Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  They had loved her in ways that streamed from their bodies as much as the flowers they grew. Estrella had loved her in the blue and white and pink of starflowers. Azalea had loved her in sherbet-bright blooms. Calla had loved her in straight-stemmed lilies, Dalia in countless cream petals, Gloria in bells that opened at first light.

  They had each been a little bit in love with Bay Briar. And this had been such strong poison that their nighttime offerings could not temper it. The truth of it sank into Estrella with the heat of her cousin’s back, the damp and blossom-sweet warmth of her wearing-off perfume, the sour salt smell of the tears glossing her cheeks.

  Bay. They had, all five of them, killed Bay.

  FOURTEEN

  For the first nights, he heard them in their rooms. The Nomeolvides girls bit their pillows as though this would keep them from crying. He heard the rustle of pillowcases against sheets, the wet, rough noise caught in their throats.

  Their mothers gathered on the worn sofas downstairs, running their thumbs over the rims of ceramic cups. From the way they shook their heads at their roselle tea, Fel thought that the mothers were grieving, too. They were grieving for Bay, who they’d all lost, though no one would say how she’d died.

  But the mothers tilted their heads toward the ceiling; their daughters’ sobs were coming through from the floor above. They were crying more for the breaking of their daughters’ hearts than for the loss of Bay Briar.

  Their own mothers, the Nomeolvides girls’ grandmothers, sat outside on wooden benches, reading from their Bibles in soft voices and praying with their heads bowed to the grass. The sky clouded over. Rain beaded the leaves like drops of glass, and a spring wind left the air cold. But still, they read to one another from their Bibles, and they stayed.

  Fel pulled wool blankets down from the linen cupboard and left them folded at their feet. But they did not take them, as though the penance of their own bodies might bless their granddaughters.

  He searched for some thread of grief in Reid. Some halted breath. Some pause as he stepped onto the paths Bay had walked. But Reid had meant the things he had told Fel under the stares of painted men and women.

  Reid and Bay did not belong to each other. He did not consider the loss of her as something that was his. He did not wear the dark colors the Nomeolvides family wore, the younger ones in purples and greens, the older ones in black and brown.

  After a few days, Reid prodded them all into town and into a shop where Fel could not see walls. There were only dark suits and bright dresses and angled mirrors that reflected them back over and over.

  Reid wanted them all measured. But the Nomeolvides grandmothers did not close their Bibles and prayer books. They did not give up their rosaries. They did not lift their eyes. They did not yield to the women trying to push them toward the mirrors. Their weathered hands held on to the beads and the leather covers. So the women at the shop had to work around the Bibles and prayer books and the red glint of the rosaries. They had to weave their measuring tapes over and beneath.

  The Nomeolvides mothers tried to lift their daughters’ chins. They tried to make them laugh, told them that maybe Reid would set a tablecloth on fire with a candlestick and have to leave La Pradera. Maybe he would set so many things on fire with so many candles that there would be no place in the world that would want him.

  But their cheer sounded so dry and forced, Fel expected it to catch in their throats.

  As the women at the shop turned and measured them, Estrella and Gloria stared out the windows, as though they might catch Bay passing by. Calla held her hands lightly cupped in front of her, like she was holding something that might fly from her palms if she drew her fingers apart. Azalea winked to the women in the shop, setting a fingernail to her teeth, tilting her head back with a silent laugh when her flirtation made them shiver.

  Dalia kept her eyes on the corner point between the ceiling and two walls. As a measuring tape whipped across her waist, Fel saw she was holding her back teeth together, flinching at the touch of hands she did not know.

  Fel looked away, feeling guilty for watching.

  He tried to draw out anything he might know about the town’s main street. But it seemed as far from his memory and as unfamiliar as the garden valley. Like all those flowers, it dizzied him. Everything seemed so defined, so bright, it felt sharp. The cobblestones looked as perfect as the brick of the enormous house. The coverings arching out from the storefronts were as green as La Pradera’s lawns. The dresses in the window were as complicated as the flower-covered arches, frilled skirts puffing away from dress forms.

