Small Damages (13 page)

“But he would understand.”

“No, he wouldn’t. Not Don Quixote. Losing a child is not for understanding—ever.” She shakes her head vigorously, side to side, as if this is an argument she is having with herself, that she has had with herself for almost forever.

“But it isn’t fair,” I say. “Not fair to Luis, not fair to you,” and I know, as soon as I say it, what I’ve done. I know because of the way Estela looks at me now—her big eyes back here, in present time. Don’t judge, my father said. Evaluate. Evaluate, especially, yourself, because no decision is a decision until the action has been made.

I feel my eyes grow wet. The olive trees beyond us smear.

“I have something to show you,” she says, and she sticks her hands out straight so that I can help her up, which means that I have to wobble up myself, so I wobble. It’s like I grew ten times bigger overnight. Like you have your place in me and you will not be budging.

Maybe it’s noon. The sun overhead feels like a bucket of burn, pouring down. We walk as close to the shade line as we can, listening to the creak of crickets, the calls of those
cortijo
birds, also that stork. In one stream of sun there is a herd of gnats—like a tornado funnel, I think. Estela says nothing, just circles around, then comes close to the shade line again. She slaps the dust from her skirt. I tuck the loose hairs behind my ears. We walk slowly until, at a crooked-elbow tree, Estela turns left and goes deeper into the shade, telling me to follow.

“It smells different here, no?” she says.

I shrug. “Kind of. I guess.”

Way at the end the grove of trees stops; it’s just earth and grass to the east. “This is it,” Estela says, lowering herself to her knees, and that’s all she says, and I stand there watching while, with one fat hand, then two, she begins shoving the dust from side to side, like some archeologist digging for bones. “It’s deep in,” she says, telling me to get down beside her, which I kind of clumsily, and not exactly wanting to, do. She tells me to move my hands like she’s been moving hers—knocking the dust away, the time. This dust is soft as a baby’s head. It puffs up before it settles. It doesn’t seem to me that we are getting anywhere, and then the earth goes hard, and it isn’t earth anymore, but the lip of a thick stone.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“The old grindstone.”

“I don’t get it, Estela.”

“Keep going.”

The dust is sliding down in piles on every side. The hardness below is rising up into view—a big, thick stone stained bronze and reddish brown and black.

“For the olives,” Estela says. “Before.”

I shrug my shoulders, shake my head, feel strange inside, a little dizzy.

“There was a mule,” Estela explains, looking exasperated that I am totally missing her meaning, “and another stone. We crushed the juice out of the olives right here. We made our oil. Now the olives get shipped away. They come back in bottles. Something’s missing.”

I nod, but still it doesn’t make much sense. I can’t see what she wants me to see beyond the dust and the stone. I can’t see well at all; things are blurry.

“The old days,” she says, “get buried like this.”

“Yes,” I say.

“But you’re still young.”

“I’m eighteen.”

“Kenzie. I was young once. I was young, like you.” She stuffs a dusty hand inside her apron pocket. She removes the photograph, sets it on the stone. “Luis and me,” she says, “we were in love. I gave away his child.”

“You did what you had to do, Estela,” I say, leaning now, just slightly, against her. Leaning, and needing to sit.

“I was a coward.”

“There was a war.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No. It does.”

“Estela . . .”

She lifts the picture from the stone. She presses it against her heart. She lets her tears fall freely, then swipes them away with her free hand. “Maybe I should stop being so mad at Angelita,” she says. “Maybe it wasn’t her fault; it was mine.”

“Estela,” I say now. “Estela?”

“¿Sí?”

“I think I’m bleeding.” For suddenly I feel warm and wet down there, and there are small drops of rust at my feet.

THIRTY-FIVE

She holds me tight against her and hurries. “No, Estela,” I say, but she is strong enough, determined, and she will not listen. The
cortijo
is a country away, a continent, and Estela’s calling for Miguel and Esteban, calling out “
ayúdenos!
” and saying to me, “I am s
orry,” and I am saying that it’s not her fault, and she is saying that it is her fault, she is so selfish. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” I say, but I don’t know if it is nothing, and finally I hear Miguel’s jeep in the distance, I feel it dusting up the road, coming for us. Still Estela is carrying us along—her big arms, her old hands, in the two of us swept up beside her—and she will not stop, she is saying, “Hold on, hold on, oh, Kenzie,” saying it hoarse and hard, with a lifetime of regretting.

