When the Moon was Ours(19)
For Miel to refuse Ivy’s gift, to turn her back now, would be a declaration of war. The girl from the violet house against the sisters who lived in the navy one.
So she went with Ivy.
The deeper they walked into those gold and orange woods, the more she flitted between fear and excitement. That was the thrill of the Bonner sisters, she guessed, to the boys who loved them. That they never knew in which parts to be elated and terrified. Their time being loved by a Bonner girl might be short and sudden as a firework, or long and spun out, and they never knew which. The letdown would be either soft or brutal, and they never knew which.
Only a few columns of light pierced the trees. But this time of year the trees were their own light, amber and coral and butter-colored. Ivy stopped in a grove that was almost all yellow, the flat gold of cottonwood and birch and tulip poplar.
A large box, long and wide as a florist’s case or a coffin, sat on the ground, its sides and lid and even its floor made of stained glass. It had been laid down, on the base where a body would rest flat, as though at any moment the whole box might sink into the ground and become a grave. Whorls of deep red and violet crossed the panels. Sprays of milky stars floated over a field of dark blue and green. Even the long cracks slicing the planets and constellations didn’t make it less beautiful.
“So it’s true,” Miel said.
“Half-true,” Ivy said. “It doesn’t make us pretty if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Miel wondered how long it’d been here. Where the Bonner girls, whichever generation of them, had gotten the stained glass, Miel would never know. Maybe they had bought it, bartered for it, or stolen it. Not that the Bonner women ever needed to steal anything themselves. From what Miel had heard, sets of beautiful sisters glittered through this family like flecks of mica in sand. It made Mr. Bonner as terrified of his daughters as he’d been of his sisters and aunts, and Mrs. Bonner baffled by her husband’s family, all those flame-haired women.
All they would have needed to do was lower the soft screen of their red-gold eyelashes to get men to tear the bright glass panels from the windows of their own church. With flashes of their cream-white shoulders, they could have gotten those same men to hand over the stained glass like boxes of violet candy. Miel imagined them flirting with metalsmiths, who would have charged them nothing to join the loose panels into this box and trim the corners and edges in rose brass.
“It got covered over for a few years,” Ivy said. “Vines and leaves practically buried the thing.” She made a half-circle around the stained glass, and Miel felt the unease of thinking that somehow, if there were smudges or fingerprints, Ivy would hold her responsible. “My parents didn’t want us to know about it. They pretended the whole thing was a rumor. But we found it.”
When Ivy said something she hadn’t shown anyone, she’d meant anyone except her sisters. It hadn’t so much been a lie—the Bonner girls were as linked as cells in a single organism, breathing together—as the fact of Ivy keeping no secrets from her sisters was implied.
“Well, Chloe and I found it,” Ivy said. “But we all cleaned it up.”
“Why?” Miel asked.
Ivy stopped, her face scrunching into a smile like Miel was slow. “Because it’s ours,” she said. “Everyone should take care of what’s theirs.”
Miel caught the movement of two shadows. She couldn’t make out their shapes yet. She just sensed them passing under the trees, like the minute before she and Sam had seen the lynx.
“I’m surprised you don’t know already,” Ivy said.
Miel turned back to Ivy. “Know what?”
“That things go easier when you just give people what they want.”
Miel felt that pair of shadows drawing closer. The second she looked toward the trees again, Ivy grabbed her. Miel tried to wrench away from her hold. But Ivy’s fingers were hot on her wrists. When she grabbed the place Miel had just trimmed a rose from, pain spun through her arm.
Miel tried to twist away from her, but then everything was orange and red, not just Ivy, but Lian’s loose auburn hair and the muted orange of Peyton’s curls. And when their hands all fell on her, she knew it was true, that they were one animal in many bodies. When one set of fingers lost its grip, another tightened. When Miel threw her weight against one of them, another pulled her back so the force dissipated and did not land.
Ivy pushed the lid of the stained glass coffin open, and they forced Miel in. Miel’s knees hit first, the impact reverberating up to her wrist. She collapsed on her side, and all those hands shoved her limbs within its walls so Ivy could throw the lid shut.
Miel turned, holding her hands up to stop it from closing, but the weight drove her down, and the sound of a latch clicking echoed through the glass.
She pushed up on the lid. It did not move. She shoved her weight against the panel. It stayed in place, sealed shut.
That latch would not open from the inside.
She banged on the lid.
The walls barely gave her enough room to twist her body. She tried to throw her shoulder at the side, and then the lid. She tried to shove her weight against the panels, aiming for the places where long cracks cut through the patterns. But the cracks, even the long ones, were shallow, and didn’t give, and she was trapped like a moth in a killing jar. Only the cold wisp of a few holes in the glass let her breathe.