When the Moon was Ours

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  She threw the screen door open and let it slam shut.

  Among the flecks of orange and white in the pumpkin fields were small glints of light, like the field was dark velvet dotted with white opal.

  Her eyes adjusted, the vines and little points of light sharpening.

  Glass. The pumpkins were turning to glass. Everything that whirled between the Bonner sisters had not stayed inside that house. It had not huddled inside the sisters’ bedrooms. It would not be locked inside their closets or hidden on shelves under their sweaters.

  It had slid out here, creeping over their family’s fields, this land they would inherit. It was seeping into the pumpkins so that each one now held a little storm spinning it to glass. It made the pumpkins brittle and hard and unyielding as the bond between those four girls. Miel could almost feel it skimming her neck like fingers of cold air. If she stayed still, it would find its way into her. It would make her breakable.

  It would turn her to glass.

  Miel ran down the path to the road, keeping as far from those pumpkins as the spread of the land let her. Her sweater clung to her skin, and the scalloped neckline of the shirt she wore underneath bit into her like teeth.

  The pain in her wrist shot through her body. But she ran, fast enough that she could pretend she didn’t see the pumpkins at the fringes of the fields, hardening and turning clear, shining the faint gold of hot glass.

  sea of vapors

  Sam and his mother had just finished cleaning up from dinner when Aracely called.

  “Can you come help me?” she said when Sam picked up.

  His mother stood at the stove, firing the cast-iron pan, the way she dried it so it wouldn’t rust.

  Sam propped the phone against his shoulder and looked over at her, his silent way of asking, Do you mind? They’d held to the unspoken agreement that as long as he asked permission to go out when his mother was awake, she wouldn’t comment on the times he snuck out to see Miel when she was asleep.

  Did you finish your math? his mother mouthed.

  He nodded.

  His mother turned off the fire and nodded back.

  “Sure,” Sam told Aracely.

  “Good,” Aracely said. “Because I’m about three seconds from strangling your girlfriend.”

  She hung up, leaving Sam to pick apart what little she’d said. The clench in his throat when he wondered if Aracely knew. The breath out when he realized that if she did, she didn’t seem to want to kill him. And the question of what had gotten her in a bad enough mood that she was ready to kill Miel.

  His mother threw a jacket at him. He shrugged into the sleeves on his way out, and followed the moons he’d set out for Miel, a path of light between their houses.

  Miel didn’t cure lovesickness herself. She didn’t have what she called el don, the gift Aracely had. But often Miel helped her, passing her matches and glass jars and the right kind of egg. She went out and picked lemons from the tree outside, the gold rinds rain-slicked. Aracely couldn’t set these things out beforehand because she never quite knew what she needed until she met the lovesickness living inside a broken heart.

  Sam walked up the front steps, and like always, the color of the outside made him think of a paint he’d once used. Wisteria, the tube had called it. It had sounded like a place, somewhere that was both beautiful and too small to show on a map. But when he asked his mother, she told him it was a flower, a vine that dripped blossoms like icicles.

  Aracely met him at the door.

  “Watch her,” Aracely said, tilting her head inside.

  Miel stood with her back against the wall, shoulders rounded. He would have wondered if Aracely had yelled at her, but in front of those who came for lovesickness cures, she never did.

  Aracely’s heels clicked against the floor, Sam and Miel following.

  “What happened?” Sam said, keeping his voice low.

  Miel shook her head. Not now.

  Tonight, Aracely was curing a man. Sometimes Aracely called Sam over to hand her eggs and herbs and the right kind of lemon. Having a boy around made the men more comfortable. They were already skittish about having Aracely’s hands on their chests. Having a girl passing blue eggs to Aracely unnerved them, like the fact that there were two of them made it more likely they were witches.

  This man looked a little older than Aracely, maybe twenty-eight or thirty. Everything about him seemed so pale against the dark walls of this room, the color of a blue milk mushroom. The waves of his hair, a dark blond like dried corn, had been cut short. He wore pressed slacks, nice enough for church, and a gray sweater in a knit too heavy for the weather, like he was trying to protect his heart from the thing he was paying to have done to it.

