Small Damages (11 page)

THIRTY

It’s dark by the time Adair drops me back at Los Nietos. No light in the kitchen, no Gypsies in the courtyard, no Miguel in the library, where sometimes he sits with his boots on the desk, one arm crooked behind his head, talking bull things to bull people. I can’t find Esteban, and when I knock on Estela’s bedroom door, no one answers. When I crack it open, the shadows move.

“Estela?” I say.

The bed aches up beneath her.

“Estela? Are you okay?”

“Mind your own business,” she says, but there’s no fight mixed up with the words, and when she sits up, she doesn’t bother tying her hair into a knot. Doesn’t bother with a thing. The light from the hall spills into her room, and now I see where a candle has been lit, and how the smoke has snaked up gray beside the bed.

“Where is everybody?” I ask.

“Miguel took Esteban to Seville.”

“He did?”

“The bulls,” she says. “It’s their time.”

“You mean . . . ?”

“
Sí.
That’s what I mean. Don’t ask your questions.”

“And Miguel took Esteban?”

“Tradition,” she says. “Every year.”

“But—”

“Nothing.”

“And everyone else?”

“Feed yourself, I told them.”

“Feed yourself?”

“I couldn’t,” she says. “I couldn’t cook for them today.”

She’s been crying. She’s been lying here, all this time, mad at Angelita, mad at Luis, embarrassed by herself, alone. She’s been lying here for who knows how long, rehearsing this hurt in her head.
Feed yourself.
And the Gypsies are gone.

“You should talk to Luis,” I say, after a long time passes.

“I had been talking to him,” she says. “Just that afternoon, while you were out meeting Adair. And then Angelita had to go and sit on his lap and ask for a kiss and ruin everything. Again.”

“Talk to him again, Estela.”

“And tell him what?”

“Whatever it is you still haven’t said, Estela. It’s too crazy not to.”

“And you should talk.”

“Don’t live your life regretting, Estela.”

“Ha,” she says. “I’ve already lived my life. It’s done. I’m old, and I’m not talking.”

I move closer to her, and the bed creaks crazy, and I wonder how she sleeps at night, with a bed this loud and aching. She sits in the half dark, watching the candle smoke snaking. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” I say. “Sit up. I found something in Seville.”

“Good for you.”

“For you. I found something for you.”

She turns in the bed, and it moans. “What have you done?” She crosses her arms, looks almost angry.

“Just close your eyes.”

“What?”

“Close your eyes. Don’t cheat.”

“I’m not playing any games.”

“This isn’t a game, Estela. Close your eyes.”

I wait her out, and she finally gives in. I reach into the bag that I’ve carried here from Seville. I draw out the yellow tissue paper package, slip it onto Estela’s lap. “Okay,” I say. “We’re ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“Just open your eyes, Estela. Please.”

She looks at me first, then she looks at her lap, then she looks back up at me, and she frowns.

“For Estela,” I say. “Happy birthday.”

She turns the package over but does not untie the string. She crosses her arms over her chest.

“Estela,” I say, “just open it.”

“It’s not my birthday,” she says.

“Every day is your birthday.”

“It’s not any special day.”

“Will you stop and open it? Please?”

She lets her hands fall down onto the knot. She works it loose, unfolds the paper. “Oh, my bleeding heart,” she says.

“You can’t dance flamenco in an old brown dress,” I tell her.

“Kenzie.”

“Adair helped me,” I tell her.

“I can’t,” she says.

“Can’t what?”

“Can’t wear it.”

“What good would that do? An empty dress? Stand up. See if it fits.”

She sits.

“Estela, you have to.”

“Too beautiful,” she says. “Not for me.”

“It’s only for you,” I say, and then I say that if she won’t wear it, I will never eat her tapas again, her gazpacho, her lango-whatevers. I won’t halve a pear. I won’t snap an artichoke. I won’t do anything else in her kitchen. I’ll go on walks, really long walks, and not tell her where I’m headed. I will dance with the Gypsies. I will become one.

“Santa Maria, madre de Dios
,” she says. “Kenzie, the American girl.”

“And you’re the queen,” I say. “Of Los Nietos.”

She runs a wrinkled finger across the valleys of each eye. She tries to fix her hair, but it’s useless. Now she irons her hand across the dress, like it’s the only dress she’s ever seen, the only gift she’s ever been given. “Your mother called,” she says. “Again. I told her you’re a cook.”

“You told her that?”

“I needed,” she says, “to tell her something.”

“You could tell her my eyesight is being improved by the tip of a black cat’s tail,” I say. “That should impress her.”

“Phhhaaa,” Estela says, slapping the air. “I hate Angelita.”

THIRTY-ONE

They don’t come home, Miguel and Esteban, and Luis and the rest of them stay away too—Arcadio, Rafael, Bruno, Joselita, and also Angelita. When Estela finally gets up, finally goes to the kitchen, she’s doing what she does for me. I tell her not to. I tell her I’m fine. Try the dress, I say, and she says, “Maybe. Later.”

“How about now?”

“You have to eat,” she says. “For the baby.”

