Small Damages (3 page)

EIGHT

I take my time—cut through the front courtyard, past the table set for four. I straighten the knives up as I pass, test one of the floppy courtyard chairs. I close my eyes and feel the sun burn fire up the end of my eyelashes. Then I stand and keep walking and turn right into the shadows that nudge against the wall of this no-man’s-land, along the east side of the
cortijo
. One of the windows of my bedroom looks out onto this space, but I keep that curtain shut, because there are only split barrels out here, a couple of scrawny shade trees, the cradle of a fallen window box that’s been taken over by seed, and this poor excuse of a clothesline, which is slung between two blue poles. It’s white from the sun and loose from the weight of all the stains in Estela’s clothes.

“Those stains are weighing nothing,” she told me, when I mentioned it.

“Those stains are butt ugly,” I told her straight back.

The flat sacks of my dresses are where I left them—stiff as five boards with their shoulders pinched high. A tabby sits in the raffia basket, smudging a wet paw over its eyes. “Scat,” I tell the cat, and when it opens its eyes, it stares up at me, like nothing in the world can scat it. I tip the basket to its side and scoot the cat off with one hand. It lands four feet right in the dust and purrs. It nudges up against my shin and weaves between my legs. “Leave me alone, will you?” I tell it. It yawns and lies down, fits its chin to its paws, like this is some show I’m delivering.

“Don’t blame me if you’re bored,” I tell it. “Blame this
cortijo.
Blame Spain.”

The dresses crack when I unclip and fold them. Their shoulders stay pinched. There is fade along the zippers and hems that wasn’t there when I left home, which feels like years ago. I pull down Estela’s yellow apron and the pale green slip that I guess she sleeps in. Her underwear is hanging here too—big boxy things that must have been invented before they invented elastic. Thing after thing, I pull it down, tossing the clothespins to a sawed-off barrel top.

“Show’s over,” I tell the cat now, stooping to lift the basket from the ground, feeling a bead of sweat working its way between my breasts and down over the slight hill of you, and feeling, all of a sudden, a wave of nausea, or maybe I’m just dizzy with the sun. The cat is weaving between my legs. I close my eyes and breathe.

When I open my eyes and turn to make my way back to the front courtyard, to the kitchen, to the cool cave of the
cortijo,
where I will lie down, where I will go to be alone, no matter what Estela says, he’s there—standing in the thin ribbon of shadow that runs along the wall. He leans into it—the wall, the shadows. He holds sticks in his hands, fallen limbs from the shade trees, as if he’s come to make a fire.

What are you doing here? I ask him, feeling dizzy again, but a different kind of dizzy. I lean against the edge of the split barrel, shift the basket to one side, shift it to the other.

For the birds, he says, looking down at his hands.

Sticks for the birds?

Sticks for a tree. I’m making one for them to play in.

You’re building a tree out of dead sticks? I think I ask, though I’m not sure that it comes out right in Spanish.

He just shakes his head, yes and no. He stands there, not moving, not sweating, his eyes so dark beneath his hat, the sticks knotted up in his hands. It’s as if he has all the time in the world and time can’t bore him. If Estela ever once yelled at him, it doesn’t show. If he cares that I’m her victim, he leaves my shame alone.

Who’s Luis? I ask him at last.

Luis is Estela’s friend, he says. He’s also Miguel’s uncle.

Well, that’s a fine story, I want to say, but I hold my line and he holds his, stands there in his purple shade.

There’s a party, I tell him now, if you want to come. I shift the basket again, nudge the cat with one foot, wonder if it can get any hotter—if there is anywhere in the world that simmers as much as southern Spain in summer. A
party,
I repeat, like he didn’t hear me the first time. But all he does is turn the sticks in his hand, dead sticks for a dead tree. You can’t build a tree out of sticks.

I have to go, I say, and I wait for him to stop me.

“Buenas tardes,”
he tells me and nods.

I stare at him, and he doesn’t care. I feel my face burn hotter. Finally I turn for Estela—her kitchen and her rules. I walk with the basket to one side and the heat on my back, and when I reach the corner and look toward the shadows, Esteban and his sticks are already gone. I think of my friends back home—Ellie, Andrea, Tim; I think about Kevin. “I love you,” he said, before I left. I’m still trying to decide whether to believe him. I’m still waiting for a letter—something. I’m still here, and I’m alone, and Esteban cares more about birds and sticks than anything that I could tell him, and now I hear Estela in the kitchen: “Kenzie?”

“Coming,” I tell her, taking my time. I wish I were at the Jersey shore. I wish none of this had happened.

