Small Damages

by Beth Kephart

  Our chances. Because you are mine. You always will be.

  “My mother’s going to kill me,” I say, and when Estela squeezes me in, I feel her whole strength—the all that she’s given and the all that was taken, and all the dreams that never died, no matter what. Estela breathes in hard, then out, and her dress breathes with her. She wipes a giant tear out of one eye.

  “I don’t know how to tell her.”

  “You let me. I’ll tell her.”

  “What will you tell her?”

  “That regretting lasts a lifetime. And you’re her daughter.”

  “But what about Adair?” I say. “How can I tell her? What will she do?”

  “Adair is young,” Estela says. “Adair survives. Miguel will talk to her. After, you will send her a letter. You will send a letter to Mari, too. Real letters. You make that promise to me, Kenzie, and you will keep it.” She unwraps her arms and touches her hands to my face, trying to stop all my tears. “Now you listen to me,” she says. “You are five months, almost six months pregnant. The sooner you get home now, the better.”

  “Dios,” I say.

  “Give me time to make arrangements.”

  “Okay.”

  “And tell the rest that dinner’s soon.”

  “They’ve been waiting for you,” I say, “all afternoon.”

  “Those lazy thieves,” she says, but she smiles.

  “I’m going to miss you,” I say. “I’m going to miss you and Esteban and Tierra and Los Nietos. Maybe I’ll even miss the bulls.”

  “You know where we are, and we’ll always be here. You know you can come back. That room’s your room.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Outside my bedroom window, the sky is polished. In the love seat Joselita is dead asleep. Arcadio holds the guitar like a cradle, picks out one note, lets it vibrate. I lift my camcorder to it all and press Record. Your Life with Me. It started here.

  Beneath the hem of Joselita’s dress, the pink nose of a silver cat pokes, and across from Arcadio, in the second love seat, Rafael sits, his hands curled like two parentheses. He knocks them together every now and then, like he’s trying to get a song started. But nothing starts, nothing begins until Luis appears, with Limón riding his shoulder. He looks like a man who has walked a whole country, like a soul still searching for something. He walks straight to the window, where I am standing, filming. I put the camcorder down.

  “¿Sí?” he asks, looking toward Estela’s kitchen.

  “Sí,” I assure him. “Se lo he dado.”

  He nods and reaches his hand toward mine, through the window. He smiles, but it’s a sad smile, and now he turns and looks through the courtyard arch, down the road.

  “Feliz cumpleaños,” I tell him, and he nods, and suddenly I understand that today, after these many days of almost days, is his actual birthday, his one day of the year. He takes the seat nearest Bruno, then looks up, toward Angelita, who presses her fat hand to her heart.

  Arcadio floats his hand over the strings of his guitar. The cat leaps to Joselita’s lap. Luis brings his fingers together, but not his palms, and he closes his eyes for a long time, thinking, and maybe now, even maybe now, he’s dreaming. About Triana and the girl who could cook. About the journey he took to find his brother’s only son. About the places it took him to, and the things he left behind. Maybe Estela will tell him. Maybe she already has. Maybe all that matters is that they love each other, still, the way people who have known each other will always love each other. Somewhere in Luis’s heart, Estela is. Somewhere, in Kevin’s, I am. There’s peace in not wanting what can’t be had. There’s peace in not regretting what was.

  I leave the window. I take the camcorder with me, down the hall, open the door, cross into the courtyard, and now as I arrive, Estela’s arriving too—holding the paella out before her. Between the lip of the pan and the metal of the lid, the paella steam slips skyward, and in that steam is the smell of Spain, the smell of the sea and Los Nietos.

  “A Luis,” Estela says, and the Gypsies raise their imaginary glasses. “A Luis,” they agree. And now Esteban is there, in the door, full of indecision, that hat on his head. But it’s Estela that we’re looking at, Estela my camera sees, in her lemons and limes, her noisy bracelets. When she sets the plates down, I watch Luis’s face. I try to understand what’s passed between them.

  “Feliz cumpleaños,” she says.

  “Tu eres muy hermosa,” he says.

  She shakes her head and blushes.

  “Kenzie,” she says, casting her eyes low, “por favor. The paella.” I lift the lid from the pan and send a cloud to the stars. I pick up the silver spoon, the first white plate.

