Dalia still shook her head. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?” Gloria asked, dabbing tears from the corners of her eyes.
“This is where Briars get exiled,” Dalia said. “No one ever came here because they wanted to. They sent him here.”
The truth settled over Estrella.
La Pradera, as beautiful as the gardens made it, was the place the Briars banished relatives they wanted out of the way. Marjorie’s father, with his shameful legacy she would never speak of. Bay, a child made by a Briar daughter’s affair. And now Reid, who had cost his family more money than Estrella thought books and a piano could be worth.
A hundred years ago, this land was the ugliest of the Briars’ estates. The great house stood on rocky ground overlooking a barren ravine. The Nomeolvides women had been making a home in town but were a few Sundays from being driven out as witches. Anywhere they tried to live, peonies and flowering willows broke through rafters. Water lilies choked ponds and streams.
So the outcast Briars issued to these women an invitation: If you can grow anything on this land, you can live here, too. The Nomeolvides women answered by turning this place into La Pradera, acres of blooms and flowering trees, a barren ravine coated in vines and blossoms until it was worthy of being called a sunken garden.
The only reason the other Briars didn’t move in and take this place for themselves was the shadow of the Nomeolvides legacy, their fear that anywhere the women had touched was a place men disappeared.
“She’s right,” Estrella said. “He wouldn’t be here if he had a choice.”
“Maybe Reid’s not as stupid as he looks,” Gloria said. “You know what Marjorie used to say. When they’re about to run you out of town…”
“Get in front of the crowd and make it look like the parade,” Calla said.
Reid Briar meant to turn a punishment into an opportunity.
The four of them put everything back, smoothing the duvet, hanging the clothes up, sliding the papers into the suitcase pocket. They slipped back down the stairs and into their shoes.
Azalea and Fel were still keeping Reid’s glass full. Estrella and her other three cousins stopped in the doorway so fast they bumped into one another, skirts brushing.
Reid, his eyes reddened from the sherry that did not taste like sherry, looked up. His gaze caught Fel’s.
“I thought it was all girls here,” he said.
Fel stilled.
“They’re not girls, Reid,” Bay said, “they’re women. And he’s theirs.”
“Who is he?” Reid asked, as though the boy he was looking at could not hear him.
“He’s our brother,” Azalea said. And it felt true, like the land had given them a brother when they had never had one.
“He’s our cousin,” Gloria said at the same moment. And this too felt true, even though they had never had boy cousins, either.
The words spoken at the same time made Gloria and Azalea whip their heads toward each other.
Reid might not have known they did not have brothers or boy cousins, but they had wavered, and now he watched them all.
Fel looked at Estrella. The terror in his face was as clear as a spoken question. Please don’t tell him. Please don’t tell this stranger what little you know and how I know even less.
“He’s with me,” Estrella said. Not only because she had been the one to find him. Not even because her cousins blamed her little wooden horses for the appearance of this strange boy. But because this was an explanation for their nervousness that Reid might believe. That what they were hiding was how a boy none of them were married to lived with them. “He goes with me.”
Reid looked from each of their faces to the next.
“Why didn’t you just say that?” he asked. “There’s no rule against that. That’s allowed.”
The tension came into Bay’s jaw so fast Estrella could see it. She felt it in her own bones, the muscles around her mouth hardening.
Azalea looked at the rest of the cousins, one eyebrow lifting, her open-mouth smile showing how she was too disbelieving to be angry yet.
Under Reid’s friendly permission was the rough ground of what he wanted them all to understand. He was here now, so he was the one who would say what was allowed.
Dalia leaned into Estrella. “I guess we get to keep him.”
A breath fell from Estrella. Dalia was right. Now that Estrella had claimed Fel as theirs, they couldn’t put him in this house, no matter what Bay had offered.
“Fel or Reid?” Calla asked.
“Both,” Gloria said.
“Give it two days,” Dalia whispered, with a flick of her eyes toward Reid. “Bay’ll be sleeping with us to avoid him.”
EIGHT
The man looked through Fel as though he were branches. As though he were leaves and the sun found the cracks in him.
The man called the Nomeolvides women, even the older ones, girls. To this man, Fel was probably boy. That would be his name. Boy. The man might not bother to call Fel anything else. If Fel bringing the man orange and sugared sherry in a heavy glass did not seal it, then the brown of his face and forearms would.
Fel could not remember where he had learned to make the thing Azalea had watched him pour into glasses. The sugar and ice, the orange and sherry. It was a trick, a way to get a rich man drunk. A thing someone had taught him.
Sherry tasted sharp and strange, but the bite of alcohol, that was familiar. Fel remembered a few spoons of red wine swirled in water, to make it safe to drink. He remembered the dark color tinting the water. He remembered holding the glass in hands smaller than his but the same brown. His own hands, but younger.
He was sure of this memory, but he could not find the edges of it. It was a sense so distant, so faint and worn that light came through it. It faded like a scrap of paper disintegrating, and then there was nothing but these gardens, and the brick house where he’d sliced oranges, and this stone house where the women told him he would stay.
