Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “And you know me,” Bay said. “I wouldn’t let that happen.”

  “I thought I knew you,” Estrella said. “But you used us.” She didn’t understand how awful it was until she said it. Bay had taken the legacy of disappearing loves to lay out her path away from La Pradera.

  And Dalia. Sobbing, screaming Dalia. Whatever trick of the light Bay had used to convince Dalia she was turning to air and sky had worked so well, Dalia carried the memory up and down the halls at night. Each night, Estrella woke up in the bed she was sharing with Dalia to find her cousin’s side cold. Every few minutes, Dalia’s shadow broke the seam of light at the bottom of the door.

  “You used Dalia,” Estrella said. “How did you even make her believe that?”

  Bay may have had the hard-jawed resolve, the faked arrogance, to drive up bets at the card tables. But she didn’t have the blank expression to hide what she knew. Her guilt was so pained and clear even Fel caught it. He turned to Estrella, waiting for her to understand.

  “Dalia,” Estrella said, the idea so new she laughed as she said the name. “Dalia knows.”

  “Don’t blame her,” Bay said. “I begged her to help me.”

  “We all would have helped you,” Estrella said. “All you had to do was ask.”

  “I didn’t want you all to have to lie,” Bay said.

  Even though Estrella believed it, she found the heart of why Bay had asked Dalia. It was clear in the perfect contrast between the neat, pale braid Bay had worn for years, and Dalia’s hair, loose and half-curly. It was in Dalia’s cruel laugh and kind hands. It was in the forbidden lingerie showing at her neckline in ribbons of purple or deep red.

  Estrella wanted to say Dalia’s name just to check again, just to see the slight hope in Bay’s face, the soft lift of her eyebrows, the parting of her lips.

  The bond held tight between Estrella and her cousins had not just been their adoration of Bay. It had been that Bay seemed to love none of them back, or at least that she loved each of them only a little, and all the same.

  But Bay was in love with Dalia.

  Bay still hadn’t eaten the scrap of cotton candy. It was dissolving on her fingers, turning to wet, pink sugar.

  Voices filled the alley below, and the warm, bitter smell of cigar smoke rose up through the grated landing. Bay eyed the space underneath them, not afraid but anxious, as though these might be men she’d spurred on at the card tables.

  “I promise you,” Bay said, putting her hat back on, “as soon as I get what I need to keep you and your family safe, I will come back.”

  Estrella didn’t need that promise. Of course Bay would come back. Bay would come back not just to the place Marjorie had made her own. Not just to the Nomeolvides women who had brought Bay back to life after Marjorie’s death.

  She would come back for the Nomeolvides girl she loved.

  Bay nodded a farewell greeting at Fel, then set her hand in Estrella’s hair and kissed her on the forehead.

  In the moment of Bay’s lips touching her hairline, Estrella expected the same flutter as when she’d kissed Bay years ago, her heart like a cabbage moth’s wings. But this was a kiss Bay might give her own cousin, and it landed on Estrella’s skin as dull as an ache.

  Bay climbed up three more flights of the fire escape and then disappeared onto the roof.

  Estrella leaned against a stretch of brick and shut her eyes, the feeling of Bay’s mouth left on her forehead. Estrella had never felt more like Bay’s little sister. Dalia was her beautiful cousin, fire-eyed and straight-backed, her hair sweeping behind her like a cape, and Estrella was still more girl than woman.

  When she opened her eyes, Fel was holding out the little box of marzipan fruit to her.

  She shook her head and gave him as much of a smile as she had. She felt how forced it must have looked on her closed lips. But she didn’t want to hold a soft round of marzipan on her tongue.

  She wanted to rip things apart with her teeth.

  TWENTY

  The main street ended. The space between lampposts grew. The last ones led Fel and Estrella to a green-flanked road.

  Estrella was eating tiny rounds of sugar off a strip of paper, scraping them off with her teeth. When he’d seen the bright rows—candy buttons, she’d called them—he would not have thought this kind of rage could be brought to eating them.

