She wanted to see La Pradera the way he did, find the wonder in the tiller spurs like they were silver stars.
Calla ordered him to stay still like he was a younger brother, not a boy with three or four years on her. She tied to his wrist a scrap of cloth, brushed with glowing paint, the same as they tied on one another after every ball and summer party.
“It’s so we don’t lose each other,” Calla said.
“Here.” Azalea handed Fel a bottle. “Unless you’re not legal.”
“You don’t want to play that with me.” He took a swallow without flinching and handed it back to her. “You’ll be under the table before dawn.”
Azalea took a drink twice as long as his, trying to hide her wince. “Try me.”
For that second, they seemed a little bit happy. In the town down the hill, they had their shared love, alive and not vanished. For right now, Gloria, Azalea, and Calla put aside their anger toward Dalia and Estrella. Estrella had heard Azalea say to Dalia, “If anything happens to her, I’m holding you responsible,” but after that, Azalea seemed to let it fall.
In that forgiveness, even if it was just for tonight, Estrella could even shrug away making that ocean of blue petals.
She had turned her family into a show. In doing what Reid asked, she had made them all more objects of fascination than women. The fact that there were reasons she had to, the truth that Reid could throw them off La Pradera whenever he wanted, didn’t soften what she’d had to do. The logic didn’t wear down the edges.
But for right now, she could put this away, sure as locking it inside her jewelry box.
Bay was alive, and in her being alive was the possibility for everything so ordinary it was luminous. Azalea tossing her head to clear her hair from her face. Dalia stealing the lower corner of a darkening window and checking the lipstick she’d borrowed from her mother’s dresser. Gloria and Calla wiping their mouths on the backs of their hands, hoping the hard candies they shared hadn’t turned their lips purple.
Tonight, they were the same girls who snuck out of their windows and ran into town on summer nights, first buying swirled sticks of candy and then lace-trimmed camisoles they didn’t want their mothers to know about. Except for these small things, the world outside La Pradera’s did not call to them. They knew what was waiting. A world that thought their gifts were magic within estate gardens but witchcraft on wild land. Towns that called them murderers for loving farmers’ sons and ministers’ daughters into nothingness.
Gloria stood next to Estrella, both of them watching Calla fasten the knot on the back of Fel’s wrist.
“Are you worried?” Gloria asked.
“About?” Estrella asked.
“That he was someone else’s,” Gloria said. Her voice was open, not accusing.
“Yes.”
Estrella wanted to reach into Fel and find every scrap of remembrance that might tell her who he had belonged to, which of their great-great-grandmothers. Was she the kind to forgive? Or would she be jealous even from the grave, striking down both Estrella and the boy she herself had once loved?
Fel looked seventeen, eighteen at the most, caught in the age he was when he vanished, the age he had been when that love burned so fast and bright he disappeared.
“Do something for me?” Gloria said.
Estrella looked at her.
“Don’t love him too hard,” she said.
Estrella put her hands against her dress, one spread over the other, like this was where Gloria’s words had gone in.
Don’t love him until he is nothing.
Don’t let your heart kill him.
Estrella felt her lips part and stay parted, until all she could say was, “Gloria.”
“Please,” Gloria said. “Azalea and Calla, they love him. They’ve gotten attached. And not the way we got attached to Bay. Worse. They love him like he’s their blood. Maybe you’ve been too distracted with Dalia and Bay to notice.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I don’t want anything bad to happen to him,” Gloria said. “First Bay walks out on us and now Reid’s made us a circus act. They can’t take anything else. It’ll destroy them.”
“I care about them too.”
“I know.”
“And I care about him.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Gloria said. “There’s a difference. You want him. They want their mothers to adopt him.”
“Whose fault is that?” Estrella asked. “You’re the one who told us to treat him like a brother.”
“What did you want us to do?” Gloria’s voice grew fiercer even as she lowered it. “We gave La Pradera our jewelry and it gave us a person. I didn’t want to test that.”
Estrella’s eyelashes felt hot, the corners of her eyes prickling. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to wake up,” Gloria said. “All of us, our hearts for women and for men. You know what that means?”
“More ways to lose them?” Estrella asked.
“Our hearts or the ones we love?” Gloria asked.
“Both.”
The word came out bitter. Estrella let it. This was what their mothers would say if she and her cousins ever told them the things they folded inside their hearts. Twice as many paths to trouble, their mothers would whisper. As though their daughters loving men and women meant they wanted all of them in the world. There was no way to tell their mothers the truth and make them believe it, that hearts that loved boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart. They loved who they loved. They broke how they broke. And the way it happened depended less on what was under their lovers’ clothes and more on what was wrapped inside their spirits. What secret halls and trapdoors their souls held, and what each one hid and guarded.
Estrella’s heart and her cousins’ hearts, the way they were as likely to fall in love with women as with men, was a language the five of them shared. But they did not know how to teach it to their mothers and grandmothers. All their mothers and grandmothers could do was listen and decide for themselves what it sounded like.