The wet and the warm has rusted my dress. My insides are light and dizzy. I put my hand to you and close my eyes and hear the thump of Estela’s feet, the roar of Miguel’s jeep, and now the jeep brakes to a stop and all three of them are near—Estela, Esteban, Miguel—lowering me into the back of the jeep, pillowing my head on Estela’s lap. I close my eyes beneath the sky that is so wide and blue, and I feel Esteban’s hand reach for mine, and now the jeep goes up and down over the pockmarks of the road, and when at last Miguel pulls around in front, it’s Esteban and Estela helping me to my room, and Miguel running off to call Adair’s doctor.

“It is my fault,” Estela keeps saying, in English and in Spanish. “All my fault.” And she is crying worse than I am, and when they settle me into my bed, I close my eyes, and I don’t remember what happens after that, or I do remember, and I cannot say it, I cannot say how it was, how it felt, with the doctor’s hands inside me, and me not knowing how you were.

THIRTY-SIX

When I wake, it is only me and Estela in the dark of my room. On the roof above, I hear the pattering of rain. “Rain came through in the night,” she tells me, and now she reminds me of what the doctor said when he was leaving—that it seems that I’ll be fine with rest, that the baby’s fine too, that he’ll be checking the blood work in the lab. Stress, the doctor said, in English and in Spanish. No baby likes a mother’s stress. You keep that baby peaceful.

Estela held my hand throughout it all. She covered me with sheets. She closed the curtains. She fed me soup, and then I slept, and she’s sat here all night, by my bed, and the rain has come. Where did the rain come from? I wonder.

“Estela,” I tell her, my mouth dry, my head still dizzy and light, “go get some of your own rest.”

“I am not going anywhere,” she tells me.

“But you must be tired,” I tell her, for there is stain still on her dress, and dust on her arms, and her shoes are banged out of shape, but mostly, her face isn’t the right color. She is too pale. She is too old.

I hear a knock, now, at my bedroom door, and before either Estela or I can answer, Angelita pushes through, her hair flattened, her orange dress clinging with the rain.

The rain has a mind of its own, she says, and then she asks Estela how I am, and then she asks me the very same question, as if Estela’s version might be wrong, or incomplete.

Kenzie needs rest, Estela says, giving Angelita the eye.

She needs this too, Angelita says, and now she reaches into the pouch that she wears around her neck and pinches out a ladybird—bright and spotted, alive. She swishes toward me and gently opens my hand. For luck, she tells me, and I feel the slow tickle of the bug moving across my hand; I watch its ruby and black wings open and close, the skirts inside the outer wings crumpling and straightening. Now Angelita clenches her jaw and closes her eyes and says that she’s gathering the sun’s force.

It’s raining, Estela tells her, impatient.

Sun’s still up there, Angelita says, in the sky. She touches my face with her long, old, brown finger and traces out a pattern I can’t see. Taking away the bad, she tells me. Putting a blessing on your baby.

You’re impossible, Estela says, but Angelita doesn’t stop for a very long time, and when she does, she is shaking out her finger bones, like she can shake away the bad, the risks. The girl will be fine, she decides.

As I have said, Estela says.

The girl and the baby, too.

Are you finished? Estela asks.

I am.

Then let the girl sleep, Estela says, looking toward the door like she can walk Angelita there with her two dark eyes, but in the doorway now Arcadio stands, his skinny guitar in his hands. Beside him stands Bruno, and beyond him, Rafael, and the light in the room is wet and gray, and I hadn’t heard them come, and I wonder, Where is Esteban? Where is Miguel? Where in the world is Luis?

We brought music, Arcadio says.

She needs her rest, Estela says again, and again.

Music for the good dreams, Bruno says, and now Arcadio pulls a note from a string, and Bruno answers with a note of his own—soft notes, a tender something. The ladybird walks a trail up my arm. Estela sits here, listening. I close my eyes, and I dream the past. They stay all morning with their quiet songs. I sleep. I dream. I remember. I think about my mom at home. The ends of things. The beginnings.

