by Beth Kephart
“You need us all,” I tell her.
“I don’t.”
“You hit her, Estela. Actually slapped her face.”
“Whose side are you on? What has she done? What magic trick?”
“Be reasonable, Estela.”
“She gave the man a kiss. While I was standing there watching.”
“Open the door so we can talk.”
But she won’t answer and she won’t come out and I’m failing at this thing too; I cannot fix it. I leave her be. I walk away. Through the house, past the stables, toward Esteban’s room, where the light is on and the door open. He sits on his bed, Bella on one shoulder, his boots tucked away in the corner. His hat hangs from the tree built of sticks. There’s a photograph, in a frame, on his dresser. It’s black and white. It is three people. It is Esteban, before any of this. What is taken away. What is given.
How is she? he asks.
She won’t talk to me, I tell him.
That’s Estela, he says. Give her time.
Bella flies like a moth—from one edge of the room to another. Limón stays in the cage, watching him go. They’re like two totally different people, I say.
They get along well enough.
I guess.
The woman in the photograph is tall, dark-haired, big-eyed. The man wears a matador hat and a cape. The boy looks away, toward something.
You can come in, Esteban says, if you want to.
I don’t move.
I’m just saying, he says. If you want to.
I stay where I am, halfway in, halfway out, the moon and the stars bright behind me.
I’m taking Tierra down the road tomorrow, Esteban tells me now. There’s room for two, he says. Even three.
PART TWO
TWENTY-SEVEN
He talks her out of the courtyard, through the gate, and down the road. He sits behind us holding the reins with one hand and the two of us with the other.
It’s easy, he’d told me. Climb on.
I told Estela, he’d said. So she won’t worry.
There are pears in the cacti and pink flowers in the brush. The long fence is leaned against by barrels of sunned-up water. Now the road edges up against a stand of yellow houses—tin for their roofs, doors for their windows, the houses of farmers and bull men. The grass in the fields is like crèche straw. The mountains in the distance seem hacked off by sun.
Tierra’s hooves metronome the softened earth. The farther we go, the wilder it gets—the scrub brush growing denser and the olive trees growing tangled and the flowers don’t look like they should survive the heat. There are birds overhead, flying in twos and fours. Big things with red in their wings. Beds of moss run wild over bits of broken pots. Bougainvillea wraps the fences. The cork and eucalyptus trees are statues. There are deer in the shadows beyond.
When the road splits into a shaded path, Tierra leaves the wide part for the narrow one, for the pine and oak and roses. It’s like a garden that someone’s forgotten. A place for deer and birds, but not like the forests back home, which are darker and taller and cooler and less broken into by color.
It’s there, Esteban says, into my ear, and I wonder what he means until I realize that he has felt you move, his hand on my belly, and on you. I lean back into him, rest my face against his cheek.
She’s a dancer, I tell him, and I want to tell him everything about the pearls that are your spine and the seeds that are your eyes and the way you play with your hands. They aren’t webs now. They are real fingers.
He tells Tierra to slow, and when the branches start riding too low on the trees, he pulls the horse to a stop. He jumps down, turns, and reaches up for me. I remember Kevin at the beach, the length of pipe. His arms pulling me back down to earth. His arms reaching for Ellie.
We should have been careful.
We’ll just sit here, Esteban says, and look for birds.
He ties Tierra to the firm branch of a tree. We walk past gladiolus spikes through scrub and lavender, and now when Esteban curtains back the branches, I see the rock beyond—big as the back of a whale, split apart by bursts of yellow flowers.
I found the rock when I was a kid, he says. I thought it was another country.
When I sit, he sits. When he lies back, I do.
So long as you don’t move, the birds find you, he tells me.
So the birds know you, then.
Maybe.
A guy known by birds.
It took a long time, Esteban says. But, yeah. I guess so.
How long?
Since I was seven, I guess. That’s when Miguel gave me Tierra and taught me to ride. You’ll grow up together, he told me. And we have.