  Everything here—even the white trims and the tints of the palest flowers in the window boxes—looked clear, the edges cutting. The far memory of where he had once come from, small and blurred, felt both duller and warmer. He felt its colors, not bright, but gray, brown, its most vivid shade the auburn of rust.

  The contrast between this place and what little he remembered pressed cold against his skin. His fingers prickled with wanting to cross himself, to join in the grandmothers’ prayers.

  But the loss of Bay was not his, and this family was not his, and he had no place shoving his way into their blessings and whispers.

  Coming back to the gardens, seeing the wild land that led to the scrolled iron gates, stirred something in him. It felt like a single dark point spinning between stars.

  He brushed his fingers over the woody stalks and purple-spined flowers of milk thistle.

  He had gathered these from the roadside, brought them back to the one who was taking care of him. He and the one who had taken care of him had peeled away the spines and eaten the stalks and hearts and leaves.

  In spring, they had filled their arms with dandelion greens and snapped wild asparagus from their stems, sunrise turning the tips gold.

  In fall, they had been so hungry they took their chances with wild mushrooms and feral grapes one color off from nightshade berries.

  They had eaten the blue, star-shaped flowers Estrella drew up from the land.

  He felt the tastes of all these things in his mouth, all seasons at once. His heart filled with the remembered joy of finding things that were safe to eat, and his stomach wavered with the memory of his fear and hunger when they had to eat things not knowing if they would make them sick.

  He sealed this grief and wonder inside him, locked them behind a heavy door. He did not want them crowding the stone house. There was already so much grief and worry thickening the air.

  That night, as the sun drifted down into the garden valley and the blue of the sky deepened, Estrella and her cousins crowded into Dalia’s room. No lights on. Azalea and Gloria lay on the bed, Azalea’s head resting on Gloria’s stomach. Calla settled into a nest of pillows she’d thrown on the floor. Dalia sat on the windowsill, one bare foot dangling off, her eyes on the window like she was waiting for the stars to tell her something.

  They had cried themselves out, all of them. Except Dalia, who Fel had seen outside, arms wrapped around herself against the chill. Dalia did not wail or sob. She faced the moon with her back and shoulders straight, her jaw held tight, and Fel wondered if this was a sign that maybe Dalia loved Bay a little harder.

  Not more than the rest of them. Not deeper. Just harder. It had taken such sure root in her that when it pulled away it turned her up like the ground.

  Estrella lay across a woven rug, her shoulders against the rough wool. A bar of light from the hall fell across her stomach and hips. It caught in the folds of her slip. Through the thin fabric, he could make out a softness in her stomach and thighs that he hadn’t noticed through her dresses and skirts. Her breathing was so slight and shallow he had to stare to find its rhythm. Her eyes took in the ceiling, head tilted like she had never considered it from this angle.

  They all shared so many features, the Nomeolvides girls. Maybe Estrella’s hair fluffed out, neither curly nor straight, and Dalia’s fell in coils, but they still looked more like sisters than cousins.


  The same with the older women. They shared a similar half-curl to their silver and black hair. One might have six or seven inches on another, and a rounded face instead of a pointed chin, but they all seemed like photographs of one another, younger and older, shorter and taller, fuller and bonier.

  The guilt of watching Estrella and her cousins crawled over the backs of Fel’s hands. He passed their door.

  The things he had remembered spun inside him, insisting he do something with them.

  He did not know how to thank these women for feeding him and giving him a place to sleep and lending him clothes owned by men he had never met.

  But he could do this.

  No part of this house was his. But he had dried enough dishes and scrubbed enough pans that their kitchen was familiar country. They had sent him out to the garden for squash blossoms and oregano lace enough that his hands could pick leaves from the wooden box planters without him thinking.