THIRTY-SEVEN

My mother never took a single second look at my father’s photographs after she started Carlina’s. It was like she figured they’d hijack her out of the present and into the past—lock her up with the person she’d been when it was already way too late to love her husband out loud, or to ask for his forgiveness. She put his photos, his cameras, his lenses, his albums in boxes. She put the boxes in the basement, closed the door, and left it shut. She moved things. She made things vanish. “We put things behind us,” she said.

We were having dinner, late, when she said it—leftovers from some engagement party. Hand food, she called it, which cut us loose from forks, knives, and plates, made cleanup nobody’s job—a good thing, since we had both stopped caring, since I’d leave the plates, and she’d leave the plates, and they would stack up in the sink, like some challenge. She’d come home with a beat-up laminated box—stained up, smashed in—and open the lid. It’d be bruschetta, or toothpicked melon, or pesto tuna on mini baguettes. Not shrimp. Not crab cakes. Not lemon squares. Nothing that the people at the party actually wanted. Just the leftovers that would have gotten trashed anyway—that’s what came home with my mother. That’s why she started gaining weight and how I started getting too skinny. She ate with her skirt zipper half down and her shoes kicked off, her hair pulled back into a crooked barrette. She was working for the people she’d always wanted to be. She thought that she could still get there, party-throw her way into her high society.

The executive’s widow: she called herself that. She Match.commed herself. She was ready. Ready for someone else to take Dad’s place, to treat her like the woman she always thought she’d be.

She had rearranged the house so she could focus. She’d taken Dad’s clothes to the Goodwill, except for a single white, button-down, wear-it-to-the-office shirt. She’d replaced the photograph above the fireplace mantel with a eucalyptus wreath. She filed her catering receipts in Dad’s sock drawer. She slept in the middle of the bed as if she’d always slept alone, as if she were some virgin, waiting. And that day, the day we were eating mini quiches for dinner, she’d moved Dad’s favorite chair into the guest room. Got up early, moved the thing, then went to work, leaving the space empty where the chair had been, the four leveled-out craters in the green shag carpet. Cold quiche is not exactly something you want to stock up on. But my mother was downing them, one after the other, and I was sitting there watching, feeling annoyed, wondering when she was going to mention the chair, but she never mentioned the chair. She just kept eating quiche like there wasn’t some gigantic hole in the middle of the living room.

“You’re acting like Dad was never here to begin with,” I said, after she’d gone for at least ten minutes just opening her mouth and chewing. I’d spent the day alone. Most people, except Kevin, were gone, and Kevin had been working the golf course since dawn.

“Kenzie,” my mother said, “mind your mouth.” She gave me a cold stare, then dabbed at her lips with a catering napkin. All my mother’s napkins were Carlina’s marked. She must have ordered up a million.

“I mean, the chair, Mom? The chair? What was the matter with that chair? Why couldn’t you leave Dad’s favorite chair downstairs?”

“I didn’t throw it out, Kenzie. I just moved it.”

“Yeah, like, to Siberia, Mom. If he were to come back here and look around, he’d think he had the wrong address.”

Her eyes got small. She drew her lips together in a lowercase
o
. When she did that, all the skin around her mouth fell in, like curtains pulled loose to the side. “He’s not coming back, Kenzie,” she said.

“But he still
matters
.”

“He matters. Of course he matters. But we put things behind us. We have to.”

She closed the lid on the box of quiche. She started stroking the skin on her neck. I could have left it right there, but I was mad about the chair. I was mad about how she made decisions about Dad, who had belonged to both of us.

“So Dad’s a
thing
?”

“That’s not what I mean, Kenzie, and you know it.” Her voice was flat the way her voice got flat just before it went absolutely silent. My mother was CEO of the silent treatment. I was about ready to get mine.

“I’m not abandoning him, Mom.”

“I’m not abandoning him either.”

“You’re on friggin’ Match.com.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“How about remember him, Mom? How about give him some time to still be a part of us?”

“Your father had a heart attack, in case you forgot, Kenzie, and there’s only one parent here, in case you haven’t noticed. I am doing what I can.”

“You’re doing nothing, Mom.”

“You have a roof over your head, Kenzie. Be grateful.”

She stood and collected the sagging quiche box. She yanked at her skirt, which had slipped to her hips. “Turn the lights off when you’re done,” she said.

