Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

He smiled, and it looked so true she wanted to take it apart and see how it worked. How she could draw that smile out of him again.

  “No,” he said. “I mean if horses don’t have the chance to run, they wither. If you keep them in stables, they end up kicking at their stalls. But if they get worked too hard, they get sick.”

  She didn’t know about the comparison, this boy likening her and her cousins to animals. But before she could object, an idea flickered on with the garden lamps.

  “How do you know about horses?” she asked.

  He looked at the grass beyond the flower bed. “I don’t know.”

  “Did you work with them?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Estrella slid her hands back into the earth, as much habit as a way to make him less conscious of her watching.

  “Fel, I’m going to ask you something, and I really want you to think about it,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “Were you ever in love with anyone?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anyone who looked a little like all of us?” There was no softer way to ask this. She wanted to know if he had belonged to a Nomeolvides woman neither she nor her cousins nor their mothers had been alive to know. Their grandmothers had no memory of a boy like Fel, even in stories.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Did you ever love anyone?” she asked.

  He shut his eyes. “Yes.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  He shook his head. She was learning this was his shorthand for I don’t know.

  “Someone who took care of me,” he said.

  “Do you remember anything about her?”

  He watched the borraja, the blue bright against the earth.

  “No,” he said.

  She let the silence draw out. This was a place she couldn’t press too hard. He was soft here. He would feel the pressure as pain and turn quiet.

  “Did she give you the horses?” Estrella asked. “The wooden ones.”

  More borraja sprouted, first leaves, then stalks, then down-covered purple stems and sharp-petaled flowers.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Do you know anything about them?”

  “I know I loved them very much,” he said. “But I don’t know why.”

  He looked wound, coiled, even when he breathed out.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “This isn’t a test.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said.

  Now he looked at her. The light had turned from gold to blue, and the warmth in the brown of his eyes cooled.

  She picked a borraja flower. “You can eat them, you know.”

  She held it out on her palm, the five petals opening into darker blue.

  “Try it,” she said.

  “I don’t think I should,” he said.

  “Why not?” She ripped away a handful of them, the starflowers breaking from their vines. “I do it all the time.”

  Fel cringed like she’d torn out a lock of her hair. “But they’re yours.”

  “And I’m giving these ones to you.” She took his hands and let the confetti of blue petals rain into his palms. “So now they’re yours.”

  TEN

  He did not sleep, not more than a little at a time. When he did sleep, it was shallow and dreamless, the darkness reminding him of all he did not remember.

  If he did not dream of this empty place, he dreamed of a cord of heat breaking him open, marking him with all he had done.

  When he woke in the dark, his fingers found the blue borraja Estrella had set in his hands, and that he’d left on the bedside table. He grasped at them like they were slices of water. He felt struck with the certainty that they would let him sleep, make him sleep. It overcame how odd he felt putting into his mouth something she’d grown in front of him. He set the first flower on his tongue, the taste clean and cold, more like ice than something living.

  He fell asleep with one in his mouth. But it only made him dream of her fingers brushing his lips. He startled awake, shivering like the air had fallen into winter.

  How little he slept left the daylight hours in a haze as heavy as smoke. Maybe it was because he wasn’t doing enough for these women who were looking after him. He wasn’t wearing himself out enough by the time night came. His hands wanted to thank them in ways more than peeling potatoes or drying forks.

  But the mothers shooed him away from helping them with the laundry, flapping dish towels at him and reminding him that he did not know how to work the machine. The grandmothers took brooms out of his hands in ways that made him remember that this was their house, not his.

  His hands still wanted to work. So he worked on things that had gone unnoticed. A crosshatch of wood was crumbling under the weight of rose vines, so he strengthened its base until it did not wobble. The paint on a bench was peeling away, so he searched through dust-covered cans until he found the shade that matched. He replaced a few flat stones that had come loose from a path.

  “You’re a good boy, mijo,” the woman who insisted he call her Abuela Magnolia said. “Bay’s grandmother never missed a stone out of place, but ever since she died”—the woman clucked her tongue—“that girl…”

  Fel waited for her to finish the sentence. She didn’t. He understood. That was the weight of Bay losing her grandmother, a loss too heavy to name. Bay was mired too deep in it to notice small things falling apart.

  He knelt at a crumbling stretch of low wall, checking whether any bricks were missing or if they were just out of place, when Calla grabbed his arm.

  “I need a favor,” she said.

  She was the first to notice that he understood what she and her cousins were saying. So he didn’t dare stop her when she pulled him toward the house up the hill. When she shoved him through the door and into the hall, he didn’t resist.

  The inside of the Briar house looked more museum or palace than home. Portraits of white-haired men and gown-wearing women stared down from the walls. The rugs had been woven so finely Fel didn’t want to walk on them. Even the ashtrays looked like some kind of glittering stone, maybe marble or quartz. Did people really stub out live embers in there?

  Everything in the Nomeolvides house looked handled and used. Cast iron pans. Books with worn edges. Even the brass of an old kaleidoscope shined with the oils of their fingers. He liked this about them, about their home.

  Calla shoved him down the hall, where Reid was coming toward them, eyes on a set of papers in his hands.