  He tried not to stare, both so she would not feel strange and so she would not think they had to talk. He was grateful for the quiet.

  The understanding that he’d had a brother let in the first sliver of light. Then, the scent of the sugar fruit Estrella had bought him opened that crack, wide enough that the light from the moon and the stars flooded it.

  He and his brother had lived somewhere else before coming to the gray world. No matter how he grasped at it, he still could not remember the shape of the gray world, but now he remembered so much else.

  The smell of the painted fruit, the sweetness of the sugar and drunk bitter scent of the almonds, it made him remember things shared on holidays when he and his brother were children. The perfume of rosewater. The spice of anise. The carmín that dyed rock candy, and how his brother loved telling him that the red came from crushed insects.

  These memories took root, turning to rows of uncountable trees. They became the orchard Fel had once run through. They bloomed into almond and cherry blossoms, fluffy as the cotton candy Estrella had set in his palms. They splintered into the thin leaves of olive trees.

  All these things pressed into him, and his heart felt as though it might give and break like a bone.

  The sound of ripping paper drew his eyes to the girl walking next to him.

  She bit off a candy button so hard she took a scrap of white with it.

  “You’re eating paper,” he said. “Do you know you’re eating paper?”

  She swallowed and looked at him. He still wanted the distraction of her. But speaking had been a mistake. He saw in her face that she took it as an invitation to ask questions.

  “What happened back there?” she asked.

  He could say these words. They were true, and if he did not speak them when he had the chance maybe they would stop being true.

  “I had a brother,” he said.

  She tilted her head, waiting for the rest.

  “A brother who liked men,” he said.

  “Liked men as in…”

  “As in the way you and your cousins like Bay.”

  Her eyes widened. She tried hiding it with a few blinks.

  “It’s hard not to notice,” he said.

  “And that doesn’t bother you?” Estrella asked. “You don’t think we’re all damned?”

  He felt like he should say yes. He felt as though this was another test, and the angels would strike him down on this road if he gave the wrong answer.

  But lying was just as much of a sin. There was nothing to tell her but the truth.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t believe that.”

  He didn’t believe anything that his brother was could be wrong. Even if he could not remember his brother’s name, or his face, or anything more than his hands, he knew those were hands that had cared for him. Hands that were smart, and even more callused than Fel’s, and that made so little into enough to live on.

  And now Fel remembered those hands on another man’s back, fingers slipping under his suspenders. The warmth of Fel’s slight shame covered him, like this was something he might have seen when he wasn’t supposed to.

  “Maybe if my brother hadn’t loved like that I’d believe something else,” Fel said, and with saying this came the deeper breath of confessing something. “But I don’t think it’s anyone else’s to judge.”

  Estrella laughed softly. “You’re not from a hundred years ago.”

  That deeper breath turned to a worn-out sigh. “I don’t know.” He shut his eyes, still walking. “I remember where I lived when I was little.”

  That was the place where he’d learned to pick d
andelion greens, heaping them into esparto grass baskets. A world and a whole life before he and his brother had gone to the gray world, where sometimes those same dandelion greens were all they could find to eat. When he was small, the sharp, bitter taste of the greens had been the taste of early spring to him, not the taste of being hungry.

  “What do you remember?” Estrella asked.

  He opened his eyes. “The trees raining petals. When they were in bloom and the winds came. Just all those petals. A whole snow of them.” He remembered those trees planted in wide, deep beds, each a little higher than the one before, so the snow thickened as it fell. “All that pink and white snowing down over everything.”

  Estrella bit her lip, like she was trying not to smile. Her fingers softened the edge of the candy dot paper. The colors of the buttons had stained the pads of her fingers.

  He knew she was imagining it. She couldn’t not. The air glimmering with confetti. Those petals, tiny and round. Weightless.