Estrella had fallen in love twice. They had been different not because once was with a woman and once was with a boy, but because once was with Bay and once was with Fel.
“There’s nothing wrong with who we love,” Estrella whispered. “What’s wrong is what’s always been wrong. We’re Nomeolvides girls.”
Letting Bay go, accepting that Bay loved Dalia in a way she did not love the rest of them, had not lessened the poison in Estrella’s blood. She was still a girl born from generations of broken hearts. That was the dangerous thing. Not that she and her cousins all spoke the language of loving boys and girls, but that they all shared the legacy of losing them.
“And we thought we’d be the ones to get out of this,” Gloria said. “We thought we were so much smarter than our mothers.”
Estrella settled into the feeling of the six of them, her and her four cousins and this boy. For that minute, she didn’t think of kissing him. She thought only of keeping him. If keeping him meant thinking of him as a brother and nothing else, she could do it.
A breeze brought the thread of perfume off Gloria’s skin.
Not hers. Not the clean orchid scent, and not any scent familiar in the stone house.
Estrella touched her cousin’s neck, like she could trace her fingers over the place where another woman’s perfume had rubbed off on her skin.
“Who is she?” Estrella asked.
She tried to keep her voice soft, flat. She just wanted to know.
There were so many parts of themselves they never let one another see.
Gloria’s eyes glinted like the beads sewn into her dress.
“I never ask for a name,” she said. “It’s easier that way.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Luminous paint,” Calla told him, explaining the scraps of cloth glowing blue green in the dark. “They’re how we find each other.”
Lamps lit up patches
of different-color flowers. Bulbs set near the ground made the trees glow from underneath. But they were flickering off. And that glowing blue green would mark them until first light licked at the dark sky.
Calla finished the knot. She offered her arm to Gloria, who tied a band onto Calla’s small wrist. The gesture was so intimate, a thing done between cousins who were more like sisters, that it stung.
Watching them, the careful motions of Gloria’s fingers, put a ringing in Fel’s brain, like the echo from a thunderstorm.
He knew this. Not just the scene of two Nomeolvides girls caring for each other.
He knew this work of siblings marking each other.
Fel shut his eyes, and saw his brother’s hands tying a scrap of cloth onto his shirt. On that scrap, his brother had written a name.
The first three letters Fel knew. They had been pinned to his shirt when Estrella found him. Fel.
But the longer he shut his eyes, the more letters showed themselves, like glowing paint appearing in the dark.
Fel.
Felipe.
And then a name he could not make out.
He heard his brother arguing with the men who had told them what to do.
You can’t have two last names, the foreman yelled at them.
They’re not two last names, Fel’s brother said. It’s our father’s name and our mother’s name.
Well, pick one, the man said.
Fel’s brother said he would not choose between their mother’s name and their father’s. So he had told the man they would use their second name—Felipe, a family name; they both had the same one—as their last name.
This was how they had marked themselves in the gray world, where the threat of death was so close it hovered like a low ceiling. They wore their names always tied onto their clothes, last name first, then first name, so that if they died they could be known.
Fel’s brother had not wanted this. Wearing this tag, and switching their names—last name, first name—had seemed like an admission they were already dead. But the other men had talked him into it.
You think the foremen keep track of us? Fel remembered these words, the rhythm of a man’s accent. You think you matter any more to them just because you came up from slate picker? And your brother—at this, he’d tilted his head toward Fel—to them he’s always gonna be a breaker boy. We all are. They give us our dollar a week and then they forget about us.
You wear this, another man said. Fel remembered he had hair as black as Fel’s, but fine and straight, hair that looked neat even after a day’s work. He knew little English and no Spanish, but he had met Fel’s eyes with his own, the brown so deep it felt cool. For your family.
Without our names pinned on us—a third man this time, another unknown accent, a hangman’s laugh—our mothers’ll never know if we’re in the ground or the gambling halls.
Now Fel opened his eyes, finding no light but the moon and the glowing bands the Nomeolvides girls tied onto one another’s wrists.
The gardens were full of not just one caballuco, but a hundred, in as many colors as La Pradera’s flowers. They rushed through the trees in reds and oranges and greens. They sprouted dragonfly’s wings, enormous and sheer. They flew above the highest boughs. Their golds and purples streaked the dark. They screamed across the stars.
The caballucos had become too big for his hands. He could not hold them. They stood bright and fearless. The tans and browns of Fel’s body and clothes could never match their gold and green.
He and his brother had carried those carved wooden horses in their pockets, a charm against their fate. They had thought the caballucos would keep them from death. No harm could come to them as long they carried them.
But this had been a fairy tale. The same as how his brother had talked of buying land, how both he and Fel would decide whether their first horses would be grullos or palominos. But his brother had never had his land. He never taught Fel all the names for the colors of horses. He never told Fel another trick for staying out of fights he never wanted into in the first place.
Because Fel had lost him as much as he’d lost himself.