  “Go talk to him,” Calla whispered.

  “What?” Fel asked.

  “You’re a man and he’s a man,” Calla said. “So just talk to him.”

  “About what?”

  “Do I have to do everything?” Calla took Fel by the shoulders, which made him feel like he was a child she was crouching down to, even though she was younger and shorter. “I just need you to distract him for ten minutes while I go look at something.”

  She dashed out of the hall, leaving him in the path of Reid’s stare as soon as he lifted his head.

  “Oh,” Reid said. “Hi.”

  The space of the few seconds made Fel forget what to do with his hands. Before he’d been sent here, what had he always done with his hands?

  “I was”—as soon as the words came, Fel wished he hadn’t said them so fast. If he’d waited to start the sentence, he would’ve had a few more seconds to think of the end—“just looking at these.” He tilted his head up to the portraits.

  “Oh,” Reid said again, but this time a laugh brushed the word. “They’re something, aren’t they?”

  “Are they all people you know?” Fel asked.

  “Sort of,” Reid said. “If our family had a charter, it would have a line about every Briar getting their portrait painted before they die. A few are here, but most are scattered around the other estates.”

  Scattered around? Fel imagined paintings left at odd angles like pieces of a shipwreck on a shore.

/>   Reid stood next to Fel, eyes joining his on a painting of a standing woman. Against the wine red of her dress, her neckline looked pale as a pitcher of milk. Her fingers rested on a dark wood table. Her chin tipped up, like her eyes were following a bird the painter did not show.

  “It’s an old tradition,” Reid said. “But I guess there’s something charming about it. Thank goodness for pictures, right? Can you imagine the days when you had to stand there that long?”

  Reid’s words rushed past Fel. He couldn’t imagine any of this, a family with enough money that every son and daughter was painted onto canvas as tall as they were. He thought most families could not afford a single photograph of themselves, or even mirrors to see their faces in.

  He could not remember any photographs he had seen before La Pradera. He could not remember the details of faces caught in shades of brown. But he remembered how rare they were, the silver-plated copper, the flashbulb. And here, on these walls, in every space not covered with portraits or paintings of ships, there were photographs. Dozens just in this hallway.

  “Is the one of Bay here?” Fel asked.

  Reid’s eyes left the portrait. “Bay?”

  “The woman who—”

  “I know who she is,” Reid cut him off, the laugh coming back into his words. “Why do you ask?”

  Fel shuddered under the feeling that he’d just failed some test of how well he was listening. “I thought you said you all had your pictures painted.”

  “Nobody told you?” Reid asked. “She’s not a real Briar.”

  He said it without cruelty.

  “But I thought,” Fel started, and then paused. “Her last name.”

  “Her last name is Briar,” Reid said. “She has some of our blood. But she’s not one of us.”

  It was a plain correction, a statement of fact as simple as naming the woman in the dark red dress.

  “She acts like she owns this place,” Reid said. “But don’t let her tell you what to do.” He set a palm on Fel’s back. “She has no business ordering anyone around.”

  The force of that hand made the hallway seem like it was folding in on itself. The dark walls were crumbling and collapsing toward them, the paintings scattering like shards of a broken window.

  Fel shuddered away from it before he could stop himself.

  “Okay,” Reid said, lifting his hands as though to promise he would not touch Fel again. “You’re all right.”

  This man was lying. Fel wanted to tell the old women this, show it to them like a lost, shining thing he’d found in the grass. But he didn’t know what this man was lying about, and he had no way to prove it other than his own body acting faster than he could think. So the glittering thing he wanted to give the old women evaporated from his hands.

  ELEVEN

  They decided they would scare him off, this man who did not know these gardens. In the cupboards of the Briar house, Azalea grew green leaves that crowded the space between plates and bowls. Gloria’s vines clung to the inner walls, dense as mulch. Dalia’s fingers left flowers in the colors of fall trees, spilling off bookshelves and rising out of Reid’s dresser drawers. Calla crowded his marble sink and enamel bathtub with lilies, their whirls of white shielding yellow centers.

  They hid flowers in their mouths, parting their lips when Reid passed and showing the petals like white or blue tongues. When he turned his back, Estrella planted starflowers in his food. Pink blossoms poked up between the ice cubes in his drinks. White blooms dotted a plate of dry-sherry scrambled eggs. They drew vines up through the floor of his bedroom. The starflower stems, fuzzy and purple, came in so fast and thick they buckled the aged wood.

  But he drank the coffee, ate the eggs. From their hiding places in the hall, Estrella and her cousins saw him crouch to the split floorboards, pinching stems between his fingers and shaking his head as though witnessing a wonder. When they flashed the flowers hidden under their tongues, he said, “Extraordinary,” with the half-breathed reverence of seeing a saint’s relic.

  They had not frightened him.

  They had impressed him. Each flower that grew where it did not belong, each petal flashed between their teeth, deepened his interest.

  Marjorie had loved seeing princes and ambassadors stride onto La Pradera, sure that no country gardens could match their own walled grounds. She loved watching them struck silent by the sunken garden opening in front of them, a ravine of flowering color and rich green.