NINE

We scored the house at the beach six months ago, when it was winter and we owned Stone Harbor. The lady who took us from rental to rental carried a stump of an umbrella against the spitting salt of the sea and kept her eyes all high above us like it was Park Avenue and not the beach, where mostly the only things that moved were the gulls with shiver in their feathers. We were the worst part of that lady’s job—five teens on a graduation budget, who couldn’t care even a little bit about the impression we were making.

In the end we settled for the cheapest house there was, which was gray planked and shag rugged and a crazy three stories high with a hole dug out of its middle. “Like a square doughnut,” Kevin said, and after that, none of us could think of it as being any different. The second and third floors were balconied—rooms on the one side, an overlook view to the leaking space below. “How whacked-out is this?” Ellie asked, plunking down on an old brown couch and sighing her romance sigh; Ellie sighing is convincing. “Our very own castle,” she said. She already knew she was going to Community in the fall. In the winter we were pretending she wasn’t. We were pretending it would always be the same. That nothing would get left behind, no one.

The place smelled like antiseptic sprays. The walls in every bedroom were a different shade of grunged-out pink, and in the bowl of the chandelier was a mistletoe corpse. “We’ll take the doughnut house,” we told the agent, and we did the paperwork right there, in the foyer, with the winter outside the door. Handed over the deposit, each of us paying the cash we had made in our loser after-school jobs, except for Kevin, who caddied at the club and got big-ass tips for the advice he gave to the men who were playing for par. He paid more than the rest of us, and because he was Kevin, we let him.

The agent left us there, outside the locked door of our graduation house. “To the sea,” Tim said, taking the lead for once, spinning an imaginary umbrella in the winter air. We drew our plastic hoods over our heads, and when we got to the beach, we took off our shoes and ran. Ellie got to the water before the rest of us could. She stomped down a wave, and I did, and Andrea did, and the waves were freezing—the whole beach was. When I turned, I saw Tim and Kevin in the distance, walking the rusted pipe that stretched parallel to the shore. “All the way to Cape May,” Tim directed, and now we were running toward Tim and Kevin, our shoes in our hands, clambering up the pipe, catching our balance, marching south.

The wind blew the salt into our skin. Andrea’s hair looked like it might fly. We walked single file, the rust beneath our feet, until the skies grew dusky and Kevin jumped from the pipe and reached his arms toward me. I leapt high and up and down, and I knew he’d catch me, and then we both turned and saw Ellie still high on the pipe, Ellie alone, and Kevin put me down so he could reach for her, and now Tim was taking Andrea into his arms. Then we all stood just inches from the first froth of waves and tossed clamshells until real darkness fell.

I was wearing a turtleneck, jeans, a sweater, a blue plastic cape with a hood. I was shivering cold. “Come on,” Kevin said, and we all five sank into the sand with our bare feet—back north as far as we’d gone south, then up, toward the long, briny grasses and the beat-up planks until we were out on the asphalt, knocking the sand out of the cuffs of our jeans, putting our shoes on only after we had walked the sand off.

We headed into the only open bar we found. There was sawdust on the floor and a jukebox playing. There were old black-and-whites of forgotten Miss Americas on banged-up, splintery walls, and the men wore flannel shirts and tight Levi’s that fit their hips and not their bellies. There were salted almonds and nachos with cheese like peanut butter. There were singers—a couple—with two juiced-up mikes dragged out on the sawdust floor. “Must be the entertainment,” Ellie said, and none of us moved—not Ellie, whose black hair lay in a fringe around her face; not Andrea, who kept pulling the rings off her long fingers; not Tim, who had his big ideas but never was, as Andrea liked to say,
conversational
; he’d be staying close in the fall, going to Drexel. The singers played old stuff, not well. There were triangles of steel on their boot toes.

“They’d lose the high school talent show,” Andrea said. She’d stacked all her rings on her pinky finger, and now she was unstacking them again.

“You need more fingers,” Ellie told her.

“Shut up, gorgeous,” Andrea said, kissing Ellie when she said it, letting Ellie know, You are so loved, and I was watching Ellie and thinking how someday she’d show the rest of us—that she’d make something big out of who she was, which wasn’t smart like maybe we were smart, but wise, which maybe some of us weren’t. We’d say, We knew Ellie had it in her all along, and when they asked us how we knew, we’d only shrug.

“What do you think?” Kevin asked no one in particular, after time went by.

“What do I think?” I answered.

“What do you think they do in summer?” He nodded toward the duo that was singing the songs my father used to play off an old record player in the basement, which he’d made his studio after my mother threw him out of the guest bedroom. I recognized the Beatles. Cat Stevens. Bob Dylan.

“In the summer,” Tim said, surprising us by offering an opinion first, “they get out their magic magnet wands and slurp up other people’s money.”

“Lost watches,” Ellie chimed in.

