Free Small Damages by Beth Kephart

circle in the courtyard until he returns with the end of a hose in one hand and a rag over one shoulder, a bucket filled with brushes and shampoos. He streams water over Tierra’s back, sudses her neck, works the soap in hard circles. When he looks up, I’m there.
    “
Buenas tardes,
” I say.
    He looks straight through me. He walks Tierra into her stall—talks her in. He shuts the door and latches it and turns back, and I don’t move, and now Esteban watches me like I’m supposed to know what to say, or what to do, but I don’t. Tierra whinnies from her stall and shakes her head. I don’t think she likes me.
    Where did you go? I finally ask him.
    To the forest, he says, pointing with his chin. Where did
you
go?
    That way. I point beyond us, to nowhere, to some hazy somewhere, east.
    Not so great, he says. You going missing. You can’t do that to Estela, especially. You can’t get lost. She panics.
    It wasn’t about her.
    It doesn’t matter.
    Maybe not, I say.
    He pushes his hair out of his face, and it curls in its own directions, does what it wants.
    What’s in the forest? I ask.
    Trees, he says. Birds. Shade.
    Do you go a lot?
    I go sometimes.
    Would you ever take me?
    What for? he asks.
    I don’t know. So I can see it?
    He looks at me, then at Tierra.
    A lot of that is up to her, he says. If she likes you, then she’ll take you. He turns and leaves me standing with nothing but the sun and the dying pool where the water ran the heat off Tierra’s flesh.
    Esteban? I call. He’s already halfway to his room—to the birds, to the tree, to the bed, to leaving me feeling stupid.
    “¿Sí?”
    I’m sorry. About this morning.
    It’s not Estela’s fault, he says, that you’re here. Or Miguel’s either.
    I want to meet Javier and Adair, I say.
    You will, he says. Someday.
    Which means he’s in on it. He knows my story. He knows more about next than I do.
    Talk to me,
I want to say.
Don’t leave me feeling stupid.
But he’s talking to his birds instead. He’s leaving me to nothing.

TWENTY
    The night has come in more black than blue; I must have slept. I hear my name, hear boots against planks. I push myself up to sitting and feel the rough wood of near splinters on my hands.
    Estela sent me, Esteban says, leaning in with a plate, a knife, a fork, so that a smell steams up: mango and crunch. When he stands again, his head scrapes the sky. He looks around at the darkened world, then back toward his courtyard, to the house.
    You missed the party, he says.
    Oh, I say. God.
    Estela thought you left again. I told her I’d seen you in the tree house.
    So she sent you here?
    She actually trusts me.
    His teeth are stars burning. The end of the day shows in his face. The beginning of a beard. The grind of dust. He just stands there looking out, and I’m supposed to sit here eating, and it feels odd with him so high up like that—so removed and far away, still near.
    Are you staying? I ask him. Or going?
    He doesn’t answer.
    Stay? I ask.
    It’s like he can’t decide. Like all he wants to do is look out from high up, to see his world from here, the abandoned lookout of a tree. Finally he slides his back against a bracing of a branch and sits with his knees up to his chin. He pulls at the threads in the seam of his jeans. He watches me eat. I hear myself swallow.
    I used to come here all the time, he says. The beginning of my life at Los Nietos.
    When was that?
    He tilts his head and watches the stars. He lets the night fill in between us. Gypsy song rises on the other side of the house, and probably the bulls have already drifted into dreaming, thinking they’re safe, that they’ll always live here. Home. That they’ll dance for Miguel in that jeep, then sleep beneath the scrawny shade of the bony olive trees.
    My mother died, Esteban finally says, when I was five.
    I didn’t know.
    A year later, my father was dead. He was a matador, distracted in the ring. Miguel is my godfather. He brought me here. I