!”
“That him over there?”
And there he stood, on the far side of the dock, steady as a lighthouse amid a current of legs. In the fierce sunset, he was nothing more than a black shadow, boy-shaped.
“Ignacio,” she called. “Come back to me!”
He stood and watched her, knowing somehow that he was in control. He turned away and stared out at the water. Soli drew near, carefully, the way one might approach a captured animal. She held her hands out and walked slowly, until they stood a few feet apart. When she kneeled and offered him the spool of pink, he looked at it, looked up at her, and took her hand. But he would not take the cotton candy. He was led back to his stroller and buckled in, but still he refused the candy, and she was left to chew at it herself, as if she were the child in need of consolation and he the tolerant guardian. It was crystalline and wooly and clung to her lips.
That night, in their cheap motel, she turned on the news. A state-wide search, it said. From his bedroom. His biological mother. Illegal immigrant. Any information. And there, on the screen, a picture of Ignacio and one of Soli, taken at the county j
ail. Following this, to her utter amazement, was grainy video footage of Soli pushing her child, slumped in his stroller, down an empty Berkeley sidewalk. She could have been anyone—any housekeeper, any waitress. A little brown, a little round. But he shimmered on the screen like a mirage. He was a luminous little boy. There would be eyes everywhere, looking for him. They had to go.
57.
Kavya heard the doorbell ring. It had been eight days since Iggy was taken, and the droves of reporters outside their door had petered to a trickle. And the trickle, searching for a new angle, had begun asking questions that made Kavya uncomfortable. To her door and over the phone came feeble lines of questioning, suggesting dark possibilities. Mrs. Reddy, do you have contacts in India? Mrs. Reddy, when did you last see your child? Was he well behaved? Was he a burden? Kavya and Rishi had stopped answering the phone. They ignored doorbells and Eva Cabral scolded them for it. Keep the press interested, she said. The more coverage you get, the more likely they’ll find him! But Kavya was barely functioning. She couldn’t face the questions hurled at her front door like raw eggs. They were planning a press conference in two days. They would answer questions then.
Uma showed up four days after Iggy vanished. The same day, Kavya got a call from Miguel. “They offered me your job.”
“Take it,” Kavya said.
“I thought about it. I was going to take it. But I didn’t.”
“Take it.”
“I negotiated a raise and health insurance and an extra week of vacation.”
She sighed. “I hope it was a big raise.”
“It was.” He paused. “You’re coming back.”
Kavya didn’t answer this. She tried to summon a memory of the evening at the restaurant, the last of her happy, healthy life.
“You there? Kavya?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be back.”
“Okay.”
“Why don’t you tell that man to mind his business?” Uma asked when Kavya hung up. “You want me to tell him?”
“You mind your own business, Mom.”
Uma wrapped her arm around Kavya’s waist. “Enough of that.” She led her daughter back to the kitchen table.
From where she sat, she could see the mound of toys in the corner of the living room, a half-built tower of blocks that she couldn’t bring herself to dismantle. She couldn’t face another day and night of this house, these walls, not knowing. She couldn’t wait any longer for other people to find her son. She sat down and picked up the phone again. Rishi was at work, because there was nowhere else to be.
“Hello?” His voice was hollow. It sucked from Kavya the few drops of conviction she’d gathered.
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
“Look. Rishi.” She felt suddenly foolish, but she let the words out. “We need to do something.”
He sighed. “I know.”
“We need to find him ourselves.” Kavya didn’t know specifically what this meant, and neither, she guessed, did Rishi. From the stove, Uma watched her daughter carefully. She tipped a cup of milk into a saucepan of tea and waited for it to boil.
58.
What Rishi found in Oaxaca was a version of his own family’s past. The airport taxi took him through streets lined with shops open late into the night, low adobe huts fronted by garage doors and painted bright blue, yellow, pink, like the cramped and sooty storefronts of small-town India. Solitary bulbs hung from wires, sending a fluorescent shank of light through each archway—harsh, but not unwelcoming. These were Indian streets, minus the hillocks of garbage and inexplicable rubble, minus the stray dogs that sifted through them, minus the cattle that loped through traffic.
Rishi had left Kavya in bed. She had spent four days in bed when he decided to leave. Ignacio was officially missing. The police had pored over their home, interviewed their neighbors, asked them questions that felt at times like barely veiled accusations. The day Ignacio went missing, he and Kavya had moved about the house like shadows—weak and flat with disbelief, pinned to the ground only by their feet. And then they went through a busy phase—filing reports, traveling to the police station, organizing search parties through the surrounding neighborhoods. They’d done interviews on television, fielded reporters at their door, and soon—sooner than expected—there was nothing left to do. Kavya took to her bed and stared at the drapes. “I saw her,” she’d say to Rishi, every time he crossed her path. She said it each time with a sense of awe, in a state of perpetual discovery. “I saw her at the playground, Rishi.”