  Aracely asked for a Faverolles egg, and Miel, staring at the patch of indigo wall, reached for a Copper Maran egg. Sam slipped it from her palm, replacing it with the cream egg Aracely wanted. Aracely asked for a blood orange, and Miel reached for a lumia lemon. Sam stopped her.

  So that was the problem. Miel wasn’t paying attention.

  “Sorry,” Miel whispered.

  “What’s going on with you?” he asked. She’d taught him which kind of egg was which. She could usually help Aracely half-asleep. The only thing Sam was good for was reassuring the men.

  Aracely cracked the egg into a jar of water. She studied how the yolk spread, in needles like comet trails, or thick full light like a cord of dawn outlining the hills, so she would know how the lovesickness was holding on to him.

  She swept herbs and a new egg over the man’s body, put her hands on his shoulders. She pressed down on his upper rib cage, feeling through his skin. Her hands drew the lovesickness out.

  Lovesickness resisted leaving, Aracely had told him, always. Whenever Sam watched Aracely, he saw the strain in her face when she drew it out, like pulling a full, heavy bucket up from a well.

  But this man was no different from any other visitor on Aracely’s table. His heart was swollen and sore with unwanted love. It fluttered inside his rib cage like wings. When Aracely took it out, it might flit around the room, running into a cabinet, bothering the apricots in the fruit bowl. But then Miel would fling the window open, and she and Aracely would chase it out the window like a bird that had wandered in.

  Except tonight Aracely opened her hands, and Miel forgot to open the window. She stood against the wall, watching the floor.

  Sam jumped toward the window, pulling the sash up from the sill. He tensed, only relaxing when he didn’t hear the unseen lovesickness skimming the walls or knocking against the glass jars.

  Aracely caught Sam’s eye, and then nodded between Miel and the door, a look of get her out of here.

  Miel caught that look, and turned to the door before Sam did.

  She left the indigo room and then the house, stopping at the front steps.

  Sam caught up with her.

  “I don’t know,” she said before he could ask. “I’m just off today.” She shut her eyes, and shook her head again.

  He wanted to touch her. It should have been easy now. But since that night in his bed, he hesitated putting his hands near her, like his fingers and her skin carried the static of the driest days. Once they’d been like glass, and the little shocks, his forearm grazing her breast or her hand accidentally finding the thigh of his jeans, passed through them. But touching each other that night had turned them to copper. Their bodies would conduct the heat of every little moment. When his arm touched her back. When they were in his mother’s kitchen making sohan, and they realized that the flame under the sugar and honey was up too high, both reaching at the same time to turn it down.

  But now she was pulling away, and his own questions felt like threads of spider silk catching on his skin. What version of him did she want? Sam, or Samir, or some boy named Moon that this town had made up?

  Did she want him because he hadn’t grown out of this, or because she assumed he would? How long could he want her, as Sam, before he grew up and became someone
else?

  “Miel,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.” She kissed him, but it was as stiff and uneasy as the first time she’d done it, when they were children and she set her lips against his for no longer than it took to blink.

  He could taste the clover and sugar on her lips, like sage honey. It made him think of her licking it off a knife when Aracely wasn’t looking.

  She went inside, and he heard the soft creak of the stairs and then saw her bedroom lamp turn on. Light filled the window, and she felt as far and unreachable as the moon.

  bay of trust

  Aracely had tried to make Miel immune. Often, she brought home blue-rinded Jarrahdale pumpkins and deep orange Rouge Vif d’Etampes, and Miel would hide in the hallway closet. Aracely would narrate her progress from the kitchen. I’m splitting it open, Miel. Okay, now I’m hollowing it out. I’m putting it in the pot now. But Miel stayed in the closet, worried that new vines might sprout from the pumpkin’s severed stem.