  He could only remember ever cooking one thing that he would be unashamed to serve these women; the thing he and the one who took care of him ate when they had money to buy food. And he could do it with the least costly things in their kitchen. He could cook for these brokenhearted women who had forgotten to feed themselves.

  Fel remembered hands gesturing over a meat counter. Negotiating. The one who had taken care of him talked butchers into giving them the fat trimmed off good cuts of meat for a few pennies or for nothing. They rendered it into manteca, spiced it, and then poured it over stale bread, again bought with pennies.

  Now Fel stood in the Nomeolvides kitchen, melting down manteca, dyeing it red with paprika and chili powder. He tore green herbs into pieces, letting them fall into the bright sauce.

  For a minute, this was his family and his family’s kitchen. The sage-colored walls and the deep orange of the tablecloth. The copper pots and cast iron pans.

  This could be a place he could be unashamed to come through the door holding wild asparagus and dandelion greens.

  He sliced day-old bread and spread it over a metal sheet. He brushed it with olive oil and garlic cloves and left it in the oven until the edges browned.

  As he swirled the spoon through the wide copper pot, this family and this kitchen felt so much like his that he didn’t worry about the paprika staining the wooden spoon. He stirred in bay and oregano leaves, and they sank into the manteca colorá. The stems gave off a low, bitter smell that made him remember the gold and orange of fall leaves.

  He did not know if it was the bite and warmth of paprika in the air, or the noise of spoons against the copper pots, but he did not have to ask the women to come downstairs. They came, and they did not order him out of their kitchen. The grandmothers tied the extra herbs with twine. The mothers took down plates from the cabinets and set them out on the long wooden table.

  Then the daughters came, barefoot and with their hair unbrushed, their grandmothers’ handed-down sweaters over the slips they wore to bed.

  Gloria put out water and wine. Calla let a cotton napkin flutter to each place setting. Azalea took handfuls of knives and forks from the drawers.

  Fel almost told Azalea that this was nothing worth the glint of hammered nickel and copper, that he could not remember eating this with anything other than his hands. But he kept quiet.

  Estrella stood in the kitchen doorway, her eyes looking red and soft, her lips parted with a kind of surprise that made her seem like she was reconsidering him. She wrapped the too-big sweater around her, the pale blue of her slip falling to her knees.

  She held one hand to her chest like she was keeping her heart from breaking out of her. She looked at his paprika- and herb-stained fingers like this small thing had both wrecked and mended her.

  That look, like he had overwhelmed her in a way that both broke her heart and held it inside her, was enough that he wanted to remember everything he had ever been and done. Even if it was marked by the scars crossing his back, he wanted to remember.

  He wanted to sift through it all to find the things that would make her look at him like this.

  The light of her watching left him, worry covering her face when she saw Dalia. She took Dalia by the shoulders and led her to the table.

  Fel spooned the manteca colorá over the bread, softening the edges. He served the Nomeolvides women, grandmothers and mothers and daughters, hoping they would speak, talk to one another about anything, knowing they wouldn’t. He sat down with them, and they ate. The paprika’s spice slid over their tongues, the herbs coming up through the red enough that they still tasted green and alive.

  FIFTEEN

  The arrival of the slim-skirted woman shouldn’t have worried them. They had seen women like her before, walking the paths in oyster-colored high heels, the points catching between flagstones.

  But this one kept a leather folio in her arms. She made notes like an appraiser. She did not bother to introduce herself as Marjorie’s friends always had. Without warning, the woman ordered the brick house be cleaned and stripped of its older drapes, ones fraying to threads because Bay had loved rubbing the cloth between her fingers. She hired decorators who spent hours deciding on the right fabric to drape the ballroom. She brought in winemakers who laid out bottles for Reid to consider.

  “A family friend,” Reid said. “She’s doing me a favor.”

  This was his version of an apology for how the woman picked at every loose stone and stray vine.