I think of how my life until Spain was always about being part of something bigger—how we were a whole one thing—Tim, Andrea, me, Ellie, and Kevin. Samson, Saunders, Spitzer, Strenna, Sullivan: The S’s.
And then my dad died, and things changed with Kevin, and we kept us, for a while, as our secret. September, October, November: no one knew and no one guessed. We were liars already, Kevin and me. Told no one, not Andrea or Tim and especially not Ellie, who everybody knew was crushing on Kevin. “I think he likes me,” she’d say, and I’d say, “Maybe,” or she’d say, “I’m going to ask him out—see what he says.” “Yeah?” I’d say. “Really?” But of course she never did, and of course Kevin was already mine; he had chosen me over Ellie.
She didn’t call me for weeks when she found out the truth, when I finally picked up the phone and told her. Wouldn’t talk to me at school. Wouldn’t go bowling. Wouldn’t hang with any of us, wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t listen to me saying I’m sorry. She cut her hair real short and dyed it even darker. She drew a thin turquoise line beneath each eye, until one day she called and she said, “Hey,” and I said, “Hey” back, and then we just sat like that, on the phone, in silence, trying to figure out how to be friends again, how to make ourselves whole. Sometimes you can fix things, and sometimes you can’t, and Ellie allowed us to fix things. We treated Ellie like a princess after that. I tried to be a better friend, a better person. Less of a liar. I’d chosen Kevin over the dignity of Ellie. I’d left her stranded. It was a secret. It was wrong. It was her choice to return or not, and Ellie returned, and I loved her so much more for that.
I would have been so lonely, I tell Esteban. Out here. Growing up.
It wasn’t so bad, he says. Estela brought a tutor in. Miguel took me into Seville. Luis came. The Gypsies. Bull people. Horse people. Quail hunters. There was always something. They did what they could. They did a lot.
Still, I think. Still it must have felt like a total and complete punishing to a seven-year-old kid who’d lost his mother first, and then his father, who’d gone from the city to this, from rooftops to tree houses, from Seville to Los Nietos.
I took Estela riding once, Esteban says. You should have seen her. I had Tierra by the lead rope and Estela on the saddle, and we were going as slow as a horse can. But Estela kept looking at her hands the whole time, afraid she’d fall off if she didn’t. I kept telling her it was okay, look up, but she didn’t listen. Estela only knows love one way. She’s no good when it comes from the other direction.
So what is the deal with Angelita? I ask. The deal between them, I mean.
Rivals, I guess.
Why does Estela keep insisting that it’s Luis’s birthday?
Because it gives her an excuse to make things special. Luis comes two or three times each year. If it isn’t Christmas, it has to be his birthday.
When is her birthday?
She’d never tell us. One of her rules, and you can’t break it. At Christmas Miguel gives her money. She won’t spend it.
She actually hit Angelita.
I know.
Hit her. And did you see Luis after, watching the stars?
He’s complicated. He doesn’t say much.
Can I ask you something?
What?
About the photograph in your room? It’s you, right? And your
mother and father?
Día de Reyes. January sixth. They clear the streets, and the big floats come through. The Three Kings and the beauty queens and the little kids who sing. My dad was part of the parade somehow. It was cold, I remember, for Seville. That’s all I remember, really—that it was cold, that my parents were there. But it’s the last photograph of the three of us. Miguel found it and framed it. Sometimes, still, I look at it and see things I hadn’t noticed.
Always there, I think, and I think of my dad’s photos at home, how he used to say that you don’t know what you’ve seen until later, that seeing is not the same thing as knowing; knowing takes a lot longer. “Judge nothing,” he used to say. “Evaluate all.” What would he think of Esteban, I wonder. What do I think? What do I know?
Kenzie, Esteban says now. Look up.
I open my eyes and do. It’s high in the sky, its wings stretched thin. It’s white and speckled and soaring.
He’s always the first to come, Esteban says. He brings the others.