  That was probably another thing Aracely had almost asked ten times, opening her mouth and then hesitating. Why, to Miel, a pumpkin couldn’t just be a pumpkin. A question Aracely knew better than to say out loud. That hesitation always told Miel that the words on Aracely’s tongue had more weight than Are we out of blue eggs? or Have you seen my yellow sweater? Miel wondered if a look crossed her face that showed Aracely the thread of fear in her. Please. Please don’t ask questions. Please don’t wreck this, this life I have with you, by making me tell you.

  Now, standing at the edge of the Bonners’ farm, Miel wrapped her arms around herself, fingers digging in. Light from the Bonners’ house poured onto the fields, warming the soft gray color of the Lumina pumpkins. The sight of each rind covered Miel in the feeling that it could crush her, that it could put out vines and sink them into her. It would draw the life out of her and grow bigger, and she would become small enough for it to swallow.

  She was stupid to come here, and she knew it. It was after midnight, hours too late to pretend she’d stopped by to find Sam, or even to lie that she’d come to see Lian or Peyton.

  But she had to see the pumpkins.

  It hadn’t been the fever of Ivy cutting away her rose. More of the pumpkins had become glass. Constellations of them glinted, each one heavy and shining. The living flesh of a few pumpkins had turned, like flowers freezing into ice.

  The little storm held between the Bonner sisters had spilled out of their family’s house. They were shifting to try to give Chloe back the space she’d held, but they couldn’t settle into where they’d been before she left. They still held that shared power of being Bonner girls. It had kept its sharpness. But it was turning into something halting and jagged. And now the fields were showing it.

  The night air covered Miel. The cold threaded through her, and in the hollow of the wind she heard the sad murmur of her mother’s voice. To everyone else, it would sound like the warning of a storm. But if Miel listened, if she shut her eyes and found that humming under the wind, she heard her mother, caught between this life and leaving it.

  She could never hear her father. She couldn’t even remember if he’d died or if he’d left them. But how could he have left them? Miel held on to the thought of him wrapping a bandage around her wrist. Her saying It’s hurting me when he fastened it too tight, and his calm voice saying it needed to be tight, to heal.

  His mild dismay when he checked on the wound and found it growing new leaves. His assurances that don’t worry, mija, we’ll get it next time, as though he could will her rose to vanish.

  Those memories—even if they were laced with the feeling that they were not real, that they belonged to some other girl and Miel had stolen them—were her certainty that her father did not leave them.

  That left the awful possibility that they’d lost him. It left Miel to guess how, to wonder if it was her fault.

  With each wink of glass the moon found, her mother’s song sounded a little sharper, a little more like weak sobbing.

  Mr. and Mrs. Bonner would notice. And if they asked, their daughters would blame Miel. Chloe and Ivy would tell their mother and father that Miel was not only a girl once made of water, but that she’d had a mother who tried to kill her. The girls half this town thought were witches would call Miel a witch, a wicked girl the river had kept and then given back, and who was now turning their fields to glass.

  The lies in the Bonner girls’ hands were a thousand pairs of scissors, brass and tarnished. If they spread that story, her mother’s soul would never be free of it. It would follow her, pin its weight to her and drag her down. Her mother already stayed too close, watching Miel and looking for the brother Miel would never see again.

  She had to do what Ivy said. She had to wait for her next rose to grow and open, and then she had to let the Bonner sisters have it.

  The question of why they wanted them pinched at her. It couldn’t have been as simple as making boys fall in love with them. They already knew how to do that. Even Chloe, months gone, with the rumors trailing through her hair like ribbons, hadn’t lost the shimmer that lived on their skin.

  That was the worst thing, the not knowing. If them wanting the roses was about any boy in particular, or all of them. If it meant Ivy was set on the boy who’d been so disinterested at the river, or if one of her sisters had decided on a boy from another town who had never heard of the Bonner girls, and would be unprepared for the force of them.

