by Beth Kephart
He shrugs again, almost smiles.
Do they work? I ask. Her cures?
Depends on what you want, I guess. Once she tied a blue ribbon to my head when my head was hurting. In an hour or so the hurt was gone. There’s something to it. Maybe.
Esteban? I ask him now.
“¿Qué?”
How do you get a horse to like you?
Stick around, he says. For starters. And maybe stop with the so many questions.
TWENTY-ONE
We drive past groves of olive trees and vineyards, one road, then another to Seville. The landscape grows used up and the air reeks with gasoline, and Miguel and I hardly talk, and when we do, he’s not letting me in on any secrets. When the thick walls of the city are finally in view, Miguel slows down and sits forward and messes with the clutch. He parks Gloria on one of those sidewalky streets, and I open my door and get out.
Above us are balconies and orange-yellow building slopes, the slick of tiles, those lizards. Nothing is tall, but still and everywhere the buildings ribbon the sky into blue. We walk along beside the fortress walls, letting the women with the strollers pass, turning our faces from car smoke, stepping out of the way of the streams of dog pee that trickle away from the walls. Everything is different, and everything’s the same, and I don’t talk, and Miguel doesn’t talk, and finally he stops and rings a bell. I hear keys in the doors beyond the wall and then one iron grate door opens, and then another one does, and now I’m staring at some old lady in the courtyard of a house. It’s like standing inside another square doughnut—this one made of stone.
The air is greenhouse air, hot and muggy. The tiles on the floor are cracked. A miniature fountain is filled up with oranges, half of them rotten, half green. There are white birds like small moths, swooping and perching. A skylight overhead lets in the sun, and the stairs circle around, off to one side; they are iron and thin, and they look creaky. Whoever she is kisses Miguel on the cheek and tells him to go skyward, then tells me too, in Spanish. She has been told about me, I can tell. She is glad that my linen dress is ironed. I feel her eyes on me as I climb the winding stairs up high, and now there are steps that twist the other way, and suddenly I’m on a rooftop, standing not underneath but inside the sky, and I feel my eyes go wide, and I think about Angelita’s cat tail, which I’ve slipped in my bag, have brought with me.
I feel you turn inside me, swim toward the edge of us, bubble through me.
I feel dizzy, but there is no wall to hold me. Hold us.
There’s an old bathtub in one corner of the rooftop stuffed with oranges, bottles, orchids, and blossoms. “Bull business,” is all Miguel says, and I don’t ask questions, and now I watch him go off toward the tub, where five men and two women lean in his direction, nearly bow. Miguel removes his jacket and hooks it over his shoulder. The man beside him does the same. Miguel is taller than any of them, quieter when he talks, dipping his chin toward me now, saying something I can’t hear, so that all the others look my way, dip their chins, turn back to him, and keep on talking.
Across the street, an old woman on her own rooftop is knitting. Down the way, on another roof, kids bat at the balls that are tied by thin strings of elastic to wooden paddles. Down on the street, a flock of nuns in white go by. A band of boys. Babies on shoulders.
Back on this roof, the talk is all bulls. Whatever I can make out—it’s bull talk. The price of one bull against the price of another. The failures of a third in a ring. Miguel is talking now, about his six, and a man beside him is writing down numbers—standing there with a little pad, taking a second pencil out of the brim of his hat when the point on the first one gets shattered. Miguel is the star of this party, that much is clear. He’s the oracle of bulls, and now a woman in a purple dress with a hot pink belt stands on her toes to whisper something in his ear. The man beside her, the taking-notes man, stops writing to see what Miguel will do. He doesn’t blink, Miguel, not either eye. He is used to this, I realize, and then I realize that my mother was right about at least one thing: the guy is royalty, and he knows it.
Now the woman from downstairs appears—her white head rising from the puzzle of stairs, both her hands cradling a cup of tea. She brings it to me. A wedge of lemon floats on its surface.
“Para usted,” she says.
“Gracias.”
She stands beside me, not talking.
