by Beth Kephart
“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.
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.
“Rig
ht.”
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.