Small Damages (6 page)

SEVENTEEN

Miguel drives, and the road dust flies. My hair knots, and Miguel says, “So you have some possibilities as a cooking?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t actually think so.”

“Estela is saying you have the possibilities.”

“Funny,” I say.

He doesn’t smile.

I wonder what else they say, when they’re speaking of me. How often they do. When. I wonder if Miguel has any idea how it felt when I understood that I wasn’t going to the shore—that my mother had packed my things, bought pesetas, given me no choice, or a wrong one, that Kevin himself wasn’t going to fight for my sake, or live this thing with me. “No one is to know,” my mother said. “Something came up,” I told the others. “A baby is a baby,” is what I told Kevin, over and over.
Come with me.

The road splits into two. Miguel steers Gloria down the skinnier half, where the faces of the sunflowers are turned the other way and another rutted dirt road falls off the main road, travels to nothing.

“Etch A Sketch,” Kevin used to say, when he wanted a change of view, a change of scene, a change of conversation. “Etch A Sketch, Etch A Sketch.” Ellie said it too.

“Why did you take me to the Necropolis?” I finally ask Miguel.

“Because of the peaceful there.”

“Because of the peaceful?”

“Sí.”

I wait, but he says nothing more, and the road keeps going on, and I wonder how Miguel can possibly think that I can find peaceful anywhere, especially there, among dead people.

“That’s why you took me to Carmona?”

“
Sí.
So you would stop crying. For the peaceful.”

I don’t actually believe it, but I guess I should, I guess I should be grateful that he’s trying. At least he’s trying.

“What have you done?” Those were the words my mother spoke when she got it into her head at last that things weren’t right, that I wasn’t. When she heard me in the bathroom, sick. When she came upstairs to ask. I was lying on the tile floor beside the upstairs toilet, and I looked up. She was standing there, above me, her hair fringing around her face, and her eyelids red the way her eyelids get when anger spits its way through.

“Answer me.”

“It just happened,” I said. Everything was swimming—the bulb above her head was swimming, and the white floor was the white wall was the sink, which looked gigantic. I closed my eyes and tried to stop the room from spinning. She stood up there, staring down.

“You, Kenzie.
You?”

I opened my eyes, and I closed them.

“I raised you different.”

“It just happened.”

“It didn’t just happen.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Who else knows?”

“No one.”

“No one?”

“Kevin. Kevin knows.”

She was wearing gray, and the gray looked like storm. She was up there, not reaching down, and she looked like a giant in a kid’s book I’d read. I tried to remember which kid’s book.

“I’m calling Dr. Sam. We’re going to fix this.”

“Fix it?” I said, and suddenly I was getting sick again, knuckles on the toilet, knees on the floor, my hair falling down into my face, and I was crying too, because it hurts so bad when you’re sick like that and no one will help you.

“I won’t have it,” she said.

“Dad’s not here,” I said, “and you can’t make me.”

“What will people
think
?” she moaned.

“Think of you, Mom, or of me?” I looked up at her, and then I was sick again, and then all I could see, on the back of my eyes, because I was closing my eyes, was the red of her lids and the storm of her dress and the monster in that kid’s book, whichever kid’s book it was, and I knew she was remembering the days after my father’s dying, when I could not make the black howl go silent, when I didn’t say, “You meant the world to Dad.” Couldn’t say, “He knew you loved him.” The black just stayed black, and she liked me less, and I felt it, and I couldn’t fix it, and maybe she stopped loving me then, or maybe she’d never really loved me, but I was getting sick and she wouldn’t help me, and in the end, she said, it was Seville or nothing, and I chose Seville.

I chose Seville, because in my head I could see you; you were already a film that was playing. Sometimes Fate takes people down before they’re close to ready. I’m not Fate. I couldn’t do that. Call me an idiot. Call me selfish. A nothing half inch. But you weren’t that to me.

“Miguel,” I ask, “have you always lived here?”

“
Sí,
” he says. “This is my country.”

He takes both hands off the wheel to point out the long road ahead. To show me the green fields, the wells.

“When are they taking your best bulls away?” I ask.

“Soon,” he says. “When they are ready.”

EIGHTEEN

Estela acts like I’m a whole year late to somewhere I promised to be yesterday. She hands me a bowl, motions with her thumb, and keeps her shoulders up, as if to protect herself from the unexplainability of me.

“Artichokes,” she says.

“Right.”