The sky goes on for miles. Wherever there are cathedrals on the horizon, there is gold, and whenever I breathe, I smell oranges, and more and more, I feel confused. Across the way, the kids aren’t banging with their paddles anymore, and the old knitter is staring down toward the street, her eyes on the pack of Gypsies who have begun to dance and sing flamenco, who move forward now, slow, a parade. One of the rooftop kids disappears and then returns with a basket of carnations on his arm. He tosses a red bud down to the ground, toward the Gypsy song. He tosses another. The Gypsies look up and a crowd starts to gather, and the boy keeps tossing flowers. Now the knitter leans and takes a stem and throws it.
“Olé,” says the boy with the basket.
I turn to the woman beside me. She says nothing, explains nothing. I turn and watch Miguel and his friends, who aren’t talking anymore, who have started to lean out, toward the flamenco. Miguel goes first—grabs a fat fistful of the blossoms from the bathtub, opens his hand, sprinkles them down, and all of a sudden, it’s like Seville is raining flowers in the sun. The others collect their own blossoms and toss them down. This I think, is Seville, and suddenly I’m remembering last September, with Kevin, when I thought the world had lost its color and he kept trying to convince me that it hadn’t. He would drive me to sunsets and moonrises and gardens; he’d say, “Look.” He’d pick me up after my mother had driven off, and he’d take me down roads that he’d found when he was running and the rest of us were standing still. “Look,” he’d say, “Kenzie. The color’s still here,” and I tried to believe him, but he knew. And then one day he picked me up and drove me to his house and walked with me to his backyard. He told me to sit in one of those Adirondack chairs, said I should close my eyes.
“Come on, Kevin. Tell me.”
“Just wait.”
“Where are you going?”
“Sit. And close your eyes.”
I did, at last, and he was gone a long time. When I heard his voice again, I was nearly sleeping. “All right,” he said, and I turned, and there he was, by the basement door, and there, by his head, were butterflies, an entire swarm. He had a pot of asters in one hand and Joe Pye in another, and I thought that maybe I was sleeping, that this was my strange dream.
“I bought eggs,” he said. “They’ve been hatching in the basement.”
“Butterfly eggs?”
“Yeah. You can get them. Mail order.” He was walking toward me, with those pots in each hand. The butterflies swarmed, and they flew. Satyrs and swallowtails and sulphurs and skippers—the S butterflies, the ones we’d learned in science and had decided to remember.
“Kevin,” I said, but that’s all I could say.
“Color,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Color.”
“You’re still alive, Kenzie.”
Kevin was brilliant after my father died. Kevin was everything I loved. I was half an orphan, but I had him. I believed in him; I trusted.
My father took still photographs.
I take moving ones.
I thought I knew the meaning of color.
I know the meaning of nothing.
TWENTY-TWO
When he comes up the steps, he’s alone. I see his head—the red-gold in the sun—and hear his cowboy boots on the treads, but it’s his eyes that stop me—the green inside the leather of his skin.
“Mama,” he says, to the woman beside me, the hostess. He leans in and kisses her on either cheek, keeping his eye on me as he does, and now the heat of all of Spain is in my cheeks. I try to look away. I can’t.
“Vienes tarde.” She takes my empty cup a
nd leaves me standing on this roof beside her son, who is saying not one thing or the other. Ask me a question, I think. Tell me something.
“Kenzie,” Miguel says now, leaving his bull talk to join the two of us. “Letting me introduce you to Javier.”
When Javier smiles, the skin splits around his eyes—three valleys on either side. “Well,” Miguel says, like I’m the one who’s supposed to make this all right, get the conversation going, do something.
“Hello,” I say in English. On purpose.
“Javier and Adair—” Miguel says.
“I know. I remember.”
Across the way, on the rooftop, two boys are fighting. I hear them scream and look to see—the one being chased holds the other’s shirt like some flag. He’s five, maybe six, with a scrawny bird chest. The grandmother sits, pays no attention, and what I think is, “You’re lucky,” and what I think is, “I’m not.” And months from now this will be over, but it won’t. Javier and Adair. The parents of your child.