  Or Sam. That possibility whispered to Miel too. He worked at their family’s farm. No other boy had ever gotten that close to the Bonner girls without wanting them.

  Miel put her palm to her wrist, the muscle still sore. And the words she hadn’t been able to find when Ivy opened those scissors filled her mouth.

  No, she whispered over those fields. No, you can’t have this part of me.

  If they tried to take Sam, she’d do anything she could to stop them, but that choice was his. This one was hers.

  I am not your garden, she said, the words no louder than the thread of her mother’s voice the wind carried.

  I am not one of your father’s pumpkin vines.

  You do not own what I grow.

  The wind, and the crackling sounds of leaves and vines, answered her.

  Those glints of glass looked a little duller. Instead of their shine, she saw the cream gray of the Estrella pumpkins or the deep blue-green of Autumn Wings.

  The wind, and that thread of her mother’s voice, quieted.

  It was the first time the sight of pumpkins, fresh and alive, had warmed her. She stood facing those fields instead of cringing away. And this was as much of a sign as her mother had ever given her. Between them, pumpkins were a language as sharp as it was unknowable to anyone else. If she heard the distant rush of her mother’s voice, it was her blessing.

  Miel wouldn’t do it. The next time she had a full rose on her wrist, she was staying far from the Bonner girls.

  A tired feeling swept over her, equal parts exhaustion and relief. She wanted to sink into it, fall onto her bed with her clothes still on. No matter how the Bonner sisters thought they could threaten her, she wouldn’t give in to it. The decision had left her worn out, ready to slip beneath the glow of Sam’s moons.

  She went home to the violet house, and found the light on in the kitchen.

  Aracely was standing in front of the wall calendar, the belt on her robe tied in a halfhearted bow.

  Aracely looked over at Miel, eyeing her sweater, her jeans, her lack of a nightgown. “Where were you doing out?”

  “What are you doing up?” Miel asked.

  “Trying to remember the last time Emma came in.” Aracely studied the calendar. “I think we’re about due.”

  Emma Owens, the wispy blond woman who ran the school office, managed to get her heart broken at least once every couple of months. She fell in love with men who didn’t call, or men who did call and who she scared off with her gratitude and hurry. In her ear
ly thirties, hell-bent on getting married before thirty-five, she ended up sobbing on Aracely’s table at least once a season.

  Every time she set her hands on her rib cage, Aracely told Ms. Owens to slow down, that the right heart would find hers, but only when both hearts were ready. But every time Aracely cured her, rid her of wanting whatever regional produce buyer or accountant did not want her back, she was barely off the table by the time she had another date with another man who would drift between interested and indifferent. Even in her prim pearl-buttoned cardigans, she was pretty and white-blond-haired enough that she was rarely alone on a Friday night.

  Miel stood next to Aracely. “Don’t you worry about how often she comes in?”

  “First rule of business, never argue with a repeat customer,” Aracely said. “Besides, I know what I’m doing.”

  “One day you’re gonna pull her whole heart right out of her.”

  “Oh, I’d love to explain that,” Aracely said.

  Miel extended a hand in front of her, like she was setting a headline. “‘Curandera accidentally kills local woman.’”

  “Screw ‘accidentally,’” Aracely said. “They’d never believe it.”

  “A correction to Monday’s front page,” Miel said. “‘Bruja did it on purpose.’”

  Aracely clicked her tongue and shook her head, like the women gossiping at the market. “‘Tore that poor woman’s heart straight out of her body.’”

  Miel looked at Aracely. “You know my ancestors could do that in under fifteen seconds, right?”

  Aracely held her hands out in front of her. “Not with this manicure.”

  Miel felt the air settling between them, Aracely letting fall her irritation over needing to call Sam.

  “I’m sorry,” Miel said. “About before. It won’t happen again.”

  Aracely nodded, as much at the calendar as at Miel. “I know.”

  lake of death

  Aracely washed out a blue glass jar, the inside milky from when she’d used it during a lovesickness cure. The mix of water and egg always resisted coming clean.