She leans toward the icebox, takes out a bag of frozen monkfish, and rinses it beneath warm water until it goes from ice to flesh. She peels it clean of skin and bones, knives it into cubes, swishes it into a bowl of lemon juice and garlic. Says she’ll fry it.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I say.

“And what did you eat today? Cookies and water?”

“It’s just one day, Estela.”

“It’s your baby.”

She heats the oil and fries in silence. She won’t turn to talk, won’t let me help her. “I can’t just sit here,” I say, and finally she says, “Then make the flan; the flan is easy.” She tells me what to get and what to do, how flan begins, and now I’m on my feet, boiling lemon rind, cinnamon, and milk in a pan beside the frying monkfish. I’m beating the egg yolks and the sugar and the cornstarch. I’m straining some of the milk and adding in the eggs and returning the rest of the milk to the pan. Now I go backward—pour the milky eggs into the pan of milk and put the whole thing in the oven.

“Concentrate,” she tells me. “Do it right. Wait until the custard thickens sweetly.”

“It’s like something my father used to make for Christmas,” I say.

“I thought your mother was the cook.” She looks surprised.

“He was a breakfast cook and a holiday cook. His best stuff was French toast and Christmas. I miss his French toast. I miss Christmas.”

“Do you know what I remember,” she asks now, “about Christmas?”

“No,” I say. “I do not. How would I know what you remember?”

“Leave me alone,” she says, “and I’ll tell you a story,” and now she starts talking about these boats the butchers hung in the windows of their stores at Christmas. Little boats, she says, made out of something that sounds like wicker. The oars were sausage. The hams were rigged up like sails. The oranges were stuffed in like a cargo of gold. Estela and her brother would go around looking for the best boat of all. They’d bring one home, with marzipan and chocolate.

“That was before the war,” she says. “That was before Luis. That was when everything was simple.”

She sighs over the sizzle of the pan, and we work together in silence—the flan looking like it might turn out okay and the monkfish smelling delicious.

“Adair bought me a camcorder,” I tell her.

“A camcorder?”

“To film with. While I’m here.”

“That’s nice,” she says, though not like she thinks it actually is.

“She’s painted the baby’s room yellow. Hung it with clowns.”

Estela raises an eyebrow.

“Clowns, you know. Paper clowns. Have you ever been there, where Adair lives? It’s like a castle, only smaller.”

“Adair does everything big,” Estela says, not answering, watching me over the steam of her pan. When the monkfish is done, she tells me to sit. She pulls out a stubby chair and joins me. “Give the flan more time,” she says, and now she sticks a fork into my plate of fish and decides that it is good enough, that I must eat it.

“My baby will have everything,” I say. “Growing up with Adair.”

“I guess it will.”

“It’s a girl,” I say.

“
Sí.
Congratulations.”

“She would have been my daughter,” I say, and I start to cry, and suddenly I can’t stop crying.

“You aren’t happy,” Estela says.

“I can’t be happy,” I say.

“Look at me, Kenzie.”

“I’m looking at you, Estela.”

“Do you know your own
heart?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Go,” she says, “and think. And don’t come back until you know.”

THIRTY-TWO

When I open my eyes, the stars above this old tree house have wheeled past. The night has no blue; it is black. It is black popped bright by a mil
lion stars, and maybe my dad is up there, and maybe he’s met Esteban’s parents, and they’re talking. They’re looking down on us, but I’m pretty sure, after all of this, that they’re not pulling any strings. That we have to live our own lives down here, and we have to live our choices. Know our own hearts. Not wish for what isn’t. Make the right-now right.

I hear Tierra and Antonio across the way, hoofing at their hay. I see their long faces floating over their slatted stalls, their ears twitching, as they wait for Esteban to come home.
Stay near.
I smell the sweet of hay juice and the smack of lost oranges. I hear my name, I think, inside the night.

“Kenzie.”

I lift myself with my elbows and turn to look toward the ground. Something moves, but I can’t tell what. The shadow changes shape and grows toward me, like a tree busting out with a limb. It is wide in places and delicate too, slender but not long—the arm of a man who once threw candy.

“Luis?”

“
Sí
.”

“
Es tarde
.”

“
Sí
.”

“¿Está todo bien?”

“Esto es para Estela.”

“For Estela?” I repeat.

“
Por favor,
” he says.

The darkness divides into different shades of darkness. I don’t quite see Luis’s face, or maybe I don’t see more than just the slope of it, the nose, the broad, dark forehead, but I see the arm he is stretching toward me, the thin, little package. I can’t reach it from here. I climb down halfway to meet him. He slips whatever it is into my hand.

“
Gracias,
” he says. “
Esto es para Estela,
”
he repeats.

“Sí.”

“Dígale qué lo he guardado desde entonces . . .”

I don’t understand what he wants, not really. “Luis?”

“
Buenas noches
.”

The shadows shift. They vanish.

“Luis!” I call after him, but he doesn’t turn back. Tierra whinnies as he passes near, then he’s gone. I hold an envelope in my hand. A package for Estela. And when I look past Luis, through the dark, into the
cortijo,
I see just one light on, in one window, most of the window gone dark. It’s Angelita, I realize, standing there, a ribbon of blue tied with a fat knot to her head.