I cross my hands over my chest, over you. I wait for Javier to ask me something, tell me something, suit himself up as a father. But Javier is quiet, turning the rings on his hand, and now Miguel speaks to him in a quick Spanish that I don’t quite grasp, and when Javier smiles it’s a sad smile, and I wonder what the sadness is for. Javier’s mother returns with a tray of champagne and another cup of tea with a floating boat of lemon.
The cup shakes in my hand. The boat is sinking.
Javier bows toward me, says that we will meet again, that it’s time for me to meet his wife. He steps away. I look for clouds in the sky. White and high. I look for boys across the way, the lucky boys, the ones who aren’t me. I look for the wife, whoever she is. I tell myself to breathe and to see, not to cry. And now someone new is rising up on the circle of steps. I hear her shoes on the staircase. I see her corkscrew hair, her violet eyes, no Spanish person’s daughter.
“Kenzie,” Miguel says, “you have another guest.”
“What do you say we get out of here?” she asks, in perfect British.
I follow her down the jumble of alleys, past the bars and the shops until the street isn’t a street but a wide, open place, and I know where we are—the Hotel de Plaza de Santa Isabel, land of the flying nuns. It seems like years ago—me here, in Seville, alone with you. “They will take care of it,” my mother had said, and all I knew was that you would live, that I wouldn’t take away your chances. Everything pinned on that, and now here I am, behind your mother.
Your mother.
“Mari knows someone who wants a child,” my mother had said. “Her husband’s agreed. They have money.”
The smell of bread pushes through the convent windows. A guy sits on a bench playing the guitar, and Adair stops, tosses him coins, then keeps on walking through alleyways and down streets of shops, past windows of ham and flamenco, and in the sky above, the clouds grow wider, drop lower, take away the sun. There are nuns and there are moms and there are kids, and she weaves among them, stopping every now and then against the thick stone walls and the glass to let someone by, to make room for a stroller, to let me catch up. She reaches a blocked-off street—no cars, just people—and waits.
“It took me years,” she says, “to get used to this city.” Citay, she says. She can’t be more than twenty-five. Her teeth are Chiclets. She wears a linen dress with a thin black belt, and she moves, moves fast, always ahead, then turning back, like she’s forgotten that I’m walking for two, that I don’t know this place, that it leans in against me. At last, she presses her shoulder against a pastry shop door and the bar chimes sing. She asks me what I fancy. I fancy nothing.
Over the folded squares of their newspapers, the other customers watch her order what she pleases—trying to decide, it seems, if she is some celebrity, someone they’ve seen on TV. She’s used to it, like pretty people are; she doesn’t mind her fame or their assumptions. She chooses her pastries and smooths back her hair, thanks the baker with a bunch of British Spanish.
“Have some sweet?” she says, sliding into the heavy chair across from me. She pinches a piece of cake for herself with French manicured nails and waits for me to join her, to take something from the plate of four choices. Four choices. I don’t. I just sit here, watching.
“What do you think of Spain?” she asks, finally.
“Hot,” I tell her.
“And then some,” she agrees.
Her vowels are round. Her eyes are huge. She stirs her tea with her spoon and does the Javier thing—tries to see past me to you. What you will look like. Who you will be. What she’ll be free to imagine. I wonder how long Miguel will wait for me on the roof, with the bull people. I wonder what they’ve planned, what he told her: She isn’t easy. Don’t take your eye off her. I wonder why she doesn’t have a baby of her own, how long she’s tried, if she gives up on things too soon. She takes another bite of the pastry, pushes her hair behind one ear, and I notice her hands again—the engagement ring like a diamond knuckle on one hand. The wedding band on the other. She could open a jewelry store with her diamonds.
“Right, then,” she says.
Right, then. The shop chime rings and a child pushes through, waving his hands, blowing some funny plastic trumpet. He’s given a cookie without choosing which one. Then he’s marching straight back out the door.