“Key chains,” Andrea added. She leaned toward Tim, and she kissed him.

“The frames,” I said, “of missing photographs.”

“Dance with me,” Kevin said.

“To this?” I leaned against him and looked across the room, where the bartender was drinking whole almonds from his own hand. I turned and looked at Ellie, Tim, and Andrea, and I refused to think of summer, then refused to think of graduating, because maybe you can stay best friends forever, but after high school there’d be breakage. I said yes, and Kevin took my hand. He was wearing Wranglers and a sweatshirt. I fit my head into his neck and let him keep me. Kev could be a million places at once, he could be ahead of you, competing, but when he decided to be with you, he actually, actually was. It’s four of them at the shore, not me. It’s Tim and Andrea. It’s Ellie and Kevin.

“We should have been careful.” That’s how I told Kevin that Saturday night, when he didn’t call but came over instead—climbed through the window in case my mother was home, which she wasn’t. My mother was catering for some PTA fund-raiser, her biggest gig yet; she’d baked all day. She’d baked, she’d been on the phone, she’d called me to help, and I said I couldn’t, and when she yelled, I didn’t get up.

“All I do for you, Kenzie, and this is what you do for me,” she yelled up the stairs, but I had bigger problems than she could guess, and I wasn’t going to help her.

“Go knock yourself out,” I said, under my breath, and I lay there on my bed and I stared, and the patch through the window went from daylight to pink and then it went gray, then there was Kevin, twisting the sky, breaking through it, saying, “Hey, Kenzie. What is it?” His eyes were light pushing hard against glass. His face was full of the climb.

“It’s us,” I said. “It’s me.”

He looked at me weirdly, sat at the edge of my bed. The bed creaked and the neon face of the clock was its lit-firefly color.

“We should have been careful,” I said.

And then I was crying again, and Kevin put his arms around me, and he held me, held you, but then he was leaning back, he was somewhere forward in his head. “What are you going to do?” he said, and the sun had set, and the bed got quiet.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“The Newhouse School of Public Communications,” he said. “Best school for you in the coun
try.”

“I know.”

“And your mother.”

And Yale was in there too, and Kevin’s future, and everything he had to be on account of everyone else.

“What are your choices?” he asked.

Your
choices.

“When reading Hemingway watch the pronouns,” Ms. Peri said. “The pronouns will tell you the story. It’s I or it’s us. It’s we or it’s them. Stories belong to somebody.” I remembered Ms. Peri in the flash of that moment—
the night sky behind Kevin, the almost-full moon, his arms around me and around you.

“My dad died,” I told Kevin right then.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

“This baby is part of my dad.”

“But your future is your future,” he said.

Maybe I was seven and a half weeks by then. Maybe I’d been lying to myself for a month, pretending that, if I didn’t know, it wasn’t. If I didn’t find out, it couldn’t be, that you weren’t already notches for toes, a tuck in the dark, a half inch.

“A half inch,” Kevin said, “is just this,” showing me the distance with his fingers.

“I know what a half inch is,” I said, and I did. It was the length of the slender slip of wood my dad once dug out of my palm with the burnt tip of a needle. Prised it out, little by little. Dug in, and then it was gone.

TEN

Almost ready,” Estela says, “for Luis.” It’s an hour later, at least, and all this time, she’s been working some pot in her kitchen with a big, bruised spoon, and I’ve been standing in a thin ribbon of courtyard shade, watching the road for a car or for a horse or for something, watching the side of the house for Esteban, who isn’t coming, and I know he’s not coming, but still I’m waiting for something, for someone. Finally, finally, I see it.

“They’re on their way,” I call to Estela.

“Luis?” Estela asks.

“Luis and the others.”

The spoon goes silent. “No others.”

But the dust is kicking high and wide, and I’m certain: there are six of them on the road to here, four men, two women, all of them old, with their shoes tied up around their necks and guitars in their hands. “Four are thin,” I say. “Two are not.” The outside world, coming in.

“¿Qué?”

“The people,” I say. “Down the road.”

“
Santa Maria, madre de Dios
,” Estela says, like it’s the first time she’s actually heard me, and now I hear her throw her spoon into the belly of the pot, and I feel the quake of the earth beneath her stomp. She pounds toward me and stands, smelling like tomato seeds and salt, her hand high on her temples. She mutters something I don’t understand. She curses the storks and the chimneys.

“Who are they?” I ask

She says nothing.

“Estela.”

“¿Qué?”

“Who
are
they?”

But she keeps whatever she knows to herself, turns back toward the kitchen, stomps away.

“Fix the table for eight,” she says.

“But there’s six of them,” I say, “and four of us.”

“For eight,” she says. And that’s all. Estela’s kitchen, Estela’s rules.