Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  She spoke to him, but he did not hear her. She sounded as distant as the far-off call of a bird echoing through the valley. His own heartbeat, a thing he had not understood to be there until that moment, grew louder in his ears. The pressure in his rib cage made his chest feel like it was hardening into wood. He hadn’t realized he was trying to get to his feet until the act of sitting up and trying to stand left his lungs raw and worn.

  The girl knelt near him. Her skirt spread around her, the hem lapping at his thigh. He tried to breathe, but the shame of realizing how dirty his clothes were made the feeling of weight on his chest worse. The stains on his shirt matched the soil caught under his fingernails, like he’d been raking his hands through the ground. Flecks of earth fell from his forearms but dampened and stained his collar and the hems of his pants.

  They could have come from sleeping and waking on this ground. But each dulling stain felt like the sign of some transgression he had yet to confess. Maybe this girl had come to give him a chance to unburden his soul, but how could he confess the things he had done if he couldn’t remember them?

  Again, the girl spoke to him, this time with light hands on his shoulders, like she was telling him not to move so fast.

  The wonder of her struck him still. He wanted so much to both run from her and be in her presence that she must have been some saint he did not recognize. She had been sent there to find him, and now she would judge his spirit.

  But she was not dressed as some angel of Heaven, in the golds of saints’ light and the blues of la Virgen. Nor was she the flame colors of the damnation he knew to fear; she was not some beautiful demon who would turn to fire and ash when he touched his fingers to her dress. Instead, there was the dark brown of her hair and her eyes. The lighter brown of her face and her hands. The faint red of her lips, and the soft green of her dress.

  She was warmth but not fire, light but not sky.

  “Fel,” she said, and because he did not understand, he shook his head before he realized he was doing it.

  She touched his shoulder.

  “Fel,” she said.

  He followed the line of her arm down to her hand. Between her thumb and forefinger she grasped a scrap of cloth sewn to his shirt. She pulled it until the end came free from under his suspender strap.

  Three letters, F-e-l, had been scrawled onto the cloth.

  It looked like there might have been more letters, but the scrap had been torn, and those three were all that was left. The loss of the other letters felt as heavy as a prayer unsaid, like they were a map to this garden valley.

  “Is that your name?” she asked.

  He opened his mouth to say no but then realized he did not know what name to tell her instead. He didn’t remember what he was called any more than he remembered where he had been before this garden.

  If this was el Purgatorio, maybe it was his first test to resist her. The quiet force of her made him want to tell her things he did not know. It made him want to make things up, lie just so he could give her something that sounded true. And maybe she knew this and was waiting to see if he would lie in this way, or if he would admit that he knew nothing.

  But her dress, green as the trees that softened the edges of this garden valley, her dress made him think of something.

  Some understanding about the color drifted toward him but then skittered away before he could grasp it. And because he wanted to follow that understanding, to see if it would come back to him, he let this girl take his hand.

  THREE

  This boy was La Pradera’s answer.

  Estrella found him in the same corner of the sunken garden where she had buried her little wooden horse. But she wasn’t telling her cousins that. If they thought the indigo horse had been the thing to do it, they’d look at her the same way they looked at her on the nights she woke with starflowers covering the ceiling. Like she was a girl whose dreams and favorite childhood toys were things they had to protect her from.

  What they knew, all they needed to know, was that the five of them had brought their nighttime offerings, and the gardens had given them something back.

  Gloria tried to hand the boy the phone and asked, “Is there someone you want to call?”

  He blinked at the phone like it was something not only unknown but unknowable.

  He reminded Estrella of the partridge chick Dalia had as a pet when they were little. That was before the old cat Azalea had started batting at it, and Dalia got worried the cat would eat it. Dalia had long since given it to an old woman who now fed it peaches and read it the Psalms, but Estrella remembered it. Scrawny and funny-looking and made presentable only by its fluff, a mix of brown, black, and gold.

  Instead of fluff, this boy had his hair, coarse and dark as Estrella’s, but uncombed, and his loose clothes. Brown pants, and a shirt that had once been cream or tan but that the earth had darkened.

  Dalia whispered something to Calla about his clothes.

  The rough shirt, trousers, and thick suspenders were work clothes, but ones as out of place in this century as Bay’s waistcoats.

  While Bay made the clothes of some other time seem as natural to her as her hair, everything about this boy seemed misplaced. He had an underfed look made more pitiful by the lost way he studied everything from that phone to the windows. He seemed like he had wandered into a world he did not belong to.

  “How old do you think he is?” Gloria asked.

  Dalia shrugged, looking at him as though he could not see her staring. “Seventeen? Eighteen?”

  Dalia glanced at Estrella, and Estrella knew she was not saying the rest. He seemed about seventeen or eighteen, but he had the diminished sense of a boy the world had worked hard. It made them all feel a little guilty for having not just mothers who plaited ribbons into their hair but grandmothers who read to them when they had all had the chicken pox at once.

  Being a Nomeolvides girl, living so closely with generations of five women each, meant they all had not just their own mothers, not just their own grandmothers, but five.

  “Who loved him?” Azalea asked.