“That was Mario Alberto’s son,” Adair confides. “The baker’s boy. Have some cake?” She looks around, suddenly, as if she thinks that maybe she could get someone to help her—to pry me open, to make me nice, to rearrange my heart as unafraid and willing. “Miguel has told me some things,” she finally starts, a new direction. She pinches off more cake, waits for an answer, for a confirmation of my knocked-up teen-mother résumé. No diseases. Check. Good academics. Check. Boyfriend any girl would die for. Not so check. Here because she has a heart. Going home toward her future.
“Then?” she encourages.
“What’s the deal with the bathtub?” I ask.
“The deal?” A little shadow crosses her eyes.
“On the roof. Over there.” I nod my head toward somewhere. Somewhere back there, wherever we were. I could never find it again.
“Oh,” she says. “My mother-in-law. She gets these ideas. Scatty, I know, but it’s no harm.” She curls her hair around two fingers and rolls her eyes, like I’m already in on the joke, like we’re old time, like she’s getting somewhere. She’s not.
“What do they do up there?”
“They talk bulls.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, darling. There’s more to it, actually.”
“They throw flowers,” I say.
“Excuse me?”
“From the roof. I saw it.”
“Oh, yes,” she says. “It’s done.” She takes her spoon for another tour of her cup, then slowly lifts her eyes. It’s cloudy inside them, unsettled.
“It must be hard,” she says now, another tactic. “All this. For you.”
“You have no idea,” I tell her.
“You want to tell me some of it?”
“Not really,” I say.
“Where should we start, then?” she asks me.
“It doesn’t really start,” I say. “And it doesn’t really end.”
She stirs her tea and keeps on stirring. She has another bite of cake, pushes the toppled plate toward me, but I leave it there between us, hear the shop chime again, turn around. A mother with a stroller is fighting her way in. One of the men with the newspaper comes to her rescue, and she, too, it’s clear, is part of the crowd—Mario Alberto knows her order, puts her things onto plates; she doesn’t do a thing but sit down.
“I used to feel that way,” Adair says. “When I first came here. No beginning. No end.” She traces the gold hoop of her earring, around and around, like she is trying to remember, trying to find some of me in part of her, find someone she can talk to. “I was escaping something—my parents, actually,” she continues. “They were fighting the blo
ody knickers off each other. I got on a plane, and I came here for school. I was seventeen. I’d left one thing I could not understand for another.”
“But you could have gone home,” I tell her. “You still had choices.”
“Brilliant,” she says, and her eyes look past mine, like all of a sudden she’s wondering what she got into, if maybe there’s not a better unwed teen out there needing a solution to her problem. I feel dark inside, like a loser ruding her out, and I say to myself, remembering Esteban, This is so not her fault. A baby is coming; she needs a mother.
“Can we get out of here?” I ask Adair now.
“All right,” she says. Her eyes are guarded.
“I mean, like, go outside? Go somewhere else?”
“If that’s what you want,” she says. She takes the uneaten pastries to the woman with the stroller. She walks by the men, who watch her walk by; I cover you with my hands.
TWENTY-THREE
Outside the sky has grown stormy in one distant corner. The sun still shines on everything else. “I know a place,” she tells me. “Not far.” Through narrowness to broadness, up a wide plateau of stairs, she walks and I walk with her. She opens the door. She waits.
It takes time to adjust to the darkness—to find the stained-glass windows high above the smoke stain of incense and wax. “Eighty chapels,” she says, “in this one cathedral.” When she steps ahead on the marble floor, her heels strike bright, hard echoes. When I breathe, it’s the smell of oranges and crisp.
The nave is giant, endless, stoned in. The pews are worn and settled. Everything is carved into a million dimensions—it’s hanging, it’s suspended, it’s on a pedestal looking down. Adair slides into a pew, and I join her. Two pews ahead, three women veiled in black kneel side-by-side, hands against hands in prayer. Near to them, across the aisle, a Japanese man is tripodding his camera, and in between the legs of the tripod, a kid races a toy car across the tiles.