He brings them?
He shows up, and then they do. Watch, he says, and now the bird puts on a show—razors the sky with his wings, plumes out his feathers. It’s just him up there, for a long, long time, and then, as if from nowhere, there are others. Some of them white tailed, some of them red feathered. All of them writing the sky with their wings. They soar. They do not settle.
What kinds of birds? I ask, and Esteban answers with words I don’t know, birds I’ve never heard of, the sound of his language, which is not my language. It doesn’t matter, I realize. I don’t mind, not knowing this. I could lie here, I think, on this rock, in Esteban’s arms. I could lie here until this is all over.
TWENTY-EIGHT
We see it from way down the road—a hard gleam of candy red parked alongside the back courtyard. Tierra picks up speed when she sees the car. Esteban wraps his arm around us tighter.
That’s Adair, he tells me. Adair and her Spider.
What’s she doing here?
I don’t know, he says. Except that when Adair decides something, it’s decided.
TWENTY-NINE
She drives twice as fast as Miguel ever would. Takes roads I don’t remember. Talks, but her words are wind scrambled. “What?” I ask her, but after a while, we’re not bothering; we’re just watching the landscape scrape by. Spanish blossom, stranded cypress, an iron cross growing straight through some tree. There’s a house like a cake stuck in a pan and pink flowers in gray boxes, and I think about my mom and about Kevin and about the forest of strange things. The birds that came and disappeared through the trees. Esteban’s arms around us.
She’s a dancer, I told him.
Did you hear me saying so?
Every second, the sky is new—sun smash, cloud puff, the color of mildew—until our road ends and the highway begins, and then the sky is just Seville on the horizon, and Los Nietos behind, and all of a sudden, I remember lying in Kevin’s arms one night in February—my mother gone, the house filled up with just the two of us.
I had my future too. I had Newhouse and film and Kevin making promises that all through Yale he’d remember me, and after Yale, after Newhouse, we’d be together.
We should have been careful.
Now through the gates of Seville and up the pinball streets, Adair drives—along the river and now past the bridge. She turns toward Santa Cruz, which she can’t drive through because the streets are too small, even for a Spider with its top down. There is a bunch of white birds in the trees overhead.
“White pigeons,” Adair says, the first thing she’s said in a long time. “Escapees from the park.” She finds a place along a curb and stops. Gets out to open my door.
“I can do that myself, you know,” I say.
“Right,” she says. “Brilliant.”
“It’s not like I’m sick.”
“Yes. Of course.”
The streets in this part of Santa Cruz are paved with dark and light stones. The windows are caged. The walls are orange-brown and an orange shade of yellow. We walk a long time until we stop at a black door carved out of a wall so thick it seems to belong to some fortress. Adair digs a key out of her bag and unlocks the door, and suddenly we’re in a room so much wider than any street we’ve walked and that much closer to the sun. It’s a room built out of columns and arches and sky. Lemon and orange trees, palm trees and banana trees, pillars sprouting up from the floor. There’s a swarm of butterflies, or maybe it’s just dust caught in the sunbeam slicing a corner. Beyond the courtyard, on the other side of the arches, the rooms are antiqued. Out here beneath the sky, it’s only trees and flowers, puffs of bougainvillea.
“Javier’s family,” Adair says now, “is attached to old things.” She throws her bag to a chair and her keys into the bag. “Thirsty?” she asks, leading me toward the longest room on this courtyard floor—a kitchen that, I think, hardly belongs in a house that seems more like some Spanish museum.
“It’s what I insisted on,” Adair says now, as if she can read my mind, “when we bought the house. Javier could have his old things if I could have my kitchen brand-new.” She’s done everything in white—the counters, the two sinks, the cabinets with their glass faces, the double oven, the refrigerator, the phone, and a pair of mixing bowls, even the vases that sit on either end of a table that doesn’t look like it’s been used for years. “We have parties,” she says, “every now and then. What can I get you?”