It was Estrella’s room he had slept in the night before. It was her clothes in the dresser he did not look inside. Her fingerprints on the brass lamp he did not turn on, and the window he neither opened further nor closed. He had not known it was her room, but his fingers prickled with the sense that he should not touch anything.
He knew now that it was hers, when she told him he would sleep there again.
“You don’t have to do that,” Fel told her, but she had already disappeared down the hall.
He tried telling her mother and then her grandmother that he could sleep anywhere. He could sleep on the woven rugs that softened their floors. He could sleep on the worn sofa downstairs. He could sleep outside, he told them, the feeling coming to him that he had done it many times before.
But the women laughed at him.
“I’ve seen those girls watch a lightning storm for a whole night,” Estrella’s mother said. “If there’s not a door to stop them, they’ll stare at you so hard you won’t sleep.”
He didn’t know why he’d be worth staring at. The youngest one, Calla, studied him like he was something she meant to name and classify. Azalea had seemed wary of him until she saw he knew how to mix a drink, and now her wariness seemed to have passed to the oldest, Gloria. Dalia seemed not to notice bumping into him as they dried dishes, and this made him feel like she really did think of him as a brother, some relative who had always been here.
But Estrella. Estrella looked at him like he was something more than the awkward figure he saw in the mirror. That reflection, wearing borrowed clothes, seemed both odd and familiar in its oddness. But she watched him like he contained some kind of hope too fragile to name.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he found Estrella. “I don’t want to turn you out of your own room.”
She shrugged one shoulder, an identical gesture he’d seen on her cousins. That shrug almost made him sure it didn’t bother her.
“Don’t be sorry for her,” Dalia said, passing in the hall with her a
rms full of clothes. “I’m the one sharing a bed with her, and she drools in her sleep.”
Fel tried not to laugh.
“Hey,” Estrella said, following after her cousin. “I do not.”
“Estrella,” Fel said.
She turned around.
He let a question rise through him, one he hadn’t been steady enough to ask until now. “Where am I?”
NINE
The sun fell below the trees. The shadows deepened, leaving just enough light for Estrella to lead Fel through the gardens.
They passed the Briar house. When Estrella was little, that long front of brick gables and dormer windows had seemed like a storybook castle. In the courtyard of blossoming trees, the grandmothers’ magnolias and lilacs ringed a wide stone fountain, filling the air with the smell of sugar and wet petals.
Wooden lattices and rose trellises screened the beds of hyacinths, irises, and lilies. Tía Hortensia’s hydrangea bushes grew clouds of blue and violet blossoms.
Behind the trellises, Estrella caught her mother’s shadow. Through the crosshatch, she watched her mother setting palms to the wood. Her thin fingers gripped the lattices, and rose vines climbed the frame. Brambles twirled up toward the arbored ceiling. Leaves spread, finding the sun. Buds opened into tea roses so pale pink and peach they were almost white, and into wide blooms the yellow of candle flames or the deep red of black pearl peppers. They came in the soft tints of a shell’s inner curves, and in colors as deep as ink and indigo.
Through the rose lattices, her mother watched her with something between observance and disapproval. Estrella wondered if she was already falling short of the task of showing this boy the gardens.
Estrella stood up straight as they passed through the checkered shadows of the trellises.
“It’s called La Pradera,” she told Fel.
“The Meadow?” he asked. She saw the thread of confusion slipping into his wonder.
“The Briars named it, not us,” she said.
There was a kind of false modesty to the rich Estrella still didn’t understand. An estate thick with gardens was called a meadow. Women in cream silk tipped a hand toward their dresses and said they’d just thrown something on. Even Marjorie had called her midsummer balls little parties.
“My family’s been here for a hundred years,” Estrella said. “Before that it was just rocks. Nothing grew but brush and wild grass.”
Fel walked with her alongside a low garden bed. Fireflies lit the flowers, drawn by the damp air and the mild scent of azaleas and dahlias. During the hottest summer months, Estrella and her cousins slept in the afternoons and woke at dusk, gardening by the lightning bugs’ glow.
The sunken garden opened in front of them. When the Nomeolvides women first came here with flowers waiting in their hands, it had been nothing but a jagged ravine.
Estrella led Fel down the sloping path to the sunken garden’s floor. The deep, wide well sat several stories below the rest of La Pradera. The basin, lined with trees and hedges, ran down toward a carpet of green. Bright curving flower beds and cypress trees swirled through, the color softening in the morning and deepening in the evening. Blue hyacinths and morning glories made the shadows under the cypress trees richer. Globes of hydrangeas grew in the purples and fuchsias of sugar plums. Pink day lilies and burgundy calla lilies followed the waves of hedges. Flowering trees sprinkled petals over the stone paths.
At the sunken garden’s deepest point, a pond went down forty feet. The number dizzied Estrella. Branches of trailing willows almost met at the water’s center, so the thought of a pond that went down as far as it was deep made Estrella feel like she was looking into the night sky.
