Small Damages by Beth Kephart Read Free Book Online Page B

music.
Your love is like the wind and mine like a stone that never moves,
they sing, the notes smacking free and the songs shivering and time going by and also distance, until the moonlight dies, and finally I dream: Kevin on a boat in a field of floating bulls. Ellie with a pair of purple wings. No lights in the streets, only glitter candy, and then the drowned things rushing, flooding down the narrow streets.
    “What do you want me to do?” Kevin asked the day before I was leaving. “What are you asking?”
    “Help me through it. Come to Spain.”
    “Come to
Spain
? I can’t. You know I can’t do that.”
    “Because you won’t tell anyone.”
    “Because there was another way.”
    “Because you are embarrassed.”
    “Because the baby is this big,” he shows me a half inch between his fingers. “Because you don’t have to do this.”
    “I’m just asking you to come with me. Please.” He was sitting on the edge of my bed, watching me, like we hadn’t been best friends forever, like he hadn’t touched me like nobody ever had touched me, like we had not awakened one morning, with each other. I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror across the room—the mascara streaming down my face, his green eyes strange and hollow.
    “You want me to come to Spain, and watch the baby growing bigger, and watch you have the baby, and then come home. That’s what you want.”
    “That’s my life, Kevin. Right now. That’s what it is. Why shouldn’t it also be yours?”
    “I can’t,” he said. “I just can’t.”
    Everything you do now is something you do for or to another,
the doctor told me later that same day, when it was me alone in the examination room, my feet up in the stirrups, my third appointment.
You are living for two. Be careful.
    And that’s it. That’s it today; I can’t stand it. I can’t stand being here, on my own, invisible but also growing larger. I stumble from bed and shower with the cold water I can’t get used to—let the cold, cold water burn. I throw on a dress, head down the hall, cut through the courtyard, and it’s like I’m not here, like I’m already gone, like I will be gone four months from now. She was here and then she wasn’t. Pretend it never happened. Under the tiled arch, down the chalk of road, I walk. The bulls on their hills are black pepper. The cacti are brush. Distance is distance, and I keep walking, east, toward Seville, and the sun rises, it burns, and all I want is to be outside of my own head, outside of this, someplace that isn’t me, but all I can think about, still, is Kevin, and how he had all the betting people betting on him. The lacrosse scout for the summer league. The Ivies with their scholarship money. The kids who actually vote for student council.
    It’s sunflowers in the fields instead of bulls. It’s houses nobody lives in, horses nobody rides, a man on a mule trotting by. It’s abandoned wells and steam on the horizon, a cat crossing the road, and I can’t get enough distance.
    Twenty-one words, and a bunch of
we
’s, like I’m on some holiday. Like all I need out here in the desert of Spain is a lame group hug from the shore.
    Kenzie’s gone to Spain. It’s cool. She’s learning how to cook.

SIXTEEN
    I’m halfway to nowhere by the time Miguel finds me. I hear Gloria and look up from where I’m sitting along the side of the road, and there she is, a toy car on a dusty road, braking. Miguel swerves to a stop, and Gloria’s back wheels spin.
    “Where,” he demands, “are you thinking you are going?” He leaves Gloria parked in the middle of the road. Climbs out and walks, angry, toward me, and I realize I’ve been crying and don’t want him to see.
    “Get in,” he says, offering his arm so that I can stand, taking his time, because he is a gentleman first, a Spanish prince to Estela’s queen.
    He opens my door and slams it behind me. He folds himself in on his side and sits, going nowhere, staring out onto the road. “We