  Now that wonder worked against Estrella and her cousins.

  That night, Estrella flopped down onto Azalea’s bed. “Now what?”

  “We try something else,” Gloria said.

  Azalea sat at her mirror, brushing pins out of her hair. “Like what?”

  “Can we send him back to whatever corner of the world the Briars threw him out of?” Dalia said.

  Calla’s shape appeared in the doorway, outlined by the hall’s light. “That might be harder than we thought.”

  Estrella sat up. Gloria, Azalea, and Dalia shifted toward the door.

  “We might have a legal problem.” Calla sat on the edge of the bed. “Well, Bay might.”

  “What are you talking about?” Azalea asked.

  Calla sighed. “Marjorie’s will.”

  “Marjorie left La Pradera to Bay,” Estrella said.

  “It might not have been hers to leave to anyone,” Calla said.

  “How do you know that?” Azalea said.

  “I read the deed.”

  “When?”

  Calla shrugged. “When Reid wasn’t looking.”

  She gave them the words, assuming they would recognize them. Fee tail. Devise. Line of succession. Some Estrella caught. Others slipped from her hands. She felt herself settling between her cousins. She was not Azalea, who was too bored to listen and so skipped to being outraged. Nor was she Gloria, her lips pressed together in a way that meant she registered all this a little faster than the rest of them.

  But Estrella understood enough for her worry to gather with her cousins’. It was so thick in the air they were breathing it.

  “If it’s a legal problem, why can’t Bay go to court?” Dalia asked.

  “Yeah.” Azalea nodded into the mirror. “If we can’t get him out of here, a judge can.”

  “It’s not just that,” Gloria said, and that look, that apprehension over the things she understood that they did not, drew their faces toward her like trumpet flowers finding the moon. “It’s that Reid and the rest of the Briars decided she’s not one of them.”

  “But she is,” Estrella said. “It’s her last name, too. Her blood.”

  “The Briars consider her illegitimate,” Gloria said. “Because she was conceived in an adulterous union.”

  “Stop it.” Dalia rubbed her temples. “You sound like a priest.”

  “Not a priest,” Calla said. “That’s exactly what the Briars would say. They’ve probably already said it.”

  “But she was raised by Marjorie.” Azalea held up a hand. “Marjorie’s as much a Briar as any of them.”

  “And Marjorie paid the taxes on this place when they were about five minutes from losing it,” Dalia said.

  “It doesn’t matter what’s true,” Gloria said. “It matters what the Briars think. If Bay fights this, they will ruin her. They’ll not only throw her out of here. They’ll cut her off. And if she isn’t afraid of that, she’s afraid of them making her life miserable. I would be. They could tell any lie they want about her and everyone would believe it, because they’re the Briars. They make things true.”

  “They would do that to their own family?” Estrella asked.

  “Did you hear anything she just said?” Calla asked. “They don’t think she’s family. If they did, she wouldn’t be here alone.”

  “She’s not alone,” Dalia said. “She has us.”

  Azalea’s eyes found each of theirs in the mirror. “So can we kill him?”

  “Anyone falling for him?” Gloria asked. “That’d be one
way to do it.”

  Azalea looked at them one by one. “Well?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow at each of them. “Any stirrings of love?”

  Their shared laugh was small, but it was clean and rare enough that it rang. In the days since Reid had come to La Pradera, they had not heard this laugh, the sounds of their voices threading together like they were singing.

  It tasted sweeter in their mouths for being a shared joke about the thing they feared most. The way the force and poison of a Nomeolvides woman’s heart was enough to make her lover vanish. How their love was a kind of killing frost.

  Another shape cut through the light in the doorway. Not Calla, who was still swinging her legs off the edge of the bed.

  Bay.

  Estrella and her cousins shuddered, as though they had drawn her here by holding her name between them.

  “I thought you should know,” Bay said. “Reid and I are hosting a ball.”

  Estrella felt all their hearts rising to the possibility of what this meant. It was as sudden as the smell of lilacs in March. Maybe Bay had broken through the worry that she could never follow after Marjorie Briar. Maybe she was ready to hold her own parties where they sold rich men seeds and brought new health into town shops.

  But Bay’s smile was pinched. The name Reid twisted her lips like the bite of a fruit rind.

  This was not a summer party to sell seeds. This was not some evening glowing with fairy lights, meant to stir the town’s love for this odd, flowering place.

  This was a thing Reid had demanded. He had forced Bay into it.

  Marjorie had died, and ever since, the line of Bay’s posture had slumped a little, even as she laughed. Reid would not wait for her to rise from the low valley of Marjorie being gone.

  The Nomeolvides mothers and grandmothers had fed and cared for Bay for months, and a little at a time, sureness had straightened Bay’s shoulders.

  Now it was falling away like a dusting of snow.

  TWELVE

  He dreamed, and the tiny horses became things that were alive. They flicked their wooden manes. Their carved legs and wings came to life. A saffron-colored one darted across Estrella’s dresser. A green one flew toward the windowsill. An almost-white one disappeared into the sheets. They cantered into the cracks between floorboards, falling into dark places his fingers could not reach.