“We made it our home,” Estrella said. “So now we live here.”
Fel stopped on the stone path, looking at the color rising around him. His lips were a little parted, like his lungs were held in the place between taking a breath in and letting it out. The border between wonder and fear.
“You made all this?” he asked.
She nodded. “About five generations of us.”
“How?” he asked.
She felt a smile coming to her. She knelt, grabbed his forearm, pulled him down so he knelt next to her. The sudden cool of the ground came through her skirt.
She plunged her hands into a flower bed, clutching palmfuls of dark ground. This was as second nature as shaking her hair out from a braid, but the shiver of it, the feeling of something living in her becoming visible, never faded. And Fel shuddered as though he could feel it.
Small sprouts broke through the dark ground. They twisted out of the dirt, the single point of green becoming four rounded leaves. The leaves lengthened, veins deepening. The green grew richer, more textured. Stalks appeared from the point where the leaves met, and from those stalks, purple-red stems curled out from the center. Pear-shaped buds weighted the purple stems, covered in faint down, like the bowing heads of swans.
She held on to the earth, and the buds opened into the bright purple-blue of borraja flowers, five-petaled like stars. Five thin fruit petals unfurled purple-red between the blue ones.
“Does it hurt?” Fel asked. “When you do that?”
She drew her hands from the earth, untangling her fingers from the new roots.
“It hurts more if we don’t.” She brushed her hands together, raining dark soil over the leaves.
Her fingers drawing out these blooms felt like letting out the force in her. It brought the comfort not only of releasing these petals from her hands but of deciding where and when they appeared.
She couldn’t do anything about the confetti of starflowers that grew over her bed some nights. It worried her cousins and their mothers and grandmothers. Not like she was a witch; the Nomeolvides women were used to being painted as witches. More like she was a girl who needed watching, a girl whose own gifts might betray her or give her away. But here, kneeling on the ground, Estrella could decide.
“Things growing just live in us,” she said. It was true for all of them. For Estrella’s cousins, for her mother, her cousins’ mothers, all their grandmothers, there was order to it, lilies and irises growing only where they asked them to. But their inherited gift still put a kind of desperation in them, a need to grow what was in them. They all had it. It was a drive rooted as deep in each of them as it was in Estrella.
It was just that sometimes Estrella’s appeared, unwelcome, as she slept.
“It’s like words we need to say,” she told him. “If we don’t say them, it hurts.”
Estrella could see Fel trying to keep the confusion off his face. Her family was its own language, its own country, and she knew it. She laughed, the wind throwing a ribbon of her hair across her cheek. When she brushed it away, she felt her fingers leaving a damp streak of earth across her forehead.
Fel reached for her, so slowly she could have leaned back and stopped him. He brushed his fingers over her forehead, his thumb warm on her skin. That one point of heat spread through her face. It bloomed in each of her cheeks.
The pad of his thumb on her forehead felt as rough as unfinished wood. Callused. She had felt the calluses on his hands the first time she had led him from the sunken garden, their grain softened by wet earth. She’d registered the coarse brush of his fingertips when she’d set the little winged horses in his hands.
But it wasn’t until now, with his thumb set against her skin, that she realized how hard and solid those calluses were.
She took light hold of his hands, turned them over. The calluses covered his fingers and palms, thick and pale as a dusting of sand.
“How did you get these?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Do they hurt?”
“No. Not now.”
She brushed her fingertips along the center line of his palms, and he flinched.
“Sorry,” she said.
She felt him pulling his hands back. It was so slight it felt like something he was doing without thinking,
rather than him asking her to let go. In the slight closing of his eyes, she found the shame he felt over these calluses. She wondered if seeing Reid’s hands on the cut-crystal glass had made it worse, the long, smooth fingers, the nails filed and squared off.
But to her, these calluses were things he should wear with pride, the way Estrella and her cousins showed off the half-moons of dark earth under their fingernails.
His calluses were beautiful things both because they were signs of the work he had done, and because if he could remember what that work was, he would know a little more about what he had once been.
Who he had once belonged to.
Estrella let go. She sifted through things that might distract him. She shouldn’t have turned over his hands, showing his rough palms, and now she wanted him to forget them.
“Have you ever heard the fairy tale about the red shoes?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“It’s a story Tía Azucena used to tell us when we were little,” she said. “I don’t remember all of it, but there’s a girl who loves dancing, and one day she wears her red dancing shoes to church when she’s not supposed to, so the red shoes make her dance until she dies.”
“That’s the story she told you when you were little?”
“It was something like that,” she said. “I don’t remember all of it, and anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, think of it a little like that.”
“The flowers kill you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I mean it’s like dancing. We have to dance because it’s in us. We can’t not. But if we dance too much for too long it would hurt, because our bodies couldn’t take it. It’s like that with the flowers. We have to make them because it’s in us. But we couldn’t make this whole garden overnight. It would kill us if we tried. That’s why it took a hundred years.”
“Like a horse,” he said.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re like a horse.”
“I’m telling my cousins you said that.”
Wild Beauty Page 5