  “El señor tiene misericordia,” Arcadio says. And when Angelita nods her huge and satisfied chin, she nods it first in Estela’s direction.

  “You see,” Estela says to me, and to me only, “how it is when the paella breathes.”

  I look up, and the stork is flying. I look at the door, one of the millions of doors that leads to this courtyard, and see Esteban, coming for me. Luis puts his fork down deep into the pot and declares the paella perfect. Miguel heaps the plates with as much as each will hold, and Estela sits there, joins us.

  “Play her a song,” she tells the Gypsies, and Angelita stands first. She bows to me and touches one eye. She starts to sing, and Arcadio follows. Joselita grabs her half barrel and puts a beat in things; Esteban tips his hat. Dance with me, he says, and I do. You and me both, in his arms. “Look,” he says, and when I glance back toward the table, I see what he has seen—Luis putting his hand on Estela’s hand and Estela’s eyes like the mirage on the horizon.

  What happens next? I wonder aloud.

  But Esteban doesn’t know; nobody does. It’s Estela and Luis and their secrets and their hurt, and we are dancing, we are wherever we are in our hearts, wherever we have been, and now the music is ending and Esteban smooths back my hair and kisses the lobe of my ear. That is it. The lobe of my ear. Horses need some tending, he says, stepping back and looking at me like I’ve only just arrived, or like I’m only finally here.

  Do you have to go? I say.

  I do, he says.

  At exactly right now?

  He nods, doesn’t smile. He pulls one hand through my grown-out hair and walks through the arch and is gone.

  FORTY-FOUR

  I wake to the sound of a knocking at my door, the glare of morning sun.

  “Kenzie,” Estela says. “Kenzie. Hurry.”

  When I reach the door and open it, she is standing there with her hair streaming down and her old brown sack of a dress badly buttoned. Only the bracelets are where they were last night, making their music on her wrist. I step aside and let her in. She closes the door behind her. In one hand she carries an old leather purse, in another her one jar of saffron.

  “Today,” she says.

  “Today, Estela?” I’m still half asleep, and confused.

  “Pack your things, Kenzie. Today you go home.”

  I stare at Estela, try to understand.

  “It is settled,” she says. “And it is good,” though I can tell from her face that it hasn’t been good, or at least it hasn’t been easy. She hands me the saffron and the purse, then bends down and yanks until my two suitcases are freed from the wedge of shadow beneath my bed. She tosses them up onto the crumple of my sheets, then pads across the floor to the old room’s dresser. What is rumpled she folds. What is too big she halves. What is bulky she fits between things. She turns and heads toward the closet. She takes the dresses down, the ugly cotton sacks my mother bought me. Then she takes her bracelets off, one by one, and slips them into the suitcase.

  “For luck,” she says.

  “What have you done, Estela? What did she say?”

  “She will wait for you. She will learn to accept it.”

  “Who, Estela? Which one?”

  “Your mother the first. Adair the second.”

  She snaps the latches tight on the fir
st suitcase and leaves the second open. She lays my white dress off to the side and says, “This is your best dress. You will wear it.”

  “But, Estela.” I reach for her shoulders and turn her around. I hold her there until she looks at me. Those little eyes inside all those gulleys, her face like a map of her country.

  “I talked to Miguel,” she says. “He made arrangements.”

  “So soon,” I say.

  “You are eighteen years old. You are pregnant. You are ready.”

  “But.”

  “Listen to me, Kenzie,” Estela says. “You listen. You will go with Luis and the Gypsies, in Miguel’s truck, to Seville. You’ll take the train from Seville to Madrid. From the train to the plane, you will taxi. In Philadelphia your mother will be waiting.” She nods toward the leather purse. “Everything you need—the numbers, the money. Luis will stay with you until Madrid.”

  “The money?”

  “Miguel’s money,” she says.

  “Miguel’s money?”

  “And some of mine. It was getting in the way, and besides, I’m old.”

  “But—”

  “You make a decision, and I will help you, sí? It’s now, Kenzie. Luis will make sure you get off safe.”

  I feel the tears streaming hot down my face. I look around this room—its rumpled sheets, its floating dust, its crusty window. I look outside, to where the lizards are scribbling themselves up one wall and where the cats are all scrunched up inside the shadows. The table is messy from the night before. The big paella pot is open, empty.

  “Did you talk to Luis, Estela?”

  “That’s between old people.”