She pulls out the biggest one, snaps off its head, and yanks off the leaves. “This is the way,” she says, and I do what she asks, to every last artichoke in the bowl. I snap and I yank and I set aside, I separate. When I’m done, I clear the counter, wipe my hands. Estela gives me the eye under the bridge of an eyebrow, then throws the naked artichoke flesh onto some heat.

“Where did you think,” she says now, “that you were going?”

“I was taking a walk.”

“You were taking a walk.” Her voice is full of sneer. “Down those roads. In the sun.”

“I would have come back,” I say, though I’m not exactly sure that I believe this.

“Look at yourself,” Estela says.

I stare at Estela.

“You are having a baby.”

“I know what I’m having.”

“You are American.”

“I know that, too.”

“You could have been lost out there. You could have.”

“Everything’s fine,” I say. “And I’m sorry.” She presses her big fist to her big chest—presses hard. She bites at her lips and opens her mouth and makes like she’s about to speak, then stops.

“Start on the pears,” she finally says.

“The pears, Estela?”

“
Peras al horno.”

She sighs an enormous sigh. She tells me to wash the pears and peel them. To halve them, thumb out their cores, keep them fresh with orange juice. She fits her knife to my hand, her one thin knife, and shows me what she wants. I have trouble near the stem, but now that trouble’s done and the pear snaps into two parts, clean.

“Pay attention.”

“I’m sorry, Estela. I said I’m sorry.”

“I looked everywhere. I thought . . .” She doesn’t tell me what she thought. And also: sorry doesn’t count.

She is wearing a green dress. She has a flower in her hair. She has polished up her shoes and tied her apron strings. She steals the skinned pear from my hand and demonstrates expert slicing. “I have eight pears,” she says. “Eight. Do it right.” I take the other half pear, press my thumb into its core, and trowel out the seeds. Estela watches and she doesn’t swear. I choose another pear from the basket.

“Three hours,” she says. “Three hours to Luis’s party.”

“Another party?”

“Until it is right, there is a party.”

That’s ridiculous, I think. But I don’t say it. It’s not my house, it’s not my rules, and Estela won’t forgive me. There are three hours to eight o’clock, which is the start of night, which is another distance, which isn’t the end of love, at least according to Estela.

“You are here,” she says, “for a reason.”

“I know, Estela.”

“You don’t go missing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re having a baby.”

“I know. You said.”

“You were supposed to be smart.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“Phhhaaa.” She’s slicing tomatoes and tossing the seeds. She’s sharpening two knives on the back of each other and staring at me over the knife war like she’s never going to trust another word I say.

“I want to meet Javier and Adair,” I say.

“You will.”

“Are they coming to the party?”

“Why would they be coming to the party?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I thought—”

“Langostinos,” she says, shoving a bowl of spiny-looking prawns under my nose.

“Langowhat?” I ask.

She shakes her head like I’m a hopeless case and starts in on an onion—chopping and chopping until she’s leaking fat tears.

“How can you stand it?” I ask.

“Stand what?”

Stand
this,
I think—the loneliness, the distance, the dust, the heat, the way nobody talks to one another, the way Esteban’s out there and Estela’s in here and Luis is who knows where and Miguel’s in love with bulls he sends to slaughter.

“The onion,” I say. “How can you stand the onion?”

She looks at me like she can’t decide whether I deserve an answer to my question. She walks away, down the hall; I hear her pacing. When she comes back, she stands in the threshold and stares. “I learned onions in Madrid,” she finally says.

I find a knife and a place beside her at the cutting board. She hands me a tomato. I sink the knife in.

“Onions in Madrid,” I repeat. “Is there more to this story?”

“There is always more to a story, Kenzie.”

“So?”

“So don’t leave here again. Don’t make me worry.”

I look at her and I smile, and I mean it. “Tell me about Madrid,” I say. “Tell me something so I don’t go crazy.”

“All right,” she says, fixing the knife in my hand, rinsing another tomato, showing me how the knife goes in and comes out clean, no splatter, no bruising. “It was my parents’ bar. They made tapas for the people. The socialists, anarchists, liberals, peasants, Basques, Catalans, Republicans; my mama and papa fed them all. It was 1931. There was no war yet.”

“Okay,” I say. “Tell me more?”

“I had a brother. He was six, and I was ten.”

“You had a brother?”

“That’s how I met Luis.”

I look up at her, because I’m completely confused. She hands me two more tomatoes. I rinse them off. I sink the blade. I wait, but it seems that’s the end of her story.

“And?” I ask, just to make sure.

“And what?”