  The grandmothers cast their eyes toward Estrella and her cousins, each grandmother watching her own granddaughter, searching for five identical nods that would say, yes, they understood they had to obey.

  They could grieve Bay. But they could not grieve her by defying this man who now held La Pradera and so held their lives.

  We stay here or we die, Abuela Mimosa had reminded them the night before. That means we obey whoever rules this land.

  From behind the trellises, they watched the woman. She waved a hand and told Reid they would need more flowers.

  “We need so many we can cut all the ones for the arrangements without anyone noticing,” she said. “I want everyone to drop dead when they see this place.”

  “You first,” Azalea whispered, and for the first time in days the cousins had to hide their laughs behind cupped hands.

  Bay had vanished into the air like salt into water, and the only attention Reid had was for the plans of some woman he would probably take up to his room.

  Or his car.

  That afternoon Estrella passed the carriage house, and a shriek of laughter came through the wooden doors. “Reid!” in a girl’s voice, slipped between two full laughs.

  Estrella edged toward the carriage house, setting her hands against its stone face. She was just tall enough to look into one of the glass panes that broke up the dark-stained barn doors.

  Reid and the woman had stuffed themselves into his gleaming convertible. Not in the seats, but across them, lying on their sides. Reid kissed her hard enough that she backed against the dashboard, and she kissed him hard enough to press him against the seat. Estrella wondered how they weren’t catching the gearshift in their backs.

  Reid clutched a bottle of whiskey, label gleaming gold. His arm trailed out of the front seat.

  Their kissing, the spilling-out of their limbs, brimmed with mischief but seemed emptied of passion.

  They weren’t in love.

  They were just bored.

  The woman’s shoe stuck out of the front seat, the kind of simple but precise heel that cost more than anything Estrella owned. And this woman was wearing it not with Sunday clothes but with a faded dress, no bra.

  That was the thing about people with so much money. They could throw on dirty clothes picked up from their bedroom floor and still seem finished. They could wear expensive shoes with cheap shifts and look as though they were setting the dress code.

  And Reid. He was two or three drinks in. Estrella knew for sure when he accidentally hit the horn with his elbow and collapsed into laughter as
deep and real as the girl’s.

  Estrella pushed herself off the barn door, calling Reid pendejo under her breath all the way back to the stone house. But the next afternoon, when she saw the woman crossing La Pradera in a different pair of shoes, pearl-colored this time, she felt a question twirling inside her like a curl of smoke.

  How did that work? How did two people kiss and slide hands over each other’s shoulders without the specter of a vanishing curse watching them from the corner?

  The question clung to Estrella’s skin, walking up and down her forearms with the lightness of a moth’s feet.

  It distracted her later, when she put her hands into the dirt, the current from her palms stirring buds from the earth. It even distracted from the things that distracted her the rest of the time. Her cousins’ dahlias and morning glories, which looked so much like they were cut from silk her wonder over them never faded. The grandmothers’ trees bursting into bloom so full they looked like whirls of cotton candy. Her mother’s shape and shadow as she painted the wooden trellises in roses.

  But that crawling feeling, the moth’s weight of that question, drew her until she was sneaking back toward the carriage house the next afternoon.

  Estrella stood on her toes, peering through the glass and looking for the woman’s good shoes and Reid’s creased shirt. If she were a little taller, like her mother or Gloria or Calla, she could have stayed on flat feet.

  Her thought of Gloria and her mother drifted away on the wind, but Calla.

  Calla.

  Her thoughts of Calla stayed, blazing in front of her.

  Reid and the woman had not thrown themselves into the car.

  The butterscotch leather of the seats had been darkened with handfuls and more handfuls of wet earth. Green stalks rose thick and bright, cracking the upholstery. Long leaves sheltered the stems.

  And capping each stalk was the curving bell of a calla lily. Some grew orange, blushed with red, some so burgundy they look wine-stained. Others were deep purple edged in cream.