  “But how can you see me off if you won’t—”

  “Por favor,” she says. “Stop asking questions. Mind your own business.” She keeps folding things. She keeps making them right. Her hands are huge and also stumpy, and today who will they cook for? Just for Miguel and Esteban. Just for herself and for the memory of Luis. I can hardly breathe when I think of it—Estela not having a party to cook for, not having her daughter somewhere, close.

  Not having me beside her in the kitchen.

  “I’ll bring the baby,” I say. “When she’s older. When I can.”

  “Sí. Of course.”

  “She’ll be your granddaughter.”

  “If you like.”

  “You’ll teach her to cook, Estela. Yes?”

  “This is my mother’s saffron jar,” Estela says. “You teach your daughter to cook in the meanwhile.”

  Now, through the window, I see Arcadio in the courtyard, his guitar in one hand, a hat on his head. I see Angelita, Joselita, Bruno, Rafael, too—their clothes stained and crooked, and the hair broomed out on their heads. Joselita stomps off toward the shadows. She lifts the silver cat and touches its nose to her lips.

  “They’re waiting for you,” Estela says. She turns to leave me to wash up, to change, to look around, one last time alone, again.

  “I’m naming her for you,” I say, just as Estela reaches the door, puts her hand to the knob.

  “No.” She inhales sharply, then shakes her head. She turns and a big tear falls, and now another. The tears collect inside her skin and run, just like a river.

  “I decided already, and you can’t stop me.”

  “Stubborn as an old cook,” she says.

  “Stubborn as an American girl.”

  “Get changed,” she says. “Sí? And get ready.”

  She leaves the room with the one suitcase in hand. I hear her trundling down the hall, then hear a knock outside my bedroom window. When I turn, I find Angelita, pulling the pouch off her neck. She says that she wants me to have it. Says she doesn’t need it now, that love is what love is, when you get old.

  I shake my head no.

  She shakes her head yes.

  She insists.

  “Para el amor,” she says. For love.

  She crosses her arms and walks off before I can make her take it back. “Angelita. Por favor,” I say. But now she heads toward the others and hefts up a guitar, and I am left at this window with her pouch in my hand. I pull at the string and look inside. It’s lemon peel and garlic clove, an acorn, a nail, heather, lavender, thyme. It’s tea leaves, and sweet ginger. It’s a chip from some tortoise shell.

  Gypsy luck, I think. A Gypsy’s way of loving.

  FORTY-FIVE

  I find Esteban in with Tierra, her white tail whisking off the early heat of the day. When he looks up at me, I know most everything. That he hasn’t slept. That he means it. I will miss you.

  Everything is packed, I say. Everything is almost.

  He tries to speak, but he can’t.

  I’m going to write you, I tell him. I promise.

  I’m not that boy, he says.

  I know.

  I want to hear about the baby.

  I want to hear about your house, I say. I want to hear about the horses.

  He takes me in his arms. He holds me.

  FORTY-SIX

  Down the road and past the arch, the olive trees are casting webs of purple shadows. Across the way, between the sunflowers, the clover is green and the cacti bloom. Out on the horizon, there’s the leaking of silver, blue, and green, like the sea. I sit up front, with Miguel and Luis. The Gypsies sit in the back, in the bed of the truck, while the wind blows a song through Arcadio’s strings.

  Miguel drives in silence. Spain rushes by. The fields and the bulls and the storks and the earth that breaks free from itself and rises, and suddenly I remember the first time the S’s went to the beach alone—Kevin driving, all of us singing, the car sliding past the shacks, the salt bogs, the swamp bridges, the boys at their fishing lines and crab traps, until Kevin pulled into town and drove the wide street and parked, and we were free. Toward the sand dunes, across the planks, down the tumble of low hill, into the sea, we ran. The sea belongs to us. We’re home.

  I will miss you, Esteban said.

  I will miss you.

  Now I lift the camcorder from my lap where it’s been sitting and rewind. I study the screen, watch Los Nietos come back to us in pieces, and everything is leaning forward—Arcadio’s song, and Joselita’s dance, and Luis’s love, and Estela making paella in the kitchen. And then the scene changes and the zoom is wrong and I’m suddenly in Esteban’s room, where I left the camcorder just yesterday afternoon, so that I could help Estela in the kitchen. It’s Esteban’s footage, I realize, Esteban’s film—of the birds, Bella and Limón, in their tree of twigs. And now the image shakes and the room goes upside down, and it’s Esteban himself, square off, in the center of the screen.