  They all turned to her, understanding even with just those three words.

  Azalea wanted to know which Nomeolvides woman might have once loved this boy into disappearing, and how La Pradera had returned him from whatever cursed place lovers vanished to. She looked at him like he was a spirit, despite Estrella leading him by the hand and showing him to be as solid as the flowers they made.

  “I don’t like this,” Azalea said, shivering as though a draft had come through the house.

  “Well, we can’t leave him like this,” Dalia said, her voice low in case the boy could understand her. “Look at him.”

  Azalea flitted around the hall like a bird caught under the rafters. “I still don’t like this.”

  Estrella let go of the boy’s hand. She felt the slow, shared breath in that always came before they started arguing.

  To her and to Dalia, La Pradera had given them this boy, and they were asking for its wrath if they did not take care of him. If they ignored him, they risked La Pradera stealing Bay Briar, that girl they all loved, out of spite.

  To Azalea, he was a lost lover returned from some disappearing place, and to touch him was to provoke La Pradera’s curse.

  Before Gloria and Calla could choose their sides, all five of their mothers gathered around this boy the way they did around Bay. Gloria’s mother put her hands on either side of his face like he was a child, not an almost-grown man who stood a head above her.

  “Pobrecito,” Estrella’s mother said.

  The boy shuddered, eyes opening with recognition.

  “¿Comprendes?” Calla’s mother asked.

  Dalia’s mother shoved between them. She spoke better Spanish than any of her cousins, swearing she had learned it all by reading la Biblia in two languages. Now she spoke to the boy in a low voice, reassuring him in words Estrella and her cousins could neither hear nor understand.

  When she caug
ht the younger girls staring, she took them all in with one sweep of her eyes.

  “He’s not stupid,” she said. “He just speaks a language none of you bothered to learn.”

  Estrella’s grandmother and her cousins’ grandmothers had no time for the pity with which their daughters greeted this boy. They led him upstairs, stripped him out of his earth-darkened clothes, and put him under a shower. Estrella heard the water turn on, and the old women’s calming murmurs told her that the spray had startled him.

  Estrella floated between rooms, listening outside doors and catching scraps she could piece together.

  Her mother and her cousins’ mothers whispered that maybe this boy was a sign from God. The lovers they had lost would reappear. The grandmothers, who now left the boy alone to wash himself, agreed that he was a gift from the land. The Nomeolvides women did not have sons, so this boy was the son they would never bear themselves. He was a son, a nephew, a boy cousin, a brother.

  He was all these things this family did not know.

  “The land doesn’t give us gifts,” Azalea said when Estrella told her cousins.

  Even Estrella had to admit she was right. The land did not give anything without stealing something else. It had given their family a home, but in return it demanded the women stay. It insisted with such force that if any of them left, they weakened and grew sicker until they either came back or died.

  “Watch your tongues,” Abuela Magnolia said, and both Estrella and Azalea jumped to realize she was alongside them. “You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t alive before we came here.”

  “Neither were you,” Calla said under her breath. The Nomeolvides women had been at La Pradera for a hundred years. And despite Abuela Flor and Abuela Liria’s jokes that they were old enough to have seen the birth of Christ firsthand, no one alive in this family today had memory that far back.

  Abuela Lila set her hand beneath Calla’s chin, gentle but still correcting. “Do you know what it was like for our family before?”

  Calla nodded. She could have recited, half-asleep or deep in a fever, all that Abuela Lila was about to say. They all could have. Before La Pradera they were las hijas del aire. Children of the air. Children who, on paper, did not exist, and so were considered invisible and formless as the air beneath the sky. It had been an insult thrown at their family as they moved from place to place, after new treaties had declared their land now belonged to another country.

  So they wandered, with no birth certificates, no paperwork proving their names and their homes, no proof they had ever been born except the word of their mothers and the parteras who helped bring them into the world. Some—a girl who grew Mexican sage, another with a gift for tulips—tried to bury their last name and the lore of this family. But when their legacy was discovered, when blooms they never intended sprung up without warning, when their cursed love claimed the lives of adored sons, they were marked as witches, or killed.

  Some had tried to suppress their gifts for the ground. They’d tried to pretend they had no flowers waiting in their hands. They looked for job listings like secretary or shopgirl, nothing to do with anything growing or blooming. They rented apartments in cities, or houses in towns too small to be printed on maps. They tried to act as though they had not been born with petals in their fingertips.

  The blooms inside them always found their way out. Pushed down, they rose strange and spiteful, in ways as unexpected as they were dangerous. The girl christened after the purple velvet of Mexican sage had woken up to find a hundred thousand vines splintering her house apart.

  Another with a gift for the petaled cups of ranunculus accidentally grew enough to flood the schoolhouse where she worked. The children ran from them like snakes, and mothers and fathers drove her from town.

  The one with a blessing for tulips had resolved not to grow a single bloom, not even in a window box or flowerpot. She had not wanted to flaunt her gift in the middle of the drought-parched town where she hid.

