Small Damages (2 page)

FOUR

The first night after my father died, the wind started howling and wouldn’t stop. It banged the trash cans out into the street and U-turned the limbs of the trees and scorched the canopy straight off the side porch, and this was before my mother had found her talent for exerting her power over things. So that she stood at one end of the house, and I stood at the other until it was my father I heard in the wind, speaking to me and me only. He howled and howled until he’d blown a tunnel through my heart, a black, blank wilderness that rattles.

It was September of my senior year, and I had loved my father best.

They buried him in the long lawn behind St. James Episcopalian. I wore a white dress and aqua flip-flops. I watched his casket sink into the ground, heard the birds in the trees. When I turned, I saw Kevin at the bottom of the hill, waiting for me finally to see him. I went—down the grass hill, in bare feet. The earth was cool and also warm and some of the grass was soft, though most of the blades were spiking, and my shadow went out in front, leading the way past the white marble markers scattered beneath trees, and still there was a wind, but it had stopped howling.

Kevin was broad across the shoulders already. The end of his dark hair was lost in the collar of his shirt. We’d been best friends. My dad was dead.

Javier is not your father. Your father is Kevin, who got in early to Yale. Kevin, who walks tilted forward, closer to the future than the rest of us. Closer to certain. “I’m going to Yale,” he said, and that’s where he’s going, and this, here, with you, is where I am. Pregnancy happens, and not to the guy, not to the friends. Preggo, up in the duff, eating for two, in the family way, bun in the oven, knocked up: it’s yours, and no matter what you do, you’ve done a big thing that stays with you a lifetime. I know that much. I know that the me I am will now always also be this: the girl who got pregnant and had to choose.
The parents of your child,
Miguel said. No. Not actually, Miguel.

Your dad plays lacrosse; he plays forward. He has dark hair, green eyes, a crowded Irish smile. He’s always going somewhere—always planning, always scheming, always finding out what he wants to want, then finding out a way to make it happen. But when he starts to laugh, I start to laugh, and also: he totally sucks at bowling. Bowling with Kevin was my favorite thing to do. “Yeah, Kenzie,” he’d say. “You’re such a star.” Leaning back and not caring that he was no good at this, that I was better. Leaning back and not going anywhere. Kevin left bowling to me. He left singing. He left Shipley TV. But he wasn’t about to leave his big and brilliant future for what had happened to happen to me.

I should be at the shore. I should be going to Newhouse. It would be so much easier if I couldn’t imagine your feet, your fingers. But I do.

FIVE

She is making
albondigas de bonito
. Taking the tuna from the icebox and plucking its bones and chopping and tossing and salting and garlicking, and now she adds some flattened parsley. She leaves the tuna to marinate and starts chopping this ham, these olives, this hardboiled egg, and now she stuffs some old stale bread into a bowl of milk, then snaps a fresh egg open and whips its yolk away from its whites.

“You see?” she says.

I nod. My breasts are swollen sore above the lump of you. I don’t get sick anymore. I don’t sit on the bathroom floor fisting the toilet, or lie there afterward, sobbing. I don’t. But everywhere is the flail of you, your necklace of bones, your hardly skin, your fingernails; you already have them. In health class, eighth grade, we watched the movie, we saw how it is. The pearl squiggled out with a tail. The curl like a fish protecting. The webbing in between, just temporary.

“Get control of yourself,” my mother said.

“Control of myself?” I asked.

Estela adds the bread and the egg to everything else and pounds and pulls until it all looks like it was always one thing, and now she pinches off a piece and forms a ball. She makes I don’t know how many balls, never changing her expression. She fries and spoons them down into a swamp of garlic, parsley, and wine, and there’s sweat on the bottles of sherry beside her. There’s sweat on the fat black figs, and on the window too. The water is going full blast.

“You learn to cook,” she says. “You learn from me.”

I was A-minus good at high-school Spanish. I was number one camerawoman for Shipley TV. I got the first internship I applied for. I didn’t grow up needing other people’s help or trying to prove that I don’t, but at Los Nietos, Estela’s got English to prove—proves it every chance she’s got—and what’s it to me? I am no guest in the old cook’s kitchen. I am to make myself useful, and part of that, Estela makes it clear, is to let her speak her English, a language she learned, she said, from a banker family she once cooked for. Before now, she says. And that is all.

