When the Moon was Ours(27)

He paused in the doorway. For the first time since he left his house, he felt the force of how strange, how invasive this was. It didn’t matter how well he knew Miel. He was walking, without being asked, into a world ruled by women. Even at the threshold he could smell perfume and the sugary fruit scent of their soap.

The longer he stood there, the sharper that hesitation felt. He listened for the creak of floorboards above him. If Aracely had already gone upstairs to bed, he’d turn around, work himself up to this again another night.

The creak of wooden cabinets came from the indigo room. Aracely was awake, still down here.

Sam found her checking her store of eggs.

He wasn’t sure if she’d heard him come in the back door. So he knocked on the doorframe, to let her know he was there.

Aracely jumped, clutching the basket of eggs.

“You scared me,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

She had on her coat, the heavy velvet one Miel had found her at a secondhand store last Christmas.

“You going somewhere?” he asked.

“Just got back,” she said, looking down at her coat like she’d forgotten she had it on. “I had to make a house call. What’s going on?”

He could map her features against Miel’s. Their shoulder blades, Miel’s as pronounced as Aracely’s even though Aracely was thinner. The slope of their eyebrows. Even the shape of their ears, how the right lobe was a little different from the left.

“Is everything okay?” she asked, slipping out of her coat.

Sam leaned against the doorframe. He hoped it would make him look patient, unhurried, that Aracely wouldn’t be able to tell he was using the frame to keep himself steady.

“Who is she to you?” he asked.

Aracely set down the eggs and smoothed a new sheet onto the wooden table. “What are you talking about?”

“Miel,” he said. “Who is she to you? You’re not old enough to be her mother, so what is it?”

“I take care of her.” Aracely tugged on the sheet so the edges wouldn’t drag on the floor. “Why does it need a name?”

“No, I mean, who are you to her?” he asked.

Her eyes drifted to the walls, that same indigo as the mushrooms his mother found at the markets when she was a child. The caps pale lavender, the gills deep blue-violet, stems bleeding that same color.

“I can’t do this right now,” she said. “Can we talk tomorrow?”

“Are you her sister?” he asked. “Cousin? Aunt? I don’t know.”

Aracely looked up. “I’m nothing, Sam. I’m a woman who had a room free.”

Sam put his hands in his pockets. “I don’t buy it.”

“You don’t have to.”

She could not talk him out of this. He would not forget that he’d realized Miel and Aracely both wore out their shoes the same way, the right sole thinning before the left, the wear heavier on the outside edge than the inside. These were things that did not come from living with each other. These were traits and tendencies each had been born with, and there were too many of them.

“You don’t owe me the truth,” he said. “But you owe it to her.”

Aracely turned around. “If you think the truth is so great, how about you start?” She scanned his shirt and his jeans. Under her stare, his binder felt a little tighter, his jeans not quite loose enough to hide what he didn’t have. “This thing you’re doing…”

“It’s not a thing,” he said.

Maybe bacha posh were words that did not belong to him. They were only his through the stories his grandmother had told him, of families across the border from Peshawar, mothers and fathers dressing their youngest daughters as sons.

But they were so much more his than they were Aracely’s. His grandmother’s father had welcomed into his home men whose youngest daughters lived as boys until it was time for them to be wives. He had done business with these men. To mark their arrival, Sam’s grandmother and great-grandmother had shelled almonds and pistachios for sohan, their whole house sweet with the smell of cardamom.

Miel understood this. That day she’d seen enough of him naked to wonder, when she’d waited for him on the back steps, she’d been quiet enough to let him explain bacha posh. He remembered grasping at the words that would distill it down, words he could get out fast enough to keep her there, to stop her from running back to the violet house and telling him she never wanted to see another of his moons outside her window.

Where my grandmother comes from, sometimes parents who have girls but no boys dress one of their daughters like a son. Then it’s like they have a son. She can do things boys can do and girls can’t. And she can be a brother to her sisters. Does that make sense?

Miel hadn’t been looking at him as he spoke. She’d been looking down, at their legs next to each other, his in jeans, her knees showing at the edge of her skirt.

But she’d nodded, and she’d stayed.

If Miel had been able to understand when she and Sam were both children, Aracely, a grown woman, had no excuse now.

Sam looked back at Aracely. “You don’t get to pick apart bacha posh,” he said. “You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know enough,” Aracely said. “I asked your mother because I’d never heard of it before.”