  Beneath the memory of the falling blossoms, small flowers grew in the shadows of wide trees. A stalk that held petals the color of Estrella’s skin. The brown of blossoms matched her, the paler undersides of the petals like the paler undersides of her hands and feet.

  But this was something he didn’t know how to tell her.

  They left the lampposts behind. He couldn’t find the moon. In the dark, there was just the taste of almonds and sugar on his tongue, and the shape of Estrella against the grasses and trees.

  Their fingers at their sides brushed.

  “Sorry,” he said, drawing his hand back.

  She held on. Her grasp stung his hand, sore from hitting the men in the brick alley, but he didn’t move. That brush of their fingers was a door cracked open, and she was widening the space, not letting it fall shut.

  She stopped. She looked at him. And the feeling that her stare would not land, would not settle on his eyes or his mouth was so strong he felt it on his skin.

  He knew what this was. She couldn’t have Bay, so she wanted whatever else was in reach. She had everything that had happened tonight knocking around in her, all that spite toward Bay and toward Dalia, and Fel was the ground she could bury it in.

  She had found him in the valley made of flowers. Her family had looked after him. It wasn’t his place to ask her, please, please don’t do this. To tell her he felt for her what she would never feel for him, not when she’d given her heart to someone who was beautiful in braided hair and the bright colors of citrus fruits, and beautiful in men’s trousers and suspenders. There was no fighting that. He didn’t want to.

  And he didn’t want to be what she played with in the meantime, not like this.

  Estrella let go. She took her hand back with such sudden force that Fel opened his mouth to say he was sorry, again.

  But then that hand was on the back of his neck. She caught his mouth as he opened it, ready to apologize, and her lips kept him from speaking. The dye and sugar of the candy buttons cut through the almond taste on his tongue.

  For a second, her mouth shoved him back far and fast enough that he could barely hold on to something else remembered. It was slick and cold as an algae-covered stone, but he got a solid grasp on it, the last time someone had kissed him, in the gray world.

  That time, another boy, assuming Fel was the same as his brother, had kissed him. How little Fel liked it had seemed like a failing. He did not like boys, at least not this one, he had thought with such collapsing disappointment. How could any difference in himself from his brother be good? He wanted to be his brother, smart and kind and unafraid to ask for what he wanted. If sliding his hands under another boy’s suspenders would make him more like his brother, he wanted that too.

  The other boy had laughed at him, pushed him away. He told him how awful he was at it, how much worse he was than his brother. And that had seemed like another of Fel’s failings.

  But this, Estrella kissing him, this brought him back to a time before the gray world, when there had been color, and he and his brother had lived in sunlight softened by olive trees. When he closed his eyes and kissed her back, Estrella brought him to the colors of a place he could almost touch.

  With her mouth on his, the world was snow. Not ice. Not winter. The snow of countless almond and cherry blossoms, the storm of white and pink they had both thought of at the same moment.

  This girl who had found him had turned him into an ember, glowing at the end of a candlewick. She could either pinch him out into nothing or light him into a flare.

  But the feeling of a truth he did not know, awful and unnamed, hung wide and close as the clouds. And he could not stop wondering if this was the shadow of the thing he had done, the reason God had taken his memories. The reason he had his own crimes etched onto his back. This was the weight of his own sin, and he could not even remember it enough to confess it.

  He could not give Estrella what she deserved, someone clean and true.

  He broke the touch of their mouths, hard enough that he stumbled back.

  A thread of cold air cut between them.

  The white of her eyes shone in the dark. He couldn’t tell if that startled look, the flicker of her irises moving, was from what she’d done or because he’d stopped her.

  Before his fingers could find her hand in the dark, she was running off the road and toward the trees.

  He called her name. But she kept running, until the night and the tall grasses swallowed her.

  The pads of her fingers had left the dye of candy buttons on his shirt and his hands. He touched his neck, and it came off on his fingers. The blue and yellow and pink were his proof she had touched him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Estrella stood in the hall, the first time she could remember pausing in front of Dalia’s door.

