by Beth Kephart
She murders another orange. Citrus rains. She murders another, swipes the halves into a bowl. She stretches for a bottle on the shelf above her head. Pours some sherry into a glass. Stands there drinking, her back to me, and that’s when I notice her feet. Notice that she’s changed her shoes into something silly and tight.
“This was supposed to be a party,” I say. “A party for Luis.”
“Mind your own business.”
“A party you’re throwing.”
“Well.”
“There are oranges enough.”
“I don’t need you are counting.”
“Estela.”
“¿Qué?” She swallows more sherry. Swats at some dust in the air. This kitchen, in this heat, is too small for two. I step outside, into the flat sun of the courtyard. Estela calls me back.
“Your mother,” she tells me, “she is called for you.”
“On the phone?”
“How else?”
“Nice,” I say, sarcastic.
“Miguel says to her you were sleeping. You will call her back.”
“Not happening,” I say.
“¿Qué?”
“Not calling her back.”
She gives me a long, funny look.
“Kenzie, the American girl,” she says.
TWELVE
All afternoon, the Gypsies talk and Estela doesn’t budge, and the sun pours down and then, when I look back toward the kitchen, I see that Estela’s gone.
Miguel has been translating: Luis the uncle, Luis born on the banks of the Guadalquivir, Luis, whose mother rolled cigars and died, Luis the orphan.
“Éste fue el comienzo de la guerra,” the one named Rafael says.
“Éste fue el comienzo,” says Angelita of the lettuce-leaf necklace, “de Don Quijote.”
I have no idea what they are talking about. I can’t pretend that I care. There are four doors leading from the courtyard in. I push back from the beat-up chair and make my way to the closest one, turn the knob, and stand in the cool of the house. There’s the smell of locked-up dust and bull hair and the floated-in sour sweet of the horse hay outside, and up above my head a hive of wasps dangles like a crepe chandelier—all of it strange and not mine. I cut through the hall, to the door that leads to the other courtyard, where Esteban is sitting in the sun with his back against a stall. Bella’s on one shoulder, full of some song. There’s an empty plate on the ground.
I step into the flat pan of Esteban’s sun. He pushes back his hat and takes me in, like he has never seen me before, like I’m one more thing needing care. I cut the dust toward him, slowly. I bite the thin inside skin of my cheek.
“Good afternoon,” I say, in English.
“Buenas tardes.”
Say something else, I stand here thinking. But he doesn’t. He sits there, watching me. Finally I ask him what he’s doing, and he says that he’s just sitting.
Do you mind? I ask. Does he mind, I mean, if I sit with him, but it’s like he can’t decide, or it’s too hard to decide. Now he moves the empty plate to the space to his right, and shrugs. I settle in beside him, my back against the stall and my face in the sun. Bella keeps singing, and after a while, Esteban lifts him from his shoulder with two fingers.
He’s happy today, Esteban says, fitting the bird into the palm of my hand. Bella doesn’t weigh a thing. He’s only feathers and song, and now even the song stops and far away, in the main courtyard, there is the sound of guitars, of Gypsies singing.
Did you build the tree? I ask.
Esteban nods.
Is it a nice tree? Bella flits and floats in my hand.
Ask Bella, he says. He’ll tell you.
I don’t speak bird, I say, but the phrase must not translate. Esteban stares at me strangely, then turns his face toward the sun. Why are you like this? I want to ask him. What is it that I’ve done? And now I think what I can’t help but think, I’m not letting your stupid silence win.
Did you know they were coming? I ask. The Gypsies, I mean.
He doesn’t answer.
Do you know Luis well?
Of course.
Do you know why Estela hates the Gypsies?
Estela has her reasons, he says.
Behind us Tierra, the speckled mare, lets loose with a whinny. Antonio, the copper Thoroughbred, frustrates a fly with his tail. From the dark of Esteban’s room I hear Limón stirring, and now Bella twists his head in Limón’s direction, makes like he might fly.
Limón doesn’t like the sun, Esteban says, like that explains everything.
Does it ever rain? I ask.
Sometimes.
I wait for him to tell me something about the size of rain in Spain, about Luis and the Gypsies, about Estela, about the tree he built out of dead twigs for the bird who won’t come out into the sun, but he stops right there. That’s his story. Sometimes.
Why don’t you eat with us? I ask him now.
I like eating alone.
But it’s Luis’s birthday.
It always is.
It’s always Luis’s birthday?
“Sí,” he says. That’s it.
You’re impossible, I tell him.
He doesn’t say he isn’t.
He pushes the hat forward on his head and hides in its shade. I close my eyes against the blare of the sun. I feel him looking at me, but when I turn, he moves his eyes away. The horses don’t like the rain, he says now, and that’s all he says, and we sit there, and the Gypsy song rises over the long wing of the house. Bella opens and closes his wings, and stays. I feel the sickness of the sun settling in. From somewhere deep inside the house, I hear Estela calling my name, and now I risk my shame to keep sitting here; I ask him one more question.
Have you always lived here?
No, he says slowly. I haven’t.
Where did you live before this?
With my mother, he says. And my father. He shakes his head like it’s a too-long story, like I couldn’t understand even if he had the time. Please, I want to say. Just tell me, but now the cortijo door cranks open, and Estela pushes through, and Bella leaves my hand for Esteban’s. Half flies, half hops, closes his wings.
“Something came for you,” Estela tells me, giving me a look that knocks so hard against me that I feel my muscles flinch.
