When the Moon was Ours(10)

Chloe had been sent away the same week she started to show. Her baby now lived with the aunt she had stayed with these past six months, and, likewise, the boy she’d been seeing was sent to live with relatives in a town so far away Miel had never heard of it. Her sisters must have both missed her and considered her a stranger. This tall young woman who was now a mother, who was angled in her arms and nose but soft in her hips and breasts.

“Ivy,” Miel called out.

Ivy turned.

Miel was one of a hundred girls who would sleep better if the Bonner girls lost their peculiar power. But she couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for Ivy.

“If you ever need anyone to talk to,” Miel said.

Ivy paused, and then nodded, saving Miel from having to say the rest, and herself from having to hear it.





sea of islands

His mother knew.

She’d stayed the night before at the Hodges’. Mr. and Mrs. Hodge were in the city until morning, so they’d asked her to watch their children. She’d probably told them bedtime stories about a brother and sister crossing a forest guided only by stars, or a girl learning the language of Kashmir stags and musk deer. Or one Sam had heard from his grandmother, the story of a girl named Laila and a boy called Majnun.

Now his mother stood in the doorway. As soon as she looked at him, he caught the slight lift of her chin, half a nod, that told him she understood.

She looked tired but not wearied, this morning’s kohl drawn over the smudged echo of yesterday’s eyeliner, so soft gray ringed her eyelashes. The kohl, and the way she painted it on, was one of the few traditions from their family she’d held to, that one from her mother’s side. Her father, Sam’s grandfather, had given her washed-out blue eyes that looked even paler the way she lined them.

Neither surprise nor disappointment crossed her face. Only a breath in, a steadying. As much as Sam wanted this to pass by without comment, he knew better.

Finally, she said, “Well, I hope you were both safe.” She set down the red and blue tapestry bag she’d taken over to the Hodges’. “I’d hate for you to get that girl pregnant. Aracely would murder me.”

He was supposed to laugh. He knew he was supposed to laugh.

But he couldn’t force out the sound.

He wished he were different. He wanted to laugh off her words, to say back, Oh, very funny. Short of the kind of miracles Aracely taught Miel out of her Bible, Sam wasn’t getting anyone pregnant.

“And you trust her,” his mother said, more checking than questioning.

Of course he trusted Miel. She knew everything that could wreck him, but acted like she didn’t.

When he was eight, and she walked in on him changing, she didn’t scream, or run down the hall. She just shut the door and left, and when he pulled on his jeans and his shirt and went after her, he found her sitting on the back steps. Her expression was so full of both wondering and recognition, as though she almost understood but not quite, that he sat down next to her and told her more than he’d ever planned to.

Now, she slipped him tampons at school because he couldn’t risk carrying them in his bag. They had it timed so they passed each other while she was leaving the girls’ bathroom and he was going into the boys’, the two of them clasping hands just long enough for the handoff.

Once they’d worked out the system, they never spoke of it again, and she never brought it up. He never asked how she always knew when. He didn’t have to. They’d spent enough time together that their bodies had pulled on each other, and they now bled at the same time, when the moon was a thin curve of light. If Miel had been anyone else, her knowing this, the steady rhythm of her knowing every month, would have been humiliating.

Sam braced himself, though for what he wasn’t sure. Not a morality lecture. His mother had never cautioned him to wait until he was married. Agnostic, indifferent to the faiths of both her father’s family and her mother’s, she had barely tolerated Sam going along with Miel and Aracely to church and Sunday school. She allowed it only because she thought things would be easier for him if this town thought he was a good Christian boy, a phrase she never said without disdain edging her words. She’d made it clear that any God she believed in could not be contained within walls, certainly not inside the whitewashed clapboard of the local church.

But he was never supposed to sleep with a girl. This had been temporary, him living this way, with his breasts bound flat and his hair cut as short as his mother would let him. It was so he could take care of his mother, so there would be a man of the house even though his mother had no sons.

“Are you mad?” he asked, trying not to cringe and look down. His mother hated when he did that, which made him tend toward it even more.

“If you didn’t hurt yourself or anyone else, it’s not my place to be,” she said.

Sometimes she said things like that, and he could almost see the pallor of frost on her words. It’s not my place to be disappointed, she’d said when he was failing math three years ago. It’s your future, not mine. And that made him feel even worse.

But it wasn’t like that now. There wasn’t the same posture of holding herself tall and straight, her expression still. Now her face looked soft with worry. Worse, pity.

“Are you upset?” he asked.

She put her fingers to her temple, shut her eyes, let out a long breath that turned into a sigh. “Sam,” she said, the word sounding like wind, like a soft, sad song.