“How did you meet Luis?”

She whacks at a pepper. She scoops out the seeds. She throws the pepper’s guts into a brown sack on the floor. She sighs a big sigh and stops everything at once, as if she can’t work and tell a full story at the same time.

“It was May, and my brother and I were out walking. The street exploded and the crowds went crazy and the convents were burning and my brother ran, and I lost him. Then I met Luis.”

“You met Luis because you lost your brother?”

“Because he found my brother. Because he brought him home. Because my mother made her best paella, with my best onions, and Luis stayed the night, and we were talking.”

I sink the blade again, into the fourth tomato. Maybe, I think, it’s best not to ask questions. Maybe the answers give you headaches.

“Luis was Don Quixote,” she says, like she can start her story over. “Before the war. When we were free.”

“Don Quixote,” I repeat. Estela puts her hand on my wrist to stop the blade from sinking. She lifts my wrist to a new angle.

“Your mama, she called again,” she tells me now.

“What does she want?”

“To speak to you.”

“I’m not talking to my mother.”

“Are you writing back to the boy?”

I stare at her.

“The boy? The father?”

I say nothing.

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

“Are we done?”

“You’re done. For now.”

“You’re not going to tell me anything more about Don Quixote? That’s it? That’s your story?”

“It’s enough for now.”

“Can I go?”

“You can’t go far.”

“
Sí,
Estela.”

“I’m watching, Kenzie.”

I know you’re watching, I think, and turn the corner on the kitchen, make my way down the hall. Down the hall, past the room, through the shadows, which steal things and hide things and keep shifting. In the room of bull heads, something moves. Throws itself out, like a cape.

“Kenzie,” I hear my name in a Gypsy Spanish.

“
Sí,
Angelita?”

The old Gypsy has sunk her weight into the velvet couch. She wears a flower at her ear, a paper flower. The white at the part of her black-dyed hair is an inch at least, maybe two inches.

They were worried, she tells me in her strange Spanish.

I’m sorry, Angelita.

She takes the flower away from her ear, spins it between her fingers, listens to the
whack whack
sound it makes. I was the one, she says, who told the others you’d gone walking. I saw you leave. You didn’t come back. I was the one who told Estela,
Get Miguel
. She points, and all the flesh of her massive upper arm falls like a ridged curtain from her bone. Her elbow crinkles. She spins the flower. Now she pulls a blue silk bag from the bosom of her dress, hands it to me, asks me to untie the strings.

Angelita? I ask. Because inside the bag is a strange, wispy thing. A taxidermist’s thing. A fan of soft black hair.

Tail of a cat, she explains. The tip. For the eyes, when they are weary. She closes her hand and pounds it to her heart. She staggers up from the couch and comes toward me.

For you, she tells me, dangling the bag from its strings on my wrist.

A cat’s tail for me? I say.

Only the tip, she says. She smells of sweat and dust and everyday things. She smells of herbs I haven’t found in Estela’s kitchen.

I don’t understand, I tell her.

Shhhh, she says, touching her wrinkled finger to my lip. She walks past me, stirring the wasps overhead. She leaves me alone in the cave of the house, and now I’m walking down the hall, to the back door, into Esteban’s courtyard with a bag of cat tail tip hanging from my wrist. The white horse is gone, Esteban too.

NINETEEN

Where Esteban’s courtyard ends there’s sky, and under the sky there’s a scrubland of bushes, and in the middle of the bushes there’s an old cork tree. Near the cork tree is a pickup truck that nobody’s used in maybe forever. Beside the pickup there’s an orange tree. Built into that tree is a house.

“Belonging to no one,” Estela had said, my second day here, when we were walking by it. “Empty.” I kick off my shoes and start to climb, the silk bag still dripping from my wrist—you still here with me, the rest of Los Nietos vanished. I didn’t grow up with this much space. I don’t know how to live in it.

The sky—I understand this much—is free. I see Miguel’s bulls out in the fields, the six of them, whichever six have been chosen. I see his bullring down the hill. It’s peaceful, Miguel said, among the vanished. But when I remember my mother in the days after the funeral, I don’t remember peaceful. I remember my mother sitting in my father’s chair, my mother staring. Past the prayer plants with the flopped leaves, through the window, as if the arms of that chair were my father’s arms, as if a chair can be shaped like forgiveness. She held his last book of proofs on her lap. His final photographic series, incomplete.

