Small Damages (5 page)

FOURTEEN

When I open my eyes, she’s at the edge of my bed, a bowl in her hands, and a spoon.

“You didn’t eat,” she says.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Sit up.”

She looks into my eyes, and I look into hers, and she forgives me, for just that second, for sitting in the sun with Esteban. She forgives me, because she’s alone here too—because somehow or another, her party isn’t the party she was planning all this time to throw.

Outside my window, in a puddle of courtyard moon, the Gypsies are singing some song. “Gazpacho,” Estela tells me, fixing the pillow behind me and fitting the bowl in my lap until she turns too, to watch Arcadio on the love seat, his guitar on his knee, his fingers running hard against the strings. Angelita pulls at her dress like it’s an animal she can’t trust; she works a pair of castanets. Joselita bangs at the half barrel, and whatever Bruno sings, Rafael chases with some turned-inside-out note of his own. The song is a black thing with wings.

Come with me,

Come with me,

Tell your mother

I’m your cousin.

I can’t think straight

When I see you on the street.

I can’t think straight,

And I keep on looking at you.

“Eat,” Estela says.

I take a spoonful.

“What did the boy want?”

I shake my head.

“¿Qué?”

“Twenty-one words,” I tell her.

“Phhhaaa,” she says. “Numbers don’t count.”

She smells like soapsuds and orange juice, like dill, sweat, and mint, like jam and like butter that has melted. I take another spoonful of gazpacho, and I think how famous Estela would be if she came to the States and opened a restaurant and served out dishes like this. She could teach my mother a thing or two. She could buy herself a new dress.

“They ate my pork with their hands,” she says, nodding toward the courtyard, where now Joselita and Angelita are dancing with one another, their hands up above their heads, preposterously little hands, a preposterous dance, that thing still hanging from Angelita’s neck like a lettuce-leaf collar.
“Olé,”
Luis says, putting his hand up to his heart. The bed creaks under Estela’s weight. I take another spoonful of soup.

“Because your food is irresistible,” I tell her.

“Irresistible?” she repeats the word. “What is this, irresistible?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. She rubs her eye with her hand.

“You should go out there,” I say, “and join the party.”

“That’s not my party.”

“They’re your guests.”

“Joselita, the horse trader’s daughter,” she says. “Bruno, with the two dead wives. Rafael, the son of a knife sharpener. Arcadio, the lover. Angelita.
Please.
Who can stand Angelita? Look at that woman. Her size.”

She’s not much bigger than you, I think, don’t say it. I wait for her to tell me what she’s really doing here.

“You write back to the boy,” she says. “After you finish your soup.”

“I can’t,” I say.

“Can’t what?”

“Write back.”

“Why not?”

“Twenty-one words,” I say.

“And that’s your reason? He’s the boyfriend, no? He’s the father? You love him?”

“He’s on the other side of the universe.”

“So. You love him, or you don’t love him. Distance doesn’t matter.”

“Is that a fact?”

“It is.
Sí.
It is a fact.”

“What do you know about it, Estela?” I say, and she gives me a long, hard look, like she’s deciding what to tell me, deciding who I am.

“You know Triana?” she says, at last. “You know flood year in Triana? February 1936?” I shake my head, but it doesn’t matter, because now that Estela’s started, she can’t stop—she’s going on about Triana and a Spanish river and the Arabs and that Spanish river—how they dammed it and diked it and made the soil so rich that the birds made milk in their nests.

“Milk in their nests?” I ask.

“You listen,” she says. “The Christians ruined the river. Let it spill and fall and go wherever it wanted. In the summer, the river was nothing but waste. In the winter, it was a stinking stretch of swamp. Triana: the city of floods.”

“The city of floods,” I repeat.

“Triana,” she says, like I haven’t been paying attention. “On the other side of the river from Seville.”

“Got it. Triana.”

She turns around, stares at me, stares back out through the window, goes on. “In February 1936,” she says, “the flooding was worst. The river was swimming in kitchens, washing shirts down the streets, floating shoes in alleyways, sinking trees. We put the chickens on the rooftops and the animals too, and sometimes we’d hear the popping off of pistols, the ‘please somebody help’s:
Get me the butcher. I need a midwife.
But the rains still came, and things washed loose and free—train engines and pier planks, turtles and flower boxes, baskets and horse carts and sometimes the horse, the hooves upside down, the neck broken.”

“Okay,” I say, so she remembers I’m here.

“We were captures on the river,” she goes on. “Captives.” Corrects herself. “Prisoners on top floors, no roofs on our heads. Above heads.”

There were people in boats, she tells me. People tossing loaves of bread to the rooftops, and for a week at least, that is all, Estela tells me, she had to eat—wet bread. Wet bread like a nightmare, only wet bread, thought she’d die of wet, wet bread, and that’s when Luis showed up in his boat. “Young,” she says. “And handsome.