“Water?” I ask.
She smiles. “We have some of that.” She slips a pitcher from the refrigerator, fills a glass with ice. “Something to eat?” she asks, but before I answer, she pulls out a plate, sets some pastries in a half circle. “Mario Alberto,” she says. “I’d not survive without him.”
She pours a second glass of water, takes the pastry plate into her other hand. “Now,” she says, “for my first favorite view of Seville.” I follow her through the streak of sun to the corner room, where two bull heads hang and a pair of stairs makes an X against the wall. “Either one,” she tells me, “will do.” Meaning, I guess, that you can find her first-favorite view by choosing either pair of stairs, so I choose one and keep rising until I’ve reached a yard of sky.
“You see the Giralda?” she asks, pointing. “Remember? And there’s the cathedral? And over there,” she points south, “the Alcázar. Moorish geometry,” she says. “Palms and grottoes and mazes.” On the roof behind us, a striped canopy shades four canvas chairs, a glass-topped table at their center. “We’ll sit,” she says, placing the plate between us. “Take in the view.”
“You could fall straight off this roof,” I say, looking out and past and down.
“We’re taking care of that,” she says. “Don’t worry.”
I try not to. I try to listen to the stories she starts telling—about her life here and the people she knows, the bullfighters Javier brings home, the movie stars who come to the ring, to the parties. She talks about Hemingway and Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth like they’re still alive, part of Adair’s own story, proof that she has earned something more than all she already has, which is a house with a gigantic perch of a roof and a brand-new kitchen and a courtyard with a forest’s worth of palms. She talks about her mother in England, her father, his investments, her brother, who never left home, about the park named Maria Luisa and the Plaza de España. She says, “I’ll take you everywhere, there’s plenty of time,” and then she’s talking about the university, where she got her own degree. “It was a tobacco factory,” she says, “did you know that? A tobacco factory until they shut the whole place down. Had its own prison, even, and its own stables, and twenty-one fountains. You know Carmen?” she asks. “The opera Carmen?”
“Not really,” I say.
“Oh. That’s just too bad. The tobacco factory and Carmen: they go together.”
She eats one pastry, breaks off a chunk of another, and now I’m wondering if that’s all she eats, if you’ll grow up on a diet of Mario Alberto’s sugar things. Sh
e washes the cookie down with the last of her water, then swirls the ice to make it melt.
“It’s a good place,” she says, finally. “Seville. A good place for anyone. Your mother made a good choice,” she says, “sending you here.”
“Maybe,” I say. “I guess.”
“Do you think you should call her?” Adair asks. “Just, you know, to tell her how you’ve been.” Her been a bean. My daughter will grow up speaking British.
“What has Estela been telling you?” I ask. “About me? About my mother?”
She smiles. “She says you’re an American girl. Says letters have come. Some phone calls.”
“My mother and I don’t get along,” I say. “And Kevin should have come with me. I shouldn’t have to do this alone.”
“Maybe he just couldn’t,” Adair says. “But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.”
“Kevin was the kind of guy who was perfect on his own terms. The kind who decided when and how. I know that he loved me. I know I loved him. I don’t know what I feel now. Kevin is where Kevin is, and I’m here, and my mom—like, what am I supposed to tell my mother? It’s not like I know what I’m doing, you know? I’m just here. My mother sent me.”
“You might tell her you’re not alone,” Adair says, “to begin with.”
“But I am, actually.”
“Are you?” she asks. “Think about that.”
I feel my face go hot and look away toward the tops of the palms in the palace garden, to the white birds that flicker in the green. I feel the touch of Adair’s hand on my arm. I turn, and her eyes are searching for mine.
“I will treat your child as my own,” she says. “I will give him the proper everything. I promise.”
“Her,” I say.
“Excuse me?”
“Her.”
“A little girl? Really, Kenzie?”
“It’s not that I actually know, I guess. It’s just something I feel. Something inside.” I take a long breath in and exhale.