Fel’s own stupidity bit at him. He had never wondered how the caballucos had turned up in these gardens. How they had come to gather in a tiny, colorful herd on Estrella’s shelf.
They were here, because this was where Fel and his brother had died. The caballucos were a sign of death, but Fel had turned his face away, refusing to see it.
The caballucos had been the only bright color in the gray world, the world that had once stood in the same place as these gardens. The gray world was not flowers but rock and rust. It was Fel and his brother sleeping outside in their clothes, dust sticking to them so hard it felt like part of their skin. It was getting rich men in town drunk enough to win money off them, not for fun but so he and his brother could pay to get broken bones set.
The gray world was the truth of this place. La Pradera was the lie. Everything Estrella and her cousins had given him was lies. Their family’s legacy was fairy tales. What to them was the color of raw gold dust was to him the shade of a dun horse, or the color of a quarry they had made into a garden.
Fel wished the caballucos could grow to the size of real horses. He wished they would gallop across these grounds and break through the walls of the stone house. Their brays and the buzzing of their wings would scare every Nomeolvides woman into telling the truth.
He thought he heard Estrella saying his name, but he couldn’t hear. The caballucos laughed their laughs that were half-horse and half-human. Their color was the milk from a thousand indigo mushrooms, pouring everywhere, dyeing the night air.
They were laughing at him because he had believed he had life and breath of his own.
He had believed they were things he could hold in his hands.
The sounds he had forgotten rushed at him. The crumbling and collapsing of rock. Men calling out in fear or warning. Rubble crashing down, folding them all into its wave like it was night falling.
This was why he could not remember his brother’s name, or face. It hurt too much to remember him, because he had lost him in the gray world.
“Fel.” Estrella’s hands slid onto him.
The feeling of her touch, this girl with one palm on his back and the brush of fingers on his forearm, broke him into pieces. He was made of wood and paint, a caballuco figurine, splintering.
She’d found every crack he’d shown. Like his dreams of the caballucos disappearing between floorboards, she’d slid her fingers into those open places.
He wrenched away from her. This girl had been part of the family who turned a graveyard into a garden. They had hidden and covered over the truth of his brother’s death and his own.
To anyone but his own brother, he had been nothing but an underaged miner. He was an immigrant whose name no one cared to learn. He wore his own name on his shirt because he was not worth listing on a role sheet.
Fel looked at Estrella, still in that blue dress, the sky color bright against the night. Her skirt traced a wide arc behind her. A few drowsy fireflies hovered their tiny bulbs near the glowing bracelet on her wrist.
“You lied to me,” he said.
His mouth still felt warm from hers, the night air cold against his lips.
“What?” she asked.
“You hid this,” Fel said. “All of you. You took the truth and you turned it into flowers.”
When she blinked, the indigo of the milk mushrooms showed on her eyelashes. “Fel.”
She reached out for him. Her fingers struck his forearm.
He drew back. She grabbed him, one hand landing on his upper arm, the other on his side. Her touch, the first from her he hadn’t wanted, shocked through him.
His breath pulled in on itself. In one half-second, there was less air in him than he needed.
“This is what your family does?” he asked. “You take all this blood and death and you make gardens out of it?”
“Fel,” she sa
id. “I don’t know what…”
He held up a hand.
“No,” he said. “Stay away from me.”
His steps crushed the grass, and it let off a scent like leaves and citrus.
Estrella was a girl drawn in blue and brown and gold, and he wanted to hide his face from her.
She could have her gardens and her family and the lies she spoke as a first language.
He had been cared for and watched and taken into this family, and they had all covered over the thing that had killed him and his brother and so many others.
“I loved you,” he said.
He tried to throw it all away. Estrella spreading blue paint on his skin. The pond giving off light like it was full of stars. The caballucos screaming through the dark. Estrella and him cooking the indigo mushrooms until they turned teal.
“Fel,” Estrella said, coming toward him. Her stricken face broke through the dark. She cut through that blur of stars and memory.
Gloria set a hand on Estrella’s shoulder. “Let him go.”
It was the one thing he could still be grateful for, the oldest Nomeolvides girl stopping the girl he had loved from following him.
La Pradera turned to a beautiful, terrifying fairy tale. Trees in bloom and bushes covered in color grew from the earth. Thick stripes of flowers banded the ground. Roses and vines dripped from wooden frames. Branches drooped so heavy with blossoms they should have broken.
The gardens were a whirl of petals. The stone and brick walkways were winding paths that led nowhere but back onto themselves. The flowers stood so bright and full they looked like frightening magic, their heads nodding in the wind so they seemed like they were watching him.
He had one decision left to him. There was a little of his own life still in his hands.
Fel crossed the gardens. Water lilies sat still in the fountains. A broken champagne glass had left shards over the flagstones.
Stone steps led to the still-open French doors, strewn with flowers and lost bracelets and curls of lemon peel. Wind puffed up the curtains, airing out the smells of cologne and liquor. The traces of women’s perfume faded, giving way to the nectar and petal scent of the blossoming trees outside.
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