Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran

Author:Shanthi Sekaran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-12-01T14:13:50+00:00

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 throat 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.

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