“Do you hearing that?” Estela suddenly spins on her cook shoes and asks me.

“Do I hear what?”

“Esteban,” she says. “The birds.”

She turns the spigot off and now, in a faraway way, I do—the sound of Estela’s name, the freaking of birds. Estela wipes dry her hands, flips the dials on the stove. “It has happened,” she says. She pulls an eyedropper from one drawer with one hand and lifts the pan of olive oil she’s been warming on the burner with the other and starts running, so we are, too, through the kitchen door, past her bedroom, through Miguel’s part of the house and down the hall to the back courtyard. Estela’s feet are fat and short. Her rubber soles squish-snap against the dark floor tiles. She swings the eyedropper and she swings the copper-bottomed pan right to left.

When we reach Esteban’s room, the door is open—his only door, since his room doesn’t connect to the house. The sleeves of his white shirt are rolled to his elbows. His face is hidden beneath the broken lid of his hat. I’ve been here a whole three weeks, almost four, and I have not seen the whole face beneath that hat—have not seen Esteban outside of shadow. He’s kept to himself and away from me, like I’m the worst kind of American—the intruder version who doesn’t just take up space, but takes space away from others. He says hello now, but only to Estela. He says it in a way that’s urgent.

From a hook near his head the birdcage hangs, lanterning the sun. Bella, the greener bird, is twitting from cage to tree, from tree to cage. She lands on Esteban’s arm, beaks him, pulls at her feathers, twists her head, and now she’s flying again, rippling the air, and all this time Esteban is not watching Bella, and if I were filming this, I would not know what the story is. Esteban seems most worried about Limón, in the bottom of the cage, who has spread out her wings and is whipping her tail like she’d smash up the air if she could.

Estela fills the whole room. Esteban lets her. I stay where I
am, the last thing from necessary, listening to the horses in their stalls next door stomping and chuffing and feeling the sun on the back of my neck. Finally I see Limón on the flat of Esteban’s hand, the bird looking half dead, or maybe all dead, I don’t know which. I only know that Estela is calm, filling the dropper with the oil from her pan. Esteban upside downs Limón. Estela drips the warmed oil over the underbelly of the bird, and this is how they work Limón despite Bella, who is winging wild and desperate. Estela tells me to come close and hands me the dropper, and now she’s massaging Limón with her fat cook’s fingers—her big hands on the shrinking bird and the bird just lying there until Limón lets out a strange bird cry and presses a white pebble into Estela’s hand.

A small white pebble. An egg.

“Stuck,” Estela says. She turns Limón upright and slips her back onto Esteban’s hand, who smooths the green and yellow feathers down before he releases Limón into her cage. Bella wings and flaps and cuts through the room before flying through the open door of the cage and taking the perch beside Limón, who is standing there upright, eyes open, alive.

I look at Estela. I look at Esteban, his face still down under his hat.

“We thought Bella was a girl,” Estela tells me. “Then they started having babies.”

“Oh,” I say, and Estela slips the egg into the dark hole of her pocket.

“Done,” Estela says, and just like that, she walks away, the ends of her violet apron making little sweeps in the dust.

“
Gracias,
” Esteban calls out after her, and when he lifts his hat from his head to swipe away the sweat, I stare. He has night-colored eyes and arched eyebrows. His dark hair falls to his shoulders from the place that the hatband dented in. A scar frowns down from one cheek, like the lip of a glass cutting in, or a half moon fallen. He wipes his face again and fits his hat back on. He meets my stare front on.

Why don’t you ever come inside? I ask him, in Spanish.

Because this is where I live, he says.

One room?

One room. The sky. The horses.

Two birds.

Thanks to Estela, he says. “
Sí.
” Two birds. But that’s all he says, and now Estela’s calling from the kitchen.

She needs you, Esteban says, a half smile.

She owns me, I say, and I mean it.

SIX

The day I learned about you, I’d wakened from a dream, and the dream was how I knew, or how I guessed. The dream was me in a room of mirrors where there weren’t any doors, and in every single pane of glass was me big and getting bigger, like Alice in Wonderland and Willy Wonka got together for a pig-out. I was wearing a T-shirt top and pajama-bottom sweats, and when I woke up, they were soaked, and even awake I could not get up, like I was five hundred million pounds of blubber all trapped inside that glass. I thought about Dad looking down, and I started to cry, and no matter how hard I tried to tell myself that it was nothing, only a dream, I knew my dreams better than that, and besides, I was pukey.