  Then, one morning, the yard in front of her rented house turned from the bristle of dried grass to tulips so thick she could not find the ground. Cream and orange. Lipstick pink and pale green. Color-broken red and frilled peach. All with smooth leaves as green as algae on a pond. And before she could clear them, her neighbors saw. They thought she was a witch who’d stolen all the water, and a group of barely grown sons shot her like a scavenging bird.

  “La Pradera may keep us here,” Abuela Lila said now, “but we had a worse life before these gardens.”

  They all knew. Their mothers never let them forget.

  The legacy of disappearing lovers made the Nomeolvides women reviled, called the daughters of demons. They had endured the taunts and threats that came with being considered witches. Towns cast them out, not wanting them near their sons and daughters for fear Nomeolvides women would love them and they would vanish.

  “And now the land is softening toward us,” Abuela Flor said.

  Estrella could almost hear the unspoken hope hovering in this house.

  La Pradera had given them back a boy a Nomeolvides heart had once loved out of existence. His presence in their house held the enchantment and wonder of making a vanished love reappear.

  If La Pradera could bring back a boy lost a hundred years ago, maybe it could break this curse they had carried here in their hearts. Maybe it would give them back other vanished lovers. Maybe it would lift the awful legacy from this generation of daughters.

  That hope calmed Azalea, quieting her for as long as it took the boy to wash himself.

  But then Abuela Liria volunteered clothes that had once belonged to her vanished husband.

  “You’re putting him in the clothes of the dead,” Azalea said, paling.

  Abuela Magnolia and Abuela Mimosa handed him the trousers and pulled the shirt over his head.

  “Fine,” Azalea said. “You don’t care what you’re bringing down on us. But what about him? You could be cursing him.”

  “Enough,” Gloria said. The word came low, Gloria not wanting the boy to hear. But she hit it so hard it turned rough. Her eyes flashed to each cousin, first Azalea, then Dalia, Calla, Estrella. “If there’s any chance he belonged to one of ours, we treat him like one of ours.”

  They all hushed under her logic.

  If he had been loved and made to vanish by a woman in their family, no matter how long ago, then in some way he belonged to them. His lostness was, in whatever far-removed way, their fault. Every woman in this house had inherited it, the same way they had inherited the loss and broken hearts written into their blood.

  This was Gloria, quiet, her posture straight and unyielding. She held back so often that sometimes her voice startled them. But when she thought the four of them were acting like children, she took certain hold of their whispering and wondering and she decided.

  “So until we have a reason to say otherwise, he’s our brother.” Gloria caught each of their eyes again. “Understand?”

  The pride in their mothers’ and grandmothers’ faces was so open and full that Estrella thought it might lift them off the floor, each of them floating to the rafters and bobbing beneath the ceiling like balloons.

  In the easing of their shoulders, Estrella saw their faith that, one day, this family could be left in Gloria’s hands.

  With the same rough efficiency as they’d gotten the boy naked and clean, the grandmothers went about feeding him. They fried eggs and tortillas for huevos divorciados, Abuela Mimosa spooning salsa verde over one egg and salsa roja over the other, and they sat him at the kitchen table.

  Tía Hortensia and Tía Iris told him to “Eat, mijito, you’re so skinny, mijito,” as though it was his own gaunt frame, and not the legacy of this family, that put men at risk of vanishing.

  “Gracias,” he said, the first word Estrella heard him say. Then he bowed his head and said grace as though he had been speaking the whole time.

  FOUR

  They asked him if he wanted to sleep. He shook h
is head; he felt as though he had been sleeping, or dead, for a long time before this.

  They asked him if he wanted to read, and handed him an age-softened Biblia. The insistence with which they pressed it into his hands made him wonder if they could see into his soul, if this was in fact el Purgatorio, a softer version of it than any he could remember hearing of.

  He set la Biblia on the kitchen table.

  What he wanted most was not to be a bother to these women who acted as though they were all his mothers and grandmothers. They had already taken off his clothes like he was a child, put him under water that washed the earth off his skin, given him clothes that did not belong to him, fed him without asking if he was hungry because they seemed to know he was.

  In the same soap-bubbled water where the pan soaked, he washed the plate he’d eaten off of. Then the pan, scouring the cast iron with a stiff brush. He knew these things. His hands knew how to wash his face and knot the laces on his shoes and scrub an iron pan. He understood that around him in the garden valley were flowers, and he knew what flowers were, even if he could not remember the last time he saw them. Even if it seemed impossible that so many could crowd together in one place.

  He was grateful for his hands, how they acted without waiting for him to tell them how. But they did not know what he wanted to know. He wanted to know things held not in his fingers but in memories so dull and tarnished he could not make out what they were.

  He dried the plate and pan, and then stood holding them, realizing he did not know where to put them away.

  A girl swept into the kitchen and whisked the pan and plate from his hands. She looked a little like the girl who had first touched him, but younger, and both taller and thinner.

  “Did you disappear?” she asked.

  He didn’t know what she was asking. He hadn’t gone anywhere but across the kitchen.

  She put the plate away in a cupboard. “Did you disappear and come back?”

  He shut the cupboard for her. Instead of risking giving her a wrong answer, he pretended he hadn’t heard.