“Wasn’t he handsome?” she asks, but it’s not really a question. It’s Estela remembering.

I look through the window, into the night, at Luis—an old man in a stuffed chair, his hair white, his nose a lump, the cuff of his pants riding high over his ankles. He’s leaning over, toward the foot he taps. There’s air between the buttons of his shirt.

“He threw us candy,” Estela says. “Glitter paper. Butterscotch. You know what time is?”

“What?”

“It’s distance.”

“Maybe.”

“Distance isn’t the end of love.” She touches her heart and closes her eyes. “You write to him, Kenzie. If you love him.”

“Maybe he doesn’t love me anymore. Maybe that’s how it is.”

“Know your own heart first. Be careful.”

“Estela,” I ask, “who are Javier and Adair?”

“You will meet them,” she tells me. “Someday.”

“I want to meet them now,” I say. “I want to know at least one thing.”

“Everything in its time,” she says. But not like she actually means it.

FIFTEEN

All through the night, the Gypsies make music.
Your love is like the wind and mine like a stone that never moves,
they sing, the notes smacking free and the songs shivering and time going by and also distance, until the moonlight dies, and finally I dream: Kevin on a boat in a field of floating bulls. Ellie with a pair of purple wings. No lights in the streets, only glitter candy, and then the drowned things rushing, flooding down the narrow streets.

“What do you want me to do?” Kevin asked the day before I was leaving. “What are you asking?”

“Help me through it. Come to Spain.”

“Come to
Spain
? I can’t. You know I can’t do that.”

“Because you won’t tell anyone.”

“Because there was another way.”

“Because you are embarrassed.”

“Because the baby is this big,” he shows me a half inch between his fingers. “Because you don’t have to do this.”

“I’m just asking you to come with me. Please.” He was sitting on the edge of my bed, watching me, like we hadn’t been best friends forever, like he hadn’t touched me like nobody ever had touched me, like we had not awakened one morning, with each other. I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror across the room—the mascara streaming down my face, his green eyes strange and hollow.

“You want me to come to Spain, and watch the baby growing bigger, and watch you have the baby, and then come home. That’s what you want.”

“That’s my life, Kevin. Right now. That’s what it is. Why shouldn’t it also be yours?”

“I can’t,” he said. “I just can’t.”

Everything you do now is something you do for or to another,
the doctor told me later that same day, when it was me alone in the examination room, my feet up in the stirrups, my third appointment.
You are living for two. Be careful.

And that’s it. That’s it today; I can’t stand it. I can’t stand being here, on my own, invisible but also growing larger. I stumble from bed and shower with the cold water I can’t get used to—let the cold, cold water burn. I throw on a dress, head down the hall, cut through the courtyard, and it’s like I’m not here, like I’m already gone, like I will be gone four months from now. She was here and then she wasn’t. Pretend it never happened. Under the tiled arch, down the chalk of road, I walk. The bulls on their hills are black pepper. The cacti are brush. Distance is distance, and I keep walking, east, toward Seville, and the sun rises, it burns, and all I want is to be outside of my own head, outside of this, someplace that isn’t me, but all I can think about, still, is Kevin, and how he had all the betting people betting on him. The lacrosse scout for the summer league. The Ivies with their scholarship money. The kids who actually vote for student council.

It’s sunflowers in the fields instead of bulls. It’s houses nobody lives in, horses nobody rides, a man on a mule trotting by. It’s abandoned wells and steam on the horizon, a cat crossing the road, and I can’t get enough distance.

Twenty-one words, and a bunch of
we
’s, like I’m on some holiday. Like all I need out here in the desert of Spain is a lame group hug from the shore.

Kenzie’s gone to Spain. It’s cool. She’s learning how to cook.

SIXTEEN

I’m halfway to nowhere by the time Miguel finds me. I hear Gloria and look up from where I’m sitting along the side of the road, and there she is, a toy car on a dusty road, braking. Miguel swerves to a stop, and Gloria’s back wheels spin.

“Where,” he demands, “are you thinking you are going?” He leaves Gloria parked in the middle of the road. Climbs out and walks, angry, toward me, and I realize I’ve been crying and don’t want him to see.

“Get in,” he says, offering his arm so that I can stand, taking his time, because he is a gentleman first, a Spanish prince to Estela’s queen.

He opens my door and slams it behind me. He folds himself in on his side and sits, going nowhere, staring out onto the road. “We have been looking,” he tells me, “all of the morning, we are. Angelita and Estela and Luis. Esteban. Everyone looking.”

“I’m sorry.” I lean my head against Gloria’s window, close my eyes.