I wasn’t an idiot.

I’d taken chances.

It must have been two hours later when I crept downstairs and called to my mother, “I’ll be back.” I pulled my bike out of the shed, and I wobbled myself onto the triangle seat and set on down the road, still wearing my tee and my sweats and feeling dizzy—not in my head, but in my gut. The front door of the all-night pharmacy shimmies with bell song when you walk in, making sure that everyone knows you’re there to buy the things you wish no one would see you buying. The floors of the pharmacy are white gleam all the way down the aisles. The shelves are silver and glaring. The price tags are blue and they change all the time, and they put chocolate at every corner. I paid the long-haired guy at the cash register for the kit, his tattoos snaking up to his chin. I turned out of the bright-light store into the dim-light hall and then turned the knob to the bathroom.

Behind the thin door, I peed onto the stick, and then I waited, balancing the stick across my knees, until one minute was two and you weren’t a dream, you were you. I felt something rising hot along the backside of my throat, and turned and got sick. Then I forced myself upright on the hard, white seat until I could breathe again, until I could stand up and walk out of that room, out of that hall, out of the dim into the bright, out of the store.

It was early and had rained the night before. It was late March and too cool for just a tee and sweats, and I was shivering now and couldn’t help it. I’d stuffed my bike into the pharmacy rack and left it unlocked, because that’s the kind of place I live in; people don’t steal bikes, and girls like me do not get pregnant, especially with the guy going to Yale. My mouth tasted like bleach—bleach and metal. I couldn’t swallow.

“Can’t be true, can’t be true, can’t be true,” I kept saying, and I thought I was going to fall down and die, and it hurt to look up, and I had to steady myself by sitting right there on the ground, bringing my knees to my head, hugging my legs with my arms, rocking back and forth, rocking off my sickness. I needed somebody bad right then. I needed someone to hold me.

“Hey,” Kevin said, after the fifth ring. It was a little after nine
A.M.
, a Saturday. He’d been asleep.

“Hey,” I said.

“What’s up?”

“Kev?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s just . . .”

“Kenzie?”

“Kev?”

He was turning over in his bed, the air hissing out of his pillow. I could hear someone nearby, down the long hall of his house, calling for Pep, Kevin’s ADD pup. I could hear Pep barking, all combat crazy, and the creak of Kevin’s bed and the huffing of Pep’s breath, the little whine that dog makes when he’s playing a game he thinks he’s won.

“Such a little weasel dog,” Kevin started saying to Pep. “A little thief. Give me the shoe, Pep. Give it up.” Pep was panting, whining, putting more creak into the bed, and I was shucking off tears, punching my own eyes out with my fists, and finally Kev said, “Hey, Kenzie. Can I call you back?”

I hung up.

I waited.

And here’s the thing: Kevin did not call me back. The sun didn’t come out, and my eyes were broken, and breathing was swallowing a rumble of sticks.

Then the cashier guy from the pharmacy came out the door to fire up a cigarette and to scratch at the snake on his neck. He gave me one look, and he knew my whole story; he stopped scratching his snake, then he shrugged. Cashier as my witness, Kevin did not call me back. Not that morning. Not in that right-then space, when I needed him most, when I was still thinking,
Maybe, maybe
. Eighth-grade health. The baby like a pea, a lima bean, like a see-through ocean of living. Six weeks, I thought. Maybe seven. And the baby and the cord still growing. That was the question on the test, quiz:
Explain
the role of the umbilical cord in placental mammals. Two arteries. One vein. Wharton’s jelly. The vein takes the good blood in. The arteries take the bad blood out. The cord splits in two at the liver. Extra credit to the girl in back who can give the cord its other names.
Funiculus umbilicalis,
she wrote.
Birth cord.
The cord of birth. The line between. Elbows at six weeks. Digits. Eyes on the sides of the head.

SEVEN

When Estela says my name, it comes out flat. “Kenzie!” A demand, never a question. “Kenzie!”

“Yes?”

“We have guests coming.”

“Uh-huh.”

“When we have guests, you help. Those are the rules.”

“Yes, Estela.”