  Esteban filming Esteban.

  I am waiting for your letter, he says, into the camera, to me. And then he leaves. Walks out of the room, keeps the camera running, lets his shadow disappear. I play the scene back, and I play the scene back, and suddenly I’m sobbing in the cab of Miguel’s truck. I can’t hold my head up, can’t stop. Luis’s hand is on mine, his arm is around me, he says something I don’t understand, and I smell garlic on him, and ginger, and lemon. The past. The war. The choices.

  “Miguel,” I say now, “please. I need to go home.”

  He studies me with both his eyes—the one that sees, and the one that doesn’t. Then he brakes the truck and turns its wheel, and he is driving fast, fast, fast through the heat, the wind through the strings, the sound of return beneath our wheels.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to the multitude of travelogues, memoirs, guidebooks, recipe books, and historical documents that inspired and shaped Small Damages, including Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1985); Abel Plenn, Wind in the Olive Trees (1946); Claus Schreiner, Flamenco (1990); John A. Crow, Spain: The Root and the Flower (1985); Ellen M. Whishaw, My Spanish Year (1914); Elliot Paul, The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937); H. V. Morton, A Stranger in Spain (1955); Harry A. Franck, Four Months Afoot in Spain (1911); Edward Hutton, The Cities of Spain (1906); Federico García Lorca, In Sear
ch of Duende (1955); Federico García Lorca, A Season in Granada: Uncollected Poems and Prose (1998); Leslie Stainton, Lorca: A Dream of Life (1999); Robert Medill McBride, Spanish Towns and People (1931); Thomas F. McGann, editor, Portrait of Spain (1963); Penelope Casas, Discovering Spain: An Uncommon Guide (1996); MacKinley Helm, Spring in Spain (1952); Nina Epton, Love and the Spanish (1961); James Reynolds, Fabulous Spain (1953); Sacheverell Sitwell, Spain (1950); Jan Yoors, The Gypsies (1967); Ann and Larry Walker, To the Heart of Spain: Food and Wine Adventures Beyond the Pyrenees (1997); Rafael de Haro, Classic Tapas; Janet Mendel, Cooking in Spain (1992); Bertha Quintana and Lois Gray Floyd, Qué Gitano! Gypsies of Southern Spain (1972); Diane Tong, Gypsy Folk Tales (1989); Robert Payne, The Civil War in Spain: 1936–1939 (1962); Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (1977); Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (1979); and Raymond Buckland, Gypsy Witchcraft & Magic (1998).

  I am grateful as well to an old Andalusian named Luis, whose countenance and parakeets inspired some of the fictions here; to Count Leopoldo Sáinz de la Maza, who allowed me to walk and ride with him over his 7,500-acre estate in southern Spain; to my brother-in-law Rodolfo, who introduced me to his Seville; to my brother-in-law Mario, who helped with the translations; and to my husband, Bill, who traveled with me. Friends—Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Alyson Hagy, Ivy Goodman, Kate Moses, Susan Straight, and Anna Lefler—read iterations of this book over the ten years of its creation, and to them I offer deepest thanks. My thanks, too, to Amy Rennert and Robyn Russell, who have seen this book evolve, and who have cheered it on. My thanks to Denise Roy and Laura Geringer, who read Small Damages when it was a very different book.

  Finally, and most essentially, Small Damages would have remained a mere book of dreams had not a few remarkable things occurred. The first happened in the summer of 2010, when my friend Jill Santopolo shared a book she thought I might love, a book edited by her Philomel colleague, Tamra Tuller. I did love that book—saw in it meaning and beauty—and began a many-month correspondence with Tamra that elevated my understanding of Small Damages and what it might be. Tamra, as it turns out, loves many of the things that I love, and her partnership and faith in this final leg of the Small Damages journey have meant the world to me. Treasured, too, are the words Michael Green, Philomel president and publisher, sent upon the close of the deal; reference was made—rightly and memorably—to the title of one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs. Further, behind every (blessed) writer stand the copyeditors who take a long and knowing look at the words, straighten the slack, ask the right questions, and then—remarkably—read again. For their combined care here, I thank Ana Deboo, Adrian James, and Laurel Robinson, not to mention Cindy Howle, who headed the team.