“And for what?” He lifts his hand to the heat, to the day, to the fields, to the road. He looks at me with his one good eye, pulls the clutch, and Gloria starts rolling.

“I needed to get away,” I say, knowing how stupid it sounds, how messy I must seem. “From me, I mean. Away from me.”

“And you are thinking that is a possible?”

“I don’t know. I just—”

“I been promised your mother,” he says. “And Javier and Adair.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We are taking care of you so you are taking care of baby. Four more months,
sí?
Then it is over.”

“But it won’t be,” I say. “It won’t be. I will always be here. Some part of me. Here and not here. Like, forever.”

I shake my head, push away my tears, feel you inside me, feel Miguel watching me from his one eye, and the road keeps blurring by, until finally Miguel stops at a gas station to make a call.

“How are you feeling?” he asks me.

“I’m fine.”

“You are tell the truth?”

“Miguel,” I say, “I’m fine.”

“Then stay here,” he tells me, a stern look on his face, and when he returns, he keeps driving, in silence. East, he drives east. Away from Los Nietos.

“Where are we going?” I finally ask him.

He drives on and drives on, a new kind of silence.

“Puerto de Sevilla,” Miguel says, after a long time. “Carmona.” He brakes to a stop alongside a ruined fortress and parks. I open my door and slam it behind me. I look up at the arch, and then through it.

“This way,” he says, and I follow in his shadow, and now he turns to check on me.

“I’m right here,” I say. “Behind you.”

He doesn’t smile.

The houses are running together. There’s the flicker of morning TV, the bottoms of pots hitting stoves, a game of marbles on a stoop. It’s an uphill place, then downhill. It folds and bends. It’s white like someone tipped a can of bleach, like the sun has destroyed all other colors, and then it is the color of concrete or of lemons or of sky; it’s ochre brick in fly-away towers—everything skinny, all of it bright. Miguel walks the same speed no matter which direction the hills are falling—past stone lions, fountains, wood doors, hinges, until we reach a bar with a thick glass door and an old woman with a hill-shaped nose opens the door.

“Wait here,” Miguel tells me. “Don’t move.” I don’t. He stands just within the door, dials into a pay phone, and I hear him talking to Estela now, saying things I don’t understand in Spanish. Down the hill, around the bend, comes a priest with an armful of kittens, their pink tongues like petals in their mouths. Across the way sits a woman on a stool, a pincushion bracelet on her wrist and a fringe of tapestry on her lap, her needle going in and out of two white doves.

Finally the door opens and Miguel’s back in the sun, and we’re walking through the thin, white streets, which is like walking between sheets hung up to dry, the white walls making the cobblestoned streets blue.

“Estela is not happy,” he says.

“Did you tell her I’m sorry?”

“You will be telling her,” he says, “when we get home.”

Home.

He can’t think that I think this is home.

Now he puts his hand out, tells me to step to the side. He points to the sky, and I hear what he hears—a church bell song and also a flamenco song—and suddenly I’m wondering what would have happened if I had had a plan this morning, had not woken up and cold showered and started walking on my way to who knows where. Think ahead, Kevin always said, but I don’t know how to think anymore, or what to think about, and now, from around the bend come a bride and a groom and a party, and suddenly I am thinking about you—how I wish you could see this, wish I could someday tell you how, at the end of the procession, there was a pig and after that pig there were four boys chasing it straight through the streets.

Your eyes are on the sides of your head, and then they move forward. They are black seeds, and then they blink. I can’t remember if it’s happened already. You’re not some tiny half inch anymore. You’re a baby, my baby, but you won’t be. You aren’t. You are Javier and Adair’s, and I know nothing—they’re telling me nothing—about them.

“I have something for to show you,” Miguel says, when the crowd is gone and the pig is lost and we can still hear the holler of boys. He takes me around to the other side of town. “The Necropolis,” he says. It’s a low hill relaxed beneath the shade of cypress trees. We walk between thin slabs of stone walls and down into a world carved out of sand, a world of Roman ruins.

“Two hundred tombs,” Miguel says, and he says, “Go and see.” He stays where he is. I walk alone through walls that seem carved out of earth toward rooms that definitely are, and everything is timeless, everything is smooth, everything is like it must have always been. Gone is gone; it lasts forever.

I find Miguel a long time later, in a room of urns. The roof is its sky. The sun is blazing.

“Who will be with me when my baby is born?” I asked my mother.

“Miguel will make arrangements,” she said.

“What will happen after that?”

“You’ll go to Newhouse, second semester. You’ll say that you’ve been overseas.”

No one will know about you. That was my mother’s point. And you will not know about me. But Miguel will know, and he’s brought me here, where vanishing seems to be the point that history makes.