THIRTY-THREE

I find Esteban in the morning at the edge of his bed—one boot off, his hat tossed to the tree of sticks. Bella has turned the hat’s rim into a perch. He struts around, parading his colors.

Always a party, Esteban says, rubbing his eyes, when Miguel delivers his bulls.

I feel the night still in my hair, the smell of old oranges in my skin, the weight of Luis’s package in my pocket, the memory of Angelita at the window. I feel every part of me, leaning toward Esteban, and yet I stand here, waiting.

You can come in, Esteban says. If you want to. He lifts Limón from the cage and walks the room, toward me. He slips the bird into my hand. Bella wants all the attention, he says. But Limón is a good bird too.

He returns to his bed to shake off the other boot, and after a while, I join him—sit there with Limón weighing nothing and Bella zag-flying, stopping now at Esteban’s shoulder, as if he can have him all to himself. I study the photo on Esteban’s dresser. There’s no scar beneath Esteban’s eye, not yet.

What happened there? I ask, touching the moon shape, tracing it gently, feeling the smooth and the rags of Esteban’s skin.

That, he says, was a long time ago.

But what was it? He doesn’t mind my finger, and I keep it there. The smoothness and the tear.

It was winter, Esteban says. One of Miguel’s men was sick. Estela had heard and taken him soup, and she’d taken me with her. I was a kid, you know, and it was one of the houses down the road—the yellow ones with the tin roofs. I got bored and wandered off. Found a bone, and I picked it up, but it belonged, as it turned out, to a dog. All I remember is teeth.

A
dog
did this?

Estela’s the one who heard the mess and found me. She beat the thing off with a stick—hammered at it until it stopped, yelled at it after it was over, got me free. I remember her hurrying—all the way back here with me in her arms, her dress all torn and bloody, her old bones creaking. Miguel heard her calling and took off for a doctor. He came, sewed me up, gave me shots. But Estela wouldn’t let me out of her sight after that. She loves in big ways. She never does forgive herself.

But it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t your fault, either. It was a dog.

But that’s Estela—so afraid of losing. You should have seen her the other day when you walked off—big, old Estela in her big, old shoes. She was calling, pleading. Miguel was in the field with the bulls, his jeep driving off in the other direction, and she was out there, waving her arms, not caring what the bulls thought or did. Nobody can stop Estela.

I feel my face go red, the tears returning. Limón spreads her wings and hops to my wrist. I’m sorry, I say, about the dog. And about Estela. About all of this, really. I’m sorry.

Look, he says. Don’t be. He puts his arm around me, pulls me close. Then he leans back on his bed, watches me closely. Do you want to know what I do, he asks, when I go to the forest?

Wait for birds?

Yes. Wait for birds. But also I lie out there planning the future.

You can’t plan the future, I want to tell him, but I don’t, because he’s still talking, telling me about his father, his longest story, I realize, ever.

One of the best bullfighters of Spain, he is saying.

Yes.

And he was wealthy.

Yes.

And his money—it was all left to me. Miguel managed it when I was younger, and then last year, my eighteenth birthday, the money became mine. Miguel took me to the bank, we signed the papers. He took me to lunch, asked me what’s next, and I said that I was still thinking about it. I thought about it for a year. I went out there, to the forest, lay down, watched the birds. Tried to hear what they might tell me.

And what did they tell you?

That I was free to choose.

And what did you choose?

I chose to stay here. Not here, here. Not in this room, like this. But in a house at the edge of the forest.

There’s no house at the edge of the forest, Esteban.

No. Not right now there isn’t. But I’ll be building one. I’ve bought the land from Miguel. Land for the house. Land for horses.

Horses?

I’ll breed them, he says. I’ll train them. They make me happy.

God, Esteban.

What?

I don’t know—just. Well. I don’t know. I didn’t know all that about you.

Miguel’s the only one who knows so far. I’m going to wait for Luis to leave before I tell Estela. One thing at a time for her. Big hearts like hers break huge.

I nod. I know, I say.

Hey, he says. What’s happening? He touches his hand to the point of my chin and lifts my eyes to his.

I don’t know, I say, and Esteban doesn’t try to force it. He doesn’t try to make me do anything at all. Doesn’t insist. Leans back, stays close.

Luis came to me in the night, I say.

“¿Sí?”

He gave me a package for Estela.

What is it?

I don’t know. I mean, it’s hers, and it’s sealed. I take it from my pocket, show it to Esteban, turn it over so that he can see that it’s just an envelope, old and pretty grimy. No address on it. No stamps.

Don’t make her wait, Esteban says. She should have it.

Right. I stand up to go, but I don’t move. Limón hops to the other hand. She hardly weighs a thing, but she’s all there. Just like a soul, I think. Just like a baby.

Are you okay? Esteban asks me.

Not really.

But you will be.

That’s what everyone says, Esteban, but how do you know? How can you know? Nothing’s okay, and it can’t be.

Because I’ve been watching you, he says. He steps toward me and touches my lips. Come back later, he says. If you want.