I sat for a long time. Then I called Kevin. Called him because I had actual faith that he could stop my dad from disappearing. That disappearing could be stopped.

You have to know what cannot be forgotten.

I was outside when he rumbled up the drive. I got in the car, slammed the door, banged my head against the headrest.

“You okay?” he said.

“I’m a jerk,” I said.

He drove, and we didn’t talk. I closed my eyes. He dialed up the radio. He’d had his own day, but I didn’t ask. He let me be alone, beside him. Maybe this was Kevin’s best trait—the way he knew how to just let me be. The way he waited until I came out on the other side of whatever mood I’d tunneled into. It had been misting earlier in the evening, but now it had stopped, and the air outside the car was cooler than the air inside the car, so Kevin rolled the windows down and the breeze blew my loose hair all around. Finally I felt the car slow down and roll to a stop. I heard Kevin get out, walk around, open my door. We were at the bottom of a hill. At the top of the hill was moonlight. Under the moonlight was my dad.

I looked from the hill to my boyfriend and back. “Kev?” I said, because I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t told him about my mom or the chair on the phone. I hadn’t told him about Match.com. I’d only said, “Can you come over here? Can we go out?” and he’d come—Kevin, the guy who was always looking ahead, but the guy who also knew how to stop and look straight at me and see what would save me, or heal me. I trusted him with that. I believed in him.

“It just seemed like . . .”

“Yeah,” I said. “It seemed like perfect.” I leaned in and kissed him. Touched his head with my hands, his dark, fine curls.

“Come on,” he said, taking my hand, starting up the hill and taking me with him—up—until the hill flattened into the graveyard. We walked between the crooked rows of headstones and all the things that people leave for the people they have loved. A jar full of lemons. A paperback book. Two wide-lipped wineglasses. The dahlias from some garden. It was pocky and uneven up there with the dead. There was a plastic bunny nestled on top of one stone. There was a mound of soft dirt, recently dug. In front of one marker, spread out like a picnic, was a plate and a knife and a fork.

My dad’s headstone was new, dug in two months before, after the stonecutters were done.
Corey Spitzer
, it said.
April 1, 1945–August 30, 1995. Husband. Father
. It was on the edge, where the forest began, the big birch trees with their peel-away bark. Kevin had my hand in his, and he was taking me there, weaving through slowly, following moonlight, walking slightly ahead so he could test the shadows first.

I let him lead me. I let him think for both of us, so that all I had to do was feel—to let my dad near, the good of him, the parts my mother could not vanquish. “Mr. Spitzer,” Kevin said, when we stood at last by the grave, “your daughter’s here.”

“Kev . . .”

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t move.”

“Wait,” I said.

“What?” He had that expression on his face, that crowded smile.

“I so love you, Kevin Sullivan.”

“Yeah. Well, I kind of love you too.”

Kind of love you—
that’s what he said.
Kind of love you.
What did it mean? What didn’t I know? Why didn’t I ask?

“Where are you going?”

“I think you guys need some time for just you.”

* * *

The night stirred and the moon creaked, and after a while I talked to my dad. Told him I was thinking of Newhouse and that I fought too much with Mom, and that all we ever ate at night were cold things from banged-out boxes that had been made in Mom’s Corian kitchen twenty hours before. “Mom misses you,” I said, because despite everything I knew she did; it was lying to myself to pretend she didn’t. She missed him, and she was trying to live forward, she was trying to take care. She was just really lousy at it.

“But, Dad,” I said then, “I miss you more,” because it would have been another kind of lying to pretend that I did not. “You dying sucks,” I said, and then I touched his tombstone, and I traced out his name. Traced out the letters of the word
Father.
Then I sat there listening to the squirrels in the trees until I heard Kevin’s footfalls at the top of the hill, through the graveyard, there beside me. Until I saw his shadow spilling.

“Remember this picture?” he said, but I could barely see what he meant in that moonlight. I didn’t understand until I could actually see the picture Kevin held in one hand. “The five of us,” he said. “The photo your dad took last summer. I thought maybe he could use the company.”

“Yeah,” I said, and now nothing was going to stop me from crying. “Our company. He probably could.”

“I’ll find a stone,” Kevin said, “so we don’t fly off.” He went out into the woods. He returned. It was the two of us. It was all of us. It was we.

And it was then.