“And don’t be bothering with the boy.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard what I said. You listen.”

“I was only asking—”

“Go,” she interrupts me. “Make the table for four.”

“Four?” I say, though I want to say,
Rules? Bother? Listen?
I want to ask her who she thinks she is. I want to leave and go very far away.

“
Sí
. Luis is coming.”

“Who?” I bite the inside of my mouth, where the skin’s so thin. I feel my eyes go hard, watch Estela watching.

“Luis,” Estela repeats slowly. “It is his birthday.” A strange something creeps up around the corners of her mouth, and I wait for more, wait for something, wait, at least, for her to smile. But all Estela ever does is deliver her instructions.
Keep the fire low. Keep the spatula ready. Hang your wash on Tuesdays. Water the flowers on Thursday. Leave the cats alone. Wait here. Watch me.
Estela has rules, and she’s in charge of us both. Thanks to my mother, which is really thanks to Mari.

Now Estela shows me the good plates, the good silver. She nods toward the open door, because in Spain, at Los Nietos, we eat outside, beneath the weather. I find a tray and stack it. I walk from the steam of the kitchen into the steam of the day, and when I get into the sun, everything mirages—the lizard on the stucco wall, the snake tail of a cat, the heat that rises from Estela’s kitchen, making for the sky’s only cloud. I put out four forks and four knives and four plates, and beneath the forks, I fold bright red linen napkins. I slap the dust from the falling-through-their-own-seams chairs and pull them all into their places. I leave the table baking in the sun—courtyard dining. All-year weather. I cross the courtyard and stand in the door of Estela’s kitchen, watching her measure by pinches between her thumb and forefinger, by scoops out of one bowl into the next—this many shoves of the wooden spoon, this much knocked-out sugar, this long pour of oil from the yellow bottle on the sill. She’s pulling six gherkins from a green-glass jar. She’s taking a tray of pork ribs out of hiding, seasoning the ribs with some potion, plopping the lard into the pan, turning the heat dial to the right without even checking the number, and now she’s asking, “You have been watching?”

I nod.

“Luis’s birthday,” she says.

I nod again.

“I make what he likes.”

She works furiously above her ugly shoes. Ortho shoes, Ellie would call them.

“Who else is coming?” I ask. “To the party?”

Estela turns. She gives me a look. Her black eyes watch over the crinkle of her cheeks. “This is our excluding party,” she says. “For Luis. Peel the grapes. Do it careful,
sí
?” Handing me a bowl of big green ones, she reaches for her apron strings and ties them back into a knot. She leans against the oven and pulls a thick, gray stripe of hair behind one ear. A ray of sun has fallen in through her window, catching the steam and the dust.

“Why not Esteban?” I ask, after all of that.

“¿Qué?”

“Why isn’t he coming to the party?”

I meet her eyes. She gives me that look.

“No,” she says.

“Why?”

“Esteban does not eat with us.” He never does, he never has. Estela’s always taking him a plate, a chore she keeps to herself and will not share.

“But why not?”

“You’re a guest here.”

I peel another grape, put a little thumb against it. “I know, but—”

“Watch it,” she says. “Don’t make a messing of things.”

I stare up at her, over the bowl of grapes. She stares at me.

“For what are you staring?”

“I’m not staring.”

“Phhhaaa.”

I sit, chew the skin from around one nail. “Who is Luis?” I ask again.

“Luis is Miguel’s uncle. The grapes,
sí
? You finish them.”

She scowls. I work the grape skin. I work grape after grape after grape, until I’m done, until I push the bowl of naked grapes toward her, triumphant.

“How does Miguel know Mari?” I ask her now, holding my chin in my hand.

“Will you stop the asking of questions?”

“My mother wouldn’t tell me.”

“You mind your own business.”

“There’s nothing for me to do.”

“¿Nada?”

“I finished the grapes,” I say. “See?” I point toward the bowl with my chin.

“You also left your dresses drying in the sun,” she says.
“¿Sí?”

“I guess.”

“You want your dresses to fry like some egg in a pan?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then you have something to do,” she says. “And so you do it, and so when you are finishing, you come back to help with the party.”

“You want me to go do the laundry?”

“You were listening?”

I don’t budge.

“You hear me, Kenzie?”

“Estela,” I say, rising, “of course I hear you. You are two feet away speaking your English.”