He knew she’d want to come with him, so he left without telling her, with only a note to assure her that he’d return. You need to keep the search going, he’d written, I’ll do everything I can to bring Ignacio back. He’d called Uma and asked her to come back to the house and watch Kavya, to make sure she ate and washed herself. “Will she want me to be there?” Uma had asked, a question that had surprised Rishi. Uma had never asked, never seemed to consider, whether her daughter wanted her anywhere. Uma was a woman who assumed her authority without a second thought, and her question brought to light the instability of their world post-Ignacio.
Rishi was giving himself four days to find his son.
After dropping his bags off in his room, he approached the hotel’s concierge, a woman with a face he’d seen on Disney princesses, all eyes and smile.
“I need a taxi to Santa Clara,” he said. “And maybe a guide? Who speaks English?”
“Señor? Where would you like to go, sir?”
“Santa Clara?” He showed her the page in his notebook with the name of the birth mother’s town. “And a place to stay there. A hotel. Please.”
If Soli had been there, standing next to Rishi in that terra-cotta lobby, she would have broke down laughing. A hotel in Popocalco!
The concierge smiled and said, “I’ll see what I can find.”
What she found was a driver named Helio, scheduled to arrive at four the next afternoon, hours later than Rishi had hoped to leave. He paced his hotel room all morning, tried and failed to work on the Weebies PowerPoint. At 5:30, Helio appeared in a green Toyota Camry. By 5:35, they were off.
• • •
THEY ARRIVED IN POPOCALCO at dinnertime. It was a low and dry place, bordered by vast tracts of land. “Those used to be farms,” Helio said. “All of this, farmland. No more.”
The town was less of a town than a stretch of dusty road peppered with some widely spaced homes, three shops, and a bar. Outside the bar a village square spread luxuriantly, hemmed in by stone archways. Vast white bricks covered the ground, bleached clean by the sun.
Riding along a dirt road, Rishi kept his eyes glued to his window. He peered into shop fronts, into the dark doorways of adobe huts and tidy brick houses. He searched for Ignacio wherever it seemed people might be. He searched the streets for children, but saw none. A few old men strolled by the roadside. Others sat outside their houses, shut their eyes to the low evening sun. He searched for Ignacio in these faces. An adult who looked like Iggy might have been a family member. The thing was, they all looked like Iggy, but they all lacked the essential spark.
“We’re here,” Helio said. What he’d called a hotel was really just a house with an extra room, owned by a woman named Dolores. He walked through its doorway and into a plume of familiar smoke. Incense burned in a corner beneath a framed portrait of a young man.
Helio nodded gravely to the woman. She had streaks of gray in her hair, an unlined face. She softened when she looked at Rishi, but she didn’t smile.
“Dolores had a son,” Helio said. “You’re staying in his room.” He pointed at Rishi. “Americano,” he said.
“Americano?” Dolores asked, then shook her head. “No, no es americano.”
“She says you’re not American.”
“I got that.”
Dolores took R
ishi by the arm and led him to his room. She watched him roll his suitcase to the wall, and then she pointed to the bed. “Mi hijo,” she said.
“Sí.”
And she left him to himself for the night.
• • •
TWO THOUSAND MILES AWAY and two hours behind, beneath the covers of a rumpled bed, his wife lay in shreds. Rishi would have three days in Popocalco. In the morning, he would find the Castro Valdez home, where Soli and Ignacio were sure to be living. He’d memorized her face and her name, its parade of syllables. The next day, he would find out where she lived. He would find her.
In the meantime, he had no hope of sleeping. He was closer to Ignacio than he had been in two weeks. He’d felt him the moment he’d stepped off the plane in Oaxaca and into the muggy afternoon, and the feeling had grown stronger as he neared Popocalco. Ignacio steamed across this land, rested on its pillows of stagnant air. Ignacio was everywhere.
• • •
HELIO MET HIM at the breakfast table the next morning. He sat down across from Rishi, nodded when Dolores offered him a coffee, and waited for Rishi to speak. Rishi had spent most of the night looking out his bedroom window until he woke, still sitting upright, his arms weak with exhaustion. They passed a silent minute, sipping. “What’s the plan today?”
“I need to find a Mister Valdez. Or Castro Valdez? Do you know him?”
Helio grinned. “I know many men named Valdez. But Castro Valdez—you’re speaking of Solimar’s father.”
“Yes! Yes.” Rishi tried to sound calm. “Do you know her?”
“Of course I know her. I’ve known her since she was born. She went to the North. Is she back?”
“I think so. I think she is. I’d like—I’d like to visit her.”
“You know her, then. From California?”
Rishi nodded.
The Castro Valdez home stood away from the main road, among patches of fallen corn. Dried white husks bowed low to the ground and lay in stacks. If this had been a different time, a different story, the sight of these husks would have thrown Rishi into a frenzy of invention. He would have seen in them materials for building, insulation, creation—renewable and untapped. Now they looked like an ancient massacre. Rishi stepped out of the car before it stopped moving. He ran up the drive. A fist, his fist, was knocking on the door.
Lucky Boy Page 40