Every day for weeks I’d come home from school, and I’d find her in that chair with those proofs, looking out. Some saltines on a plate on the table beside her, a few dried-up squares of cheese. And then one day she wasn’t home, and the book of proofs was gone. I toasted two English muffins and knifed them thick with peanut butter. I went upstairs, lay on my bed, called Ellie, called Andrea, called Kevin, called Tim—even Tim, for a gigantic thirty seconds. It was nine o’clock before I heard my mother’s key in the front door. Nine thirty before she called my name.

“Kenzie?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m home.”

“Right.”

“Did you eat?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are there leftovers?”

“There’s peanut butter,” I said. “And a knife.”

I was making shadows with my hands in the lamplight. I was waiting to find out if she would make the big long climb to come upstairs to see how her daughter was. The half orphan. Her only child. I was waiting, and another half hour went by, and I was almost asleep when she knocked. I’d turned off my lamp, and so when she opened the door, she was lit by the light in the hall. She was wearing a suit. She had knotted her hair.

“Kenzie?”

“Yeah?”

“We’re going to be all right.”

I said nothing.

“I’m starting a business.”

Nothing.

“Kenzie.”

“What?”

“Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“If you want me to know, you should tell me.”

“Carlina’s Catering. I’m starting small. I got a loan from the bank.”

I said nothing. I turned over in bed.

“What do you think?” she finally asked. I could hear the squirm of her. I could tell that she wanted something big.

“Dad just died, and you’re throwing parties,” I said.

“Jesus, Kenzie. I’m not
throwing
parties. I’m
orchestrating
them. It’s a
business
.”

I could see her, and I knew she couldn’t see me. I could see her face fold and change, and I could have said a million things, but I didn’t say one of them. I figured it was what she deserved. My silence for her silence. My not caring for her not caring.

“Carlina’s Catering,” I said. “Congratulations.” Flat words that made her squirm worse. She undid her hair, kicked off her shoes. I saw her eyes and the hurt that I did, but I didn’t take it back; I didn’t know how, and I don’t know how to live just now, where every inch of sky is blue. From down the road, a storm rumbles in. It’s Esteban, I realize, on Tierra’s back, riding the horse without a saddle. The bulls don’t care, don’t lift their heads from the scruff. The stork stays put. At the edge of the fence, near the gate, the chase breaks. Tierra goes from speed to trot, enters the gate without fussing. She shudders and quits. Esteban jumps to the ground. The dust goes up, and the horse hooves the earth, and all this time, nobody sees me.

From within Esteban’s room, the birds start to sing, like they’ve been saving their voices right till now. Esteban has a private talk with his horse, heads off for the stall, and lets Tierra walk a small circle in the courtyard until he returns with the end of a hose in one hand and a rag over one shoulder, a bucket filled with brushes and shampoos. He streams water over Tierra’s back, sudses her neck, works the soap in hard circles. When he looks up, I’m there.

“
Buenas tardes,
” I say.

He looks straight through me. He walks Tierra into her stall—talks her in. He shuts the door and latches it and turns back, and I don’t move, and now Esteban watches me like I’m supposed to know what to say, or what to do, but I don’t. Tierra whinnies from her stall and shakes her head. I don’t think she likes me.

Where did you go? I finally ask him.

To the forest, he says, pointing with his chin. Where did
you
go?

That way. I point beyond us, to nowhere, to some hazy somewhere, east.

Not so great, he says. You going missing. You can’t do that to Estela, especially. You can’t get lost. She panics.

It wasn’t about her.

It doesn’t matter.

Maybe not, I say.

He pushes his hair out of his face, and it curls in its own directions, does what it wants.

What’s in the forest? I ask.

Trees, he says. Birds. Shade.

Do you go a lot?

I go sometimes.

Would you ever take me?

What for? he asks.

I don’t know. So I can see it?

He looks at me, then at Tierra.

A lot of that is up to her, he says. If she likes you, then she’ll take you. He turns and leaves me standing with nothing but the sun and the dying pool where the water ran the heat off Tierra’s flesh.

Esteban? I call. He’s already halfway to his room—to the birds, to the tree, to the bed, to leaving me feeling stupid.

“¿Sí?”

I’m sorry. About this morning.

It’s not Estela’s fault, he says, that you’re here. Or Miguel’s either.

I want to meet Javier and Adair, I say.

You will, he says. Someday.

Which means he’s in on it. He knows my story. He knows more about next than I do.

Talk to me,
I want to say.
Don’t leave me feeling stupid.
But he’s talking to his birds instead. He’s leaving me to nothing.