by Beth Kephart
“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.
TWENTY
The night has come in more black than blue; I must have slept. I hear my name, hear boots against planks. I push myself up to sitting and feel the rough wood of near splinters on my hands.
Estela sent me, Esteban says, leaning in with a plate, a knife, a fork, so that a smell steams up: mango and crunch. When he stands again, his head scrapes the sky. He looks around at the darkened world, then back toward his courtyard, to the house.
You missed the party, he says.
Oh, I say. God.
Estela thought you left again. I told her I’d seen you in the tree house.
So she sent you here?
She actually trusts me.
His teeth are stars burning. The end of the day shows in his face. The beginning of a beard. The grind of dust. He just stands there looking out, and I’m supposed to sit here eating, and it feels odd with him so high up like that—so removed and far away, still near.
Are you staying? I ask him. Or going?
He doesn’t answer.
Stay? I ask.
It’s like he can’t decide. Like all he wants to do is look out from high up, to see his world from here, the abandoned lookout of a tree. Finally he slides his back against a bracing of a branch and sits with his knees up to his chin. He pulls at the threads in the seam of his jeans. He watches me eat. I hear myself swallow.
I used to come here all the time, he says. The beginning of my life at Los Nietos.
When was that?
He tilts his head and watches the stars. He lets the night fill in between us. Gypsy song rises on the other side of the house, and probably the bulls have already drifted into dreaming, thinking they’re safe, that they’ll always live here. Home. That they’ll dance for Miguel in that jeep, then sleep beneath the scrawny shade of the bony olive trees.
My mother died, Esteban finally says, when I was five.
I didn’t know.
A year later, my father was dead. He was a matador, distracted in the ring. Miguel is my godfather. He brought me here. I lived in the room where you are living, but mostly I lived in this tree h
ouse. I thought climbing brought me closer to them. I thought as long as they could see me, I’d be all right. I was a kid. Estela would sleep down there, on the ground, beneath me. If I was here, then she’d be there. She wouldn’t let another thing happen. That was her promise.
God, Esteban, I say, and suddenly I see it—the boy in the house, the cook on the ground, the stars coming close, but you never can stand up, touch stars.
Esteban watches the night. He pulls at that thread. He looks at me through everything else—past me, past you, through the branches. Did you do it? he asks me.
Do what?
Write back to your boyfriend?
I don’t know, I say.
Well, did you?
Not really. No. I haven’t.
Will you?
I’m not sure.
From far away, on the other side of the cortijo, one guitar sounds like it is crying, and another strikes a chord and a word gets loose—Ay! Ay!—and I think about Kevin, an ocean and his own bright future away, and I think about Esteban, right here. Know your own heart, Estela said. Be careful. Kevin should be here. He’s not. Dear Kenzie, Kevin should have written. I am coming for you. I am sorry.
I heard them talking, Esteban says now, a little while ago.
About what?
About you. About Seville.
What about Seville?
You’re going back. Tomorrow.
For what?
You have been asking the questions. You want the answers. You’ll go.
Adair? I ask. Javier?
He shrugs.
What am I supposed to do?
Be ready, is all. You have to do that.
Esteban stands and straightens his jeans. He reaches for the plate, which I’ve scraped empty. He curls his free hand against one branch of the tree, and fits his boot onto a riser, and I’d give anything to have him stay all night. To sit here with me, counting the stars, looking for people we know passing by.
Should I be scared? I ask him.
I don’t think so, he says.
Do you believe in Gypsy magic? I pull out Angelita’s pouch, put it on the planks between us. Tip of a black cat’s tail, I tell him. Cure for weary eyes.