She stuffs her hand into her apron pocket and fishes out a letter.
“My mother?” I ask.
“Not your mother,” she says. “The boy. Your boy.” She looks from me to Esteban and punches her hands into her hips.
THIRTEEN
It’s twenty-one words. One letter, twenty-one words, a group effort. We look, we wish, we all, we miss. Not we are coming for you. Not, I am.
“Watch the pronouns,” Ms. Peri says.
Love, Kev.
I lie on my back on my bed looking up, counting the cracks in the ceiling, taking little shallow breaths, because if I don’t, I’ll die, I’ll disappear. Kevin and Ellie and Andrea and Tim are in Stone Harbor, pulling peanut butter sandwiches from the Kmart cooler, celery sticks for Ellie, and I’m here, with you, in a strange place with strangers, where the calendar that hangs in Miguel’s old library says it’s the middle of July, and where all I can think of is the high school dance, when I was doing a bang-up job of pretending that I wasn’t late. The dance was the five of us together in the clothes we’d left our houses in—Andrea in ridiculous yellow, me in mandarin, Ellie in a pink that clung, like she was some kind of early-summer flower. The guys wore suits, not tuxes, and ties bright as birds, and the whole thing was Ellie’s idea, it was Ellie saying, “Kenzie’s dad would want it for Kenzie. He’d put us in a photograph and frame us.”
Five of us in the picture.
Six.
One vein going in. Two arteries coming out.
We’d made a pact. We’d climbed into Kevin’s car, looking like the sky that had just that second lost its sun, and of course the dance was a bust. It was a 1960s convention center—a big chunk of conc
rete crashed down on an asphalt wilderness, little twinkle lights at the door when we went in. “Oh, look at this,” Ellie said, standing at the entrance, looking at a sign that read WELCOME SHIPLEY. She was squinting at the sign because she rarely wore her glasses, because when she did, she said, people accused her of being smart. Ellie’s great-grandfather was Mongolian, and when she squinted, you could see it—the faraway quality around the edges of her eyes. The enviable loveliness of her special single difference. Ellie was the kind of person you’d never confuse with another soul.
We walked the hall, through a tunnel of balloons. Dr. Kane, our principal, met us, in the brown-crossed-with-navy-plaid jacket that he wears most days of the week. It was a deejay dance. It was a long room with a bronzed mirrored wall that made us look like we were twice who we were. After a while, we started to dance. Kev and me, and Andrea and Tim, then all of us together because Ellie was ours, she belonged to us, and besides, Ellie made like being single was the coolest thing there was.
“And who’s the freest of them all?” she’d say.
We got away as fast as we could, Kev driving on a narrow, no-margin road, until he turned and we were on a bracelet of road that curved to the right and valleyed down to the left and that is where we found the deer—eight of them at least, staring us down with the gold disks that they had just then for eyes. Kevin braked to a stop and let them pass. We were in country territory now. Out near an old chicken coop and a small stone bridge and a house that was falling down beside a blooming apple orchard. The road dipped and then it went up, steep, and finally Kevin slowed and parked the car by the side of the road.
“This is it,” he said, and I turned and looked at him, because it was dark out there—it was land that dipped down and away, beyond the road—but it was land, most of all that Kevin knew that we didn’t. “I’m thinking bare feet,” Ellie said, tossing her shoes to the back of the car. She opened the door and got out. Tim and Andrea followed, hurling their own shoes behind them so that later they’d need the dawn to find them. It was early March, not late March, and it was cold.
Kevin led. We followed. Hands on hands because it was dark and there was only a three-quarter moon to guide us, and clouds cutting the light. The earth went down; it was cold. I could feel the hem of my dress growing moist, could feel it growing green, and now the earth settled down and went flat, and over in the west, there was a puddle of gleam, as if the moon had fallen to the ground. It was a mill house, sunk and bunkered. It was old and long abandoned. A big chunk of birch plunged through the planked door of the mill house at some ferocious angle.
There was no going through that door, so they lifted us up, through the empty window frames. Tim climbed in first. Then Andrea got lowered. I went second. Next was Ellie and Kevin. Now the earth was old timber and moss and mud, and there was a pile of beer cans where there’d been people before us, and a book someone had left; it was too dark to see which one. Kevin took off his jacket and spread it across the ground, Tim, too, and it was like the place was upholstered. We settled into a circle, almost. Ellie asked if there were bats.
“Bats?” Kevin said.
“They have wings,” Ellie said. “They hang upside down. They shit guano.”
Nobody spoke after that. We all just sat, waiting and listening through the quiet of that night, to the sounds beyond the mill house. The fox, I thought. Or an owl on the prowl.
“So this is it,” Andrea said at last. “The big class dance.”
“This is it,” Kevin said.
“What happens next?” Ellie asked, and all I knew was that I’d survived the biggest losing—that my dad was dead and I was still alive. That’s what I thought, anyway, except that I was weeks late, and it’s not like worse things can happen than your dad passing away. It’s just that other things can happen too. You can end up at Los Nietos in a room that isn’t yours, holding your boyfriend’s twenty-one words in your hand. You can end up wishing that time were a bendable thing, that you could take it back, do some of it differently.
“You let Kevin go,” my mother said to me. “Look what good he’s done to you.” My mother, the greatest hypocrite in the land. My mother: she loved Kevin. I take little breaths. I count the cracks.
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.
“Y
ou 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.