  The cousins all entered one another’s rooms without knocking. They never apologized if one walked in on another half-naked, or drying her hair, or scrubbing salt and baking soda over the red stains on their underwear at the same time every month. When Fel started sleeping in Estrella’s room, she had tied a green ribbon around the doorknob, a reminder to her cousins that she wasn’t in there, and not to walk in on this skittish boy changing his clothes or sweating through a nightmare.

  But opening this door felt like holding her lungs still to go underwater.

  At the sound of the hinges, Dalia looked up, pausing midstitch. She was sewing a fabric leaf back onto a nightgown. Calla’s.

  Estrella had always recognized Dalia as beautiful in the way all her cousins were beautiful. But now, Estrella saw the woman Bay loved. Her black hair and dark eyes warmed against the fire colors she wore, the softened oranges and peaches, the butter yellows and chili reds. Her eyelashes were lush and curling as the center petals on her cream dinner plate dahlias.

  But that lie. It spun and whirled and pulled Estrella down.

  “You know, we had a great-great-aunt who wanted to be an actress,” Estrella said.

  Dalia set down the nightgown, tucking the threaded needle into the gathered fabric. “Estrella.”

  “Abuela Flor told me about her. She used to play in the chorus in the theater in town sometimes.” Estrella let the bitterness thicken in her voice. “If she was as good an actress as you, she could’ve been the star of every show.”

  Dalia’s eyes shut. “Estrella.”

  From her dress pocket, Estrella pulled a bag of strawberry vanilla drops, Dalia’s favorite. She threw them at her cousin.

  Dalia caught the bag against her chest. She looked up from the sugar-sanded red and cream.

  “I held you,” Estrella said, her back teeth set so hard the words sounded choked. “My heart broke when yours broke.”

  She had thrown her arms around Dalia as she screamed and cried into the air. She had blinked at the ceiling in the half-empty bed, worrying about her cousin who slept even less than the boy down the hall.

  But Estrella knew now. It hadn’t been grief keeping Dalia awake.

  It had b
een the unfamiliar guilt of keeping a secret from her cousins.

  Estrella shut the door behind her.

  “You’re a liar,” she said, startled at how level the words came.

  “Bay had to get out from under Reid and you know it,” Dalia said. “The best way to do that was for everyone to think she was gone. If you had a better idea, I’d love to hear it.”

  “I don’t blame you for what you did. I blame you for keeping it from me. From all of us.”

  “It was safer for everyone. I did this for us.”

  “You did this for you,” Estrella said. “Because you wanted to be the only one she was still alive to. You wanted her to be yours.”

  “That is not true.” Dalia got to her feet. “And even if I did, so what? We have to answer to each other for everything?”

  “We don’t lie to each other. We don’t keep things from each other.”

  “Oh, we don’t?” Dalia asked. “So you just forgot to tell us you were planning on torching Reid’s car?”

  Estrella shoved her anger down. She tried to dull the whispering voice reminding her that she and Calla had kept their own secrets.

  “You don’t know anything about that,” Estrella said.

  “Because you didn’t tell me, or any of us. And you didn’t tell us what you did to make Reid forget about it. Are you in bed with him now?”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “I mean what are you doing for him?” Dalia said. “What does he want from you?”

  “A good show for his friends,” Estrella said. “That’s all.”

  “What does that mean?” Dalia asked. “Are you his date now?”

  “He just wants me to show his friends how we grow flowers. It’s nothing.”

  “I don’t like this,” Dalia said. “You’re not a sideshow. He has no right to ask you for that.”

  “A few flowers for a whole car?” Estrella asked. “That’s the best deal we’ll ever get from someone like him. Leave it alone. If it was something you needed to know, I would have told you. And if you’d asked me earlier, I would have told you then. I didn’t lie to you. We’re not supposed to lie to each other.”